The True Nature of History

I read Marc Bloch's relatively boring The Historian's Craft. Even though his plea for a rational historicism is utterly understandable, given that his country had been occupied by Nazi Germany, a nation not particularly interested in rational explanations of anything, and depite the fact that his basic points--history is about human beings, is about consciousness, must strive to understand, not judge--could have been made in three pages, his analysis of the nature of history is incapable of realizing the true nature of history. In his last, unfinished chapter, which discusses historical causation, Bloch asks: "What military historian would dream of ranking among the causes of a victory that gravitation which accounts for the trajectory of the shells, or the physiological organization of the human body without which the projectiles would have no fatal consequences?" This is precisely the subject of science fiction, a genre that attempts to look past the shallow aspects of human psychology to the realm of the physical universe--its laws and probabilities. It involves an almost incomprehensible perspective--one that steps away from the petty and predictable choices that human beings make and focuses on how physical forces (like gravity) and shape and function (like physiology) do determine much of what has occurred. Bloch's belief in the empirically visible simply is too small to fully understand the larger context of human history.