Historical Contingency - Y. Ben-Menahem

HISTORICAL CONTINGENCYYemima Ben-Menahem Abstract The paper provides a new characterization of the concepts of necessity and contingency as they should be used in the historical context. The idea is that contingency (necessity) increases in direct (reverse) proportion to sensitivity to initial conditions. The merits of this suggestion are that it avoids the conflation of causal- ity and necessity (or contingency and chance), that it enables the bracketing of the problem of free will while maintaining the concept of human action making a difference, that it sanctions tendencies without recourse to teleology, and that it recasts the controversy between historicists and anti-historicists in less dogmatic language. Philosophers and logicians often make use of the distinction between necessary and contingent truth. A common way of distinguishing the two notions is by means of possible world terminology. A statement is a necessary truth if it is true in all possible worlds, and contingent otherwise. The historian has little use for that distinction – the truths she is after are clearly not true in all possible worlds, that is, they are contingent in the logical sense of the term. And yet, it seems quite natural to say of a historical event, a defeat for instance, that it was necessary, inevitable, etc., or, by contrast, that it was unnecessary, could have been prevented and so on. It might also be of some historical interest to find out which of the two descriptions of the defeat is more plausible. But if all historical truths are contingent in the logical sense, what do we mean in this context by the distinction between the necessary and the contingent? One possibility is that this is just a careless use of language, that the distinction has no real content in the historical context. Another is that while these terms lack cognitive content, they are used intentionally for rhetorical or other pragmatic purposes. For example, we may present the defeat as inevitable when we do not want it to harm the reputation of the commander. A third possibility is that neces- sity and contingency should be understood in terms of the © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. Ratio (new series) X 2 September 1997 0034–0006 notions of causality and chance: on this suggestion, the view that the defeat was necessary actually means that it was caused, or predetermined by other events, whereas the view that it was contingent regards it as a random event. Although both careless- ness and rhetoric figure amply in human speech, and although the notions of chance and causality have been used interchange- ably with contingency and necessity (respectively) by some writ- ers, I find neither of these replies fully satisfactory. In what follows I draw the distinction between the necessary and the contingent in terms of the degree of sensitivity to initial condi- tions, and argue that this characterization captures the meaning of these notions in historical discourse. We tend to speak of necessity when we think that what happened had to happen, and of contingency when we think things could have happened differently. My suggestion is to understand this contrast as follows: what we mean by necessity is that the same type of final outcome results from a variety of different causal chains. In the extreme case, all possible chains (possible, say, in terms of the laws of nature and certain initial conditions) lead to the same type of result. For example, we may think of death as necessary in this sense since a wide variety of possible courses of life ultimately lead to death, and, so far as we know, there is no possible path that does not. Similarly, thermo- dynamic equilibrium will follow from a wide variety of initial conditions, and under certain circumstances it will follow no matter what the initial conditions. But it is perfectly acceptable to speak of degrees of necessity with reference to less extreme cases, as long as the final outcome is relatively insensitive both to initial conditions and to potentially disruptive intervening events. In this type of case, the result seems necessary to some degree, since even were the earlier conditions different, and even were addi- tional factors to have intervened in the causal process, the process would probably still have resulted in the same kind of outcome. We can say, for example, that quarrels between couples are virtually necessary in the sense that there are many different courses of events that lead to quarrelling, even if there is no reason to think that all possible courses in fact do so. In contrast, a type of outcome is contingent if there is only one course, or at most, a few courses, that could possibly lead to it, and there is sensitivity to initial conditions and intervening factors. Returning to our defeat, when we say it was unavoidable, we mean that it would have occurred even if the commander had used different 100 YEMIMA BEN-MENAHEM © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997 tactics, the weather had been different and so on. If, on the other hand, we are of the opinion that these, and many other factors could indeed