However, I don’t mean to toss general explanations overboard completely. Even though small-scale contingencies remain frequently decisive, the larger scale provides the context.

Maybe it’s not that obvious in politics, but think of technological progress, history of technology, engineering. When the time comes for some discovery or innovation: radio, telephone, conveyor belt assembly line or whatever – the thing just gets invented, and it’s often invented independently and almost simultaneously by several different individuals. Is there any doubt that if the officially recognized inventor died in his/her childhood, his discovery would’ve been made around the same time by someone else?

I think it’s very similar with the politics.

If there had been a Tonkin, but no WW1, would Viet nam and everything that has flowed in consequence have happened. For the United States not to go to war under such circumstances would require postulating away much more than WW1. OTOH, WW1 in itself implies neither Tonkin, nor Vietnam. Nor does it necessarily imply a Cold War, as the Bolshevik rebellion could have gone myriad different ways.

In the absence of WW1, would we have also had a major conflict between the US and Russia, the context of Tonkin? Marx at the end thought communism would start in Russia, though he obviously knew nothing of WW1. De Toqueville predicted before Marxism even existed that the world would eventually become alligned arouund strategic conflict between the United States and Russia. So if major minds were able to see this coming, there was obviously much more to it than WW1. But the “more” is not necessarily a function of scale. Marx’s reasoning was based on the existence of the Russian communes that existed in his day.

The notion that big effects require big causes has an appealing intellectual neatness. It tells you that the big questions will not hinge on small matters that may not be recoverable. But that is not necessarily true, however pretty it may be to think so.

http://www.kuro5hin.org/comments/2004/6/30/33339/3949/164

abb1, Although butterfly effects emerged from the study of chaotic systems, effects that are out of scale with their causes have been found to have much wider applicability, for example, to complexity theory, which is not primarily concerned with chaotic systems. The important point is positive feedback loops, which certainly do operate in human societies, can cause minor changes to have major effects.

Your assertion was “What happened there didn’t happen because of Hitler; it’s just that an objective historical process pushed him to the top. Without Hitler it would’ve been some Shcmitler with pretty much the same results,” The presupposition to this is that “objective historical processes” are causally sufficient to determine such things. Attempts to reconstruct such processes – probably the most thorough-going being Marxism – have a very poor predictive record, but if it cannot withstand the test of prediction, what is the advantage to moving to a more remote level of causation? We know Hitler did this; to say someone else could have is speculation, and what evidence is there for it? Much of the classic modernist view of history has suffered from science envy and tried to develop a picture of history that minimized the importance of human intention, countering chiefly with metaphors drawn from dynamics – history is determined by “impersonal forces”, it is a “flow”, and so on. But the picture of dynamics that underlies those metaphors has been seriously undermined.

Why was America majorly involved in Viet Nam? The proximate cause was the Tonkin fraud. There the chain of causation was clear. However, that amounts to saying “we were in Viet Nam because members of the Johnson administration wanted us there, and covertly manipulated and misrepresented events to bring it about.” Human intention, covertly expressed, is at center stage. So modern theorists seek “deeper” explanations – that is to say, explanations that are less causally direct, but less reliant on human intentions. Generally, the justification for an explanation with a weaker causal chain is that it is more general or more testable. But the problem is that the specific cause of Tonkin is decisive: the range of “objective conditions” under which America would have declared war given Tonkin is very broad, and the likelihood of America going to war absent Tonkin or something much like it looks very slim. The “deeper” causes do provide important context, and I am not saying they should be ignored, but they are not sufficient and should not therefore be privileged over more proximate explanations.

Jonathan, in terms of chaos theory, this come down to what frame of reference captures the information to render the determination intelligible. In other words, chaos theory describes processes that are fully deterministic in principle, but are indistinguishable from non-deterministic processes without complete and perfect information about initial conditions. From a frame of reference that does not capture that information, the outcome looks contingent. The comparison I’m drawing to history is that “objective condition” paradigms often do not capture enough detail of a situation to get to the point that is causally sufficient. Theories that look more specifically at who is holding power and what they intend do capture information the more general models do not, although, to be fair, the reverse is also true.

(On second thought, maybe instead of tralatio it should be collocatio… Argh! Someone help me!)

Germany’s economy and infrastructure were in tatters in 1933. By 1939 the country had been turned into a severe threat to the combined might of the great powers. It came at a terrible price, and I’m certainly not defending any part of it, but can you see Bush being involved with anything like that (irony intentional)?

“Among the characteristics of chaotic systems, described below, is sensitivity to initial conditions (popularly referred to as the butterfly effect). As a result of this sensitivity, the behavior of systems that exhibit chaos appears to be random, even though the system is deterministic in the sense that it is well defined and contains no random parameters.”

For history to be chaotic in this sense it would first need to be governed by well defined, deterministic (albeit unknown) laws. Opinions about that vary.

But if it is, and an individual or a group obscure enough to be under everyone’s radar can have a significant effect (that is, historically significant), then history is chaotic.

I, too, am willing to consider that possibility. I reject it because it is false; Democrats are about where they were 20-odd years ago and Republicans have moved far to the right. This is documented in, for instance, Off Center by Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, a book commented on in this blog.

Around that time I said:

“emotionally, Nazi comparisions will always seem like hyperbole because Nazism has become mythical. It is larger than life, and we see the people who did it as other kinds of people than ourselves, living in a different kind of world, although this clearly is not so. The Nazi is the secular 20th century figure that has been called on to fill the psychological space traditionally held by archetypal figures like “Satan”. This is why comparisons of actual human beings to Hitler seem like comparison of unlike entities, even though Hitler was obviously human, however much it may offend our vanity to claim him.”

Godwin’s law codified this bias, when it should be overcome.

As for the objection that Godwin’s law in an observation not intended as proscriptive, that’s false. Go read what he wrote himself as someone else here linked. He thought Nazi analogies were abused (and they are), and set out to develop a counter-meme. It was an experiment in censorship by meme propagation, and it was definitely intended to change the discourse. As we now see, the counter meme was also virulent.

abb1, the notion that history is shaped only by large-scale forces is appealing to a certain modernist project of seeking to theorize everything, but even our sense of simple dynamics no longer holds that causes must operate on the same scale as effects. To trot out the cliche, just as butterflys can cause hurricanes in China, individuals and small groups can change history. This does magnify the role of contingency in history in a way that some find uncomfortable, but the world is not constrained by a need to care for our comfort.

Imean both Chavez and Falwell using the term in a matter of days.

Godwin is the DEVIL