CONSIDER this. At 11 am on a fine summer morning in Sarajevo, 28 June 1914, a car carrying two passengers made a wrong turn. It stopped directly in front of Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb student. Princip drew a pistol from his pocket, pulled the trigger and killed the Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand. This initiated a chain reaction, leading to the First World War.
How could a chauffeur's mistake lead to this cataclysm? Is this really a meaningful interpretation of events?
The tool of history, certainly, is story-telling after the fact. Why is this? Why does it make no useful theoretical predictions? Why is it, in other words, that "Life is understood backwards, but must be lived forwards", as philosopher Søren Kierkegaard put it. Mark Buchanan's
Buchanan wants us to know that we live ...
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