One of the things that separates confident from diffident people,

is their approach to history.

Broadly speaking, the unconfident believe that history is over.

The confident trust that it's still in the process of being made,

one day possibly by themselves.

The way we enter the world carries with it an inherent bias

towards an impression that change has finished and history has been settled.

Everything around us conspires to give off a sense that the status quo is entrenched.

We 're surrounded by big people who follow traditions that have been in place for decades,

perhaps centuries.

The house we live in appears as immutable as an ancient temple.

The school we go to looks as though it had been performing the same rituals

since the Earth began.

We 're constantly told why things are the way they are,

and encouraged to accept that reality is not made according to our wishes.

We come to trust that human beings have fully mapped the range of the possible.

If something has n't happened, it's either because it can't happen,

or it shouldn't.

The result can be a deep wariness around imagining changing the world.

There's no point starting a new business, the market must be full already.

Pioneering a new approach to the arts, everything is already set in a fixed pattern.

Or giving loyalty to a new idea, it either exists or is mad.

When we study history in a certain way however, the picture changes sharply.

Once time is speeded up and we climb up a mountain of minutes,

and survey centuries, change appears constant.

New continents are discovered, alternative ways of governing nations are pioneered,

ideas of how to dress and whom to worship are transformed.

Once people wore strange cloaks and tilled the land with clumsy instruments.

A long time ago they chopped a king 's head off.

Way back, people got around in fragile ships, ate the eyeballs of sheep,

used chamber pots and didn't know how to fix teeth.

We come away from all this knowing at least in theory,

that things do change.

But in practice, almost without noticing, we tend to distance ourselves

and our own societies from a day-to-day belief that we belong to the same,

ongoing turbulent narrative and are, at present, its central actors.

History, we feel, is what used to happen.

It can't really be what 's happening around us in the here and now.

Things have, in our vicinity at least, settled down.