Ada Palmer
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
If small perturbations cascade unpredictably through chaotic systems, then perhaps historical actors are merely throwing pebbles into turbulent water, creating ripples they cannot control, in directions they cannot predict.
They perturb the system, yes, but with unknown and unknowable consequences.
Palmer argues otherwise.
Her students don't just perturb the system at random.
They achieve goals.
Not perfectly, not completely, but meaningfully.
As she observes, no one controlled what happened, and no one could predict what happened, but those who worked hard, most of them succeeded in diverting most of the damage, achieving many of their goals, preventing the worst.
Not all, but most.
Florence doesn't always survive, but when Florentine players work skillfully, it survives more often.
The outcomes aren't predetermined, but neither are they purely random.
This is what Machiavelli asserted.
In The Prince, Chapter 25, he writes, I compare, fortune, to one of those violent rivers, which when swelled up floods the plains, sweeping away trees and buildings, carrying the soil away from one place to another.
Everyone flees before it, all yield to its violence without any means to stop it.
And yet, though floods are like this, it is not the case that men, in fair weather, cannot prepare for this, with dikes and barriers, so that if the waters rise again, they either flow away via canal, or their force is not so unrestrained and destructive.
End quote.
The flood comes, but prepared actors can channel it.
They cannot choose whether it occurs, but they can influence where it flows, which fields it devastates, which cities it spares.
Fortune, Machiavelli concludes, is arbiter of half-hour actions, but still she leaves the other half, or nearly half, for us to govern.
Experimental history, as outlined above, could test whether Machiavelli's metaphor actually describes how history works.
If history is pure chaos, if human action makes no predictable difference, then skilled and unskilled players should succeed equally often.