On a recent visit to Europe, I had the opportunity to engage in the tourist-type-of-activities which often escape my short and utilitarian visits. It was interesting to me what stood out to my now-americanized eyes – that is to say, after a dozen or so years spent in a country where I am not often and not really confronted with the complexities of dealing with the legacy of a long history.

How long is the past? Growing up in Europe did promote within me a notion that the tangible past is at least couple thousands years old. Maybe not quite bronze-age-old, but when the streets you travel on every day were named by the literal Romans, and walking into buildings built over a thousand years ago barely registers as even a curiosity – that does something to you.

Namely, it makes you feel emotionally connected to the past: battles fought, centuries-long rivalries, arcane political power-plays or the lives of obscure men feel like they actually matter. The thought of occupying the same physical space as people whose only real characteristic is that they existed a long time ago also may make you feel like you are taking part in a grand whole.

And while lousy, this generic feeling of attachment is sufficient to underpin the perpetuation of eternal rivalries as silly (I am told Italians are supposed to dislike the French, for example) as they are toxic and foundational to the continental character. A storied legacy is not the same as the study of a long history.

I found this kind of mindset to be almost wholly absent in the US – yes, at great cost and despite their best effort, but that’s besides the point here: all I am saying is that the root system doesn’t go quite as deep, and that this slight change in perspective accounts for most of my observations below.

So as I was visiting Saint-Jacques tower in Paris and the guide was explaining its tortuous history, my attention was drawn by the room dedicated to the details of its most recent restoration. I found it interesting that a process meant to enhance an exhibit became itself a part of the exhibit – a pattern that repeated itself in a great many of the churches, buildings, sites and museums I visited.

This, alongside a certain narrative that positions contemporary conservation as an essentially neutral act (“alter the form but not the essence”), shrouded with the language of science in an attempt to characterize a political choice as an objective and technical process (not unlike contemporary capital punishment) – made me reconsider the nature of this whole interaction and of the artifacts themselves.

It is entirely obvious that the decision of what artifacts to conserve, ignore and restore is political; sticking to French history, I would argue that there isn’t in fact any substantial difference between burning a painting of the King during the revolution versus restoring Notre-Dame after it burned down in 2019: both are politically-motivated, culturally-significant acts of engaging with an historically significant artifact.

The Tower of Saint-Jacques offers an excellent example of the ebbs and flows that might bless and vex an artifact: originally part of the gothic-style Church of Saint-Jacques-la-Boucherie, which was built by the professional order of butchers in the early 16th century and then largely demolished during the French Revolution, the tower somehow was preserved, albeit in bad shape. It then got restored during the Second Empire gothic revival phase. The political forces at play are clear to see.

Then, crucially, it got restored again in 2009. This time around the stated motivation wasn’t, say, “reconciling with the medieval past and assert a sense of historical continuity and pride amid political modernization” like it could have been in 1855. The stated motivation was technical in nature: structural issues, cracks, cleaning up the stone from pollution – all in respect of the architectural integrity of the building. Ostensibly, a neutral act.

Respect of the original, reversibility, integrity – all tenets of modern conservation that somehow suggest a kind of restoration structurally different from those of a past in turmoil. The passage of time and styles are for all to see in the walls of buildings that got built and re-built over centuries (Mount St. Michel is a great example from this trip, but also St Peter’s in Rome or the cathedral of Seville come to mind), carrying layer of styles like bedrock carries the scars of geological eras – but no more. For some of these buildings, it feels like history is over and they shall remain frozen in time.

This is certainly not a general statement, as examples of unafraid engagement with our historical artifacts abound: the Louvre pyramid, the Calatrava bridge in Venice and the St. Paul’s Millennium bridge in London, the new Reichstag in Berlin, etc. It is also not a new attitude: the very reason we have historical artifacts is precisely that people have been preserving them since the dawn of time (to support narratives, creation of in-groups, etc). So you could argue that this is nothing new.

Yet, I disagree. I think the implicit claim of objectivity implied in modern restorations highlights something more subtle than simply some run-of-the-mill political hypocrisy. To me, it’s all about technology.

I can only speak to my experience, but I have a really hard time relating to the life of a 15th century peasant (the target audience for a lot of this art); I don’t mean conceptualizing it, I mean really empathizing with it. I know too much. My brain has been bombarded with orders of magnitude more units of information than anyone even a hundred years ago had even access to. I take it for granted that the earth is round and that the same force that I succumb to due to my poor motor skills is the same that keeps satellites and planets in orbit. I know that computers can be made. My life experience is radically different, too: bubonic plague is a non-concern, and neither is food supply. There is always electricity. I have in the last few weeks traveled more than the average King would have in a lifetime, only a short couple hundred years ago. Living in our times also does something to you.

All this is not to say that the nature of the human condition has fundamentally changed, far from it. Art production has not stopped, only expanded. I find it as easy to empathize with the very human plights of love and loss of Virgil just as much as watching “Inside out”, or laugh at Lisistrata as much as standup comedy, or relate current political events to Shakespearian plays (isn’t Biden probably confronting very similar feelings as King Lear was? Wasn’t his decision to step down ultimately motivated by not wanting to be another Richard II?). These things do not change.

But for art works and artifacts that are more situational and less intellectual, which relate to life circumstances (buildings) or political climate (propaganda), my current frame of reference feels far more removed than – I suppose – it would have felt had I lived in the 18th century and was looking back two hundred or so years. In a bit of a crass oversimplification, I credit technological progress for most of this hiatus.

This other-ing creates a certain awkwardness: how am I supposed to relate to a worldview that is entirely un-relatable to me, or that I know for a fact it is not true? I believe the algid, impersonal, a-chronic style of conservation outlined above is an attempt at addressing this very question by not really answering it.

But other-ing has also some material advantages, such as allowing for the notion that we have departed and overcome this older, harsher, more brutal world and are now modern men and women, protective of this unusual stretch of peace we are holding on to, delegating war to robots and abstractions, living longer than ever before, participating in a collective society and a small world, and denying death at every turn. We don’t really do revolutions like they did back then! We don’t really do wars like even our grandads did!

Except of course we do – but in a profoundly different information environment, with tools at our disposal that would have been unthinkable to a middle-ages warlord. But we still have kings, we still have revolutions, we still have wars. The context of it all has changed so much that it makes me (and maybe us) feel like it’s a different thing entirely.

Surely this is a highly partial viewpoint too: my life experience is also not representative of anything other than that of a white dude who grew up in the west. I don’t purport to be anything else. In fact, I would welcome a differing viewpoint (comments are open).

Western philosophy has graced us with the notion of hermeneutics, as an attempt to answer this question. My feeling is that the problem runs much deeper: the existence itself of a discipline concerned with the question of how do we relate to our past is indicative of a degree of societal consciousness and sophistication that in itself renders that very past “other” – until the next revolution or war.