Stories We Tell Each Other.

Because contingency frightens us.

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Imagine the scene if you will. The Reichstag buzzing with excitement and decked with flags, the brown-uniformed Party functionaries straining for a glimpse of their leader. A small man with a moustache strides onto the podium, and the place erupts: Heil Shicklgruber! Heil Shicklgruber!.

It could have been like that, of course. We will never know exactly what motivated Alois Shicklgruber to change his family name in 1877, except that it seems to have been something to do with property succession. He could have chosen the more difficult Hiedler, or perhaps other family names. So we could have rooms full of books these days about the life and evil of Winifried Schicklgruber or Hans-Joachim Nepomuk.

Or maybe not. The most fervent materialist/rationalist will concede that names have effects on us. Hollywood knew very well what it was doing in changing Roy Scherer’s name to Rock Hudson, or Norma Jeane Mortensen to Marilyn Monroe. In the same spirit, Ivo Livi changed his name to Yves Montand, just as Declan MacManus became Elvis Costello.

Trivial, you say? Well, World War 2 didn’t just start because of a family name, certainly, but I’ll use this deliberately trite example as an extreme case of the subject of this week: the terrifying contingency of history and of contemporary events, and the strategies we use to try to bring a semblance or order out of the ambient chaos. Some of these strategies are reasonable and necessary, others are more doubtful, and some are downright dishonest. All of them have their origins in different literary modes, but we’ll get to that point later.

That history is in fact highly contingent is generally accepted. It’s enough to recall that Napoleone Buonaparte was born just a year after the French took control of Corsica from the Genoese and, although Corsica did not become part of France proper until 1789, he was nonetheless able to join the French Army. (Throughout his life he spoke the French he learned as a child with an Italian accent, and his spelling was apparently awful.) Come to that, Stalin hailed from the outer and recently-acquired fringes of the Russian Empire, briefly an independent state once more before the Red Army entered in 1921.)

When you read history with any attention, the “what ifs” become almost paralysing. After all, Corporal Hitler did well to survive the First World War: many of his comrades did not. And how many other potential national leaders, dictators and putative saviours of their peoples died in the trenches? It’s impossible to know. Go to Sarajevo and someone will take you to the undistinguished bridge where the Archduke Ferdinand was shot in 1914: read about the incident, and it seems that Ferdinand—who had already survived one attempt on his life that day—was really determined to get himself killed.

And so on and so on. If the Germans had not sent Lenin to the Finland Station in the famous sealed train? If, more recently, the French had not agreed to host the Ayatollah Khomeini in France for a few months, before sending him back with great publicity into the middle of the Iranian Revolution?

Sometimes, small decisions rattle down the generations. The bitterness engendered by the Boer War made the South African government’s decision to allow volunteers to fight on the side of the British in World War 2 highly controversial. Indeed, it’s generally credited with finally allowing the Nationalist Party to scrape into office in 1948, to drive the English-speaking establishment from power, and to ultimately introduce the apartheid system. But conversely, many of those volunteers were members of the Communist Party, later banned by the government, who provided weapon training for the ANC’s military wing, and subsequently made up a good proportion of the leadership. Funny stuff, history.

The almost-infinite contingency of history up to the present day, is a source of terror to some, and of delight for others. Different forms of materialism have comforted some, including determinism, where, essentially every event is the inevitable result of earlier events, hard though this is to demonstrate in practice. For his part, Engels seems to have coined the term, ”historical materialism” (in opposition primarily to the Idealistic interpretation of history) though in later life both he and Marx expressed worries about the way in which it had degenerated into just a slogan. In later years the concept was memorably attacked by Walter Benjamin and Karl Popper, and its misuse was critiqued by the dissident British Marxist EP Thompson, who was an actual historian. Whilst the dominance of materialist explanations is now somewhat less pronounced than it was, it remains a constant presence among those who think of history as evolving through simple ideas on a grand scale. I’ll come back to the wider influence of these ideas later.

There is, of course, an entire industry of counterfactual history, both fictional and non-fictional, which has fun with alternative histories and the futures they might have given rise to. In many cases, these amount to no more than “assume a miracle,” with the South winning the Civil War or the Germans winning World War 2. Much of this is for entertainment, but in some cases, as with Philip K Dick’s classic The Man in the High Castle, an important philosophical point is being made about what is real and what is not, and whether we can know the difference.

