An historical mystery arises when historians consider why events happened and, after considering all the forces that are at work, there is no satisfactory explanation for why the event or events took place. A good example of an historical mystery is the outbreak of World War I, a topic rigorously investigated from the overly ample materials of the circumstances and events of what is called The July Crisis that occurred after Prince Ferdinand (and his wife) had been assassinated in Sarajevo in 1914 and had for some reason precipitated a World War from which we might say we did not all recover until the Soviet Union collapsed and Germany was reunited in the late 1980’s. How had this apocalypse, none of its member states believing it would happen (Germany mistakenly thinking it would be a short war), had nevertheless occurred?
Historians have elaborated the circumstances that led to war, but none seem conclusive. Christopher Clark, who I rely on for his book “The Sleepwalkers”, marshals these circumstances together, and each of them are found wanting as the sufficient explanations for engaging in war. Everyone was shortsighted. The Austro-Hungarians wanted to put down a Serbian insurrection and were given carte blanche to do so by the Germans, and did not consider that they were not equipped to fight the Russians. The Russians supported Serbia but did not consider what it would mean to confront Germany, and Germany thought it could manage a two front war, while France supported its entente with Russia and the British would not allow the German incursion through Belgium, considering it a breach into the British balance of power whereby only a weak power could control the Lowlands. None considered that a war would be of such great destructiveness even though the experience of the American Civil War was that rapid fire rifles gave the defensive advantage crucial and therefore would lead to protracted fighting. Perhaps Doris Lessing gave perhaps the best explanation when she offered the thought that Europeans could delay a war but sooner or later thought bloodletting was good for the collective soul or at least inevitable. It is obvious that at least one side in a war miscalculates in that both sides will think they will win, but the case of the Great War was that multiple sides were wrong and that only the British and Americans could be said to have won the war goal of disrupting the German advance across Europe, but the British paid a much higher price to do so than they had contemplated.But nations thought it wouldn’t happen but it did happen anyway.
Not only wars have historical mysteries. Perhaps one of the most impressive was the ability of Christianity to come to dominate Europe. After all, it started off as a cult group in the far reaches of the Roman Empire. How could it have so greatly expanded? Perhaps the Jews who at first had included the Christians were already well entrenched in the political leadership of Rome. Perhaps it was because the Christians decided early on to break off with the Jews and their customs and so had become open for gentile conversion. But these explanations seem meagre in that the Christians became so quickly influential rather than just another set of Jewish ethnics going through their own diaspora to Rome and because there had to be a reason more than not being Jewish to explain the spread of its influence. Perhaps it is because the collection of emotions that the Christian experience offered: a careful interpenetration of love, vengeance, atonement and salvation, were rich enough to sustain it, but that is to see Christianity as not also buttressed by its economic and social events and so simply relying on its insights to make its way in the world’s life. A mystery indeed.
Not every war or social crisis is a mystery. The American Civil War was not a mystery. The divisions between the North and the South were very deep, as old as the time the Founding Fathers created the three fifth’s compromise so that the southern states would have greater representation in spite of the fact that the slaves were not citizens. There were conflicts over the Tariff Act of 1824, the Missouri Compromise of 1830, the Compromise of 1850, all suggesting that a war was all but inevitable. It would have been a surprise if the war could have been much longer averted even if Douglas had become President and allowed state sovereignty to preserve slavery for another generation. Some prickly point would have emerged. And a civil war commenced sooner or later, such were the chasms dividing the two, both economic and ideological. Indeed, if there is a surprise in the Cold War was that it did not result in nuclear apocalypse whether by accident, miscalculation or design. There were so many things moving in the direction of war that only the awfulness of it all led thee Soviet Union asnd the United States to create arms control agreements and only because Gorbechev had gain power and was more willing to deal with the West.sExplanation is sufficient and all agree how it happened.
Another non-mystery is the Westward Expansion, something supported by both Jefferson and Polk, and there is an underlying explanation that takes any mystery out of the matter. The United States did not want to see itself Balkanized, having witnessed the European continent subject for a thousand year civil war between nation states and even peoples before they recognized themselves as nation states. To the contrary, there would be a single continental nation so as to assure peace from the Atlantic to the Pacific. That dream was subverted by the fact that Canada had not been overcome by Revolutionary troops or during the War of 1812, and the only reason far more of Mexico was taken into the United States was that the President's envoy had already negotiated a much more lenient cession. It was fortunate that Canadian American relations became so pacific, perhaps because they were populated by similar immigrants, and because Mexico was so backward with regard to the United States that it was not a threat that required another war.
