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July 29 - July 31, 2021
The logic of beginning with a landscape may not be immediately obvious. But consider the power of metaphor, on the one hand, and the particular combination of economy and intensity with which visual images can express metaphors, on the other.
think, that science, history, and art have something in common: they all depend on metaphor, on the recognition of patterns, on the realization that something is “like” something else.
We pride ourselves on not trying to predict the future, as our colleagues in economics, sociology, and political science attempt to do. We resist letting contemporary concerns influence us—the term “presentism,” among historians, is no compliment. We advance bravely into the future with our eyes fixed firmly on the past:
We know the future only by the past we project into it. History, in this sense, is all we have.
you think of the past as a landscape, then history is the way we represent it, and it’s that act of representation that lifts us above the familiar to let us experience vicariously what we can’t experience directly: a wider view. II.
“considering that no greater gift could be made by me than to give you the capacity to be able to understand in a very short time all that I have learned and understood in so many years and with so many hardships and dangers for myself.” The purpose of his representation was distillation: he sought to “package” a large body of information into a compact usable form so that his patron could quickly master it. It’s no accident that the book is a short one.
The inheritance of acquired characteristics may not work in biology, but it does in human affairs: “History is progress through the transmission of acquired skills from one generation to another.”14
We relish revisionism and distrust orthodoxy, not least because were we to do otherwise, we might put ourselves out of business.
The very fact that orthodoxies so dominate the realms of religion and culture suggests the absence of agreement from below, and hence the need to impose it from above.
It’s part of historical consciousness to learn the same thing: that there is no “correct” interpretation of the past, but that the act of interpreting is itself a vicarious enlargement of experience from which you can benefit.
interpret the past for the purposes of the present with a view to managing the future, but to do so without suspending the capacity to assess the particular circumstances in which one might have to act, or the relevance of past actions to them. To accumulate experience is not to endorse its automatic application,
Studying the past is no sure guide to predicting the future. What it does do, though, is to prepare you for the future by expanding experience, so that you can increase your skills, your stamina—and, if all goes well, your wisdom.
Machiavelli estimated, “that fortune is the arbiter of half our actions,” it’s also the case that “she leaves the other half, or close to it, for us to govern.” Or, as he also put it, “God does not want to do everything.”
Thucydides, unlike Crichton, is also a great generalizer. He meant his work, he tells us, for those inquirers “who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the interpretation of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it.” He knew that abstraction—we might even call it a Picasso-like separation from context—is what makes generalizations hold up over time.
Artists coexist with the objects they’re representing, which means that it’s always possible for them to shift the view, adjust the light, or move the model.23 Historians can’t do this: because what they represent is in the past, they can never alter it. But they can, by that means of the particular form of abstraction we know as narrative, portray movement through time, something an artist can only hint at.
historians have the capacity for selectivity, simultaneity, and the shifting of scale: they can select from the cacophony of events what they think is really important; they can be in several times and places at once; and they can zoom in and out between macroscopic and microscopic levels of analysis.
it’s the historian here who selects what’s significant, no less than would have been the case with a more traditional account of, say, the Battle of Hastings, or the life of Louis XIV. Millions of people over thousands of years have crossed the Rubicon, E. H. Carr pointed out in What Is History? We decide which ones we want to write about.14
Simultaneity. Even more striking than selectivity is the capacity history gives you for simultaneity, for the ability to be at once in more than a single place or time.
It’s only by standing apart from the events they describe, as Keegan and Kern do, that historians can understand and, more significantly, compare events. For surely understanding implies comparison: to comprehend something is to see it in relation to other entities of the same class; but when these stretch over spans of time and space that exceed the physical capabilities of the individual observer, our only alternative is to be in several places at once.19 Only viewing the past from the perspective of the present—the posture of Friedrich’s wanderer on his mountaintop—allows you to do that.
shift the scale from the macroscopic to the microscopic,
Anytime a historian uses a particular episode to make a general point, scale shifting is taking place: the small, because it’s easily described, is used to characterize the large, which may not be.
By continuities, I mean patterns that extend across time. These are not laws, like gravity or entropy; they are not even theories, like relativity or natural selection. They are simply phenomena that recur with sufficient regularity to make themselves apparent to us.
for example, that birth rates tend to decline as economic development advances, or that empires tend to expand beyond their means, or that democracies tend not to go to war with one another. But because these patterns show up so frequently in the past, we can reasonably expect them to continue to do so in the future.
By contingencies, I mean phenomena that do not form patterns.
They can involve what the chaos theorists call “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” situations where an imperceptible shift at the beginning of a process can produce enormous changes at the end of it.33
students of accidents know that when predictable processes come together in unprecedented ways, unpredictable consequences can follow.
what if we were to think of history as a kind of mapping? If, as I suggested earlier, the past is a landscape and history is the way we represent it, then this might make sense.