But even leaving that aside, it is a truism that history could very easily have developed in ways quite different to those we know. The biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously argued that the actual evolution of life on Earth was so contingent that if we could go back hundreds of millions of years and re-run evolution, life today would look totally different. Much the same is true of history. In Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, a minor character called Brigadier Pudding is trying to write a book entitled Things That Could Happen in European History, beginning just after World War 1. But of course scarcely has he finished the first chapter than events have already occurred that he had not anticipated, so he’s forced to start all over again. This is one way in which the novel subtly subverts the paranoid delusions of its ostensible narrator (or narrators), of ever-proliferating fantasies of world domination by mysterious cartels, banks and international financial conspiracies. If the novel is among other things a rumbustious satire on the conspiratorial mindset which demands that absolutely everything should be connected (“You will want cause and effect” sighs Pynchon at one point “very well.”) it also portrays very clearly the existential terror felt by its characters in a world without meaning, where any alleged cause and effect is better than none at all.

But even if history is not preordained and controlled by mysterious cabals, and even if some elements of history, as Thompson argues, are entirely amenable to materialist analysis conducted on an empirical basis, what are we to make of these stubborn events that happen all the time, often unexpectedly, and are difficult to fit into pre-existing structures?

Let me suggest a very simple typology that I take from my personal experience of political crises, and propose to extend to historical examples. It could be described as the difference between What? and When? between the underlying dynamics of a crisis and the point where something striking happens that gets political and media attention. As I have pointed out many times, the West is very good at being “surprised” by events which “nobody saw coming.” Much of this surprise results from a confusion between the What and the When: in other words, what happened was very likely if not inevitable, in some way and at some time, but its exact timing and nature could not have been predicted. (We may compare this to Thompson’s distinction between necessary and sufficient causes in describing historical events.) There are many examples just in the past few years: the Taliban takeover in Afghanistan, the civil wars in Ethiopia and Sudan, the fall of the House of Assad, the Israeli war on Gaza, were all predictable in the sense that the ingredients were all in place, it was a question of When. Domestically, the rise of the so-called “extreme Right” and the popularity of so-called “authoritarian” leaders results from developments that have been widely covered, and about which there is really no mystery. But our current political class, and the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) that serves them, have the attention span of a gnat, and the intellectual curiosity of an radish, so they are neither able to think deeply about contemporary events, nor inclined to listen to the warnings of those who do. The result is that, being ignorant of underlying tendencies, they are surprised by the often unexpected nature and timing of incidents that were foreseeable in outline but not in detail.

So specialists knew that the position of the Assad regime in Syria was precarious. The regime’s victory in the civil war had not been exploited politically to liberalise the political system or to loosen Assad’s iron grip on the country. Sanctions were continuing to have an effect. The Kurdish occupation of the oilfields was cutting off an important source of revenue. Production and smuggling of Captagon, a powerful amphetamine much in demand in the Gulf States, and which had helped to make up for the loss of oil revenues, was being interdicted by the US and the Lebanese Army, with the result that the Syrian Arab Army was scarcely being paid, and its morale was at rock bottom.

But such precarity can endure a long time, like a rickety house in the absence of a strong wind. When and how were very much undecided questions. But few would have expected Assad’s fall to stem ultimately from the October 7 2023 attack by Hamas. The Iranian response, through Hezbollah, led to an all-out conflict in which Hezbollah was badly mauled and was forced to withdraw many of its troops to Lebanon. Seeing the lack of Iranian and proxy support, HTS launched an opportunistic attack which led to the disintegration of the SAA and the end of the regime. (Yes, it’s more complicated than that: it always is.) The point is that, whilst the regime was known to be fragile, nobody could reasonably have predicted in October 2023 what would happen a little over a year later, and most importantly when.

Historians are aware of this distinction, of course. The classic example is that of World War 1, which was waiting to happen, given the political tensions throughout Europe at the time, and the widespread belief that most of them could only be settled by war. If the immediate cause was the Austrian obsession with manufacturing a reason for attacking Serbia, there were a whole series of other opportunities for conflict as well. A war (not necessarily the War as we know it) was highly likely, but it might have happened earlier or later and the cast might have been different. More recently, experts knew that the Shah of Iran’s position in 1978 was much weaker than it appeared, and that the Islamists were strong, but the timing of his downfall, the timing and place of his decision to go into exile, the strengths of various forces jockeying for power, the return of the Ayatollah Khomeini, the tactics adopted by the Islamists and the eventual proclamation of the Islamic Republic, were all highly contingent developments.

