Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts

Monday 4 July 2022

Picture Post #76 Ancient Salt Marshes



'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be
neither will they become what they might appear to become.'

 

Posted by Thomas Scarborough


Remains of Cape Town's Salt Marshes (Thomas Scarborough, 2022)

In Cape Town, there are everywhere reminders of the Holocene ‘transgression’ which peaked around 3400 BC. At that time, most of the area on which the city now stands was invaded by sea and salt marshes. Then the sea retreated once more.
 
However, in this picture, railway lines, separating Cape Town’s suburbs of Milnerton and Rugby, reveal the remains of ancient marshes on either side of the tracks. One finds patches of these marshes all over: along freeways, on undeveloped properties, and surrounding remaining wetlands, in particular. Once one is aware of them, they seem to be everywhere. They are older than history, so often undervalued, and yet they are still among us.

The image reminds us us that another kind of history surrounds us everywhere. This is cultural history. I think in particular of the culture of thought. Richard Feynman once said, ‘History is fundamentally irrelevant.’ But is it? Where did today’s thoughts come from? Why? How much more would we better understand, if we were aware of the ancient remains among us?

Monday 27 September 2021

The Recounting of History: Getting From Then to Now



Double Herm of Thucydides and Herodotus

Thucydides was a historian of the wars between Athens and Sparta, in which he championed the Athenian general Perikles. Herodotus travelled and wrote widely and tried to be more impartial.



Posted by Keith Tidman

 

Are historians obliged to be unwaveringly objective in their telling of the past? After all, as Hegel asserted: ‘People and government never have learned anything from history or acted on principles deduced from it’.

 

History seems to be something more than just stirring fable, yet less than incontestable reality. Do historians’ accounts live up to the tall order of accurately informing and properly influencing the present and future? Certainly, history is not exempt from human frailty. And we do seem ‘condemned’ to repeat some version of even half-remembered history, such as stumbling repeatedly into unsustainable, unwinnable wars.

 

In broad terms, history has an ambitious task: to recount all of human activity  ideological, political, institutional, social, cultural, philosophical, judicial, intellectual, religious, economic, military, scientific, technological and familial. Cicero, who honoured Herodotus with the title the father of history’, seems to have had such a lofty role in mind for the discipline when he pondered: ‘What is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?’ The vast scope of that task implies both great challenges and vulnerabilities.

 

History provides the landscape of past events, situations, changes, people, decisions, and actions. Both the big picture and the subtler details of the historical record spur deliberation, and help render what we hope are wise choices about societys current and future direction. How wise such choices are — and the extent to which they are soundly based on, or at at least influenced by, how historians parse and interpret the past  reflects how ‘wise’ the historians are in fulfilment of the task. At its best, the recounting of history tracks the ebb and flow of changes in transparent ways, taking into account context for those moments in time. A pitfall to avoid, however, is tilting conclusions by superimposing on the past the knowledge and beliefs we hold today.

 

To these ends, historians and consumers of history strive to measure the evidence, complexities, inconsistencies, conflicts, and selective interpretations of past events. The challenge of chronicling and interpretation is made harder by the many alternative paths along which events might have unfolded, riven by changes in direction. There is no single linear progression or trajectory to history, extending expediently from the past to the present; twists and turn abound. The resulting tenuousness of causes and effects, and the fact that accounts of history and human affairs might not always align with one another, influence what we believe and how we behave generations later. 

 

The fact is, historical interpretations pile up, one upon another, as time passes. These coagulating layers can only make the picture of the past murkier. To recognise and skilfully scrape away the buildup of past interpretations, whether biased or context-bound or a result of history’s confounding ebb and flow, becomes a monumental undertaking. Indeed, it may never fully happen, as the task of cleaning up history is less alluring feature than capturing and recounting history.


