The Invention of Destiny: VIII. Beyond Origin and Destiny

We began with a simple question.

Why must everything have an origin?

Then another question appeared.

Why must everything have a destiny?

Both questions seem natural because we are accustomed to telling stories with beginnings and endings. We look backwards for where something started and forwards for where it is going.

But perhaps history does not need either horizon.

An origin is a past event that becomes significant because of what subsequently develops from it. A destiny is a future possibility that becomes significant because we imagine it as an endpoint.

Neither is necessarily a boundary built into history itself.

The origin is selected from what has become.

The destiny is projected from what might become.

Between them lies something less tidy but perhaps more faithful to history: an unfolding of possibilities in which each event changes what can happen next.

This does not mean that origins are useless. Nor does it mean that futures cannot guide action. Origins can mark important transitions. Imagined futures can organise present activity.

The problem begins when these useful perspectives become properties of the world itself.

A transition becomes the beginning.

A possibility becomes the destination.

A consequence becomes a purpose.

A trajectory becomes inevitable.

And history is transformed into a story that appears to have known its own shape all along.

But history does not know what it is becoming while it is becoming.

The past is not a beginning waiting to be discovered. The future is not a destiny waiting to be reached.

There are events. There are transformations. There are possibilities opening and closing. There are consequences that could not have been known in advance.

And then there is us, looking backwards and forwards, giving some of these relations names.

Perhaps that is enough.

There was no destination waiting at the beginning. There was no beginning waiting for the destination. There was only history becoming what it had not yet been.

The Invention of Destiny: VII. Time Without a Destination

Time has a direction.

Events happen before or after one another. Causes precede their effects. What has happened cannot simply be unhappened.

But does that mean time has a destination?

We often slide from one idea to the other.

A process has a direction, so we imagine that it is going somewhere. Evolution has a history, so we speak of progress. A civilisation changes, so we ask what it is becoming. A universe develops, so we look for its ultimate fate.

The sequence is understandable.

It is also misleading.

Temporal direction tells us that events are ordered. It does not tell us that the order has a destination.

A river flows downhill, but the water does not need to know the sea in order to flow. An organism develops through time without its earlier states having to contain its mature form as a purpose. A history can have irreversible consequences without being directed towards an endpoint.

The distinction is between direction and destination.

Direction belongs to the structure of temporal succession.

Destination belongs to a possibility we have placed ahead of that succession.

Once we separate them, history can look rather different.

There is no need for every development to be a step towards something. There can be transformation without progress, succession without trajectory, and increasing complexity without a final form waiting at the end.

This does not make history directionless.

It makes direction less ambitious.

The past constrains what can happen next. The present opens some possibilities and closes others. The future remains a field of possibilities until events make some of them actual.

History therefore has direction because what happens changes what can happen.

It does not need a destination in order to have consequences.

Time can have a direction without having an end in sight.

The Invention of Destiny: VI. The Horizon That Moves

A horizon is always ahead of us.

We can move towards it, but we never arrive at the horizon itself. What seemed to be the boundary of what we could see becomes the new standpoint from which we see further.

Destiny has something of the same structure.

We imagine an endpoint: the society we will create, the technology we will achieve, the form humanity will eventually take. We place it at the end of history and call it our destiny.

But then history moves.

The future becomes the present.

And the destiny we imagined is either reached, abandoned, transformed—or simply replaced by another future beyond it.

This gives destiny a peculiar temporal property.

A destiny cannot remain a destiny once it becomes real.

The moment it is actual, it belongs to history. We can then look backwards and identify the conditions that led to it. What was once anticipated becomes an outcome; what was once a destination becomes another event in the past.

And the horizon moves again.

This is why histories of progress can be so deceptive. Each generation can inherit a future imagined by the previous one, discover that it has become the present, and then construct a new horizon beyond it. The destination recedes as we approach it.

What looked like the end was simply the limit of an earlier standpoint.

The horizon was never a wall at the edge of history.

It was the boundary of what could be seen from where we were standing.

Perhaps destiny is similar. It is not necessarily a place history is going. It may be the shape that the future takes when viewed from a particular present.

And if so, the moving horizon tells us something important.

The future does not wait at the end of history. It keeps becoming present, and history keeps opening beyond it.

The Invention of Destiny: V. The Future That Explains the Present

We usually explain the present by looking backwards.

We ask what caused it, what preceded it, what conditions made it possible. Causes come before effects.

But there is another kind of explanation: the explanation that looks forwards.

