Forks in the road of history
With the benefit of hindsight, the road we took to get to this point can look straight and obvious, even if it didn’t seem that way at the time. The way in which choices, opportunities, apparently random connections and the like become the story of your life is something you can only see by looking backwards. It should be obvious that history – personal or on the grand scale – only makes sense in retrospect, but there are less obvious implications that are important.
When we look backwards, we see the path walked; the line from then until now. In hindsight, it looks like a line. All the things that didn’t contribute to it seem less important. The choices not made, the options discarded, and all the little things we did and said and had a go at that led to nothing of apparent import. When we look back to make history stories, all the asides tend to seem less relevant. What we’re looking for is that story of how we went from there to here.
There may be all kinds of consequences in terms of what we lose, but there’s a reliable one in terms of how we tell the story and how we understand it. With the path from then to now apparent to us, ‘now’ looks inevitable. It becomes harder to imagine we could have gone the other way. That we are here seems to validate all of the choices that brought us to here, or to prove that everything before was inevitable. Here we are, history has happened and because we are where we are, it is foolish to think any of it could have gone differently.
There are a lot of people in the past who still influence us, whose beliefs included the will of God and predestination. If you think everything must happen in line with God’s plan, then you look at the past and see the clear line of intent. I think that influence dominates how many of us tell stories – that we see the line of clarity. I also think that life lived, and the trajectory we follow is not inevitable. I think it’s important to look at options, for chances to rethink the whole direction and for different ways of understanding all the stories we carry.
In terms of history, I believe we have a major fork in the road before us. Are we going to become wholly corporate in a world ruled by big business? Huge international trade agreements that give companies the power to sue governments if their profits are harmed, seem to be taking us that way. The growth of giant companies, and the rising wealth and power of the 1% suggests an inevitable trajectory. But it’s not inevitable, and we can choose differently. Many of us are uniting through an array of campaigning groups around the world to fight for human rights, to resist ecocide, to challenge over climate change and to resist the direction our collective path seems to be taking us in. We could win this.
If we let go of the idea that history went the only way it could have done, we can think a lot more flexibly about the present. If we let go of progress narratives, and watch out for ideas of predestination, then we don’t have to go with the apparent flow, we don’t have to be washed away by someone else’s story. By changing how we see the stories of the past, we can imagine the future differently.
I’ve read a fair bit of radical history. I’ve read about resistance, and apparently futile fights, and things we didn’t win, and I see in there not the failures of the losing side, and not the people stood on the wrong side of history, but an ongoing thread of not accepting that we have to go where we are told to. There are options. A neo-feudal world of warring corporate entities is not necessarily our future.
