For a moment last night, I thought that Tim Burgess, the singer from the Charlatans (or the Charlatans UK, for US readers) was fronting a popular science programme. A few moments of slightly more attentive viewing revealed that the presenter was in reality Professor Brian Cox, and the show was an episode of Horizon, called ‘Do You Know What Time It Is?’.
It did the usual run through the physics of time – our image of the sun being eight minutes late, Einstein, string theory, etc – but also touched on the psychology of time; how it affects our sense of the world and where, perhaps, society might be heading. Is, as classical and quantum physics contest, the future already written or unplanned?
During the exhibition’s planning, the most pressing question of time was the deadline. Nevertheless, the question of historical progress did come up. Were we telling a story of gradual, progressive improvement, from medieval, feudal oppression to a happy ending of liberal democracy, gradually given shape by benign, long-standing institutions, such as parliament?
The adjective ‘whiggish’ could be heard from time to time, a term popularised by the historian Herbert Butterfield between in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). It takes its name from the Whig ‘party’, which dominated British politics from the late 17th century, and which celebrated the triumph of parliament over the monarchy.
Whig history, practised by men such as Thomas Babington Macaulay, was ‘a history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement’. Butterfield argued that this view of history dominated the national story and much historical writing, presenting the past as an inevitable, enlightened march towards democracy and constitutional monarchy. One thing was seen as leading, with a certain inevitability, to another necessary thing. Worst of all, the past was read in light of the present, rather than on its own terms.
This sort of history has fallen out of fashion among professional historians. Things, it seems, don’t always get better. There are dead ends, setbacks; not everyone does well out of change and, perhaps most importantly, historians are uncomfortable with what are termed ‘metanarratives’ – overarching explanations of the past that tell a single, usually nationalistic, self-satisfied story. Causality is suspect, a victim of the collapse of ideology. On the other hand, no reassuring alternative has taken its place.
How to reflect this in the exhibition? Should it be a maze with dead ends, false steps, roads untaken, setbacks? Or should it celebrate, commemorate and, perhaps, regret?
Inevitably, it does a bit of all of this. But, for example, by showing how Magna Carta has been reinvented, rediscovered and redeployed over time, it might suggest how history is malleable, a tool of the present as well as the past. At points, the exhibition seems to suggest that there can be a tradition of reform, as well as of resistance to change.
Professor Cox spent some time among the Mayan pyramids, whose highly developed civilisation placed a great emphasis on the ‘Long Count’ in 13.0.0.0 – or 2013 in the Gregorian Calendar. The media has happily misrepresented this as a prediction of a calamity, missing the other message from this civilisation. The sight of crumbling and overgrown monuments offered a visual reminder that sometimes change comes earlier than you think.
The Mayan civilisation ended – either suddenly, or by transforming itself into something else. History does not come to a full stop: if there is another Taking Liberties exhibition in two hundred years' time, I expect it would be very different.
