next up previous contents
Next: III Up: HISTORICAL INEVITABILITY Previous: I   Contents

II

The notion that one can discover large patterns or regularities in the procession of historical events is naturally attractive to those who are impressed by the success of the natural sciences in classifying, correlating, and above all predicting. They consequently seek to extend historical knowledge to fill gaps in the past (and, at times, to build into the limitless gap of the future) by applying `scientific' method: by setting forth, armed with a metaphysical or empirical system, from such islands of certain, or virtually certain, knowledge of the facts as they claim to possess. And no doubt a great deal has been done, and will be done, in historical as in other fields by arguing from the known to the unknown, or from the little known to the even less known.2.2But whatever value the perception of patterns or uniformities may have in stimulating or verifying specific hypotheses about the past or the future, it has played, and is increasingly playing, another and more dubious role in determining the outlook of our time. It has affected not merely ways of observing and describing the activities and characters of human beings, but moral and political and religious attitudes towards them. For among the questions which are bound to arise in any consideration of how and why human beings act and live as they do, are questions of human motive and responsibility. In describing human behaviour it has always been artificial and over austere to omit questions of the character, purposes, and motives of individuals. And in considering these one automatically evaluates not. merely the degree and kind of influence of this. or that motive or character upon what happens, but also its moral or political quality in terms of whatever scale of values one consciously or semiconsciously accepts in one's thought or action. How did this or that situation arise? Who or what was or is (or will be, or could be) responsible for a war, a revolution, an economic collapse, a renaissance of arts and letters, a discovery or an invention or a spiritual transformation altering the lives of men? It is by now a familiar story that there exist personal and impersonal theories of history. On the one hand, theories according to which the lives of entire peoples and societies have been decisively influenced by exceptional individuals2.3--or, alternatively, doctrines according to which what happens occurs as a result not of the wishes and purposes of identifiable individuals, but of those of large numbers of unspecified persons, with the qualification that these collective wishes and goals are not solely or even largely determined by impersonal factors, and are therefore not wholly or even largely deducible from knowledge of natural forces alone, such as environment; or climate, or physical, physiological, and psychological processes. On either view, it becomes the business of historians to investigate who wanted what, and when, and where, in what way ; how many men avoided or pursued this or that goal, and with what intensity; and, further, to ask under what circumstances such wants or fears have proved effective, and to what extent; and with what consequences.

Against this kind of interpretation, in terms of the purposes and characters of individuals, there is a cluster of views (to which the progress of the natural sciences has given a great and growing prestige) according to which all explanations in terms of human intentions rest on a mixture of vanity and stubborn ignorance. These views rest on the assumption that belief in the importance of the motives is delusive; that the behaviour of men is in fact made what it is by causes largely beyond the control of individuals; for instance by the influence of physical factors or of environment or of custom; or by the `natural' growth of some larger unit--a race, a nation, a class, a biological species; or (according to some writers) by some entity conceived in even less empirical terms--a `spiritual organism', a religion, a civilization, a Hegelian (or Buddhist) World Spirit ; entities whose careers or manifestations on earth are the object either of empirical or of metaphysical inquiries depending on the cosmological outlook of particular thinkers. Those who incline to this kind of impersonal interpretation of historical change, whether because they believe that it possesses greater scientific value(i.e. enables them to predict the future or `retrodict' the past more successfully or precisely), or because they-- believe that it embodies some -- crucial insight into the nature of the universe, are committed by it to tracing the ultimate responsibility for what happens to the acts or behaviour of impersonal or `transpersonal' or `superpersonal' entities or `forces' whose evolution is identified with human history. It is true that the more cautious and clear headed among such theorists try to meet the objections of empirically minded critics by adding in a footnote, or as an after thought, that, whatever their terminology, they are on no account to be taken to believe that there literally exist such creatures as civilizations or races or spirits of nations living side by side with the individuals who compose them; and they add that they fully realize that all institutions `in the last analysis' consist of individual. men and women, and are not themselves personalities but only convenient devices--idealized models, or types, or labels, or metaphors--different ways of classifying, grouping, explaining, or predicting the properties or behaviour of individual human beings in terms of their more `important (i.e. historically effective) empirical characteristics. Nevertheless these protestations too often turn out to be mere lip-service to principles which those who profess them do not really believe. Such writers seldom write or think as if they took these deflationary caveats over seriously; and the more candid or naive among them do not even pretend to subscribe to them. Thus nations or cultures or civilizations for Schelling or Hegel (and Spengler; and one is inclined, though somewhat hesitantly, to add Professor Arnold Toynbee) are certainly not merely convenient collective terms for individuals possessing certain characteristics in common; but seem more `real' and more `concrete' than, the individuals who compose them. Individuals remain `abstract' precisely because they. are mere `elements' or `aspects', `moments' artificially abstracted for ad hoc purposes, and literally without reality (or, at any rate, `historical' or `philosophical' or `real' being) apart from the wholes of which they form a.part, much as the colour of a thing, or its shape, or its value are `elements' or `attributes' or `modes' or `aspects' of concrete objects--isolated for convenience, and thought of as existing. independently, on their own, only because of some weakness or confusion in the analysing intellect. Marx and Marxists are more ambiguous. We cannot be quite sure what to make of such a category as a social `class', whose emergence and struggles, victories and defeats, condition the lives of individuals, some times against, and most often independently of, such individuals'. conscious or expressed purposes. Classes are never proclaimed to be literally independent entities: they are constituted by individuals in their interaction (mainly economic). Yet to seek to explain, or put a moral or political value on the actions of individuals by examining such individuals one by one, even to the limited extent to which such examination is possible, is considered by Marxists' to be not merely impracticable and time wasting (as indeed it may be), but absurd in a more fundamental sense--because the `true' (or `deeper') causes of' human behaviour lie not' in the specific circumstances of an individual life or in the individual's .thoughts or volitions (as a psychologist or `biographer `or novelist might describe them) but in a pervasive `interrelationship between a vast variety of such lives with their natural and manmade environment. Men do as they do, and think as they think; largely as a `function of' the inevitable evolution of the `class' as a whole--from which it follows that the history and development of classes can be studied independently of the biographies of their component individuals. It is the `structure' and the `evolution' of the class alone that (causally) matters in the end. This is, mutatis mutandis, similar to the belief in the primacy of collective patterns taken by those who attribute active properties to race or culture, whether they be benevolent internationalists like Herder who thought that different peoples can and should admire, love, and assist one another as individuals can and do, because peoples are in some sense individuals (or super individuals); or by the ferocious champions of national or racial self-assertion and war, like Gobineau or Houston Stewart Chamberlain or Hitler And the same note, sometimes mild and civilized, sometimes harshly aggressive, is heard in the voices of all those upholders of collectivist mystiques who appeal from individual to tradition, or to the collective consciousness (or `Un conscious') of a race or a nation or a culture, or, like Carlyle, feel that abstract nouns deserve capital letters, and tell us that Tradition or History (or `the past', `or the species, `or `the masses') is wiser than we, or that the great society of the quick and the dead, of our ancestors and of generations yet unborn, has larger purposes than any single creature, purposes of which our lives are but a puny fragment, and that we belong to this larger unity with the `deepest' and perhaps least conscious parts of ourselves.2.4There are many versions of this belief, with varying proportions of empiricism and mysticism, `tender' and `tough' mindedness, optimism and pessimism, collectivism and individualism; but what all such views have in common is the fundamental distinction on which they rest between, on the one hand, `real' and `objective', and, on the other, `subjective' or `arbitrary' judgments, based respectively on acceptance or rejection of this ultimately mystical act of self-identification with a reality which transcends empirical experience.

