The Wanderer Above the Sea of Clouds 1818
Historians and Social Scientists are by nature always at odds with each other in the way they choose to delve into the questions that lie before them. For in the case of social scientists engaging their methods of analysis, there is a tendency for them to become reductionist thinkers whose methodologies oversimplify the past to the point where it is a removal of the human element that is what make history as a method of inquiry so captivating in the first place.
In their path toward reducing human aspects of the past into a series of interdependent variables, social scientists have been diverted away from being able to use the approaches so well established by the natural sciences which they profess to have modeled their investigative means. The escape hatch that allows all too many social scientist to clamber through on their way toward assembling an 'unbiased' explanation of the past is constructed from a great, singular 'generalization' that all at once answers away all of the the minutia of a past long gone by and fills in the many cracks and fractures that it leaves in its wake with the belief that their methodology was creating a knowable future from a dimly lit past.
The result of the quantifiable approach driven by the social scientists is a constant shifting between the uncovering of painstaking dedication to exacting detail where ever possible only to be supplanted by over zealously made connections made to pull together those portions of the past that did not leave behind ample evidence for 'thick descriptions' and instead were held together by a thin and under nourishing gruel that left behind plenty of questionable 'answers.'
The way out from under this mounting threat against the establishment of a scientifically designed mode of generalization was introduced into the methodological toolbox of the quantifiers with the mathematical conclusion that dynamic systems, as represented by the past, did not in point of fact demonstrate any discernible relationship between dependent and independent variables, but instead, uncovered the great equalizer of 'chaos.' which portrayed the complexity of existence as something underwritten by a repeating and ever lasting simplicity upon complexity upon simplicity upon complexity ad infinitum that went on beyond the finite borders of any 'generalization' of the past had been created to prove.
The social scientists were confronted by the real existence of both predictability and unpredictability existing side by side. The result is that linearity emerges from the existence of an infinite cohort of interdependent variables effectively making none of which the cause of the occurrence being observed.
Input and output just as stimulus and response which also became predictable. The response to this bewildering discovery to the late 20th century mind was the creation and reliance on particular generalization which allows social scientists to escape a need to absolutely replicate the past and instead allow selectivity of variables to re-enter the process of quantification. While mathematics had uncovered the science that allows the predictable and the unpredictable to exist in tandem; social scientists attempting to engage in the work of historians had become totally baffled; but in their befuddlement had actually become more, rather than less like historians by being forced to deal with the interdependency of variables.
Thus the simplicity of the co-existence of chaos and complexity had melted away the veneer that social scientists had painted over the surface of exploring the past. Along with this shifting of perspective came the morphing of the acceptance of the predictable, machine like qualities of the universe created by Newtonian physics which was replaced by a chaotic, evolving and increasingly accepted historically based understanding of the cosmos.
Soon the explanations put forth by Einstein and Heisenberg brought even greater distortions to the Newtonian finely crafted universe analogous to the predictability of a timepiece, forever ticking away with such stable precision. With time and space being held to each other in relative terms and if the observer could not escape becoming a part of the observation what fate was certainty to suffer? The once bedrock assumptions of Newtonian physics had given way to the uncertainty of the quantum universe in which the past was no longer to hold an element of knowability; thus making the predictability of the future meaningless and forever destined to float along on a sea formed from an unpredictable past. The new reality meant that regularities co-existed with randomness.
The craft of historians gained at the expense of the Social scientists tendency to being absolute quantifiers. With there newly found relevance in tow historians could now deal with questions involving the interplay of patterns between predictability and non-predictability. The element of spontaneity correspondingly gained credence as linear and non-linear occurrences demonstrated how order and dis-order can interact.
So for historians who held fast to their humanities inspired methods while the social scientists endeavored to meld their methodologies and practices to those of the natural sciences it seems that the historians' persistence has brought the recently discovered sciences that incorporate chaos and complexity into the practice of history. In essence, science and history have developed sophisticated connections that incorporate inquiry through the practice of narrative.In addition, for some time, historians have been been stretching the boundaries of the discipline into such diverse areas as human behavior to the study of the environment and beyond.
This Posting was inspired by Chapter 5 "Chaos and Complexity" in The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past by John Lewis Gaddis
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