The Value of "I Don't Know"

Here's the opening of an early section of this book in progress: "Although the great forces of history are probably immune to the acts of any individual will and most of what we like to see as turning points are more likely, really, to be the first manifestations of movements already bound to happen, still it’s interesting to speculate on how the cultural history of America may have turned on the shooting of that rabid dog in Winnipauk, Connecticut in the summer of 1862. There were other events to the south that had a more obvious impact on the nation’s course and no doubt deserve the much greater attention historians have given them—the Battle of Antietam and the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation to name a couple—but even so, what happened inside the soul of one young man when he leveled his gun, not at a Confederate soldier but at a foamy-mouthed mongrel, and pulled the trigger would echo through the next five decades and beyond."

      In the 19th century historians argued that question a lot—do individuals change history or are they just the way history manifests itself?—often using Napoleon as their example. Clearly he was a singular man of tremendous will who drove events as few individuals ever have. But even without him, in a generation or two, wouldn't the biggest changes he brought about have happened anyway: a burgeoning England and ascendant Prussia knocking France from its dominant position; an uneasy compromise between the old monarchies and the new republicanism; mass armies; a universal system of decimal measurement; American occupation of the Mississippi Valley? Had Napoleon not emerged, the Egyptian wing of the Louvre might be a lot smaller and those little layer cakes would have a different name, but the big forces of economics, politics and population may well have found other men and events to get where they were going.

       I'm not smart enough to answer that question, but I am smart enough not to try. It's a question I let roll through the book: did Anthony Comstock shape Victorian America's extraordinary censoriousness, did Bernarr Macfadden really knock down the walls of suppression, or were they just the first surfers to catch their cultural waves? And from there the question spreads out to all of us: when I reveal some part of myself that I've been hiding because I fear the world's reaction, to what extent am I advancing the cause of personal revelation and to what extent am I being carried there by a hurtling mass of social, economic, technological and every other kind of influence too big for me even to see clearly?

      It's some of both, I'm sure. But that's the joy of "trade books" as opposed to academic books. I get to intrigue people by raising a topic we can all think about together and I don't have to pretend that I've actually figured out an answer...or that such an answer even exists.