Notes Towards a Deep History of Night and Darkness
Part 1.a: The Night Sky and the Nature of Knowledge and Experience
Apologies, readers: I had planned on a more substantive continuation of last week’s theme—my exploration of the deep human history of the night and of darkness, from the Paleolithic to the industrial present—but was sidelined by our family coming down with the novel coronavirus late last week. We’re mostly fine now but I’m rather behind on everything, as you might imagine; despite the relative mildness that comes with vaccination and with the current variant it was still a decidedly unpleasant experience not very conducive to sustained analytical thought and writing! And anyway I had a few additional thoughts that will not tie directly into future installments, so I’ll be spacing them out in between, starting with the following on the shifting dynamics of human knowledge and experience when it comes to one of the most salient features of the night for humans, seeing and thinking about (in ways that include everything from practical issues of navigation to the deeply mythic) the stars overhead.
Never in human history have we—in the collective global sense, though what precisely that ‘we’ means is as always far more complicated—known so much about the celestial bodies that course above us. And it is not just the stars (including the planets, what our ancestors knew as the ‘wandering stars’) the knowledge of which has filled the whole earth, but a whole cosmos full of entities which were entirely unknown to humanity over the course of nearly all of our prior history up till now. To be sure there is a great deal in modern astronomy and cosmology that remains unknown, including many things at very fundamental levels, but that does not obviate the truly incredible expansions in scientific knowledge over the last few centuries as far as the stars are concerned. As the recent launching of the James Webb Space Telescope reminds us, we have made great strides in understanding the deep time history of the cosmos, with the stellar world acting as a locus for the construction of a whole modern mythos of sorts, perhaps appropriately given their historic role in human imagination.
At the same time, as has been increasingly recognized over the last couple of decades and on occasion acted upon, for a majority of human beings on earth—perhaps an overwhelming majority in fact—the actual experience of seeing stars and planets and other celestial bodies has diminished to the point of almost nothing. In the typical urban night sky on a clear night at most a small handful of stars are visible, with the outlines of a very few constellations still traceable. But that is the extent of it. If you want to see stars you must go on vacation in a truly remote location. Here in the Washington DC metro area one must be well within the mountains of West Virginia, a good three hours’ drive away, before the stars appear again, so strong is the nocturnal glow of the vast eastern mega-metropolis. The result, or one of the results, is that where for the overwhelming extent of human history the sight of the stars on cloudless nights was an ordinary part of life, a part of life that was frequently viewed through various cultural prisms of knowledge from the agricultural to the astrological (with no clear hard dividers between what we would now see as separate epistemic divisions), today our knowledge of the stars interacts or overlays the real thing only through technological mediation. We know what stars look like because we’ve seen pictures, or because we see them in movies and television depictions. The stars have no actual phenomenological presence in our lives, they do not act upon our senses and imaginations directly. Unless we deliberately seek out astronomical knowledge we will remain almost entirely ignorant of the celestial bodies above our heads.
This disconnect between scientific knowledge—or what we might better call culturally mediated and distributed knowledge, to bring it into conversation with much older and not necessarily scientific ways of knowing—and lived experience in modernity is especially stark when it comes to the night sky. There are many such disconnects, of course, but some are more easily surmountable with effort and attention: while many modern inhabited landscapes are experienced as historically ‘flat’ and meaningless by many of their inhabitants, means exist to rectify this. Historical sites, interpretative markers, books, articles, organizations, and so on can all provide a deepening of one’s historical knowledge of place, even if the means and the end result are, generally speaking, very different from traditional modes of knowing these things (though I do think they can be supplemental and complementary, but that’s another story). As I’ve talked about here before, while it is generally more difficult one can discover and inhabit the deep history of the land one inhabits, not just through abstract knowledge derived from reading and visual materials but through actual tactile experience. The same goes, to varying extents depending on location, for the whole breadth of natural history. It takes work, but ‘head knowledge’ can become ‘hand knowledge’ in these cases. Over time abstract knowledge of natural history can become experiential knowledge, integrated knowledge, a way of seeing that can become a part of one’s doxological presence in the world. To know becomes not an opportunity for material gain or power, but an opportunity to offer the world up to God in thanks and to extent the graciousness and given-ness of the natural world to others.
