People have a sense or some indication or belief in what we might call the pulse of history in that they try, inevitably, to outguess the future, whether that means who will win a Presidential election or whether the animals in the wild will come out and harass the cavemen during a dry season. This sense or practical understanding is described in metaphors because the pulse of history is not really a sine curve by which to follow a human heart but is, to use another metaphor, a way history will jump, and it is often described in literary terms, as when Marx said that history comes first as tragedy and then by farce and that we can suggest that Nixon was a tragic figure and that Trump is a farcical one, even if much more dangerous. These perceptions are not quite accurate, the second one only vaguely parallel to the other incident, but giving the idea of a theme and variation. My mother knew nothing of the theory of probability, but advised me that the card I needed would turn up in a rummy deck especially when the deck was getting depleted. Be patient, she warned. She was also a good poker player. But let us not consider the clear comparison between the mathematical rules of probability in contrast to intuition. Think of real life ways in which people try to grasp how things will turn out and see how those insights get formalized into scientific like procedures, the model of natural science overshadowing how it is that people actually do what seems reasonable. Here are three examples.
The attempt to guess the future is easiest to do with politics because everyone is familiar enough with the political figures and the dynamics of American politics to take an educated guess as to what will happen, whether history will zig or zag, that next event plausible even if surprising and also following with some resemblance to some prior event. Garland may decide to indict ex-President Trump. That would raise political drama to an unprecedented height and back to when some people thought Robert E. Lee should be executed for treason. There are reasons to do so which seem to me compelling and even satisfying in the sense that it would provide a “just” result, even if I want him disgraced rather than in jail He did, after all, try to overthrow the government and Trump’s more gullible followers are now serving time in jail. Prosecute the ringleader rather than the underlings. That scenario, in fact, might seem the only one possible, and that is the view of Larry Tribe, the reigning expert on Constitutional law. Moreover, people bend the story so that it will sort of provide a happy ending, as some would think if Trump were tried but found not guilty, which some feared would happen if Robert E. Lee was tried in a Virginia jurisdiction. But some people can stretch to another scenario which is also plausible but very different and would not be scandalous, which is what Tribe would think if Trump were not indicted.. Garland could decide that the evidence of Trump intent is less clear and so he might get off and so the charge of insurrection would be dismissed, though not the purloining of the secret documents into Mar A Lago. or following Gerald Ford concerning Nixon, Garland might decide that indicting an ex-President is so fraught that he will not charge him with anything.Let us put the unpleasantness past us. That can also seem a pleasant outcome.
I thought of a third possibility while awaiting these developments. Garland could publish the grounds of indicting Trump and then demur from indicting him. That would be unprecedented and contrary to Justice Department policy which makes no statements unless there is an indictment so that the accused has a way to answer the charge in court. Otherwise, the government is condemning a person without a trial. But these are unprecedented times and maybe the public should know what the Justice Department knows, though the Jan. 6th Committee layed that out rather well. There is some precedence in bending judicial procedure. Judge Anthony Sirica pressed the Watergate defendants to come more clean than they wanted to so he didn’t throw the book at them even though they had pleaded guIlty but stayed mum and that was a bit of leveraging so as to get political information rather than just deal with the charges before them, I will let Garland, who is a seasoned, very bright and very conscientious man, to make the decision about the three scenarios and we will see how it plays out.
There is also a constraint in what people might imagine. The scenarios outlined are legal and so follow the procedures of the law, which have to do with edicts established at a time to apply at times in the future and so provided to cover practices over time as to whether to incarcerate people or give parking tickets or to legitimately elect a President and so are different from natural laws which are ones without exception and have been “legislated” by nature. So the scenarios include what might or might not happen under law when there are so many other considerations to fill out a story. Maybe Trump will get sick and so out of combat, or new revelations more dastardly than the ones already uncovered and so heap him with such opprobrium that a trial is required. Another and perhaps a more important context to change the scenarios concerning what Garland will do is public opinion. Garland may make an assessment that Trump fever is waning and so people will not be all that upset if he is indicted or maybe that it is no longer necessary to do so because he is no longer a present danger. There are any number of contextual factors. Maybe there will be tactical nukes aimed at Ukraine and everybody is preoccupied with that rather than the not so petty crimes of Trump. Maybe the issues on the border can be resolved by a grand coalition that protects Hispanic immigrants which Democrats want to protect and Republicans wake up to the fact that supporting Hispanics could help them become a majority party. I doubt that anyone will invent or enact a fourth scenario, but you never know. History is clever.
