Matriculating on the Margin of History
Will, George
George Will MATRICULATING ON THE MARGIN OF HISTORY Another commencement address recalled two years after the fact. since finishing my formal education, I have had three careers: as professor of...
...to suggest that mankind is a cork bobbing on uncontrollable currents...
...And suppose that on July 20, 1944, when Count Von Stauffen-berg tried to kill Hitler, it had not been so hot...
...It was not "necessary," it was not "inevitable," that Spain should take the course it has taken...
...Freud pioneered exploration of mankind's inner Africa, the dark continent of the unconscious...
...Similarly, if General Lee had charged Little Round Top that first night at Gettysburg, this might be two nations today...
...they can make history...
...and he could have made any one of a dozen fatal mistakes...
...to one man goes credit for making anti-Communism not only intellectually respectable- even in France-but making it appear what it ruly is-the moral obligation of free societies...
...Marx purported to discover a science of social evolution...
...Darwin attached mankind to the primeval mud from which mankind rose...
...the narrator's voice says, "And the rebels marched on Madrid...
...And if you doubt the power of Solzhenitsyn, consider this fact: In 1978, at Harvard, he did the impossible: He gave a commencement address that was remembered a year later...
...that individuals are plastic playthings of vast, impersonal forces...
...I saw it on the campus of a small middle western college that is very proud of having subscribed to every progressive idea in this century...
...The reappraisal of the conventional intellectual tendency to absolve Communism and blame America as the "cause" of the Cold War has been fueled by another remarkable individual who is changing the minds, and thus the destinies, of men-I refer to Pope John Paul II...
...and that is because Carter won in 1976...
...The first was in the realm of thought...
...All my experience conspires to teach me that individuals can make a difference...
...But today, and especially in Europe, the debate about America, and Vietnam, and Communism in general, has taken quite another turn...
...One unintended result of the influence of these four men is a kind of vague historical and social pessimism...
...That war (according to this school of thought) was first seen as an "indigenous peasant revolt" by the South Vietnamese against the South Vietnamese national' government...
...As their thoughts have been vulgarized and have seeped into the mind of society, the net effect has been to diminish mankind's sense of self-mastery...
...Finally, Einstein called into question the most basic assumptions about the most elemental categories by which we organize experience- categories like matter and time...
...But we tend to devalue our own era...
...The social fallout from much of the modern intellectual tradition, as foolishly taught or superficially experienced , is that history is, as Marx and J ames Joyce said, "a nightmare"-a nightmare because mankind cannot shape it...
...At one point the film shows a column of soldiers marching...
...that human volition is not as sovereign or as consequential as mankind, in its naive vanity, thinks it is...
...they provide knowledge that enhances the ability of mankind to gain purchase on reality...
...They had heard the word "rebels" and their reflexive response was to cheer...
...The defender said-and I quote-"Proof of Trotsky's farsightedness is that none of his predictions have come true-yet...
...Yet, rightly understood, neither Darwin nor Freud nor Einstein really suggests that...
...If Hitler had died that day, the war might have ended eight months sooner...
...The influence of Solzhenitsyn illustrates my thesis, which is this: The more one knows about the making of history, the less one will believe any of the many histori-cisms that are merchandised in our rime- those theories that depict too narrowly the scope for decisive imerveention by individuals in history...
...he demonstrated a continuity not only between mankind and the animal kingdom, but between mankind and lesser matter...
...about the real intentions of the military class that rules that garrison state...
...Unfortunately, the very people who have the strongest and most critical opinions about things often seem to have the weakest foundation in facts...
...The debate was about the Soviet buildup that nobody believes represents a Soviet calculation of defensive needs...
...It is, after all, odd to think that the chairs one sits on are mostly space and electricity-and odder still to think that one who is sitting is mostly space and electricity...
...most of what he originated is false...
...I have only said that contingencies matter in history, not that history is rational...
...they can matter...
...All four have at least this in common: An explicit or implicit lesson of their writings vaguely but widely felt is that human beings are not, and cannot be, in charge of their destinies...
...At that line, the undergraduates exploded in cheers...
...In order to understand the way history is made in our time, one needs to know something about how history recently has been made...
...And he acknowledged, for himself and for the many who behaved as he did, guilty complicity in the triumph in Indochina of regimes that are much more tyrannical than the regimes they supplanted...
...Oliver Wendell Holmes had an unseemly reverence for vast, impersonal forces, but even Holmes could say, with reason, that Kant had ruled Europe more effectively from his study than Napoleon had ruled it from his throne...
...In the spring of 1979, I was in Spain, with King Juan Carlos...
...And I have come to believe that one of the tasks of our time is to rescue the realm of action from disparagement in the realm of thought...
...Great and consequential debates occur in our time...
...The Washington Post, no friend of either the Vietnam war or conservative doctrines, has rightly dismissed that pro-Hanoi movie about the Vietnam war as vicious anti-American propaganda...