This distinction between background and foreground, and between the reasonably predictable and the largely contingent, is one that applies just as much to the (usually “unexpected”) consequences of major events as to their causes. Thus, western policies to ”stabilise” the Balkans over the last thirty-odd years have had the unintended effect of handing organised crime in Europe over to mafias from the region. Clever, that. Moreover, they have set in train consequences that “no-one anticipated,” when the KLA declared Kosovo independent (something the West had once said was not acceptable) and now of course faces a difficult election this week because the minority Serb population feels persecuted. This was entirely unexpected, of course.

So if we return to Syria for a moment, we can see a chain of consequences as well. The fall of the House of Assad was a massive blow to Iran and to its Axis of Resistance policy. Together with the losses they had suffered, and the forced abandonment of their attacks on Israel, this radically reduced the domestic political strength of Hezbollah, and unfroze the political blockage of the last few years. With Iran and Hezbollah now ready to countenance both the election of a President and the nomination of a Prime Minister, these two things happened very quickly, and a new government has now been formed. The combination of a tough, no-nonsense President who very publicly didn’t even want the job, and a reformist Prime Minister from outside the hothouse of everyday Lebanese politics, together with a renewed interest by Saudi Arabia, has resulted in the mildest of optimism that things might actually stop getting worse in that poor country. But it’s not just that no-one could have predicted this outcome a year or so ago, it’s also that such outcomes are so contingent that it’s not even worth trying.

Whilst I find this distinction between the background and the detail, the reasonably foreseeable and the hopelessly contingent, of analytical value, it’s obviously no good just demanding “the facts,” in order to make judgements, since facts do not line up like soldiers ready to be deployed. The closer you get to “facts,” then like a Mandelbrot diagram the subtleties are revealed and the more qualifications are needed, and when it comes to interrelations between “facts”, the problem is geometrically worse.

Thus, in the last few paragraphs, I have been obliged to select examples in the first place, decide how to describe them, decide which “facts” to include, decide which judgments it was fair to make, and present everything as honestly as I could. Someone else making broadly the same argument might have selected or emphasised different “facts,” whilst obviously it would have been possible to present much the same “facts” in a negative light, if you were a supporter of Iran/Hezbollah.

We do this all the time in our private lives, in deciding which media stories to read, which to believe, what to say to friends and family, what to say on social media (if we are so inclined.) Maybe we occasionally leave comments on Internet sites. Unless we are one of that tedious band who comment on everything just to show how clever they are, we will generally make comments about things we care about or believe we understand, and we then face the same problem: what to include, what to leave out, what judgements we can make.

If you’ve ever written a sustained work on history or current events, and even more a book, you will be painfully familiar with the problem. In theory, narrative history should be easy: “what happened?” But at its simplest, any narrative has to decide what to include and what to exclude, and why, and no two authors will make the same judgement. The sum total of such judgements, sometimes about questions of fine detail, can produce two narratives whose broad content may be the same, but whose detailed treatment may be very different. (Note that this is about choice of content alone: the two authors may be in fundamental agreement with each other on major questions.) The idea of “neutral” or “value-free” history is thus ultimately a fantasy, however determinedly one tries to approach it. Similarly, in writing about current events in Ukraine, some writers make a great deal of the Russian assertion that the government in Kiev is not legitimate. I haven’t mentioned it, because I think it’s a problem which certainly has a pragmatic solution, and won’t obstruct a settlement: it’s therefore not important enough.

Which brings us to the second part of this essay. To a degree which would have appeared unthinkable in the days when I first wrote about history and current affairs, we are now the beneficiaries of firehoses-worth of writing on every conceivable subject, and from every conceivable point of view. In theory, this should be a good thing: in practice, the Paradox of Choice strikes again. Simply discovering good-quality things to read, noting and remembering them, organising them in some form and retrieving them amounts to a lot of work. When you get new subscribers on Substack, the site tells you which other Substack they subscribe to as well. In some cases, my new subscribers already have sixty or seventy other subscriptions. If they are serious, and they read one article every week with the comments from each site, the that would mean perhaps 12-15 hours per week on this activity alone, which does seem a bit excessive. And this is in addition to the time people spend endlessly trawling the Internet, following links and recommendations, trying to find something actually worth reading.

