Can history transform into science and predict the future? What was predicted for 2020

True, those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. But it is far less rare to see an explanation of how history can help us to build a better future. Of course, this does not prevent historians like Juval Noah Harari from advising world leaders in Davos, or scientists like Jared Diamond, from writing bestseller books on the fall of traditional societies.

But mechanisms that can enable knowledge of the past to change operations in the present are rarely clear. And historians who present a great historical picture to the broad reader, “designed” the many voices of humanity's past in a single human history are often accused of “of safe generalisation”, as happened with the recent Harary.

But is the story story itself a problem? If the big data could enable us to turn the big story into math rather than a confession, would it facilitate our own analysis of our past? Some scientists think so.

So in February 2010, Peter Turchin, ecologist at the University of Connecticut, U.S.A., predicted that 2020 would see a sharp increase in political instability in Western democracies. The U.S., he said, was reaching a peak in the order of a destability (which occurs regularly every 50 years or more), as the world economy was reaching the moment of a decline known as “when the Kondratiev” -- that is, a steep decline in a growth-oriented supercycle.

Two years earlier, in July 2008, Turchin had made a series of claims on nature and the future of history. Based on more than <x0,200 explanations” on the fall of the Roman Empire, he was surprised at how historians were unable to agree, that “cillate explanations are acceptable, and which should be rejected”.

He wanted to know if efforts in medicine and environmental science, to produce healthy bodies and ecology, were not reflected in taking similar measures to create stable societies? It was probably the time “for history to become an analytical science, and even a” seer. Knowing that historians were unlikely to adopt such analytical approaches to the past, he proposed a new discipline.

Like C.P. Snou 60 years before him, Turchin wanted to challenge the line between the sciences of nature and humans to implement the theories of natural science in human behavior (such as sociobiology). In fact, there is a long tradition of molding scientific history - studying the past in order to shape the future.

In the 19th century, English historian Henry Bakle used a broad approach to the past, in an attempt to identify the social-governing <x0 natural laws”. His contemporary, French positiveist August Komt, had earlier proposed his 3-stage “law” that, according to him, characterises human society, passing to the stages “x5> and “sicy”, before reaching a scientific self-conception through which a better society would be built.

The Komt's work provoked a number of answers, including Herbert Spencer's social Darwinism, which coined the phrase “the survival of the fittest”. Organic expertise between biological and social evolution was reflected by other Victorian scholars, often in ways now described as racist. So John Lubok used the “behaviors and customs of modern savages” to illustrate his exploration in human history. According to him, local people could be treated as literal fossils, as vivid incarnations of early stages of human evolution.

All these models, based on the idea of “progress”, which argued that while mankind and human societies became more complex, they also became the best “”, more rational, more liberal, more modern and more capable of managing nature.

Moreover, they contained within them the idea that the future would be even better, whether conceived as Carl Marx's communist society, at the merit of the eugenic-based democracy of Francis Galton, or Edward Bellamy's socialist utopia.

The idea that such progress was inevitable was strongly dictated by the genocides and totalitarianism of the mid - 20th century. But the concept of the general laws of social evolution survived through modern schools of thought. For example, with creation in 1952 of the term “third world” by French historian Alfred Sov.

In 1925, Soviet economist Nikolai Kondratiev claimed to have discovered cycles, or curves, in the world economy, repeated every 40 to 60 years. This idea was energetically revived in the West by Ernest Mandel, with his essay in 1964 on the economy of neocapitalism.

But in the late 1960 ' s, optimism about man's ability to manage the future was getting very dim. Concerns about the “nuclear weapon” joined the new fear of ecological bomb. As the exponential increases in informal power made it easier to obtain complex historical data to create realistic apocalypse scenarios.

Scientist Donald Medout and her husband, Dennis, were particularly important in developing the strategies for shaping the global ecological future, based on the computer program “Weld3”, which simulated interactions between population growth, and industrial-manic production.

Their simulations were the basis of the Roman Club's bestseller book, “Economic Growth Confisions” of 1972, which argued that economic growth was unstable, and that if it continued with levels then, it would lead to disaster. Simulations of isolated systems had already been developed, but the concrete case was a model of how these systems can interact globally.

The more powerful computers they are, the more complex the systems can be molded. Of course, the accuracy of each model depended on the initial assumptions of its programmers, and the nature of the data coming into it, something for which the Club of Rome was criticized.

Moreover, for most historians, <x0) historical artifacts” are not hidden items that exist independently, pending that researchers find, collect and catalog them. They must be created and interpreted. Archives may seem relatively easy to reproduce. But as with archaeological excavations, the physical context in which documents are found is essential to their interpretation.

Since Leopold von Ranke ʹ German XIX scholar who founded professional history ʹ history has paid great attention to the resources used by historians. As long as Emi Durkheim is prefraud, historical facts should not be treated as items. And that's exactly what Turchi proposed in 2003.

Inspired by the work of American sociologist Jack Goldstone, who in the 1990s had tried to translate Alexi de Earthville's philosophy into mathematical equations, Turchin began to link the size of the population with economic production (and with levels of economic inequality), as well as social and political instability.

To measure the differences in these three variables over time, he had to identify a variety of different sources of data. For example, social structure can be treated as a product of health and wealth inequality. But to do so, rough variables must be resolved.

The process was further complicated by the fact that when working over a time involving millenniums, these rough variables change over time. Based on Greenland's ice core data, skeletal abnormalities and currency storage levels, Turchin claimed to have identified manageable data, enabling him to track down population, economy and political changes over thousands of years.

In particular, he identified two repeat models as essential to understanding political history: secret sociomographic cycles, and father-son cycles. The first was referring to centuries of age, in which destabilities rise and decrease according to the population.

When the population reached earth's capacity, living standards would decline. Previous elite groups, experiencing a loss of resources or status, would start to revolt against the established political system. In the subsequent chaos, population levels would drop, and new technologies or strategies could be found to exploit old ones, and a new wave could begin.

Within these centuries-old cycles, there were to be shorter 50-year-old tremors “babe-bier”, where, for example, the experience of war from one generation to another encourages the next generation to reject violence, while the third generation (nipi), having no direct experience of the horror of conflict, is willing to start the cycle from scratch.

This cycle was also the main basis for forecasting chaos in 2020 by Turchi. The experiences of World War II, and those of imperialism in general, made Western scholars very careful in using biology and evolution to explain human culture and society.

However, a multidisciplinary evolutionary approach, which includes both quantitative and qualitative methodology, characterizes some of the developing intellectual programs, otherwise known as the deep “ ” or “the great story”. Finally, it is not clear at all whether the creation of a science of history is actually a good idea.

The quantitative mathematical patterns, directed by data, on human experience aimed at secession, objectivity, and the ability to develop and test hypothesiss, must be balanced with quality and imaginary efforts to create and design a living future, enabling their audiences to rely on expectations and fears of what might happen in the future.

Note: Amanda Rees, is a science historian at the University of York at the University of Great Britain.

Taken with cuts from “Aeon.co” World.al