The importance of the past to ensure a brighter future

There is an old Soviet-era joke. That life was hard not because the future was uncertain — one could after all predict with certainty that the future would come. No, life was hard because the past was unpredictable — the past simply refused to stay the same.

This Soviet-era humor was a product of harsh times: The powers that be often rewrote history to their advantage.

At the same time, like the best jokes, there is also a deep truth. An unexpected wisdom that it might be smart for us to treat our past as unpredictable and constantly changing.

Historian Margaret MacMillan gave us a peek into this during a lecture in 2015. Sharing a similar joke, she mused that history in fact, “does keep changing.”

It keeps changing because lost records are unearthed, new materials are uncovered, and ancestors’ letters and diaries are found. All of these, she says, shifts, adds, and deepens our understanding of the past.

Our past also keeps changing because “we ask different questions... [and] become interested in different things.” She cites, for example, that there is a new field of environmental history.

This did not exist two to three decades ago, but is increasingly important because of the looming climate crisis. And women’s history was neglected until the feminist movement in the 1970s. Now it is an established field.

Singapore has its own version of a changing past. For decades, the birth of modern Singapore was anchored to the landing of the British in 1819, just over 200 years ago. This changed in 2014, when a new narrative was taught in schools that stretched 700 years into the past to the 1400s. It included a “golden age” between 1300 to 1600, during which Singapore was a “thriving multinational trading hub”.

What was the impetus for the change? It had much to do with decades of dedicated digs led by archaeology professor John Miksic of the National University of Singapore. According to the New York Times, Professor Miksic and his teams found “eight tons of artifacts — evidence of a precolonial history that was largely neglected until now”. Together with research by other scholars, this gave voice to the new narrative.

Taking the past as unpredictable so that we are prepared to change our understanding of it, is in fact also crucial to how we can better prepare for the future.

In his book Super-forecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, Philip Tetlock describes the experiment he ran to find the best forecasters of the future. He discovered that the most accurate forecasters were not experts in the fields being forecasted. On the contrary, these best forecasters came from all walks of life.

Where they stood out was how they assimilated the new to modify the old. With every piece of new evidence, big and small, they adjusted their assessment and assumptions of the probabilities of their forecasts, refusing to remain wedded to their previous predictions. They treated their past as fluid, and let their past change in unpredictable ways. As they did so, they succeeded at becoming surer about the future.

This also underpins billionaire Ray Dalio’s explanation of the decision making approach that has helped him build the biggest hedge fund in the world. In his book Principles, he describes how he is constantly challenging his understanding by shifting his decision making emphasis from one that is about “I know I’m right” to one about “How do I know I’m right?” He reflects and writes down his criteria each time he makes his decisions, so that these criteria can be transparently tested, assessed, and refined together with his colleagues continuously.

Changing our understanding of the past to better prepare for the future could even be embedded in our cognition.

Cognitive psychologist Carmen Simon states that memories are useful for our survival because they are prediction machines for our future. In a LinkedIn article, she shares that “[m]emory’s main purpose is not to help us keep track of the past, but to help us navigate the future. This is a critical understanding in business, because decisions happen in the future… and influencing them is how you drive profits.”

According to her, our memories use our past to help us predict what is likely to happen. We then act accordingly. When our actions are right, our memories will repeat the predictions the next time round. But when our actions turn out to be wrong, we are compelled to re-interpret our memories, to change how we perceive the past, and to make new predictions about the right future actions.

What all this means is that we need to update several clichés we have about our past and future.

The future is unpredictable. But so is our past.

The only constant is change is often used to refer to our future. But we should be focused just as much — perhaps even more — on our constantly changing past.

And lastly, the past is a poor predictor of the future. But only if we fail to change our understanding of it.