Executive Editor of the American Heritage and Invention & Technology Magazines, and Author of War on the Run: Robert Rogers and the Conquest of America’s First Frontier and The Polar Bear Strategy: Reflections on Risk in Modern Life

One of the most important tasks as the editor of a magazine of American history is to challenge readers to reach back into our past, examine situations and behaviors, and then use that knowledge to inform our judgments on current events. Cliches jump to mind of history repeating itself, of course, but it’s far more nuanced than that. The eminent historian Daniel Boorstin once wrote that planning for the future without a sense of the past is similar to planting cut flowers and hoping for the best.

Rebecca Costa likes to challenge me by asking why then I limit stories in the magazine to covering only those events that fall between the 15th century and present day. To understand 21st-century America, she argues, it’s critical to reach back to the earliest proto-humans taking their first upright steps. It’s the achievement of bipedilism after all that so unalterably changed the size and function of the human brain. And that significant moment sent us on our way to becoming the wondrous creatures we are today. The evolution of the human brain—and its response to the complexities of the world we create—has everything to do with American history and the situation we find ourselves in today. While her query to me is rhetorical, of course, the major point she is making is not. 

As she argues eloquently in The Watchman’s Rattle we have reached a “cognitive threshold,” a point in which the complexity of problems we’ve created—global pandemic epidemics, global terrorism—has grown beyond the ability of our still-evolving brains to solve. If we can’t address this issue, our culture may fall, just as the Romans, Mayans, Khmer, the culture at Chaco Canyon, and dozens of others did when they hit similar cognitive thresholds.

If you don’t think that we can create technologies that leapfrog the capacity of our brains, just think about the eccentric turn-of-the-18^th-century French monk and philosopher, Blaise Pascal. In an exercise of logic known as Pascal’s “Wager,” he tackled the age-old question of whether God existed or not. He knew he couldn’t answer the question directly because he had no proof one way or the other. But he could evaluate various scenarios based on whether God existed or not, and whether or not a person believed in God. The simple and startling act of sussing out various possibilities ushered in an intellectual revolution, eventually know as probability theory, which enabled us to attach numbers to the possibility or probability of different outcomes resulting from various scenarios. Instead of making decisions through the usual channels of hunch, instinct, and past experience, we could now use numbers to quantify the odds of different outcomes. Science began to reveal that events and conditions long attributed to the gods of magic were caused in fact by tangible natural forces and substances, or by chance, in a quantifiable way. From that point on, we entered a new relationship with uncertainty, and the word “risk” came into our lexicon. Insurance and new investment vehicles emerged. Whole new fields of science came into being. New ground-shaking technologies were invented. Our world became vastly more complex. And with it, we opened new Pandora’s boxes, further adding more complexity. Our brains, Costa argues, which had evolved to handle certain levels of complexity were now facing—in a blink of an eye—a whole new order of demands.

Complexity increases not just in revolutionary breakthroughs of Pascal, Newton, and Einstein but also more incrementally and prosaically. As Tom Fleming points out in a recent issue of American Heritage, for instance, Congress passed fewer than 100 bills annually in the nineteenth century, most of which were less than a page. The typical law now arrives for passage with thousands of pages of minute regulations attached to it. Worse, legislators typically introduce more than 10,000 bills in a session and pass between 400 to 500. The latest classic was the more-than-2,000-page health care bill this year. The House of Representatives voted this prodigy into law late on a Sunday night, after a weekend of wrangling and deal making. A New York congresswoman remarked, without a hint of irony, that they would have to “pass this bill to find out what’s in it.” If our lawmakers, who are charged with paying attention to the big issues can’t keep up, where does that leave ordinary citizens?

Costa’s brilliance is to force us to step out of the muck of political gridlock and confusion of modern life and look at our society and issues through the lens of sociobiology. She makes a convincing and important case. We would do well to listen to her.