"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way...". So begins Charles Dickens' famous opening paragraph in "A Tale of Two Cities." By setting his story in the days of the French Revolution, at a distance of time from publication nearly equal to that between our present and WW2, Dickens is able ask the same question of a different generation. What would they have done had they lived in 18th century France? Be as vengeful as Madame Defarge or as self-sacrificing as Sydney Carton?
We could ask ourselves a similar question about the 20th century. "In May 1940, during the Second World War, the British war cabinet was split on the question of whether to make terms with Nazi Germany or to continue hostilities. The main protagonists were the prime minister, Winston Churchill, and the foreign secretary, Viscount Halifax. The dispute escalated to crisis point and threatened the continuity of the Churchill government." To anyone living at the time with no foreknowledge of how WW2 would finish, Halifax's estimate of probabilities would appear correct. The right thing to do would have been to negotiate with Hitler. Churchill's sole hope was that Britain would win the lottery -- America would enter the war -- "in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old." That was a long shot. A reasonable person would have backed Halifax but Winston got lucky.
To paraphrase Churchill's own adage, even though wars are not as a general rule won by evacuations they are not immune to fortune. The hundred to one odds sometimes come off. Hitler throws away the game, Pearl Harbor is bombed, surprises occur. Many of us assume that, had we lived in the historical past, we would have had the vision of Leonidas at Thermopylae, Stauffenberg in Valkyrie, of Winston not Halifax. At least we would have rooted for the "right side." But the probability is that we would have been as uncertain as any rational person about how it would turn out and might have disagreed about which was the right side. Lord Action argued that it was history's role to settle those questions, to judge us in posterity according to some standard that is hidden from the actors, some "final maxim" we are incapable of perceiving in the present.
“I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong,” for “if we lower our standard in History, we cannot uphold it in Church or State.”
In Acton's view, history has a final maxim, the judgment of God, rendered for reasons that people often can't understand. Whether or not the actor believes in God does not exempt him from the outcome which no one can predict beforehand. Accepting this possibility makes a political movement's legacy impossible to completely anticipate. Those who enthusiastically supported mandatory Covid vaccinations, the Cultural Revolution of Mao Tse Tung, or the campaign against Israel run the risk they might yet be the villains. It follows that anyone who takes part in events has an unavoidable non-zero chance of being an unwitting Baddie the future will eternally condemn. For reasons of morale the activists and true believers of every age banish all possibility of error from their minds when advancing their causes or else they might hesitate. They would like certitude beforehand.
Against Acton's possible adverse final verdict of history, British scholar Antony Beevor noted that Lenin's solution was simply to abolish the past; to wipe out every trace of it, so that nothing could rise up to accuse them. Who would stand in judgment of the Bolshevik activism then? George Orwell's restatement of Lenin's solution was even more striking. "Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." If history does not exist, except temporarily, to Dickens we can say: the French Revolution never happened and neither did Aztec human sacrifice, the Ottoman slave trade, or October 7, 2023. Stop bothering everyone with things that never took place and let us focus on the climate emergency and threats to our democracy. Besides, as a practical matter, "in most historical accounts, the prisoner's dock stands empty, the accused no longer available for earthly penalties or exoneration." The accused have flown Acton's coop, but if the villains have all escaped history's "undying penalty" the victims have no apparent way to escape the self-appointed heroes.
Ahmed Ali Alid, 45, attempted to kill his housemate, a Christian convert, stabbing him in his bed as he slept. He then prowled the streets of Hartlepool until he came across Terence Carney, 70, who was out for a morning walk, attacking him and stabbing him to death. He told police the attack, a week after the Hamas attacks on Israel, was "for the people of Gaza" and he had wanted to kill more victims.
If Alid had killed that 70 year old stranger in order to rob him, revenge himself for a slight, or for any comprehensible human reason, that would have been ignoble and deserving of punishment. But Ahmed Ali Alid acted from pure idealism -- for reasons to do with narratives -- and that made everything all right. In a world without an objective state, you can be a hero on the narrative alone, but only if all narratives are equally valid and neither causation nor correlation affects how things actually turn out. Otherwise it is never the best of times, or the worst of times, the season of Light, or the season of Darkness, the spring of hope or anything else. It is only ever what the media says it is. You can always ignore the knocking on the door. It's only the judgment of God.
