The Course Of Human Events

History, in the creation, does not go according to some master plan. This is true in general and in particular, because it is also true that the master plans proposed from time to time by individuals or governments never proceed as intended. History is better seen as countless precipitating events that send everything crashing into each other, which in turn set off countless unpredictable chain reactions.

In other words, human history is chaotic. Evidently there's a Yiddish proverb that goes: we plan; God laughs. (Paraphrased by Woody Allen: if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.) You don't have to be a Rebbe to know that that's true. 

This is never truer than in the case of war. The Iraq War in 2003 was a minor example. The original plan seemed simple to its designers, but it all went terribly wrong very quickly. The resulting chaos is still spinning through Iraq and several other countries in the area, and American military personnel are still being killed.

Many times the resulting chaos utterly destroys the initiating countries. In the matter of Germany and Japan in World War II, the master plan was to seize vast swathes of land from numerous countries by military force, achieving huge empires and world hegemony. The chaos left both countries kneeling in the rubble and choking on their own blood and the dust that had recently been their infrastructures. That was chaos at its finest.

Governing human events, the business of politics and statecraft, is an overwhelming challenge. Everything is usually out of control. Governments ride the wave while times are good. When times are bad they try different strategies to fix things, and then when events move into the good part of the cycle, usually on their own, the governments take the credit.

The men, almost always men, who are in positions where they can initiate great events are a mixed group. The list includes many men of measured temperament and great ability, from Emperor Augustus of Rome to President Obama in the United States, and many men wild or reckless in nature like the Emperors Caligula and Nero to President George W. Bush. The former can create progress and order while holding together disparate elements and without setting off on the path to chaos. The latter blindly sow the wind of inadequately considered plans and personal fantasies, later reaping the whirlwind of insecurity and economic ruin.

Aside from the individuals who display true mental aberrations, one major problem is that most of the politicians, in any era, are not students of history. Frequently, many of them are also intemperate men who lack the gene for caution. From time to time truly maniacal narcissists become the rulers of major countries. These men may lack not only the basic knowledge required to make plans that will affect the future of their countries, but also lack the ability to evaluate plans presented to them by others. They are like an inexperienced doctor who has little idea what his patient is suffering from or what the patient needs. Let’s try this! Didn’t work? Okay, let’s try this! And so on. In extreme cases these men may even have their own agendas and set in motion wild schemes to achieve personal goals, wealth or historical celebrity. Things can get ugly very quickly. I might be thinking of someone in particular. 

Perhaps the greatest generator of chaos, along with war, has always been revolution. No nation or culture on earth is safe when its very structure is seized, from without or within, by a group whose only wish is to destroy the existing structure and replace it with . . . something else. Here the nature of unintended results leading to chaos is the most stark. Well intended revolutions have taken entire continents into misery and destruction. I’m thinking of the French Revolution. God knows they had a good reason to wish to restructure their governing situation. The most immediate results, though, were terror and the Napoleonic Wars.

So, Fred, is there a conclusion here? Why yes, dear reader, there is. The current ruling clique in Washington, and in about thirty-seven state capitols, is a revolutionary mob that has taken control of all of our democratic institutions with the stated goal of tearing them down. Most of the good things that our politics have created over the last century are under immediate threat of destruction. I shouldn’t have to tell you what they are, and honestly, if there are any Americans that haven’t seen it yet, they have their heads thrust so far into the sand that no kind of common sense appeal could reach them. For those of you who know of which I speak, there is nothing to do but resist by whatever peaceful means are available. What can we do? Talk to people? Let our friends and family know how we feel about all of this? Get involved in planning for the mid-term elections? At the very least, don’t let weird anti-American comments go unchallenged, not at work, not in your neighborhood, not on Facebook. This whole thing is about to get out of hand. It’s close to spiraling down the drain out of control already. It’s past time to start trying to do something.  

