Long read: History is in the Making

Our history curriculum in school largely involved learning about major political events such as kingdoms, wars, revolutions, etc. As this brilliant article points out, the Wikipedia pages for specific calendar years in history also primarily highlight political events and figures in those years. This piece talks about what’s wrong with that view of our history and instead why looking at history through the lens of ideas or technological breakthroughs gives us a better perspective of human progress and indeed how we can solve the important problems faced by humanity today.

“Most of us recognize the following dates and years: 4th July 1776, 14th July 1789, 1914, 1933, 1917, 1215, 1815, and 1066….It is because the events in question (the adopting of the US Declaration of Independence, the fall of the Bastille, the start of World War I, Hitler’s coming to power, the Russian Revolution, the drafting of the Magna Carta, the Battle of Waterloo, and the Battle of Hastings) are seen as critical events or markers in a particular story. They are supposedly events that had a profound subsequent impact on the shape and destiny of society and so shaped the way that later generations lived.”

The author acknowledges there is an element of truth but reckons this understanding of history through political events is incorrect for the following reasons:

a. “It places emphasis on the wrong events.
b. It judges the relative importance of events incorrectly.
c. It ultimately misunderstands which events had the most transformative effects on human life.”

He then turns our attention to a second set of dates:

“5th July 1687, 9th March 1776, and 24th November 1859. These dates are associated with the publication of major works of intellectual inquiry that changed the human understanding of how the natural world works.

The first of these, 5th July 1687,  has been rated as the second most significant date of the last millennium, as it saw the publication of the first edition of Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. The text brought about a revolution in the understanding of the nature and mechanics of the physical world.

The second date, 9th March 1776, was the publication of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, creating not just modern economic thought but also several other intellectual disciplines. It also saw the first systematic exposition of a spontaneous-order analysis of the workings of human society.

The third date, 24th November 1859, saw the publication of Charles Darwin’s great work, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. This not only wrought a revolution in biology and social thought; it also built on the earlier work of people like Smith to introduce a truly dangerous and revolutionary idea: that complex and elaborate orders in the human and natural world could be the product of blind processes and chance rather than any design or intent.

We could compile a much longer list of dates of this kind; another possibility would be 28th February 1953, the date when Francis Crick and James Watson revealed their discovery of the structure of DNA at a meeting in a pub in Cambridge.

These are all landmarks in a quite different kind of story, one in which the driving force is not politics but intellectual inquiry and discovery. This story’s main figures are scientists and philosophers and thinkers, not politicians and generals. The story is about the gradual growth and deepening of human knowledge, and with it understanding and mastery over the physical world.”

He then goes on to highlight some of the technological breakthroughs that have had a significantly greater influence on mankind than the political events – Boeing’s jumbo jet which brought people closer by taking air travel to the masses or the container ship which drove globalisation of trade and efficient utilisation of resources, or the Ford Model T or the oral contraceptive. Why are these more important than the political events?

“One reason is that politics is, in a sense, downstream of these technological breakthroughs, as politics is determined and driven by the changes in material circumstances and lived experiences that those events brought.

The forms that events such as wars and revolutions or peaceful politics took were both made possible by the kinds of events we are looking at here but were also limited by them. Certain possibilities were not possible or no longer possible because of the changes brought by these events and the way that they also created systems with limits or unavoidable requirements. For example, after the jumbo jet, containing pandemics with quarantines, as was common in the nineteenth century, has become difficult or impossible. 

In this materialist way of thinking, it is material lived experience that determines consciousness and shapes things like culture and politics, and so things that influence or shape that material lived experience are what we should give more weight and attention to.

…Certainly, on an initial comparison the fruits of technology seem to have created more good than the battles of history. This would be even clearer if we thought about other events that could be added to this kind of list, such as the discovery of anesthesia and antisepsis, the synthesizing of antibiotics by Ernst Chain and Howard Florey, the fundamental breakthroughs in our understanding of the biology of infectious disease that were brought by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch, or the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process for taking nitrogen from the air to create artificial fertilizer, which reduced the threat of famine and starvation to a historical low. 

An understanding of the past in which not just our intellectual successes but our technological breakthroughs occupy pride of place would be very different from the political one that dominates now. Instead of politics and war, and the growth, rise, and decline of states and empires being the focus, the central story would rather be one of human cooperation and inventiveness, innovation and scientific and technological progress and discovery, and the improvement in human well-being than the deeds (often diabolical) of those with power. 

The important figures would no longer be rulers, generals, prelates, and revolutionaries but scientists, entrepreneurs, and businessmen and -women.”

Why then do we fixate so much on political developments?

“Part of the reason is obvious: Those events are dramatic, as unpleasant things often are. A more cynical explanation is that this flatters the self-importance of the most immediately powerful people in society, and also causes the rest of society to see them as more important than they are. It also legitimizes and justifies the actually existing systems and institutions of political power by making it seem that these are the keys to human well-being and advancement.

If our alternative, technology-focused way of thinking about history became the default mode of understanding the past and how our world came to be, rather than the first, many things may change. We might pay less attention to politics and more to technology, science, and business. We would think more about trade and innovation. We might think of technological solutions to social and environmental problems.”