Those who are to conduct a war cannot in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges, whether a war ought to be commenced, continued, or concluded. They are barred from the latter functions by a great principle in free government, analogous to that which separates the sword from the purse, or the power of executing from the power of enacting laws.
James Madison, “Helvidius No. 1,” Philadelphia Gazette, August 31, 1793.
The author of the best-selling and prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse wrote this piece earlier in his career about the worst mistake human beings have made: settling down into societies and pursuing agriculture. As Diamond’s works tend to do, this piece makes you think.
This past weekend, I was out watching Big Shot, a Billy Joel tribute band, play. They came to one of the classic Billy Joel songs, “We didn’t start the fire…” Listening in the crowded club while drinking a jack and coke, I thought to myself – “This makes me want to write a blog entry. This song is a profound statement about politics. This is about what those on the far left and far right have in common, and about a fundamentally conservative (meaning in this case cautious) view of the world, America’s place in it, and of foreign policy. This is beyond Kissingerian realism, past Wilsonian idealism, deeper than the Clintonian third way.” And then, of course, I drank until such thoughts were drowned.
But, here I am, writing about Billy Joel and his fundamentally sound view of history as presented in a pop-rock song.
Billy Joel’s understanding of history
Billy Joel presents history as a fire, out of control, creating beauty and destruction. Change and destruction, he insists, are not decided from above and implemented, but are spinning out of control as those in power try desperately to have some effect on this chain of events that began before history itself.
We didn’t start the fire.
It’s always been burning
Since the world’s been turning;
We didn’t light it,
But we tried to fight it.
It is easier to try to understand history as determined by the actions and words of prominent individuals, nations, and organizations, as they set agendas and implement them. And perhaps, when events seem out of the control, it is easier to assume that more shadowy forces are at work behind the scenes, implementing the levers of power and economics, manipulating the machine of history to their will. This view of history and current events is facile, if emotionally persuasive.
Contingencies
Our everyday experience demonstrates that individual events are largely the result of forces beyond our understanding, forces acting in the present and forces in the past. For example, if any of these events or decisions had changed, I couldn’t have made it in to work today: a man a hundred years ago decided to establish a railroad going out to Long Island; a butterfly flaps its wings in Tokyo; a motor company, flush with success, built a skyscraper in Manhattan; an engineer maintains a system of pumps that keep water out of the subways; an immigrant decided to leave his home to try a new life in America. Just the fact of my commute each day is contingent upon all these facts of history and all these conditions of the present day. Without thousands of people doing their daily jobs for the past hundred years, I would not have been able to make it into work today. Millions of decisions, tens of millions of people, mixed together with the largest portion of chance – and that is how I come to be here.
How is it that we assume history is so different from our own experiences? If current events are driven by individuals masterminding large-scale events, and we assign responsibility to this or that person in power at a given time, we are asserting a very different kind of reality than that we live with each day. In fact, the events of history and the present are every bit as contingent, as prone to chance, as out of control as the events of our own individual lives. The leaders of our world do not possess some secret which allows them to control events. Rather, the best leaders, move with the events and try to shape them gradually.
The Great Man Theory
Time and again, we see that no individual, no matter the extent of their power, can manipulate the forces of history for long. Those individuals that are most successful are those that have ridden the wave of history and, ever so gently, tried to alter its’ course. A dictator such as Hitler could harness the anger and despair in a post-world war Germany, but as he began to impose his will more forcefully, other entities rose up against Hitler and his Germany and destroyed him and his vision of the future. For a more successful example of a leader, you can look to Abraham Lincoln, who sought to preserve the status quo at every step and only took radical measures after calamity made them seem reasonable. In the end too, the forces that opposed Lincoln murdered him; but his legacy lived on, because he rode the wave of history, guiding it rather than forcing his will upon it.
America clearly has more power than any other nation on earth at this point. Because of this, we bear more responsibility for the state of the world than anyone else. But the lesson to learn from Billy Joel is that we are not responsible for the fire, the change, the destruction. If you combine this acknowledgment of the complexity of the world of Billy Joel’s with the lesson of the current administration, you learn that American power has rather definite limits, as we are unable to impose our will upon two militarily weak countries despite billions of dollars and thousands of lives.
While many on the left are suspicious of American power and see it as responsible for most of the world’s ills; and many on the right believe in the goodness of American power and believe if we were to apply it, we would be able to cure most of the world’s ills, both have in common a single fallacy: that American power is sufficient to change the course of history and the world. It simply is not.
Conclusions
The best and the worst we can do, and the most we should try to do, is affect change at the margins and adopt a modest and patient foreign policy, trying to encourage the trends we see as positive and discourage those we see as negative. We do not have the power to re-make the world in any image, but we do have the power to affect the course of event if we are judicious.
Note: There were two references I wanted to make in this article that I could not find:
If anyone knows what I’m looking for, please post a link or email me at [email protected]
If history at its best can be seen as the recollection and recreation of past events
unvarnished by propaganda, emotion, and the focus of the present; of the best and worst, and most often, the muddled in between of human events, human endeavors, and natural forces, then James Fallows’ take on Al Gore seems to be on the right track. Fallows writes:
Gore can be pompous, lecturing, pedantic, and all the rest. But [just as] in retrospect the criticisms of [Martin Luther King, Jr.] look very small, and — without equating the stature of the two men — I think something similar will be true regarding Gore. Like him or not, he has turned his efforts to an important cause, under historical and political circumstances that would have tempted many people to drown themselves in drink or move to Bhutan.
