Retrodiction & Prediction: History Wednesday
Charles Maier seems to think that he should be able to use his expertise as a historian to judge and offer at least possible scenarios for the future. I think he is a good enough historian that he ought to know that prediction is a trap. What history teaches us is not how to predict the future, but that from the perspective of any moment the future isthat will turn out to have happened looked very unlikely. Now it is true that retrodiction is possible given the outcome: the unlikely thing that will turn out to have happened will have taken place in the least unlikely way. But that is very different from prediction proper…
Last month I found, in my inbox, historian Charles Maier. (And that reminds me that I have to pick up and reread his absolutely classic Recasting Bourgeois Europe.)
I found him wringing his hands:
Charles Maier: Feeling Stupid <https://csmaier.substack.com/p/rearview-mirror-3b9>: ‘Read[ing] the predictions of global trends in Foreign Affairs, or similar… the authors seem so confident that they can summarize the past and offer possible scenarios for the future based on… economic stats… [or] indices of comparative military strength…. I feel ill-equipped to assimilate the onrush of events, to keep my bearings against the headwinds of global change…. In my mind’s ear [do] I hear the last slowly chirping crickets of America’s late waning summer[?] Or have the Chinese overreached?… Or perhaps… an accommodation…. I am not impugning the brain power of the commentators….
Instant history tempts, and it can be intoxicating: relive the parabolas of empire… and recall their melancholy decline… or… think in terms of entropy and Newton’s Second Law. Or perhaps just insist that history is a record of the unforeseen….
So why bother studying history?… For the spectacle? For… self-flagellation?… For the satisfaction of participating and observing?… Or because it’s there…. But for now the ground is trembling underfoot…
Come now! There are powerful reasons to study history. At least. They are to remind you of important things. At least six of them:
That the future will be one we now see as very unlikely and do not foresee—for it always is: this, too, shall pass (or at least change) and in an unexpected direction is one of the few constants. Thus durable human happiness or cultural survival depends on cultivating robustness and optionality, because attempting prediction is a trap.
That the unlikely things that will happen will happen in the most likely way possible for them to happen. It is in that sense that people and groups can grab onto the hem of the cloak when they hear the footsteps pass. Retrodiction is very possible, but acknowledgement that it is simply retrodiction is key.
That while a lack of the romantic and the spectacular may make an honest history boring, an honest history will be judged useful by inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not repeat it. Thus an honest history is not written to win the applause of the moment, but as a treasure for all time.
That before our day the transformation of society’s mode of production (and distribution, and communication, and domination) took thousands of generations (as the transmission from gathering-hunting to pastoral-slash-and-burn took over -75000 to -12000) or hundreds of generations (as the transformation from pastoral-slash-and-burn to irrigation-agrarian took from -12000 to -3000) or even tens of generations (as the transformation from irrigation-agrarian to commercial-imperial took from -3000 to 1500)
That starting in 1775 the transformation from commercial-imperial to steampower took four generations, until 1875
And that since 1875 it gets accomplished in a single generation—for that is what we have seen since 1875 as we have speed-run from steampower to applied-science to mass-production to globalized value-chain to info-bio tech-attention modes of societal organization.
Now back to reading Recasting Bourgeois Europe and In Search of Stability, as I try once again to wrap my brain around the transformation from steampower to applied science society, and why it, before our day, was the least successful and hopeful of the transitions from one mode to another that we have been experiencing over and over again since 1775.