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History often found its own ways

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History often found its own ways

Certain inventions are inevitable – not mandated from above, but bound to happen from the very forces of technology, climate, and human desires.

By Nazarul Islam

What really, has moved history forward? This could be a weird or a funny question for you. It’s a mesmerizing and all-encompassing query, but also impossible to convincingly pin down. To even get started, it takes grand theories of Zeitgeists, of Marx’s inexorable laws of history, of thinkers like the Annales School or stories like Ray Dalio’s debt cycles. Any hopeful revolutionary who utters Victor Hugo’s old quote (“An idea whose time has come”) supposes that ideas act on their own, consume people’s minds, and propel history towards a select number of all possible routes that it could take.

Niall Ferguson, the Scottish author and historian now at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, has repeatedly said in lectures and podcasts that all history is counterfactual history. Most professional historians would intuitively object, thinking that what they’re doing is uncovering the past and connecting the dots of what really happened. The problem is that whenever a historian connects two or more factual dots into a casual chain, they are implicitly assuming a counterfactual: Had A and B not preceded C we would not have had C.

In other words: there was a single channel through which C emerged and someone with wisdom can decipher how the world would have unfolded in the absence of A and B.

A few years ago, I religiously watched the show Timeless, starring one of my favorite actresses (Abigail Spencer). If I’m being a little unkind, we could call the Show’s two-plus seasons a hip, not-so-high-flying Americanized version of Doctor Who.

Good versus Evil, both sides equipped with time machines, running through famous episodes in history to change key events. Initially, Spencer’s team tries to thwart the bad guys as far as possible, all in service of rescuing history as we know it. Any minor change in the past can butterfly into massive changes today: if Abiah Franklin never gives birth to Benjamin Franklin, we’re short one revolutionary and America might remain a British colony when it was supposed to secede.

Add drama, love, treason, and lots of good low-key conversations about fate, destiny and what’s “meant to be.”

But history isn’t quite like that, hostage to key individuals and identifiable actions in their lives. Matt Ridley, the British writer, biologist and member of the House of Lords, wrote a book last year on innovation, foreshadowed in his previous book The Evolution of Everything.

Rather than locating the source of innovative genius in individuals, he writes that: “Innovation is not an individual phenomenon, but a collective, incremental and messy network phenomenon.” Our mistake is to associate the past with unique individuals, without whom history would have unfolded differently.

Does that mean everything is already set in stone? And that God, fate, or some unique combination of unalterable chance has already prescribed a future? Are kings, in the Leo Tolstoy quote, “the slaves of history?”

Probably not – As similar problems emerged for people worlds apart (the wheel and even agriculture was invented in many different places at different points in time), certain inventions are inevitable. Not mandated from above, but bound to happen from the very forces of technology, climate, and human desires.

History was thus primed for an agricultural innovation to happen, not because of determinism but because of the problems facing lots of people at the same time, and lots of people trying to solve that specific problem – Selection and time – not genius and Eureka moments. Thomas Edison, cherished as the inventor of the lightbulb, had competition by some 20-odd others who invented it around the same time. Simultaneous invention is a thing, so much so that there are anecdotes of people applying for patents for the same technology mere hours apart.

The implicit consequence of that reasoning is that had Edison (A) not invented a lightbulb (B), we’d never have light (C); had the Wright brothers never flown in 1903, we’d never have commercial air traffic; had Steve Jobs never launched a smartphone, we’d still be on those Nokias and Motorolas from the ’90s.

Wrapped in an entertaining drama show, Timeless grapples with such historical counterfactuals. In the opening episode, Spencer’s character Lucy goes back in time to the 1937 Hindenburg disaster, to thwart a terrorist who wants to blow it up when leaving instead of arriving. Partly unsuccessful, her crew returns to the present only to find out that Lucy’s sister has gone missing with no record of her ever existing – lost to the intricacies of time travel. The butterfly effect therefore, in action.

(To be continued)

Courtesy: History’s old tiles

[author title=”Nazarul Islam ” image=”https://sindhcourier.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Nazarul-Islam-2.png”]The Bengal-born writer Nazarul Islam is a senior educationist based in USA. He writes for Sindh Courier and the newspapers of Bangladesh, India and America. He is author of a recently published book ‘Chasing Hope’ – a compilation of his 119 articles. [/author]