A (long) exploration of a flight of fancy.
I was in doubt about whether I should publish this post, detailing an idea that I’ve unsuccessfully tried to turn into a short story. It’s very much a flight of fancy. I got permission from Aristotle, though, so it’s ok. In the introduction to the Poetics, he writes: “The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse—you might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history; it consists really in this, that the one describes the thing that has been, and the other a kind of thing that might be. Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.” This is most definitely a kind of thing that might be, not one that has been.
Imagine a world in which history is written. In the real world, history is our story of the past, which we, through various indirect means, try to assemble from the scraps of the past that survived into the present, and the goal is for the narrative to match the past exactly, but we can only ever approximate it. In my imagined world, history describes the past exactly, precisely and completely. There is a book, History, which describes everything of significance that has happened from the start of human history to exactly ten years ago in infinite detail. The book is continually being written, but it has no author (it’s a magic book, of course). When people look into it, every historically important event is described in exactly as much detail as is needed; if people need more detail, the book is happy to provide it. Every event that conceivably could have significance for the course of history is described exactly as it happened. The clockwork of causality is drawn in exquisite detail; every red thread from past to future is delimited and numbered and connected in both ends with events all perfectly described, so that the mechanism of history is revealed: every decision, happening, random or deliberate occurrence, is connected to its past by its causes (all laid bare) and to its future by its effects. Reading History, you can follow every chain of events and understand exactly how it came to be, in impossible detail. Everything is there. Every page is fractal: every line describing an event is divided into smaller lines describing sub-events and sub-causes and sub-effects, and yet, being a magic book, you always land at exactly the level of detail you need.
Let’s say the book has three or four or five copies, all discovered someplace deserted around 1900, each copy residing in world metropolises like London and Cairo and New York and Tokyo and Mumbai and Hong Kong, all tightly guarded, all copies identical but continually cross-checked, national treasures of the countries that own them yet also, on pain of global war, accessible to researchers and accredited laypeople from all over the world, to add a little flourish and geopolitical intrigue lurking in the background.
There are several reasons why I find this imaginative exercise interesting. One is that drawing out the consequences of this kind of world is interesting and would, I think, tell us a thing or two about our relationship with history. Another is simply that I love a good riff on an original idea; I love idea fiction, I love crazy ideas, I love to explore the mechanisms of various unrealities which, although they don’t mesh with our reality, could conceivably exist with their own internal logics. There isn’t as much of a tradition for doing this kind of imaginative exercise or idea-riff in nonfiction — although there’s nothing wrong with writing nonfiction that essentially asks you to consider a fictional scenario — which is why I originally tried to create a piece of fiction out of it. So far, I haven’t been able to, so I figure there’s nothing wrong with telling you about it. This blog is about my interests, come hell or high water, anyway. Besides, if the technique is good enough for Aristotle and Borges, it’s good enough for me. (See Theme of the Traitor and the Hero.)
So what would this world look like? Well, first of all, actual historians would become a fringe phenomenon. After the discovery of History, there will be a brief period in which historians subject the book to rigorous testing. Because of the level of detail and interconnectedness, formulating predictions of how the world would look like if things happened the way the book says it did would be easy. Soon, historians will be travelling all over the world confirming that everywhere they go, everything is exactly as the book presents it. The evidence for its accuracy will be overwhelming, and not a single piece of counter-evidence will be found. The book is magical and works in mysterious unexplainable ways — a true miracle — and people will be wary of trusting it because they don’t understand how it could possibly work, but at some point, experience and convenience will overpower skepticism in most people’s minds. We can only ever increase the likelihood of a hypothesis by finding evidence in favor of its predictions, never completely confirm it, but we can comfortably discredit it by finding counterevidence. At some point, though, the evidence will have to side with the least unlikely of miracles: on the one hand, there is the miracle of a magic book detailing history as it really happened, in infinite detail; on the other, there is the miracle of a seemingly endless series of corroborating evidence and the absence of any disconfirming evidence whatsoever, despite the book actually being wrong. The former will at some point be more likely than the latter. This is the line of reasoning that most people will follow. Within decades of discovery, the general public and most of the scientific community will have accepted History as the ultimate authority on what really happened.
