Clock Time

Clocks are one of those things that affect a great many others. In the case of clocks, it is because they affect one of our fundamental perceptions: time. But in the beginning, I think they had a second effect, changing, or perhaps sharpening, our common understanding of cause and effect. For a period of about five hundred years the clock was the most complex device in existence, certainly the most complex one most people would ever encounter. It was also understandable. One could look at the clockworks, big or small, and have their arcane processes explained. One thing followed logically after another. Effect followed cause; all was visible, orderly, and explicable. Is it any wonder that it would become a model for the universe and the divine order?

For the small percentage of humanity living in European towns, clock time came to replace nature as the timekeeper from the 1380s onward. No longer did hours vary in length with the seasons. They were uniform; urban workers were now expected to work the same length of time each day regardless of the month or the changing length of daylight.

Humankind was learning to live to an artificial rhythm, one at odds with the world around them but also with their own circadian rhythms. One wonders if they did not also become more irritable. People also became more used to breaking things up into units, into atomizing their experiences.

New geographies of time emerged. This was not immediate, and for the first century or two was communal, private citizens could rarely afford clocks, and watches were unknown before 1500. But clocks became smaller and more accurate, slowly making their way into homes, first of nobles, then of the bourgeoisie.  The minute, the hour, and the day were mapped not on the sun and the moon, but on the clock. As clocks increased in accuracy, minutes began to matter.

These changes coincided with the emergence of humanist notions of historical time and time periods. Religion and mythology had long constructed chronologies with different ages in them, but these were not historical time periods. Typically, all of history was one and continuous. The Renaissance began to see that there were discontinuities and that the ancient world and the modern world were not one seamless whole. Through the work of men like Bruni, the differences came to be understood and appreciated.

So it was not only the daily sense of time that was being altered in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. It seems to me that the entire human sense of time was changing radically in those years. Likewise, I would argue that both clocks and the new understanding of history were creating a broader command of causality, one that would come to rely less-and-less on divine intervention. These were important changes in the mental processes of Renaissance Europeans.

Becoming Aware of Mental Boundaries

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.

But Why Didn't They ...

Most often a historian tries to show why something happened. In other words, the author is mainly interested in creating a chain of cause and effect. That is the way it is normally done, but it may leave readers wondering why the actors in the historical drama did not do things in a different way, or why they did not know something that seems obvious to us.

For instance, in the First Punic War, the Romans managed to win almost every naval battle, but it took them a very long time to win the war, in large part because they kept losing entire fleets to storms. Since they normally sailed close to land, it is logical that they could have been able to beach their galleys and avoid major losses. The problem was probably threefold. First, as J.H. Thiel noted repeatedly in Roman Sea-Power Before the Second Punic War (1954), the Romans had no prior history of large-scale naval or maritime endeavors. They had very little knowledge of the sea and of storms at sea. That their naval leaders failed for a long time to gain such knowledge is largely due to the fact that they were not admirals in any real sense. Instead, they were magistrates, elected from the aristocracy and replaced yearly, intended to lead legions on land. Few of them commanded at sea for more than a campaigning season, so they had little chance to gain experience.

Note here there are two limiting factors. (There were probably others that were specific to a given time and place, but these two seem the most important and the most widespread.) The structure of Roman government meant that men would be chosen from among the large land-owning families to serve for a year. They lacked knowledge of the sea and they lacked time to gain it. So one limitation was structural. The other was the simple unfamiliarity of the citizens with the sea. As more than one nation has found out, you can make seamen into soldiers, but it is much more difficult for a landsman to become a sailor.

Some historians, such as Theil, do spend a time on these kinds of negative explanations. Any good historian will be aware of the limiting factors, but they may not discuss them in detail or at length. One of the reasons for this is often that the limiting factors are complex and structural, difficult to explain in a short space. Another is that historians internalize many of these as they work over the material and become intimately familiar with the events, the people, and the time in question. The knowledge becomes implicit after a while. Implicit knowledge is difficult to communicate, difficult sometimes even to verbalize. It also creates a barrier between the author and the audience, because the author knows things and has difficulty comprehending what knowledge the audience has or what it lacks. At what point does the explanation become a digression, the digression a distraction, and the distraction a separate project?

So the question of "why didn't they" can apply just as much to the limitations on the author as on the people about whom he is writing.