Gulf Today

We are living in historic times. Or are we?

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If we are living through historic events, would we know? In 1965, Arthur Danto, a philosophe­r at Columbia University, argued that it is impossible to tell, when you’re in the midst of things, whether an event is going to be deemed “historic” by future historians. If something happens – Russia successful­ly reclaims Crimea, for example, or Pete Butigieg declares that he’s running for president – its ultimate significan­ce will be determined by causal chains that cannot possibly be anticipate­d, and by an assortment of events that have yet to take place.

Danto pointed to the limitation­s of the “ideal chronicler,” whose judgment about the importance of a current event would have to depend on knowledge that no one can possibly have. Russia’s annexation of Crimea or Butigieg’s announceme­nt could turn out to be relative blips or they could be momentous (or something in between). You can find out in hindsight, but never in advance.

Danto suggests that history’s arc is essentiall­y unpredicta­ble. Even the wisest people will have no idea whether a current event is a world-changer. Is that claim correct? A research team, led by Joseph Risi at Microsot Research, recently tried

to test that question. The answer is: Not quite, but prety close.

Risi and his colleagues begin with a collection of nearly two million US State Department cables from 1973 to 1979. In those cables, diplomats tried to summarise essential informatio­n about ongoing events.

The researcher­s created a “score” for how important events were perceived at the time. Human annotators helped construct those scores based on an assortment of factors — for example, by examining whether the cable’s author designated it for high-level atention.

To see whether the contempora­neous judgments were accurate, the researcher­s looked at a document collection called the Foreign Relations of the United States, known as FRUS. Profession­al historians compile those documents decades ater the events. Their explicit goal is to include informatio­n that is historical­ly important.

Of the nearly two million cables studied by Risi and his colleagues, just 1,723 ended up in FRUS (less than 1%). Did the FRUS documents contain cables believed, at the time, to contain something really important?

In strong support of Danto’s claim: The highestsco­ring cables among the nearly two million were only slightly more likely than the lowest-scoring cables to end up in the FRUS file. In other words, the authors of the cables did beter than they would if their judgments of what was important were random – but not a lot beter.

It’s true that the data can be analysed in several different ways, and on some issues, the authors in the 1970s got it right. They rightly recognised the importance, at the time, of the Iranian Revolution, the second Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia and the civil war in El Salvador. But many cables with high scores never ended up in FRUS. Many cables with low scores did end up there.

That is good evidence for Danto’s suggestion that contempora­ry observers have a tough time in predicting historical significan­ce. To be sure, such observers will inevitably make some successful prediction­s; for example, the atacks of 9/11 were rightly seen as historic on that very day. But numerous events that do not seem especially important at the time will be seen to qualify as such by posterity, “in part because of events that have not yet taken place.”

As Risi and his co-authors note, their findings are connected with a growing body of work, coming above all from Duncan Wats, a principal researcher at Microsot Research, finding that prediction­s run into immense difficulty in numerous domains, including the success or failure of cultural products (music, books, art), the scientific impact of publicatio­ns, political revolution­s, and the spread of informatio­n in social networks.

In defence of that claim, Wats gives the example of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Painted around 1503, it may well be the world’s most famous work of art, but for most of its life, it was relatively obscure. As late as the 1850s, Leonardo was believed to be far inferior to Titian and Raphael, whose paintings were worth far more than the Mona Lisa. It was only in the 20th century that Leonardo’s masterpiec­e became recognised as such.

What is true for popular judgments about the quality of old paintings holds as well for historians’ judgments about the importance of historical events: A great deal depends on what happens later and on social interactio­ns – on who ends up saying or doing what, and when, and with whom.

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