Redeeming Our Past

Transhumanists, like other futurists before them, sometimes make the mistake of viewing history as an inexorable upward march⁠—downplaying present problems and looking forward to a bright and inevitable future full of possibility. This optimism is sometimes the product of privilege. Insufficiently aware of, or altogether oblivious to, the suffering of others, these progressives may ignore or downplay efforts to address societal problems in a naïve faith that technology will cure all present ills.

Indeed, many critiques of Silicon Valley culture focus on its insularity: designing successive social media apps that may be this month’s rage in downtown San Francisco but hardly register a blip in the heartland, the rust belt, or the favela. Some futurists may even actively disdain efforts to promote social justice. As people become increasingly frustrated with the digital divide and the difficulty of consensus-based processes, some use their technological privilege to promote apathy, cynicism, exclusion, nativism, and even fascism. Their autocratic, deterministic, manifest-destiny view of history is one in which historically marginalized groups become less and less worthy of consideration and inclusion.

What we need is a different relationship with history altogether⁠—one that does not merely catalog the past or celebrate its triumphs, but that actively seeks to redeem it. For this, I turn to the work of Walter Benjamin, and to the Mormon philosophical tradition that, I believe, gives his ideas a uniquely powerful resonance.

Someone who experienced the violence of these historical fallacies firsthand was Walter Benjamin, a German Jewish philosopher who fled Germany as the Nazis rose to power in the 1930s. After failing to emigrate safely to the United States, Benjamin chose suicide over forced repatriation and imprisonment at the French-Spanish border in 1940. His final major work, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” written in the months before his death, offers one of the twentieth century’s most penetrating critiques of historical progressivism.¹

Benjamin observed:

Without exception, the cultural treasures [the historian] surveys have an origin which he cannot contemplate without horror. They owe their existence not only to the efforts of the great minds and talents who have created them, but also to the anonymous toil of their contemporaries. There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.¹

This is a bracing claim. It insists that we cannot honestly survey the achievements of any civilization⁠—its cathedrals, its constitutions, its technological marvels⁠—without simultaneously confronting the exploitation, displacement, and suffering that made them possible. The pyramids were built by forced labor. The wealth of empires was extracted from colonized peoples. The digital infrastructure we depend on today is assembled in conditions that would shock most of its users. To celebrate progress without acknowledging this reality is to participate in a kind of historical violence.

Benjamin proposed an alternative to this triumphal view of history, one he called messianic time. He claimed that it is possible to reconfigure the past by collecting and calling attention to subtle, pivotal moments that cause prior events to be reinterpreted. Just as the Messiah “hath no form nor comeliness” and there is “no beauty that we should desire him” (Isaiah 53:2), the redemptive moments of our lives are not immediately recognized as such. They appear small, marginal, easily overlooked. But in the fullness of time, they come to restructure our entire understanding of what has happened and what matters.

There is a pivotal moment in the life of individuals, communities, and nations when suddenly everything gets reconfigured⁠—when we begin to see things clearly, it seems, for the first time. The events of the past shift. What was celebrated is now questioned. What was dismissed now demands our attention. The comfortable narrative cracks open, and something truer, more painful, and more hopeful emerges in its place.

To illustrate the scale of this reconfiguration, Benjamin invoked a striking image from biology:

In relation to the history of organic life on Earth … the paltry fifty millennia of homo sapiens constitutes something like two seconds at the close of a twenty-four-hour day. On this scale, the history of civilized mankind would fill one-fifth of the last second of the last hour.¹

Our very biological heritage is itself an example of messianic time. In the last fraction of a second of our planet’s history, a sudden reconfiguration of everything has occurred. The emergence of consciousness, of language, of moral reasoning⁠—these are not the predictable outcomes of a smooth upward curve. They are ruptures, discontinuities, moments when the meaning of everything that preceded them was irrevocably transformed.

