I have a feeling we’re slowly slipping towards the conflict between the “impersonal forces” and “great people” views of history :-)
A synthesis of the two views clearly outperforms either view on its own. There seems to be a difference between, basically, forest fires and earthquakes—both rely on long build-ups (the impersonal forces contribution) and when they happen may be surprising (I couldn’t tell you when the housing bubble would burst until it had but I could tell you that it would eventually), but the while there’s little control over when an earthquake happens and how the consequences shake out, there’s quite a bit of control over when a fire happens and how the consequences shake out (the great people contribution).
That’s an interesting distinction—can you say more about it?
It seems to me that events and changes vary quite a bit in how much control various people have over them. For things like the Chinese economic difficulties, it looks to me like this is the result of lots of malinvestment over the years, and there’s not too much control over whether or not things get worse / no clear single point of failure. Then there are other issues where there does seem to be a single point of failure, or a single failure avoidance point. Even in those cases, there are systemic forces that created the fuel for the conflagration.
One example that comes to mind is Arkhipov voting against firing nukes during the Cuban Missile crisis. The things that put the missiles there and made their standing orders to fire if attacked (and the officers agreed) might be better thought of as ‘systemic forces,’ but it seems hard to argue that ‘systemic forces’ are a better explanation of a 2-1 vote instead of a 3-0 vote than the ‘great people’ view. Similarly, one can imagine many forest fires that almost happened, and then didn’t because of direct action by a person on the scene.
(Or many forest fires caused by direct action of a person on the scene.)
A synthesis of the two views clearly outperforms either view on its own. There seems to be a difference between, basically, forest fires and earthquakes—both rely on long build-ups (the impersonal forces contribution) and when they happen may be surprising (I couldn’t tell you when the housing bubble would burst until it had but I could tell you that it would eventually), but the while there’s little control over when an earthquake happens and how the consequences shake out, there’s quite a bit of control over when a fire happens and how the consequences shake out (the great people contribution).
Of course—they are just endpoints and the discussion is about where in the middle the proper balance is struck.
That’s an interesting distinction—can you say more about it?
It seems to me that events and changes vary quite a bit in how much control various people have over them. For things like the Chinese economic difficulties, it looks to me like this is the result of lots of malinvestment over the years, and there’s not too much control over whether or not things get worse / no clear single point of failure. Then there are other issues where there does seem to be a single point of failure, or a single failure avoidance point. Even in those cases, there are systemic forces that created the fuel for the conflagration.
One example that comes to mind is Arkhipov voting against firing nukes during the Cuban Missile crisis. The things that put the missiles there and made their standing orders to fire if attacked (and the officers agreed) might be better thought of as ‘systemic forces,’ but it seems hard to argue that ‘systemic forces’ are a better explanation of a 2-1 vote instead of a 3-0 vote than the ‘great people’ view. Similarly, one can imagine many forest fires that almost happened, and then didn’t because of direct action by a person on the scene.
(Or many forest fires caused by direct action of a person on the scene.)