Everything Is Obvious_ _Once You Know the Answer - Duncan J. Watts [56]
HISTORY CANNOT BE TOLD WHILE IT’S HAPPENING
The inability to differentiate the “why” from the “what” of historical events presents a serious problem to anyone hoping to learn from the past. But surely we can at least be confident that we know what happened, even if we can’t be sure why. If anything seems like a matter of common sense, it is that history is a literal description of past events. And yet as the Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin argued, the kinds of descriptions that historians give of historical events wouldn’t have made much sense to the people who actually participated in them. Berlin illustrated this problem with a scene from Tolstoy’s War and Peace, in which “Pierre Bezukhov wanders about, ‘lost’ on the battlefield of Borodino, looking for something which he imagines as a kind of set-piece; a battle as depicted by the historians or the painters. But he finds only the ordinary confusion of individual human beings haphazardly attending to this or that human want … a succession of ‘accidents’ whose origins and consequences are, by and large, untraceable and unpredictable; only loosely strung groups of events forming an ever-varying pattern, following no discernable order.”8
Faced with such an objection, a historian might reasonably respond that Bezukhov simply lacked the ability to observe all the various parts of the battlefield puzzle, or else the wherewithal to put all the pieces together in his mind in real time. Perhaps, in other words, the only difference between the historian’s view of the battle and Bezukhov’s is that the historian has had the time and leisure to gather and synthesize information from many different participants, none of who was in a position to witness the whole picture. Viewed from this perspective, it may indeed be difficult or even impossible to understand what is happening at the time it is happening. But the difficulty derives solely from a practical problem about the speed with which one can realistically assemble the relevant facts. If true, this response implies that it ought to be possible for someone like Bezukhov to have known what was going on at the battle of Borodino in principle, even if not in practice.9
But let’s imagine for a moment that we could solve this practical problem. Imagine that we could summon up a truly panoptical being, able to observe in real time every single person, object, action, thought, and intention in Tolstoy’s battle, or any other event. In fact, the philosopher Arthur Danto proposed precisely such a hypothetical being, which he called the Ideal Chronicler, or IC. Replacing Pierre Bezukhov with Danto’s Ideal Chronicler, one could then ask the question, What would the IC observe? To begin with, the Ideal Chronicler would have a lot of advantages over poor Bezukhov. Not only could it observe every action of every combatant at Borodino, but it could also observe everything else going on in the world as well. Having been around forever, moreover, the Ideal Chronicler would also know everything that had happened right up to that point, and would have the power to synthesize all that information, and even make inferences about where it might be leading. The IC, in other words, would have far more information, and infinitely greater ability to process it, than any mortal historian.
Amazingly, in spite of all that, the Ideal Chronicler would still have essentially the same problem as Bezukhov; it could not give the kind of descriptions of what was happening that historians provide. The reason is that when historians describe the past, they invariably rely on what Danto calls narrative sentences, meaning sentences that purport to be describing something that happened at a particular point in time but do so in a way that invokes knowledge