Nathan Gardels, A Quantum Theory Of History, Noema, May 2, 2025.
Recently, the philosopher Slavoj Žižek gave a lecture on “a quantum theory of history” at the Berggruen Institute Europe’s Casa de Tre Oci in Venice.
For Žižek, all major ideologies, from Liberalism to Marxism, believe history has a direction that moves inexorably toward their universal realization. But today, he maintains, we live in a moment where you can’t draw a straight line to the future.
As Žižek argued in a video interview prior to the lecture, the notion of “superposition” in quantum physics “fits our circumstances perfectly.” In this condition, multiple, non-universal configurations, or states of being, can exist simultaneously on trajectories that are not predetermined.
“We live in a situation,” he says, “where we have the remnants of the progressive, Enlightenment European dream. Then we also have something very different … which is precisely the anti-Enlightenment. I sometimes call this ‘soft fascism.’” It is not the same as totalistic Nazism. Rather, it combines the dynamism of capitalism with a strong state rooted in ethnic or religious traditional ideology to cement social bonds that would otherwise fray amid the dislocations of unleashed animal spirits.
In Žižek’s view, you see this everywhere. “In China, as Xi Jinping recently said, ‘We need to teach young people what? Not Mao, but Confucian tradition.’ Then you have Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey and Putin in his own way in Russia.” Trump’s America now joins the mix. Instead of some harmoniously balanced multipolar order, Žižek sees each “trying to create their own small empire” in a discordant world.
Both the Enlightenment and anti-Enlightenment strains live side by side, neither with a determinist advantage in the long run, and both in a state of perpetual transformation.
In short, history is open in all directions. There is no through line you can draw that will tell us where it will all go and where it will end up. There are a multitude of possibilities and arrays of conditions everywhere, all at once, that will only have looked inevitable in retrospect.
What we are learning about nature through quantum physics changes our very concept of being. For Žižek, this means we must also change the ontological foundations of our perception of history. We now know that nature is neither stable nor linear, but mostly in a state of perpetual flux and plural potentiality that only apparently crystallizes when we observe contingent circumstances converging at a given time in a given space.
There's more at the link.
Add in that history is only our perception of history and the equation is even more complex.
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