Paths of History, Contingency, Chance, Necessity and
Love
A love, a helpful hand, a word, someone, a small thing,
may lead us to success; but almost the same things – a
lack of love, or a bacteria, or a defective gene and
many minor things that have nothing to do with what we
are - can open the misfortune doors. Our personal lives
are largely dependent of the game of chance.
And the same is true of our collective history, where
minor and erratic forces may push enormous masses of
people along unexpected paths. «Had Cleopatra's nose
been shorter, the whole face of the world would have
changed», said Pascal, not only metaphorically. Or, as
Francis Fukuyama or Arthur Schlesinger have asked:
Would Julius Caesar and Napoleon have felt the necessity
of conquering almost all Europe, had they the
opportunity of taking a Prozac pill? And if this is
true, how would History have been?
Francis Fukuyama, American essayist, O nosso futuro
pós-humano
Suppose that Lenin had died of typhus in Siberia in 1895 and
Hitler had been killed on the western front in 1916. What
would the twentieth century have looked like now?
Arthur Schlesinger Jr., American historian, The Cycles of
American History
Our collective history might indeed be very different if
Julius Caesar or Napoleon had been different men, with other
temperaments and personalities, with other lives, and if
they had been more capable of loving.
More clearly yet, wouldn’t our history be rather different
if nature had introduced into human brains something
equivalent to Prozac, something able to turn us into more
placid beings, more capable of love, and less tied to the
particularities of the Cleopatra’s noses of this world?
How different would our history have been, in this case! It
wouldn’t only be the paths that were different. Also the
profound forces of human history would have been different.
And we would live in a totally different world (supposing
that more capable-of-loving beings would have survived the
cruelty of the world…).
Books, Films,
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