Was it better before? Well, there are effectively no barriers to entry these days, or any need for qualifications. Essentially, anyone can write about anything, and hope to attract an audience. Does that matter? In principle, it shouldn’t, because let a thousand Internet sites bloom etc, but in practice I think it does, because it enables a form of consensual micro-targeting to take place, where readers find sites that play back their own opinions to them, and site owners make sure that those opinions are duly echoed. There’s often a financial component to this, like paying a busker to sing a song for you.

“Do you know The United States is Responsible for the Bloodshed in the DRC?”

“Yes, it’s in my repertoire. That will be five dollars please.”

I’m not going to presume to instruct readers on which sites to frequent and which to avoid, and anyway much depends on your taste. but I do think it might be useful to say a word now about the generic approaches of different sites and different writers, because they can vary wildly, and it isn’t always obvious what they are doing. Internet and other pundits, perhaps unused to longish-form writing about contemporary and recent events, fall mostly into one of three traditional types of structure, without realising it. (Much as I like writing about literature, I’m going to keep the description of the types very brief.)

The first, we can simply characterise as Traditional. Here, there is a Narrator, a Teller of Tales, who knows past, present and future, who comments on the action and who knows things about the characters that they themselves do not know. This style of writing (still present, especially in popular fiction) means that by the end of a novel such as Middlemarch, the reader effectively knows everything there is to know about the characters, and their eventual fate after the story proper ends. Characters are described, including their inner lives, rather than defining themselves by their actions. The author is everywhere, tying up knots in the plot and leaving us with the feeling that life is, indeed, a rational whole, where cause and effect have some meaning. Dumas, in some senses the very caricature of the nineteenth century novelist, never lets us forget that we are reading a story (“Now, where did we leave Aramis?…”)

This is fair enough for literature, but much more dubious when we apply the same approach to history, let alone current events. You can recognise the signs when authors make sweeping judgements based on little evidence, but on a conviction that they have, in some Gnostic fashion, understood the deeper meanings of things. I first encountered this mode of thinking during the Cold War, when much of my parents’ generation, and the newspapers they read, saw the Hand of Moscow everywhere in every untoward event. All these inexplicable and potentially frightening, disconnected events around the world could be rationalised and understood if only we accepted that Moscow was behind them. And indeed, numerous books were written, plotted exactly like nineteenth century novels, providing a coherent narrative about the Red Threat. (The names have changed today, but this mode of writing is still popular.)

At its most extreme, this approach presumes to psychoanalyse figures from the past or present, and penetrate their innermost thoughts. It’s been deservedly mocked (“What must Napoleon have thought as he looked out over the sea from St Helena on that morning of New Year’s Day 1816? Surely …”) Surely we can never know, and it would be pointless to speculate. But, disregarding Wittgenstein’s famous injunction in the last thesis of his Tractatus (“if you have nothing interesting and useful to say, STFU”—my translation), the Interwebs are full of people confidently claiming to know “what Putin thinks” who is really in control in Washington, what Netanyahu’s real plans are, and so forth, all without any indication that they have a clue what they are talking about. I have no idea what Putin is thinking, and don’t pretend that I do.

This way of thinking leads to the curse of Geopolitics, which in my view is not really a discipline at all, even though some claim to practice it. You can spot a geopolitician as much by their obsessive references to “pro-western”, “pro-Russian,” or “China-aligned” states and actors as by their lack of curiosity about the actual situation on the ground, and what the local actors want. This way of thinking, which ironically has its origins in the popular literature of the Imperialist age (“Scramble for Africa, “Great Game”), insists that whatever happens in the world is really all about Us, Our Interests and Our Enemies. Locals are merely bit players. This does, of course have the advantage of making analysis easy. You don’t need to know anything about the dynamics of a crisis, you just look at what major states of the world are doing, and perhaps look quickly at some economic data. In half an hour you can convert yourself from being a pundit on Ukraine to a pundit on Gaza, Sudan or Myanmar. But it sells.

The cultural movement that followed the omniscient narrator was modernism, as first industrialisation and secularisation, then Freud, and most of all the First World War, made the godlike pose and the tidy operation of cause and effect more and more problematic. Modernist writing was essentially subjective and fragmented, and avoided great statements and grand designs: James Joyce, of course, but also Virginia Woolf, Rilke, Kafka, Pirandello, and emblematically the poetry of TS Eliot, who famously could connect “nothing with nothing.” Interestingly, this approach spilled over into writing about both the major wars: all the outstanding war literature is modernist, fragmented and partly autobiographical, from Goodbye to All That to Catch-22. (There is no western equivalent of Grossman’s epic Life and Fate, for example.) And popular non-fiction about the Wars, and even academic studies, eventually followed the same fragmented, personal model, increasingly dealing with decontextualised small-scale events. Now, eighty years after the end of the Second World War, its popular image is of a disconnected, almost random collection of incidents, most of them atrocities of one kind or another.

