The creation of a global society was probably inevitable, but not the type of global society. For instance, the language of our global society is English. Why is English so prevalent and not, say, Danish? Why are we a society dominated by monotheistic religions and not dualistic ones?
We don’t know the answers to these questions, but there are two things we can say about history: 1) It isn’t predictable and 2) Its progress doesn’t necessarily benefit humans.
The hindsight fallacy (or hindsight bias) is the human tendency to believe that events that have already happened were more predictable than they actually were. Looking back, we think we could have predicted how history would unfold—it seems obvious in hindsight. But while today we can describe how history has unfolded so far, we can’t say why it’s turned out the way it has.
For example, we can detail the events leading up to Christianity’s take-over of the Roman Empire, but we can’t determine the causal links between these events. We don’t know why Emperor Constantine chose to convert to Christianity when he could have continued to practice his own polytheistic religion. He also could have converted to Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, or Buddhism, all of which were available to him at the time. But he chose Christianity, which, as we’ll see, was actually an unlikely choice.
The less we know about a historical period, the more we tend to think that the events of that period were inevitable. The more we learn, the more we see all the roads untaken, some of which were more probable. History often takes unexpected turns—what seems inevitable now was seen as extremely unlikely at the time.
For instance, if you were to suggest in AD 306 that Christianity, an obscure sect of Judaism, would become the religion of the Roman Empire, your contemporaries would laugh at you. Similarly, no one could have reasonably predicted that a tiny Russian faction called the Bolsheviks would take over their country in a matter of years. It’s not that anything is possible in history. It’s just that there are far more options than we realize.
For the same reasons we can’t explain why history happened the way it did, we can’t predict the future. We can’t know if we’re out of the global economic crisis or if China will become the world’s leading superpower.
Why do we fall for the hindsight fallacy? We like to think that history is deterministic because it means that everything that has happened was supposed to happen. It’s comforting. Conversely, it’s unnerving to realize that all the events leading up to this moment could have easily turned out differently and that it’s only a coincidence that most of us today believe in collective fictions such as capitalism and human rights.
One reason we can’t explain history or predict the future is that history is chaotic—it’s too complex to understand how all the variables interact. Not only is history chaotic, it’s a “level two” chaotic system.
A level one chaotic system is not affected by predictions we make about it. For example, the weather is a level one chaotic system. We can make predictions about the weather tomorrow, but those predictions don’t have the ability to change the weather tomorrow.
A level two chaotic system is affected by predictions we make about it. For example, the oil market is a level two chaotic system. If we predict that the price of oil will increase from $90 a barrel today to $100 a barrel tomorrow, traders will buy a bunch of oil today so they can benefit from the rise in price tomorrow. But this action increases oil prices today, which in turn changes the price of oil tomorrow.
Similarly, politics is a level two chaotic system. If someone were to have predicted the Arab Spring and told Egypt’s President Mubarak that a revolution was imminent, he would have taken actions to prevent it, perhaps lowering taxes and increasing government handouts. In doing so, he likely would have prevented the Arab Spring, nullifying the original prediction.
Level two chaotic systems, like history, are inherently unpredictable.
If there are so many unknowns, and we can’t use our knowledge of history to predict the future, what’s the point of studying it?
We study history to better understand what’s happening today. It’s important to realize that nothing in our lives or the world is inevitable. Just as the past had many variables, the present is full of possibilities, and we should never assume that a single path is natural or unavoidable.
For example, studying how Europeans came to have power over Africans reminds us that this power dynamic has nothing to do with racial inferiority and superiority. History could have easily turned out differently, perhaps with Africans enslaving Europeans. We study history, in part, to remind ourselves that our discriminatory hierarchies are based on random events and the fictions that spring from them. They aren’t natural and they weren’t inevitable.
The other thing we can say with confidence about history is that it doesn’t care about us. We like to think that as history progresses, life for humans gets better, but there’s no reason to think that what’s good for humans is also what’s good for history or vice versa. As we’ll see in Chapter 19, our well-being doesn’t necessarily increase as history moves forward.
Similarly, there’s no reason to think that just because Christianity and Islam defeated other religions, they are therefore the best religions for humanity. We have no objective way to judge what’s best or even what’s good because different cultures define “good” differently.
Still, we believe that the way things are is the way they should be, for two reasons:
We think that cultures exist to serve us, but we’re actually serving them. Scholars in different fields have different analogies to describe this process. Therefore, this concept has three names: mimetics, postmodernism, and game theory.
Many scholars compare cultures to parasites, an approach called mimetics. Just as parasites live in human hosts, feed off of them, and “care” only about multiplying and spreading from host to host (often at the expense of the host’s health), humans are just the hosts and vehicles of cultures. In other words, cultures don’t exist for the benefit of humans; rather, they infect and feed off humans.
If this analogy sounds threatening, it should. Cultures live inside our minds and spread from person to person. They often weaken or even kill the host when the host is willing to die to propagate the culture, such as those who’ve died in the name of Naziism, democracy, Christianity, human rights, Islam, and nationalism.
Scholars in the humanities call the process of humans serving cultures “postmodernism.” For example, they talk about nationalism as a plague that infiltrated the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. It started in a few countries, then spread to its neighbors, leaving war and genocide in its wake. Nationalism was purportedly good for humans, but it actually weakened and killed its hosts. It was and is only good for itself.
Scholars in the social sciences call this process game theory. For example, they compare arms races to a game that no one wins. Arms races benefit no country or individual. Like a parasite, an arms race hurts all the players involved, and yet the players still spread the system. If Pakistan buys more weaponry, so does India. When India develops a nuclear bomb, Pakistan develops one in response. When Pakistan increases the size of its navy, so does India. At the end of this process, the balance of power between the two countries is exactly the same as it was before the arms race started, but both countries have bankrupted themselves, spending money that could have been used for health care or education. Systems like arms races only benefit themselves.
Because the progress of history is inherently unpredictable, we can’t explain why today’s world is the way it is. But we should remember that, just as history is unpredictable, history isn’t inevitable, and our world isn’t the product of benevolent hands of time. It’s important to question our values, cultures, and systems, and ask why we adhere to them in the first place.