Mastering The Tides Of The World

I've written before of some of the unexpected lessons and pleasures of writing history related posts.  Now that I've been at this for a few years it is not uncommon to see connections between posts I wrote at different times, even though I failed to see those connections at the time.  A case in point is about contingency in history and specifically the inability of humans to predict the long-term impacts of our actions and how they may appear successful, unsuccessful, conscientious, or reckless, depending on when they are evaluated.  This post revisits and recombines a couple of earlier pieces.

In Federalist 1, Alexander Hamilton wrote:

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. 

If there be any truth in the remark, the crisis at which we are arrived may with propriety be regarded as the era in which that decision is to be made; and a wrong election of the part we shall act may, in this view, deserve to be considered as the general misfortune of mankind.

But it is often difficult to determine what the right decision or wrong election may be, or at least to accurately predict the consequences.  In his remarkable eulogy for Neville Chamberlain in November 1940, Winston Churchill eloquently (and graciously, considering how shabbily Chamberlain treated him before he became Prime Minister) expressed this uncertainty:

It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values. History with its flickering lamp stumbles along the trail of the past, trying to reconstruct its scenes, to revive its echoes, and kindle with pale gleams the passion of former days. What is the worth of all this? The only guide to a man is his conscience; the only shield to his memory is the rectitude and sincerity of his actions. It is very imprudent to walk through life without this shield, because we are so often mocked by the failure of our hopes and the upsetting of our calculations; but with this shield, however the fates may play, we march always in the ranks of honour.  

In JRR Tolkien's The Return of the King, a similar sentiment is expressed in the words of Gandalf at the Council of Gondor during the great debate on how to best resist Sauron:

Other evils there are that may come . . . Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till.  What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.

Churchill and Tolkien do have a difference in their emphasis.  For Churchill it can be difficult to determine how a decision may play out even in the immediate future, with rectitude and sincerity our only anchor in this process.  Tolkien seems to be saying we can know the right decision to be made now, and it is a decision that must be made, but how it plays out in the longer-term will be determined by others.  The similarities and differences may derive from their personal experiences and personalities.  Churchill, born in 1874 and Tolkien, born in 1892, both served in the Western Front trenches in France but while Churchill's views were rooted in his study of history, his upper-class upbringing and sense of Englishness, Tolkien's love of Nordic folklore, along with his committed Christianity, gave him a different perspective.

Iain Pears' 2002 novel, The Dream of Scipio, confronts us directly with both the need to make decisions and the uncertainty and consequences of those decisions.  The Dream of Scipio is unsettling from its opening passage, "Julien Barneuve died at 3:28 on the afternoon of August 18, 1943.  It had taken him twenty-three minutes exactly to die, the time between the fire starting and his last breath being sucked into his scorched lungs.  He had not known his life was going to end that day, although he suspected it might happen", until its terse and chilling closing paragraph.

Scipio is an inverted version of the author's best selling novel, An Instance Of The Fingerpost (1997), concerning a curious series of events taking place in and around Oxford in mid-17th century England, as told in parallel narratives by four participants.  Like Fingerpost, Scipio is set in and around a specific geography, in this case the Avignon region of southern France, but unlike the earlier story it is set in three different time periods over a 1500 year period.  While Fingerpost concerns itself about the same events seen from multiple perspectives, Scipio tells of different events that all raise the same questions about how one should act and make choices in life.  The narrative in Fingerpost is more straightforward, even with the variations in the tale, but is more oblique in its approach to the larger questions it raises, questions that are front and center throughout Scipio, which employs an intertwined narrative moving back and forth across its three time periods.

The earliest historical setting of Scipio is the crumbling Roman province of southern Gaul around 475 AD.  Manlius Hippomanes is a member of the dwindling elite of wealthy Romano-Gallic aristocrats, educated in classical philosophy and literature in a world that no longer has use for either, and from which the last of the Roman Legions who protected them disappeared a decade before.  While the Goths approach from the west and the Burgundians hover threateningly to the north some of his compatriots dream of being rescued by a renewed Roman Empire and others, like the real-life Sidonius Apollinaris, actively resist, Manlius believes himself more practical minded and steers a course designed to save what he believes can be saved and to do whatever must be done to achieve that goal, even at a high cost.

The second story tells the tale of Olivier de Noyen, an aspiring poet and courtier of Cardinal Ceccani, a real historical figure, in the Papal Court at Avignon as the Black Death approaches and then engulfs the city during the middle of the 14th century.  His role as courtier to a Cardinal involves him in the complicated plotting over whether the Papacy should stay in Avignon or return to Rome and leads to an encounter with another historical figure, the rabbi Gersonides, eventually forcing him into choosing what, and whom, to save and to betray.  De Noyen is also a collector of ancient manuscripts and discovers a copy of The Dream Of Scipio, a puzzling tract written by Manlius, who by this time is considered a saint by the Catholic Church. 

The final setting is Vichy France during WWII, and centers on Julien Barneuve, a scholar and intellectual, emotionally numbed by his experience in the trenches during the prior war.  When someone observes that he is sitting in a library while the world burns he replies:

The world did burn.  I was at the cremation.  And it would have been better if I had stayed in a library.  One person, at least, would be alive now who is dead, because I wouldn't have been there to bayonet him.

