Ecclesiastes Chapter One, Old & Forgotten

Ecclesiastes 1:10 Is there anything of which it may be said, “See, this is new”? It has already been in ancient times before us. [11] There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembrance of things that are to come by those who come after.

Amazingly, these first 11 verses form a sort of primer for the weightier material the preacher is about to examine and give his insight on. One may say that this introduction was a sweeping overview of the issue (the purpose for man’s labor) and his rebuttal to an argument for purpose under the sun: there isn’t one. Not one that is universal and absolutely satisfies the craving eyes and ears of humanity.

Every generation is victim to being a child of their time. We believe that history represents forward progress, that former times were primitive, men were superstitious fools, and modernity reveals an idyllic picture of all of the strides humanity has collectively taken. But the preacher takes this cozy image and ravages it by explaining that there is nothing new under the sun. There remains war, poverty, murder and all manner of sin. There remains injustice, intolerance, persecution, greed, and men whose ideals compel them to enslave others politically, philosophically or religiously to their cause. The homeless abound as we put the elderly and enfeebled to death as a ritual medical practice. Children are murdered in what we clinically dub abortion. In 2021 there were nearly 626,000 abortions. For every 5 births, one child was killed. People still worship the heavens, practice astrology and witchcraft, use the Ouija board to speak to the dead and harness the curative power of gem stones for medical issues. The gods still reign in many peoples’ lives, having taken different forms and names, but there they are, hidden beneath post modern rhetoric and New Age ideologies.

It is difficult to measure what progress should look like. Each generation feels like it has progressed further than the prior generation. True, around the turn of 1900 life expectancy in our country was certainly shorter and medical knowledge was more limited. Travel is simpler and communication is second nature in the age of the Internet. But with every step forward, mankind reveals that this purported progress is horizontal rather than vertical. What I mean is that, while in one sphere man lived in a certain way, possessed of certain moral, spiritual and intellectual dispositions that shadowed how he viewed the world around him and his fellow man. While superficial changes have aided in travel, language and longevity, is this progress? If so, progression toward what, per se? With longer lives comes increased despondency as man is always depressed in modern America and in need of therapy and medication. Travel takes one far from home and family and sometimes evolves into a lifestyle or addiction as one globetrots in an effort to fulfill something in them. Medical science is capable of helping and curing much, but its advances have also created problems uniquely their own in terms of (sometimes permanent or lethal) side effects, germ warfare and conveniences for self-murder or infanticide. Progress is viewed through very partial glasses.

The ancients could travel efficiently as well, though not as quickly. They could build, and did build, many wonders that modern humanity cannot replicate or even understand. The old languages are more complex and nuanced than modern language, which suggests a degradation of linguistic complexity, not an evolution. The point I am ultimately attempting to make here, and I believe the preacher is as well, is that we, as products of the era we inherit, view former eras as inferior golden times of rustic simplicity. Those people had it so easy back then. I feel bad for people who lived back then. And so goes our ignorant views of ancient man, views that will be adopted if God allows future generations to follow after we are dead.

The preacher accuses humanity of being complicit of a worldwide willful ignorance of former things. This ignorance goes so deep that man willfully chose to forget God, and change Him into something more akin to our fallen nature. Man knew God in the beginning, but we were ungrateful to Him and so, as Paul wrote, became futile in our thoughts, Romans 1:21. The preacher’s vanity is Paul’s futility, coupled with the human heart becoming both foolish and darkened. This condition is not revoked by progress, but only removed in Christ, 2 Corinthians 3:16, 4:4. Bildad the Shuhite agreed, writing, “so are the paths of all who forget God; and the hope of the hypocrite shall perish,” Job 8:13. The greatest “former thing” that is, was knowledge of God, retained in the remnant the Lord always preserves but cast off by the many who prefer the broad road that leads to destruction.

The progress the preacher predicts comes from an astute assessment of how his contemporaries consider history. There is no remembrance, he states. Even what follows after him will be forgotten by the generations that it precedes. A woeful lack of caring about man’s origins, historical, political, geographical, religious, leads to a general apathy that paralyzes modern man. We don’t want to know what came before, because it is boring and irrelevant. But George Santayana made this shrewd remark about such a mentality, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” That is why I prefer the allegory of moving horizontally from one sphere to another, rather than ascending some ladder of betterment in regards to the human condition. The last 150 years have given us wars that have taken more life on planet earth than any previous generation could have ever believed possible. A conservative estimate of the death toll from 1900 onward for warfare is 187 million lives. Again, that is a conservative estimate, and likely smaller than the actual count.

We glimpse the notion that the preacher, a student of philosophy, history and human nature, views progress through a different lens, casting a severe and nihilistic light on man’s work under the sun. Having laid a little ground work for his thesis, he begins to genuinely search out answers beginning with the next verse.