A seed is described in terms of the tree it will become. A young organism is understood in terms of its mature form. A technology is interpreted according to what it will eventually enable.

There is nothing necessarily wrong with this. Future consequences can be relevant to understanding present possibilities.

The difficulty begins when possibility becomes purpose.

The tree begins to appear as the reason for the seed. The mature organism becomes the point towards which development was directed. The eventual technology becomes the explanation of why earlier forms appeared.

The future has become an explanation of the present.

This is the forward-facing version of the mistake we encountered with origins. There, the present selected parts of the past and called them beginnings. Here, an imagined future selects aspects of the present and calls them signs of what is to come.

In both cases, the standpoint reorganises the history.

But the asymmetry matters. When we look backwards, we have an actual history to constrain our interpretation. When we look forwards, we have possibilities.

We can know what preceded us.

We cannot know, in the same way, what will follow us.

The future can therefore guide action without determining meaning. We may act towards a possibility without discovering that the possibility was already the purpose of what preceded it.

A present event can make a future possible.

That does not mean the future explains why the event happened.

The future may be a consequence of the present without being its reason.

Perhaps the deepest temptation of destiny is therefore not to predict what will happen.

It is to make what we hope will happen explain why we are here now.

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.

The Invention of Destiny: III. The Two Ends of Time

Origin and destiny seem to mark the two ends of time.

One points backwards: where did we come from?

The other points forwards: where are we going?

It is tempting to treat them as symmetrical. If everything has an origin, perhaps everything has a destiny. If the past explains what we are, perhaps the future explains what we will become.

But the two horizons are not the same.

An origin is reconstructed from what actually happened. We know the outcome, and from that outcome we identify earlier events as significant. A destiny is projected into what has not yet happened. We imagine an outcome and allow it to organise our expectations of what comes next.

The difference is temporal, but also epistemic.

The origin belongs to a history whose possibilities have already been resolved. The destiny belongs to a possibility space that has not yet resolved.

This gives us an intriguing asymmetry.

Origin is a future-selected past. Destiny is a future-imagined future.

Once an origin has been identified, it can remain an origin because the history that made it significant has already happened. Destiny is more unstable. If it is reached, it ceases to be destiny and becomes history.

The two ends therefore behave differently.

The origin is created by becoming.

The destiny disappears by becoming real.

Perhaps this is why the two horizons can be so easily confused. Both are produced from a present standpoint, but they project in opposite directions. We look backwards and select a beginning from what has become. We look forwards and select an ending from what might become.

Between them lies the actual history: neither origin nor destiny, but an unfolding field of possibilities becoming particular.

The origin is what the future makes of the past. The destiny is what the present makes of the future.

The Invention of Destiny: II. The Future We Put at the End

A future becomes a destiny when we put it at the end of the story.

The gesture seems innocent enough. We imagine what might happen, then describe the present as leading towards it. But the moment we place a possibility at the end, everything between here and there can acquire a new appearance.

The path becomes a trajectory.

Events become stages. Developments become steps. Earlier possibilities begin to look like preparations for the outcome we have chosen to place ahead of them.

Nothing in the history itself has changed.

What has changed is the standpoint from which we describe it.

This is particularly tempting when the future we imagine is one we value. Progress becomes movement towards a better society. Evolution becomes movement towards greater complexity. Technological development becomes movement towards some anticipated form of intelligence. Human history becomes a story whose meaning lies in what humanity is becoming.

The danger is subtle. We have not necessarily claimed that the future caused the past. We have done something rhetorically similar: we have allowed the imagined future to organise the significance of the present.

A possibility has become a destination, and the destination has begun to explain the journey.

But a history unfolding in time does not contain its own ending in advance. At every point, other possibilities remain possible. What later appears as a path was, while it was happening, a branching field of alternatives.

The future we put at the end therefore does more than describe where we think history is going.

It changes what we see when we look at history.

Perhaps that is why destiny is so powerful.

It does not need to exist yet. It only needs to be placed at the end.

The Invention of Destiny: I. When the Future Became a Destiny

We often speak of the future as though it were already waiting for us.

A civilisation has a destiny. A species has a destiny. The universe has a destiny. Even an individual life can be described as though it were moving towards some outcome that was, in retrospect, somehow already implicit in its beginning.

But a future is not yet an event. It is a field of possibilities.

Something changes when we give one of those possibilities a name and call it a destiny. We have turned a possibility into an endpoint.

