by Paul Montgomery Crabaugh
 

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Dragon #66	-	1st Edition AD&D	-	Dragon magazine

It is popular to denigrate the role of the
individual in history and in current
events. Over and over, in news and opinions
and lectures, one can hear the refrain
that history is an inexorable tide,
sweeping over individual attainments.

The Name of the Game is socio-economic
forces. Political and social leaders
merely ride the tide of events; wars
merely confirm changes that have already
occurred; great inventors were
simply present at “steam engine time”—
the idea being that if technology has
reached the state where a steam engine
is possible, then someone will invent a
steam engine. If that person falls under a
rock, someone else will do it.

There’s a considerable amount of truth
to this notion. Take the American Revolution.
The key change in the colonies
during that period was not that a bunch
of smugglers and amateur terrorists decided
to stir up a revolution. The important
change had occurred years earlier,
very subtly, as Englishmen living in
America began to think of themselves as
Americans living in America. It was this
change in the way people thought that
made it impossible for England to hold
the colonies, because it changed the
Crown from a heavy-handed but legal
government to a bitterly resented occupying
army. The Revolution merely
confirmed, for the world to see, that the
change had occurred.

Similarly, steam engines really were
inevitable at the time they were invented.
They were so easy to imagine and construct
that any one of dozens or hundreds
of people could have invented the steam
engine with no help from the others.

It’s the sizable kernel of truth in this
line of thinking that leads to much criticism
of heroic literature, in both fantasy
and science fiction genres, and a lot of
that criticism spills over into heroic
games.

After all, if one buys the view that individual
people don’t count for much, how
much credence can one lend to fiction —
or games, which stress individual attainment
over all else?

I don’t propose to touch the other side
of the coin, which is to question how
such a person can support a society
which places the rights of the individual
above all. I’m not writing a book, yet.
Let’s confine the discussion to the validity
of the notion that individuals have only
a slight influence on the flow of history.

Let’s have a look at 3 figures in
fairly recent history, individuals and individualists
all, associated with major
events, and see to what extent their accomplishments
could have been relegated
to someone else. For a good
spread, we’ll use 1 political leader,
1 scientist and 1 military leader.




There was no law of nature that required
that Abraham Lincoln win the
election of 1860. He could have still been
a depressed lawyer. A relatively uncompromising
idealist, he could easily have
found it impossible to get serious attention.
One could easily see another figure
taking his place at the front of the major
political and social upheaval that was inexorably
taking place, with or without
Lincoln. Regardless of who was (or was
about to be) in the White House, slavery
was about to take the final plunge, the
problem of states’ rights was about to get
polished off, and the political power of
the South was about to die.

On the other hand, a different, less
controversial leader might not have
touched off the flare of fury that Abraham
Lincoln’s election ignited in the
South. Secession might have been delayed,
or aborted altogether in favor of a
protracted battle in Congress. Even if
secession were to occur, things might
have been greatly changed. A leader
lacking Lincoln’s self-confidence and
his flair for psychological warfare might
well have rushed into the Civil War,
dragging a divided and weakened North
with him. It took lots of nerve to sit and
wait, knowing that the South would have
to strike, have to reduce Fort Sumter,
and thus provide the same unifying event
that Pearl Harbor did a century later.
Under different circumstances, the war
might have dragged on for more years,
might have come to a negotiated settlement,
or might have been even more bitter
and destructive than the one we
knew. We might still be feeling the reverberations
of such a war.




What about Albert Einstein? A classic
steam-engine case. The problems he
solved had been kicking around physics
for years; they would have been solved
by someone, sooner or later. All Einstein
did was make it sooner rather than later.

But timing can be important. If Einstein
had remained a patent clerk in
Switzerland, how long might those problems
have remained unsolved? They
weren’t easy; it took genius to see the
solutions, and genius is difficult to predict
or produce. The Michaelson-Morley
experiment had been bothering people
for two decades; it might well have been
two decades more before someone else
came up with Special Relativity to put a
final solution on it.

That extra delay could have slowed
down nuclear and subnuclear research
by years. The atom was first split in 1939
— the year the Second World War broke
out. Suppose the atom-splitting hadn’t
happened in 1939 and wasn’t destined to
happen until 1949. Nobody would have
wasted any great amount of war effort on
anything so science-fictiony as an atomic
bomb, and they wouldn’t have gotten a
bomb in time to affect the outcome of the
war anyway. The most obvious result
would have been the invasion of Japan:
Operation Olympic and Operation Coronet.
After a protracted and bloody
campaign to finally put down Japan,
how far could MacArthur have gone in
picking Japan up after the war, getting it
going, installing a workable government?
How far would either country have allowed
him to go? It seems doubtful that
Japan would ever have become the
powerful, peaceful ally of the United
States that it is now. The consequences
of such a sequence of history would be
great indeed; Japan’s importance in the
politics of the Pacific Ocean can scarcely
be overstated.




The last, and certainly most ephemeral,
figure we’ll consider is a military leader
a general in the Second World War
— George S. Patton. Here, surely, is the
sort of person whose influence on the
course of history is slight. A general, not
especially high in the chain of command,
a classic individualist, lacking any political
influence or ambition, whose moment
of glory was a fight whose eventual
outcome was virtually foreordained —
once the United States entered the war,
we can see, in retrospect, that there was
no reasonable doubt about the outcome
of the war. The Axis was out of its league.

Certainly Patton could have been
erased from history easily enough. He
was an old man when the war broke out.
He was a walking stress condition. He
took inordinate risks. Any number of
things might have slain him or sent him
back to the States, perhaps in 1942 or
1943.

So he might not have been available
for Operation Cobra, the breakout from
the Normandy bridgehead. Could another
general have filled his shoes? Not really.
Other generals would have risen to fame,
would have made their mark, but nothing
on earth could have made, say, the quiet,
careful, enormously competent but conventional
Hodges into the go-for-broke
human tornado that was Patton.

Hodges, for example, would almost
certainly have carried out his orders in
Cobra and subdued the Brittany peninsula.
He would never have dreamed of
going berserk, smashing his way like
some kind of military Andromeda Strain
across the length of France, regardless
of the best efforts of the high commands
of both sides to stop him.

Would the Allies have lost the war
under different circumstances than Patton
provided? Of course not. But they
would have been delayed — perhaps a
month, perhaps two. And with one or two
months of additional campaigning on
the Eastern Front, the Russians would
have marched much further into Germany
than they did in real life. And, after
the war, they showed little inclination to
give up occupied territory. Can you imagine
the consequences of having the
border between the Warsaw Pact and
NATO lie along the Rhine River? France
would not have been able to afford the
luxury of toying with NATO — it would
have been that nation’s neck on the
chopping block, not West Germany’s.
The whole character of post-war politics
for four decades would have been altered.
That’s quite a bit of influence for a
single man.
 

So the next time someone criticizes
the realism of the dominant characters in
the heroic fantasy literature so near and
dear to our hearts, or the heroic fantasy
games that are perhaps even nearer and
dearer, ask them to have a look at history.
Much of what we are today has been
shaped by individuals who didn’t believe
in their own ineffectiveness.