The fit becomes more precise the more the landscape is investigated. The first maps of newly discovered territories are usually crude sketches of a coastline, with lots of blank spaces and perhaps a few sea monsters or dragons occupying them. As exploration proceeds, the map’s features become more specific and the beasts tend to disappear. In time, there’ll be multiple maps of the same territory prepared for different purposes, whether to show roads, towns, rivers, mountains, resources,
HISTORICAL LANDSCAPES DIFFER from cartographic landscapes, however, in one important respect: they are physically inaccessible to us.
historians too start with surviving structures, whether they be archives, artifacts, or even memories. They then deduce the processes that produced them.
The historian’s imagination must be “sufficiently powerful to make his narrative affecting,” Macaulay once wrote. “Yet he must control it so absolutely as to content himself with the materials which he finds, and to refrain from supplying deficiencies by additions of his own.”
Still further reflection raised the possibility that this specific difference in how historians and political scientists operate might reflect a larger divergence in methods of inquiry that separates history from the social sciences generally. It is, most fundamentally, the distinction between a reductionist and an ecological view of reality.
I take reductionism to be the belief that you can best understand reality by breaking it up into its various parts.
you search for the element whose removal from a causal chain would alter the outcome. It’s critical to reductionism that causes be ranked hierarchically.
The social sciences have too often dealt with this problem by denying its existence. They’ve operated from the conviction that consciousness and the behavior that results from it are subject, at least in general terms, to the workings of rules—if not laws—whose existence we can detect and whose effects we can describe.
“rational choice” assumptions in economics and political science, which maintain that people calculate their own best interests objectively and on the basis of accurate information about the circumstances within which these exist;
modernization” theory, which insists that all nations go through similar stages of economic development; (4) the “where you stand depends on where you sit” argument in organizational studies—also known as Miles’s Law—which explains the behavior of bureaucracies, large and small, in terms of an overriding concern with self-perpetuation;
“The historian’s business is to know the past, not to know the future,” R. G. Collingwood insisted, “and whenever historians claim to be able to determine the future in advance of its happening, we may know with certainty that something has gone wrong with their fundamental conception of history.”12 Or, as Tom Stoppard’s heroine Thomasina puts it in his play Arcadia: “You cannot stir things apart.”13
The growing “constructivist” movement in political science stresses the evolution of ideas and institutions: as in the natural sciences, Alexander Wendt explains, the emphasis is on “explaining why one thing leads to another, and how . . . things are put together to have the causal powers that they do.”26 The “new historicism” in sociology questions the tendency to seek universal generalizations detached from time and space.27
reductionism remains the dominant mode of inquiry within the social sciences: historians are still the principal practitioners of an ecological approach to the study of human affairs.
In seeking to show how past processes have produced present structures, we draw upon whatever theories we can find that will help us accomplish that task. Because the past is infinitely divisible, we have to do this if we’re to make sense of whatever portion of it we’re attempting to explain. Explanation is, however, our chief priority: therefore we subordinate our generalizations to it.
We generalize for particular purposes; hence we practice particular generalization.
Historians reject, however, the doctrine of immaculate causation, which seems to be implied in the idea that one can identify, without reference to all that has preceded it, such a thing as an independent variable. Causes always have antecedents.
one historian’s personal quest for the independent variable a century ago, and where that led him. I. The historian was our old friend Henry Adams, and the quest is chronicled in his extraordinary autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, completed in 1907 but only published posthumously in 1918.
Carr used this case to distinguish between what he called “rational” and “accidental” causation: [I]t made sense to suppose that the curbing of alcoholic indulgence in drivers, or a stricter control over the condition of brakes, or an improvement in the siting of roads, might serve the end of reducing the number of traffic fatalities. But it made no sense at all to suppose that the number of traffic fatalities could be reduced by preventing people from smoking cigarettes. Rational causes, Carr went on to explain, “lead to fruitful generalizations and lessons can be learned from them.”
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There’s no precise rule that tells historians where to stop in tracing the causes of any historical event. But there is what we might call a principle of diminishing relevance: it is that the greater the time that separates a cause from a consequence, the less relevant we presume that cause to be.
Bloch’s second distinction, between exceptional and general causes, comes into play. Bloch’s point was that although his mountain climber could not have fallen from his precipice without the path along it having been built, without the mountain having been uplifted, and without the law of gravity having been in effect, not everyone who skirts precipices plummets from them. The placement of the path, the existence of the mountain, the effects of gravity were all general causes of the accident: they were necessary for the death to have occurred, but they weren’t in themselves sufficient to
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sufficient cause is still dependent upon necessary causes: that’s why a misstep on a mountain path is more dangerous than one that takes place in the middle of a meadow.
Causes always have contexts, and to know the former we must understand the latter.
Bloch’s understanding of exceptional causes, I think, anticipates what the chaos theorists have called “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,”