This is not necessarily because the endpoint is inevitable. Often, it is because we have begun to organise the present around it.

The distinction matters. A prediction says: this may happen. A destiny says, or at least suggests: this is what is going to happen. The first preserves possibility. The second narrows it.

And once a future has been imagined as the destination, the history leading towards it can begin to look different. Events become steps. Developments become stages. Choices become signs of an emerging direction.

The future has acquired explanatory power before it has acquired existence.

This is the forward-looking counterpart of what happens with an origin. An origin is a past event whose significance is reconstructed from what actually followed. A destiny is a future possibility whose significance is constructed from what we imagine will follow.

The difference is crucial.

The origin is constrained by history because we know what happened. Destiny is not. It belongs to a possibility space that has not yet collapsed into actuality.

Yet once we call a possibility a destiny, we can begin to forget that distinction.

Perhaps the most revealing question is therefore not What is our destiny?

It is:

When did one possibility become the future we could no longer imagine otherwise?

The Invention of Origins: VIII. Histories Without Origins

We began by asking when a beginning became an origin.

Perhaps we can now ask whether a history needs an origin at all.

An origin seems to promise an explanation. Find the first event, and the rest will follow.

But histories rarely work that way.

An event has preceding conditions. Those conditions have their own histories. What appears to be a beginning from one perspective becomes a continuation from another.

The origin keeps moving backwards.

Perhaps this is because history is not fundamentally a collection of things with beginnings and endings. It is a process of transformations in which what exists becomes capable of what comes next.

Life did not need an origin called life in order for chemistry to become organised into processes that eventually became living. Humanity did not need an origin called humanity in order for evolutionary histories to produce organisms with increasingly distinctive capacities.

There were only histories.

The categories came later.

This does not make our categories useless. Calling something the origin of life, or the origin of humanity, can be an extremely useful way of marking a particular transition in a history.

But the usefulness of the boundary should not be confused with a boundary existing independently of the history we construct.

An origin, then, may be neither a thing nor a place in the past.

It may be a relation between a past event and a later outcome.

We look backwards from what exists and ask where it began. The later thing selects an earlier event and gives it a special status.

The past has not changed.

But the history we tell about it has acquired a centre.

And once we recognise this, another possibility opens.

Perhaps we do not need to tell histories from their origins.

We can tell them from their transformations.

We can ask how one form became capable of another. How possibilities became actualities. How differences accumulated. How organisations changed. How new relations became possible.

Such histories have no single privileged beginning.

They have continuities, ruptures, contingencies and emergences.

They can still have moments that matter enormously.

But significance need not imply purpose.

A consequence need not have been a destination.

And an endpoint need not have been waiting at the beginning.

Perhaps this is what it means to think historically without teleology.

Not to deny that things have causes.

Not to deny that events have consequences.

But to resist the temptation to turn consequences into purposes simply because we know them in advance.

We began by asking:

Where did we come from?

Perhaps the better question is:

How did this history become the history we now recognise?

The first searches for an origin.

The second follows a becoming.

And perhaps, when we stop looking for the beginning that was always going to lead to us, history becomes stranger—and more open.

There was no destination waiting at the beginning.

There was only what happened.

And then, looking backwards, we called some of it an origin.

The Invention of Origins: VII. The Direction of a History

A history has a direction.

Events happen in time. Earlier states give rise to later states. Causes precede their consequences. Once something has happened, it belongs to the past.

But a history does not necessarily have a destination.

This distinction is easy to lose when we look backwards.

Suppose a particular sequence of events eventually produces something new. We can trace the sequence from its earlier conditions to its later outcome. Because we know where it ends, the sequence can look directional in a stronger sense: it can look as though it was moving towards the outcome.

But temporal direction is not teleological direction.

A river flows downhill, but it does not flow towards the sea because the sea is its purpose. Evolutionary change occurs through processes that have temporal direction, but this does not mean that evolution is moving towards whatever forms eventually emerge.

The distinction becomes particularly important when we reconstruct long histories.

Looking backwards, we see actual events. The possibilities that disappeared leave little trace. A history therefore appears narrower in retrospect than it was while unfolding.

At an earlier point, several futures may have been possible.

Only one became actual.

Once we know which one, that future can make the preceding history appear more constrained than it really was.

We see the path that happened.

We do not see, with equal vividness, the paths that didn't.

This is one source of historical asymmetry. The future was once possibility; the past is now actuality. Retrospective explanation therefore begins with a world in which the alternatives have already vanished.

