Lunatic Fringe
By Scott Oliver.
Ask a learnèd man to explain the general cause of historical events and chances are he will witter on abstractly about the ‘hidden hand’ effect of so-called ‘rational actors’ interlocking in a so-called ‘free market’ (the liberal version), about the ‘dialectic’ of antagonistic classes in perpetual struggle (the Marxist version), or perhaps about divine will and Fate (most monotheisms) – all very neat and tidy, but just a touch simplistic, no? And that’s being generous.
Perhaps instead of looking for a ‘grand design’ to the flow of events, we need to take a step back and ask a more pertinent question: is there any overarching pattern to history, or do things just bumble along fairly haphazardly – intentions, desires, decisions, struggles, and stuff organic and inorganic all bumping into each other in ways that are not random, exactly, but undirected? In this view, historical events would emerge from a messy brew of colliding causes, producing unforeseeable, unpredictable outcomes. Thus we have a first golden rule of historical analysis: that of contingency, not necessity. Or: things could always have turned out differently… An example: the swift and bloody Spanish conquest of South America was less the effect of superior weapons and organization, or even persuasive Catholic stories, as often supposed, than of the debilitating diseases they introduced (by accident) to the local population.
What has all this abstruse philosophising got to do with football, you may ask. Well, it’s this: these contingent ‘rules’ governing complex historical processes apply equally to – and should be used to understand – the ‘fate’ befalling footballing dynasties. For instance, where would the two Merseyside teams be today had a Belgian structural engineer or UEFA stadium inspector realized that Heysel Stadium was unfit for purpose? Every penalty call closes off certain paths through the future and opens others. Then there were Gazza’s tears…
So, historians (including football historians) are now far less likely to bridle and meh contemptuously at the claim that an event ultimately occurred – or a course of events took a particular direction – because of something as simple and ‘insignificant’ as an emotion: it could be argued the true cause of the Cold War and its nuclear overarmament was the fear of a future event (one that never came to pass, yet nevertheless set history off down a runaway causal spiral: an arms race). In this conception of history, shame, self-consciousness, vanity, and narcissism are all perfectly valid historical causes (which in turn have their own complex causes, of course, albeit of more interest to biographers than historians…).
Anyway, acknowledging that minor events – events that would scarcely be thought of as historical (such as the beating wings of a famous Japanese butterfly) – are able, if sufficiently amplified, to have major, world-changing effects is tantamount to conceding this second ironclad rule of historical analysis: one man’s hang-up, felt intensely enough, can change the course of history…
Which brings us to Steve McClaren. And Hitler.
As a nipper in Austria, the future Führer flunked his way through high school then famously set his heart on becoming a painter, only to be rejected at the tender age of 18 by the Vienna Art School. Hard lines. He may well have written about the episode in Mein Kampf; he may just as well have suppressed it, pretending that it was water off the proverbial duck’s back. Were I a proper historian, I would probably have read the book to find out. Or had a research assistant do it.
At any rate, Hitler’s attempts to take the boho route – wild beards, kaftans, joss sticks, jazz – were met with as sturdy a palm (face-palm, in this case) as would later be adopted by the Nazi salute. According to a close friend, he never came to terms with this incident in his life, nor ceased to feel ashamed of his ‘inadequate’ paintings, even ordering Nazi Party officials to round up as many of them as possible out of fear of public ridicule. Now, it seems reasonable to assume that, had the old Viennese rector somehow intuited that his no doubt well-intended and meritocratic prevention of what was likely to be an unfulfilling career spent knocking out low-grade kitsch paintings would ultimately lead more or less directly to the Holocaust, then he might have been persuaded to relax his stringent entry criteria. Just this once. For the greater good. Of course, there was, in addition to the shame, more than a smidgeon of cocaine-fuelled racist delirium and deathlust in Hitlerism. Yet the point stands: do not underestimate the lengths that people will go to in order to conceal and/or surmount their neuroses (Exhibit A: Michael Jackson’s face).
Page 1 of 4 | Next page