The Invention of Destiny: IV. When Possibility Looks Inevitable

A strange thing happens when we know how a history turned out.

What was once possible can begin to look inevitable.

We know that a particular species survived, so its survival can seem like the natural outcome of its history. We know that a particular institution developed, so earlier changes can appear to have been leading towards it. We know what a technology became, so its earlier forms can look like primitive versions of something that was already waiting to emerge.

But possibility does not disappear merely because one possibility became actual.

At the moment an event occurred, other outcomes may still have been possible. The future had not yet narrowed to the one we now know. What we experience as inevitability may therefore be an artefact of looking backwards from actuality.

This is one of the peculiarities of historical knowledge.

The actual path remains visible. The paths not taken largely disappear.

Retrospect therefore compresses a branching possibility space into a line.

And once the line is visible, it is remarkably easy to mistake it for a trajectory.

The same thing can happen when we look forwards. If we become attached to a particular future, we can begin to treat it as though it were already implicit in the present. Possibility acquires momentum. Expectation becomes anticipation. Anticipation becomes inevitability.

Eventually the distinction between could happen and will happen begins to disappear.

Yet a possibility does not become inevitable merely because we can tell a convincing story about how it might unfold.

Nor does an actual outcome prove that it was inevitable before it happened.

Perhaps inevitability is sometimes nothing more mysterious than possibility viewed from the other side of actuality.

The question is not whether history has a direction.

It is whether we mistake the direction we can see for the direction history had to take.