distinction between
the push of past versus the
pull of the future
Any historian worth his salt knows how to eschew monocausal explanations of human events — that is, the attribution of a single motive to any given decision.
And there is another necessary distinction, the one between motives and purposes (the first a push of the past, the second the pull of the future), for rare are also those instances when the purposes of a decision are singular or exclusive.
I was struck by this phrase written by by John Lukacs in his book, Five days in London, May 1940 (New Haven, ale University Press, 1999).
It brought to mind the old discussion (and forgive me for my use of pronouns) between the idea that men make their time (The important man theory of narrative history) against the idea that times make the men (The social view of history).
As I was taught, Hitler impacted his world or the world as it existed in the middle 1900’s created the vortex that vomited out a Hitler and had not Hitler existed, another person would have been created by the spirit of the time or Zeitgeist.
I guess I go both ways.
The boiling angst of post WWI Europe was going to lead to someone or something at sometime.
The fact is that Hitler DID show up in 1932 and his arrival on the stage had a great impact on the world at that time.
In the grand scope of things, 20 or 30 years either way in the history of the world may not mean much, but for those people alive and soon to be dead, that Hitler showed up in 1932, the man and his times had a great impact.
So I DO think that the former President could have been created by the times.
But the man and the moment, for better or for worse, met.
With consequences unforeseen, the man and the moment met.
The push of the past and the pull of the future called for someone and that someone turned out to be Mr. Trump.
Maybe not a single motive but I do feel that the term monocausal explanation kind fits as I think you can look at a lot, and I mean A LOT or what is impacting us today can be traced to this one person being in office.
It leads to easy speculation, on just one topic, how this country and this world would have reacted to COVID had the President of the United States and ‘Leader of the Free World” had provided leadership.
I think I will leave it there.
The push of the past, the pull of the future and the impact of one person.
Maybe this was best depicted in the life of George Bailey in the movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life” which was a box office failure and rarely watched until NBC discovered it as a cheap holiday on air filler but I digress.
I imagined a time where an Angel came down to me and asked had I ever thought about a world where I hadn’t been born.
He snaps his fingers and we visit a world where I had never been born and it turns out that everyone was better off and having a great time.
The Angel looks at me and shrugs and says sorry, sometimes these things don’t work out.
Then the Angel has me click my heals three times, I am wearing black loafers, and say there is no place home and bang, zoom here I am.
One of those rare those instances when the purposes of a decision was both singular and exclusive.
No Haiku For You 