The statement above might not be true. But then again it might.

We can never know what that fetus who was aborted or miscarried yesterday in Shanghai—or somewhere else in the world—would have done had he or she lived.

The contingent nature of history, both staggeringly complex and mystifyingly simple, is nicely illustrated in this familiar rhyme:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Upon seemingly the smallest of events, the whole course of future development may hinge.


I’m currently reading a thought-provoking book called What If?: The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been:

What if Hitler had not attacked Russia when he did? He might have moved into the Middle East and secured the oil supplies the Third Reich so badly needed, helping it retain its power in Europe. What if D-Day had been a failure? The Soviet Union might have controlled all of Europe. What if Sennacherib had pressed the siege of Jerusalem in 701 B.C.? Then the nascent, monotheistic Jewish religion might never have taken hold among the people of Judah—and the daughter religions of Christianity and Islam would never have been born.

So suggest some of the many first-rate contributors to this essay collection. One of them is classicist Josiah Ober, who suggests that if Alexander the Great had died at the age of 21 instead of 32, Greece would have been swallowed up by Persia and Rome, and the modern Western world would have a much different sensibility—and probably little idea of democratic government.

Still other contributors are Stephen E. Ambrose, Caleb Carr, John Keegan, David McCullough, and James McPherson, who examine a range of scenarios populated by dozens of historical figures, including Sir Walter Raleigh, Chiang Kai-shek, Robert E. Lee, Benito Mussolini, and Themistocles. The result is a fascinating exercise in historical speculation, one that emphasizes the importance of accident and of roads not taken in the evolution of human societies across time.

This brilliant book makes clear how uncertain the direction of history really is. Flukes, accidents, and surprises—completely unpredictable events—repeatedly have influenced the outcome of important military confrontations that shaped the world we live in to an unimaginably large extent.

It is thus compellingly obvious that predicting the future course of events from the standpoint of an analyst in 700 BC or 700 AD (or, for that matter, 1930 AD) would have been a pathetically futile effort.

That being the case, how can we have any confidence that predictions about our own future will have any more value?

For example, what if Al Gore had been granted the election he won in 2000? How might that have affected the military and economic history we have recently experienced?

Which events of the year 2010 or 2015 or 2020 will radically influence the world we will inherit in 2040 or 2050?

The startling and humbling conclusion we must draw is that we cannot now predict the most important events to come. The best we can hope for is to develop a roughly vague set of future probabilities that might be most likely to occur.

What that means for us here at the IEET is the importance of focusing on resilience in selecting the policies we propose and support. Since we, along with everyone else, are demonstrably unable to plan for specific outcomes, our best bet is to emphasize choices that will provide society with the largest range of responsive actions depending on how things actually turn out.

History is contingent. The future, therefore, demands effective contingency planning.