pumpkinstrokemarrow

Or was it a consequence of the odd pint of 'Taste the Difference' Chablis from Vauxhall Sainsburys (item code 6377601 according to their site on www2, whatever that might be. Which also tells me that as well as being able to taste the difference, I should find this item complex and elegant. It was the second cheapest of their Chablis, which did not appear to include anything from their 'Basics' range, so I am now unclear as to what the baseline for tasting the difference is)? The Chablis certainly was the cause of the discussion and subsequent ponderings on whether or not certain classes of questions were sensible.

The first such question posited my being a railway signal man in charge of a set of points so configured that I either had to kill General Eisenhower on the eve of the D-day landings or to kill a random selection of 1,000 people, excluding the general. After reflection overnight, I hold to the view that this is a sensible, if rather unpleasant, question to think about. Situations of this general kind do arise in real life and it is as well to have some kind of framework within which to make a decision. There is, for example, the incident in the 'Cruel Sea' where a corvette depth charges what it thought was a German submarine in the knowledge that these depth charges would kill a number of seamen from a previously torpedoed merchantman, in the water at the time. The submarine turned out to be missing or non-existent and so the seamen were killed for nothing. A fictional incident which I imagine to be taken from a real incident. Field hospitals, overwhelmed with casualties during a battle, have to make choices about who to save and who to let die. A process known as triage. One might decide that one was not going to make a choice. That it was better to throw a dice or something of that sort. But such a decision does not mean that one does not need to have thought about the problem. In this particular case, I find 1,000 a rather difficult number. Too large a proportion of the fatal casualties on the day to make for an easy choice.

The second question raised different issues. What would have happened had Nelson lost the battle of Trafalgar as badly as the French and Spanish actually lost it? One line of argument is that what is important is what actually happened. Looking at what did not happen is a waste of time or at best an activity for saloon bars in the intervals between conversations about football.

One might add there is an inevitability about history. It just rolls forward under its own steam, picking out its route for itself. Pointless pondering about routes that it did not take. An argument not without force, but which can be taken too far. Lots of things happen in history which are not inevitable, or, at least, are caused by externalities. Externalities which have no particular connection with the unfolding events. So, for example, Alexander the Great might have caught whooping cough as a child and died even younger than he did. History would of been completely different. So different and so long ago that I am not sure one gains much by thinking about it. But smaller differences can be interesting. Maybe Napoleon being killed at Austerlitz would be a better bet. Something which could easily have happened; he certainly lost the odd maréchal and Wellington lost the odd general.

A history of something might be thought of as a story. A story in which one episode follows another in a plausible way. That there is a chain of causation. I think it is interesting to look at such a story and to try to pick out the points in the story where someone or something might have made a difference. At what points in, say, the events leading up to the Magna Carta, did King John have the freedom of action to take action which he did not actually take but which might of made a difference if he had? If Louis XVI has not bankrupted France by bankrolling the American revolution to spite us Brits., would he have been able to avoid the French revolution? One might argue that weaknesses in Louis' character made mistakes inevitable and that given the state of France at the time he was, inevitably, going to make enough mistakes to tip the thing over the edge. But I do not think that takes away from the interest in identifying those mistakes.

Suppose one of the links in the story is the statement that A was a result of B1, that is to say if B1 then A. Is such a statement really that different in kind from the statement that if B2 then not A? This B2 being a what-if.

Chablis starting to wear off. Can probably cope with what St Thomas Aquinas had to say about the first question now. See for example http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/kwkemp/Papers/MPSTA.pdf. I wonder if other faiths have people of comparable sophistication and stature?