History as Topsy

What “we” have to do, according to this pretentious venture into deep thinking by a well-known Liberal ideologue (Robert L. Heilbroner’s The Future as History, Harper, $4.00), is to learn to “understand the grand dynamic of history’s forces,” to see the “future as a part of the sweep of history,” above all, to seal ourselves off from “false hopes” and “an equally false despair.” History (which includes, for Mr. Heilbroner, roughly speaking, everything that has happened since last night’s dinner, as his “future” includes everything between here and the end of our collective nose), has a “drift and a temper,” a “pattern,” from which no “vital . . . effort can depart very far in its essentials.” It poses “challenges” that are “irresistible, pitiless, unyielding,” so that often “we” are not “the masters but the prisoners” of our time, “with no alternative but to bow before its demands.” Why only often? Because we do not, as all that might seem to suggest, have to “remain passive before the enveloping changes of history”; we can, rather, “attempt to adapt our institutions so as to minimize . . . [the] impact of those changes.” But the “often,” in any case, gives the show away: there are “forces,” “necessities,” where Mr. Heilbroner and his political allies choose to see them, and “opportunities,” “freedom,” where what is involved is what they want to go and do.

I do not forget, of course, that the notion of “forces” in history is often a useful metaphor—useful, that is, to persons who keep themselves reminded that it is a metaphor, that what is “there” in history is people, who behave or misbehave, who do that which we wish them to or that which we would prefer to keep them from doing, and who keep on doing that which they do either because we permit them to or because we lack the strength or the will to keep them from doing it. I do not, by the same token, forget that there are at given moments in history states of affairs, situations, that given persons are indeed incapable of affecting. Nor do I forget that wisdom and statesmanship indeed consist in part in distinguishing between these situations and those we can affect: it is not wise or statesmanlike, either, to see stone walls where there are none, or to fail to distinguish between stone walls you can push over if you use your bulldozer, not your head, and those you can’t push over. Or to fail to identify the stone walls that have been built of stones and mortar of which you are the only supplier—that is, a) the ones you can learn a lesson from, and b) the ones you can keep the other fellow from building any higher or any thicker. “Forces” in history are a profitable study only for men who approach history responsibly, which means regarding themselves, and other men, as agents in history, responsible for their own actions and the consequences of those actions.

WK

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Willmoore Kendall

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What “we” have to do, according to this pretentious venture into deep thinking by a well-known Liberal ideologue (Robert L. Heilbroner’s The Future as History, Harper, $4.00), is to learn to “understand the grand dynamic of history’s forces,” to see the “future as a part of the sweep of history,” above all, to seal ourselves off from “false hopes” and “an equally false despair.” History (which includes, for Mr. Heilbroner, roughly speaking, everything that has happened since last night’s dinner, as his “future” includes everything between here and the end of our collective nose), has a “drift and a temper,” a “pattern,” from which no “vital . . . effort can depart very far in its essentials.” It poses “challenges” that are “irresistible, pitiless, unyielding,” so that often “we” are not “the masters but the prisoners” of our time, “with no alternative but to bow before its demands.” Why only often? Because we do not, as all that might seem to suggest, have to “remain passive before the enveloping changes of history”; we can, rather, “attempt to adapt our institutions so as to minimize . . . [the] impact of those changes.” But the “often,” in any case, gives the show away: there are “forces,” “necessities,” where Mr. Heilbroner and his political allies choose to see them, and “opportunities,” “freedom,” where what is involved is what they want to go and do.

I do not forget, of course, that the notion of “forces” in history is often a useful metaphor—useful, that is, to persons who keep themselves reminded that it is a metaphor, that what is “there” in history is people, who behave or misbehave, who do that which we wish them to or that which we would prefer to keep them from doing, and who keep on doing that which they do either because we permit them to or because we lack the strength or the will to keep them from doing it. I do not, by the same token, forget that there are at given moments in history states of affairs, situations, that given persons are indeed incapable of affecting. Nor do I forget that wisdom and statesmanship indeed consist in part in distinguishing between these situations and those we can affect: it is not wise or statesmanlike, either, to see stone walls where there are none, or to fail to distinguish between stone walls you can push over if you use your bulldozer, not your head, and those you can’t push over. Or to fail to identify the stone walls that have been built of stones and mortar of which you are the only supplier—that is, a) the ones you can learn a lesson from, and b) the ones you can keep the other fellow from building any higher or any thicker. “Forces” in history are a profitable study only for men who approach history responsibly, which means regarding themselves, and other men, as agents in history, responsible for their own actions and the consequences of those actions.