The Hero in History/Chapter 8
VIII
THE CONTINGENT AND THE UNFORESEEN
The relative size of things depends upon perspective. The scrub oak and the towering maple that contrast so sharply in the valley are hardly distinguishable when viewed from the mountain-top. Similarly, when we survey the fortunes of a people from a great distance, important facts of variety are overlooked, and the disparities between great men and little are flattened out.
To the question: what is the proper perspective from which history should be viewed—a year, a decade, a century, or a millennium?, our answer must be that there is no such thing as a “proper” perspective independent of a problem. The posing of the problem already presupposes that we have limited our inquiry to a definite time span. For purposes of comparative analysis, an intelligible account of an entire culture can be written in brief compass, without reference to the causal influences of outstanding personalities or to other contingent happenings. But it does not follow from this that the history of any limited period within the culture can dispense with such references.
To a mind sensitive to possibilities and lovingly curious of detail, the aspect of contingency in history will loom much larger than to those whose eyes make century sweeps over the record. When we view the life of a man, not as it appears to a biographer, but as a history of a human being compared to a history of the Earth, the seas, or the stars, it can be described in simple formulas. These will not say much more than did the Chinese counsellors to their aging emperor, who early in his reign had set them to fathom “the secret” of man. On his deathbed they reported to him that man is born, lives, suffers, and dies. Change any detail of his life, make him beggar or king, warrior or saint, and it still remains true. Change the man, his country, his period, the same pattern can be traced in all the changes. Such reflections are relevant to the human estate in which each man counts for any other; applied to the history of any particular man they are worthless except where the tale would make us believe that he is more than man.
If we chart the history of human societies with calipers that stretch over millennia can we, from that perspective, say much more than that they, too, have a common pattern and fate? They are born, grow more or less powerful, weaken, and disappear. With a strong government, they last a little longer; with a wise government, the condition of their members is a little more liveable; with a religious government, more of their members die in the odour of sanctity or as heretics at the stake. But they all run the same course—Greece and Persia, Rome and Jerusalem, the societies of Saladin and of Richard I. If this were all the wisdom that could be found in the cyclical theories of Vico, Hegel, Spengler, and Toynbee, they would not be worth reading. The Book of Ecclesiastes would be enough.
Historical enlightenment is not furthered by approaching cultures as wholes and trying to explain them in their entirety. Nor can everything about cultures be understood by intuiting them as “unique totalities of meaning.” Historical understanding is furthered by isolating specific problems of connection within cultures or of interaction between cultures; by tracing structural interrelations and temporal dependencies between the institutions found within a culture; and by showing how determinate phases and changes of a culture are conditioned by features of the non-cultural environment of man. It is doubtful whether anyone knows what he means, or has accurately expressed what he means, when he requests an explanation of Greek culture as a whole or of the entire course of American history. To be historically significant, the uniformities alleged to hold for cultures must go beyond the inadequate metaphors of the cycle of birth, maturity, and decay. They must point to specific mechanisms, to controlling conditions, to casual influences weighted in a certain order—in short, to those recurrent aspects of ever-fresh experience on the basis of which we can predict and act intelligently.
But, then, what happens to the contingent, the unique, the individual, and the novel about which we have previously spoken? Do they not all slip through the meshes of our understanding? Does not the “historicity” of the historical vanish whenever we explain a specific historical event in terms of general relations, functions, causes? This question has given rise to a great deal of discussion, but part of the difficulty lies in the ambiguity of the term “contingent.” The contingent in one sense is that which is given or found, whose existence is not logically necessary and whose non-existence is not logically impossible. In this sense everything that exists is contingent, as are the laws that describe the way contingent things are related. In another sense, the contingent is the irrelevant. Once we discover a law relating classes of things, from the point of view of this law, the phenomena that are unrelated to it are contingent. And no law can be found that describes the behaviour of some things without the assumption of the irrelevance of other things. In a third sense (a special case of the second) an event is contingent if it occurs as a consequence of the intersection of two series of events, described by laws that are irrelevant to each other.[1]
In the primary sense of the term, we can admit the existence of the contingent in every individual event, but it does not therefore follow that everything about the event is contmgent or novel. In the secondary sense we can legitimately predict that an event will occur as a consequence of a series of earlier ones and yet find that because of the interposition of another series of events what we expected turned out otherwise a good or bad “accident.”
Historians who are immersed in the rich details of historical events, and who are often brought up short by the unexpectedness of happenings, sometimes exaggerate the element of contingency to a point where history appears to them as nothing but a story of the unexpected. The “great man” as well as everything else appears contingent so that in their account he plays no greater role than in the account of the extreme determinist. In consequence, the problem of what specific historical effect a particular individual has at any definite time is a problem that, on this view, can hardly be stated. One contingency is born of another, and who can say where it leads and why. Such historians do not distinguish between three different things: the tautology that the absolutely novel aspect of an event cannot be understood or predicted; the view that the interrelationships between events show such complexity that intelligible explanations and predictions cannot be made; and the view that the contingent can only have historical effects because of what is not contingent.
