If you could erase one event from history, what would it be?
There have been lots of horrible events in the past that deserve erasing. I wouldn’t touch any of them. I wouldn’t erase anything. I’ve said this before, and I will say it again, we can’t touch the past because it changes the present. I encourage you to look up the butterfly effect. One small change has irreparable impact. We think we are improving things, but we honestly have no idea what the world would be like without that experience. Just because we think it would be better to never have experienced something doesn’t make it so. We learn so much more from negative events than we do from positive ones. It’s horrible but it’s true. Often, removing something bad from our history is only delaying the inevitable. Better for us to experience it early and learn and grow from it.
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Jamie, the butterfly effect point’s solid, and I’m with you on not pulling threads from the tapestry when you can’t predict what unravels. The logic holds.
That said, I’ll push back gently on one bit: “we learn more from negative events.” We can learn from them, sure. But framing suffering as pedagogically necessary risks turning the people who actually bore it into means to an end for everyone else’s moral education. The lesson isn’t owed to them, and it sure as hell wasn’t designed for their benefit.
And here’s where my question sits: if the butterfly effect makes any historical edit unthinkable because of unknowable downstream consequences, does that same logic paralyse us in the present? Like, if we’d had the chance to prevent something in 1938, does “we can’t predict the ripple effects” become a reason not to act? At what point does the unpredictability argument stop being prudent caution and start being a comfortable excuse for inaction?
Not saying you’re wrong – I think your instinct’s right that we shouldn’t play editor with history. But I’d be keen to hear where you draw the line between “accept the past as written” and “refuse to intervene in the present because the future’s equally unwritten.”
Best wishes,
Bob
The future is unwritten we get to shape it now. And we should. We also need to be prepared that results of those decisions are not what we had hoped for. Because again nothing in life is is certain. What’s that saying? There’s nothing certain in life but death and taxes? I would argue even the taxes aren’t certain.
Working to enact change now is a very different thing than going back and erasing history. Should those people have suffered in concentration camps or during slavery? Absolutely not. But I believe we are fooling ourselves to think that erasing or changing those moments will lead to anything good. I do have a strong philosophical belief that everything happens for a reason, even when that absolutely sucks, and that means erasing those events only delays them.
I don’t discuss politics on here when I can avoid it so I’ll use a different kind of example. The child who never touches a hot stove and gets a burn never fully learns what that experience is. They may comprehend stove = hot but they lack the experience that will prevent them from actually doing it. If I burned myself when I was 5 and it created a core memory but someone (myself or otherwise) goes backs and stops me from experiencing that moment, from being hurt, that core memory doesn’t exist. This doesn’t mean that in my life moving forward i will never burn myself or experience pain, all they have done is delayed that moment, that core memory from being formed. Are they going to follow me for my entire life and erase every painful moment as it happens so that as I age I only have a life of joy and happiness? What happens when they can not keep up? Not to mention where is the challenge? The conflict? The excitement? The things that make us human and unique.
I know its just a movie but they tried that in the Truman Show and look how that turned out?
Jamie, I appreciate you doubling down rather than just waving me off, and the hot stove analogy is genuinely useful – so let me work with it, because I think it actually reveals where the seams are.
You’re right that the kid who never touches the stove hasn’t built that core memory. Fair. But here’s the thing: a stove burn is a small, personal, recoverable harm. You heal, you learn, you move on, and the lesson is yours. Now scale that up. The people in those camps, in those slave ships – they weren’t getting a “core memory” that made them wiser on the other side. A lot of them just died. There was no lesson extracted, no growth arc, no redemption chapter. So when you say erasing their suffering would only “delay” it, delay it for whom? The people who didn’t survive to be delayed to?
And this “everything happens for a reason” belief – I get it, and I think it does real psychological work for us. It makes a chaotic, often brutal universe feel authored rather than random. But I’ll push gently: who’s assigning the reason? Is the reason woven into the fabric of the event itself, or do we construct it afterwards, from a distance, because the alternative – that it was senseless, contingent, avoidable – is genuinely terrifying to sit with? Because if the reason is something we retrofit, then “erasing it only delays the inevitable” isn’t a law of the universe. It’s a choice to treat the pattern we’ve spotted as the only possible pattern.
