The Landscape of History by Gaddis John Lewis

Author:Gaddis, John Lewis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2002-12-24T16:00:00+00:00

II.

First, the distinction between the immediate, the intermediate, and the distant. Although historical narratives normally move forward, historians in preparing them move backward.11 They tend to start with some particular phenomenon—large or small—and then trace its antecedents. Or, to put it in the terms I used earlier, they begin with structures and then derive the processes that produced them. In a tacit acknowledgment of Bloch’s mountain climber’s misstep, they assign the greatest importance to the most proximate of these processes—but they don’t stop there.

It would make no sense, for example, to begin an account of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor with the launching of the planes from their carriers: you’d want to know how the carriers came to be within range of Hawaii, which requires explaining why the government in Tokyo chose to risk war with the United States. But you can’t do that without discussing the American oil embargo against Japan, which in turn was a response to the Japanese takeover of French Indochina. Which of course resulted from the opportunity provided by France’s defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany, together with the frustrations Japan had encountered in trying to conquer China. Accounting for all of this, however, would require some attention to the rise of authoritarianism and militarism during the 1930s, which in turn had something to do with the Great Depression as well as the perceived inequities of the post—World War I settlement, and so on. You could continue this process all the way back to the moment, hundreds of millions of years earlier, when the first Japanese island rose up, in great billowing clouds of steam and smoke, from what was to become the Pacific Ocean. However, we don’t usually go back quite that far.

There’s no precise rule that tells historians where to stop in tracing the causes of any historical event. But there is what we might call a principle of diminishing relevance: it is that the greater the time that separates a cause from a consequence, the less relevant we presume that cause to be. Notice that I didn’t use the term “irrelevant,” although Carr at one point did in dismissing what he called “accidental” causes.12 The Japanese government could hardly have decided to attack the United States if the Japanese islands had never surfaced, any more than Bloch’s mountain climber could have fallen if the mountain had never arisen. The relevance of these causes, however, is sufficiently remote that they don’t tell us very much: to invoke them is like explaining the success of the Japanese fighter pilots in terms of the fact that prehumans evolved binocular vision and opposable thumbs. We expect the causes we cite to connect rather more directly to consequences. When they don’t, we tend to disregard them.13

What about causes that are neither immediate nor distant but intermediate? The principle of diminishing relevance works here too, but the zone of “intermediacy” is sufficiently great that we need some additional standard for differentiating between low levels of relevance at one end of it and high levels at the other.

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