There will be people who aren’t convinced or who prefer to do things the old way, but these old-school historians will be decisively on the fringes of both science and society. These people will be endlessly travelling the world trying to confirm or discredit History’s version of events, or they will be continuing to work with sources and older written accounts and other kind of evidence of the past in the way that pre-History historians did (and in the way that real historians still do). Many of them will become obsessed with finding flaws in the History, and there will spring up conspiracy theories regarding the various ways secret societies have doctored evidence to convince the world of History’s veracity, a trust they will then exploit or are already exploiting for their own sinister purposes. The public opinion of historians will span the range from “they’re lovable nerds” via “they’re slowing down progress” to “they’re full-on kooks or provocateurs bent on destroying society”. Openly admitting to being an old-school historian will sometimes be like proclaiming your love of stamp collecting (you’ll be seen as terribly nerdy) and other times like announcing that you’re a 9/11 truther (you’ll be denouncing your right to ever be taken seriously by anyone but other conspiracy theorists). Historians will be nerds and loons and obsessives. The scientific establishment will completely ignore anything published by an old-school historian more than two decades after the discovery of History; the papers written during those two crucial decades will be oft-cited classics, and anything before that will be left to psychologists and philosophers of science.
New fields of study will emerge. Consider this: what is the function of history? I think it’s twofold: one, we all love a good story, and perhaps we crave a narrative of the past as a basic human tendency. This function of history is really a part of literature and religion, and both of these will be reinvigorated and changed due to the discovery of the History. The other function of history, the one that makes it a science in addition to an art and a branch of literature, is predicting the future. We only have one kind of evidence regarding how the future will unfold: the past. Every scientific theory, every prediction we make, will be made with reference to past events, or extrapolated from those events into theories which attempt to generalize what we have seen happen to similar possible circumstances. The past is the well from which our predictions about and knowledge of the future springs. The reason we should study history is because it repeats itself — it’s a basic fact about the universe that it has some laws, and everything follows these laws, so similar entities in similar circumstances will act in similar ways. The past is the raw data that we use to construct theories about how the universe — past, present and future — acts and works, and based on these theories we decide how to act. If you put your hand on a hot stove, the pain will be more than enough data for you to avoid doing that again. And so it goes on the macro-level of empires, nations, wars, famines and revolutions: we try to learn from the mistakes of the past and to repeat its successes. That is the function of knowledge about the past, and history is our best attempt at gaining that knowledge.
With perfect knowledge of history, I predict the emergence of a new field of science: the alternate historian. Today, hobbyists are the mainstay of alternate history. (Yes, it’s called alternate history, not alternative history. I don’t know why, but now the name’s stuck.) Alternate historians are hobbyists on forums or novelists with word processors and active imaginations. They furiously type away, setting points of divergence and imagining how history would have turned out differently if only this had happened at that point, rather than what actually happened. Some of the scenarios alternate history buffs come up with are really fascinating. You should definitely check out some of the forums sometime. The problem with alternate history in our world is that we always have incomplete knowledge of both what actually happened, what caused what happened to happen, and what effects the events really had. Many things happened after 1945, but only some of them were caused by WWII. Finding out what really happened is hard enough, but teasing apart the mess that is cause and effect is nearly impossible and slipping into post hoc ergo propter hoc is always a risk. The raw materials are so lacking that anything built on top of them is going to be shaky. Imagine what kind of solid speculation would result from rock-solid knowledge of not only what happened but why and what happened as a result of that. Imagine what alternate history could be with perfect knowledge of actual history. Enter professional alternate historians and alternate history as a legitimate branch of science.
Alternate historians will latch onto Aristotle’s dictum that stories of what could have happened are “more philosophic and of graver import than history.” The scientific community of alternate historians will concern itself with detailing plausible alternative roads that history could have taken, if only a given possibility had happened at the point of divergence rather than what actually happened. What if the United States had intercepted the attack on Pearl Harbor before it could take place? How would the course of history have been altered? What if Genghis Khan had not respected the local customs, but had instead imposed his own culture and religion on the lands he conquered? What would’ve happened? What if there was no 9/11? What if Jesus was born into a Muslim family? What if some crucial battle tipped in favor of the other side, the one that in actual history lost? What if Hitler was killed in World War One? What if, what if, what if. The alternate history boards are full of more creative and obscure points of divergence than I could ever come up with.