And so a branching history can look like a line.

The danger is to mistake the line for a trajectory.

A trajectory implies more than sequence. It suggests direction towards a destination.

But the history of life, for example, is better understood as branching, contingent and continuously transformed. Humans are one outcome among innumerable outcomes. We can trace the particular history that produced us without turning that history into a journey whose destination was humanity.

Perhaps the same applies to origins.

An origin is often the point at which we decide that a particular direction of history began.

But the direction may have been supplied retrospectively by the outcome.

The past did not know where it was going.

And this may be the deepest reason to be cautious with teleological language. It can turn the asymmetry of time into a purpose of time.

Time gives us an irreversible sequence of events.

We give that sequence a destination.

The first may belong to the world.

The second may belong to us.

The Invention of Origins: VI. Before There Was an Origin

Before there was an origin, there were events.

They did not know what they were beginning.

A star formed. A planet cooled. Molecules combined. Life emerged. Populations changed. New forms appeared. Others disappeared.

At each point, the future remained open.

Only later, when something has emerged from the history, can we look backwards and identify an earlier event as its beginning.

This suggests that an origin is not necessarily something that exists at the beginning.

It may be something that exists only in retrospect.

The distinction matters because beginnings are everywhere. Every event has preceding conditions. Every process has an earlier state. Every transformation can be traced further backwards.

If we insist on finding the origin of something, however, we eventually face an awkward question:

How far back should we go?

If the origin of humans is a particular population, what is the origin of that population? If it is a particular evolutionary lineage, what is the origin of that lineage? If it is life, what is the origin of the chemistry from which life emerged?

At every stage, the supposed origin dissolves into an earlier history.

There is no obvious point at which history itself announces:

Here I begin.

We supply the boundary because we already know what we are trying to explain.

This does not make origins fictitious. A particular event can be genuinely important in the causal history of something that follows. But its status as the origin depends upon the relation we subsequently establish between that event and the thing whose history we are tracing.

The event comes first.

The identity of the origin comes later.

This reverses a familiar intuition. We tend to think that the origin explains why something became what it is. But often it is the later thing that determines which earlier event counts as its origin.

Before humanity existed, there was no human origin.

There was only a succession of biological and environmental histories.

Before life existed, there was no origin of life in the sense that we now use the phrase. There was chemistry, physics and a changing planet.

The categories we use to divide these histories are ours.

And this may be one reason that origin stories are so powerful. They transform continuous histories into beginnings, and beginnings into explanations.

But perhaps a history does not need a beginning in order to be intelligible.

It may be enough to follow how one state became capable of another.

Then the question changes.

Instead of asking:

Where did this begin?

we can ask:

How did this become possible?

The first searches for a point.

The second follows a process.

And perhaps, before there was an origin, there was simply a history becoming what it had not yet been.

The Invention of Origins: V. The Universe We Find Ourselves In

We find ourselves in a universe capable of containing us.

That much is unavoidable.

The universe we observe has the conditions necessary for observers like us to exist. Had those conditions been otherwise, we would not be here to observe them.

This is the basic insight behind anthropic reasoning.

It is an important insight because it reminds us that observation is not conducted from nowhere. The observer is part of the world being observed, and the conditions under which observation is possible constrain what can be observed.

But a curious transformation can occur.

From:

We can observe only a universe compatible with our existence

we can slide towards:

The universe is compatible with our existence

and then, sometimes, towards:

The universe is arranged for our existence.

The first is a selection effect.

The second is a description.

The third introduces purpose.

The movement is subtle because the three statements can sound remarkably similar.

Yet they point in different directions.

The fact that we exist necessarily constrains the kind of universe we can find ourselves in. But that constraint tells us nothing, by itself, about whether the universe was for us.

Our existence can be a condition of observation without being a condition of cosmic purpose.

This distinction becomes especially important when anthropic reasoning is used to interpret origins. Once humanity is treated as the endpoint of cosmic history, the conditions that made humanity possible can begin to look like preparations for humanity.

The universe becomes a story whose remarkable feature is that it eventually produced beings capable of asking why the universe exists.

But that is partly a consequence of where the question is being asked.

We are not outside the universe looking at its suitability for observers.

We are observers within a universe that happens to permit observers.

The fact that this universe contains us therefore tells us something about the relationship between observation and possibility. It does not, by itself, tell us what the universe is for.

There is an important asymmetry here.

We can reason:

If humans exist, then the conditions of their existence must have been compatible with their existence.

