Feed your head. (Jefferson Airplane, White Rabbit)

[Sweeney]

108. It is hard enough to know what happened.

My friend; there are romantic views of history where by the smallest margin some remarkable event occurs. I am a materialist like my friend Marx. It is very often the case that the only defense humanity has for what takes place is the defense Oedipus gave: I did what I did not knowing what I did.

Do you think the Prussians would have passed Lenin through their lines if they could have imagined the possible results? People very often do have a sense of results, though short sighted. If you want to talk of the possibilities only talk of the future, because when we talk about history, it is pretty well cast and frozen. History never changes. What changes in regard to history is our perspective on it. History never is what it is, and is always what it means. One meaning is that we should always look at our moves as a we would a chess game, and be thinking many moves ahead. No one should ever set a train of events in motion with out some sense of the outcome. I read a good if small book a long time ago called disease and history. You can hardly count the number of times where disease has won more wars than generals, and now we may well face generals who will use disease with a purpose of winning their wars.

In viewing history it is important to understand what happened, certainly. It is also important to understand that nothing happened without a rationally understandable cause, even when that cause is not completely in evidence. And while often, a multitude of forces do converge to cause a single event, there is more often a step by step progression. The exception is cataclysm, wars, and revolutions. You will look in vain for single causes for vast events, and these causes are real even when they are in the imaginations or the actors. If the Germans could be inspired to fight for living space only to find a grave, would you not say imagination played a part? But only try to measure the effect of imagination as if so much material substance, and you are doomed. All you can know is that it has an effect, like psychology generally, and must be accounted for even without exact measure. What I am trying say here is that human events are fantastic enough without throwing fantastic possible explanations into the mix. Cut out the extraneous with Occam's Razer. Look for proximate causes. Nature is not replete with superfluities as the monk said, and neither is history.