pumpkinstrokemarrow

Have been strong country smells on the way to Cheam for the last few days, with the addition today of a whiff of fresh cut grass. On closer inspection the primary source turns out to the the ivy flowers on the railway bridge on the way into Cheam. Quite pretty little things in a restrained sort of way; not the thing for lovers of florid blooms from the topics. Presumably insects like the whiff of corruption. But in the end, urban smells disguised as country smells. Real country smells come from men spraying slurry on their fields or from pigs in factories.

But clearly the smells stimulated higher powers as I was led on to ponder on the fact that while all power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely. (I had thought that this was a quote from one Lord Denning, an 18th century politician, but failing to confirm this or the existance of Lord Denning by sources nearer home, Google told me in very short order that the gent in question was one Lord Acton, of curious, somewhat foreign, lineage, a 19th century historian. Senior moment). This drew on an interesting lead review in this week's TLS about the value of counterfactual history - a maligned branch of the historical profession which spends its time pondering about what might have happened if some other thing, other than what actually happened, happened. What might have happened if Napoleon had won the battle of Waterloo sort of thing. In a pub, this can lead quite quickly into entertaining speculations of all sorts. I think I have pondered on such matters here before but, for once, search fails and I can't find it. So on we go.

The author of the book being reviewed was alleged to take a very firm line with counterfactuals. What actually happened is usually over detirmined and pondering on lines off the detirmined path is fruitless chattering. The wind of wind-bags. Which is a rather odd line to take in a book about 10 key decisions in the second world war. How can there be a decision if there is not a choice? How can there be a detirmination if there is choice? What do we mean by a wrong decision if the actual decision was inevitable?

The reviewer quite reasonably points out that what might seem like obvious decisions with hindsight didn't usually look so obvious to the players at the time, who probably thought that that there were lots of options, all with very uncertain outcomes. So even if one were to argue that what happened was inevitable, it remains of interest that the players did not think so at the time. How did what they saw as choice get converted into the inevitable decision? (A side issue being the interesting way in which one swings very rapidly from uncertainty to certainty. One flogs around the pond without a clue - rather like detectives on a serious crime - then, all of a sudden, one decides that one knows the answer and usually become blind to anything which does not support that answer. Forward at all costs. Lots of mistakes get made this way).

I also hold the view that one could make a very good model of the world which was largely detirministic - that is to say if one ran the model twice one would get the same answer - but which included, at various interesting points, a random element. Where the model tosses a coin in order to decide what action to take at some particular junction. The thinking here is that while many things in history are largely detirmined by fundamentals and some things are largely dertirmined by the whim of individuals who manage to concentrate some power in their own persons. (Hitler being a good example of one such, with the process by which he acquired that power or autonomy from a position of having neither being of much interest in its own right). But some important things are decided by random events. So a meteorite hits what is now Mexico and wipes out the dinosaurs. The tricky point here being that while the movement of the meteorite is very un-random and can be detirmined with a high degree of accuracy - provided one sees it before it hits one - its arrival and its arrival time were random with respect to Mexico. There was no connection between the affairs of the meteor and the affairs of Mexico. And I can see plenty of interest and value in speculating how dinosaurs might have evolved (or become extinct) if their evolution had not been so rudely interupted.

And the whim of a powerful person can be close to a random event. I hate elephants because one trod on my teddy when I was small so I started the third world war. Clearly time for the pub.