One of the best books I’ve ever read is a non-fiction piece titled Dreadnought: Britain, Germany, and the Coming of the Great War. The author, Robert K. Massie, is also known for writing the fabulous biographies Nicholas and Alexandra and “Peter the Great: His Life and World”. The first book of Massie’s that I read, Peter the Great, was back during high school and I instantly fell in love with his examination of the great historical movements. Massie is able to capture moments in time and describe them in the context of the great history and great personality v. humanity and “fate” in the Greek sense. Brilliant mortals in positions of great power and influence but struggling with the concept of control against the winds and tides of history.
And, really, that’s the ultimate question: Who is in control? On the one hand, we come to understand the historical and larger than life personalities of Churchill, Peter the Great, Bismark, and Fisher. But on the other hand, we also come to learn their very human and very frail aspects as well. If these people are nothing more than, well, people, then how much control do they really have over bringing Russia into the West, or over the events that lead us into the first World War and then set the stage for the second? Who leads? Who is being led? Is it a matter of these individuals doing the best they can, but, ultimately, wandering blindly and hoping for the best? How is it possible to foresee the consequences of our decisions for any more than a couple of weeks, at best? Without pure communication and understanding, without pure empathy, how can we truly understand our competition or our foes or even our friends? How can the leaders, the “great” ones, be great if they are just as incapable of seeing the future or seeing each other as anyone else?
Is control a fiction that we make ourselves believe in in order to make sense of the world or is the truth that we are all led around by events much greater than us that we cannot possibly begin to understand until 40 years after the fact?
That very tension is why I love history so much. Stories of great, well-spoken, decisive, and brilliant men and women caught up in events far greater than they will ever know. Stories of individuals struggling to capture some sense of control over the blinding tempest that is life and the human condition en masse. Some of my favorite shows on television: Rome, The West Wing, HBO’s John Adams, and the Tudors are all shows about individuals trying to steer their way through calamity and crisis, but also having little to no idea how monumental their smallest decisions and actions are going to have on the characters and directions of their countries, or of western civilization itself. (Imagine, for dramatic purposes, if the show “Rome” had Titus Pullo not get into the fight that prevented the veto to be recorded in the Senate. Imagine had Thomas More convinced Henry VII otherwise. Imagine if Bismark hadn’t been able to convince the generals not to march to Vienna.)
In the end, history is the story of human beings doing – for the most part – the best that they can under a severe limitation of information and clarity. We have no idea what the consequences of our actions, our words, or our decisions are…not really. Not in the long run. There are so many external, and internal, factors that we have so little control over…it’s a chaos theory that we all live through. Small variations of the daily, or historical, initial condition and there are exponential variations in the long term behavior of the system.
A butterfly flaps its wings in Turkey and the Roman Empire is born, but the glory — or the tragedy of it — is that we still strive to understand. The human condition is such that, even during the darkest times, we still stand up and attempt to understand. We still stand up and face the Moirae and the tempest. We still stand.