History functions as the primary mechanism for reducing world complexity

Evidence

In familiar worlds, the past prevails over the present and the future. The past does not contain any ‘other possibilities’; complexity is reduced at the outset. Thus an orientation to things past can simplify the world and render it less harmful. One can assume that the familiar will remain, that the established will be repeated and that the familiar world will continue into the future. And this is by and large a plausible assumption, since all human beings depend on it and yet are not capable of suddenly doing anything differently. Humanity cannot consign its own lived experience to the past. The essentials of experience must be represented in history, since history is the most important way of reducing complexity. By this means, the time dimension, in respect of what is past, solves a problem which belongs strictly speaking to the social dimension, namely, the exclusion of unanticipated action. The socially contingent nature of the world is thereby obscured, so that in the familiar world, the unavoidable social construction of meaning remains anonymous. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 137

Categorization

• XREF: Speaks directly to Stevens’s idolization of the past and Darlington Hall’s ordered history as a way of obscuring the socially constructed, contingent nature of that world — his trust in the past blinds him to unanticipated moral action.
• SEED: An essay angle: how institutions weaponize ‘history’ and ‘tradition’ to obscure the contingent, socially constructed basis of their authority — dramatized through Stevens’s deference.