This discussion will all happen in scholarly journals and the occasional pop-sci article. Knowing in perfect detail and with perfect accuracy what happened and what caused it to happen and what happened because of it, scholars will be able to very firmly draw parallels between different kinds of cause and effect relationships. They will have very good reason to believe that certain kinds of choices or events set off certain kinds of effects. This will allow them to extrapolate to hypothetical scenarios much better than what is currently possible.
Just like historians, alternate historians will develop grand theories of how history works, but, just like real historians, this will be on the way to or as a side effect of the real goal. (Just like in reality, some will be too obsessed with the grand theory to remember that it was supposed to be applicable to particulars. Or too steeped in ideology to be objective. Hence “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle”, &c.) If the ultimate goal of historians is to accurately and completely describe the past, the ultimate goal of alternate historians will be to describe accurately and completely all the possible scenarios given all the possible things that could have turned out differently at all historically significant points in the past. They will build up a catalog of alternate histories based on all significant points of divergence (points in time that an alternate history starts to diverge from actual history). Like real historians who will sometimes try to revise or overthrow the conventional understanding of a given historical event, alternate historians will after a while come to a consensus on most major events, and like real historians, alternate historians will sometimes become revisionist alternate historians, ruffling up things with alternative stories of commonly accepted alternate scenarios.
Today, a politician who is about to make a choice has the option of reading up on history, finding a comparable situation, and reading about the consequences, in order to make the right choice. How many politicians do this? Right. The same will happen with alternate historians. They’ll build up a huge library of alternative historical scenarios. Hardly anyone will actually go to the trouble of consulting them when making important decisions. That’s academia for you.
The idea of a professional league of alternate historians bickering in academic journals, citing sources, reaching consensus on fictional scenarios and holding scientific conferences on topics such as the consequences of a Nazi victory in WWII or a working copy of Babbage’s difference engine — topics that are now the forte of scifi writers — is amusing enough. It’s not the only interesting consequence of a completely known past, though.
In the beginning of this post, I stipulated that the History details everything that happened up to ten years ago. So, on July 8, 2009, the book will magically contain everything historically relevant that happened on July 8, 1999. The ten-year lag is a little short if all I wanted to do was explore the importance and function of history, because ten years ago is too recent to be of interest to historians, but I thought it would be interesting to consider a society where nothing of importance could be hidden for more than a relatively short period of time.
No one finds out you’ve been cheating on your wife from reading History. The book delves deeply into every issue of historical importance, but events that have no significance outside the average person’s generally limited social circle aren’t in there. That’s not the point. Everything that does have significance, though, is in there. If this book were reality, we would be one year from finding out exactly what happened during the 2000 US Presidential election, for instance. If there was trickery involved, it wouldn’t remain hidden for longer than ten years. Most of the people involved in any given fraud, scam, coup or crime would be alive when exactly what transpired would become known to the general public. No one would have more than a ten year head start on anything. No significant secret could be kept longer than a decade.
What would such a world look like? Would people be more honest? I think the internet can be instructive here: on the web, ten years is a lifetime. A meme can live, prosper and die in a matter of hours. Any new trend or technology that more than a handful of people adopt will be everywhere and free within a year or two of its inception. If something hasn’t taken off within a few years, it’s probably never going to take off. There is little in the way of long-term strategy: any plan that spans more than a few years will be hopelessly outdated well before it’s fully implemented. There’s no way you can put a lid on a secret super-technology for ten years. On the internet, there’s no way you can lay down a master plan now and expect it to be relevant in ten years. All this doesn’t make people more honest, just more frantic.
Imagine that on the scale of politics and geopolitics. Imagine world leaders and entire nations jumping on trends and immediately enacting plans for fear that if they sit on them, their enemies or competitors will jump on them. (Ok, I know that happens every so often. Imagine it becoming the norm.) World politics would suddenly become a lot more volatile. Everything would gain a new sense of urgency. Rather than give up secrecy, I imagine people would scramble to take advantage of the short time period they could have ideas to themselves.