For Bossuet, for Hegel, for Marx, 2.5 for Spengler(and for almost all thinkers for whom history is `more' than past events, namely a theodicy) this reality takes on the form of an objective `march of history'. The process may be thought of as being in time and space or beyond them; as being cyclical or spiral or rectilinear, or as occurring in the form of a peculiar zigzag movement, some times called dialectical; as continuous and uniform, or irregular, broken by sudden leaps to `new levels'; as due to the changing forms of one single `force', or of conflicting elements locked (as in some ancient myth) in an eternal Pyrrhic struggle; as the history of one deity or `force' or `principle', or of several; as being destined to end well or badly; as holding out to human beings the prospect of eternal beatitude, or eternal damnation, or of both in turn, or of neither. But whatever version of the story is accepted--and it is never a scientific; that is, empirically testable theory, stated in quantitative terms, still less a description of what our eyes see and our ears hear2.6--the moral of it is always one and the same: that we must learn to distinguish the `real' course of things from the dreams and fancies and `rationalizations' which we construct unconsciously for our solace or amusement; for these may comfort us for a while, but will betray us cruelly in the end. There is, we are told, a nature of things and it has a pattern in time: `things are what they are' said a sober English philosopher over two centuries ago `and their consequences will be what they will be; why then should we seek to be deceived ? `What, then, must we do to avoid deception? At the very least-- if we cannot swallow the notion of superpersonal `spirits' or `forces'--we must admit that all events occur in' discoverable, uniform, unaltering patterns; for if some did not, how could we find the laws of such occurrences? And without universal order-- a system of true laws--how could history be `intelligible'? how could it `make sense', `have meaning', be more than a picaresque account of a succession of random episodes, a mere collection (as Descartes, for this very reason, seems to have thought) of old wives' tales? Our values--what we think good and bad, important and trivial, right and wrong, noble and contemptible--all these are conditioned by the place we occupy in the pattern, on the moving stair.We praise and blame, worship and condemn what ever fits or does not fit the interests and needs and ideals that we seek to satisfy--the ends that (being made as we are) we cannot help pursuing--according to our lights, that is, our own perception of our condition, our place in `Nature'. Such attitudes are held to be `rational' and `objective' to the degree to which we perceive this condition accurately, that is, understand where we are in terms of the great world plan, the movement whose regularities we discern as well as our historical sense and knowledge permit. To each condition and generation its own perspectives of the past and future, depending upon where it has arrived, what it has left behind, and whither it is moving; its values depend on this same awareness. To condemn the Greeks or the Romans or the Assyrians or the Aztecs for this or that folly or vice may be no more than to say that what they did or wished or thought conflicts with our own view of life, which may be the true or `objective' view for the stage which we have reached, and which is perceived less or more clearly according to the depth and accuracy of our understanding of what this stage is, and of the manner in which it is developing. If the Romans and the Aztecs judged differently from us, they may have judged no less well and truly and `objectively' to the degree to which they understood their own condition and their own very different stage of development. For us to condemn their scale of values is valid enough for our condition, which is the sole frame of reference we have. And if they had known us they might have condemned us as harshly and, because their circumstances and values were what they inevitably were, with equal validity. According to this view there is nothing, no point of rest outside the general movement, where we or they can take up a stand, no static absolute standards in terms of which things and persons can be finally evaluated. Hence the only attitudes correctly described, and rightly condemned, as relative, subjective, and irrational are forms of failure to relate our judgment to our own truest interests that is, to what will fulfil our natures most fully--to all that the next step in our inevitable development necessarily holds in store. Some thinkers of this school view subjective aberrations with compassion and condone them as temporary attitudes from which the enlightenment of the future will henceforward preserve mankind Others gloat exultantly or ironically over the inevitable doom of those who misinterpret, and therefore fall foul of, the inexorable march of events. But whether the tone is charitable or sardonic, whether one condemns the errors of foolish individuals or the blind mob, or applauds their inevitable annihilation, this attitude rests on the belief that everything is caused to occur as it do by th machinery of history itself-- by the impersonal forces of class, race, culture, History, Reason, The Life Force, Progress, The Spirit of the Age. Given this organization of our lives, which we did not create, and cannot alter, it, and it alone, is ultimately responsible for everything. To blame or praise individuals or groups of individuals for acting rightly or wrongly, so far as this entails a suggestion that they are in some sense genuinely free to choose between alternatives, and may therefore be justly and reasonably blamed or praised for choosing as they did and do, is a vast blunder, a return to some primitive or naive conception of human beings as being able somehow to evade total determination of their lives by forces natural or supernatural, a relapse into a childish animism which the study of the relevant scientific or metaphysical system should swiftly dispel. For if such choices were real, the determined world structure which alone, on this view, makes complete explanation, whether scientific or metaphysical, possible, could not exist. And this is ruled out as unthinkable, `reason rejects it', it is confused, delusive, superficial, a piece of puerile megalomania, prescientific, unworthy of civilized men.

