Why Does History Sound Like a Story Book?

What is it about the past that makes people feel that things were heading towards a particular outcome? Why does history feel like a story book with a clear causal link between events? After all, we don’t feel that the same can be said about “our times”. We feel our future is rich with uncertainties, that our tomorrow is not already decided by our yesterdays and our todays.

Is there really something unique about our period because of which our future is unpredictable? But everything before our time was moving in a direction, towards a particular outcome? Not likely. Time after time, mankind’s feeling that he is unique has been proven to be just an anthropic illusion (arrogance?): we thought that the earth was the center of the universe, that the sun revolved around the earth…and we were wrong on all counts. Similarly, each generation thinks it is unique. That it’s different. Sounds like a generational illusion (arrogance?) to me.

Take the major events over the last century. It’s pretty obvious that nobody saw what was coming. Chamberlain said he had won “peace for our time”. The Americans were unprepared at Pearl Harbour. The Jews didn’t run and hide until it was too late. The end of Communism came abruptly. Saddam invading Kuwait was a bolt out of the blue. And the ongoing recession was again a big surprise.

And yet, today people feel that there were clear causal links leading to each of those events. Obviously, after the event, one can always connect the dots and tell a story. The problem is that at any point of time, there are millions of dots. Many of those dots turn out to be irrelevant. Or get neutralized by other factors. It’s only with hindsight that one knows which dots were “relevant”.

But even the dots that we now treat as the relevant ones is so only because they conform to the already observed outcome. If a random act had killed one of the major protagonists early on, would the same outcome have happened? Probably not. And then, we’d have considered a different set of dots as the relevant ones. And built a different story around those dots!

That’s what Nassim Nicholas Taleb referred to as the “narrative fallacy” in his book, The Black Swan. After the event, we look for all the signs and events that “fit” the already observed outcome. And ignore all the events that don’t fit. How convenient. No wonder history reads like a story with a clear causal chain from beginning to end!