…Indeed, for a historian who can establish himself in the past and not in the future, the world’s development is full of surprises: in religion, in politics, in social attitudes, there are sudden, almost electrifying, shifts and changes that would, were they grasped, make historically minded commentators more wary of their confident prognostications.
—In his introduction to Robespierre: Virtue and Terror, a collection of Maximilien Robespierre’s speeches and writings during the French Revolution, published in 2007 through Verso Press, Slavoj Žižek quotes the dictum ‘every history is a history of the present’. He is right to quote it; few historical events are as likely to be interpreted through the prism of prevalent political consensus as the French Revolution.—Read More:http://softmorningcity.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/danton-and-the-french-revolution-between-dw-griffith-and-soviet-russia/
One particular instance is the doom-laden voice of the modern demographer forecasting standing room only on this planet in another hundred years or so- a fashion too, among scientists ignorant of history. They thoughtlessly expected population to grow in a straight line, as it were, ever upward. The slightest knowledge of the history of population would have taught them that population growth and population decline occur very oddly.
Why did Elizabethan Englishmen want babies, and Stuart Englishmen not? Why did not only Europe’s but China’s population- indeed, the world’s- leap forward in the eighteenth century? Why did France’s population scarcely grow in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?
Historians know there is no easy, simple, or even satisfactorily complex explanation of the changes, which are sudden and tale the societies that experience them by surprise. Historians aware of these facts are not astonished that population growth should suddenly go into reverse. Indeed, one of the surprises of history in store for us may be a very sharp decline in global population over the next century. And it will not be the first time that great cities have emptied.
—The Triumph of the Winter Queen: Allegory of the Just by seventeenth-century Dutch master Gerrit van Honthorst….The Winter King and Queen take their nicknames from the shortness of their reign. They were actually Frederick V, Elector (ruler) of the Palatinate, and Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of England’s King James I. In 1619 Frederick, who ruled portions of Germany, was selected as King of Bohemia (roughly today’s Czech Republic). Central Europe was divided by fierce religious and political conflict at the time, and Frederick’s selection helped ensure the slide into war. Frederick was a Protestant, as were many of his Bohemia subjects, but most of the surrounding powers were Roman Catholic. As soon as Frederick was crowned, the Holy Roman Emperor, a Catholic, claimed Bohemia as well. After just a year in power, Frederick and Elizabeth were driven into exile; the conflict was a key early moment in the Thirty Years’ War that ravaged central Europe….click image for source…
To the perceptive historian, there would be nothing remarkable in the idea of Chicago buried under a mountain of rubble, not through natural disaster, but because it ceased to be. Nor should deep rooted assumptions like the automobile be a sacred cow: they could also go the way of the horse and buggy.
The future, however, is just as obscure to the knowledgeable as the novice, although they should be less surprised and quicker to discover “why” changes occur. But the so-called experts can teach others to be wary, stressing the element of surprise in the story of humankind, and perhaps point out that historical surprises seem to occur most frequently, although certainly not always, in periods of rapid inflation, which dislocates belief and rots social structure and institutions: all surprise is dangerous, and invariably sudden changes create human misery, at least in the short term….
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