How do you evaluate these potential influences on alternative scenarios? A formalized version of taking such matters into account consists of looking at available distributions of cases in a population as when a statistician shows that one demographic figure or another has more weight in deciding that customers will buy one car brand rather than another. In that case, statisticians use regression analysis to weigh alternative scenarios while in real life people just guess or presume whether an eventuality is more or less likely, death of an actor in the political drama always a possibility though unlikely, though voters having to think now about whether a Biden election is worth it if he dies or is incapacitated in his second term, who to be considered vice-president a more important role than is usually the case. At any event, people, in their ordinary and actual reasoning, scurry around to reimagine what seems a plausible scenario without benefit of mathematics, trusting to their senses of things rather than to proofs that seem concocted and bundling up presumptions about what make up their mathematical models.
There is a very different form of actual reasoning that differs very much from the way in which the scenario approach is used in explaining politics and large scale social trends. That is used in literature and the humanities. Begin with something concrete. I regularly read “The New York Review of Books” to find out what new topics are taken up or else to hear what old arguments are revived, as noticed, for example, where there are still disputes about whether Pope Pius XII did enough to oppose Hitler, an issue I thought settled in that he might have done more without risking the Germans taking over Vatican City. One thing I notice, characteristic of literary or humanistic thinking, is that I am pleasantly surprised at how many of the writers in the journal are still familiar to me, still putting out their very credible work, I read an article by Stephan Greenblatt, still the dean of Elizabethan literature, talking with great detail about Elizabeth I, and Michael Tomasky looking at the ins and outs of contemporary politics. So what I do is name figures with whom I am familiar and generalize, in this case, that there are old ones who are still goodies. That is, in fact, the way humanists proceed. They become familiar with the literary canon (and Greenblatt extends that to art objects and history) the more successful ones digging more deeply into the persons and their works and contexts to the point that Frank Kermode seems to have mastered minor plays in any number of periods, while someone like me has skinned the surface by reading only the standard ones required in graduate school. And what literary studies do as a method is to select and compare some of these works and people, scanning across the ages and the people of which they feel comfortable to find the comparisons that seem apt or illuminating. A teacher of mine compared Shakespeare to a Greek tragedy and was depthful enough to make his reputation. The same process occurs when I note that film noir movies are not mostly set at night, which they are, but also take advantage of the ability to film outdoors so that you get streets and towns and not just gin dives. Did those things illuminate the melodramatic plots and make them more realistic than would seem earned by their excessive emotions and plots? Well, “Double Indemnity'' doesn't use much exteriors in order to make Fred MacMurray seem unnerved by his passion for a woman, but then again Billy Wilder was always more about plot and character rather than setting, and so on and so on comparing aspects of different works intermingled with deeper probings into the particular work, as that Edward G. Robinson feels serene because he is not overcome by passion or maybe had just channeled it. Endless queries; endless debates.
This approach remains true even if in this generation critics look at themes, like chance or fate, and pick other than canonical literature as the grist for their mills. They are just making their own canons as if anything is literature if it is treated as literature and that the point of the exercise is to finding something true about the wo0rld rather than the work and works to be contemplated so that the literature of post colonial literature reveals what has happened to Africa in the past fifty years rather than what people think about that, deepening what remains is cultural or economic exploitation or whatever. I consult an outlier, Ishiguro’s “A Pale View of Hills” to suggest that the occupation of Japan by the United States revealed fissures in Japanese society that were only made more apparent by occupation and by the trauma of war. But the Germans rebuilt themselves quickly and the scars on Japan persisted even if that nation also rebounded quickly economically. A puzzle for the humanistic approach. The thing about this humanistic approach is that there are so many items available for comparisons that any number of them will serve and so the critic will find available for comparison some work or person recently come to attention and, bingo, that is the right comparison. I read Ishiguro’s first novel recently and there it is to compare to post-colonial literature rather than use old comparisons as to “The Heart of Darkness” or “Things Fall Apart”. The disadvantage is that literary studies suggest rather than prove their findings, suggesting that proof is an outrageous assertion rather than a modest proposal.
