Causes of History

The historian and the storyteller (novelist, screenwriter) finally are interested in the same question: why do things happen? Why does a man decide to murder his wife? Why does a king invade another country, or start a new religion? Why does someone decide (and do they, really, “decide”) to become a doctor, or a lawyer? The historian Peter Gay proposes, in answer, a “tripartite division of causes into immediate ‘releasers,’ short-ranger dterminants, and long-range causes, and a comprable division of 'worlds' (‘Man lives in several worlds at once, each of them capable of supplying causes’) into culture, craft, and the private sphere.”

I quote from John Updike’s review of Gay’s Art and Act (in Hugging the Shore), an attempt on Gay’s part “to analyze the structure of historical causation by means of those who paint pictures and design houses rather than those who lie for money or kill for glory….” Among the many felicities to be found in Updike’s review is this passage on the utlitity of trying to propose historical causes—come up with reasons--in of itself:

Though….any history is to some extent stylized, the attempt must be made. Otherwise, the nightmare of medieval nominalism is upon us again, and by a kind of Zeno’s paradox of infinte factual subdivision the Achilles of understanding can never overtake the gargantuan tortoise of reality.