THE YEARS AHEAD

A History of Strange Bounces, a Future of the Unexpected

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: December 28, 2003

MK Mabry

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ONSIDER the acorn: a small thing. Produced by the millions by uncaring oaks, most rot on the ground. But under the right conditions, dirt and light and water conspire to make the most of the little seed, and it becomes a mighty oak.

History is the story of the mighty oaks; the acorns get little ink. There are too many seeds, and their existence is too transient. So historians, in professional retrospect, tell us which of the acorns got lucky.

We go forward armed with the lessons of the past: it's not always the obvious things that change the course of the world. Sometimes they are small, or overlooked. The best sellers of pre-Revolutionary France were largely ignored by literati of the time and by literary tradition since. They tended to be roughly drawn and raw, even pornographic. But those works have been rediscovered by historians like Robert Darnton of Princeton University who see the possible causes of social movements in the bawdy tales, "certain books that were never reviewed, that appeared and were ignored by the media of the time, but that made a tremendous difference," he says.

In Professor Darnton's 1995 book, "The Forbidden Best Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France," he writes about racy works like "Anecdotes About Mme. la Comtesse du Barry," the story of the courtesan to King Louis XV. It was, he says, "a book that presented the king as a very flawed human being" - in fact, "a dirty old man, incompetent and decadent." Thus a book overlooked by the elite helped to strip the monarchy of its sacred aura and may have ultimately helped to open the royal path to the guillotine.

Revolutions have come from less.

Sometimes big changes start with something as simple as drawing a line. The statesmen and bureaucrats who devised the modern Middle East from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire during World War I and just after did not foresee the decades of bitter conflict that would ensue along every border. What the historian David Fromkin called "a line drawn on an empty map by a British civil servant in the early 1920's" between the nations now known as Iraq and Kuwait was disregarded by Saddam Hussein when he invaded in 1990. The attempt to rebuild Iraq depends on the meshing of three provinces of the Ottoman empire, sewn together as part of the same effort to divvy up the region and create British and French spheres of interest that eventually defined the outlines of Israel, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Thus do bureaucrats and technologists shape the world, drawing lines and setting standards that might cause the eyes to glaze over at the time but which ultimately define reality. Consistent standards for railroad tracks boosted national trade and population movements. Protocols for the movement of packets of data across computer networks laid the foundation for the Internet, with its vast online libraries and spam, virtual communities and porn.

Each surprising revolution, it seems, can bring benefit and nuisance. When the Postal Service introduced its Zone Improvement Plan in 1963, the mundane goal was to identify the mail delivery station associated with an address. It drew a border between past and present, says Edward Tenner, the author of "Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences." What resulted was a more efficient mail system, but also "a new style of demographic and social analysis, marketing and clustering" that shapes everything from the allocation of bargain fliers and mail-order catalogs to the placement of stores.

Other major influences may not have started small or even unnoticed, but are pushed aside, with enormous consequences. At the founding of the American republic, abolitionists were already campaigning to stop the slave trade, and wore political buttons - Wedgwood pins depicting a slave in chains - to show their views. But the authors of the Constitution protected the right to repossess a slave - or, as they euphemistically put it, a "person held to service or labor," and counted slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of taxation and representation.

The repercussions of that decision produced the most powerful chapters of the American story, from 1789 to the Civil War to the racial battles of the 20th century and into the 21st.

A History of Strange Bounces, a Future of the Unexpected

Published: December 28, 2003

MK Mabry

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(Page 2 of 2)

When the economy of the South withered in the early 20th century, the black migration to the North, little noted at the time, reshaped the demographics and economies of the region. That population movement "wasn't a story covered in the press very much" at the time, but it is a phenomenon that reshaped the nation, said Nicholas Lemann, the dean of the graduate school of journalism at Columbia University. Mr. Lemann has written two books that find the unnoticed causes of revolutions, "The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America," and his history of the SAT, "The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy." The black migration to the North "nationalized the race issue in America," he said, and "turned it from a mainly Southern question to a more national question."

This migration urbanized black America, changed the geography of cities, shifted the focus of politics and raised fundamental questions about the role of government in people's lives. It even "had a lot to do with making American pop culture an African-American culture, which then spread around the world," Mr. Lemann said.

There would be, notes Michael Lind, an author and senior fellow at the New America Foundation, "an equally important white migration to the South.'' Built on the development of seemingly small amenities like air-conditioning that made blistering summers livable, the politics and economics of the South were transformed by those moving away from crowded cities and seeking the wider open spaces of a nice backyard, with a corresponding rise in conservative politics, he said.

We never know where change will take us. In a 1994 essay on military revolutions, "Cavalry to Computer," the historian Andrew F. Krepinevich described the advent of the six-foot yew longbow during the Hundred Years' War in the 1300's and 1400's. By substituting yew for heavier woods, an archer could carry a bow into battle that could pierce the armor of a cavalryman. Mr. Krepinevich warns that technology alone does not change the course of war; any advance must be coupled with changes in the structure and operation of a military unit. But the changes made possible by the yew longbow were a factor in a more powerful role for the infantry, and a competitive advantage for England in that conflict and beyond.

To Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, those shifts in materials and technology in the eternal back-and-forth ways of war are anything but small. "Empires change hands over things like this," he said. But the march of progress in military technology, he added, has an unintended consequence of its own: each advance gives the owners the tantalizing sense of invincibility, and "victory at low cost."

Do consequences get any bigger?

In this issue of the Week in Review, we are proposing to find some developments today that could have profound effects tomorrow. No one can predict where the changes will lead, but the goal here is to identify some causes of the next big things, whatever they may be. It's always possible that we'll be wrong: Sometimes a butterfly flaps its wing in the Brazilian rain forest and nothing happens.