Note to the Surveillance State: I’m sorry that most of my e-mails, Android chats and blog-posts are so dull. My browser history has not been scrubbed. It actually is that uninteresting. I do get carried away sometimes, but please believe me when I say that I have never counseled any actions that are violent or illegal. I am not a danger to myself or others, and I remain a loyal American citizen. I have never, to my knowledge, known or even spoken to anyone who wished to harm the interests of the United States or individual Americans.  In fact, the mere possibility of unintentional contact is remote in the extreme. So please don’t charge me under some new anti-dissent statute. If you want to stifle me, just let me know! I’ll stifle! 

The History Of "History"

That Duck Quack so called patriarch was in the news again recently, quacking on about his unlearned theories about the world, and Mr. Jesus. His thesis was that Jesus was obviously God incarnate because why else would we still be counting the years since his birth? His sub-thesis was that anyone who acknowledged that this was the year 2016 was also acknowledging that Jesus was lord.

That’s a pretty silly thing to say. For anyone with a sense of history it should be clear that the years are counted as they are because of the introduction of the Augustinian Calendar around the time of the Year Zero. Before that, the calendar had the wrong number of days and the seasons changed character over time, you know, like January moving over to where April should be. Also, before that, whenever a new emperor was brought in, or even when some new king was crowned somewhere, they called it the year one in that jurisdiction. So the number of the year was different in different places. The Emperor Augustus knew that that was no way to run an empire, so he commissioned a new calendar and straightened the whole problem out in a way that is still to our satisfaction. Later on, that numbering system took hold over much of the world, and we still use it today in most countries.

The imagined Jesus connection is obviously wrong, because the year ten, let’s say, was the year ten before anyone had any idea of the existence of Jesus. Except maybe the three wise men, but their comments, if any, were not recorded.

The designations “BC” and “AD” came later, and to some extent they are not even used anymore. For AD, CE has crept into use (“Common Era,” or “Christian Era”); for BC, make that BCE. Even Christian Era is just an acknowledgment of the fact that in this era Christianity became the dominant religion in the Roman world and then way beyond that.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. The Duckster’s comments served to remind me of another popular misapprehension. The feeling that many people have that the word “history” somehow means “his story,” as in “that’s not my story . . . that’s HIS story!” Well, that’s kind of a silly idea, too, in a way.

History, a noun (plural, histories) 1. The study of past events  2. The past, considered as a whole. (and maybe, the whole series of past events connected with someone or something.) 3. A continuous, typically chronological record of past events or trends.

Origin: Middle English: via Latin from Greek, historia, meaning narrative or history; from the earlier word, histor, meaning a learned, wise man.

Looking up historia in Latin yields further insight.

Historia, plural historiae, feminine, 1. An inquiry, the results of inquiry 2. Learning, a historical narrative or history 3. In general, a narrative or a story.

There’s no “his” at all in “history.” In its origins, the word was closer to the idea of it being the story rather than the subject matter. So it’s best not to take the whole thing too personally.

A Big But . . .

The word may be innocent in itself, but the whole history of history does include plenty to be angry about. Maybe angry is too strong a word; it might be better to say there’s plenty to be annoyed about. Within the study of History as an academic pursuit, the concentration on the history of the white world quickly becomes apparent. This is also true of Art History. Not only of the white world, but of the history of important white men who were prominent in its events.

My undergraduate degree is in Art History. I had always enjoyed history, but I had become disappointed in history’s preoccupation with kings, wars and treaties, relieved only by a passing interest in things like plagues and the like, to break up the monotony. It was only the history of important white people in white kingdoms, with scant mention of ordinary people or people of other races. 

I found Art History more interesting, since at least it included the history of the artists themselves, their commercial lives, their patrons and their subject matter. This all started out being the church and the rich as patrons, and mostly religious scenes and saints as their subjects, but it grew during the Renaissance to include the new commercial class as patrons and scenes of ordinary life and people as subjects worthy of depiction. During my education in the field, however, I came to find oppressive the omission of the rest of the world from the curriculum. It was still a very white, European Art History.

