On Challenging the Inevitable

By LANCE MORROW

Once, when lunching with young Winston Churchill in 1895, the Chancellor of the Exchequer fashioned a wonderfully weary ormolu dictum: "My dear Winston, the experiences of a long life have convinced me that nothing ever happens." Churchill, of course, spent a lifetime of 90 years learning that practically everything happens, especially, from time to time, the unthinkable.

Anwar Sadat's trip to Jerusalem, and all that has followed from it, suggests again the ingenuity with which some men and women have approached the seemingly insoluble problem, the historical impossibility. Old impregnable conundrums usually fall to the simplest, most elegant assaults. Alexander's sword at one stroke solved all the mystification of the Gordian knot. Hannibal crossed the Alps with elephants--military genius riding through the snow upon absurdity. Gandhi defeated the British raj with a contradiction: nonviolent resistance. In 1955 a weary black woman in Montgomery. Ala., Rosa Parks, refused to surrender her seat on a bus to a white man; at that instant, three centuries of America's racial tragedy began slowly to unravel.

If politics is the art of the possible, then statesmanship can sometimes be a genius for the impossible. Certain leaders over the centuries have understood the necessity of breaking free from old patterns of custom, expectation, even divine ordination. Jefferson suggested as much: "I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past." Less elegantly, Henry Ford decided: "History is more or less bunk." Civilization of necessity operates by habit. But that process can groove the collective cortex into fatal designs--the ritual--hatreds of Arabs and Israelis, for example.

For much of its career, the world has functioned on the principle of predestined and even tragic inevitability. Most of the planet's religions are steeped in a fatalism that teaches acceptance of dira necessitas, the fearful inevitability of things. The Greeks' Moira, the Romans' fatum, the Muslims' kismet--all enforce the will of an otherworldly plan, against which it is useless to exert a defiant or creative will.

The courage to think and perform the unthinkable is one of the most complicated and powerful of human gifts. It often has the splendor of inspiration and sheer surprise. The development of zero as a tangible number is a breathtaking conception; the idea, like some arithmetical antimatter, was among the forces that eventually propelled man into space. Darwin's thought enforced an intellectual evolution of its own. So did Freud's and Einstein's.

Martin Luther touched the Vatican with such a blunt but deftly accurate hand that the authority of the Roman Catholic Church was forever fragmented. Several centuries later. Pope John XXIII surprised the world, and the cardinals who elected him, by transforming the church. Jesus Christ himself was the model of surprise: his teachings, especially in the Beatitudes, contradicted a whole world of customs and values. U.S. Ministers Robert Livingston and James Monroe abruptly accepted Napoleon's offer in 1803, bought the Louisiana Territory and thereby doubled the size of the United States. Franklin Roosevelt told the American people that they had nothing to fear but fear itself and then proceeded to change substantially the working premise of the nation's Government. Richard Nixon, a coelacanth of American antiCommunism, dismantled all of his earlier rhetoric and flew to Peking.

In the most creative excursions into the unthinkable, there is always a question of whether it is inspiration or the demand of circumstances that prompts the deed. Charles de Gaulle dramatically withdrew France from Algeria in 1962, risking tremendous internal eruptions. It was inspired statecraft, but may also have reflected the Hegelian idea that freedom is the knowledge of one's necessity. France more or less had to abandon its colonial enterprise. Similarly, it might be said that Egypt's domestic problems--poverty and overpopulation--virtually propelled Sadat toward some accommodation with Israel. Lindbergh's transatlantic flight was no suddenly inspired stunt but the almost necessary culmination of his career as a flyer. The Israeli rescue at Uganda's Entebbe Airport last summer was a brilliant act of desperation. So too, perhaps, was Spartacus' slave rebellion of 73 B.C.

The key to challenging the inviolable may lie in the difference between vertical thinking and lateral thinking. Vertical thinking is deductive, systematic, eminently useful and always necessary. Lateral thinking is a crackling arc of association: the mind scans apparently unrelated events and facts and locates new meaning where none seemed to exist before. Great inventions and great alliances have been born from such mental flashes. From the first hominids to use tools or cook meat to the first man who thought to consume an oyster ("He was a bold man that first eat an oyster," said Jonathan Swift), human minds have been engaged in overcoming determinism--unless, of course, one believes that even the most audacious intellectual leaps are themselves predestined. The irony is that many of the bravest innovators could not have thrown themselves into the unimaginable unless they believed they had no choice. That may be the deepest fatalism of all.

All ventures into the unthinkable depend crucially on timing. Without it, the potentially great statesman is merely a visionary. In 1968 Eugene McCarthy challenged all prevailing political custom by starting his solitary race against the sitting President, Lyndon Johnson; for better and for worse (L.B.J. capsized, Bobby Kennedy murdered, Richard Nixon elected), McCarthy can be said to have made all the difference that year; at least he set it all in motion.

Public acts fall into several categories: 1) the tragic dullness of missed opportunity--for example, British and German general staffs were mired for years in the Western Front's stalemate of trench warfare; 2) the inconclusive--Wallace Warfield Simpson separated Edward VIII from his crown, but the event belonged more to the history of celebrity than to that of power; 3) magnificent failure--Imre Nagy, for example, in 1956 tried to withdraw Hungary from the Warsaw Pact and then discovered the brutal insistence of things in the Soviet tanks that arrived to iron out his impulse; 4) the satanic leap--what inspiration instructed Hitler that he might conquer Europe and destroy 6 million Jews?

Proudhon once wrote of the "fecundity of the unexpected." That is the infinitely various system of alternatives, within which civilization works itself out. The greatest of human gifts may be the talent for improvisation, the ability to evaluate a situation and then to devise some entirely new way of dealing with it. Without that gift, history would be nothing more than a brutal repetition. --Lance Morrow

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