What if Genghis Khan hadn’t unified China into one nation? What if Ferdinand and Isabella had remained staunch in their initial decision to not finance Columbus in his ventures? What if Adolf Hitler had died of measles at the age of three?
I’m not asking how you think the world would be different had some of these things had happened.
I’m asking whether or not you think someone or something else would have taken over, had these things I’ve postulated happened. Was the unity of the tribes in China–the discovery of the ‘New World’–WWII and the Holocaust–inevitable, no matter what–or who–is thought to be the causation of these and other historical events?
I sometimes think about things like this–not often enough to worry about them, but enough to ponder them.
I think it’s ridiculous to put significant historical movements down to 1 person - as though it was only the guy who happened to be leader at the time who made the entire thing happen on his own…
Hitler is just the scapegoat for the whole breeding of humans like animals idea, which was bound to come up at some point - most likely at around the same time in around the same place, just under a different leader with slightly different (potentially more extreme) details. America was not essential to the European advancement in technology and curiosity necessary to do what Colombus did, so would have been discovered eventually - just later in history I guess. I don’t know enough about Genghis Khan uniting China.
As far as we know, time and the universe are infinite.
This means that eventually, somewhere, everything will happen.
Maybe in 1x10^999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 million years earth will be exactly how it was around Genghis Khan’s time and he won’t unify china, someone else will.
And then another 1x10^999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 million years or so it will happen again and no one will unify china.
Everything can, and probably will, happen at some point or another. I realize this is probably on too big of a scale for the topic at hand.
China would probably unify without Genghis, it has been broken and rebuilt since then. The Americas would be found eventually due to the relative proximity and someone eventually trying to sail/fly/swim from europe to china.
WWII was inevitable because most of the major players in the war were on the brink of it anyway and I’m sure someone would try to kill the jews eventually in europe, it had already happened in the puritanical christian middle ages.
I hope this second answer was what you were looking for.
They’re both relevant answers, Khrone–but your first answer brings up another question–Are time and the universe–or time within the universe–infinite?
History isn’t about 1 person, Sil, I know that. I was going to list the Dred Scott decision, but that (and Dred Scott, himself) were only parts of the movement toward the War Between the States. But I don’t think Hitler is a scapegoat–I think he and his inner-circle were the end of an historic movement. That movement started with an ‘inborn’ hatred of the Jewish people which actually began before the Middle Ages and was rampant in Poland, Germany and Spain–although not so much in Spain-- way before the Inquisition In what is now Poland and Germany, it was basically political, having to do with money-lending–but that’s another thread.
I also believe the misunderstanding of Nietzsche’s philosophy played a large part in the movement toward WWII–but that’s my opinion.
Somehow all these threads of history created a tapestry of thoughts and events leading up to certain particular people, with distinct personalities, at just the right time to act as they did, most often without realizing what would be the consequences of their births.
Just things I ponder rather randomly. My answer is, “Yes, they occurred when, why and how they occurred and with the people involved who were involved, because the time was ready for the events.” The specific people had very little to do with anything. In fact, Leif Ericson ‘discovered’ North America–but his discovery came too soon and, so, was of little importance.
Time is definitely infinite, there will always be an after to follow the before. I’m not certain about the universe but it appears to be and even if it isn’t it is very large and with infinite time everything will most probably happen at least once.
I don’t think we can know this. I think that to even attempt to answer it, with a Yes or No, means that we do not see our lives as having any free will…that we don’t have the power to go in different directions at different points in time. That the evolutionary process is part of some kind of pre-ordained fate which we can’t avoid. I think that everything is up for grabs - it is just that in hindsight, we refuse to see the patterns that were there in front of us - we created them in each and every moment.
Many things are dependent upon the context of each individual’s psyche and personal human journey. Life is a process and a continuum. It’s a question of Will and personal autonomy. Each life is touched and influenced by another, sort of like a cause and an effect but not quite like that. Just an ongoing evolutionary road on Earth.
Yes, there will always be a future, present and past for everything observable here on earth and we call that progression Time. But our ‘time’ depends on what is unique to us–that we live on a planet which takes roughly 365 days to circle our sun while it takes roughly 24 hours for our earth to rotate on its axis in its orbital journey around our sun. This makes time variable even within our own galaxy. In that sense, time is an invention of man–and a very important one–without which we wouldn’t have an accurate measure of longitude or Einstein’s equivalence theory of energy to mass–E=mc2. But I’m going off on a tangent–c2 doesn’t mean time squared, because time isn’t a constant, so Einstein chose the speed of light within a vacuum, squared, as his constant. But the speed of light can be measured in terms of light years, hence the common use of c2 to mean time squared.
Is the universe infinite? If we accept the theory of an ever-expanding universe, as science posits, and if Einstein’s theory is also shown to be valid, yes, to us it probably is. Sometime in the future, whoever proceeds from us may be able to break through the energy-mass equivalence and send man to the space outside our solar system. That is, to me, so far in the future–in time to come–I don’t even try to contemplate it.