Towards the end of my BA, I became fascinated with the Balinese artist, Gusti Lempad. You can look up Google Images of his stuff, and it is just remarkable. We had a wonderful Art History library at my university, with a large collection of books and scholarly magazines, and even some interesting galleries. But of Lempad, there was almost nothing. There were mentions in a book or two, and there were some articles to be found, and even then most of that was in Dutch. 

If I had stayed in the field, and wished to pursue Lampad studies, it would have been in the manner of genre studies, a sub-category called Asian Art or something. There wouldn’t have been any market for teaching it, either, unless it was at a university that had a big South East Asian Studies program. Are there even any of those? That’s a dubious future after all the work of mastering Dutch and Bahasa Indonesia, and probably Balinese as well.

I gave up the idea of devoting my life to the study of Art History for two major reasons: 1. Early in your career you move around the stix teaching survey classes to bored students from other majors; and 2. The office politics in our department was a snakes’ nest of intrigue that no one would want to pursue. We had a few professors that were quite famous already, and several moved over time to Ivy League schools. What a slog, though. I just figured that I didn’t have the constitution for fighting like that.

So I understand why non-white people look at history as it is studied and discussed and become annoyed at the all-white-all-the-time character of it. History should include all of history, without way too much weight being given to white history. All of the world’s people have contributed to the world we find at our doorsteps every morning, and their contributions should be acknowledged. (And not as condescending footnotes, either.)

I still think that the “his-story” thing is a bit silly. The onomatopoeia of it is too coincidental to make it really useful for anything but a protest sign. The problem is real, though, so I guess that I should be happy that people bring it up at all. 

History Is A Mystery

All of these things happened long ago. They are written up by people who took different paths to the knowledge, people who studied and believed different versions of events. Historians, like anyone else, may be biased. New original sources are being discovered all the time. An older history book may or may not still be a reliable account of events. Dollar amounts are given for certain things; they may be adjusted for the current value of money or just reported in contemporary amounts. It can all be confusing.

It is also important when reading history to read many books on the same subject. Different historians will address different facets of the events. They will provide different details. To get the complete picture, you need to read as many sources as possible. This aspect will be important for another post that should hit the blog within a week or so.

But today, the money.

I don’t have a real historian’s interest in history. I have a grown-up little boy’s interest in historical events that have always fascinated me. Like World War II. It is often reported that the Manhattan Project, which gave the world the atomic bomb, had a total cost of two billion dollars. That’s an impressive figure; that’s still a lot of money. But a little context would be helpful.

It has recently come to my attention that the development and construction of the B-29 bombers used in World War II had a price tag of THREE billion dollars. Is that merely shocking? Or does it only serve to make the atomic bomb sound like a bargain?

Here’s a good one. The Thompson sub-machineguns used in WWII had a price tag of about $350 apiece. Okay. It was a complicated piece to manufacture. It had lots of parts that needed to be individually machined. It had a wooden stock and hand grip. It was a terrific weapon though, it was durable, efficient and reliable. Very popular with the troops. America made an impressive one point three million of them (1,300,000 units). That comes to about a half a billion dollars, total. How should we fit that into the context of the atomic bomb or the B-29?

Then there are the little gems of information that drop by sometimes. It seems that the unit cost of the Thompson was daunting to the people running that war, and early on they began to look for a lower cost replacement. They found it in the sub-machinegun designated the M3 and called “the grease gun.” This gun only made it into use for the tail end of the war, but it remained in use by the armed forces for a long, long time. Unit cost? Between $15 and $20.

How’s that for a contrast? Almost identical in their utility, but the cost drops from $350 to $20. The M3 was made from parts that could be pressed out of sheet metal and mass produced. It only had one part that needed to be machined, the bolt.

My interest in these things is almost certainly foolish, but I’m not hurting anybody. Let an old man have some fun!