But we cannot simply reverse this into:

Because the conditions were compatible with humans, they were therefore directed towards humans.

The result cannot be used to manufacture the purpose of the conditions that preceded it.

Perhaps the anthropic principle is therefore most interesting when stripped of its apparent grandeur.

It tells us that we cannot ask what kind of universe we inhabit without taking account of the fact that we are inhabitants of it.

That is already profound.

But it need not make humanity the reason for the universe.

We may be looking at a universe capable of containing us.

Or we may be looking at one of many possible universes in which observers can arise.

Either way, the fact that we are here does not turn possibility into purpose.

The universe we find ourselves in is necessarily one in which we can find ourselves.

What does not follow is that it is a universe that was waiting for us.

The Invention of Origins: IV. The Endpoint Looking Back

Imagine that a species appears at the end of a long history and asks:

Where did we come from?

The question seems straightforward.

But the word we has already reorganised the history.

The universe is billions of years old. Earth has a long geological history. Life has existed for an immense period before humans appeared. Countless organisms have lived, reproduced and disappeared. Most evolutionary lineages ended without producing anything that subsequently asked where it came from.

Yet when humans tell this history, we naturally select the events that connect to us.

The result is a peculiar transformation. A vast and branching history becomes a path.

The history of the universe becomes the history of a universe that eventually produced stars, planets and life. The history of life becomes the history of life that eventually produced humans. Earlier organisms become ancestors. Earlier capacities become precursors. Earlier environmental conditions become enabling circumstances.

Nothing in this reconstruction need be scientifically wrong.

The danger lies elsewhere.

The endpoint can begin to look as though it was the point of the history.

This is an artefact of perspective. We cannot tell the history of humanity without beginning from the fact that humanity exists. But the existence of an endpoint makes the preceding history look different from how it appeared while it was unfolding.

Before humans existed, there was no human future to organise the past.

There were possibilities.

There were contingencies.

There were organisms responding to their circumstances, reproducing, changing and disappearing. There were innumerable futures that never happened.

We know only the one that eventually contained us.

That knowledge is powerful enough to make contingency look like inevitability.

Perhaps this is why expressions such as “the origins of humanity” can be subtly misleading. They are useful shorthand for a scientific history of human emergence. But the phrase can also suggest that somewhere in the deep past there was a beginning whose significance was already determined by what humanity would become.

There wasn't.

There was a history.

Humanity became one of its outcomes.

And because we are that outcome, we naturally organise the history around ourselves.

This does not make the history unreal. It makes our standpoint part of the history we tell.

The endpoint looking backwards sees a line.

The history itself contained a branching possibility space.

Perhaps the most important question is therefore not:

How did the universe lead to us?

but:

Why does a history look as though it led to us when we are the ones looking backwards?

The answer may tell us something not only about evolution, but about explanation itself.

For when the endpoint becomes the standpoint, the result can begin to masquerade as the reason.

The Invention of Origins: III. When Consequence Becomes Purpose

Something happens.

Something else follows.

We can therefore say that the first event contributed to the second. This is ordinary causal explanation.

But something changes when we describe the first event as leading to the second.

The phrase sounds harmless. Yet it can carry a direction that the events themselves did not possess.

A consequence can be mistaken for a purpose.

Evolution provides a familiar example. We can trace the conditions and processes through which humans emerged from earlier forms of life. But once we know that humans emerged, it is remarkably easy to retell the history as though it were a movement towards humanity.

Earlier organisms become ancestors of us. Earlier capacities become steps towards us. Earlier environmental changes become conditions for our emergence.

The causal relations may be real.

The direction may be retrospective.

Nothing in the process required humanity to be its destination.

This distinction is easy to lose because human explanation is naturally organised around outcomes. We begin with something that exists and ask how it came to be. We then construct a chain of events connecting the present to the past.

The chain runs backwards through our explanation even though causation ran forwards through time.

And the further we move backwards, the more tempting it becomes to turn contingency into necessity.

If A contributed to B, and B contributed to C, and C eventually contributed to us, then A begins to look like the beginning of a process whose destination was us.

But the same history could have unfolded differently.

The importance of an event depends partly on what subsequently happened. Its causal consequences are one thing; its historical significance is another.

This matters because purpose is stronger than consequence.

A purpose explains something by reference to what it is for. A consequence explains something by reference to what happened after it.

Confusing the two turns history into a project.

And once history becomes a project, its endpoint begins to look like its reason.