Anyway, what I was trying to express was my awe and wonder at the way time seems to have converged at certain points in certain places, where it met with certain people who’s backgrounds and environments led them to take certain actions that effectively changed the environment of the world as we know it. Is this pre-determination, or is it truly random?
To me, preordained or predestined implies a something that does the planning, which gets into a discussion of an infinite, omniscient ‘being.’ We’ve anthropomorphized that ‘being’ or ‘substance’ into what we call God. That’s the god in which I don’t necessarily believe; however, I do believe there could be a pattern in randomness–an ‘orderliness’ as we see in nature, when we take the time to look, but that we can’t ‘see’ because it’s too big and we’re too small and too close. Does that deprive us of ‘free will?’ I don’t think so.
Within the context of time and randomness, of which we are such a small part, we have free will and the ‘right’ to make our own decisions. But we don’t have the ability to look into the future to ‘see’ the consequences of our decisions five generations ahead of us, or even five days ahead of us. Which means, imm, all we can do as we bumble and tumble our way through our live, is what we think is the ‘best’ we can do at the time.
China sought allies against Japan after Nanjing. The German Mark became literally as worthless as kindling before the Nazis offered a “solution”, the Vikings set foot on the Americas long before Columbus . . .
It seems like every big historical event is tied with a “crazy” that could iconify the statistical pressures of the community. Everyone wanted to do something, but they needed a figurehead to embody what they want to do. Something similar was going to happen, regardless of the crazy in power. The nature of conflict and control probably would have changed, depending on the leadership of the time. But the actual pillage and destruction, the hatred of a specific creed or nation- that I think is purely the superfluous psychology of the masses. Soldiers are to blame for war. Consumers are to blame for pollution. But our brains could not comprehend the factors involved within simultaneous thousands of people. So it’s easier to identify some dynasty or empirical figure.
Genghis Khan came way before Nanjing. Much of the world was going through a depression in the '30s. I already said Leif Ericson discovered No. America. But no one has understood what I’ve been trying to say–Is there order in time and randomness that we can’t see?
I don’t really buy into the “Great Man” theory of history. That heroic mold belongs to another century. But there are cases where it is hard to deny. Genghis Khan is one of those. Unifying the Mongols (I assume that is what you meant, China has been unified since 221 BCE) and conquering pretty much the entire world really, really, really changes things. The stability created by the Mongol Empire allowed for trade routes that wouldn’t have otherwise been possible and the destruction wrought by the Mongols really set many areas of the world back quite some time. Others are more products of their time. The widespread use of emergency powers in the Weimar Republic, the German Sonderweg, widespread anti-Semitism, a long history of pushing Jews out further East via pogroms, economic decay, reparations, German propaganda during WWI plus how WWI ended all pretty much make a highly belligerent Germany a historical inevitability. WWI left too many loose ends and something was going to complete it. Would it have been precisely the same had Hitler not risen to power? No, it probably would have been different, maybe even no Holocaust . . . but I doubt it. Blaming a visible minority is a pretty common tactic all throughout history and the Jews are a traditional scapegoat in Europe. Likewise, the European desire for trade created a situation that was very receptive to a high risk/high rewards venture like Columbus. Someone would have likely funded such an excursion.
Xun, I didn’t realize there was a “Great Man” theory of history–and I’ve studied history! Nor will I quibble about the unification of China which occurred many times, depending on the definition of unification. I’m sorry, now, that I ever introduced my thought the way I did.
Is it possible that there is order within our perceived randomness that we cannot understand because we’re too small and too unimportant–given an orderliness–that we can’t ‘know’ the general scheme of things except at a very constricted level? Do the events of time and space – within our time and space–only effect our time and space, or are they a part of the randomness we perceive as randomness which may or may not comprise a pattern of orderliness?
While I was sitting one night with a poet friend watching a great opera performed in a tent under arc lights, the poet took my arm and pointed silently. Far up, blundering out of the night, a huge Cecropia moth swept past from light to light over the posturings of the actors. “He doesn’t know,” my friend whispered excitedly. “He’s passing through an alien universe brightly lit but invisible to him. He’s in another play; he doesn’t see us. He doesn’t know. Maybe it’s happening right now to us.
Loren Eiseley (1907 - 1977)
Xun, I thought “structuralism” was a method of literary criticism–is there also a ‘structuralist’ philosophy? I have a bit of a problem with reducing things down to an ‘-ism.’ I was simply thinking about my god-concept and how to put it into words.
What was there before the Big Bang? Was there some ‘thing,’ or was there no ‘thing?’ (Should the plural be used instead–Were there some ‘things?’) Or is there a ‘problem’ with the verb “to be?”
Or is the thread nothing other than an example of my maundering thoughts?–something like wondering what it is in human spit that can take the itch out of some bug bites?
Now all we have to do is to take that out into the "real’ world to intuit that where we are is not where we think we are.
And then we might begin to ‘really’ see.
