Imaginationism

I started rereading Edmund Wilson's To the Finland Station over the weekend. The first paragraph:

One day in January 1824, a young French professor named Jules Michelet, who was teaching philosophy and history, found the name of Giovanni Vico in a translator's note to a book he was reading. The reference to Vico interested him so much that he immediately set out to learn Italian.

So the story begins and continues to Lenin's arrival at the Finland Station in 1917. Even though I have read the book before and remember quite a bit of Wilson's story, I read To the Finland Station like a story, as in I wonder what happens next. I know how it ends post-Wilson in 1991.

Or does it end? The book is about history and historical movements--in particular, socialism and communism. Starting with Vico we have the idea that history has movements and direction. Two questions arise. Can historical movements be predicted scientifically? Is there progress to better states of welfare and being?

One prediction about history seems seductive. The world will go about its merry way until a handful of people blow it up, and make it unhabitable for the human species. I hope it happens after I am dead. I don't want to watch it or be a part of it.

Another seductive prediction is that one political and economic system will come to dominate the politics of all nations. Pick your favorite system. Then hope for the stability promised by it even if it does not create a better state of welfare and being.

I prefer to think that the human imagination makes history radically unpredictable. All one can do is soldier on and do one's best to make things come out right. Let's not call it fatalism though. Let's call it imaginationism.