Over the last few months I have had a chance to learn more about history.  I have gotten the chance to read various articles and a couple of books that talk about our history to explain various situations. I have found myself getting more engrossed into learning about not just the last 10 but last 1000 years and how it brought things to be in the current state. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction is one of the famous laws of physics. But it’s not just about physical objects but also cause and effect in how things evolve.

For example, if you wake up in the morning and have a backache and are irritable, you might not hold the cup of your coffee correctly. That might lead to you spilling coffee on your shirt and so on, the chain of events might evolve ending in you losing all your wealth in a poor stock market transaction. These are cause and effect scenarios that influence us daily. But in each effect, there might be underlying causes 100s or 1000s of years old. The reason we use roman numerals can be traced back centuries. Hence I have increasingly started to find history as a way to understand the present. If you are skeptical, let me share scenarios we do this already.

Using history to model the present

All the major companies that are public and produce quarterly results usually have a forecast of their revenue or profits or some key metrics for the future. For example Apple can say they predict 10 million iphones will be sold in this quarter. How can they predict such an inherently human thing? How do they know who will be buying these iPhones? It’s always been so fascinating for me to think that these companies know I will buy a product before I know it myself. But essentially they use data generated over the years to model and predict how we will behave in future. Without that historical data, there will be no prediction.

Machine Learning is another key buzzword of the last few years. But in a way, it is the art of crunching historical data to create models that can predict the future. If we don’t have enough historical data, these models perform poorly. The more history we can provide these models, the more accurate they become.

Well, no one predicted COVID

Given large enough datasets, things smoothen out. Let’s take an example: do you know if you will spend $2K on a vacation next year? Probably not. It’s hard to predict this event. But if you take a generalized view of your total expenses over the last 2/3 years, it’s possible they fall in the same ballpark range. I have lived in 3 countries in last 5 years and somehow my yearly spending adds up to same amounts for last 5 years. It’s crazy but it’s true. So essentially with large datasets, there will be exceptions. But the exceptions are both up and down, positive and negative. And given enough time and data they smoothen out.

So if you think we did not predict COVID-19, you are right. But we had been predicting in last few years, that we were due for an infectious epidemic in the next few years. Historically we have seen such diseases at a fairly regular intervals. We just happened to have COVID-19 which brought us back to statistical average again. And I think we will have similar infectious diseases at roughly periodic intervals in the future. If we have too many of them too fast, we might have a few spaced out ones in the future. That’s numbers.

Nations and wars

None of the nation’s we know have existed in their current form for more than a few hundred years. Yet, we tend to consider them as a natural fact like rivers or mountains when they are nothing like that.

A lot of my recent ruminations on history stemmed from the book Why Nations fail. The book talks about how the events in our past, sometimes 1000s of years in the pasts, can influence our present. The rise of democracy and constitutions is linked to Britain becoming a constitutional monarchy which in itself is linked to British rise to dominate the global shipping trade. That was influenced by other factors in the fast and so on.

The other reason for me to think about history is this thought I have held for a while now, that each generation has to fight its own wars. Every generation forgets the suffering and devastation each war brings because it happened before them. They think this war is not like the previous ones, it is more relevant and righteous. It takes down a journey where they fight a new war. I wonder if we are due for another global war just because the world and our generation has forgotten the horrors of WW2.

Our history is a source of learning

Life is and always will be unpredictable. Nations will fall, epidemics and disasters will happen, people will love and fight. Companies will start, grow and die. We have to realize that nothing will be the same or static. So we have to learn to live in a way that we can adapt and change to our present circumstances. But we don’t have to feel hopeless that no one knows how to handle the current crisis.

Our history offers us a valuable source of learning from our past. We tend to go through similar crisis and our responses also tend to be similar. We can see what kind of wars were won with money or diplomacy or weapons. Then we can learn about what made either of those factors win those wars and use this knowledge to guide us better through the wars we fight now.

One of the most arrogant things we can do, is to believe that you might be dealing with something that no one knows to handle except you. Rather, we need to embrace the idea that we can learn as much from our past to help us build a better future. To that end, I think we should spend more time telling people about our histories. Not just the good parts but the bad parts. Especially the bad parts.

Telling people of the things we did wrong, spectacularly wrong, and how we learned and got better is the best education we can give anyone in current times. Blaming and hiding the facts or painting a perfect historical picture is only going to prolong the crisis we are meant to deal with.