The Blue Monkey Review

Structure and contingency as explanatory approaches in western historiography go back to the beginning. Herodotus [The Histories, trans’ Aubrey de Selincourt (Penguin, 1954) is the version I have used, but here is a version on the web in case you have lots of time on your hands] begins his history of the Persian war (beginning in the 490s B.C.) by setting himself the task of showing why the Greeks and Persians went to war. He recounts several stories from the distant past, shares his skepticism about these explanations, then goes on to say that “I prefer to rely on my own knowledge…. I will proceed with my history, telling the story as I go along of small cities of men no less than of great…. Knowing, therefore, that human prosperity never abides long in the same place, I shall pay attention to both alike.” (4-5) Herodotus leaves no detail alone in explaining this conflict. His sense of causation is such that in order to know an event, you must know every event that contributed to it. In human terms, that sometimes meant discussing the family life of every individual involved for pages before explaining what they did in the larger story. Herodotus took for granted that the gods had a hand in everything, that the oracles all accurately predicted the future (though generally they couldn’t be understood). Xerxes, in his frustration at moving his army over the Hellespont, ordered his men to lash the water. Xerxes later experiences decisive defeat, at the hands of the Athenians, in the naval battle of Salamis. [As the oracle had predicted, “the wooden wall only shall not fall…”] For Herodotus, there was a straight line between the Persian arrogance and humiliation.

But it is because Herodotus offers human explanations that he is the father of history. And in dealing with the lives and decisions of individuals, he recognizes contingency in every part of human affairs. Consider the story of Croesus, the king of a the wealthy country of Lydia. When threatened by a Persian invasion he consults an oracle who gives him the comforting advice that if he goes to war against the Persians he will destroy a mighty empire. “Cool” thinks Croesus, not realizing until too late that the mighty empire was his own. He then became a member of the Persian royal entourage, living with dignity but always as a retainer to the Persian kings. He traveled with Cyrus the Great in his travels of conquest. In the last of these Cyrus invaded the land of the Massagetae and faced a formidable foe. At a strategy meeting before the decisive battle, the joint chiefs were unanimous that Cyrus should follow a particular course of action. Croesus, however, disagreed. “[H]uman life,” he tells Cyrus, “is like a revolving wheel and never allows the same people to continue long in prosperity.” That seems more a comment on Croesus’ life than an argument for military tactics, but Cyrus takes Croesus advice. The next day the battle goes against him and the Persian emperor is killed in his army’s defeat. Croesus returns to Persia, however, to continue his service to the line of his conquerors.

Some people, those who don’t get or don’t like Herodotus, will refer to Thucydides as the “father” of history. This dispute over the paternity of history reveals something about the discipline that perhaps I will leave alone. But, clearly, Thucydides’ History of the Pelopennesian War [trans. Richard Crawley (E.P. Dutton, 1910) is my version, but here is a version online] is the foundation work of structural history. Thucydides says far less about the gods than does Herodotus, so in that sense he foregoes “deep” structure. But the war between the Athenian empire and the Spartan-led Pelopennesian league (begins 431 B.C.) came about due to structural dynamics within Greek social and political life. “The growth of the power of Athens, and the alarm which this inspired in Lacedaemon, made war inevitable.”(16) Early in the work Thucydides portrays a council of Greek states considering the growth of Athens as the principle power among the widely scattered Greek colonies (from Sicily to Ionia). This gives the author his first chance to contrast the Spartans and Athenians. “The Athenians are addicted to innovation,” says a delegate from Corinth. “[Y]ou [Spartans] have a genius for keeping what you have got, accompanied by a total want of invention….” Spartans were cautious, homebound, conservative; Athenians were adventurous, even foolhardy, and they had a far-flung commercial empire. “To describe their character in a word, one might truly say that [the Athenians] were born into the world to take no rest themselves and to give none to others.” (45)

Later in the book, and more famously, Pericles, the Athenian ruler, also contrasted Athens and Sparta in his funeral oration. This has become a classic contrast between an open, commercial, and democratic society (“Our constitution…favors the many instead of the few…”) with a closed, militaristic society. Perhaps the contrast went too far, but the point that Thucydides made was clear: the differences between Athens and Sparta created an irrepressible conflict, one that broke into open war as Athenian power pushed its way into the Spartan sphere.

It should be clear that Herodotus does not write all contingency all the time; and Thucydides recognizes the differences that policies, adopted by always volatile majorities in the free-for-all of the Athenian agora, made for differing outcomes in the war’s strategies. No historian relies entirely on either structure or contingency in explaining the past. Edward Gibbon, for instance, attributed the gradual demise of Roman rule to religion and barbarism, but he didn’t stop after one short article. He devoted volumes to detailing the moral drama of Rome, lurching from crisis to crisis. But it is the case that historians do lean in one direction or the other. Historians like Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee and even William H. McNeill offered huge systems that explained whole civilizations. Drama, moral or otherwise, more or less dropped away. Since at least the 1960s, historians of all kinds have been more and more influenced by the social sciences. This has placed structure at the center of much of historical work, even political history which has traditionally provided some of the most detail-driven historiography. Social historians in the 1970s wrote works that analyzed reform movements, family structures, and even sexual changes through the use of sociological or anthropological systems. This probably reduced the readership for historical works to the readership for monographs in social science.