have changed the course of the battle, we see the defeat as contingent. Note that the distinction here is not that between causality and chance, since in both cases the defeat is the result of a causal process. Speculations about how history might have differed had Cleopatra’s nose been longer vividly illustrate this sense of contingency. Schematically, we can represent the difference between the two cases in the following way: HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY 101 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997 Contingency: Necessity: Similar causes lead Different types of causes to different types of effects lead to similar effects. High sensitivity to initial Low sensitivity to initial conditions. conditions. • e 1 • e 2 • e 3 • e 4 • e 5 • e 1 • . • . • . • e 5 c 1 • c 2 • c 3 • c 4 • c 5 • c 1 • . • . • . • c 5 • On this view, contingency (necessity) varies in magnitude: the greater (smaller) the sensitivity to initial conditions, the greater the degree of contingency (necessity). Chaotic phenomena provide radical examples of such sensitivity. Where such phenom- ena are concerned, the slightest change in initial conditions can bring about a drastic change in outcome. In meteorology, one of the first fields to apply chaos theory, this phenomena is known as the butterfly effect – a butterfly flapping its wings in Jerusalem can cause a hurricane in Florida. Such chaotic phenomena (deter- ministic chaos) illustrate a failure of predictability without failure of causality. Identical causes have identical effects, but similar causes do not, in general, have similar effects. Moreover, monot- ony breaks down: if C is an initial state between initial states A and B, (say, a velocity between initial velocities A and B, or a popula- tion whose size lies between the sizes of two populations A and B etc.), it does not follow that the effect of C will lie between the effect of A and the effect of B. The sensitivity of historical events to initial conditions may or may not be as radical as that of chaotic phenomena, but it can certainly be very significant -- if he only managed to get two hours of sleep, one might say of our comman- der, the defeat could have been prevented. In such cases it is easy to understand the intuition that outcomes that actually happened didn’t have to happen. Of course, if the initial conditions them- selves are necessary effects of earlier circumstances, the situation becomes more complex. Also, where large ensembles of systems are concerned, we might find a large degree of overall necessity due to the law of large numbers, but a low degree of necessity at the level of individual events. Evidently, one has to consider many more possibilities then the simple paradigmatic ones. But in both simple and complex cases, I suggest, sensitivity to initial condi- tions is the primary consideration underlying the common distinction between the necessary and the contingent. There are, in my view, several merits to this suggestion. (a) Unlike the logical terms, contingency and necessity as here defined are not binary either-or concepts, but span a spectrum of possibilities. This suits the needs of the historian as she wishes not only to classify occurrences into contingent and necessary ones, but to compare degrees of stability, or degrees of sensitivity to unexpected interference and so on. She might, for example, want to say that a regime was initially much more stable than in later years, when a relatively minor problem, such as a drought, could have caused a revolution. 102 YEMIMA BEN-MENAHEM © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997 (b) Contingency and necessity turn out to be quite different concepts than chance and causality. As we saw we can get a high degree of contingency in a perfectly deterministic process, so causality does not entail necessity. On the other hand, a causal chain may be interrupted by a random event without altering the final result in cases where the process is insensitive to such inter- ruption. It might be argued that historical explanation would cease to be meaningful in the total absence of causality. It is therefore an advantage that contingency as here understood does not constitute a threat to either causality or explicability. In general, both the category of chance and causality, and that of contingency and necessity, can be relevant to the analysis of historical processes; what I wish to emphasize is that neither of them can be reduced to the other. In the literature, there is a pronounced tendency to conflate the concepts of chance and contingency. E. H. Carr attacks what he calls ‘the trap of Cleopatra’s nose’ i.e. the idea that chance plays a significant role in history. He maintains, correctly in my view, that Cleopatra’s nose, Trotski’s cold, and other such famous incidental factors, provide no support whatever for the claim that history is a random progression of events. Had he used the above notion of contingency, however, he could have been clearer about the source of the confusion. The above examples illustrate contingency rather than randomness, that is, they represent a special type of causal connection, not the lack thereof. 