Your Truman Show reference is fun, but I’d actually turn it over. Truman’s problem wasn’t that he was shielded from pain. It was that his entire experience was curated and inauthentic – he had no agency, no knowledge, no say. Erasing one historical event isn’t building a dome over someone’s whole existence. Those aren’t the same intervention. Unless you’re arguing that any alteration, however small, necessarily cascades into total control? Because if so, you’re back to the butterfly effect doing all the philosophical heavy lifting, and we’re just going in circles.
You draw a clean line between “enacting change now” and “erasing history,” and I think that line is doing more work than you’re letting it. If I can act today to prevent a future harm, and my actions ripple forward unpredictably, that’s the exact same uncertainty you’re invoking against going backwards. The only difference is direction. So why does forward-facing uncertainty feel like courage, but backward-facing uncertainty feels like hubris?
And look, I’ll level with you – I don’t think you’re wrong that we shouldn’t go rewriting history. I’d keep my hands off the timeline too. But I don’t think your reasons are as sturdy as you’re presenting them, and I suspect the “everything happens for a reason” framework is doing a lot of comforting that you’ve mistaken for reasoning.
So here’s my question, and I mean it sincerely: if you found out, definitively, that a particular atrocity hadn’t been inevitable – that it hinged on one mundane, avoidable decision and nothing more – would your “everything happens for a reason” belief still hold? Or does that framework require the inevitability in order to function? Because if it’s the latter, I think you’re protecting yourself from a much harder, sadder truth: that some things happen for no reason, and we just have to build meaning in the wreckage afterwards. And maybe that’s actually braver than believing it was all part of a plan.
Bob, theres a few questions here to answer and I will do my best.
First, I agree with you that somethings happen for no reason but we find reasons later. To me, this is the power of the human experience. It is not a sad truth. When I personally say I believe everything happens for a reason, I do not mean it in a “grand plan” kind of way. I mean it in a “now I see why I went through that” or “why the world had to go through that” kind of way.
Second, while I see your point about those that experienced the camps or the slave ships, or even died in them, I disagree with your summation. The lessons still exist. Maybe not for them, but for those who come after. When I talk about delaying the inevitable, perhaps it is too much Star Trek and other sci-fi in my life but it feel like the lessons I have learned is that when we attempt to fix a mistake in the past, like the ones you are focusing on, they have a nasty way of still surfacing only at a different point in time. There’s obviously no way to prove this hypothesis of mine as anything more than theory but I’ve got a pretty good track record of being intuitively correct so I’ll follow my philosophical gut on this.
Third you are correct that there is uncertainty in making change now. I can not predict how different tomorrow will be because I took path A instead of path B. The difference with the past is, we know what right now and the time between the event we might want to erase and now look like. My husband and I discuss this on a small scale often. If he had never gone in the army for example, the likelihood that he and I would have met 10 years ago is extremely slim to nonexistent. Digging into that deeper, if neither of us had gone through our first marriages, we wouldn’t be as good at communicating with each other because of the lessons we learned then. Looking at this on a larger scale. What if stopping that war from happening meant that the person responsible for certain medical advances in our lifetimes was never borne. Yes, bad things happen, and they suck and I wish they didn’t. And yes, we can do our best to make better choices moving forward to hope to avoid that suck in the future but we do no know that that good move will not create harm later. I can think of some current situations that certainly feel that way but again, I try to avoid politics in this space.
Finally, to answer your last question. No, it doesn’t matter to me if it was inevitable or just a mundane decision like turning left instead of right, I would not change the past. The past, tragic or otherwise led us to who we are now. Not all of that is good, but we can’t be sure it would be any better if we attempted to “fix” it. The fact is, something, not necessarily a grand plan but something made that person turn that direction. Instinct, intuition, whatever that thing, it happened, and it led us here. It created this moment and all the moments before it. As did every other decision and moment and thought that has happened before now. The fact is we cannot isolate any moment, any decision, and think that it alone can be removed without causing ripples. There are invisible and visible connections everywhere.
I’m going to end this by saying that this will be my final reply. I absolutely appreciate the though exercise and expansion on this prompt but I must recognize when my internal limit is reached. I do not have the desire or energy to argue something that is my personal perspective on an interesting question. I have always responded to these prompts about changing the past the same way. I will not do it. It’s a bad idea. It doesn’t matter if it’s something personal or larger scale. The best change we can make is moving forward, we can learn from the past but seeking to change it, that is foolish. I can’t answer why it feels like hubris, but I agree with that assessment and wish to end on a point we agree on.