The notion that history obeys laws, whether natural or supernatural, that every event of human life is an element in a necessary pattern, has deep metaphysical origins: infatuation with the natural sciences feeds this stream, but is not its sole nor, indeed, its principal source. In the first place, there is the teleological outlook whose roots, reach back to the beginnings of human thought. It occurs in many versions, but what is common to them all is the belief that men, and all living creatures and perhaps inanimate things as well, not merely are as they are, but have functions and pursue purposes. These purposes are either imposed upon them by a creator who has made every person and thing to serve each a specific goal; or else these purposes are not, indeed, imposed by a creator but are, as it were, internal their possessors, so that every entity has a `nature' and pursues a specific goal which is `natural' to it, and the measure of its perfection consists in the degree to which it fulfils it. Evil, vice, imperfection, all the various forms of chaos and error, are, on this view, forms of frustration, impeded efforts to reach such goals, failures due either to misfortune which puts obstacles in the path of self-fulfilment, or to mis-directed effort to fulfil some goal not `natural' to the entity in question.

In this cosmology the world of men (and, in some versions; the entire universe) is a single all inclusive hierarchy; so that to explain why each ingredient of it is as; and where, and when it is, and does what it does, is eo ipso to say what its goal is, how far it successfully fulfils it, and what are the relations of coordination and subordination between the goals of the various goal pursuing entities in the harmonious pyramid which they collectively form. If this is a true picture of reality, then, historical explanation, like every other form of explanation, must consist, above all, in the attribution to' individuals, groups, nations, species, of their proper place in the universal pattern. To know the `cosmic' place of a thing or a person is to say what it is and does, and at the same time why it should be and do as it is and does. Hence to be and to have value, to exist and to have a function (and to fulfil it less or more successfully) are one and the same. The pattern, and it alone, brings into being, and causes to pass away, and confers purpose, that is to say, value and meaning, on all there is. To understand is to perceive patterns. To offer historical explanations is not. merely to describe a succession of events, but to make it intelligible; to make intelligible is to reveal the basic pattern; not one of several possible patterns, but the one unique plan which, by being as it is, fulfils only one particular. purpose, and consequently is revealed as fitting in a specifiable fashion within the single `cosmic' overall schema which is the goal of the universe, the goal in virtue of which alone it is a universe, at all, and not a chaos of unrelated bits and pieces. The more thoroughly the nature of this purpose is understood, and with it the patterns it entails in the various forms of human activity, the more explanatory or illuminating--the `deeper'-- the activity of the historian will be. Unless an event, or the character of an individual, or the activity of this or that institution or group or historical personage, is explained as a necessary consequence of its place in the pattern (and the larger, that is, the. more comprehensive the schema, the more likely it is. to be. the true one), no explanation--and therefore no historical account--is being provided. The more inevitable an event or an action or a character can be exhibited as being, the better it has been understood, the profounder the researcher's insight, the nearer we are to the one embracing, ultimate truth.

