Tuesday, February 24, 1998

Moral of history's 'might have beens'

By George Will

WASHINGTON - Suppose. Suppose the car had hit the pedestrian slightly harder.

What car? The one on Fifth Avenue the evening of Dec. 13, 1931, when an English politician on a lecture tour momentarily forgot the American rules of the road and looked the wrong way when stepping into the street.

Winston Churchill could have died. Then, perhaps in 1940 or 1941, a prime minister less resolute and inspiriting than Churchill might have chosen to come to terms with Germany before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. Imagine the hegemony of a National Socialist Germany stretching across the Eurasian landmass from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

Suppose Robert E. Lee had occupied Cemetery Hill on the first night at Gettysburg, which he might have done if Stonewall Jackson had not been accidentally killed two months earlier by Confederate soldiers.

The dynamic of the next few days would have been entirely different. Lee probably would have prevailed there, and this might now be two nations. (Actually, there probably would be lots of nations in the territory that was the Confederacy, because those fractious people would have improvidently established a weak central government and the right of secession.)

Suppose the northeast wind blowing across New York harbor had not suddenly turned into a southwest wind on the night of Aug. 29, 1776. Or that a thick fog had not rolled in the next day. There might never have been an independent United States for Lee to try to dismember if those climatic changes had not facilitated the evacuation whereby George Washington and 10,000 soldiers - about half the entire Continental Army - escaped capture by the British after the Battle of Long Island.

These are among the "might have beens" that some distinguished students of military history consider in the new issue of MHQ, a quarterly of military history. That their speculations about history-altering contingencies are deeply satisfying says something about intellectual currents of modern history.

Two converging intellectual tendencies have had demoralizing - and de-moralizing - effects on the way we are encouraged to understand history. This matters because the way we think about the past conditions how we act - or do not act - to shape the future.

The first tendency has been to blur the picture of human beings as responsible, consequential actors in history. Marx argued that the unfolding of history is governed by vast impersonal forces obeying iron laws of social development impervious to, and largely controlling, the volitions of individuals.

Darwin, presenting the human species as continuous with the slime from which the species has only recently crept, seemed to embed mankind in the necessities of nature. Freud said the individual has uncharted depths with turbulences that the individual, whose "self" is a kind of fractious committee, cannot master.

The second tendency is a consequence of the first, of postulating that individuals are inconsequential.

It is a degenerate democratic impulse in the historians' craft - "history from the bottom up" or "history with the politics left out." All "elitist" history that stresses great individuals and events-political, military, diplomatic, intellectual - supposedly insults common people.

The corrective - call it "affirmative-action history" - allots at least as much attention to the ordinary activities of the many as to the extraordinary activities of the few.

The trouble is, this involves painting mankind's story without the bright primary colors of personal greatness, which has two bad consequences. Pastel history teaches that mastery of events is a chimera, so why bother with politics?

And it makes the idea of "leadership" suspect, so who cares about the character and caliber of leaders? The salutary effect of MHQ's "what if" exercises is a keener appreciation of the huge difference that choices and fortuities make in the destinies of nations.

Perhaps the pleasure of that appreciation helps explain the astonishing popularity of the movie "Titanic." The story is dramatic and this is a three-hanky movie, but among people who have been plied with philosophies denigrating the role of choice and chance in the human story, the story of the Titanic has more than merely tragic resonance.

The sinking of the "unsinkable" ship on its maiden voyage, a ship with a social order replicating society's classes, quickly became a metaphor for the fragility of civilization, and a rebuke to technological and other hubris: So, mankind, you really thought you could iron the future flat, removing risk and the need to pay attention to what might be in the fog dead ahead?

Which is the moral of history's many crucial "might have beens": Pay attention.

Washington Post Writers Group