Why did 'they' use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
Why did the wagons use that odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long-distance roads, because that's the spacing of the old wheel ruts.
So who built these old rutted roads? The first long-distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of its legions. The roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts? Roman war chariots made the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagons. Since the chariots were made for or by Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Thus, the standard U.S. railroad gauge of four feet, eight and a half inches derives from the specification for an Imperial Roman army war chariot.
Specs and bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right. Because the Imperial Roman chariots were made to be just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two warhorses."
So even though this one is false, I invite you to share any other instances that you find interesting or revealing or charming of how the past and the present interpenetrate.
*******
Leaving that apparently false instance behind, let me share instead an example that has been important to me in the thinking that led into my work here on NoneSoBlind regarding the workings of evil in American civilization.
The deepest insight that has come to me in the course of three years of the Bushite mission, as I've said here many times, has involved the nature of evil. In particular, it has involved seeing evil as a force working through patterns that operate in cultural systems (and in their human components) moving through history. And here is the pattern that triggered for me that whole line of thought, describing in "The Concept of Evil" how, when I saw
how that manipulative genius, Karl Rove, effected his seduction of many traditionalist Americans, I recognized an old pattern—one used a century before to seduce poor whites in the Jim Crow South.
In the Jim Crow South, and now again in Karl Rove’s America, the leaders inflame passions around peripheral issues to distract their supporters from what the leaders are really doing with their power. A century ago, the hot-button distraction was racial purity. Now, the leaders whip people up about issues of moral purity. In both cases, unjust leaders use deception to exacerbate divisions useful to magnifying their own power and wealth.
In that essay, "The Concept of Evil," the presentation of this pattern is immediately preceded by this, which helps point the way toward the larger issue of how patterns work in societies through time:
Just as a hen has been described as an egg’s way of creating another egg, so also can we human “individuals” be seen as our culture’s way of perpetuating certain patterns. Through our socialization and our life-experiences generally our culture creates us –for better and for worse— in its own image.
History isn’t made just by people; it’s also made by forces.
This is the vital dimension that wasn’t captured by talking about the ruthlessness or amorality of individuals, and that led me to use the “e-word.” I saw something about the way that those forces operate, about how patterns can lurk in the cultural interstices, awaiting the chance to impose themselves again.
I felt a need to speak of "evil forces," in other words, and not just about the characteristics of particular actors, because I saw that a "vital dimension" was missing if one looked only at the discrete and specific and present parts of the picture. Beyond that level, and ultimately more important than that level, was the working of patterns, acting as cultural forces.
Andrew Bard Schmookler's website www.nonesoblind.org is devoted to understanding the roots of America's present moral crisis and the means by which the urgent challenge of this dangerous moment can be met. Dr. Schmookler is also the author of such books as The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution (SUNY Press) and Debating the Good Society: A Quest to Bridge America's Moral Divide (M.I.T. Press). He also conducts regular talk-radio conversations in both red and blue states.
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