But such possibilities are almost entirely foreclosed when it comes to the celestial bodies. What would otherwise be the most universal of ‘natural resources’ are in fact among the scarcest. While epistemic scientific progress has given us truly rich overlays for seeing and experiencing the night sky, parallel scientific-technical development has simultaneously robbed us of that night sky, which has also meant that most humans have little to no practical astronomical knowledge—they may know rather vaguely that stars are very old, very far away, and are big burning balls of gas, or something, but they cannot locate more than a couple constellations, they have no sense of where in the heavens anything is, no real sense of the dynamics and motion and diversity within the visible stellar spectrum. As a result, in a mirror of the general tendency of modernity towards astronomical levels of inequality, a very small minority of people possess knowledge exponentially greater than the sum total of what came before, while the overwhelming majority possess mere dregs of that knowledge and no first-hand experiential understanding or participation.
Now, if I may be permitted a little pure speculation, I wonder whether the current vogue for astrology that has arisen in many quarters, particularly it seems among younger adults here in the United States, is at least partially related to our strange and distorted epistemic and phenomenological relationship with the night sky and the celestial bodies. Obviously there is a lot at play in the astrological resurgence, from deeply felt but inchoately expressed needs for religious structure to a desire for temporal order and predictability. Perhaps also there is a sense of longing, a sort of nostalgia, for the stars and the night sky, a desire to feel as if one is somehow connected to those now hidden—and hence perhaps even more mysterious—heavenly bodies whose presence is announced by science and visualized in popular media? Regardless, for anyone thinking about the difference between astrology in the modern world and astrology in the past, the very distinct ways of seeing and knowing the stars must be kept in mind, and the differing ways in which the actual physical sensory presence of the stars may or may not help to make astrology ‘thinkable.’
The dynamics I have briefly described here are very deeply built into the literal and metaphorical infrastructure of the modern technological world, for reasons that we explore further in coming weeks and which have been well treated in the historiography of the modern night. But they are not immutable dynamics. If, as seems very likely (though certainly not—yet—certain), overall human energy usage is due a serious correction in the coming decades, the amount of illumination human civilization pumps out into the night is going to decline; some of this decline might come through the simple deterioration (related to but often distinct from changes in energy composition and use) of the political and economic structures that quite literally keep the public lights on. If the future of the night will require us to grapple with very different—in both broadly positive and negative ways—nocturnal worlds in practical terms, it will also present new possibilities of experience and knowing. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future our children or grandchildren will be able to regularly look up at thousands of stars overhead, the arc of the Milky Way (which I happily recall seeing as a child in rural Tennessee, I think the last time I lived somewhere it was pretty regularly visible) coursing across, the planets visible regularly and meteors on occasion. They will know the names of the constellations, and will be able to see ‘times and seasons’ traced in the seasonal changes to the heavens, orienting themselves geographically through the heavenly bodies. They will have the spectacular overlay of what will hopefully still be expanding and refining astronomical and cosmological knowledge, the awareness of the vast spans of time traveled by those twinkling stars, the scales and grandeur so seemingly close overhead. They will be able to speak the words of the Psalmist in praise of God and His celestial works, and do some from the vantage point of lived knowledge and scientifically-obtained depth. The gains of artificial illumination will not be entirely lost or rejected, but they will exist within carefully worked out limits. The night sky will no longer be the preserve of the few, but will once again belong to the many, in a richer and deeper way than had been possible before.
That’s my dream, anyway—and if it sounds like a good one to you, well, let’s do what we can in the coming years to see that it’s realized, in whole or in part.