There is a third distinctive form of actual reasoning that applies to everyday life of personal interaction rather than the first two practices which deal with the wide world of politics and culture. That is to reduce what happens in the mundane to big and inclusive issues of ideology and custom, the first of which develops moral systems, such as Christianity or Kantianism, both of which fall on G. E. Moore’s objection that you still need a reason to be moral rather than a system which calculates what is correct rather than sensed as moral. Or is reduced to whatever for the moment that seems compelling, like a norm or a fashion, which can go away in a moment even though, for that moment, it seems to bind people for forever, such as whether homosexuals or mixed race people can marry. An alternative theory of everyday life, which does make assumptions but also engages in reasoning, is provided by consulting designations that allow for inferences, entailments, circumstances and intuitions about those designations. A person may be tall enough to be too tall to fit comfortably into an airplane seat. A person who has many lovers is presumed to be more savvy about sex than a singly wed person. Blondes or any girls may just want to have fun. Professors are glib and if they are not are thought not up to the job.
Here is a personal example that makes this method of reasoning clear. I was meeting a new primary care physician and so was telling her something about my life. I said that my wife of some fifty years had died recently and that I should not blame her because she had been a lifelong heavy smoker and so had left me alone when she got lung cancer. The doctor said that your wife was dead now and you could blame her for anything you cared for because it wouldn’t hurt her feelings. I was taken aback by that because my wife’s presence for me was still vivid and I heard in my mind’s voice, what she might have said about something that occurred after she died. But this was an insight even if I prefer to keep the voice alive and not blame people who are no longer alive. What the doctor was doing was to invoke the idea that the dead are no longer conscious and so you can deal with that, including to blame them for whatever occurs to you, as how she or I mishandled older relatives when the two of us got married rather than asserting our own responsibility for events long past.
Another deceased spouse story illuminates how moral;ity has to do with assigning one or another designation as primary. When my wife was three years old, or so she was told, she said she wanted a Christmas tree, and her mother went to her own mother, who had left Odessa to land in a while in a cold water flat in the lower east side, where they bathed in the kitchen, whether it was alright to have Christmas. Jane's grandmother said that this was America and so she could do whatever she wanted. So Jane had a Christmas tree every year for close to seventy years until she got sick. A Christian friend comforted me by saying everybody, not just Jewish me, had trouble constructing and decorating the lights on my Christmas tree. everybody did. Not all my Jewish friends on the West Side approved. One close friend, also now deceased and whose memory I cherish because she was outspoken and from the heart, said it was all right to be nothing, but to have a Christmas tree was a betrayal of Judaism. I explained to no avail that Christmas was an American celebration of material abundance as is made clear every day during the romcoms this past December when Santas were everywhere while couples met cute. The argument between us was not really an argument. My friend had identified the object of a Christmas tree with Christianity while I had not, or maybe I was beyond caring about religious identification, and there was nothing else to say about it.
The truth of the matter about how people engage in moral reasoning, the factual truth, is that both professional and laic people do not live up to a supposed Platonic ideal that people engage in one another’s thoughts, modifying their own by somehow incorporating some feature or other into their own point of view. (I say that this Platonic ideal is “supposed” because so many of the dialogues show how resistant people are to modifying their own point of view and wind up rejecting any alternative.) What peop[le do instead is to cling to some designation of some object in question and disregard the alternative. That is what happened in two of the great debates of the last hundred years: racial integration and abortion. Martin Luther King, Jr. identified with the entity, the Black person, and insisted that they were human and therefore entitled to all the other attributes of being human, which included voting and being able to sit at the lunch counter in Woolworth’s. It was the white people, like Bull Conners, who were brutal while the well dressed Black protesters were well mannered. The segregationists were at a disadvantage because few forthrightly said Blacks were inherently inferior, but some were willing to say that change should be slower, more time needed until blacks, presumably, had become well enough educated and socially well grounded to take part in desegregated society. The resolution did not consist of a meeting of minds, an integration of their two points of view, but the abandonment of the segregationist position because it seemed beyond reason, a matter of tastelessness to make fun of black inferiority, perhaps still mumbled in private, but disgraceful rather than just submerged and adjusted to the now major belief even if there is an undercurrent whereby people like Sen. Ron Johnson who says he is more comfortable with Jan 6th rioters than ANTIFA people who weren’t there at the Capitol.
