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lently. Insofar as the law insists upon such accrual of cases as “precedents,” and
insofar as “cases” are narratives, the legal system imposes an orderly process of
narrative accrual.
There has been surprisingly little work done on this fascinating subject,
although there are stirrings among anthropologists (influenced principally by
Clifford Geertz) and among historiographers (prodded by Michel Foucault's
ground breaking
The Archeology of Knowledge
) (Geertz 1988; Clifford 1988;
Foucault 1972). What kinds of strategies might guide the accrual of narratives
into larger scale cultures or traditions or “world versions”? Surely one of them
must be through the imposition of bogus
historical-causal entailment
: e.g., the
assassination of Archduke Ferdinand is seen as “causing” the outbreak of the
First World War, or Pope Leo III's coronation of Charlemagne as Holy Roman
EmperoronChristmasDayin800isofferedas“afirststeponthewaytoward”
or as a precursor of the enactment of the European Community in 1992. There
is a vast literature of caution against such simplicities by both philosophers and
historians, but it has not in the least diminished our passion for converting
post
hoc
into
propter hoc
.
Another strategy might be called, for lack of a better expression
,coherence
by contemporaneity
: the belief that things happening at the same time must
be connected. I made the wry discovery, writing my own intellectual autobi-
ography several years ago, that once I had discovered in the
New York Times
Index what else had been happening at the time of some personal event, I
could scarcely resist connecting the lot into one coherent whole - connect-
ing, not subsuming, not creating historical-causal entailments, but winding
it into story. My first scientific paper (on maturing sexual receptivity in the
female rat), for example, was published about the time Neville Chamberlain
had been duped by Hitler at Munich. My original story before consulting the
Times
Index was vaguely about a nineteen-year-old's first discovery, rather like
a Bildungsroman. The post-Index story, with Munich now included, was an
exercise in irony: young Nero fiddling with rats while Rome burned! And by
the same compelling process, we invent the Dark Ages, making everything all
of a piece until, finally, the diversity becomes too great and then we invent the
Renaissance.
Once shared culturally - distributed in the sense discussed earlier - narra-
tive accruals achieve, like Emile Durkheim's collective representation, “exteri-
ority” and the power of constraint (Durkheim 1965).
4
TheDarkAgescometo
exist, and we come to cluck with wonder at the “exceptionality” of any non-
traditional philosopher or deviant theologian who lived in its shadows. I am
told that the ex-President and Nancy Reagan sent a letter of sympathy to a na-
