There are many sorts of limiting factors that have kept actors in historical events from behaving in certain ways or that prevent an event from unfolding in the way that would seem most likely or logical to us. Of these, the hardest to grasp are often mental limits. When we read history, we must keep in mind not only the factors that governed the thought and behavior of individuals in the past, but also the ones that govern our thoughts and judgments as we read about them or try to place ourselves in their shoes.
There is a trope in science fiction that suggests that a modern person could survive more easily in the past than a person from the past could survive in our time. It is largely hogwash, for each time has a set of skills and a basic body of knowledge that is quite different from its remote predecessors and successors. I mention this because I think it speaks to the core of the way we see ourselves in regard to past generations. We need to be as aware of the bounds of our own mental world as we are of the actors in the historical dramas we read and re-imagine in our minds.
Broadly speaking, factors that limit our mental worlds fall into two broad categories. One might be termed the limits of knowledge and belief. The other consists of limits imposed by mental habits and cognitive processes. These are not always distinct, and some things fall in between, particularly phobias, which might be termed both belief and habit. I am thinking here of Grant's previously mentioned horror of returning the same way he came, which so influenced his behavior on campaign when temporarily checked. In my previous discussion of the repeated loss of fleets to storms by the Romans during the First Punic War, I suggested that lack of knowledge was one of the main reasons for this. Clearly that would fall into the first category. At the same time, the commanders of the fleets were clearly landlubbers, with the mental habits and equipment of soldiers, not sailors. That would fall into my second category.
When dealing with figures and events from the past two or three centuries (at least in dealing with the West), the differences between their minds and ours are largely the result of differences in knowledge and belief. As one moves back beyond that, differences in mental habits and cognition become more and more important. A close friend once told me that he did not like to read about periods before the American Civil War, because he found it too difficult to understand the way people thought when he moved into earlier periods.
I have noticed when moving as far back as Elizabethan times that significant differences in mental habits appear. For instance, I was floored by Francois de La Noue, the third-ranking Huguenot general in the French Wars of Religion. He wrote penetrating analyses of campaigns and battles, showing an excellent understanding of cause and effect while ferreting out lessons from contemporary combat, but when he moved to larger events and the ultimate causes of the Wars, he moved into a species of magical thinking, invoking God's wrath on France for impiety, witchcraft, gambling, and similar sins. It is as if he crossed some threshold of abstraction and lost his reason. Of course it was reasonable in his time, even if such thinking (as emerged from certain quarters after Hurricane Katrina and the 2004 Tsunami) draws derision today. Many people still think in that way, but they are not usually leading military or political figures (I hope.)
Even when we read something as concrete and seemingly non-intellectual as an account of a battle, we are dealing with this sort of thing, at least unconsciously. To develop a truer understanding of the past, we need to make it explicit and pull it out into the open.
No comments:
Post a Comment