“We didn’t start the fire…”

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:

1. a Tom Friedman column from (I think) sometime in the period after 9/11 in which he makes the point that for many in the world, their daily lives are more affected by who wins the American presidency than by who wins their own local elections; and
2. a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip in which Calvin explains how the sweep of history has led to the pinnacle of all creation: him.

If anyone knows what I’m looking for, please post a link or email me at [email protected]