But does any ordinary human being, does any practising historian, begin to believe one word of this strange tale?
VII
Two powerful doctrines are at large in contemporary thought, relativism and determinism. The first of these, for all that it is represented as being an antidote to overweening self-confidence, or arrogant dogmatism, or moral self-satisfaction, is nevertheless founded on a fallacious interpretation of experience; the second, for all that its chains are decked with flowers, and despite its parade of noble stoicism and the splendour and vastness of its cosmic design, nevertheless represents the universe as a prison. Relativism opposes to individual protest and belief in moral principles the resignation or the irony of those who have seen many worlds crumble, many ideals turned tawdry or ridiculous by time. Determinism claims to bring us to our senses by showing where the true, the impersonal and unalterable, machinery of life and thought is to be found. The first, when it ceases to be a maxim, or merely a salutary reminder to us of our limitations or of the complexity of the issue, and claims our attention as a serious Weltanschauung, rests on the misuse of words, a confusion of ideas, and relies upon a logical fallacy. The second, when it goes beyond indicating specific obstacles to free choice where examinable evidence for this can be adduced, turns out to rest either on a mythology or on a metaphysical dogma. Both have, at times, succeeded in reasoning or frightening men out of their most human moral or political convictions in the name of a deeper and more devastating insight into the nature of things. Yet, perhaps, this is no more than a sign of neurosis and confusion: for neither view seems to be supported by human experience. Why then should either doctrine (but especially determinism) have bound its spell so powerfully on so many otherwise clear and honest minds?
One of the deepest of human desires is to find a unitary pattern in which the whole of experience, past, present and future, actual, possible and unfulfilled, is symmetrically ordered. It is often expressed by saying that once upon a time there was a harmonious unity – ‘the unmediated whole of feeling and thought’, ‘the unity of the knower and the known’, of ‘the outer and the inner’, of subject and object, form and matter, self and not-self; that this was somehow broken; and that the whole of human experience has consisted in an endless effort to reassemble the fragments, to restore the unity, and so to escape or ‘transcend’ categories – ways of thinking – which split and isolate and ‘kill’ the living reality, and ‘dirempt’ us from it. We are told of an endless quest to find an answer to the puzzle, to return to the seamless whole, to the paradise whence we were expelled, or to inherit one which we have still not done enough to earn.
This central conception, whatever its origin or value, is surely at the heart of much metaphysical speculation, of much striving for the unification of the sciences, and of a large proportion of aesthetic and logical, social and historical thought. But whether or not the discovery of a single pattern of experience offers that satisfaction of our reason to which many metaphysicians aspire, and in the name of which they reject empirical science as a mere de facto collocation of ‘brute’ facts – descriptions of events or persons or things not connected by those ‘rational’ links which alone reason is held to be able to accept – whether or not this lies at the back of so much metaphysics and religion, it does not alter the order of the actual appearances – the empirical scene – with which alone history can properly claim to deal. From the days of Bossuet to those of Hegel and increasingly thereafter, claims have been made, widely varying in degree of generality and confidence, to be able to trace a structure of history (usually a priori, for all protests to the contrary), to discover the one and only true pattern into which alone all facts will be found to fit. But this is not, and can never be, accepted by any serious historian who wishes to establish the truth as it is understood by the best critics of his time, working by standards accepted as realistic by his most scrupulous and enlightened fellow workers. For he does not perceive one unique schema as the truth – the only real framework in which alone the facts truly lie; he does not distinguish the one real, cosmic pattern from false ones, as he certainly seeks to distinguish real facts from fiction. The same facts can be arranged in more than one single pattern, seen from several perspectives, displayed in many lights, all of them valid, although some will be more suggestive or fertile in one field than in another, or unify many fields in some illuminating fashion, or, alternatively, bring out disparities and open chasms. Some of these patterns will lie closer than others to the metaphysical or religious outlook of this or that historian or historical thinker. Yet through it all the facts themselves will remain relatively ‘hard’. Relatively, but, of course, not absolutely; and, whenever obsession by a given pattern causes a given writer to interpret the facts too artificially, to fill the gaps in his knowledge too smoothly, without sufficient regard to the empirical evidence, other historians will instinctively perceive that some kind of violence is being done to the facts, that the relation between evidence and interpretation is in some way abnormal; and that this is so not because there is doubt about the facts, but because there is an obsessive pattern at work.25 Freedom from such idées fixes – the degree of such freedom – distinguishes true history from the mythology of a given period; for there is no historical thought, properly speaking, save where facts can be distinguished not merely from fiction, but from theory and interpretation, not, it may be, absolutely, but to a lesser or greater degree.