The abortion debate even more starkly shows how a so-called debate is one which consists of the two sides arguing past one another rather than answering one another. The entity described by anti-abortion or “pro-life” advocates is the foetus and the designation to ask about it is when it begins and so conclude that it begins at conception and some pro-life people will alter that for cases of rape and incest even though a strict reading of conception being the outset of life would require no exceptions. So some circumstances do make a difference on whether a birth should be allowed to mature until term, which breaks the logical point that a zygote once created has as many rights as any other human being. On the other hand, pro-abortionists do not deal with the state of the fetus. They think of the woman and the description that women are not prisoners to their biology but can shape their histories however they choose depending on their own circumstances, such as poverty or age or just not wanting a child to take care of. Philippa Foote argued more than half a century ago that carrying a child was like a woman waking up in a hospital being plugged into a patient who needed that sustenance to live and required to continue to provide that service for nine months. That, Foote thought, was obviously wrong, though one could argue it was obviously humane that people should help patients in need so long as they volunteered or were legitimately drafted into that service. In both cases, the two sides did not consult or adopt to the other side except so as not to appear hardhearted, which was an excuse rather than a concession of thought.
Is there any way to find a better way to assess the pulse of history than invoke scenarios more or less plausible or by canvassing canonical literatures or by designating qualities of entities? One was developed in the late Eighteenth Century. In Adam Smith and in Thomas Malthus. That was to apply what was known about natural science to social life. Formulas could develop about how social life worked though it still remains a mystery as to what happens when the predictions go wrong. Does that mean the laws of economics have been faulty or is it that people were dunces enough not to follow the self interest that would lead trade to be advantageous to the parties? As of late, even economists are dubious. Paul Krugman has a hunch that inflation is transitional rather than baked in but his formulas aren’t certain and so his forecasts are like studying entrails and with the telltale sign of shamanism by not knowing the time parameters as to when things will work as the formulas suggest. Will inflation fall in three or six months or not for a longer while? The economists, these days, can’t say.
Sociology, predicted as a science that could offer formulas that offered predictions, similarly faltered. Lipset showed how upward mobility worked by applying the relative rates of mobility for different class groups over generations, but what applied in the Forties don’t work today because the occupational categories have changed and as does what upward mobility means, given that becoming a boutique baker is the ambition of a college educated person who know sees himself as an artist. Moreover, many so called iron laws of politics are just circumstantial rather than essential. Pundits unl 2022 invoked the idea that overwhelmingly midterms in a first term Presidency vastly favored the p[arty out of office, at least since 1934. But it didn’t happen in 2022. Did that mean there were other factors at work that overwhelmed the rule, such as “democracy” being on the ballot, or was it that the theory only worked as a set of occurrences rather than as the expression of underlying forces? Did people not obey their rule or was their rule just a set of instances? The same problem arises for those who said that armament races result in war. It seemed to be true in the First World War but that might be that armament races are an indication of rising international tensions rather than the cause of the war. Yes, Germany and Britain were in an arms race just before World War II but that was because Hitler, despite his generals saying Germany needed a few more years of preparation, wanted to go ahead even if unprepared so as to thwart British developments. Hitler was a risk taker rather than the result of a prepared Germany, and so could win short wars but not long ones. So we remain with comparisons but few if any formulas and so we mostly fall back to our pre-scientific methods to develop a sense of how history procedes, even though we do make comparisons and generalizations about the nature of history and literature. People, all of them, not just experts, press on to explain whatever it is in life as best they can because people have a craving and a need to do so.