Philosophy of History

In The Ocean of Churn, a book on events in and around the Indian Ocean, Sanjeev Sanyal wrote about what he calls the “philosophy of history”, or the style of writing history over the ages. Initially, all events were written about as if they were God driven. Others called it Fate, but it was the same concept: humans were merely the actors on the stage; the director was an external entity or force.

Next came the Great Man Theory of history, a style where history was narrated as if it was decided by “heroic (or demonic) individuals whose thoughts and actions disproportionally influenced the course of history”. Think Alexander or Genghis Khan or Akbar. To some extent, this was obviously true since kings made the big decisions. Then again, as Sanyal reminds us:

“History was financed directly and indirectly by ‘great men’ who liked to highlight their own importance.”

The next phase of history is usually narrated to “emphasize grand social and economic forces”. The role of individuals was down-played in this style, except as being part of a “larger machinery”. Marxist history is the obvious example, where:

“The narrative of history flows along a predetermined track like some Victorian steam engine driven by the inescapable laws of Newton.”

By taking this approach, no wonder Marxism claimed to foretell the “final” outcome of history: communist forms of government all over the world.

But then, as well know, communism collapsed. Nature abhors a vacuum, and the most “popular” form of writing history these days is based on something from physics: chaos theory! It is called the Complex Adaptive System:

“A chaotic place where the flow of events is influenced by the constant and unpredictable interactions between a host of factors and independent agents.”

Sanyal points out that historians who subscribe to the Complex Adaptive System do not care about counterfactual history, aka “What-if” history (e.g. hypothetical history written by changing one big event: what if Germany had won World War II?). Why not? Because if history is so messy and influenced by the proverbial fluttering of the wings of a butterfly, you can’t change just one thing: it will have cascading effects way beyond anybody’s analytical capabilities.

Complex Adaptive System share another attribute with parts of physics: path dependence. That means, no matter how unlikely a particular path, once the first step is taken in that direction, all later events are influenced by it. An example would be agriculture as a pivotal point, as I wrote in an earlier blog.

I knew history is full of missing information, biases and even outright lies; but I didn’t realize that even the style of writing history has changed over time!