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Ubiquity: The Science of History . . . or Why the World Is Simpler Than We Think - Hardcover

Buchanan, Mark

 
9780609608104: Ubiquity: The Science of History . . . or Why the World Is Simpler Than We Think
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 060960810X ISBN 13: 9780609608104
Verlag: Crown Pub, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

The author outlines his theory of the "Tipping Point"--that tendency for things to organize themselves into a moment of crisis that results in collapse and an eventual rebuilding process--and applies it to human history. 25,000 first printing.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Buchanan is a science writer who has worked on the editorial staff of <i>Nature</i> and as a features editor for <i>New Scientist</i>. He earned a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Virginia. This is his first book.

Aus dem Klappentext

trophes happen? What sets off earthquakes, for example? What about mass extinctions of species? The outbreak of major wars? Massive traffic jams that seem to appear out of nowhere? Why does the stock market periodically suffer dramatic crashes? Why do some forest fires become superheated infernos that rage totally out of control? <br><br>Experts have never been able to explain the causes of any of these disasters. Now scientists have discovered that these seemingly unrelated cataclysms, both natural and human, almost certainly all happen for one fundamental reason. More than that, there is not and never will be any way to predict them. <br><br>Critically acclaimed science journalist Mark Buchanan tells the fascinating story of the discovery that there is a natural structure of instability woven into the fabric of our world. From humble beginnings studying the physics of sandpiles, scientists have learned that an astonishing range of things–Earth’s crust, cars on a highway, the

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Politics is not the art of the possible.
It consists in choosing between
the disastrous and the unpalatable.
--John Kenneth Galbraith

History is the science
of things which are never repeated.
--Paul Valéry

It was 11 a.m. on a fine summer morning in Sarajevo, June 28, 1914, when the driver of an automobile carrying two passengers made a wrong turn. The car was not supposed to leave the main street, and yet it did, pulling up into a narrow passageway with no escape. It was an unremarkable mistake, easy enough to make in the crowded, dusty streets. But this mistake, made on this day and by this driver, would disrupt hundreds of millions of lives, and alter the course of world history.

The automobile stopped directly in front of a nineteen-year-old Bosnian Serb student, Gavrilo Princip. A member of the Serbian terrorist organization Black Hand, Princip couldn't believe his luck. Striding forward, he reached the carriage. He drew a small pistol from his pocket. Pointed it. Pulled the trigger twice. Within thirty minutes, the Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, the carriage's passengers, were dead. Within hours, the political fabric of Europe had begun to unravel.

In the days that followed, Austria used the assassination as an excuse to begin planning an invasion of Serbia. Russia guaranteed protection to the Serbs, while Germany, in turn, offered to intercede on Austria's behalf should Russia become involved. Within just thirty days, this chain reaction of international threats and promises had mobilized vast armies and tied Austria, Russia, Germany, France, Britain, and Turkey into a deadly knot. When the First World War ended five years later, ten million lay dead. Europe fell into an uncomfortable quiet that lasted twenty years, and then the Second World War claimed another thirty million. In just three decades, the world had suffered two engulfing cataclysms. Why? Was it all due to a chauffeur's mistake?

On the matter of the causes and origins of the First World War, of course, almost nothing has been left unsaid. If Princip touched things off, to the British historian A.J.P. Taylor the war was really the consequence of railway timetables, which locked nations into a sequence of military preparations and war declarations from which there was no escape. The belligerent states, as he saw it, "were trapped by the ingenuity of their preparations." Other historians point simply to German aggression and national desire for expansion, and suggest that the war was inevitable once Germany had become unified under Bismarck a half century earlier. The number of specific causes proposed is not much smaller than the number of historians who have considered the issue, and even today major new works on the topic appear frequently. It is worth keeping in mind, of course, that all this historical "explanation" has arrived well after the fact.

In considering how well we understand the natural rhythms of human history, and in judging how able we are nowadays to perceive even the rough outlines of the future, it is also worth remembering that the century preceding 1914 had been like a long peaceful afternoon in European history, and that to historians of the time the wars seemed to erupt like terrifying and inexplicable storms in a cloudless sky. "All the spawn of hell," the American historian Clarence Alvord wrote after the First World War, "roamed at will over the world and made of it a shambles. . . . The pretty edifice of . . . history, which had been designed and built by my contemporaries, was rent asunder. . . . The meaning we historians had read into history was false, cruelly false." Alvord and other historians thought they had discerned legitimate patterns in the past, and had convinced themselves that modern human history would unfold gradually along more or less rational lines. Instead, the future seemed to lie in the hands of bewildering, even malicious forces, preparing unimaginable catastrophes in the dark.

The First World War, the war sparked by "the most famous wrong turning in history," is the archetypal example of an unanticipated upheaval in world history, and one might optimistically suppose that such an exceptional case is never likely to be repeated. With the aid of hindsight, many historians now believe they understand the larger forces that caused the world wars of the twentieth century, and that we can once again see ahead with clear vision. But Alvord and his colleagues had similar confidence a century ago. What's more, few of us--professional historians included--seem any wiser when it comes to the present.

In the mid-1980s, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had existed for nearly three-quarters of a century, and it stood as a seemingly permanent fixture on the world stage. At that time, there were palpable fears in the United States that the U.S.S.R. was way ahead militarily, and that only with a concerted effort could the United States even stay competitive. In 1987, one would have had to scour the journals of history and political science to find even a tentative suggestion that the U.S.S.R. might collapse within half a century, let alone in the coming decade. Then, to everyone's amazement, the unthinkable became a reality--in just a few years.

In the wake of the U.S.S.R.'s unraveling, some historians leaped to another conclusion. Democracy seemed to be spreading over the globe, binding it up into one peaceful and lasting New World Order--the phrase favored, at least, by politicians in the West, who happily proclaimed the final victory of democracy (and capitalism) over communism. Some writers even speculated that we might be approaching "the end of history," as the world seemed to be settling into some ultimate equilibrium of global democracy, the end result of a centuries-long struggle for the realization of a deep human longing for individual dignity. Just a few years later, in what was then Yugoslavia, war and terrible inhumanity once again visited Europe. A momentary setback? Or the first ominous sign of things to come?

No doubt historians can also explain quite convincingly--though in retrospect, of course--why these events unfolded as they did. And there is nothing wrong with this kind of explanation; it is in the very nature of history that thinking and explanation must always proceed backwards. "Life is understood backwards," as Søren Kierkegaard once expressed the dilemma, "but must be lived forwards." And yet this need to resort always to explanations after the fact also underlines the seeming lack of any simple and understandable patterns in human affairs. In human history, the next dramatic episode, the next great upheaval, seems always to be lurking just around the corner. So despite their aim to find at least some meaningful patterns in history, it is probably true that many historians sympathize with the historian H. A. L. Fisher, who in 1935 concluded:

Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another . . . and only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen. . . . The ground gained by one generation may be lost by the next.

Having read this far, you may be surprised to learn that this book is about ideas that find their origin not in history but in theoretical physics. It may seem decidedly odd that I have begun by recounting the beginning of the last century's major wars, and by trumpeting the capricious and convulsive character of human history. There is nothing new in the recognition that history follows tortuous...

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Verlag
Crown Pub
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
060960810X
ISBN 13 
9780609608104
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
273
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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