Is History Progressive?
Also, Why You Should Hire People Who Are Wrong (a lot); finally, drones, and the future of war
Does history (as a discipline, or practice) have a direction? In other words, do historical explanations improve over time? Naively, we may assume that growth in historical knowledge is definitional: we know more history at present because we have more history to know about. So, in this sense, the historical database does increase, and this may be taken as axiomatic.
But absolute growth in data in no way implies better - more accurate - understanding. At present, we have access to more historical information, more quickly, then at any point in history, but correct interpretation of that information has not scaled commensurately. Far from seeing growth, history as anything other than a descriptive discipline is falling further and further behind. Even worse, few seem even aware of the problem. Historians are drowning in data, and have nowhere evolved their structures to address this. It is remarkable that the practice of history - how history is produced - would be immediately cognizable by Herodotus, the “father of history” himself! The Lindy Effect, first identified by Albert Goldman, and later given its modern definition by Benoit Mandelbrot, predicts that the work model of the historian for all practical purposes is unassailable; but perhaps a sufficiently committed vanguard may demonstrate via practice superior returns in utilizing novel methodologies. The key is not to change all minds, but just one mind if that is the kind of mind you want. As any historian should recognize, it isn’t the majority that is history’s primary agent of change.
No one, for any real world problem, asks “where are the historians?” Nor, if they did, would the answers they received resemble anything actionable. While it is not the purpose of the historian to provide road maps for politicians or the business class, the obvious inability of historians to do so if reflects the blunt reality that historical understanding is of an entirely different category from understanding in the sciences. Understanding - knowledge - in history is a preferred - and wholly arbitrary - perspective, a frame or lens that serves as the selection function for the data to be incorporated into the analytical framework. This is why Herodotus, Thucydides, or Gibbon all remain relevant as historians, and why Thales of Miletus has none as a scientist. Scientific explanations converge to unity (consensus) over time; there is no such equivalent social dynamic in history. Historical debates never resolve; they may be abandoned, but are as liable to subsequently return as otherwise, and the issues themselves remain live. This is precisely the kind of phenomenon non-progressive fields demonstrate.
Yet it is not incoherent to speak of truth in history. History really did happen just one way, and the discipline’s goal should be to approach, as nearly as possible, that absolute. History’s failure to do so to date is not evidence that the task cannot be accomplished. But to do so, history itself needs nothing less than a cultural revolution.
Interestingly, the most creative people are likely to be more often wrong, on average, than their less creative counterparts. If you look at the most successful industrialists - or politicians, for that matter - they often exhibited outré views or simply outlandish beliefs. (Alan Brooke, wartime Chief of the [British] Imperial General Staff during the Second World War, once reflected that Winston Churchill had ten ideas per day, of which perhaps one was good, and that the crux of the matter was identifying which one was which). We most often celebrate geniuses for being right, and retrospectively edit out all the instances in which they were wrong. In one sense, it is wholly appropriate to do so (as being right really does matter). But this is of no practical use, as the rightness of an idea can only be tested over time, and there is no objective test in the moment, at the point of hiring (or funding), that can identify which idea may be a loser, or a unicorn. So perhaps we should look instead to evidence for the rate at which a person produces ideas, and one way of doing so is to identify people with a high quotient of ideas that appear, on first review, simply wrong.
The reported combination drone and missile strikes on the Saudi oil production facility at Abqaiq and Khurais underscores a step change in the military capacity of low-ranked military powers. Perhaps using its Houthi clients as a cut-out, the Iranian government was able, at least temporarily, to halve Saudi oil production, and at a total cost of doing so most likely no more than U.S. $10 million, and probably much less. By contrast, Saudi Arabia boasts the world’s third-highest military budget. There is no better real-world demonstration of the declining utility of military high technology. The operation would be easily repeatable, and at a much-enlarged scope, if so desired. The cost, again, would be minimal. The counter-force expense on the part of coalition forces, American or Saudi, would be three orders of magnitude greater.
The Pentagon should be listening; Beijing certainly is. Force protection for U.S. military assets is much more robust than that at Saudi oil facilities, but the delta is perhaps not as great as might be assumed, and U.S. defenses would likely be overwhelmed if seriously tested in a similar fashion. This is all shades of the 2002 Millennium Challenge war game overseen by U.S Joint Forces Command, when Van Riper, a Marine general commanding the enemy “red team” destroyed a full U.S. Navy carrier task force in a matter of minutes using a combination of missiles and small, very fast suicide boats loaded with explosives. Make the appropriate substitutions, and you have a scenario eerily prescient of the Abqaiq and Khurais attacks.
The current atmosphere in Washington is emphasizing great power conflict and pushing out the military technological frontier: hypersonics, directed energy, infantry exoskeletons, a Space Force. This is a science-fiction force structure, against which only China is positioned to compete. But as the U.S. moves up the military value-added ladder towards greater complexity and sophistication, it should be forewarned against abandoning the bottom rungs, dominated by lower orders of military life, rapidly evolving, into forms and modes awkwardly addressable, if at all, by the apex predators. Don’t forget: even the king can be felled by the bacillus and the virus.