With the defeat of France in 1940, Julien accepts an appointment from a friend as a minor functionary in the Vichy regime, a position from which he believes he may be able to save as much as possible from the barbarian Nazis.  At the same time he is studying de Noyen's poetry and through him Manlius' Dream.  Julien, after rediscovering hope through reuniting with his long elusive lover, realizes it requires he make choices between Vichy, the Resistance, and the actions needed to protect his love, even as it dawns on him that he has fatally misread both de Noyen and Manlius.
(Prisoners taken by Vichy militia)

All three protagonists live in dark times of crisis for civilization; the end of the classical era amidst rampaging barbarians; the advent of the Black Death which may kill all; and the seeming triumph of the Nazis.  All are confronted with decisions about what is worth saving and face conflicts between friendship and loyalty.  Each makes compromises to try to preserve something they believe is of even more value.  Terrible consequences follow each decision, some recognized beforehand, some unanticipated.  The Dream of Scipio asks should we decide how to make a decision based upon its perceived consequences or are there values more important regardless of consequences since we cannot know in advance what those consequences may really be.  It asks, what is civilization?  How do we preserve it?  What if we are mistaken about what civilization consists of?  What if, in saving civilization from barbarians, we become barbarians ourselves? It asks, but does not answer. Or does it?  As Pears wrote elsewhere:

Every cataclysm is welcomed by somebody; there is always someone to rejoice at disaster and see in it the prospect of a new beginning and a better world.  Equally, however much an act of God, there is always someone ready to take responsibility for any event or, failing that, to have blame thrust upon them.

In trying to answer these questions characters commit what they know to be terrible acts in order to preserve what they believe is best in the world, while others commit acts that have horrible consequences they did not intend. 

Pears does not betray to the reader his own views, wanting us to constantly feel uneasy and on guard.  Julien's closest friends are Bernard, a skeptic, atheist, and man of the left who ends up with the Resistance, and Marcel, religious, and a man of the right who offers his friend a job with Vichy.  Pears deliberately makes it difficult for us to clearly sympathize with either and disrupts any preconceived notions we may have.  Julien recalls an incident when, as children, Marcel threw a stone, breaking a church window, a deed for which Bernard takes the blame:

This was the event Bernard had referred to, one of those moments of childhood from which the whole of adult life can be projected.  Julien, nervous, innocent, but standing fast.  The insouciant Bernard, making the grand gesture in the name both of friendship and of self-aggrandizement, his actions extravagant but generous.  And Marcel, a little cowardly and frightened, afraid of authority, not wishing to take on the ownership of his deeds, content for others to be punished instead of him.  The resister, the collaborator, and the vacillating intellectual . . . 

Except that Julien remembered it like that only because Bernard retold the story many years later and brought it back to his mind.  Imposed his narrative on what had become the faintest of recollections; created memories by his skill as a raconteur  . . . 

But, on a few occasions, he was almost certain he remembered that it was Bernard who had thrown the stone and run away, and Marcel who had been beaten.

In this passage, Pears also touches on the issue raised in Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty - how do we come to know what we know?  When are the stories we tell ourselves over and over again about ourselves and others just stories rather than memories?  How much does memory influence the answers to the questions Pears poses the reader?

For readers who wish to delve deeper there is a further layer of interpretation. While the fictional Manlius never wrote a book titled The Dream of Scipio, Somnium Scipionis (Dream of Scipio) is a famous piece by the 1st century BC Roman writer and politician, Cicero, which tells of the dream of Scipio Aemilianus (the destroyer of Carthage in 146 BC), in which his grandfather Scipio Africanus (who defeated Carthage to end the Second Punic War in 201 BC) appears and instructs his grandson on what makes a good Roman citizen while at the same time pointing out the relative insignificance of Rome in the scheme of the cosmos and discussing virtue from a Stoic perspective. In the novel, Olivier de Noyen initially thinks that what he has found is just another copy of this work before realizing it was composed by Manlius.  In turn, Cicero's work was the subject of a 5th century AD commentary by a Roman aristocrat, Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius, a contemporary of the fictional Manlius, and both Cicero's original and Marcobius's work have prompted philosophical examination over the centuries.

Cicero himself was caught in the same dilemma presented in the novel.  Born in 106 BC, Cicero was one of the "new men" who rose to prominence in the last years of the Roman Republic.  Devoted to the preservation of the Republic, he opposed the ambitions of Julius Caesar, after earlier supporting him, and approved, after the fact, of his assassination, an act which, in retrospect, doomed the Republic he loved.  When Octavian, Caesar's 19-year old nephew, and adopted heir, showed up in Rome in the aftermath of Caesar's death, Cicero felt confident he could manipulate the young man, using him as a tool to restore the Republic, but the calculating Octavian ultimately allied himself with Marc Anthony, an enemy of Cicero, and together they put an end to Cicero's plan.  As a price for their alliance, Octavian agreed to Anthony's demand that Cicero die.  Eighteen months after Caesar's death, Cicero's hands and head were nailed to the Rostrum in the Roman Forum.  The Republic and Cicero were dead.