Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (5 page)

It would be wrong, however, to exaggerate the determinism of ecclesiastical history. In Augustine’s
The City of God
, God is not crudely biased in favour of Christians, rewarding them and punishing the wicked; for the good as much as the wicked have been contaminated by original sin. Augustine’s God is omnipotent and omniscient, but He has given men free will - albeit a will which has been weakened by original sin and is therefore biased towards evil. In theological terms, this put Augustine somewhere between the absolute fatalism of Manichaeism, which denied the existence of free will, and the Pelagian view that free will could not be compromised by the imperfection of original sin. In historical terms, it allowed him to combine the Judaeo-Christian idea of a preordained divine plan with a relatively autonomous portrayal of human agency - a distinct refinement of earlier Greek and Roman formulations.

From a practical point of view, this provided a relatively flexible framework within which to write Christian history. Indeed, much the same flexibility can still be found more than a millennium later in Bossuet’s
Discourse on Universal History
(1681). As with Augustine, secondary causes appear to have some autonomy, despite the overarching theme of divine intention:

Of course, the line from Augustine to Bossuet was anything but straight. During the Renaissance, for example, there had been something of a revival of the original classical conception of the relationship between divine purpose and human freedom of action. In Machiavelli’s historical writing,
Fortuna
is the ultimate arbiter of the individual’s destiny - though a capricious, feminine arbiter who can be wooed by the ‘virtuous’ man. By contrast, in Vico’s essentially cyclical model of ’the ideal eternal history’ (composed of successive divine, heroic and civil periods), the role of Providence is distinctly Augustinian. Free will is:

Vico’s
New Science
was therefore ‘a rational civil theology of divine providence ... a demonstration, so to speak, of the historical fact of providence, for it must be a history of the forms of order which, without human discernment or intent, and often against the designs of men, providence has given to this great city of the human race’.
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There is a close parallel between Vico’s approach and that of Arnold Toynbee, certainly the most ambitious of twentieth-century Christian historians, who retained a firm belief in ‘free will’ despite subscribing to a similar - and, to some critics, fundamentally deterministic - cyclical theory about the rise and fall of what he called ‘civilisations.’
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Of course, there was always a more strongly deterministic tendency (of which Augustine had been well aware) within Christian theology. It was a logical enough conclusion to draw from the fact of God’s omniscience that He had already determined upon whom to bestow his grace. This raised a problem, however, which first surfaced in the predestinarian controversy of the ninth century. If God had predestined some for salvation, according to Godescalc of Orbais, he must also have predestined others to damnation; it was logically incorrect to speak of Christ dying for this second group, as on their account he would have died in vain. This doctrine of ‘double predestination’ persisted in the teaching of medieval theologians like Gregory of Rimini and Hugolino of Orvieto and resurfaced again in Calvin’s
Institutes
(though it was actually Calvin’s followers like Theodore Beza who elevated predestination to the position of a central Calvinist principle). Yet once again it would be misleading to equate Calvinist predestinarianism with historical determinism. For the theologians’ arguments about predestination were largely concerned with the afterlife, and did not have any very clear implications for human affairs of the world.

In short, ideas of divine intervention in history circumscribed, but did not eliminate, the idea that individuals have some freedom to choose between possible courses of action. In that sense, neither classical nor Judaeo-Christian theology necessarily precluded a counterfactual approach to historical questions - though clearly the notion of an ultimate divine purpose did not encourage such an approach either. If there is a connection from theology to fully fledged historical determinism, it must therefore be an indirect one, mediated by the self-consciously rationalistic philosophies of the eighteenth century. That century is often associated with ‘secularisation’ and the decline of religion relative to science. But in historiography, as in so much of the ‘Enlightenment’, this distinction is less clear-cut than at first appears. Much Enlightenment thought, as Butterfield has said, was merely ‘lapsed Christianity’, with ‘Nature’, ’Reason’ and other nebulous entities simply taking the place of God. Doctrines of progress were clearly secularised adaptations of Christian doctrine, although supposedly based on empirical foundation. The difference was that these new doctrines were often significantly more rigid in their determinism than the religions from which they were descended.

Newton’s ‘revelation’ of gravity and three laws of motion marked the birth of a truly deterministic conception of the universe. After Newton, it seemed self-evident (as Hume put it) that ‘every object is determin’d by absolute fate to a certain degree and direction of its motion.... The actions, therefore, of matter are to be regarded as instances of necessary actions.’ Whether one chose to see these laws as divinely ordained or not was, as it still is, to some extent a question of semantics. Hume invoked ‘abolute fate’. Leibniz put it differently: ‘As God calculates, so the world is made.‘ The important point is that science appeared to have eliminated contingency from the physical world. In particular, Leibniz’s emphasis on the ‘complex attributes’ of all phenomena - the interrelatedness of everything - seemed to imply the unalterable nature of the past, present and future (save in other, imaginary worlds). From this it was but a short step to the rigid determinism of Laplace, in whose conception the universe could ‘only do one thing’:

The only limit to this kind of determinism was the possibility raised by Descartes and others that thought and matter were distinct substances, only the latter of which was subject to deterministic laws. A modified version of this distinction can be found in the work of Laplace’s contemporary Bichat, who insisted that determinism only really applied to inorganic entities, whereas organic entities ‘defy every kind of calculation ...; it is impossible to foresee, predict, or calculate, anything with regard to their phenomena’.
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However, this kind of qualification could be countered in one of two ways.

