The Invention of Origins: II. The Past That the Future Creates

The past is fixed.

The future is not.

So how could the future possibly create the past?

It cannot, of course, create past events. What it can create is the past as significant history.

An event happens. At the time, its future consequences are unknown. It may have countless possible consequences, most of which never occur. Only afterwards, when one particular future has unfolded, can we identify that event as significant in relation to it.

A mutation becomes the beginning of a lineage because the lineage survives and develops. A geological change becomes an important condition for later life because life subsequently emerges within the altered environment. A small social practice becomes the beginning of a cultural transformation because the transformation actually occurs.

The future has not altered any of these events.

It has altered what the events are for us.

This produces an intriguing temporal asymmetry. Causation runs from past to future: what happens earlier can contribute to what happens later. But significance can run in the opposite direction. What happens later can determine which earlier events we regard as important.

The two directions are easily confused.

Once we know the outcome, we can trace a chain backwards and tell a coherent story:

This led to that, which enabled this, which eventually produced us.

The story may be entirely accurate as far as its causal relations go. But its coherence is retrospective. At each earlier point, other futures remained possible.

The event did not know that it was going to become an origin.

Indeed, most events leave no recognisable descendants. Most possibilities disappear without becoming history. We rarely name these vanished possibilities because they do not lead to anything that later needs an explanation.

History therefore has an odd asymmetry. The future is full of possibilities, but the past is full of consequences.

Looking backwards, we encounter a world in which the actual has already displaced the possible. We can see the path that was taken, but not the paths that disappeared.

This can make the past appear more determinate than it was.

Perhaps this is one reason historical narratives so easily acquire teleological form. Once the future has happened, we select the past events that connect to it. The result looks like a trajectory.

But a trajectory seen from its endpoint is not necessarily a trajectory that existed before the endpoint.

The future does not create the past as an event.

It creates the past as a history: a patterned, selective and meaningful account of what happened.

And perhaps that is why origins are so strange.

An origin is a past event seen through a future that did not yet exist.