This attitude is profoundly anti-empirical. We attribute purposes to all things and persons not because we have evidence for this hypothesis; for if there were a question of evidence for it, there could in principle be evidence against it; and then some things and events might turn out to have no purpose and there fore, in the sense used above, be incapable of being fitted into the pattern, that is, of being explained at all; but this cannot be, and is rejected in advance, a priori. We are plainly dealing not with an empirical theory but with a metaphysical attitude which takes for granted that to explain a thing--to describe it as it `truly' is--even to define it more than verbally, that is, superficially-- is to discover its purpose. Everything is in principle explicable, for everything has a purpose, although our minds may be too feeble or too distraught to discover in any given case what this purpose is. On such a view to say of things or persons that they exist is to say that they pursue goals; to say that they exist or are real, yet literally lack a purpose, whether imposed from outside or `inherent' or `innate', is to say something not false, literally self-contradictory and therefore meaningless. Teleology is not a theory, or a hypothesis, but a category or a framework in terms of which everything is, or should be, conceived and described. The influence of this attitude on the writing of history from the epic of Gilgamesh to those enjoyable games of patience which Professor Arnold Toynbee plays with the past and future of mankind--and plays with exhilarating skill and imagination--is too familiar to need emphasis. It enters, however unconsciously, into the thought and language of those who speak of the `rise' and `fall' of states or. movements or classes or individuals as if they obeyed some irresistible rhythm, arising or falling wave of some. cosmic river, an ebb or tide in human affairs, subject to natural or supernatural laws; as if discoverable regularities had been imposed on individuals or `super-individuals' by a Manifest Destiny, as if the notion of life as a play were more than a vivid metaphor.2.7 To those who use this figure history is a piece--or succession of pieces--comical or tragical, a libretto whose heroes and villains, winners and losers, speak their lines and suffer their fate in accordance with the text conceived in terms of them but not by them; for otherwise nothing could be rightly conceived as tragical or comical; no pattern--no rules--no explanation. Historians, journalists, ordinary men speak in these terms; they have become part and parcel of ordinary speech. Yet to take such metaphors and turns of phrase literally; to believe that such patterns are not invented but intuitively discovered or discerned, that they are not only some among many possible tunes which the same sounds can be made to yield to the musical ear, but are in some sense unique; to think that there exists the pattern, the basic rhythm of history--something which both creates and justifies all that there is--that is to take the game too seriously, to see in it a key to reality. Certainly it is to commit oneself to the view that the notion of individual responsibility is, `in the end', an illusion. No effort, however ingenious, to reinterpret that much tormented expression will, within a teleological system, restore its normal meaning to the notion of free choice. The puppets may be conscious and identify themselves happily with the inevitable process in which they play their parts; but it remains inevitable, and they remain marionettes.

Teleology is not, of course, the only metaphysics of history; side by side with it there has persisted a distinction of appearance and reality even more celebrated but of a somewhat different kind. For the teleological thinker all apparent disorder, inexplicable disaster, gratuitous suffering, unintelligible concatenations of random events, are due not to the nature of things but to our failure to discover their purpose. Everything that seems useless, discordant, mean, ugly, vicious, distorted, is needed, if we but knew it, for the harmony of the whole which only the Creator of the world, or the world itself (if it could become wholly aware of itself and its goals), can know. Total failure is excluded a priori, for at a `deeper' level all processes will always be seen to culminate in success; and since there must always exist a level `deeper' than that of any given insight, there is in principle no empirical test of what constitutes `ultimate' success, or failure. Teleology is a form of faith capable of neither confirmation nor refutation by any kind of experience; the notions of evidence, proof, probability, and so on, are wholly inapplicable to it.

But there is a second, no less time honoured view according to which it is not goals, less or more dimly discerned, which explain and justify whatever happens, but a timeless, permanent, transcendent reality, `above', or `outside', or `beyond'; which is as it is for ever, in perfect, inevitable, self-explaining harmony. Each element of it is necessitated to be what it is by its relations to the other elements and to the whole. If the world does not appear to manifest this, if we do not see actual events and persons as connected with each other by those relations of logical necessity which would make it inconceivable that anything could be other than it is, that is due solely to the failure of our own vision. We are blinded by ignorance, stupidity, passion, and the task of explanation in science or in history is the attempt to show the chaos of appearances as an imperfect reflection of the perfect order of reality, so that once more everything falls into its proper place. Explanation is the discovery of the `underlying' pattern. The ideal is now not a distant prospect beckoning all things and persons towards self-realization, but a self-consistent, eternal, ultimate `structure of reality', compresent `timelessly', as it were, with the confused world of the senses which it casts as a distorted image or a feeble shadow, and of which it is at once the origin, the cause, the explanation, and the justification. The relation of this reality to the world of appearances forms the subject matter of all the departments of true philosophy--of ethics, aesthetics, logic, of the philosophy of history and of law and of politics, according to the `aspect' of the basic relation that is selected for attention. But under all its various names--form and matter, the one and the many, ends and means, subject and object, order and chaos, change and rest, the perfect and the imperfect, the natural and the artificial, nature and mind--the central issue, that of Reality and Appearance, remains one and the same. To understand truly is to understand it and it alone. It plays the part which the notion of function and purpose plays in teleology. It alone at once explains and justifies.

