History As Regression

The question I'd like to think about today is "What would history look like if we knew everything about the past?" To answer that question, we have to start from the basics. What does it mean to 'know everything about the past'? In the study of history, there are two main components: the events themselves, and the cause and effect relations between the events. In the modern conception of history, having the events on their own isn't really that interesting: we need those causes and effects. However, when we think about knowing all of history, we generally are talking about knowing all the events, rather than all the cause and effect relationships. Trying to find all those cause and effect relationships is generally left to science. On the other hand, if we really knew all the events of the past, it probably wouldn't be that difficult to create some theories for some of the causal relationships, due to the vast quantity of data at our disposal. But back to ...

Butler writes Rufus such that the reader could feel sympathy for him, despite his rape of Alice. Rufus is unfortunate to live in a time in which it is not appropriate for a white man to love a black woman. However, if we imagine a parallel case in which Alice and Rufus grew up in the current day, Rufus would still face the same problems that he did before. Rufus' insane and unrequited love of Alice and Dana is his problem, and that wouldn't change even if he were born after slavery were abolished. It is only that in the time of slavery Rufus is able to get part of what he wants by raping Alice, thus causing Alice unimaginable suffering, which would not be allowed today. There is no reason to believe either that Rufus wouldn't have his insane love or Alice would love Rufus if the environment were changed, only that the way Rufus acts on that love would different in that different environment. If we were to believe Rufus to be a terrible person in the past, and his core per...