Shifting Sands

On history's primary problem: historians.

(The pyramids at Giza, still mysterious, thousands of years on… Public Domain.)

“History would be a wonderful thing – if it were only true.”
~ Leo Tolstoy (1828 - 1910)

Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Cairo, Egypt...

Assume the brace position, dear reader... this bird is going down! At least, that’s what we’re being told by those who got everything else wrong...

“Globalization is collapsing,” warns The New York Times. “Brace yourselves.”

“Wall Street woes deepen,” frets The Economic Times. “Dow on track for worst April since Great Depression of 1932.”

“Trump’s trade war risks global meltdown,” carps The Telegraph, “Geopolitical threat at highest level in decades.”

Sheesh! And here we thought our masthead might be too grim. To read the headlines today, you could be forgiven for thinking we really are heading for the End of the World.

And yet, the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west... the Nile still flows from south to north... and Cairene cab drivers still follow no lanes at all.

More from “The City of a Thousand Minarets” in future Notes, but first...

Round and Round We Go

When we left you this time last week, before we swapped the Pyrenees for the pyramids, we were ruminating over a theory of cycles, large and small. This is not a novel musing. Far greater thinkers have been puzzling over the subject for millennia, at least as far back as the ancient Greeks, if not the Egyptians themselves.

It was that clever ol’ Ephesian, Heraclitus, who believed in the universal concept of enantiodromia (later taken up by Nietzsche and Jung) — the idea that everything is at all times in the process of becoming its opposite; hot things cool, wet things dry, etc. One might consider this with regards to centralization vs. decentralization, top down control by the few vs. bottom up “spontaneous order” of the many, growth vs. value, life giving way to death...and, at least for the Ancient Egyptians, an afterlife hereafter.

The pendulum swings from one extreme to another, the emergent membrane between the two akin to that undefinable moment where one thing morphs into the other, when an edgy, “alternative” band becomes mainstream, when the politics of liberation becomes the politics of oppression, or when a young man looks in the mirror one day and sees an old man staring back at him... maybe even with his lame arm in a sling, partially mummified.

In political terms, we might think of peace giving way to war... then, once the parched earth is soaked by the blood of young men... yielding to a hard-won peace once again. So the great wheel turns... and man, ever susceptible to the whim and caprice of his particular age, sees what he wishes to see.

In some ways, all history is fiction.

On Shifting Sands

We don't mean to suggest that the past did not happen (how could we know?)... only that the retelling of it is, necessarily, flawed. We're interested in this point because we're trying to reckon out a theory about cycles, both great and small, and how they shape the world around us over time.

Dear readers will recall from our last musing a pithy, inexhaustive list of historical undulations... from the minute, barely perceptible news and Tik Tok cycles… to seasonal fashion cycles... through to slightly longer election and stock market cycles... to the longer still natural resource and bond market super-cycles...

… and, standing back from our cracked lens a little further, the vast rhythms revealing the centralization and decentralization of political power over the ages.

To put these cycles in some kind of context, we first need to take a quick look at history itself... and how we've come to understand it.

The primary problem with history, it seems to us, is the historians. Humans recount events selectively. Which is to say, at least with regard to objective reality, poorly. We do this — whether consciously or not — with a blind eye to our own personal biases.

Power and fame, envy and vanity, fast profits and false prophets... many and varied are the compromising, corrupting influences on our ability to faithfully recall the past. And here we refer only to our day-to-day recollections, fallible as they are. Whether trawling through primary sources or scouring dusty, secondary documents, most historians come to “misimagine” history, too.

Of Gods and Men

At least, that's how Leo Tolstoy saw it. The Russian-born writer set out to explain his thinking in the second epilogue to his momentous work War and Peace, itself an impressionistic, largely fictionalized retelling of the Napoleonic Wars.

Instead of grappling with the nature of cycles within our immediate focus, Tolstoy observed, academics tend to ascribe meaning where there is none, to conflate cause and effect and to generally make a mess of things. Historians give credit where none is due, he argued, endowing certain actors — Napoleon, for example — with near Godlike powers to impact the course of history.

This is hardly surprising. After all, humans are painfully self-aware creatures; creatures that have fashioned many gods in their own image. It should be little wonder then that we would, looking back over our own sordid affair, from the banks of the Nile to the penthouse of Trump Tower, imbue our kin with history-altering omnipotence... to deify, glorify and vilify our ancestors... and, by extension, ourselves.

What does this say about our past, present and future? Where are we in our current cycle? And in the end, what does it matter, anyway?

Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World…

Cheers,

Joel Bowman

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