Finally there is the influence of the natural sciences. At first this seems a paradox: scientific methods surely the very negation of metaphysical speculation But historically the one is closely interwoven with the other, and, in the field of which I speak, shows important affinities with it, namely, the notion that all that exists is necessarily an object in material nature, and therefore susceptible to explanation by scientific laws. If Newton was able in principle to explain every movement of every particular constituent of physical nature in terms of a small number of laws of great generality, is it not reasonable to suppose that psychological events, which constitute the conscious and unconscious lives of individuals, as well as social facts--the internal relationships and activities and `experiences' of societies--could be explained by the use of similar methods? It is true that we seem to know a good deal less about the subject-matter of psychology and sociology than about the facts dealt with by physics or chemistry; but is there any objection in principle to the view that a sufficiently scrupulous and imaginative investigation of human beings might, one day, reveal laws capable of yielding predictions as powerful and as precise as those which are now possible in the natural sciences? If psychology and sociology ever attain to their proper stature--and why should they not?--we have laws enabling' us, at least in theory (for it might still difficult in practice), to predict (or reconstruct) every detail in the lives of every single human being in the future, present, and past. If this is (as surely it is) the theoretical ideal of such sciences as psychology, sociology, and anthropology, historical explanations will, if they are successful, simply consist in the application o the laws--the established hypotheses--of these sciences to specific individual situations. There will perhaps be `pure' psychology, sociology, history, i.e. the principles themselves and there will be their `application': there will come into being social mathematics, social physics, social engineering, the `physiology' of every feeling and attitude and inclination, as precise and powerful and useful as their originals in the natural sciences. And indeed this is the very phraseology and the ideal of eighteenth-century rationalists like d'Holbach and d'Alembert and Condorcet. The metaphysicians are victims of a delusion; nothing in nature is transcendent, nothing purposive; everything is measurable; the day will dawn when, in answer to all the painful problems now besetting us, we shall be able to say with Condorcet, `Calculemus', and return the answers clearly, exactly, and conclusively.

What all these concepts--metaphysical and scientific alike-- have in common (despite their even vaster differences) is the notion that to explain is to subsume under general formulae, to represent as examples of laws which cover an infinite number of instances; so that with knowledge of all the relevant laws, and of a sufficient range of relevant facts, it will be possible to tell not merely what happens, but also why; for, if the laws have been correctly established, to describe something is; in effect, to assert that it cannot happen otherwise. The question `why?' for teleologists means `in pursuit of what unalterable goal?'; for the nonteleological metaphysical `realists' it means `determined unalterably by what ultimate pattern?'; and for the upholders of the Comtean ideals of social statics and dynamics it means `resulting from what causes --actual causes which are as they are, whether they might have been otherwise or not. The inevitability of historical processes, of trends, of `rises' and `falls', is merely de facto for those who believe that the universe obeys only `natural laws' which make it what it is; it is de jure as well--the justification as well as the explanation--for those who see such uniformity as not merely something given, brute fact, something unchangeable and unquestionable, but as patterns, plans, purposes, ideals, as thoughts in the mind of a rational Deity or Universal Reason, as goals, as aesthetic, self-fulfilling wholes, as metaphysical rationales, theological otherworldly justifications, as theodicies, which satisfy the craving to know not merely why the world exists, but why it is worthy of existence; and why it is this particular world that exists, rather than some other, or no world at all; the solution being provided in terms of values which are either somehow `embedded' in the facts themselves or `determine' them from some `transcendent' height or depth. All these theories are, in one sense or another, forms of determinism, whether they be teleological, metaphysical, mechanistic, religious, aesthetic, or scientific. And one common characteristic of all such outlooks is the implication that the individual's freedom of choice (at any rate here, below) is ultimately an illusion, that the notion that human beings could have chosen otherwise than they did usually rests upon ignorance of facts; with the consequence that any assertion that they should have, acted thus or thus, might have avoided this or that, and deserve (and not merely elicit or respond to) praise or blame, approval or condemnation, rests upon the presupposition that some area, at any rate, of their lives is not totally determined by laws, ; whether metaphysical or theological or expressing the generalized probabilities of the sciences. And this assumption, it is then maintained, is patently false. The advance of knowledge constantly brings new areas of experience under the sway of laws which make systematic inference and prediction possible. Hence we can, if we seek to. be rational, praise and condemn, warn and encourage, advocate justice or self-interest, forgive, condone, make resolutions, issue orders, feel justified remorse, only to the degree to which we remain ignorant of the true nature of the world. The more we know, the farther the area of human freedom, and consequently of responsibility, is narrowed. For the omniscient being, who sees why nothing can be otherwise than as it is, the notions of responsibility or guilt, of right and wrong, are necessarily empty; they are a mere measure of ignorance; of adolescent illusion; and the perception of this is the first sign of moral and intellectual maturity.