Sociologists, for their part, think there are no historical mysteries, They just think that historians have just misconstrued what explanation is. Historians are out to identify a cause or a collection of causes as the explanation of an event and so there is no satisfactory explanation if you cannot find a cause that seems definitive. Sociologists do not look for causes but only contexts and so the putative reasons for an event is just exhausted by looking at all the contexts that might be plausible, or even those that are not particularly plausible, as when sociologists find that the theory of sunspots having made the late middle ages as cold and rainy and plague infested led to a different set of agricultural practices and perhaps to the development of capitalism. But once the contexts are exhausted, there is nothing else to say unless one wants to invoke the idea of cause as meaning the equivalent of a punch in the nose causing a person to have a nosebleed. That is a matter of legal responsibility rather than cause in a scientific sense, and is unnecessary and so there are no mysteries, there is no explanation for a particular event other than it happened, like the First World War or events that are multidetermined, such as World War II, and about which there is no mystery, but that wouldn’t have precluded Hitler dying or deciding not to test his luck one more time after Czechoslovakia. Events don’t get explained, for the sociologists eye; they just happen.
There is a single metaphysical glitch which separates the experience of history from sociology, that makes the experience, the kind of being, distinct from the other so that whatever their variances, history is one thing and sociology the other. History is concerned with causes; it arranges events so that some events cause others by deploying sequences of events as if one set of events or situations lead to another. Sociology, for its part, makes its subject matter timeless in that there are only contexts that serve as explanations for how something happens. It wasn’t until the end of the Eighteenth Century that Malthus learned the trick of abandoning historical sequence and providing instead a formula between forces rather than depending on people to punch one another in the nose to understand how events took place.
There is another metaphysical glitch separating two disciplines or verbal experiences that is far more venerable. It is the difference between history and drama and that is found in ancient times when there was the simultaneous development of these two deep, deep ways of thinking, feeling and talking. Herodotus said in the very first line of “The Histories” that his purpose was to insure that the past would be preserved, that heroic people would be remembered (which is much the same thing) and also to ascertain the causes of events. Herodotus was not a metaphysician, did not speculate about states of being, but he did think of history as a purposeful inquiry and therefore necessarily meant to alter the materials or events on which it worked so that its prose narrative would do something other than relate events. It was to sanctify and glorify and explain, which means that it has to shape events, to recast what might seem recalcitrant so as to achieve its endeavors. Doing so is a mighty task in that the matter of history will be resistant to be shaped, just as a stone when turned into a sculpture and that shaping it turns it into a story or multiple stories that are somehow faithful to the stories, however much they become changed by finding the stories within the history. A history without stories is just a chronicle and is hardly worth remembering unless names, very arbitrary things, are worth remembering just so as to let the name roll off the tongue, like Vercingeterx, or so that some unremembered minor dignitary’s name is affixed to a highway.
That is very different from a story. “The Iliad” also begins with an invocation or purpose, which in this case is to sing of the wrath of Achilles, and that opening may have inspired Herodotus, but the whole principle of the two is different: while Herodotus is abstract, Homer is there to expand and review rather than to explain, and so suggests that epic poetry is not a description of the world however much it offers insights about the way the world works, but to offer the story itself for its own sake, to elaborate rather than to analyze. Indeed, we can use our distinction between cause and context as a way to understand story. Stories don’t have contexts because every event in the story is a cause because it is consequential. Checkov can provide the atmosphere of a society and there can be a gloomy day in a novel but everything means something because they are taken as a part of the whole rather than an accident, a part of the design by which minor things will emerge as major and if the action seems innocuous, as in James’ “The Beast in the Jungle”, the author will show that what was innocuous was significant and profound. Nothing in a story is an accident because otherwise why would the author have created or noted or included it? In history an author is allowed to point out things that are atmospheric because it happened to happen, what to be included as significant, like the local showers that seem to crop up after artillery barrages clear, or maybe just a set piece where a civilian observes with contempt that the enemy is occupying the land, though that may be important because it explains local hostility. Historians can make stories but storytellers cannot make other than stories. So we can say of stories that they are internal in that all within them creates the connections between all these created events while a history is compared to what is external, which is the truth of the matter rather than the truths which stories take from their concatenations of events. Certainly epic poets and novelists rely on the world outside so as to create their inner worlds. No science fiction author escapes from the present day to show how people talk or how politics handle, whether in the roman empire or in a Rome like StarWars. The question is that the associations are not incidental but essential and, if the storyteller is artful, is integrated so that the world seems whole even if it is just out of the storyteller’s imagination. How storytellers make art is indeed a mystery, just not an historical one.