Then, and Then Again

“Life cannot be understood other than through stories we tell about it—we are led to say an examined life is a narrated life.”

- Paul Ricoeur

“Historical, contingent truths can never be proofs of rational, necessary truths.”

- Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Historians are in a strange situation: to narrate is not to explain and to explain is not to narrate. Yet we do not narrate without explaining, and we do not explain without narrating. A chronological succession, once incorporated into a narrative, constitutes, if only implicitly, an explanatory order of relations. When we write history, we conflate the then that first means next with the then that in its second definition signifies thus, therefore, or hence.

Crimean Conference: Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Marshal Joseph Stalin, February 1945. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-USZ62-7449].

But our division between the empirical (the next of fact) and theoretical (the therefore of connections and succession) is both a necessary and good thing. Indeed, a good narrative, whatever the paths of its artifice, must walk between the certitude of facts and the illumination of ideas—open equally to what time presents and what constructive intelligence can connect and order.

Events are the clocks of human life. They place us in and make us part of time. Events—the death of a parent, the declaration of war, a scientific breakthrough—defy systematic analysis. Narratives never comprehend the ineffable singularity and causal power of events. Events both compound and eliminate the perplexities of life, mind, and society.

Works of history move between the poles of narrative and explanation. The then of explanation—thus and therefore—never fully comprehends the pure and simple then of a story, and vice versa. For the then of story arises out of unique events. The then of explanation seeks laws and patterns and wants to make events regular and explainable. The reality of events calls forth both narrative and explanation, the division of which gives rise to different forms of truth.

This delivers us to the heart of history, which, by my lights, is first devoted to recognizing great changes and seminal events. Yet the act of recognition requires what we can never complete, for it necessitates explanations of origins, forms, and consequences. To put this in other terms, we recognize but cannot explain human mortality; the conditions, possibilities, limits, and significance of human experience; or the mix of actors, groups, institutions, forces, processes, interconnections, influences, and consequences that attend every great change or seminal event. Events, which shatter and fragment societies, institutions, laws, and customs, leave their interpretation and reinterpretation to historians.

If historians are to offer more than random and aimless chronologies, they must by hook or crook supply explanations that establish connections, reasons, and purposes. If there are not laws, there at least must be agents—be they humans, institutions, or gods—that give form, purpose, and direction to things. However, explanations postulated are explanations challenged.

Unexpected, unprecedented, and even entirely unimagined things happen, though not at predictable times and in regular forms. Time instead opens surprising, and thus contradicting, doors. Before us occur phenomena too glorious and too hideous either to explain or to leave unexplained. Inevitably, the totally unanticipated, unwanted, and even cataclysmic happens, or to use the metaphorical title of a recent and popular work, “a black swan” appears.¹ And, might I add for an age that has not seen a great war or depression or the unraveling of Western democracy for fifty years, from time to time a double black swan appears.

Historian and writer Henry Adams deemed ignorance of events and their progression a condition of contemporary consciousness. In his classic Education (1918) he proposes that the modern person doesn’t grasp the consequences of accelerating revolutions in science, technology, and society. Furthermore, Adams argues that the contemporary world has by its own advance deprived itself of symbols, myths, and religions. The only symbol left for the contemporary mind is the dynamo, a pitiless engine of accumulating human powers over nature and the world.

If there is truth...