This doctrine has taken several forms. There are those who believe that moral judgments are groundless because we know too much, and there are those who believe that they are unjustified because we know too little. And again, among the former there are those whose determinism is optimistic and benevolent, and those whose determinism is pessimistic, or else confident of a happy ending yet at the same time indignantly or sardonically malevolent. Some look to history for salvation; others for justice; for vengeance; for annihilation. Among the optimistic are the confident rationalists, in particular the heralds and prophets (from Bacon to modern social theorists) of the natural sciences and of material progress, who maintain that vice and suffering are in the end always the product of ignorance. The foundation of their faith is the conviction that it is possible to find out what all men at all times truly want; and also what they can do and what is for ever beyond their power; and, in the light of this, to invent, discover, and adapt means to realizable ends. Weakness and misery, folly and vice, moral and intellectual defects are due to maladjustment. To understand the nature of things is (at the very least) to know what you (and others who, if they are human, will be like you) truly want, and how to get it. All that is bad is due to ignorance of ends or of means; to attain to knowledge of both is the purpose and function of the sciences. The sciences will advance; true ends as well as efficient means will be discovered knowledge will increase, men will know more, and therefore be wiser and better and happier. Condorcet, whose Esquisse is the simplest and most moving statement of this belief, has no doubt that happiness, scientific knowledge, virtue, and liberty are bound as `by an indissoluble chain', while stupidity, vice, injustice, and unhappiness are forms of a disease which the advance of science will eliminate forever; for we are made what we are by natural causes; and when we understand them, this alone will suffice to bring us into harmony with `Nature'. Praise and blame are functions of ignorance; we are what we are, like stones and trees, like bees and beavers, and if it is irrational to blame or demand justice from things or animals, climates or soils or wild beasts when they cause us pain, it is no less irrational to blame the no less determined characters or acts of men. We can regret-- and deplore and expose--the depth of human cruelty, injustice, and stupidity, and comfort ourselves with the certainty that with the rapid progress of our new empirical knowledge this will soon pass away like an evil dream; for progress and education, if not inevitable, are at any rate highly probable. The belief in the possibility (or probability) of happiness as the product of rational organization unites all the benevolent sages of modern times, from the metaphysicians of the Italian Renaissance to the evolutionary thinkers. of the German Aufklárung, from the radicals and utilitarians of prerevolutionary France to the science-worshipping visionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is the heart of all the utopias from Bacon and Campanella, to Lessing and Condorcet, Saint-Simon and Cabet, Fourier and Owen, culminating in the bureaucratic fantasies of Auguste Comte, with his fanatically tidy world of human beings joyfully engaged in fulfilling their functions, each within his own rigorously defined province, in the rationally ordered, totally unalterable hierarchy of the perfect society. These are the benevolent humanitarian prophets--our own age has known not a few of them, from Jules Verne and H. G. Wells and Anatole France and Bernard Shaw to their unnumbered American disciples--generously disposed towards all mankind, genuinely seeking to rescue every living being from its burden of ignorance, sorrow, poverty, and humiliating dependence on others.

The other variant of this attitude is a good deal less amiable in tone and in feeling. When Hegel, and after him Marx, describe historical processes, they too assume that human beings and their societies are part and parcel of a wider nature, which Hegel regards as spiritual, and Marx as material, in character. Great social forces are at work of which only the acutest and most gifted individuals are ever aware; the ordinary run of men are blind in varying degrees to that which truly shapes their lives, worship fetishes and invent childish mythologies, which they dignify with the title of views or theories in order to explain the world in which they live. From time to time the real forces--impersonal and irresistible--which truly govern the world develop to a point where a new historical advance is `due'. Then (as both Hegel and Marx notoriously believed) the crucial moments of advance are reached; these take the form of violent, cataclysmic leaps, : destructive revolutions which, often with fire and sword, establish a new order upon the ruins of the old. Inevitably, the foolish, obsolete, purblind, homemade philosophies of the denizens of the old establishment are knocked over and swept away together with their possessors. For Hegel, and for a good many others, though by no means all, among the philosophers and poets of the Romantic movement, history is a perpetual struggle of vast spiritual forces embodied now in institutions--churches, races, civilizations, empires, national states--now in individuals of more than human stature-- `world historical figures'--of bold and ruthless genius, towering over, and contemptuous of, their puny contemporaries. For Marx, the struggle is a fight between social1y conditioned, organized groups--classes shaped by the struggle for subsistence and survival and consequently for the control of power. There is a sardonic note (inaudible only to their most benevolent and single hearted followers) in the words of both these thinkers as they contemplate the discomfiture and destruction of the philistines, the ordinary men and women caught in one of the decisive moments of history. Both Hegel and Marx conjure up an image of peaceful and foolish human beings, largely unaware of the part they play in history, building their homes, with touching hope and simplicity, upon the green slopes of what seems to them a peaceful mountain side, trusting in the permanence of their particular way of life, their own economic, social, and political order, treating their own values as if they were eternal standards, living, working, fighting without any awareness of the cosmic processes of which their lives are but a passing stage. But the mountain is no ordinary mountain; it is a volcano ; and when(as the philosopher always knew that it would) the inevitable eruption comes, their homes and their elaborately tended institutions and their ideals and their ways of life and values will be blown out of existence in the cataclysm which marks the leap from the `lower' to a `higher' stage. When this points is reached, the two great prophets of destructionare in their element; they enter into their inheritance ; they survey the conflagration with a defiant, almost Byronic, irony and disdain. To be wise is to understand the direction in which the world is inexorgbly moving, to identify oneself with the rising power which ushers in the new world. Marx--and it is part of his attraction to those of a similar emotional cast--identifies himself exultantly, in his way no less passionately than Nietzsche or Bakunin, with the great force which in its very destructiveness is creative, and is greeted with bewilderment and horror only by those whose values are hopelessly subjective, who listen to their consciences, their feelings, or to what their nurses or teachers tell them, without realizing the glories of life in a world which moves from explosion to explosion to fulfil the great cosmic design. When history takes her revenge--and every enragé prophet in the nineteenth century looks to her to avenge him against those he hates most--the mean, pathetic, ludicrous, stifling human anthills will be justly pulverized; justly, because what is just and unjust, good and bad, is determined by the goal towards which all creation is tending. Whatever is on the side of victorious reason is just and wise; whatever is on the other' side, on the side of the world that is doomed to destruction by the working of the forces of reason, is rightly called foolish, ignorant, subjective, arbitrary, blind; and, if it goes so far as to try to resist the forces that are destined to supplant it, then it--that is to say, the fools and knaves and mediocrities who constitute it--is rightly called retrograde, wicked, obscurantist, perversely hostile to the deepest interests of mankind.