Up to a point, it aids accuracy that historians may turn to primary, or original, sources of past happenings. These sources may be judged on their own merits: to assess evidence and widely differing interpretations, assess credibility and ferret out personal agendas, and assess the relative importance of observations to the true fabric of history. Artifacts, icons, and monuments tell a story, too, filling in the gaps of written and oral accounts. Such histories are intended to endure, leading us to insights into how the rhythms of social, reformist, and cultural forces brought society to where it is today.


And yet, contemporaneous chroniclers of events also fall victim to errors of commission and omission. It’s hard for history to be unimpeachably neutral in re-creating themes in human endeavour, like the victories and letdowns of ideological movements, leaders, governments, economic systems, religions, and cultures, as well as of course the imposing, disruptive succession of wars and revolutions. In the worst of instances, historians are the voice of powerful elites seeking to champion their own interests. 

 

When the past is presented to us, many questions remain. Whose voice is allowed to be loudest in the recounting and interpretation? Is it that of the conquerors, elites, powerful, holders of wealth, well-represented, wielders of authority, patrons? And is the softest or silenced voice only that of the conquered, weak, disregarded, disenfranchised, including marginalised groups based on race or gender? To get beyond fable, where is human agency truly allowed to flourish unfettered?

 

Therein lies the historian’s moral test. A history that is only partial and selective risks cementing in the privileges of the elite and the disadvantages of the silenced. ‘Revisionism’ in the best sense of the word is a noble task, aimed at putting flawed historical storytelling right, so that society can indeed then ‘act on the principles deduced from it’.



Monday 2 November 2020

Picture Post #59 Proscenium



'Because things don’t appear to be the known thing; they aren’t what they seemed to be neither will they become what they might appear to become.'


Posted by Martin Cohen

      

To me, this image has a theatrical quality, almost a grotesque aspect. Look at the man's hand, on his leg, like a dead thing… the awkward tilt of his head. And how thin and sickly the whole body, in this seedy room with the dirty backdrop. 

Yet, at the time, this was modernity, and sophistication. This image represented new technology: think 'Steve Jobs' and iPhones.

The photo was taken exactly 127 years ago, that man could be my great great grandfather, which is to say not so incredibly a remote relation. Yet something has changed, and a certain innocence has been lost even in our celebration of sophistication.

Oh, and why did I call this post ‘Proscenium’? I came across the term reading about the new, trendy visual presentations. It's a term describing the part of a theatre stage in front of the curtain.  The two figures are thus playing out a very ancient routine - that also points to a very different future.



Monday 14 September 2020

Poetry: The Non-linear Mathematics of History



Posted by Chengde Chen *


Things are so obvious, why can’t we see them?
We are still obsessed with developing technology
as if we wished to hasten our extinction
This is because history is deceptive
We have no understanding of the mathematics of history
hence are immersed in a linear perception of ‘progress’:
history has proved that man controls technology
so technology must do more good than harm
This has been our experience of thousands of years
thus our unshakable faith and confidence

We, of course, need to rely on history
which seems to be the only thing we have
Yet, history is not a piece of repeatable music
but more of non-linear mathematics
Some histories may be mirrors of futures
while some futures have no reflection of history at all

It is hard to establish such a non-linear understanding
as it’s so different from our intuition
Thanks to the difficulty, as a famous tale relates
Dahir, an Indian wise-man of 3000 years ago
almost made the King bankrupt his Kingdom!

One day, the chess-loving King challenged Dahir
by asking him to play the final phase of a losing battle
As it seemed impossible for anyone to turn the table
the King promised Dahir smugly:
‘If you can win, I’ll meet you a request of any kind!’
Dahir, with his superior intelligence, did win
but he only made a very small request:
‘I would like to have some grain
placed on the chessboard in the following way:
one for the first square
two for the second square
four for the third square
and so on and so forth
so that each square is twice that of the previous one
until all sixty four squares of the chessboard are placed’


What an insignificant request, the King thought
and approved it immediately
He ordered his soldiers to bring in a sack of grain
and to place them in the way requested
When one sack was finished, another was served
Then another, and another…
until they exhausted all the grain in the Kingdom
it was still far from completing the 64 squares
The grains required are such astronomical quantity that
even the amount of grain in today’s world
does not come near it (over 1000 billion tonnes)!
It was the modest figures of the early counting
as well as the linear intuition about ‘history’
that made the King miscalculate the matter completely
He is still in debt to Dahir to this day!

