THE VERY INK WITH WHICH HISTORY IS WRITTEN IS MERELY FLUID PREJUDICE.

Mark Twain



Reading a lot of history lately and it’s beginning to make me wanna go back and dip into some Howard Zinn just to remind myself that The Great Men of history weren’t and the Great Men of history theory is not even a theory.





Ron Chernow’s Washington Bio and Stacy Schiff’s Cleopatra tome are wonders of serious scholarship and pointless hagiography. It must say something about the human condition that even when we know practically every detail of a person’s life (which one would assume would make us less prone to hero worship) we still wish in some way to elevate that life to proportions that transcend the human.

Washington and Cleopatra were fascinating figures living in volatile eras, and both played major roles in shaping and reshaping much of the world they lived in…so why not leave it there and let their deeds speak for themselves? If neither had ever been born, there would have been others to fill their shoes.

Are we to think that without Cleopatra, Caesar and Antony would have just whored around the Forum and left it to others to deal with the heirs of Alexander The Great as they expanded their empire and amassed a fortune. And that without Washington, the revolution would have fizzled and failed and today we’d all be eating bangers and mash and sitting on the couch chuckling at Benny Hill? It’s just lazy thinking to imagine that so much could depend on so few.

And it doesn’t compute. Schiff is clearly trying to establish that Cleopatra was more than just a sexy seductress and manipulator of men’s passions and egos. And she succeeds. By the end of the book I was persuaded that Cleo was as ruthless and savvy a politician as her male counterparts from Rome and that she could keep her cool with the best of them while murdering and deceiving and sending tens of thousands to their deaths in order to protect her hold on wealth and power. What a gal.

Schiff attempts to enlist your sympathy when recounting how Cleo and Antony killed themselves shortly after their defeat at the battle of Actium. Their love for each other was so great that neither could imagine going on living without the other. Oh really?

At the same time that she’s narrating this sentimental melodrama, we’re also learning that Cleopatra is filling her mausoleum (the humble little shack pictured left) with a fortune in possessions (much of it stolen) to take into the next life with her. Small point? Not at that time. Cleo and Antony were not like us when it came to the concept of mortality. Seems to me that if you really believe that you’ll live on after death then it makes sense to plan and pack carefully before relocating to your new address—and there's nothing romantic or brave about cutting your losses and leaving town with your boyfriend to start a new life in paradise. Schiff doesn’t address this at all, despite all the details regarding Cleo’s hoarding and storing of her worldly possessions prior to taking her own life.

Fast forward a few thousand years...

Einstein was a genius, but he didn’t invent anything …he recognized something that was already there. Without him, would it have remained a secret? There were other guys--see above. And okay, maybe it would have taken those lesser fellows another 5 or 10, or even 20 years , but I suspect there's some law of physics that states that the laws of physics are inclined to wait for no man.

Educator/Author of "Triangulations" Sabio Lantz points out:

Ideas are often born of several people independently and often simultaneously showing that any particular “Great Person” is not a necessary as one might be tempted to think. In fact, if any of these great men or women had never been born, the idea most likely would have come out eventually anyway. It is as if we share knowledge which ripens for any number of people to eventually pick.

(For a list of co-discoveries or “multiple discoveries” see this wiki article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries)

Here are a few famous ones:
Calculus: Newton, Leibniz (1600s)
Oxygen: Scheele (1773), Priestley (1774)
Electric Telegraph: Wheatstone & Morse (1937)
Evolution: Darwin (1840), Wallace (1857)
Chromosomes: Sutton & Boveri (1902)
Sound Film: Tykociner (1922), Forest (1923)
Quantum electrodynamics: Stueckelberg, Schwinger, Feynman, Tomonaga (1930-40s)
Universal Computing Machine: Alan Turing & Emil Post (1936)
Polio vaccine: Koprowski, Salk, Sabin (1950-63)
Jet Engine: Campini (1940), Whittle (1941)
Nanotubes: Bethune and Iijima (1993)

Which brings to mind old Carl Jung (who had a close working relationship with Nobel laureate and quantum physics pioneer Wolfgang Pauli, who is in the group shot above, and may have been "Einstein" had there been no Einstein. He also once said something that is one of my favorite quotes: "That is not only not right, it is not even wrong."
)


but back to Jung-- whose concept of Synchronicity he defined as: "temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events."

And in short he used it to define the experience of coincidence, the nature of which only has meaning on a subjective level. To wit: I’m riding the train reading about the role of women in Muslim societies and at the next station a woman enters covered head to toe in black and a Khimer around her head and face with only an opening for her eyes.

To me, it’s a striking moment of coincidence, but it isn’t to anyone else on the train—unless they too were reading or thinking of something related to Muslim women. In a sense, when we ascribe meaningful (and for some people seemingly magical) import to coincidence, we are simply indulging in a kind of egocentricity and putting our perception of the world at the center of it and regarding all outside phenomena in its relation to our subjective experience. Silly us.

And even Jung knew a good example when he saw it, and this was one of his favorites:

'The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday--but never jam to-day.'
'
'It MUST come sometimes to "jam to-day,"' Alice objected.

'No, it can't,' said the Queen. 'It's jam every OTHER day: to-day isn't any OTHER day, you know.'
'
'I don't understand you,' said Alice. 'It's dreadfully confusing!'
'
'That's the effect of living backwards,' the Queen said kindly: 'it always makes one a little giddy at first'--
'
'Living backwards!' Alice repeated in great astonishment. 'I never heard of such a thing!'
'
'--but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways.'
'
'I'm sure MINE only works one way,' Alice remarked. 'I can't remember things before they happen.
'
'It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards,' the Queen remarked.