Different though the tone of these forms of determinism may be--whether scientific, humanitarian, and optimistic, or furious, apocalyptic, and exultant--they agree in this: that the world has a direction and is governed by laws, and that the direction and the laws can in some degree be discovered by employing the proper techniques of investigation: and moreover that the working of these laws can only be grasped by those who realize that the lives, characters, and acts of individuals, both mental and physical, are governed by the larger `wholes' to which they belong, and that it is the independent evolution of these `wholes' that constitutes the so called `forces' in terms of whose direction truly `scientific' (or `philosophic') history must be formulated. To find the explanation of why given individuals, or groups of them; act or think or feel in one way rather than another, one must first seek to understand the structure, the state of development and the direction of such `wholes', as for example, the social, economic, political, religious institutions to which such individuals belong, once that is known, the behaviour of the individuals (or the most characteristic among them) should become almost logically deducible, and does not constitute a separate problem. Ideas about the identity of these large entities or forces, and. their functions, differ from theorist to theorist. Race, colour, church, nation, class; climate, irrigation, technology, geopolitical situation; civilization, social structure, . the Human Spirit, the Collective Unconscious, to take some of these concepts at random, have all played their parts in theologico-historical systems as the protagonists upon the stage of history. They are represented as the real forces of which individuals are ingredients, at once constitutive, and the most articulate expressions, of this or that phase of them. Those who are more clearly and deeply aware than others of the part which they play, whether willingly or not, to that degree play it more boldly and effectively.; these are the natural leaders. Others, led by their own petty personal concerns into ignoring or forgetting that they are parts of a continuous, or convulsive pattern of change; are deluded into assuming that (or, at any rate, into acting as if) they and their fellows are stabilized at some fixed level for ever.

What the variants of either of these attitudes entail, like all forms of genuine determinism, is the elimination of the notion of individual responsibility. It is, after all, natural enough for men, whether for practical reasons or because they are given to. reflection, to ask who or what is responsible for this or that state of affairs which they view with satisfaction or anxiety, enthusiasm or horror. If the history of the world is due to the operation of identifiable forces other than, and little affected by, free human wills and free choices (whether these occur or not), then the proper explanation of what happens must be given in terms of the evolution of such forces. And there is then a tendency to say that not individuals, but these larger entities, are ultimately `responsible'. I live at a particular moment of time in the spiritual and social and economic circumstances into which I have been cast: how then can I help choosing and acting as I do? The values in terms of which I conduct my life are the values of my class, or race, or church, or civilization, or are part and parcel of my `station'--my position in the `social structure'. Nobody denies that it would be stupid as well as cruel to blame me for not being taller than I am, or to regard the colour of my hair or the qualities of my intellect or heart as being due principally to my own free choice; these attributes are as they are through no decision of mine. If I extend this category without limit, then whatever is, is necessary and inevitable. This unlimited extension of necessity, on any of the views described above, becomes intrinsic to the explanation of everything. To blame and praise, consider possible alternative courses of action, accuse or defend historical figures for acting as they do or did, becomes an absurd activity. Admiration and contempt for this or that individual may indeed continue, but it becomes akin to aesthetic judgment. We can eulogize or denounce, feel love or hatred, satisfaction and shame, but we can neither blame nor justify. Alexander, Caesar, Attila, Mohammed, Cromwell, Hitler are like floods and earthquakes, sunsets, oceans, mountains; we may admire or fear them, welcome or curse them, but to denounce or extol their acts is (ultimately) as sensible as addressing sermons to a tree (as Frederick the Great pointed out with his customary pungency in the course of his attack on d'Holbach's System of Nature).2.8

To assess degrees of their responsibility, to attribute this or that consequence to their free decision, to set them up as examples or deterrents, to seek to derive lessons from their lives, becomes senseless. We can feel ashamed of our acts or of our states of mind, or of theirs, as a hunchback may be ashamed of his hump; but we cannot feel remorse: for that entails the belief that we not only could have acted otherwise, but also could have freely chosen to do so. These men were what they were; and so are we. They acted as they acted; and so do we. Their behaviour can be explained in terms of whatever fundamental category is to be used, whereby history is reducible to a natural science or a metaphysical or theological schema. So much we can do for them and, to a more limited degree, for ourselves and our contemporaries. This is all that can be done.