Since the fighting in the Former Yugoslavia, this has been the basic technique by which the media deals with complexity and contingency: ignoring it, in favour of decontextualised “human interest”stories, often written from a position of moral superiority. Indeed, just to want to discuss the wider context is often dismissed as “making excuses” for whichever political group or nation is currently in disfavour. The narcissism inherent in Modernism (Joyce spending seventeen years writing a book only he could really understand, poets like Lowell and Plath just writing about how miserable they felt) is the antecedent of much modern political commentary, which is very largely now about What I Feel About This Situation, rather than any serious attempt to enlighten, or even produce a coherent argument. In late 2023, I started (but did not finish) reading any number of tearful essays by lifelong Zionists describing the mental agonies they were going through: how could you do this to me, Oh Israel? And of course there is a very popular Internet business model now which might be described as “I don’t know anything about the subject, but I have strong feelings about what I read on the Internet and I am skilled at expressing my feelings in angry and violent prose, so please send me some money.”

Modernism eventually ran into a brick wall, for reasons that will be evident. If its authors were still concerned about the fragmentation of the world, then their successors, generally called the postmodernists, actively celebrated it, and portrayed a world of chaos where meaning was inherently absent, in works that were self-referential, playful and full of parody, and often made no attempt to be credible. Authors like Pynchon and Nabokov, Borges, Beckett, John Barth and Umberto Eco, the Magical Realists of Latin America are representative. However, the influence of postmodernist literature on political writing has actually been quite minor compared to the influence of postmodernist theory, and of some Marxist cultural ideas that were around at the same time.

It’s arguable that more harm has been done by books that have not been widely read than by books that have, because the former persist only in fragments in the popular consciousness, as (ironically) decontextualised snippets. So it’s true that Roland Barthes did write an essay in 1967, called “The Death of the Author.” All that Barthes was saying, in typically playful terms, was that a work of art was not a crossword puzzle, to be solved by discovering the author’s intentions and influences, and that any reader could have a valid personal reaction to a text. There’s actually nothing new about this: when I was involved with literature fifty-odd years ago, we were sternly warned against the “intentional fallacy.” But the striking formulation of Barthes led those who had not read his essay to suppose that he was saying that the intended meaning of any text is irrelevant, or at least just one of many, which is not what he intended.

Likewise, his fellow-countryman Jacques Derrida said in a book published in 1967 that “il n’y a pas d’hors-texte”, a gnomic phrase which many who had not read the book took to mean mean “there is nothing except the text,” ie that background and authorial intention had nothing to do with the meaning of a text, which could therefore be interpreted as a reader wished. In fact, Derrida protested that he really meant the opposite: that it is necessary to take all these factors into account, because they were all represented somewhere in the text: in French, the hors-texte, is the contents of a book (title-page, illustrations) which are outside the main text but which must, in Derrida’s view, be considered part of it.

If Barthes and Derrida were misunderstood when talking about words, Louis Althusser was correctly understood when talking about “facts,” and his influence has been long-lasting and almost entirely destructive. Althusser discounted all forms of material or “factual” knowledge (though he remained a member of the French Communist Party), and held that “facts” are only “concepts of an ideological nature.“ Thus, knowledge proceeds from theory to theory, not fact to fact. Theories are tested for their congruency with Marxist thought (which is by definition perfect) and their truth is judged accordingly. Truth is thus not a matter of evidence but of theoretical demonstration, as with mathematics. And importantly for our purpose, there is no such thing as “historical reality,”the past literally changes as theory changes. (It’s not clear whether Althusser regarded the murder of his wife and his subsequent confinement in a mental hospital as “facts” in the banal sense, or just ideological constructs.)