In a famous passage of an impressive historical work, a distinguishd English scholar claims that the only uniformity the practising historian can legitimately recognize in human development is “the play of the contingent and unforeseen:”
One intellectual excitement, however, has been denied me. Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in History a plot, a rhythm, a pre-determined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows wave; only one great fact, with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations; only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and unforeseen. This is not a doctrine of cynicism or despair….[2]
The view expressed in the passage is so widely held that it will repay closer study. As it stands there is a certain ambiguity in it. If it is taken to express Mr. Fisher’s disbelief in some kind of theological determinism like that of Augustine and Tolstoy, or of the purposive idealism of Hegel and the dialectical materialists, no one interested in scientific history can take objection to it. Yet events that follow each other “as wave follows wave” certainly suggest a rhythm which in any case is different from the meaning of a plot and the finality of a predetermined pattern. And although a thing may be unique—our Earth, for example—there are many generalizations that may validly be applied to it. But the author’s basic meaning is clear—and mistaken. The “one” great fact of contingency that he stresses is no more basic or important than another great fact, viz. the limits of contingency in human affairs.
Chains of consequences are not strictly necessary, but we may count upon them nine times out of ten, and often more frequently. Introduce technology into a culture, even one hostile to the foreign values associated with technology, and a whole series of effects, from the establishment of an armament industry to political centralization, will ensue. Humiliate a defeated enemy without utterly destroying his potential powers of rearmament, and there will be another war in a generation. Let a nation wax fat and grow pacific while its neighbour remains hungry but well armed, and the prosperous country will be overrun as soon as a plausible pretext can be found. If those who start a civil war fight only defensive battles, it is only a matter of time before their cause is lost. Call a general strike without setting a limit to its duration, and the strike will fail. Let a democratic organization make a united front with a disciplined totalitarian organization that agitates for its own programme, and the democratic body will either become a catspaw for purposes foreign to its democratic aims or meet organizational disaster.
Of course every situation will to some extent be different. That is what we mean when we say we can distinguish between two situations. We can go beyond this tautology. We can admit the contingent and unforeseen, eruptions from outside into the pattern of expectation, almost invariably crop up. But it will not do to count upon them to stave off a disaster that can be spelled out from what we have previously done. We can be sure that something will always turn up, but not always in the right place. What is truly unique about the contingent and unforeseen is that it always can be anticipated but never relied upon.
That the variations in contingent historical effects by certain “laws” of historical behaviour is recognized at every hand in the body of the work which the cited passage mtroduces. In fact I am acquainted with few historical accounts that are studded with so many laws and generahzations—some of quite questionable validity—about the limits with which the contingent and unforeseen are to be found. We introduce them as illusttations, not because we accept them as true, but to show that Mr. Fisher must believe them to be true, or something like them to be true, in order to compose an intelligible story.
In speaking of the periodic raids of the early Greek settlers, he tells us: “The quest of supplies by war or plunder was a necessary supplement to the tillage and pasturage of the community. It was not so much a crime as a part of state economy. Man must eat to live. If crops run short, he must steal, fight, or emigrate.” Of the course of Roman expansion, he writes: “The successive stages of her conquest of Italy were forced upon her because, as England afterwards experienced in India, an orderly power ringed round by turbulence always finds itself compelled to establish peace and security upon its frontiers.” And of the effect of this expansion, in its later phases, on Roman character he adds: “The vast plunder of Africa and Asia, of Macedonia and Greece, produced upon the Roman character the evil effects which suddenly acquired wealth always exerts upon minds unprepared to receive it.”
Mr. Fisher is not a historical materialist or an economic determinist, but he has such a healthy respect for the “laws” of political economy that he gives them sway over the entire realm of historical contingency. Thus “…Diocletian, one of the wisest of the Emperors, issued an edict fixing prices all over the Empire, and found, as many have found since his day, that not all the laws or penalties in the world can prevent men from buying in the cheapest and selling in the dearest market.” What is true for the time of Diocletian is also true eleven hundred years later for England after the black Death: “In England Parliament called labourers and artisans to their old rate of wages and forbade them to move from one country to another. Political economy, like nature, may be expelled with a fork, but it always returs. The legislation of the Edwardian parliaments was unavailing to arrest a process grounded in the economic necessities of the time.”[3]
Expressions like “necessary,” “forced upon,” “always,” “must,” and “cannot” are no part of the language of contingency, not to mention those rhetorical flights in which Sulla’s reform of the Roman Senate is pronounced doomed, since “what neither Sulla nor anyone else could do was to fight against the stars in their courses.”
Every contingent fact makes a break in a web of historical relationships that determines how far it shall fall. All that we need to vindicate here is the fact that the web is often broken, and that a great man may be one of the contingent phenomena that break it.
