The dead would say yes, though one can't be certain. The living will certainly cry, No! The ethical ambiguity of the latter response could be glossed over, were it not based on the false perception that what happened in the Third Reich was unique. It wasn't. What took twelve years in Germany lasted for seventy in Russia, and the toll—in Jews and non-Jews—was almost exactly five times higher. With a little industry, one may presumably establish the same ratio for revolutionary China, Cambodia, Iran, Uganda, and so on: the ethnicity of human loss makes no difference. But if one is loath to continue with this line of reasoning, it is because the similarity is too obvious for one's liking, and because it is too easy to commit the common methodological error of promoting this similarity to the rank of admissible evidence for a subsequent law.
The only law ofhistory, I am afraid, is chance. The more ordered the life ofa society or an individual, the more chance gets elbowed out. The longer this goes on, the greater the accumulation of disfranchised chance, and the likelier, one would think, that chance will claim its own. One should not attribute a human property to an abstract idea, but "Remember that the fire and the ice/Are never more than one step away/From a temperate city; it is/But a moment to either," said the poet, and we must heed this warning, now that the temperate city has grown too big.
As the spelling out of the laws of history goes, this one is the closest. And if history is to be admitted into the ranks of science, which it craves, it should be aware of the nature of its inquiry. The truth about things, should it exist, is likely to have a very dark side. Given the humans' status as newcomers, i.e., given the world's precedence, the truth about things is bound to be unhuman. Thus any inquiry into that truth amounts to a solipsistic exercise, varying only in intensity and industry. In this sense, scientific findings (not to mention the language to which they resort) that point toward human inconsequence are closer to that truth than the conclusions of modern historians. Perhaps the invention of the atom bomb is closer to it than the invention of penicillin. Perhaps the same applies to any state-sponsored form of bestiality, particularly to wars and genocidal policies, as well as to spontaneous national and revolutionary movements. Without such awareness, history will remain a meaningless safari for historians of theological bent or theologians with historical proclivities, ascribing to their trophies a human likeness and a divine purpose. But humanity of inquiry is not likely to render its subject human.
The best reason for being a nomad is not the fresh air but the escape from the rationalist theory of society based on the rationalist interpretation of history, since the rationalist approach to either is a blithely idealistic flight from human intuition. A nineteenth-century philosopher could afford it. You can't. If one can't become a nomad physically, one should at least become one mentally. You can't save your skin, but you can try for your mind. One should read history the way one reads fiction: for the story, for the characters, for the setting. In short, for its diversity.
In our minds we do not usually hook up Fabrizio del Dongo and Raskolnikov, David Copperfield and Natasha Rostova, Jean Valjean and Clelia Conti, though they belong to roughly the same period of the same century. We don't do this because they are not related; and neither are centuries, except perhaps dynastically. History is essentially a vast library filled with works offiction that vary in style more than in subject. Thinking of history in a larger manner is pregnant with our own self-aggrandizement; with readers billing themselves as authors. Cataloguing these volumes, let alone trying to link them to one another, can be done only at the expense of reading them; in any case, at the expense of our own wits.
Besides, we read novels rather erratically; when they come our way, or vice versa. We are guided in this activity by our tastes as much as by the circumstances of our leisure. Which is to say, we are nomads in our reading. The same should apply to history. We should simply keep in mind that linear thinking, while it is de rigueur for the historian's trade—a narrative device, a trope—it is, for his audience, a trap. It is awful to fall into the trap individually, but it is a catastrophe when it happens collectively.
An individual, a nomadic individual especially, is more on the lookout for danger than the collectivity. The former can turn 360 degrees; the latter can look in only one direction. One ofthe greatest joys ofa nomad, ofan individualist, is in structuring history in one's own personal fashion—in cobbling one's own antiquity, one's own Middle Ages or Renaissance in a chronological or achronological, wholly idiosyncratic order: in making them one's own. That is really the only way to inhabit the centuries.
We should remember that rationalism's greatest casualty was individualism. We should be careful with the supposedly dispassionate objectivity of our historians. For objectivity does not mean indifference, nor does it mean an alternative to subjectivity. It is, rather, the sum total of subjectivities. As murderers, victims, or bystanders, men in the final analysis always act individually, subjectively; and they and their deeds should be judged likewise.
This robs us of a certitude, of course, but the less of that the better. Uncertainty keeps an individual on guard, and is generally less bloodthirsty. Of course, all too often, it makes him agonize. But it is better to agonize than to organize. On the whole, uncertainty is more true to life itself; the only certain thing about which is that we are present in it. Again, the main trait of history, and of the future, is our absence, and one cannot be certain of something one was never a part of.
Hence that vague look on the face of the Muse of Time. It is because so many eyes have stared at her with uncertainty. Also, because she has seen so much energy and commotion, whose true end only she knows. And ultimately, because she knows that had she stared back openly, she would have rendered her suitors blind, and she is not without vanity. It is partly owing to this vanity, but mainly to the fact that she has nowhere else in this world to go, that on occasion, with that vague look on her face, she walks into our midst and makes us absent.
Speech at the Stadium
Life is a game with many rules but no referee. One learns how to play it more by watching it than by consulting any book, including the Holy Book. Small wonder, then, that so many play dirty, that so few win, that so many lose.
At any rate, if this place is the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, that I remember, it's fairly safe for me to assume that you, its graduates, are even less familiar with the Good Book than those who sat on these benches, let's say, sixteen years ago, when I ventured afield here for the first time.
To my eye, ear, and nostril, this place looks like Ann Arbor; it goes blue—or feels blue—like Ann Arbor; it smells like Ann Arbor (though I must admit that there is less marijuana in the air now than there used to be, and that causes momentary confusion for an old Ann Arbor hand). It seems to be, then, Ann Arbor, where I spent a part of my life— the best part for all I know—and where, sixteen years ago, your predecessors knew next to nothing about the Bible.
If I remember my colleagues well, if I know what's
Delivered as a commencement address at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1988.
happening to university curricula all over the country, if I am not totally oblivious to the pressures the so-called modern world exerts upon the young, I feel nostalgic for those who sat in your chairs a dozen or so years ago, because some of them at least could cite the Ten Commandments and still others even remembered the names of the Seven Deadly Sins. As to what they've done with that precious knowledge of theirs afterward, as to how they fared in the game, I have no idea. All I can hope for is that in the long run one is better off being guided by rules and taboos laid down by someone totally impalpable than by the panel code alone.