Technological progress is the kind of exponential curve
but it is even more deceptive
It had crawled very slowly for very long in ancient times
but rose quicker and quicker in recent centuries
People, however, have considered the change linearly
assuming the rate of growth the same as the past
Hence a common-sense conviction:
we have always progressed through technology
so through it we can always progress into the future
technology has always become more and more advanced
so with it we can always be more and more powerful

Oh, the linear thinking of progress!
History is not optics
nor is the future a mirror image of the past

In the past man was a small member of the club of nature
while today, we have changed the weather, raised oceans
and created new species, as well as new forms of energy
If we cannot see such a world of difference
we are as miscalculating as the old King was!

We cannot, however, afford to miscalculate
as we would have no time even to be surprised
The surface value of history is its usefulness
The deeper value of history is to prove itself useless

The history in which we controlled technology
was only history, no matter how brilliant it was
The future may mean a ruthless breaking away from it!



Editor's note. The amount required is 2 raised to the power of 64 minus one. Wikipedia offers that the total number of grains is eighteen quintillion, four hundred and forty-six quadrillion seven hundred and forty-four trillion seventy-three billion seven hundred and nine million five hundred and fifty-one thousand six hundred and fifteen (18,446,744,073,709,551,615) and that this is “about 2,000 times annual world production”. 
 
* Chengde Chen is the author of the philosophical poems collection: Five Themes of Today, Open Gate Press, London. He can be contacted on chengde.chen@hotmail.com

Monday 15 January 2018

What Are ‘Facts’?

On the trail of the Higgs Boson
Posted by Keith Tidman

What are 'facts'? The ages-long history of deception and sleights of hand and mind — including propaganda and political and psychological legerdemain — demonstrates just one of the many applications of false facts. But similar presentations of falsities meant to deceive, sow discord, or distract have been even more rife today, via the handiness and global ubiquity of the Internet. An enabler is the too-frequent lack of judicious curation and vetting of facts. And, in the process of democratizing access to facts, self-serving individuals may take advantage of those consumers of information who are ill-equipped or disinclined (unmotivated) to discern whether or not content is true. Spurious facts dot the Internet landscape, steering beliefs, driving confirmation bias, and conjuring tangible outcomes such as voting decisions. Interpretations of facts become all the more confounding in political arenas, where interpretations (the understanding) of facts among differently minded politicians becomes muddled, and ‘what’s actually the case’ remains opaque.

And yet surely it is the total anthology of facts — meaning things (their properties), concepts, and their interrelationships — that composes reality. Facts have multiple dimensions, including what one knows (epistemological aspects), how one semantically describes what’s known (linguistic aspects), and what meaning and purpose one attributes to what’s known (metaphysical aspects).

Facts are known on a sliding scale of certainty. An example that seems compelling to me comes from just a few years ago, when scientists announced that they had confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson, whose field generates mass through its interaction with other particles. The Higgs’s existence had been postulated earlier in mathematical terms, but empirical evidence was tantalizingly sought over a few decades. The ultimate confirmation was given a certainty of ‘five sigma’: that there was less than 1 chance in 3.5 million that what was detected was instead a random fluctuation. Impressive enough from an empirical standpoint to conclude discovery (a fact), yet still short of absolute certainty. With resort to empiricism, there is no case where some measure of doubt (of a counterfactual), no matter how infinitesimally small, is excluded.

