Shrapnel and History - The Static Model

[Payne]

I've been thinking recently that history (as an academic exercise, as opposed to The Past in totally objective terms) and shrapnel (as the concept has been formulated on PD, and specifically in the way I've been trying to make it work) are very similar things, if not quite the same thing.

I'll start with history here.

Historians will usually tell you that their "job" is to inform the present day, and by extension the future, about the pitfalls of history. The mistakes of people that were made in situations similar to what we face today features strongly in this, but more importantly a relation of 'Why' we got to where we are today as opposed to 'How'. The latter almost always requires an historian to overlay some form of Theory of History over past events, in the vain hope that we can create some form of recurring pattern from them and thus have a stronger tool for predicting the future.

History, however, is not a grand story, written by even a competent author. It's a series of decisions, actions and events occurring in the contemporary present. There is no beginning, end and climax. There is no thematic arc and there is no cast of characters (there are characters, certainly, but they weren't cast for the role or written in to satisfy a need for them in the plot).

Having thought about this a bit, I decided to try my hand at creating a model for my view of history. The first idea that popped into my head was a very simple and controlled thought experiment that may not work very accurately or even reflect the real world, but bear with me.

I started with something that was very fresh in my mind - the recent presidential elections. Picture a voting district with absolutely no decided voters in it. Every single one of them are 'swing' voters and are not predisposed to either candidate (an impossibility in real life).

When their votes are counted, the results are roughly 50/50 to each candidate. There are only two candidates running here. and every single eligible person cast a vote for one of them.

You can view each vote, each person, with a colour coded square. For perversity consider 'black' as a McCain vote and 'white' as an Obama vote. You can also arrange these squares onto a grid, and assign each square a place on that grid based on extra information about them, for example; ethnicity, geographical location, age, weight or whatever else you want.

The more extra information you use to arrange the grid, the more broken up the blocks of colour will become, until it begins to look like a screen shot of static on a detuned television. the complexity doesn't even have to end there; you can create a series of these picture representations by doing the same for voting results over a number of elections or by changing the parameters by which you placed the squares on the grid.

Run these series of pictures as an animated .gif and you will end up with a crude version of television static.

Historians will look at this model and try to glean a Theory of the History of the electoral results from it, but as we've seen, the complexity only increases with added (possibly important) information even from a fairly simple premise.

Real television static is caused by the TV set picking up signals from a relatively wide band of the electromagnetic spectrum, including other broadcast frequencies and even a trace of the background radiation from the birth of the universe - the big bang. What historians are trying to do with finding the thematic arc of history in our model is really finding one specific frequency and its effects on the results, so they can apply that finding to other models. They are looking for 'Why' of past events.

When you expand the premise of our model to include the almost infinitely wider range of reactions (add differently coloured squares) and the same for the extra information we used to place those squares on a grid, the huge complexity of such an undertaking makes the effort to find out 'Why' in any useful detail becomes a pointless exercise.

Presidential candidates, luckily for us, are not historians. They will look at the actual results and move on. The breaking down of demographics and analysing of electoral performance is a job for their campaign staff and their parties, the only important thing for them is the 'How', in this case how the result turned out for them and how that impacts their election night.

Now, to tie this into my thoughts on shrapnel, I needed to consider how small actions and events affect people in the contemporary present, and how those effects continued to influence them. I immediately realised that the important lesson to take away from the thought experiment was to remove the 'why' from the discussion. Why shrapnel affects us and continues to do so is not so important as how it does, which is possibly why I've been on such a loose end with this concept for a while now.

Becoming aware of the shrapnel that affects us, and learning to deal with it is the ultimate goal here. We don't need to invest the entire process with a narrative in the hopes of creating a usable model which we can attempt to map shrapnel and its effects. The causes, processes and consequences of shrapnel are too complex to allow it and are very much tailored to each individual, so any model we arrive it will be inherently flawed anyway.

Maybe it's time for me to change the channel of this detuned television and actually watch something on it. Maybe some porn or something.

[Cramulus]

Interesting thoughts Payne.

You're chiseling away at the walls of modernism, whcih is (in part) the notion that history has a singular narrative that's going somewhere. The Postmoderns suggested that the narrative is different for each individual and each of us picks and chooses what parts of the Greater Narrative are part of Our Personal Story.

The problem comes when people interpose their own narrative and present it as fact. Public Opinion Polls are a primary offender.

see also:
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/10/26/how_media_polls_manufacture_pu/

Typically, media polls are designed not to report public opinion but to manufacture a "public opinion" that is interesting and plausible for the news stories - often at the expense of anything that resembles what Americans are really thinking.

The major tactics media pollsters use are 1) asking forced choice questions, to get answers even from people who have no opinion; 2) providing information to respondents in the interview, in case they don't know enough already to offer an opinion - and in so doing taint the sample, so that it no longer represents the general public that has not been given that same information; and 3) failing to provide meaningful intensity measures that could help distinguish firmly held views from the "top-of-mind" views that respondents express in the press of a quick telephone interview.

Typically, the news media do not want to report polls that show a significant segment of the public unengaged and without an opinion on an issue. So pollsters "force" (pressure) respondents to come up with an answer, no matter how lightly held. And if respondents don't know enough, pollsters provide them some limited information.

The net result is that often media poll results conflict greatly with each other, because different polls give different information to respondents, and thus influence them to give different answers. That was the case recently with polls that asked people their reactions to the efforts by Congress and the President to address the economic crisis.

[Golden Applesauce]

So... history is just one big law of fives, historians connecting the Pebbles according to their own shrapnel?

Sorry, I'm having trouble making sense out of this.

[Cainad (dec.)]

So... history is just one big law of fives, historians connecting the Pebbles according to their own shrapnel?

Sorry, I'm having trouble making sense out of this.

That was also my first impression

but then again, the first time I was introduced to the concept of Shrapnel, I didn't "get" it. I'll re-read this and try a little harder to grasp the actual point.

[Payne]

To be honest, shrapnel was an afterthought in this. I just found some of the ideas I thought about when I was in the middle of a diatribe about history could actually apply to shrapnel too.

As for the historians and their penchant for patterns and grand causes: maybe.

I reckon a lot of historians would fall for the standard human impulse for making patterns and assigning causes to completely random events. Cram was closer with his point about Modernism, in which history is assigned a grand narrative which reaches into the future (in part, at least. There is more to Modernism than only that. I should also point out I'm not specifically aiming for a Post-Modernism vibe in this essay)

The link to shrapnel comes from disavowing the narrative and judging purely the effects (the how instead of the why). I think this comes mostly from an attempt to excuse my lack of progress in describing shrapnel any clearer than it already has been, but there could be something more to it. If so, I hope someone else can point it out to me.