For the moment, let us imagine the role of some historian a generation hence. The major biographies of our age have already been written and re-written by our peers, our children and children’s children. The comic-tragedy of Dubya that ended in the tragedy of a war; the comic-tragedy of Bill Clinton, who wasted his presidency on trivialities; the dark force of Cheney whose sudden personality shift between 2000 and 2002 still remains a mystery, but whose insider skill and cachet with the president led him to amass more power than most presidents; and of course, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleeza Rice, Rudy Guiliani, Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Tommy Franks, David Petreaus, Nancy Pelosi, and John McCain. All these men and women who exercised power from 1998 to 2008 will have been written about. But someone will remember to write about a man who almost was president; who was the most powerful vice president in history (only to be dwarfed in power by his successor); who, after losing his lifelong ambition in the most excruciating fashion possible, slowly, gradually, gained a second chance at his life and dedicated it to stopping what he saw as the world’s most pressing challenge.
The Inches We Need [digg-reddit-me]
Bobby Kennedy once said that:
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.
Al Gore proved in 2000 that he did not have the first greatness that Kennedy spoke of;
greatness is only separated from failure by luck, providence, or destiny. As with any time I try to understand the meaning of something significant, I am reduced to invoking sport. In a ballgame, the difference between greatness and a fleeting memory is only a matter of inches. Who would remember Carlton Fisk’s walk off home run – which I was not even alive for, but vividly recall – if it hadn’t been for a few inches. In the photo, you can see him wishing, pushing the ball, already far beyond his control, fair with his hands. And in the miracle of that moment, Fisk’s home run became a legend, one of the most dramatic moments in sports history.
Many imbue success with a kind of moral quality, seeing in a successful person more will-power, more determination, more grit, more perseverance, more discipline. They do not acknowledge the controlling factor of luck that time and again makes these moral qualities superfluous. Carlton Fisk’s moment of triumph, carrying his team to victory, made him immortal and great. He changed the course of history and allowed the Boston fans one more day to hope. But a million minute factors contributed to this moment and any one could have rendered it forgettable, typical, a failure. There is no moral quality to success. A swing a quarter of a second sooner or later, a strong breeze, an imperfection in the baseball, anything that made the ball move a few inches to the left would have made this moment instantly forgettable. History would gone on, oblivious. These seconds, these moments, these triumphs that barely were: they are what separate those with the greatness to bend history from those who try their best.Al Gore’s swing in 2000 was a bit too early, a bit too late, and for him, things certainly did not end fairly.
Al Pacino in the single moment that redeemed the decent picture Any Given Sunday gave a soliloquy:
Pacino captures the beauty of sports and of history, properly understood. A battle of wills, a competition in which every inch matters because winning and losing are only inches apart. What Pacino ignores, what every actor in history ignores is that even the most outstanding success is largely the result of luck. That is why you can find the morality of sports not in success but in the process, in the way the game is played: the discipline needed to attain the skills needed to compete; the determination and perseverance in the face of adversity; the will-power and focus; the camaraderie and community of a team; the dignity in the face of setbacks and successes; the respect for one’s opponent. A great ball player is one who has been given the opportunity and through luck, skill, and character is able to take advantage of it. A good ball player is one who has skill and character. You can study the great men and women who have changed history and the many men and women who have failed. There are those who choose to do great but terrible things – who, once attaining power, destroy societies, murder, lie, steal. There are those who choose to do great things for others – but who in their great ambition, they always destroy something. In studying these men and women you will find no golden formula for success; the only necessary condition is to be willing to take advantage of an opportunity that presents itself, but even that is only occasionally sufficient.
Al Gore failed, but he put himself out there, to win or lose, to compete. He paid his dues over the years, accumulating a wealth of experience. He faced failures and successes, again and again. He ran a good but flawed campaign and lost in a mess of butterfly ballots and pregnant chads.
Al Gore, Failure
If we were to judge Al Gore by the standards of an earlier era, he would look better. In an era before television and the 24/7 media cycle he so hates began to dominate our culture and politics, Al Gore would be more readily seen as the man of substance, conviction, and morals he is. He has shown good judgment throughout his career, both personally and politically. Maybe he demonstrated poor judgment in letting a political consultant dress him in earth tones, and by kissing Tipper a bit too enthusiastically for everyone to see. As important as those seemed at the time, today, these lapses in judgment seem paltry compared to the worst of Bush, for example, calling his Secretary of Defense “RumStud”, unnecessary wars, etcetera and so on.
But most important is what Al Gore did after his loss. He was a man. He was a good man. He did not give up on making a difference in the world. He fought for what he believed in. He maintained his good sense despite his colossal failure that was a lifetime in the making. He has done more than any other living person to put climate change back on the global policy agenda, and all of this from a man who failed when history most needed him, who could not bend history even a bit at his most opportune time. Al Gore failed to become a great man; what Gore proved though, was that he was something better and more rare – a good man who, being passed over by history, still chose to make what difference he could.
As an historian of the future, we can look at Al Gore as a good man on whom God or fate chose not to bestow the blessing or curse of greatness. But he was – and is – a good man.
History as a Morality Tale
As a concluding thought, I would turn to Reinhold Niebuhr:
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime,
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone.
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.