Mathematics, meantime, provides an even higher level of certainty (rigor of method and of results) in applying facts to describe reality: Newtonian, Einsteinian, quantum theoretical, and other models of scientific realism. Indeed, mathematics, in its precise syntax, universal vocabulary, and singular purpose, is sometimes referred to as the language of reality. Indeed, as opposed to the world’s many natural languages (whose known shortcomings limit understanding), mathematics is the best, and sometimes the only, language for describing select facts of science (mathematical Platonism) — whereby mathematics is less invented than it is discovered as a special case of realism.

Facts are also contingent. Consider another example from science: Immediately following the singularity of the Big Bang, an inflationary period occurred (lasting a tiny fraction of a second). During that inflationary period, the universe — that is, the edges of space-time (not the things within space-time) — expanded faster than the speed of light, resulting in the first step toward the cosmos’s eventual lumpiness, in the form of galaxies, stars, planets. The laws — that is, the facts — of physics were different during the inflation than what scientists are familiar with today — today’s laws of physics breaking down as one looks back closer and closer to the singularity. In this cosmological paradigm, facts are contingent on the peculiar circumstances of the inflationary epoch. This realization points broadly to something capable of being a fact even if we don’t fully understand it.

The sliding scale of certainty and facts’ contingency apply all the more acutely when venturing into other fields. Specifically, the recording of historical events, personages, and ideas, no matter the scholarly intent, often contain biases — judgments, symbols, interpretations — brought to the page by those historians whose contemporaneous accounts may be tailored to self-serving purposes, tilting facts and analyses. In natural course, follow-on historians inadvertently adopt those original biases while not uncommonly folding in their own. Add to this mix the dynamic, complex, and unpredictable (chaotic) nature of human affairs, and the result is all the more shambolic. The accretion of biases over the decades, centuries, and millennia doesn’t of course change reality as such— what happened historically has an underlying matter-of-factness, even if it lingers between hard and impossible to tease out. But the accretion does distort (and on occasion even falsify) what’s understood.

This latter point suggests that what’s a fact and what’s true might either intersect or diverge; nothing excludes either possibility. That is, facts may be true (describe reality) or false (don’t describe reality), depending on their content. (Fairies don’t exist in physical form — in that sense, are false — but do exist nonetheless, legendarily woven into elaborate cultural lore — and in that sense, are true.) What’s true or false will always necessitate the presence of facts, to aid determinations about truth-values. Whereas facts simply stand out there: entirely indifferent to what’s true or false, or what’s believed or known, or what’s formally proven, or what’s wanted and sought after, or what’s observable. That is, absent litmus tests of verifiability. In this sense, given that facts don’t necessarily have to be about something that exists, ‘facts’ and ‘statements’ serve interchangeably.

Facts’ contingency also hinges in some measured, relativistic way on culture. Not as a universally  normative standard for all facts or for all that’s true, of course, but in ways that matter and give shared purpose to citizens of a particular society. Acknowledged facts as to core values — good versus evil, spirituality, integrity, humanitarianism, honesty, trustworthiness, love, environmental stewardship, fairness, justice, and so forth — often become rooted in society. Accordingly, not everyone’s facts are everyone else’s: facts are shaped and shaded both by society and by the individual. The result is the culture-specific normalising of values — what one ‘ought’ to do, ideally. As such, there is no fact-value dilemma. In this vein, values don’t have to be objective to be factual — foundational beliefs, for example, suffice. Facts related to moral realism, unlike scientific and mathematical realism, have to be invented; they’re not discoverable as already-existing phenomena.

Facts are indispensable to describing reality, in both its idealistic (abstract) and realistic (physical) forms. There is no single, exclusive way to define facts; rationalism, empiricism, and idealism all pertain. Yet subsets of facts, and their multifaceted relationships that intricately bear on each other’s truth or falsity, enable knowledge and meaning (purpose) to emerge — an understanding, however imperfect, of slices of abstract and physical reality that our minds piece together as a mosaic. 

In short, the complete anthology of facts relates to all possible forms of reality, ranging the breadth of possibilities, from figments to suppositions to the verifiable phenomenal world.