But another strand in history has given far greater importance to the actions of individuals. Sometimes called the “great man” interpretation of history, this approach makes a plausible claim that some people influence or shape the historical past. In Niccolo Machiavelli’s judgment, “fortune is the arbiter of half the things we do, leaving the other half or so to be controlled by ourselves.”(Prince, ch. 25) If William Seward had not offered such a memorable phrase as “irrepressible conflict” in his 1858 speech, perhaps he would have seemed less extreme on the slavery question and so have gained the Republican nomination two years later. Instead, Abraham Lincoln, whose “house divided” image of 1858 seemed somehow less offensive, came from behind at the Chicago convention and so became the Republican candidate. . Instead of as our 16th president, Seward is now known for “irrepressible conflict” and for his purchase of Alaska (i.e., "Seward's ice box," "Seward's folly") from Russia. But, surely a Seward administration would have handled the secession crisis far differently than Lincoln did.

Or, consider a single historical issue from both directions. Some historians of the Holocaust have used Hannah Arendt’s argument about the banality of evil to picture the Holocaust as part of a huge Nazi bureaucracy. No one had responsibility for the whole of it, and few had direct responsibility for the death of actual Jews. So for most Germans involved in the Holocaust industry, the Jews (in their millions) just fell through the cracks. Daniel Goldhagen’s recent, and highly controversial, book provides a cultural explanation of the Holocaust that we can call “structural” but one that leaves us with the ability to make moral judgments. According to Goldhagen, Germans in all walks of life and at all levels of society had absorbed a particular strand of anti-Semitism that claimed that a solution for the Jewish “problem” could only come with the elimination of the Jews (they all move away, they all become Christian). On the other side of the question, when I studied Holocaust history at Yad Vashem we were asked to consider structural explanations of Shoa. When our professors came down on the question, it was clear that their view was “Structure shmucture; no Hitler, no Holocaust.”

This division between structure and contingency has implications beyond history (I’m assuming, as sort of a thought experiment, that there is meaningful life beyond history). The near-unanimity of my students made me see that structure’s stock must be higher than I expected. After all, we all believe in huge abstract impersonal forces like the market, progress, democracy, not to mention God, love and rock and roll. All of these are products of human imagination and industry (okay, let’s bracket God), yet they appear to us in alienated form as forces shaping our lives. It’s easy to find structure, anywhere we look, and in fact we find it even when we’re not looking or thinking about it. We know that we need higher education, that we need to make lots of money, that we need better cars and better homes and gardens and happy families. These aren’t choices we make; they’re just facts of life.

But considering how much structure seems to, well, structure our lives, do we really live in a world of structures? If so, why isn’t naturalist literature more popular? Let’s see a show of hands—how many of you have read Bahnwärter Thiel? Don’t read German? In this instance, consider yourself lucky. I think most people would rather sit down with one of Eric Meyer’s mysteries set in the Rome of the twelve emperors. And how many people, when they have their latest smackdown with Eros, think, “I feel a brain-stem controlled dopamine surge causing me to reenact a behavior pattern that evolution has made available to all humankind, giving us vital advantages for reproduction and, ultimately, for the survival of the species. I’m so lucky.” Okay, maybe it’s that way for you. But my best memory of my last experience of that kind had me thinking something like, “My God! I feel an exaltation of my self and a heightening of all my senses. This is special. No one in all human history has ever felt this. Poor losers—this had to wait for me!”

But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there is a normal variation between a sense of living in a world of contingency on the one hand, and a world of structures on the other. This possibility provoked me to an in-depth study of the problem this morning at the coffee shop. What I want to offer is an instrument that can determine where individuals fall in their orientation toward structure and contingency. This is about how you experience life. How do make decisions? How do you understand the world around you? How do you think about your self and your life?

Understand that you are in on the ground floor of this. This is a project under construction, but we might as well get started. I thought first that I could build a Likert scale, but had no idea how I would translate that into the blog. So, for each pair of contrasting qualitative statements below, imagine that there is a five point scale separating them. You, of course, would circle a one if you feel or think just like the first statement, a five if you feel or think just like the second, and another number if you have some intermediate response. Got it? Here goes.

Single shooter-----------------------------------------Grassy knoll

William James------------------------------------------John Calvin

Chandler, The Long Goodbye---------Dreiser, American Tragedy

“every man against every man” --------------------The Invisible Hand

Søren Kierkegaard-------------------------------------B. F. Skinner

Red Sox-------------------------------------------------Yankees

Okay, it’s a beginning. If you have some help for this instrument, put your comments into “Comments.” Once again, you have a chance to make a the world a better place through blogging.