Althusser was strongly attacked, not only by Thompson but by other dissident Marxists such as Koloakowski, who argued that his thought was by turns banal, obscure, and simply full of mistakes. Nonetheless his influence was enormous in the 1960s and 1970s, not least in the elite École normale supérieure where spent his professional career. But these ideas, as with those of Barthes and Derrida were exciting and liberating to entire generations of students and to those they subsequently taught. In this Marxist-Deconstructionist world, the Second World War, for example, was not an “event” but an “ideological production,” whose notional “events” were only “true” insofar as they were consistent with Marxist theory. Likewise, the UN Charter or the latest statement by the US President are only texts: what their drafters meant is irrelevant, and anyone can interpret them how they wish.

In some cases, this has simply produced harmless entertainment: Zionist interpretations of Mein Kampf, for example, or feminist readings of Moby Dick. But as these ideas have proliferated in more and more banalised form, they have produced entire schools of counter-history and counter-narrative, buttressed by selective and often ridiculous readings of texts whose origins and intentions are otherwise well known. In my own small way, I have become inured to reading or being told that events that I witnessed did not happen, but purely imaginary events did, that documents I helped draft mean something different from what we supposed, that decisions I was present for were never made or that documents whose plain meaning is obvious nonetheless have secret depths. Ironically, the (largely unwitting) post-modernists who proliferate on the Intertubes these days use such methods of deconstruction precisely to construct a coherent, if hopelessly flawed, view of the world which rescues them from the terrors of contingency.

It’s almost time to finish, I see, but I want to mention briefly a couple of concepts drawn from a forbidding but highly instructive work of literary theory by Gary Morson, about the relationship between time and narrative. Whilst the book is largely concerned with how authors handle the relationship between a narrative whose conclusion they know (and which will already be known if the book is read again) and the concept of time, it has major implications for the writing of history and analyses of current events.

Morson describes as “foreshadowing” the technique by which authors make use of “closed time,” where the future whose outcome is known determines the present, since the present must inevitably lead to it. This is immediately relevant to all histories leading up to major events, such as the French and Russian Revolutions, where historians unconsciously but deterministically select and emphasise only those events which in their view “led up to” them. It requires a major effort of will to write about what people thought and did when they were in ignorance of the imminence of a major event—such as the Second World War. I’ve attempted on a number of occasions over the decades to write and lecture on what politicians and ordinary people in the 1930s actually thought and did, and why. I find this destabilises and worries readers and listeners, used as they are to the presentation of the inevitable, foreseeable march of events leading to 1 September 1939, and the comforting moral judgements that can be passed as result. “But they can’t really have thought that!” is the usual response, although it’s quite clear they did. Likewise, “they must have realised this was going to happen” (what Morson calls “backshadowing,”) even if it’s clear they didn’t. And of course anyone who once attended a lecture about Barthes, Derrida or Althusser knows how to find an ambiguity or a stray phrase which can all by itself restore the conventional, morally-satisfying narrative.

More generally, the narrative of closed time strengthens the belief that we live in a world of inevitable outcomes, where signs and portents disclose the pre-determined future for those with eyes to see. Thus, I don’t know how many times in the last three years I’ve read that the Ukraine crisis will “inevitably go nuclear,” as though the crisis had a mind and a set of objectives of its own, distinct from the many conflicting attempts to influence its outcome. Here, the example of asserted “inevitable” crises, like that of 1914, is elevated to the status of a historical law. Yet any analysis of recent events such as I provided above for Syria and Lebanon shows how the presumed “inevitable” consequences (a nuclear war with Iran for example) have not actually happened, and there is at the moment no reason to think they will.

Although Morson’s argument is more complex than this, his main alternative model to foreshadowing is what he calls “sideshadowing:” a narrative in which time is open and where at all stages there is a recognition that different outcomes are possible. Some writers, of course, actually tried to do this, not just the post-modernists, but classic authors such as Tolstoy, whose novels, written as serials, were deliberately open, and featured dead ends, characters who disappear without explanation, and the deliberate down-playing of causality, as when in War and Peace a group of characters happen to pass by chance a village called Borodino, and think nothing of it.

It’s difficult to write in this way as a historian: it’s practically impossible as an instant pundit. Yet the reality is that history and contemporary crises take place not in closed but in open time, and the terrifying openness and contingency of the world is a brute fact that has to be acknowledged, without letting it overwhelm us. One possible approach, which I have used in these essays, is trying to understand the world not as a closed system or a struggle between mysterious powers, but as the interaction a series of known political processes (as there are known physical processes) whose interaction does not determine the future, but may help to understand the limits of what it potentially might be. And no doubt you will have your own ideas as well.