I teach a Modern Western Civilization course a few times every year at my small liberal arts college in Tennessee and have been doing that this summer as well. Though I’m an American historian by training, I always enjoy the chance to pull the lens back and examine the larger forces at work that shape both American and global (not exclusively Western) history. It offers a chance to go “meta” – to offer, for example, an interpretation of the US Civil War in the context of larger 19th century battles over economic and social change.
It also offers an opportunity to discuss one of the most important and vexing concepts in the study of history – contingency. It so happens that I digressed into a discussion of contingency for the first time on Thursday evening. Contingency is basically the notion that so many different factors tend to converge at a particular place and time to make an historical event take shape such that the prospect of finding a singular explanatory “cause” is basically fruitless. Alas, history often appears random, with “narratives” of explanation becoming more important to the study of history than any sort of “objective” analysis of discrete causes in the end.
The example I usually give is the 9/11 attacks, being that they constitute the most “historic” moment in the lifetimes of my students. Why did 9/11 occur, I ask? I get the predictable and typical responses, from Islamist radical ideology to poor security to US foreign policy blowback, etc. All have been hashed out thousands of times by now. But then I suggest another explanation: the weather. It was gorgeous that Tuesday morning. But it was also hurricane season. And bad weather may have delayed one or more of those flights, causing one or more of the hijackers to screw something up as a nervous response to delay, and the whole plot could have unraveled with hardly a soul knowing about it. After all, the millennium bombing plot unraveled in almost-haphazard fashion too, as a random border checkpoint search led to the capture of one of the would-be bombers and the end of that particular scheme.
So, why do we not include the weather as an explanation for 9/11? First off, we don’t usually explain events by referring to the LACK of bad weather (while we DO often refer to bad weather as a factor for various historical events). But more importantly, we don’t mention the weather because it’s useless as an explanatory narrative. It offers no moral lesson on terrorism and inhumanity. It gives no practical guideline for how we can prevent a future attack. It is, in historians’ parlance, not a sort of “usable past”.
And yet, it is an example of historical contingency – the seemingly random convergence of forces that either generated – or facilitated – an unfolding of events.
Just four hours after this classroom digression, a former PhD student in neuroscience in Colorado unleashed one of the most horrifying acts of mass violence in recent memory. There is, at this point, no explanation for his motives. No manifesto. No terror cell. No accomplices. No warning.
Events like this are troubling not just because of the human tragedy that the victims and their families and friends experienced. They are disturbing because they reveal something far more worrisome about the human condition: we simply cannot explain why things happen. And yet, our human minds cannot accept what is, at heart, a matter of contingency.
We look to predictable sources for explanation. Clinical psychopathology. Media analysis. Guns and their availability. Political rancor. And, of course, theology – the moment when we throw up our hands and say that “God works in mysterious ways.”
But I think this moment is far more telling of the human condition and of human history than we generally care to admit. When we offer explanations for events in history – 9/11, the US Civil War, the Holocaust, the French Revolution, etc. – we employ a predictable matrix of logical and emotional tools to come to grips with them. We do so because it is human to seek a satisfactory explanation for things. Life cannot really be “meaningless” in an objective sense. There must be reasons located somewhere for why things happen to me, my community, my country and my planet. And if science and sociology and economics fail to account for things, we have the prophetic traditions of religion at our disposal.
And yet – we must remember that WE are the authors of those explanations. We ascribe meaning to events because that is what human beings do. We will eventually come to a socially agreed upon set of explanations for what happened at the premiere showing of the Batman movie in Aurora. We’ll even disagree with one another along predictable lines: moral/theological v. social/political. But in the end, we’ll never really “know”.
But that leaves us in another bind. Accepting the impossibility of explaining horrid events like this allows us to descend into intellectually vacuous sophistry and, at times, nihilism. And that may be the true “lesson” if there is one. As Albert Camus argued more than 50 years ago, we must rebel against that absurd destiny by ascribing meaning to events – to bring healing and prevent future tragedy at the very least. But we must remain ever conscious of the precarious human condition that we inhabit. That requires both faith and doubt. A belief in social purpose and respect for individual whim. An abiding and intuitive grasp of destiny and a tolerance for randomness. And a desire to live and live happily in this world, despite a predictably mortal fate.