...Senate, and in public commentary...
...declined sharply as a percentage of federal outlays and as a percentage of GNP...
...It is clear to me that Spain's transition from authoritarianism to democracy-one of the splendid events in postwar Europe-depended not just on a king, but on that king...
...It is marvelous that, today, Rome has a Communist mayor who knows next to nothing about real Communism, and a Bishop who knows virtually everything about it...
...This nation has passed through a debate regarding a strategic arms limitation agreement-SALT II...
...That man is Alexander Solzheni-tsyn, whose writings have inspired a host of young French philosophers...
...It is exhilarating because it undermines the folly of those who are inclined to believe that what is necessarily had to be...
...On one level, this debate was a technical debate about hard, concrete military systems of the sort that prevent-or decide-conflicts...
...The genocide of the Cambodian regime, the militarism of the Hanoi regime, and the cynicism and aggression of the Peking regime have stirred an agonizing reappraisal on the European Left...
...Most of what little he said that is true is derivative from other, more subtle minds...
...The four dominating figures of modern thought are Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein...
...People today understand the vital importance of the debate in Britain during the 1930s, a debate about how to interpret German intentions from the evidence of German arms build-ups...
...Marx is another matter...
...I am told that the movie Hearts and Minds recently was shown at Trinity College...
...So the particular reformation that occurred was not inevitable...
...According to that school of thought, America is the source of sin in the postwar world, and this was demonstrated by the Vietnam war...
...What would Eastern Europe be like today if the war had ended before the Red Army arrived there...
...There was a certain inevitability to a reformation in Europe...
...Individuals generally influence history only at the margins of events, but margins martet they matter because a small turn in the rouder of a ship early in a long voyage means a huge change in the destination and given that society never reaches its destination, always is early in its voyage...
...It is technically inferior to, and not morally superior to, Triumph of the Will, the Hitlerite propaganda film...
...and that had something to do with the fact that Carter's "lust in the heart" in Playboy was counteracted by Ford's "liberation of Poland" during the second television debate...
...That film is in the Julius Streicher-Joseph Goebbels tradition of social commentary...
...Recently, in a remarkable mea culpa, he confessed that, during the 1960s, he lied, frequently by suppressing what he knew about the real nature and intentions of the Stalinist regime in Hanoi...
...Every instance of the role of judgment- or of luck, accident, or other contingency- in history is, to me, exhilarating...
...But Martin Luther- that volcano-was not inevitable...
...Or suppose a Hitler aide had not absent-mindedly pushed the briefcase carrying the bomb behind the heavy wood leg of the map table over which Hitler was bending...
...No one else could have steered the course he steered...
...But, above all, to one man-one miracle of individualism-goes credit for changing the European intellectual climate...
...I remember when I saw the film To Die in Madrid, a documentary about the Spanish Civil War...
...Later, when it became too obvious to deny that this was a war of conquest waged by Hanoi, this school of thought said that there "really" was no, or should be no, South Vietnam...
...the second, the realm of action...
...Had it been cooler in East Prussia that day, Hitler's staff meeting would have been in a concrete bunker instead of a flimsy shack that allowed the force of the bomb to dissipate...
...At another level, the debate was about the nature of the Soviet Union...
...And regarding Marx the prophet, his defenders have been reduced to the sort of intellectual desperation I once heard from a defender of Trotsky...
...Society, he said, is sentenced to a dialectic of development, governed by inexorable laws, through predictable stages to a known and final destination...
...His studies of infant sexuality opened a disturbing vista: There seemed to seethe within human beings awful autonomous forces...
...The case of Jean Lacouture is illustrative...
...They were so innocent of knowledge that they did not know that the "rebels" in the Spanish Civil War were Franco's soldiers...
...In the 1960s, Lacouture, a prolific journalist, was one of the foremost critics of American policy in Indochina, and one of the foremost apologists for Hanoi...
...Hearts and Minds is a product of the hatred of postwar America that seized a minority of Americans in the 1960s...
...Most exhilarating are examples of the power of ideas, and of solitary thinkers, in shaping other minds, and thus in shaping history...
...the third somewhat splits the difference...
...This debate may appear, to our descendants, as epoch-making...
...The debate was about the correct inferences to be drawn from the unprecedented, sustained, and continuing Soviet arms buildup, a buildup that has occurred during a decade in which defense spending by the U.S...
...I cannot forgo noting that the SALT II debate had its particular shape because the SALT treaty had its particular shape...
...The ideas by which men act are, he said, phantoms-in Marx's language, "epiphe-nomena," or "reflections" of material conditions...
...since finishing my formal education, I have had three careers: as professor of political philosophy, on the staff of the U.S...
...But few people today see the comparable importance of today's comparable debate...
...One need not seek examples-examples of the importance of debates about ideas-so distant in time, or so far from home...
Vol. 14 • June 1981 • No. 6