Mormon philosopher Adam Miller, in his reading of Benjamin, expounds on what it means to practice this kind of history. Miller writes:

We must learn to see history from a new perspective. Then we will find ourselves incapable of continued belief in the paralyzing promise of progress. Instead of viewing the past as a wave of momentous events whose crest has successfully carried us thus far and will carry us through to the end, we will learn to see the past and present as they genuinely stand in need of salvation.²

Miller goes on to enumerate several characteristics of what he calls the messianic historian. The messianic is that which retroactively reconfigures history itself. It involves the rediscovery of what was lost. It interrupts the tyranny of homogeneous time. The messianic exposes homogeneous progress as vain, and it carefully collects the heterogeneous debris of history.²

This last phrase deserves special attention: the heterogeneous debris of history. A conventional historian may survey the great movements, the decisive battles, the famous figures. A messianic historian, by contrast, sifts through what was discarded⁠—the stories of the enslaved, the displaced, the erased. They attend to precisely those details that the dominant narrative found inconvenient, embarrassing, or irrelevant. In doing so, they do not merely add footnotes to the existing story. They transform the story itself.

We have seen recent examples of individuals and movements willing to approach our collective history in this way⁠—people who identify pivotal moments in which historical viewpoints shift, when the dam bursts and history becomes reconfigured.

In 2019, NBA player Kyle Korver published a remarkable essay in The Players’ Tribune in which he wrestled with the question of inherited responsibility. Are we guilty of the sins of our white ancestors? No, he concluded⁠—but we are certainly responsible for them, and we can do something about them. We still inherit and benefit from oppressive power structures that exist today, structures we received from previous generations.³ Korver’s essay was a small but genuine act of messianic history: a public figure calling attention to what had been conveniently overlooked, allowing the comfortable narrative to crack.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, in his landmark 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations,” performed a similar act on a grander scale. By meticulously documenting the specific mechanisms through which Black Americans were systematically stripped of wealth and opportunity⁠—not only during slavery but through decades of redlining, predatory lending, and institutional exclusion⁠—Coates reconfigured how many Americans understood the relationship between past injustice and present inequality. The essay did not merely argue that slavery was wrong; it demonstrated that its consequences are ongoing, woven into the very fabric of our economic and social systems.⁴

The Me Too movement offered yet another example. When women began publicly naming their experiences of harassment and assault, the sheer scale of the response⁠—millions of voices, across industries and nations⁠—constituted a messianic rupture. Men who had considered themselves decent and aware were confronted with the realization that they had been oblivious to suffering that was pervasive and systemic. The past was reconfigured: behavior that had been normalized was suddenly revealed as what it had always been.

These are only a few examples among many. But each illustrates the same pattern: a moment when someone calls attention to what was hidden, and in doing so, transforms the meaning of everything that came before.

I see this kind of history as an active endeavor that seeks to root out and bear the burdens of humanity throughout the ages. As Latter-day Saints, we have a theological framework that makes this endeavor not merely admirable but essential. The scriptures teach us that “they without us cannot be made perfect, neither can we without them be made perfect” (Doctrine & Covenants 128:18). This passage is typically applied to genealogical work and temple ordinances⁠—the discovery of individual ancestors so that their stories may continue. But its implications extend much further.

We are connected with prior generations in ways that transcend the genealogical. We are unavoidably shaped by the cultures, institutions, and power structures we have inherited, and we are unavoidably hindered by continuing to partake of the spoils of oppressive systems we did not create but from which we benefit. To seek the redemption of the past is not merely to look up names in a database. It is to notice, identify, reveal, and redeem the human lives that touch ours⁠—the cultures, ethnicities, communities, organizations, cities, and nations that we belong to and interact with, even those that touch ours across many distant links and generations, and especially those lives and cultures that have been wiped out, subjugated, and repressed.

Benjamin closes his theses with words that serve as both inspiration and warning for all would-be messianic historians:

Only a redeemed mankind receives the fullness of its past⁠⁠—which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments.¹

Until we are redeemed, there will always be aspects of our past that we neglect, cover up, and try to hide⁠—chapters too painful or too incriminating to face honestly. The work of messianic history is the work of moving toward that redemption, one recovered story at a time.

But Benjamin also calls us to vigilance. There will always be those who, in their ignorance and selfishness, seek to cover up the past and erase the stories of those whose suffering and toil gave birth to our age:

Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.¹

The dead are not safe. Their stories can be rewritten, their suffering denied, their contributions erased. As saviors on Mount Zion, called to participate with Christ in extending salvation to all, we are called to become a certain kind of historian⁠—one who refuses to let the comfortable narrative stand unchallenged, who sifts through the debris for what was lost, who insists that the anonymous toil of the forgotten is as much a part of our inheritance as the achievements of the celebrated.

May we learn to practice this kind of history⁠—not only as we research the lives of our own ancestors, but as we participate with Christ in the common redemption of humanity.