In our imagined world, people would be in the paradoxical position of having both all the tools available to make more rational, better informed decisions and having a strong incentive to make decisions quickly and without much forethought. The fundamental corruptness of the human soul would take on a more fatalistic streak: as the window of concealment – the period of time in which something can be successfully hidden from the public – is shortened, criminals and corrupt politicians will have much less to lose by going all in. Since they can’t expect their crimes to remain hidden for long, they have no long life of prosperity to look forward to if they don’t do something stupid. This will be a strong incentive to do something really big and stupid on the off-chance that it might actually work: a corrupt politician or the criminals behind a historic heist can only expect to keep their freedom and standing if they have sufficient power that the public can’t do something about their crimes although they know for sure how the crimes went down. Rather than pulling strings in the shadows, corrupt politicians will more frequently go for all-out coups; organized crime will increase, because being organized and putting pressure on the right people will be the only way to get away with significant acts of crime, since nothing can go on hidden for very long. That would be the price of complete knowledge of the relatively recent past. On the other hand, those criminals who couldn’t get themselves into positions of power would be much easier to convict and punish.
The History, naturally, would tell us exactly how all historical events happened. This means we’d know for sure what Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, and all those fellows really did. Of all the mutually exclusive religions in the world, at most one can be true, quite possibly none of them. I really doubt that perfect knowledge of the past would change the tune for most of the religious public, though. Religion is too ingrained into humanity that I doubt it will ever go away. Even if we knew for sure that none of the world’s religions were correct, or that one specific one was correct and all the others were wrong, I doubt that fact would move very many to convert or de-convert. What would happen is this: many would simply ignore everything History tells us about religion. Others would argue that the History is only accurate with respect to recent events, or that we cannot know for sure that it’s correct with regards to older events. After all, most religions are founded on stories about acts and events that would not leave any physical evidence if they did happen, and all of them are set far into the past; for this reason, there is a very slim chance that anything the History could have detailed would still be left around as evidence in 2009. Religious myths are cleverly constructed so that the universe after the myth supposedly happened looks exactly the same in a universe where the myth happened and in one where it didn’t.
Another salient point is this: the appearance of an indisputably magical item topples any ambition rationalists might have of establishing that the universe is rational and orderly. Perhaps the History would make it easier for people to be religious than before, even if it actually discredits all known religions!
Some fields of science would undoubtedly receive a huge boost from the discovery ofHistory. Complete knowledge of the cause-and-effect of national and global economies from 5000 BC up until the present day would turn Economics into a proper science. A new kind of power-trader could conceivably emerge, manipulating markets like marionettes informed by a complete knowledge of what has happened in economies of the past and the much more advanced theories of economics that economists would create. This could lead to a power-capitalism that puts even capitalism anno the 00s to shame by making us all slaves to the select few who master the logic of economics from prolonged study of history. On the other hand, the human element, with people second-guessing each other all the time, with irrational fears influencing trade, with many people doing the same things, and having to shift strategies away from the nominally optimal because everyone is doing what was optimal in the past, and that only works when not everyone is doing it — in short, because we are not robots and trade is not run solely by a bunch of impersonal algorithms, perhaps we’d be spared that particular dystopia.
Other sciences, too, could surely benefit from a better understanding of the past. On paper, that should drive the tempo of technological innovation even faster, but there’s no telling how all these factors would intertwine, so perhaps some of the other consequences would outweigh the newfound historical data and slow down progress.
Somewhat surprisingly, and this was not at all the direction I intended to go when I started speculating about this, it seems that a complete knowledge of the past would lead to a more dangerous, more volatile, more authoritarian world. We would know each ourselves too well.
I wanted to turn this into a piece of fiction, but I’ve tried many times, and it never got flowing as well as this prose version did. My idea for turning the setting into the story involved a letter to an alternate historian about finding a flaw in the History, a flaw that, unlike any of the previous alleged flaws that old-school historians have put forward, will be impossible to debunk. The historian would meet up with the letter writer, they would go see the London copy of History, and somehow it would emerge that the writer was the author of the History, pulling one over on humanity. As I said, I could never get it to form a coherent whole.
I had a lot of fun imagining all this, though. Sometimes you got to run with your flights of fancy. Science fiction has a long tradition for this sort of thing: not for nothing is it honorably described as fiction of ideas, a description that instantly gives it a more serious-sounding and respectable veneer than “wild and entertaining speculation about far-out, impossible ideas, usually on the verge of mental masturbation” does.
I like literature of ideas, I really do.
