Directionless History

History is taught in schools as if there is a clear cause-and-effect relation between events and a certain inevitability to what happened. And yet, none of the events that happen during our own lifetime ever seem to indicate any such clarity!

Nassim Taleb in his book, The Black Swan, describes this tendency to spin clear stories of all past events as the “narrative fallacy”:
“The fallacy is associated with our vulnerability to overinterpretation and our predilection for compact stories over raw truths…(our inability) to look at sequences of facts without weaving an explanation into them, or, equivalently, forcing a logical link, an arrow of relationship, upon them.”
I believe that history just a story where every writer (and reader) thinks that he is wise, without realizing anyone can call himself a genius after the event!

Even worse are the people who talk as if history has a direction. Personally, I think this blogger Yago describes things far more accurately:
“Action-Reaction fused to Chaos Theory. One event generates a sequences of Reactions. Those Reactions became Actions, generating ∞ number of sub reactions.”
Chaos theory, if you didn’t know, is best described by the statement that a butterfly flapping its wings in one corner of the world can cause a cyclone in the other corner. If that is considered predictable, then tell me what isn’t?

Then there is Marxist historiography that believes that the direction of history is that the oppressed classes everywhere will rise, fight and “lose their chains”.

Taking this nonsense even further, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote after the fall of communism an article titled “The End of History”. No, he didn’t mean no more events would happen. What he meant was that the last of the ideological battles had been fought: democratic and liberal (social and economic) ideals had triumphed and would take over the world. Note that Fukuyama did not mean that democracy and capitalism would necessarily spread very fast, just that it was the only sustainable option and hence would be the last one standing.

Really? The counter-examples are too big to be missed: China is not democratic by any stretch, yet growing very fast. The Arab spring didn’t produce any democracies in the Middle East, did it?

But I am sure none of this will stop some from claiming that history has a direction…democracies, Taliban, capitalism, communism…all are in the same direction. Yeah, right.

Comments

  1. Ramiah KumarApril 5, 2017 at 2:59 PM

    Maybe your blog has a point. I know Karl Marx believed there is a thing called "social evolution" and further emphasized that with the arrival of a "classless communistic society" the ultimate utopia will descend on earth. After knowing what Stalin did, what Mao did and many other communist dictators did in many parts of the world, it appears while Karl Marx might have had a sweet dream, the same was a nightmare for many people! Hope there will no more takers of that kind of communism.

    I am coming to something else. This business of 'direction' confuses me. Maybe history has no direction. Biologists say evolution has no direction. Sure enough literature, art etc. cannot also have direction. What about economics? Has anyone said it has direction? If so, what is it?

    I am beginning to go pretty fundamental here. What is direction, and what are the examples for it, if any?

    ReplyDelete

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