Yet we are adjured, oddly enough, by tough-minded determinists in the very name of the scientific status of the subject, to avoid bias; regular appeals are made to historians to refrain from sitting in judgment, to remain objective, not to read the values of the present into the past, or of the West into the East; not to admire or condemn ancient Romans for being like or unlike modern Americans; not to denounce the Middle Ages because they failed to practise toleration as it was conceived by Voltaire, nor applaud the Gracchi because we are shocked by the social injustices of our time, or criticize Cicero because of our own experience of lawyers in politics. What are we to make of such exhortations, or of the perpetual pleas to use our imagination or our powers of sympathy or of understanding in order to avoid the injustice that springs from an insufficient grasp of the aims and codes and customs of cultures distant from us in time or space? What meaning has this, save on the assumption that to give moral praise and blame, to seek to be just, is not totally irrational, that human beings deserve justice as stocks or stones do not, and that therefore we must seek to be fair, and not praise and blame arbitrarily, or mistakenly, through ignorance, or prejudice, or lack of imagination? Yet once we transfer responsibility for what happens from the backs of individuals to the causal or teleological operation of institutions or cultures or psychical or physical factors, what can be meant by calling upon our sympathy or sense of history, or sighing after the ideal of total impartiality, which may not indeed be fully attainable, but to which some come nearer than others? Few are accused of biased accounts of geological changes or lack of intuitive sympathy in describing the effect of the Italian climate upon the agriculture of ancient Rome. To this it may be answered that even if history, like natural science, is satisfaction of curiosity about unalterable processes--merely disfigured by the intrusion of moral judgments--we shall attain a less adequate grasp of even the bare facts unless we have some degree of imaginative insight into ways of life alien, or little known to us. This is doubtless true; but it does not penetrate to heart of the objection brought against historians who are accused of prejudice or of colouring their accounts too strongly. It may be (and has doubtless often been said) that Gibbon or Macaulay or Treitschke or the late Mr. Belloc fail to reproduce facts as we suspect them to have been. To say this is, of course, to accuse the writers of serious inadequacy as historians; but that is not the main gravamen of the charge. It is rather that they are some sense not merely inaccurate or superficial or incomplete, but that they are unjust; that they are seeking to secure our approval for one side, and, in order to achieve this, unfairly denigrate the other; that in dealing with one side they cite evidence and use methods of inference or presentation which, for no good reason, they deny to the other; and that their motive for doing this derives from their conviction of how men should be, and what they should do; and sometimes also that these convictions spring from views which (judged in terms of the ordinary standards and scales of value which prevail in the societies to which they and we belong) are too narrow; or irrational or inapplicable to the historical period in question; and that because of this they have suppressed or distorted the true facts, as true facts are conceived by the educated society of their, or our, time; We complain, that is to say, not merely of suppression or distortion, but of propagandist aims to which we think this may be due; and to speak of propaganda at all, let alone assume that it can be dangerously effective, is to imply that the notion of injustice is not inoperative, that marks for conduct are, and can properly be, awarded; it is in effect to say that I must either seek not praise or blame at all, or, if I cannot avoid doing so because I am a human being and my views are inevitably shot through with moral assessments, I should seek to do so justly, with detachment, on the evidence, not blaming men for failing to do the impossible, and not praising them for it either. And this, in its turn, entails belief in individual responsibility--at any rate some degree of it. How great a degree--how wide the realm of possibility--of alternatives freely choosable--will depend on one's reading of nature and history; but it will never be nothing at all. And yet it is this, it seems to me, that is virtually denied by those historians and sociologists, steeped in metaphysical or scientific determinism, who think it right to say that in (what they are fond of calling) `the last analysis' everything--or so much of it as makes no difference--boils down to the effects of class, or race, or civilization, or social structure. Such thinkers seem to me committed to the belief that although we may. not be able to plot the exact curve of each individual life with the data at our disposal and the laws we claim to have discovered, yet, in principle, if we were omniscient, we could do so; and that consequently even that minimum residue of value judgment which no amount of conscious self-discipline and self-effacement can wholly eliminate, which colours and is a part of our very choice of historical material, of our emphasis, however tentative, upon some events and persons as being more important or interesting or unusual than others, must be either the result of our own `ineluctable' conditioning, or else the fruit of our own incurable vanity and ignorance; and in either case remains in practice unavoidable--the price of our human status, part of the imperfection of man; and must be accepted only because it literally cannot be rejected, because men and their outlooks are what they are, and men judge as they do; because they are finite, and forget, or cannot face, the fact that they are so. This stern conclusion is not, of course, actually accepted by any working historian, or any human being in his non-theoretical moments; even though, paradoxically enough, the arguments by which we are led to such untenable conclusions, by stressing how much narrower is the area of human freedom, and therefore of responsibility, than it was believed to be during the ages of scientific ignorance, have taught many admirable lessons in restraint and humility. But to maintain that; since men are `determined', history, by which I mean the activity of historians, cannot, strictly speaking, ever be just or unjust but only true or false, wise or stupid, is to expound a noble fallacy, and one that can seldom, if ever, have been acted upon. For its theoretical acceptance, however half-hearted, has led to the drawing of exceedingly civilized consequences, and checked much traditional cruelty and injustice.


next up previous contents
Next: III Up: HISTORICAL INEVITABILITY Previous: I   Contents
Administrator 2001-02-25