1 Isaiah Berlin’s seminal ‘Historical Inevitability’ is another example of the tendency to interchange causality and necessity. 2 Aspiring to create space for contingency and free human action, Berlin crit- icises the notion of historical necessity. He believes that the erro- neous use of historical inevitability is rooted in the desire to emulate the natural sciences and thereby accord history the elevated status of these sciences. As he takes the concept of neces- sity to be synonymous with that of being governed by law, Berlin is assuming that paradigmatic scientific explanations require the concept of necessity. On the definition of necessity I have put forward, however, not every law-governed process is a necessary one, and typically, explanations in the natural sciences are law-like but not necessary. Berlin himself favours explanations that focus on contingent factors, but errs in identifying contingency with the HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY 103 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997 1 Carr, E. H. What is History?, (London: Macmillan, 1961), Chapter 4. 2 In: Berlin, I., Four Essays on Liberty, (London: Oxford University Press, 1969). absence of causality. I share his preference of the contingent, but decline his analysis of the concepts involved. (c) Another advantage is that on the suggested understanding of contingency, we can capture the intuition of human action ‘making a difference’ without actually taking sides in the tradi- tional free will controversy. Note that both the libertarian and the determinist may be interested in whether a certain action or event is necessary or contingent. For even if an action is free in the libertarian sense, this makes no difference to the general course of events unless it actually leads to a different result than would otherwise have ensued, that is, unless it is part of a contin- gent rather than a necessary causal chain. On the other hand, an action can be predetermined, or free only in the compatibilist sense, and still make a difference to the course of history. It seems to me, therefore, that it is useful to bracket the traditional problem of free will at this point. The possibility of making a difference is historically relevant regardless of whether we are determinists or libertarians, and of whether we are able to provide an adequate characterization of the notion of freedom. I believe it is primarily the notion of making a difference, rather than the more problematic notion of freedom that is required for the assessment of the significance of human action in history. (d) Teleological explanations have come to be seen as highly problematic. Considering the notion of necessity as defined here, we may observe that a mistaken impression of teleology is occa- sionally created by a non-teleological, causal progression, mani- festing a high degree of necessity. When a certain state or event will occur regardless of initial conditions or interferences, we are tempted to think of the process as being directed toward that particular state or event. This, however could be an illusion resulting from a false analogy with goal-directed human action. In the natural sciences, alleged teleology has been systematically replaced by non-teleological descriptions, often involving the kind of necessity we have noted. Thus, rather than conceiving of a thermodynamic system as directed towards a certain final state of disorder, or of entropy as a physical magnitude manifesting an inherent tendency to increase, we represent the equilibrium, the disordered state, or the state of high entropy, as relatively stable with regard to initial conditions and perturbations. The same strategy of explaining away apparent teleology might be useful in the historical context. (e) Finally, the present characterization is pleasantly non-meta- 104 YEMIMA BEN-MENAHEM © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997 physical, pertaining more to various familiar types of processes than to over-arching hypotheses of grand design. Since sensitivity to initial conditions varies from one process to another, there is no reason to assume that any one of the categories will suffice for historical understanding; both of them can be employed as the case requires. Philosophers of history have been divided over the question of whether it is necessity or contingency which is the fundamental historical category. Historicists such as Hegel and Marx and anti-historicists such as Berlin and Foucault exemplify polar positions. The above considerations enable one to adopt a more balanced attitude towards this problem. I would like to illustrate the adequacy of the above characteri- zation by applying it to the concept of contingency as used in a recent work on the theory of evolution. Stephen Jay Gould’s Wonderful Life is an argument against teleology, and a plea for the acknowledgement of the contingent. 