From the essay “A Statistical View of History” by Katsuhiro Morinaga, Professor of History and Archaeology at the Keio University Faculty of Letters, published in Mita-Hyoron magazine in 1989. Translated from Japanese by our editors.
Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.
Karl Marx, the 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon
First, let it be known that history and innovation are both statistical principles. From a systemic perspective the great man theory of history is as absurd as it is unnecessary: the confluence of material factors which produce historical events could not care less if their agents, their Träger, bear the name of Alexander the Great or Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Yet it does not follow that the “material conditions” which the Communists yearn for make a revolution inevitable, or that we simply need to lie back and think of the market as the Capitalists claim. It is true, yes, that material factors alter the probabilities of certain events happening, and a land war in Europe in the 1900s would perhaps have sprung to life whether Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s driver took a wrong turn in Sarajevo or not, yet it is equally true that if every human on earth ceased their striving and waited for history to happen to them history too would cease. In the case of innovation, while the sociopolitical acceleration of technological and scientific discovery in the 20th Century made Einstein’s advances possible (Einstein on a deserted island would surely have been less productive), if he had indeed become a watchmaker it is not inconceivable that the discovery of certain fundamental properties of mass and energy would be greatly delayed. From a probabilistic perspective, material forces can be said to define a probability distribution of likely outcomes for human striving in any situation and human actions modify and then sample from that distribution: the most favourable set of loaded dice will not produce any sixes if not rolled, and if rolled precious few times may yet yield snake-eyes. (Incidentally, it is this paucity of sampling that allows one to resist the tide of history, as seen in critical interventions such as the Cuban Missile Crisis.)
The function of any initiative in the arts and the sciences, therefore, is not to cultivate individual talents or ensure that one or two gifted individuals may be plucked out from the crowd. It is to alter the probability distribution, the underlying likelihood of artistic and scientific striving to succeed when humans inevitably attempt as much. Beyond that, they must seek to encourage as many as possible to roll the dice in these more favourable circumstances: how many Einsteins, I wonder, have died unknown to malaria in conflict-ridden regions of Africa, or been crushed by poverty in the so-called developed world? Similarly, the enforcement of certain economic or traffic regulations is not meant to catch every instance of offence, but rather to reduce the overall likelihood of an offence going undetected and succeeding—a stochastic principle rather than a juridical one. In all of these cases the individual is less the chief matter of concern but rather the overall trend, the scheme, the changing of the tide. But still, in those critical moments of flux, psychohistory fails us and for a moment life or death for millions rests on the whims of one. Therefore remember this: Progress is a property of statistics. Destiny is probabilistic. The way ahead is not mystical, but is not yet fully known.