This is an essay from The Culture We Deserve, by Jacques Barzun.#

In this essay Jacques criticizes the notion that history can be explained by referencing a few "Single Causes" that enabled certain events to take place. This relates to what he wrote in another essay that human life is a net, where every string pulls every other. There is no epicenter for change, the whole system must be in the right state.#

Jacques continues another one of the themes of his writing, that life, and thus art, and thus history, are not scientific and cannot be explained completely in a scientific manner.#

The assumption of a sole cause, let me repeat, is a scientific idea-in particular, a principle of physics-which in the nineteenth century became an obsession in other fields than science. That is why Karl Marx, along with many other social theorists, looked for such a cause and all believed they had found it; that is why Darwin was celebrated as the discoverer of the single cause of evolution-and is still thought to have done so, although he himself acknowledge several causes. Darwin, it may be added, is one of the classic discoverers that Webb [a historian who Jacques admires for his form of history orthogonal to Jacques'] said he would wish to be ranked with.

The appeal of the single cause is linked with the conception of history as a vast process which overwhelms any individual will. The triumph of democracy in the last third of the nineteenth century certainly contributed to making that view prevail. It seemed self-evident when large anonymous masses migrated from Europe to American and within America to the West; it seemed confirmed when those same masses, by agitating and voting along geographical, regional, social, or economic lines, moved the nation in one direction or another. At such a spectacle historians gave up the earlier conception known as the Great Man theory of history, the idea which Emerson, for example, discussed in his esay on self-reliance and summed up in the dictum that "all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons." [pg. 132]

The biggest problem with single causes, Jacques says, is that they take the power of cultural changes out of the hands of the men and women who exist in it.#

Narrative history presupposes men and women whose motives lead to action ad result in event. But we no longer believe in the importance, even in the reality, of active men and women; we think they are moved by other forces, of which they are not conscious-by economic, dialectic, material determinism; by a thing called "their society"; by the unconscious, individual or collective; or, as Webb decided, by the environment. These accounts put the motive power behind history and unmistakably point to the single cause. For no matter how much the narrator hedges by admitting lesser or secondary causes, the one he calls principal or fundamental is the one that drives the human crowd and commands the march of events.

The scheme looks so plausible: in an age of politcal democracy and mass culture, of world trade and interlocking industries, how can one believe in the Great Man and his directing will? The answer is, no need to believe in him, even though one has actually seen a few rather recently: Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Gandhi, Churchill, De Gaulle (great does not mean good). But leave them aside and forget the label "great." The question is not that of supreme power, and not even of power, but of action. [pgs. 135-136]

The belief and desire for a single cause arises from a confusion of purpose on the shoulders of historians. Their quest is not for meanings and answers, it is for ideas that will help understand.#

For a philosophy, a meaning, is by definition a principle that does not accommodate exceptions. It is like a stencil laid over the map of events: only what shows through the holes can have significance, and unfortunately it is inevitable that what the stencil shuts out is often more important than what the philosopher needs in order to establish his principle or meaning. Does this imply that history is meaningless? If so, what about the "original idea" that helps to organize confusion? Well, an idea is not the same as the meaning. The organizing idea may serve well for a modest portion of the past, modest in geographical range or in timespan. There is then no need to suppress or belittle great chunks of reality. And the bearing of an idea need not be exclusive; it may be offered as highly suggestive, a pragmatic explanation in the technical sense of pragmatic. It is a view, a convenient pattern, a tenable interpretation, not a system or a stencil. [pgs. 138-139]

What then, is a great history to Jacques? One that is "thick with the deeds and aims of many individuals" and that does not attempt the impossible and try to tell the story of every person ever of a certain class. There must be Great Men.#

To sump up, the value of history does not consist in explaining by formula, in "revealing" some potent principle that governs one or twenty-one civilizations. The value lies in the spectacle itself. [...] [T]opics that lack a spatial and chronological unity, such as "the history of the Irish in America" or "the history of Asia" do not yield books of history. The former subject has no continuity, the latter has no unity. On the same principle, there can be a history of feminism, but not "a history of women." When the late Philippe Aries wrote Centuries of Childhood, he supplied interesting vignettes of changing attitudes toward children, but he did not perform the impossible task of writing a "history of children," any more than he could have written a history of redheaded people. [...] A History of the Idea of Progress is possible and has in fact been written, whereas a History of Human Stupidity cannot be, plentiful as the source material obviously is. [pgs. 140-141]

Why would you not want to study and write history after this:#

[Knowing] history endows everything we see and touch with additional meanings-not a single overarching one, but a multitude of associations as real as the object or the scene itself. Life is made thicker, richer, of weightier import because other beings than ourselves-yet kindred-have passed where we walk. [pg. 142]