This is a crosspost from https://250bpm.substack.com/p/agency-in-politics
Matt Yglesias explains why history is not a steam roller with a steering wheel welded tight, unyielding and incorrigible.
Of course, only a very naive person would see history as the unfolding of random occurrences driven purely by individual choices. But I think sophisticated people tend to overcorrect. Once something happens — like, for example, Joe Biden getting himself renominated — smart people are often eager to explain how this was “always going to happen.”
This is, of course, at its worst, the historicism criticized by Popper, the idea that history is a deterministic process following a predetermined plan. Marx famously refrained from suggesting how a future communist society should function because if progress is driven by historical necessity, then the system is going to be what it’s going to be and there’s no point of trying to change the unevitable.
Yglesias offers numerous examples of individual decisions that have changed history:
Roosevelt was only 50 years old and he was also, to the extent we could measure public opinion at that time, very popular. There was no constitutional prohibition on him running for a third term. [...] But he decided to stand down and more or less handpicked Taft as his successor.
Taft lost, and Roosevelt’s decision not to run thus altered the course of history.
Even more strikingly, if Franz Joseph had decided to cede some contested Austrian territories to Italy in 1913, Italy might have joined the Central Powers as it promised to. This could have altered the timing of war, potentially preventing the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and changing subsequent historical events.
For want of nail the horseshoe was lost, for want of horseshoe the rider was lost, for want or rider the battle was lost, because of the battle the kingdom was lost.
On the other hand, Kurt Vonnegut writes:
During the Vietnam War… every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.
History is sometimes maleable, sometimes it is not.
But what does that mean exactly? How does it work? And how to think about it?
Here’s my intuition pump.
History is a chaotic process, non-linear, full of feedback loops. To get a sense of this, consider a simple chaotic system like a magnetic pendulum with three magnets on the underlying board.
The pendulum eventually stops at one of the magnets, but which one depends on its starting position. Imagine coloring the board based on where the pendulum will end up. If it starts at point X and stops at the red magnet, point X is colored red.
The result looks like this:
Eclipse.sx, CC BY 2,5
It’s generally chaotic, but there are patches where it is not chaotic at all. If the pendulum starts in one of these monochromatic patches, even a significant change to its initial position has no effect. If you’re a butterfly trying to influence the outcome by flapping your wings, you’re out of luck. But if the pendulum starts in one of the chaotic regions where colors mingle in crazy, fractal patterns, a flap of wings can change the outcome dramatically.
How can you apply this insight practically?
The above example teaches us that an action alone, whatever it may be, may not solve your problem. Often a crisis is needed to make it effective — that is, history entering a chaotic phase, leaving the monochromatic patch and entering the region of mixed colors.
In practice, this means that the business of breaking the inadequate equilibria often boils down to waiting for the crisis, building social networks in the meantime and preparing solutions that could be put on table once the crisis hits. [...] Of course, the method is not guaranteed to work. It’s a gamble. You can only win be trying over and over again. The proposal for Franco-British union, as already said, has failed. So did the European Defense Community, an attempt in early fifties to establish a common European army.
But it may succeed. It’s like investing in startups. You fail repeatedly, but you don’t bet everything on a single venture. You have multiple plans. Occasionally, one of them succeeds, yielding significant returns.
The obvious problem is that in a chaotic region, you can change the outcome, but you can’t predict how it will change! Will the pendulum end up by the red magnet? The green? The blue? You don’t know.
However, history is not entirely like the simple experiment above. That experiment is deliberately constrained. In real life, there are few such constraints. The system is still bound by physical laws — if your plan involves faster-than-light travel, it’s probably not going to work — but otherwise, almost anything can happen. Even if there are strict laws governing human society, we don’t know what they are.
So, what can you do? Work on the meta-level to tilt the board, so to speak. You can’t guarantee the pendulum will end up at the green magnet, but you can increase the likelihood of it happening.
Let’s say your plan is introducing some checks and balances to the political system. Is that going to prevent a dictator taking over? No. But we do have a solid intuition that it’s going to make it less likely.
This is especially true with geography. The political implications of hastily drawn borders are one example, but even which states get established at all.
For instance, in 1606, the Dutch were the first Europeans to step foot in Australia, but they do much. They thought the land was too arid and resource-deficient, so they mostly just created maps of the Australian coastlines and kept their focus on the East Indies. Australia wasn’t colonized until the late 18th century, just because the British were more optimistic about it.
I don’t think “people have made choices that mattered” is a sufficient criteria for showing the existence of agency. IMO, to have something like agency, you roughly have to have an ongoing situation roughly like this:
Goals ↔ Actions ↔ States-of-the-world.
Some entity needs to have ongoing goals they are able to modify as they go along acting in the world and their actions also need to be able to have an effect. Agency is a complex and intuitive thing so I assume some would ask more than this to say a thing has agency. But I think this is one reasonable requirement.
Agency in a limited scope would be something like a non-profit that has a plan for helping the homeless, tries to implement it, discovers problems with the plan, and comes up with a new plan that inherently involves modifying their concept of “helping the homeless”.
By this criteria, tiny decisions with big consequences aren’t evidence of agency. I think that’s fairly intuitive. Having agency is subjectively something like “being at cause” rather than “being at effect” and that’s an ongoing, not one-time thing.