Something Thoughtful

  Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

HISTORY AS CHAOS

I recently had an epiphany and understood a great truth that I had never fully understood before

While history as recorded and read is orderly, history as it is actually lived is chaotic.

My epiphany came thus: As I have sometimes remarked on this blog, I tend to have very irregular sleeping patterns. Whether I go to bed early or late, I nearly always wake in the small hours. This usually means that at 3 or 4 in the morning, I am staring in the direction of the ceiling, wishing I could go back to sleep. And at 4 or 5 in the morning I am wearily giving up on sleep, and am getting up, pulling on my day-clothes and taking a brisk half-hour walk, in the darkness, around familiar streets of the suburb.

With ear-buds in ears and cell-phone in shirt pocket, I listen as I walk. It was mainly jazz music that accompanied my night prowls until a few months ago. Then I discovered an American series of podcasts called Revolutions, and began to listen to them as a curiosity. Soon I got hooked.

Every episode (each half-an-hour or so) is read by the same American chap, Mike Duncan, who also writes the scripts. He can be slangy. He can sometimes drop in lame wisecracks. But he is fastidiously thorough and accurate in what he chronicles. So far I have heard him talk his way through the “English Revolution” (i.e. the civil wars of the 17^th century) in 16 half-hour episodes; through the “American Revolution” (what we used to call the American War of Independence) in 15 episodes; and through the French Revolution in a whopping 55 episodes. Given that each episode is about 30 minutes long, that means that I have listened so far to about 43 hours of Mike Duncan’s lectures. Wikipedia tells me Mike Duncan began the series in 2013 with the English Revolution and is currently (in 2020-2021) finishing the whole series with the Russian Revolution. So I have yet to hear his takes on the Haitian Revolution, Simon Bolivar and South American revolutions, the revolutions of 1848 and the Mexican Revolution before I even get to the Russians.

I may or may not make the distance.

By being fastidiously accurate, however, Mike Duncan shows us how chaotic history really is – how one event happens after another; how people do not see where exactly events are leading them; how crowds (especially in revolutions) can be led enthusiastically towards goals which are completely unattainable – or can be stirred up to violence for political ends; how small and unnoticed contingencies can be the deciding factor in great struggles; how widely-held fears and widely-held hopes prove to be illusory; how political and social certainties can be cancelled in a matter of weeks or even days; how grand plans for new constitutions come to nothing; how commanding figures who seem to have solved all a nation’s problems can be expelled (or killed) in favour of another commanding figure who seems a better bet.

This I learnt as Mike Duncan worked his way from the first rumblings in the English parliament in the 1620s to the restoration of Charles II in 1660; from the early discontenet of Anglo-American colonists to the surrender of Cornwallis; from Calonne’s desperate atttempts to restore French finances in the early 1780s to Napoleon making himself emperor in 1804. And in between, all the big names, all the political and social movements, and all the great upheavals that History chewed up and spat out.

It is not as if I did not know previously of the things Mike Duncan wrote and said. I had already studied in detail, and taught classes on, the English civil wars and the French Revolution (but not the American War of Independence, which I know only in a fragmentary way). To hear of these things as one event after the other, however, was a new experience.

Maybe it is this profusion of events in history that makes most people settle for myths rather than history, even if they do not acknowledge them as myths – that is, neat simplifications and generalisations that “explain” history. Maybe this endless flux is what forces even real historians into neat “periodisations” of history. So here is Absolute Monarchy, and then comes the National Assembly and the Jacobins and they split and the Girondin ones are purged and then there’s the Reign of Terror and then the Thermidorean Reaction and the Directory and then - oh look! – it’s Napoleon Buonaparte. Nice and neat and simplified and managing to reduce history to order and obvious sequence.

But history isn’t order. For those who are living through it, it is this unknown and uncertainty following that unknown and uncertainty.

God forbid that I should fall into the postmodernist fallacy of seeing history as mere “narrative” or fiction as woven by individuals (“My narrative is as good as yours!”). Real, objectively demonstable things happened to real people in real circumstances in real history. We may be talking about a variety of interpretations of these realities. But we are not talking about fiction.

Still it remains true that, as lived, history is not orderly, but is chaotic. This week’s urgent headline, or leading item on the news, will be next week’s stale memory as a new crisis or contingency robs people of their peace.

            History is chaos, and Clio, muse of history, is a tricky and frightening being.