The Search for Causal Mechanisms in History

11th December 2017

Post with 1 note

The Search for Causal Mechanisms in History

One need not subscribe to a thorough-going materialism or mechanistic worldview to value causal explanations in history, or to appreciate their explanatory force. I have learned as much from idealists in the philosophy of history like R. G. Collingwood as I have learned from naturalists like Danto, so although I would characterize my own metaphysical position as a variation on the theme of naturalism, I do not insist upon an exhaustive naturalism, and I would reject any naturalism, materialism, physicalism, eliminativism, or reductionism that denies the sui generis nature of consciousness and the efficacy of consciousness as an agent in the historical process.

With that “Profession of Faith” of my orientation within the philosophy of history, I move on to my interest today: appreciating the explanatory power of causal mechanisms in history. Because our knowledge of history is so imperfect, and history itself is so complex (thus we are easily able to lose sight of an important aspect of any given event or related cluster of events), a lot of historical events are presented as essentially mysterious and perhaps even unfathomable. No historian can master all the details of sociology, economics, archaeology, cosmology, and so on – the specialist historical sciences – and therefore have an adequate understanding of the special causal mechanisms studied in these disciplines. What they don’t know or overlook, they consign to mystery.

One of my pet peeves in this regard, and about which I previously wrote in Hyperinflation Blues, is that of presenting hyperinflation as a quasi-natural disaster, something that unaccountably befalls an unfortunate nation-state, rather than recognizing it as the excessive printing of money and failed monetary policy. This is pretty obvious, and almost any intelligent person can be brought round with sufficient evidence, especially when you can show cases in which banknotes have to be printed elsewhere and flown in by the planeload, because local money presses couldn’t keep up with the inflationary policy of the government (which may have the unspoken intention of inflating away the value of debt, so that a nation-state can pay down its own debt on the cheap).

Another example is the Scottish Enlightenment. Why did so much intellectual talent emerge in an historically sudden way in Edinburgh in the eighteenth century? Was it a fluke of several geniuses being born in the same place at about the same time? That might have had something to do with it – David Hume was, after all, authentically Scottish – but that is not the full explanation. There was also a causal mechanism in place. In England, after the Act of Uniformity of 1662 the government cracked down on religious dissenters and non-conformists. The only two universities in England (until the 19th century), Oxford and Cambridge, required oaths equivalent to Church of England membership in order to obtain a degree. This legal requirement had the effect of forcing out all the most honest, interesting, and probing minds, who crossed the border and became professors in Scotland rather than England (both Glasgow and Edinburgh benefited from this brain drain). This loss of talent was a lot like the what happened when the Nazis took power in Germany and many of the best scientists fled the country.

There is also a causal mechanism to explain (at least in part) the increase in executive salaries in recent years. The populist and muck-raking press likes to focus on the greed of the business executive class, and while I wouldn’t dismiss this out-of-hand, I would point out that the business executive class is no more greedy than any other sector of society, they simply the possess the wherewithal in order to act upon this greed, whereas the rest of us (myself included) are not in a position to act as efficaciously on our greed. Without invoking moral lessons, we can explain executive pay increases by the fact that, when search committees are presented with pay options for a potential candidate, since they all want the best candidate, they almost always choose the highest quartile of suggested compensation options. This process only has to iterate a handful of times in order to push up executive pay disproportionately.

In my recent post, A Mechanism to Explain O’Sullivan’s Law, I noted that O’Sullivan’s First Law is a law without an explanatory mechanism, and I went on to suggest a possible explanatory mechanism that could account for institutions of contemporary society passively evolving toward the left of the political spectrum. A correspondent has pointed out to me another possible mechanism to explain O’Sullivan’s First Law, based on the argument in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dominance of the Stubborn Minority.” O’Sullivan’s First Law is uninteresting as it stands, but it is very interesting as the inspiration for a research program that can answer the question why contemporary institutions drift leftward.

As historians we should always look for causal mechanisms, or, to paraphrase Alfred North Whitehead on simplicity, seek causal mechanisms and distrust them. And we should distrust them because our causal knowledge of the world is far from complete. There may be causal mechanisms operating in the world that we cannot observe and cannot understand because the forces through which they act have not yet been scientifically formulated. The delicate balancing act required by seeking causal mechanisms and at the same time distrusting them demands the rarest of scholarly virtues: being honest about one’s ignorance.