Monday 17 October 2016

Does History Shape Future Wars?

Posted by Keith Tidman
To be sure, lessons can be gleaned from the study of past wars, as did Thucydides, answering some of the ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘why’, and ‘so-what’ questions. These putative takeaways may be constructively exploited—albeit within distinct limits.
Exploited, as the military historian Trevor Dupuy said, to “determine patterns of conduct [and] performance . . . that will provide basic insights into the nature of armed conflict.” The stuff of grand strategies and humble tactics. But here’s the rub: What’s unlikely is that those historical takeaways will lead to higher-probability outcomes in future war.

The reason for this conclusion is that the inherent instability of war makes it impossible to pave the way to victory with assurance, regardless of lessons gleaned from history. There are too many variables, which rapidly pile up like grains of sand and get jostled around as events advance and recede. Some philosophers of history, such as Arthur Danto, have shed light on the whys and wherefores of all this. That is, history captures not just isolated events but rather intersections and segues between events—like synapses. These intersections result in large changes in events, making it numbingly hard to figure out what will emerge at the other end of all that bewildering change. It’s even more complicated to sort out how history’s lessons from past wars might translate to reliable prescriptions for managing future wars.

But the grounds for flawed historical prescription go beyond the fact that war’s recipe mixes both ‘art’ and ‘science’. Even in the context of blended art and science, a little historical information is not always better than none; in the case of war, a tipping point must be reached before information is good enough and plentiful enough to matter. The fact is that war is both nonlinear and dynamic. Reliable predictions—and thus prescriptions—are elusive. Certainly, war obeys physical laws; the problem is just that we can’t always get a handle on the how and why that happens, in face of all the rapidly moving, morphing parts. Hence in the eyes of those caught up in war’s mangle, events often appear to play out as if random, at times lapsing into a level of chaos that planners cannot compensate for.

This randomness is more familiarly known as the ‘fog of war’. The fog stems from the perception of confusion in the mind’s eye. Absent a full understanding of prevailing initial conditions and their intersections, this perception drives decisions and actions during war. But it does so unreliably. Complexity thus ensures that orderliness eludes the grasp of historians, policymakers, military leaders, and pundits alike. Hindsight doesn’t always help. Unforeseeable incidents, which Carl von Clausewitz dubbed friction, govern every aspect of war. This friction appears as unmanageable ‘noise’, magnified manifold when war’s tempo quickly picks up or acute danger is at hand.

The sheer multiplicity of, and interactions among, initial conditions make it impossible to predict every possible outcome or to calculate their probabilities. Such unpredictability in war provides a stark challenge to C.G. Hempel’s comfortable expectations:
“Historical explanation . . . [being] aimed at showing that some event in question was not a ‘matter of chance’, but was rather to be expected in view of certain antecedent or simultaneous conditions.” 
To the contrary, it is the very unpredictability of war that 
makes it impossible to avoid or at least contain.
The pioneering of chaos theory, by Henri PoincarĂ©, Edward Lorenz, and others, has 
shown that events associated with dynamic, nonlinear systems—war among them—are 
extraordinarily sensitive to their initial conditions. And as Aristotle observed, “the least 
deviation . . . is multiplied later a thousandfold.”

Wars evolve as events—branching out 
in fern-like patterns—play out their consequences. 
The thread linking the lessons from history to future wars is thin and tenuous. ‘Wisdom’ 
gleaned from the past inevitably bumps up against the realities of wars’ disorder. We 
might learn much from past wars, including descriptive reconstructions of causes, 
circumstances, and happenings, but our ability to take prescriptive lessons’ forward is 
strictly limited.
In describing the events of the Peloponnesian War,

Thucydides wrote:

“If [my history] be judged by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past 
as an aid to the interpretation of the future . . . I shall be content.” 

Yet is our knowledge of history really so exact? The answer is surely 'no' – whatever the comfortable assurances of Thucydides.