We shall be reminded that there is no sharp break between history and mythology; or history and metaphysics; and that in the same sense there is no sharp line between ‘facts’ and theories: that no absolute touchstone can in principle be produced; and this is true enough, but from it nothing startling follows. That such differences exist only metaphysicians have disputed; yet history as an independent discipline did, nevertheless, emerge; and that is tantamount to saying that the frontier between facts and cosmic patterns, empirical or metaphysical or theological, indistinct and shifting as it may be, is a genuine concept for all those who take the problems of history seriously. So long as we remain historians the two levels must be kept distinct. The attempt, therefore, to shuffle off responsibility, which, at an empirical level, seems to rest upon this or that historical individual or society, or on a set of opinions held or propagated by one of these, on to some metaphysical machinery which, because it is impersonal, excludes the very idea of moral responsibility, must always be invalid; and the desire to do so may, as often as not, be written down to the wish to escape from an untidy, cruel and above all seemingly purposeless world, into a realm where all is harmonious, clear, intelligible, mounting towards some perfect culmination which satisfies the demands of ‘reason’, or an aesthetic feeling, or a metaphysical impulse or religious craving; above all, where nothing can be the object of criticism or complaint or condemnation or despair.
The matter is more serious when empirical arguments are advanced for a historical determinism which excludes the notion of personal responsibility. We are here no longer dealing with the metaphysics of history – the theodicies, say, of Schelling or Toynbee – as obvious substitutes for theology. We have before us the great sociological theories of history – the materialistic or scientific interpretations which began with Montesquieu and the philosophes, and led to the great schools of the nineteenth century, from the Saint-Simonians and Hegelians to the followers of Comte, Marx, Darwin and the liberal economists; from Freud, Pareto and Sorel to the ideologists of Fascism. Of these Marxism is much the boldest and the most intelligent, but its practitioners, much as they have added to our understanding, have not succeeded in their gallant and powerful attempt to turn history into a science. Arising out of this great movement we have the vast proliferation of anthropological and sociological studies of civilised societies, with their tendency to trace all character and behaviour to the same kind of relatively irrational and unconscious causes as those which are held to have so successfully explained the behaviour of primitive societies;
we have witnessed the rebirth of the notion of the ‘sociology of knowledge’, which suggests that not only our methods but our conclusions and our reasons for believing them, in the entire realm of knowledge, can be shown to be wholly or largely determined by the stage reached in the development of our class or group, or nation or culture, or whatever other unit may be chosen; followed, in due course, by the fusion of these at times unconvincing, but, usually, at least quasi-scientific, doctrines with such non-empirical figments – at times all but personified powers both good and bad – as ‘the collectivist spirit’, or ‘the Myth of the Twentieth Century’, or ‘the contemporary collapse of values’ (sometimes called ‘the crisis of faith’), or ‘modern man’, or ‘the last stage of capitalism’.
