Time Zones
15th December 2015
Sarah Hoyt reflects on the fact that, not only is the future not evenly distributed, the present isn’t either.
I’ve long since realized that I grew up somewhere between medieval England and Victorian England. Tudor England feels about as familiar to me as the present day which is why I like visiting now and then.
But even in Elizabethan England, there were different time zones, by which I don’t mean the artificial time declarations (though they went by the sun, so it was different too) but more that different parts of Britain at that time were in different “places” historically.
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The borders of Scotland are “centuries behind” Tudor England on the road from tribalism to a modern state. This in turn means a lot of other things about it are “primitive” as the poor character keeps suffering through.
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I’m here to tell you that understanding another culture — or even understanding that another culture really exists, and they’re not just sort of playing at it — is REALLY hard. Humans are very good at absorbing the conditions they’re born into and internalizing them as THE conditions, i.e. the only true ones, and then thinking of everything else as a bizarre variation.
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For me, who grew up in one culture, entered another when I went to school (think of it as being raised in Apalachia then joining mainstream culture. I had to learn almost completely different language.) and then came here for a year, went back for four while dating someone neither Portuguese nor American, then came here to live. It gives you a very clear vision of both cultures. And it makes it very obvious it’s not all just “pretending” to be different.
It still stuns me that in that time and in that place, intelligent well read men could believe this clap trap of “one world” and government and religion both withering away leaving behind this human being that if he ever existed would be truly alien.