What has been demonstrated for Fisher can be established as easily by examining the pages of any historian who magnifies the facts of contingency at the expense of its limits. ••••• We have previously seen that “if” questions in history are scientifically meaningful. It can also be shown that they point to a fact of tremendous moral and social significance. The necessities of history as of nature, with which it is continuous, are binding without being logically compelling. The necessities of history, where they can be distinguished from those of nature, are in part purposive. They contain an implicit reference to what human beings regard as valuable or preferable.
When we say that the abolition of slavery was historically necessary or that the liberation of productive forces from the restrictions of private monopoly is a social necessity, there are at least two things involved. The first is certain assumptions about the biological and psychological nature of man as they appear in a social context. The properties of human behaviour are taken to be relatively invariant, of the same general character but of a specifically different subject matter as the properties investigated by any natural science.
The second reference is to the order of human values and preferences which obtain at the time, to a choice between evils and goods, to a policy of dealing with the given conditions. The order, the choice, the policy may themselves be the predictable result of habit, education, and tradition. But since they are voluntary, they may also be the consequence of intelligent reflection—and in that sense a free determination. This free determination cuts down but can never eliminate the hazards of the future. If, as Hans Reichenbach suggests, every act of ours is a wager against a possible disappointment, the method of intelligence is a method of increasing the odds in our favour.
Many of the might-have-beens of history were beyond human control. It is hard to see what human beings could have done to realize these might-have-beens prior to the decisive events that finally sentenced them to indeterminate status in limbo. We are gratified that the assassin’s bullet missed President Roosevelt in 1933: we deplore the fact that the Reichswehr volley left Hitler alive in the Munich Putsch of 1923. The grounded possibility of a hit in both instances brings home to us the complexity of all historical processes at the same time as it reinforces our sense of helplessness in relation to it. Remembered in season, the grounded, objective possibilities that are outside the scope of human control tend to loosen the rigid formulas of the theorist and curb the natural dogmatism of the man of action. Properly considered, they can fortify us against the sting of defeats imposed upon us by chance and hard luck.
But, as we have seen, other might-have-beens were within human grasp. They are the genuinely lost chances, for they could have been. They were lost because of the failure to be more intelligent, more courageous, more resolute—sometimes a little more of each.
The triumphs of intelligence and will never violate natural and social necessities. They tap unsuspected potential resources of mind and body the better to cope with these necessities. Intelligence and will supply by their own effort some of the conditions upon which the transition from the “might be” to the “is” hangs. That is what we mean when we say retrospectively that the impossible has been achieved. Among the most poignant tragedies of history are those in which men have cried “impossible” too soon, and for want of vision have summoned up energies sufficient to win the day—too late. The virtues and vices of men are more than catalytic agents. They can be and have been powerful historical forces, a fact which gainsays no intelligent conception of social determinism.
Moral responsibility in history consists in being aware of the relevant ifs and might-bes in the present, and choosing between alternatives in the light of predictable consequences. We may lose even after we have chosen intelligently and fought bravely. In that case regret is always vain, and resignation, without capitulation to the ideals of the enemy, is the better part of wisdom, until a new opportunity supervenes. But intelligence and sustained courage will win much more often than drift and fitful bursts of effort. If there is any ethical imperative valid for all historical periods it is awareness and action.
These reflections have a particular bearing on our own historical present. Wherever we look at the world to-day, we can observe the fateful consequences of the lost chances of yester-day. The international labour and socialist movement lost its chance in August, 1914, to stop a world war that, as was predicted then, would breed more terrible wars. Kerensky and the democratic socialist bloc lost the chance to put into effect the official but unannounced programme of his own party which, as Chernov has revealed, called for cessation of war, the distribution of land to the peasants, and other measures that the Bolsheviks advocated as preparatory to imposing their ruthless minority dictatorship. The leading party of the Weimar Republic lost its chance to break up the monarchist centres of reaction without whose help Hitler might never have come to power. The governments of western Europe and the United States lost their chance to help the legally recognized Spanish state against invasion by Mussolini and Hitler and win an active ally on the Continent instead of a hostile neutral, in the inescapable showdown with Fascism.
The consequences of a lost chance rarely close the doors to future choice. But they narrow them to alternatives that are all relatively unfavourable in comparison with earlier possibilities. The justification of the present war against Fascism is not to be found in resurrected echoes of a Wilsonian idealism which lost its chance at Versailles to redeem its promises. It is to be found in the fact that defeat at the hands of the Axis spells universal Fascism and its unspeakable barbarity and degradation, while victory over it means survival and one more chance. One more chance to solve the basic problem of our time—the fusion of the economic tendency toward a planned economy with the values and techniques of democracy. Fascism or democratic survival and another chance—this is the grim alternative of our time.
- ↑ Cf. Morris R. Cohen, Reason and Nature, pp. 151–2, New York, 1932. Also Cournot, Considérations sur La Marche das Idées et des Evenéments dans Les Temps Modernes, ed. by Mentré, vol. I., pp. 1–15.
- ↑ H. A. L. Fisher, A History of Europe, vol. I., p. vii., London, 1935.
- ↑ These quotations are from the work cited, vol. I., pp. 18, 62, 64, 93, 320. All italics mine.