Living humans approaching the total of all dead hominids erodes the past’s authority

Evidence

It would seem, according to some reports, that the quantities of human beings now alive today on earth (some five billion) is rapidly approaching the total number of hominids who have already lived and died on the planet since the beginning of the species. The present is thus like some new thriving and developing nation-state, whose numbers and prosperity make it an unexpected rival for the old traditional ones. As with bilingual speakers in the United States, one can at least predictively calculate the moment when it will overtake the past: that demographic moment is already at hand, as a rapidly approaching point in the not so distant future, and thereby to that degree already part of the present and the realities with which it must reckon. But if this is so, then the relationship of the postmodern to historical consciousness now takes on a very different appearance, and there is some justification, and a plausible argument to be made, for consigning the past to oblivion as we seem to be doing; now that we, the living, have the preponderance, the authority of the dead — hitherto based on sheer numbers — diminishes at a dizzying rate (along with all the other forms of authority and legitimacy). It used to be like an old family, old houses in an old village with only a few young people around, who had to sit in the darkened rooms at night and listen to the elders. But (with the few horrible exceptions we know) there has not been a major war for several generations or two: the curve of births rising sharply augments the proportion of teenagers to the rest of the population, marauding bands making noise in the street outside and leaving the old people to their television sets. If we outnumber the dead, in other words, we win; we are more successful merely by virtue of the fact of having been born (Beaumarchais’s account of aristocratic privilege readapting unexpectedly to the generational luck of the yuppies). — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 770

Categorization

• XREF: This demographic argument for why the postmodern dismisses history connects to a cognitive map of one’s own position in the world system — the proportion of living to dead as a material condition shaping historical consciousness.
• QUESTION: Is the five-billion-versus-total-hominids claim actually supportable? Worth chasing the demographic data Jameson gestures at but does not cite.
• SEED: The ‘demographic overtaking’ argument is a sharp, testable frame for why younger generations feel entitled to ignore the past — could be an essay on the material basis of presentism.