The first was simply to explain human behaviour in materialistic terms. Such arguments had been attempted before. Hippo-crates, for example, had explained ‘the deficiency of spirit and courage observable in the human inhabitants of Asia‘ with reference to ’the low margin of seasonal variability in the temperature of that continent’. In addition, he cited ‘the factor of institutions’ - specifically, the debilitating effect of despotic rule - in his explanation of Oriental pusillanimity.
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Precisely these kinds of explanation were taken up and developed by French Enlightenment writers like Condorcet and Montesquieu, whose
Spirit of the Laws
related social, cultural and political differences to climatic and other natural factors. Montesquieu gave characteristic expression to the new confidence of such materialistic theories: ‘If a particular cause like the accidental result of a battle has ruined a state, there was a general cause which made the downfall of this state ensue from a single battle.’ For: ‘Blind fate has [not] produced all the effects which we see in the world.’ In Britain, Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations
laid the foundation for a strictly economic analysis of society which implied a cyclical historical process. Here too, it was not ‘blind fate’ but an ‘Invisible Hand’ which led individuals to act, unwittingly, in the common interest even while pursuing their own selfish ends.

A similar shift towards determinism occurred in German philosophy, though it took a very different form. Like Descartes, Kant left some room for human autonomy in his philosophy. But this was only in an unknowable parallel universe of ‘noumena’. In the material world, he insisted, ‘the manifestations of the will in human actions are determined, like all other external events, by universal natural laws’:

In his
Idea for a Universal History
, Kant spelt out the task for the new historical philosophy: ‘To attempt to discover a
purpose in nature
behind this senseless course of events, and to decide whether it is after all possible to formulate in terms of a definite plan of nature a history of creatures who act without a plan of their own.’
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It was Hegel, more than any other German philosopher, who rose to this challenge. For Hegel as for Kant, ‘human arbitrariness and even external necessity’ had to be subordinated to ‘a higher necessity’. ‘The sole aim of philosophical inquiry,’ as he put it in the second draft of his ‘Philosophical History of the World‘’, was to eliminate the contingent.... In history, we must look for a general design, the ultimate end of the world. We must bring into history the belief and conviction that the realm of the will is not at the mercy of contingency.‘ However, Hegel’s ‘higher necessity’ was not material but supernatural - indeed, in many ways it closely resembled the traditional Christian God, most obviously when he spoke of ‘an eternal justice and love, the absolute and ultimate end [of] which is truth in and for itself’. Hegel just happened to call his God ‘Reason’. Thus his basic ‘presupposition’ was ‘the idea that reason governs the world and that history therefore is a rational process’:

This somewhat circular argumentation was the second possible way of dealing with the Cartesian claim that determinism did not apply to the non-material world. Hegel had no desire to give precedence to materialism: ‘The spirit and the course of its development are the true substance of history,’ he maintained; and the role of ‘physical nature’ was emphatically subordinate to the role of ‘the spirit’. But ‘the spirit’, he argued, was just as subject to deterministic forces as physical nature.

What were these forces? Hegel equated what he called ‘the spirit’ with ‘the idea of human freedom’, suggesting that the historical process could be understood as the attainment of self-knowledge by this idea of freedom through a succession of ‘world spirits’. Adapting the Socratic form of philosophical dialogue, he posited the existence of a dichotomy within (to take the example which most concerned him) the national spirit, between the essential and the real, or the universal and the particular. It was the dialectical relationship between these which propelled history onwards and upwards in what has been likened to a dialectical waltz - thesis, antithesis, synthesis. But this was a waltz, Fred Astaire style, up a stairway. ‘The development, progress and ascent of the spirit towards a higher concept of itself ... is accomplished by the debasement, fragmentation and destruction of the preceding mode of reality.... The universal arises out of the particular and determinate and its negation.... All this takes place automatically.’

The implications of Hegel’s model were in many ways more radical than those of any contemporary materialist theory of history. In his contradiction-driven scheme of things, the individual’s aspirations and fate counted for nothing: they were ‘a matter of indifference to world history, which uses individuals only as instruments to further its own progress’. No matter what injustice might befall individuals, ‘philosophy should help us to understand that the actual world is as it ought to be’. For ‘the actions of human beings in the history of the world produce an effect altogether different from what they themselves intend’ and ‘the worth of individuals is measured by the extent to which they reflect and represent the national spirit’. Hence ‘the great individuals of world history ... are those who seize upon [the] higher universal and make it their own end’. Morality was therefore simply beside the point: ‘World history moves on a higher plane than that to which morality properly belongs.’ And, of course, ‘the concrete manifestation’ of ‘the unity of the subjective will and the universal’ - ‘the totality of ethical life and the realisation of freedom’ - was that fetish-object of Hegel’s generation: the (Prussian) state.
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