This is perhaps the deepest temptation in the language of origins. If humanity is treated as the endpoint, then the history preceding humanity can be read as though it were a preparation for humanity. The result becomes the explanation of the process.

But an outcome does not become a purpose merely because it occurs.

A tree does not grow in order to become the particular tree we later observe. A species does not evolve in order to occupy the ecological niche it eventually occupies. A universe does not acquire a purpose from the fact that observers arise within it.

The consequence is real.

The purpose may be something we have added.

Perhaps, then, one of the most important disciplines of historical thinking is to keep two questions apart:

What did this make possible?

and

What was this for?

The first follows history.

The second gives history a destination.

And sometimes the distance between them is the distance between evolution and teleology.

The Invention of Origins: II. The Past That the Future Creates

The past is fixed.

The future is not.

So how could the future possibly create the past?

It cannot, of course, create past events. What it can create is the past as significant history.

An event happens. At the time, its future consequences are unknown. It may have countless possible consequences, most of which never occur. Only afterwards, when one particular future has unfolded, can we identify that event as significant in relation to it.

A mutation becomes the beginning of a lineage because the lineage survives and develops. A geological change becomes an important condition for later life because life subsequently emerges within the altered environment. A small social practice becomes the beginning of a cultural transformation because the transformation actually occurs.

The future has not altered any of these events.

It has altered what the events are for us.

This produces an intriguing temporal asymmetry. Causation runs from past to future: what happens earlier can contribute to what happens later. But significance can run in the opposite direction. What happens later can determine which earlier events we regard as important.

The two directions are easily confused.

Once we know the outcome, we can trace a chain backwards and tell a coherent story:

This led to that, which enabled this, which eventually produced us.

The story may be entirely accurate as far as its causal relations go. But its coherence is retrospective. At each earlier point, other futures remained possible.

The event did not know that it was going to become an origin.

Indeed, most events leave no recognisable descendants. Most possibilities disappear without becoming history. We rarely name these vanished possibilities because they do not lead to anything that later needs an explanation.

History therefore has an odd asymmetry. The future is full of possibilities, but the past is full of consequences.

Looking backwards, we encounter a world in which the actual has already displaced the possible. We can see the path that was taken, but not the paths that disappeared.

This can make the past appear more determinate than it was.

Perhaps this is one reason historical narratives so easily acquire teleological form. Once the future has happened, we select the past events that connect to it. The result looks like a trajectory.

But a trajectory seen from its endpoint is not necessarily a trajectory that existed before the endpoint.

The future does not create the past as an event.

It creates the past as a history: a patterned, selective and meaningful account of what happened.

And perhaps that is why origins are so strange.

An origin is a past event seen through a future that did not yet exist.

The Invention of Origins: I. When Did the Beginning Begin?

We often imagine that everything has a beginning.

A universe begins. Life begins. Evolution begins. Humanity begins. A language begins. A civilisation begins. We then look backwards from the thing that exists and search for the event at which it first appeared.

But there is something strange about this procedure.

We know what came later.

The event we call an origin did not.

An event happens within an unfolding history. Only afterwards, when we know what that history became, can we select some earlier event and say: there — that was the beginning.

The event itself has not changed. What has changed is its relation to the future.

This makes an origin rather different from a beginning.

A beginning can be an event at which something starts. An origin is a beginning identified from what comes afterwards. The distinction matters because the future can determine the significance we assign to the past without ever causing the past.

A particular population may be ancestral to humans. A particular mutation may become important because of what later evolves from it. A geological event may become significant because it creates conditions for later life. But none of these events contained their later consequences as purposes.

We know the ending. The history did not.

This creates a subtle danger in historical explanation. Once the outcome is known, the preceding sequence can begin to look as though it was moving towards that outcome. Contingencies become steps. Enabling conditions become preparations. Earlier forms become beginnings of later ones.

The history acquires a direction that may belong less to the process itself than to the observer looking back upon it.

Humanity is especially vulnerable to this way of thinking because we naturally tell the history of humanity from the standpoint of humanity. We ask where we came from, and then select from the immense history of the universe, Earth and life those events that can be connected to our emergence.

That is a perfectly legitimate historical reconstruction.

But it does not follow that those events were our origins in advance.

Perhaps an origin is therefore not something waiting to be discovered at the beginning of a history.

Perhaps it is something that a later history makes visible.

The beginning may be in the past.

But the origin may be a relation between that past and the future that eventually came to be.