Oh God Save History - No Future Part 4

History Is Bunkbeds

“Mr. Ford replied that he did not believe in history, that history was of the past and had no bearing upon the present and that, there being nothing to be learned from it, history need not be studied nor considered.” - Henry A Wise Wood interviews Elon Musk Henry Ford

On the first No Future post, the estimable Jacob Wright wrote and then lost a 1,000 word post on future-related topics. In much the same way that Dr Who nerds have spent vast sums of time and money trying to reconstruct Shada, I will attempt to rebuild Jacob’s post from the clues that he has left behind. If I get something wrong then: good. On such creative incompetence has many a worthy endeavour been founded. And also Britpop.

Jacob references five separate phenomena. I am going to talk about two for now. I may come back to the others later.

Whig History

If history is the study of the recorded past then historiography is the study of history. If that sounds totes “meta” then Hayden White - the author of Metahistory - would agree with you. White’s 1973 work was described as “magisterial” and at 484 pages, it certainly felt like I had received some kind of court-mandated punishment when it appeared on my undergraduate reading list. White analyses history through, among other things, the lenses of ideology and genre. History as politics and literature. As much as it is about the past, history is also about both how we think the world should be and also the clumsy illumination of the language that we use to reanimate the dead.

Most historians enjoy a good bit of historiography. In much the same way that a disproportionate number of novels have a author as a protagonist. Who doesn’t love writing about what they know? And history is already historiography. The written sources you must evaluate are histories themselves, written for purposes other than your own.

“Whig History” is a slur. AFAIK it has no adherents who pledge their loyalty to its tenets. It was term coined by British historian Herbert Butterworth in 1931 to describe a form of history that he disliked. Whig history tells simplistic narratives of goodies winning over baddies in a steady march of progress. Line move up and to the right. Lots of historians criticized Butterworth because 1. they found his work heavy on polemic and light on evidence and 2. if there’s one thing that historians like more than historiography, it’s criticizing other historians. Although if you look at them hard enough, you realize that “historiogaphy” and “criticizing other historians” often amount to the same thing.

The general public, however, loves simplistic histories with goodies and baddies and a happy ending. That’s how we like our narratives, thank you very much. There is a vast chasm between academic histories that seek to conduct ever more nuanced and painfully self-aware analyses of the past and popular histories which often seek to tell epic tales of Great Men being Great in Wars and some such. The Whiggier the better.

Such history is basically a form of entertainment. And as we have discussed before, futurism is mainly a form of entertainment. And Tech Bros love the “line go up and to the right”-ness ideological legitimation of the Whiggers. So it’s go Whig or go home.

There are other modes of history (as White and others outline). The conservative fall from grace narrative. Non-Western circular narratives. There are even crazier ones too:

 "Far from flowing in laminar and continuous lines, like a well-behaved river under a bridge, upstream to downstream, time descends, turns back on itself, stops, starts, bifurcates ten times, divides and blends, caught up in whirlpools and counter-currents, hesitant, aleatory, uncertain and fluctuating, multiplied into a thousand beds like the Yukon river. Sometimes time passes, sometimes not; but when it passes, it does so as if through a colander... and this filter or percolator supplies the best model for the flow of time." 

- Michael Serres, Science and the Humanities: The Case of Turner

If we shift from seeing history as 2-dimensional graph to a 4-dimensional complex climatic system. If the French are indeed correct that “time” and “weather” are the same. Then what futures might we conceive?

Probably ones with no commercially viable market.

Cliodynamics

What happens when History and Mathematics have sex? (Now there’s an idea for a Rom Com, get me a development deal with Netflix stat*)

One possible answer is Cliodynamics.

But first: Metanarratives.

As the work of White indicates, the 19th century was the highpoint of a type of history that tried to find “scientific” laws of mass human behaviour - often (but not always) with a basis in economics, Marx being the most famous example. Since the failure of both Marxism and Liberal grand narratives to accurately predict the future, historians have shied away from these Metanarratives. Modern history is postmodern - not in the Jordan Peterson oxymoronic sense of “Post-Modern Neo-Marxism” but rather in Lyotard’s formulation that postmodernism is an “incredulity toward metanarratives”. Modern historians would rather amuse themselves with the particular than risk deluding themselves with the general. As you might expect from my earlier comments about the public’s taste in history, public historians like Niall Ferguson and Yuval Noah Harari are much more comfortable with Metanarratives - Big Stories about the the development of humanity. To achieve mass market success, their stories have to be compelling and entertaining. Metanarratives provide that. And as you might expect from my previous comments about historians, their work has come under fire from academics. Some of this is just regular professional jealousy. However criticisms that they rarely let the facts get in the way of a good story bear more scrutiny. Ferguson has an ideological axe less to grind, more to swing at his opponents like a Hoover Institution berserker. Harari does not always understand the science that he draws on to undergird his stories, forgets to cite his sources, and will likely end up to history what Malcolm Gladwell is to the social sciences or Jordan Peterson is to cleaning up your room. That’s Entertainment.

So into this milieu arrives Peter Turchin. Turchin is a mathematical biologist who models the rise and fall of animal populations. He decided to turn his expertise to perhaps the most successful and important animal of all - cockroaches humans. Hence he and his colleagues have compiled databases of historical and archaeological evidence across human civilizations.

What he finds are cycles of growth and disintegration driven in part by predator-prey-type relationships between populations and elites. While not Marxist, his work seems to indicate that those satirical horror films where 1%ers hunt the poor for sport are actually more scientifically grounded than they first seem.

Naturally some historians get triggered by this mostly because it reminds of the now-unfashionable 19th century Metanarratives (and sometimes because the equations are scary). Personally, I have an open mind on this. And the proof of the pudding will be in the Tetlockian eating. In other words, does Cliodynamics provide testable hypotheses and does it perform well against them.

I would be very surprised if there were not repeating patterns in history given the nature of human beings. However Turchin makes a good point when he says that all such theories will be probabilistic rather than deterministic. As Matthew 24:36 states: "But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only.” Or to put it another way: the world may follow patterns but sufficiently randomly that prediction is not actually useful. There’s no point in predicting the last 27 of the 3 big technological innovations. “Nothing is more suicidal than a rational investment policy in an irrational world”

Perhaps as John Maynard Keynes Seal so memorably opined: “But we're never gonna survive, unless We get a little crazy”

*Urania and Clio both live in the same apartment block in Silver Lake. Urania is an uptight actuary from the Midwest who spends her waking hours calculating the life expectancies of different dog breeds for WoofProof - a troubled pet insurance start up. Clio has an unfinished alternative history novel about the South winning the American Civil War something original and six maxed out cred car- FFS a heterosexual man should not be writing this one.