I've said in several comments this week that World War I was The Usual Game, by The Usual Players, for The Usual Reasons. When horrible events happen, we usually look for horrible people. Sometimes we find them. But when essential conditions have changed, even The Usual can be horrible.
More below the fold.
Unintended Consequences, Part III - The Usual, The Horrible (Non-Cynical Saturday)
Note: This will be a short piece, as I was sick much of the night. It's not serious, but it was exhausting. My apologies.
This week Morning Feature looked at the causes and unintended consequences of World War I. Thursday we examined why it wasn’t the quick and easy war that leaders promised. Yesterday we explored how it set the stage for World War II, as well as lingering conflicts in the Balkans and Middle East. Today we’ll consider lessons on sweeping, systemic change from "the war to end all wars."
The luckiest moment of my life.
I worked the midnight shift on that cold, drizzly January night. I drove to work in The Usual Way: on a well-lighted, major highway at the posted speed limit. The conditions seemed fine. Then I turned onto the exit ramp and began to spin. The rain had frozen to black ice. I turned two complete revolutions and, astonishingly, I hit nothing and reached the bottom of the ramp facing the right direction. It was the luckiest moment of my life.
As I watched the world spin past, I remembered my driver's ed teacher saying "Ramps and bridges freeze before the main roadway." I should have known. Instead I'd been driving in The Usual Way, unaware the road conditions had changed. But for astonishingly good luck, The Usual Way might have been horrible.
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme."
While George Santayana's "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" is better known, the Mark Twain quote above is more accurate. Some of our worst mistakes come from trying to repeat the past when essential conditions have changed. Outcomes may rhyme but they won't repeat ... and the differences can be horrible.
Upon seeing a horrible outcome from The Usual Game, we're prone to look for Unusual Players or Unusual Reasons. Historians of the 1920s and 30s sought a cause for the exceptional carnage in some exceptional evil in the personalities or cultures of those involved. Today historians more often concede that war had no exceptional cause. Its cause was the most ordinary of human failings: hubris.
I drove to work that January night in The Usual Way, blithely confident of The Usual Outcome. In the summer of 1914 The Usual Players played The Usual Game for The Usual Reasons, and they too were blithely confident of The Usual Outcome. Like the water freezing on that ramp, the conditions of their world had changed. Like me, they ignored available information. I was astonishingly lucky that night, but the world was not astonishingly lucky in 1914. Rather than The Usual Outcome, plans for The Usual Game triggered horrible Unintended Consequences.
The lesson of 1914 should be humility. Foresight has limits, no matter how carefully we plan. Essential conditions change, and with those changes The Usual can become The Horrible. No exceptional evil is necessary. Just hubris.
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Happy Saturday!
Crossposted from Blogistan Polytechnic Institute (BPICampus.com)