Time's arrow

And history’s?

Cosmologists can tell the difference between the past and the future. The future has greater entropy, or disorder. I drop an egg on the floor and it splatters, but the reverse never happens. Splattered eggs don't leap up off the floor into unbroken shells. Sometimes, when thinking in four dimensional terms, scientists imagine traveling backward in time. But they've never been able to pull it off in the real world. Time’s arrow points in one direction only.

Does history—human time—have a similar arrow? Humans can tell the past from the future by the signs our species has left on the earth and in our collective consciousness. But is the arrow unidirectional? Can human history reverse course? Or perhaps circle around and meet itself from the other direction?

Circles—or cycles—characterize certain aspects of human existence. To a first approximation, each day is like the one before and the one after. The sun rises, the sun sets. Each month the phases of the moon repeat. Each year the seasons come and go. Human activities tied to days, months and years have corresponding circularity.

At some point someone layered a kind of linearity on top of this. People started counting the years. We're in the year 2024 by the Gregorian calendar, 2564 by the Buddhist calendar, 4721 by the Chinese calendar, 5784 by the Hebrew calendar, and 6772 by the Assyrian calendar. We have plenty of positive integers, so we need never repeat in this linear numbering scheme.

But what about the content of history? Do we build on the past to create a future that hasn't existed before? Or do we, by some means, cycle back to a previous stage of our species’ cultural evolution? 

We have more sophisticated institutions of government, for example, than our predecessors. Will they continue to become more sophisticated? Or will there be a break, comparable to the fall of the Roman empire, after which residents of the city of Rome wandered through the ruins of the imperial capital and wondered what sort of beings had created such marvelous structures? 

Will the world continue to grow more democratic? In 1800 there were about zero democracies in the world. In 1900 there were maybe ten. In 2000 there were a hundred. It strains credulity to think there will be a thousand in 2100; there won’t be enough countries. Indeed, by some measures there are fewer in 2024 than there were in 2000. Maybe we’ve already reversed course.

Is the world becoming more capitalistic? In 1800 there were zero capitalist countries. In 1900 there were a couple dozen. In 2000 there were several dozen. In 2100 will there be more or less than there are today?

Here the answer is complicated, as it is in the case of democracy, by issues of definition. How free do markets have to be, and how large must the private sector be relative to the public sector, for an economy to count as capitalist?

Many contend that the arrow of history regarding democracy and capitalism is an arrow of human welfare: people are becoming freer and more prosperous. Is this true?

Again the complications: Democracies don’t always make everyone freer, at least not at the same time or same rate. And capitalism certainly makes some people wealthier than others. But in broad terms, people who live in democracies have more rights than people who don’t, and people who practice capitalism have a higher material standard of living than people who don’t.

So, is democratic capitalism the fate of humanity at large? 

The answer seems to be yes, if we confine ourselves to the last three hundred years or so. The idea of freedom appears to be contagious. People learn that others have it and they want it for themselves. People living under colonial rule in Asia and Africa didn’t make an effective fuss at the beginning of the twentieth century, but by the mid-mark of the century they were coming alive to nationalist alternatives, and by the two-thirds mark their nationalist aspirations couldn’t be denied.

Likewise with capitalism. Countries that adopted capitalism, letting people make economic decisions for themselves, got wealthier, and the lesson caught on.

Again the caveats: Freedom for nations didn’t always mean freedom for people. China burst its colonial shackles only to clamp communist ones on its people. The economic trend was broad but not uniform. Argentina’s economy was a model of buoyant capitalism at the start of the twentieth century and an inflationist flop at the end. Moreover, humanity at large faces profound questions of sustainability and demography, not to mention the peril of nuclear war.

But on the whole, and for the time being, it appears that history’s arrow does have a direction, and it points toward human happiness.

Enjoy—while you can.