I want to return to a theme that I presented in a reprint of a letter to the editor, "Chaos in the Brickyard."
The problem the author was getting at is simple to state, but exceedingly difficult to solve: connecting the dots. He was talking about science, but it applies to every field, including history. In a world in which anything can conceivably influence something else, there are an infinite number of dots to connect. You have to connect them in some kind of order. You have to connect them in some kind of cause-and-effect pattern. But nobody agrees on the cause-and-effect pattern. Nobody agrees on how the cause-and-effect pattern he favors can be used to connect all the dots.
Connecting the dots involves a great deal of creativity. In science, there is at least this advantage: other people can set up an experiment and attempt to re-create the pattern that a different scientist has said exists in the nature of the facts. In other words, there are no people involved. The dots are inanimate. But even here, at least at the subatomic level, the patterns are at best statistical. At the subatomic level, there is no cause-and-effect in terms of tiny billiard balls banging into other tiny billiard balls. Nobody is sure whether light is a wave or particle.
This is why there are so many different stories. You get to certain events, such as the Kennedy assassination, and there are incomplete records. Some of the records are inaccurate. Some of the records have been suppressed. You can establish certain kinds of patterns, such as what was going on with the CIA, or the mob, or in the morning events of Lee Harvey Oswald. The problem, above all, is this: connecting what happened in the Texas book depository with what happened, or maybe didn't happen, on the grassy knoll. It's the timing factor. If JFK was shot from behind, how was the timing coordinated with whoever shot him up from the grassy knoll? People can make all kinds of connections between Oswald and other groups, but in a few seconds, recorded on Zapruder's film, the events come together in just a few frames. The coordination of those brief sequences of causation is really inconceivable. That is what baffles historians. There are the other issues, such as what happened to Kennedy's body while it was in the airplane. But, ultimately, it is the coordination of the events of the actual shooting that has to be explained, and it resists explanation.
I contend that virtually every event has the same problems, but most events are not worth assembling the documentation. I call it the irreducible complexity of an historical event. The event is a combination of multiple chains of causation, and every time you look in detail at these chains of causation, you cannot sort all of them out. Furthermore, there are not historical records for most of them.
What is true of history is true of the rest of the social sciences. It is the same problem of causation. So, the specialized academics are paid to produce their little bricks, but even their little bricks have components. It is not just a brick. It is a particular brick -- a combination of a lot of other little bricks. And, when push comes to shove, it is not easy to fit all the little bricks into one big brick, and make it hold together. You need a theory to do this.
The problem with a theory is that it applies only in the realm beyond history. If it is really complete, you cannot change it by adding to it or subtracting from it. But historical change has a tendency to change things. So, how do you fit the changing facts of history into a coherent, comprehensible pattern?
I have to teach American history to a group of students. There will be 180 lessons: 140 will be new; 40 of them will be review lessons. How do I select from American history a total of 140 events and individuals that a group of students can understand at the age of 14 or 15?
Multiply this by two, and you'll have my course on the history of Western civilization. But the history of Western civilization is certainly more than 280 events or individuals. Furthermore, the students have to understand the sequence. The students have to understand that there is a coherent pattern. The students then have to remember all this. How long should they remember it?
Students like good stories. The question is this: how relevant are the stories? There are always lots of good stories. But how do they fit in a pattern? Whose pattern do they fit into? How many stories must we understand in order to understand even one of them correctly?
Let's get back to the Kennedy assassination. How does Jack Ruby fit into the picture? There is a theory that Jack Ruby was an agent of the mob. The theory says that the mob hired him to kill Oswald. That makes a good story, until you know the sequence of events. Nobody knew when the police were going to bring Oswald down to the basement garage, in order to transport him to the county jail. Before Ruby went to the garage, he stopped off at a Western Union office, and he wired some money. If he had been employed by the mob to kill Oswald, why did he wait to go to the garage? What if Oswald had been brought down earlier, and transported to the county jail? If you don't know that Ruby stopped at the Western Union office, you would not ask this question. But how many people have paid any attention to what Ruby did before he showed up at the garage? The only reason I know about this is because I was told by William Marina, who spent years teaching a course on the Kennedy assassination.
The story of Ruby and the Western Union money wire is an important brick in the building that we call the Kennedy assassination. It is a construct. Nobody agrees on the structure. Which bricks should be used? Yet we're supposed to make sense of the story. It makes a huge difference whether or not Lyndon Johnson was behind the assassination. It probably makes a difference that George H. W. Bush may have been in Dallas at the time. But, can you connect Lyndon Johnson with George H. W. Bush?
This is why amateur historians can contribute a great deal. If they work on a particular brick, they can make it quite impressive. The only question is this: where does the brick fit in some building?
There is probably no historical field that has been studied as carefully as the American Civil War. There are no academic specialties in which nonprofessional historians have made greater contributions. Once the web has all of the newspapers online, and people can access these newspapers free of charge, amateur historians are going to be able to make remarkable discoveries. When all the archives in all of the libraries are online, there will be a whole lot of dots to connect. There will be amateurs who are as good at connecting the dots as professionals. We're going to have to get used to this. The number of dots is going to increase astronomically. The accessibility of the dots is going to increase astronomically. The problem then is this: how many people are going to connect the dots?
The number of bricks is increasing exponentially. The number of scholarly articles is increasing exponentially. At some point, this will begin the taper off. We will run out of scholars writing articles. There will be nobody to pay them. The universities will finally stop hiring these people. The point is, the quantity of information is so great, that all we can get from careful reading is a broad picture that is ultimately unsubstantiated by very many bricks. A lot of what we do has to be taken on faith.
Here is the schematic I use to teach all of my courses: history, literature, economics, government, business.
Sovereignty: "Who's in charge here?"
Authority: "To whom do I report?"
Law: "What are the rules?"
Sanctions: "What do I get if I obey? [Disobey]?
Succession: "Does this outfit have a future?"
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