All these modes of speech have peopled the air with supernatural entities of great power, Neoplatonic and Gnostic spirits, angels and demons who play with us as they will, or, at any rate, make demands on us which, we are told, we ignore at our peril. There has grown up in our modern time a pseudo-sociological mythology which, in the guise of scientific concepts, has developed into a new animism – certainly a more primitive and naïve religion than the traditional European faiths which it seeks to replace.26 This new cult leads troubled persons to ask such questions as ‘Is war inevitable?’ or ‘Must collectivism triumph?’, or ‘Is civilisation doomed?’ These questions, and the tone in which they are posed, and the way in which they are discussed, imply a belief in the occult presence of vast impersonal entities – wars, collectivism, doom – agencies and forces at large in the world which we have but little power to control or deflect. Sometimes these are said to ‘embody themselves’ in great men, titanic figures who, because they are at one with their age, achieve superhuman results – Napoleon, Bismarck, Lenin; sometimes in the actions of classes – the great capitalist combines, which work for ends that their members scarcely understand themselves, ends towards which their economic and social position ‘inevitably’ drives them; sometimes in huge inchoate entities called ‘the masses’, which do the work of history, little knowing of what mighty forces they are the ‘creative vehicles’. Wars, revolutions, dictatorships, military and economic transformations are apt to be conceived like the genii of some oriental demonology, djinns which, once set free from the jars in which they have been confined for centuries, become uncontrollable, and capriciously play with the lives of men and nations. It is perhaps not to be wondered at that, with so luxurious a growth of similes and metaphors, many innocent persons nowadays tend to believe that their lives are dominated not merely by relatively stable, easily identifiable, material factors – physical nature and the laws dealt with by the natural sciences; but by even more powerful and sinister, and far less intelligible, factors – the impersonal struggles of classes which members of these classes may not intend, the collision of social forces, the incidences of slumps and booms which, like tides and harvests, can scarcely be controlled by those whose lives depend upon them – above all, by inexorable ‘societal’ and ‘behavioural’ patterns, to quote but a few sacred words from the barbarous vocabulary of the new mythologies.
Cowed and humbled by the panoply of the new divinities, men are eager, and seek anxiously, for knowledge and comfort in the sacred books and in the new orders of priesthood which affect to tell them about the attributes and habits of their new masters. And the books and their expositors do speak words of comfort: demand creates supply. Their message is simple and very ancient. In a world where such monsters clash, individual human beings can have but little responsibility for what they do; the discovery of the new, terrifying, impersonal forces may render life infinitely more dangerous, yet if they serve no other purpose, they do, at any rate, divest their victims of all responsibility – from all those moral burdens which men in less enlightened days used to carry with such labour and anguish. So that what we have lost on the swings we make up on the roundabouts: if we lose freedom of choice, at any rate we can no longer blame or be blamed for a world largely out of our control. The terminology of praise and condemnation turns out to be eo ipso uncivilised and obscurantist. To record what occurs and why, in impersonal chronicles, as was done by detached and studious monks in other times of violence and strife, is represented as more honourable and more dignified, and more in keeping with the noble humility and integrity of a scholar who in a time of doubt and crisis will at least preserve his soul if he abstains from the easy path of self-indulgence in moral sentiments. Agonising doubts about the conduct of individuals caught in historical crises, and the feeling of hope and despair, guilt, pride and remorse which accompanies such reflections, are taken from us; like soldiers in an army driven by forces too great to resist, we lose those neuroses which spring from the fear of having to choose among alternatives. Where there is no choice there is no anxiety; and a happy release from responsibility. Some human beings have always preferred the peace of imprisonment, a contented security, a sense of having at last found one’s proper place in the cosmos, to the painful conflicts and perplexities of the disordered freedom of the world beyond the walls.