3 The book tells a fascinating story of scientific error – the misinterpretation of the paleonto- logical findings from the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. The Burgess Shale was the site of the discovery, in 1909, by geologist Charles Doolittle Walcott, of a paleontological treasure trove: most paleontologists agree that the population of organisms found there represents a uniquely important evolu- tionary period – that which followed the mysterious Cambrian Explosion. They estimate its age at 530 million years. Walcott represented the Burgess organisms as ancestral forms of animal life found today; that is, on his interpretation, these primitive organisms belong to phyla to which present-day animals belong. This interpretation meshes well with the traditional view of evolu- tion, which construes the development of animal life as conelike: as proceeding from a single vertex to an increasingly broad and diverge range of species. On this conception, earlier branches are less-developed ancestral forms of later, more complex branches. In the 1960’s, however, a closer look at the Burgess Shale findings led to a revolutionary conclusion -- in contradic- tion to the original assessment, many of the Burgess specimens appear to be fossils of organisms that have no living evolutionary descendants. Indeed, some 15 to 20 different organisms, individ- uated from each other by their respective structural features, represent phyla which have no progeny alive today. In other HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY 105 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997 3 London: Penguin Books, 1991. words, the great majority of early life-forms were completely elim- inated; the relatively few survivors diversified into species with contemporary descendants. There is no reason to assume that the organisms which survived were the most highly developed. At first sight this does not appear to be such a novel thesis. The main philosophical conclusion that follows from Darwin’s theory is that the adaptation of organisms to their environments does not require teleological explanation; non-teleological causality and chance suffice to account for it. But it seems that the teleo- logical model is so firmly entrenched that while it has been super- seded in terms of scientific theory, it remains influential in practice. Evolution is still perceived as one of linear develop- ment, with homo sapiens as its most advanced product. Gould cites examples of ubiquitous distortions of the theory of evolu- tion, which reintroduce teleological notions such as ‘the march of progress’. According to Gould, adoption of the erroneous paradigm, perhaps unconsciously, led directly to Walcott’s mistake, for the cone model is explicitly directional: the present is more varie- gated and complex than the past. Overwhelmed by this model, Walcott failed to appreciate the wide structural diversity among the organisms he discovered. The reinterpretation of the Burgess Shale findings made it clear that the linear picture is false: not only is the biological present not the product of a teleological process, it is not even inevitable. Indeed, it is remarkably contin- gent. Although Gould is mainly concerned with the long-term history of life on the planet, he does draw some overall conclu- sions as to the nature of history in the usual sense. The polar cate- gories of necessity and sheer chance, he claims, leave no room for human intervention in the course of events. To us, thinking indi- viduals who seek to shape our lives through our actions, contin- gency is the most relevant category. Gould does not provide us with a definition of contingency, but his imagery is suggestive. The Burgess Shale organisms provide concrete evidence of the possibility of a totally different natural kingdom. 4 If there were some way to replay the tape of evolution, Gould says, the 106 YEMIMA BEN-MENAHEM © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997 4 Naturally, if we had reason to believe that the selection process that determined which of the Burgess creatures would survive was itself necessary, we would not perceive the evolutionary process as a whole as contingent. But Gould says no such reasons have yet been produced. outcome would be entirely different. This metaphor, then, serves to graphically illustrate the characterization of contingency I have recommended. To conclude, let us note that the concepts of contingency and necessity as here defined find many other interesting applica- tions in the history of science. For quite some time, the ‘no choice’ perspective was the reigning explanation in this field. Science was likened to a highway: though it is already paved, we, here and now, do not know its course past the upcoming bend. This picture is characteristic of the necessitarian view. However, most of the work in the history of science in the past few decades has abandoned this approach in favour of the opposite picture, which stresses the myriad interchanges, by-passes and side roads that confront, and perhaps confound, the wayfarer: the contin- gent elements in science as we know it today. Clarifying the notions of contingency and necessity should facilitate a better understanding of this change of perspective. Department of Philosophy The Hebrew University Mt. Scopus Jerusalem Israel HISTORICAL CONTINGENCY 107 © Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997