Yet this is odd. For the assumptions upon which this kind of determinism has been erected are, when examined, exceedingly unplausible. What are these forces and these inexorable historical laws? What historiographer, what sociologist, can claim as yet to have produced empirical generalisations comparable to the great uniformities of the natural sciences? It is a commonplace to say that sociology still awaits its Newton, but even this seems much too audacious a claim; it has yet to find its Euclid and its Archimedes, before it can begin to dream of a Copernicus. On one side a patient and useful accumulation of facts and analyses, taxonomy, useful comparative studies, cautious and limited hypotheses, still hamstrung by too many exceptions to have any appreciable predictive power;27 on the other, imposing, sometimes ingenious, theoretical constructions, obscured by picturesque metaphors and a bold mythology, often stimulating to workers in other fields; and between these a vast gap, such as has not existed in historical times between the theories and the factual evidence of the natural sciences. It is idle for sociology to plead that she is still young and has a glorious future. The eponymous hero to honour whose memory these words are being uttered, Auguste Comte, founded it a full hundred years ago, and its great nomothetic conquests are still to come.28 It has affected other disciplines most fruitfully, notably history, to which it has added a dimension;29 but it has as yet succeeded in discovering so few laws, or wide generalisations supported by adequate evidence, that its plea to be treated as a natural science can scarcely be entertained, nor are these few poor laws sufficiently revolutionary to make it seem an urgent matter to test their truth. In the great and fertile field of sociology (unlike her more speculative but far more effective younger sister, psychology) the loose generalisations of historically trained minds still, at times, seem more fruitful than their ‘scientific’ equivalents.
Social determinism is, at least historically, closely bound up with the ‘nomothetic’ ideals of sociology. And it may, indeed, be a true doctrine. But if it is true, and if we begin to take it seriously, then, indeed, the changes in the whole of our language, our moral terminology, our attitudes toward one another, our views of history, of society and of everything else will be too profound to be even adumbrated. The concepts of praise and blame, innocence and guilt and individual responsibility from which we started are but a small element in the structure which would collapse or disappear. If social and psychological determinism were established as an accepted truth, our world would be transformed more radically than was the teleological world of the classical and medieval ages by the triumphs of mechanistic principles or those of natural selection. Our words – our modes of speech and thought – would be transformed in literally unimaginable ways; the notions of choice, of responsibility, of freedom are so deeply embedded in our outlook that our new life, as creatures in a world genuinely lacking in these concepts, can, I should maintain, be conceived by us only with the greatest difficult
y.
But there is, as yet, no need to alarm ourselves unduly. We are speaking only of pseudo-scientific ideals; the reality is not in sight. The evidence for a thoroughgoing determinism is not to hand; and if there is a persistent tendency to believe in it in some theoretical fashion, that is surely due far more to the lure of a ‘scientistic’ or metaphysical ideal or to a tendency on the part of those who desire to change society to believe that the stars in their courses are fighting for them. Or it may be due to a longing to lay down moral burdens, or minimise individual responsibility and transfer it to impersonal forces which can be accused of causing all our discontents, rather than to any increase in our powers of critical reflection or improvement in our scientific techniques. Belief in historical determinism of this type is, of course, very widespread, particularly in what I should like to call its ‘historiosophical’ form, by which I mean metaphysico-theological theories of history, which attract many who have lost their faith in older religious orthodoxies. Yet perhaps this attitude, so prevalent recently, is ebbing; and a contrary trend is discernible today. Our best historians use empirical tests in sifting facts, make microscopic examinations of the evidence, deduce no patterns, and show no false fear in attributing responsibility to individuals. Their specific attributions and analyses may be mistaken, but both they and their readers would rightly reject the notion that their very activity had been superseded and stultified by the advances of sociology, or by some deeper metaphysical insight, like that of oriental star-gazers by the discoveries of the disciples of Kepler.
In their own queer way, some modern existentialists, too, proclaim the crucial importance of individual acts of choice. The condemnation by some among them of all philosophical systems, and of all moral (as of other) doctrines, as equally hollow, simply because they are systems and doctrines, may be invalid; but the more serious of them are no less insistent than Kant upon the reality of human autonomy, that is, upon the reality of free self-commitment to an act or a form of life for what it is in itself. Whether recognition of freedom in this last sense does or does not entitle one logically to preach to others, or judge the past, is another matter; at any rate, it shows a commendable strength of intellect to have seen through the pretensions of those all-explanatory, all-justifying theodicies which promised to assimilate the human sciences to the natural in the quest for a unified schema of all there is.
The Proper Study of Mankind Page 27