History is essentially tragic

“History is essentially tragic.” What I mean is not that history is sad, though it often is, but that, to paraphrase the historian E. P. Thompson, all history is the history of unintended consequences. - Jackson Lears in The Confidence Economy

JL: We brought up Melville before. There’s a wonderful scene in his short story “The Lightning-Rod Man,” which was kind of a dress rehearsal for The Confidence-Man. The protagonist is a lightning-rod salesman. He may be the ultimate confidence man in the 19th century, in that he promises to take this extraordinary force of nature and channel it safely into the ground. This is really titanic power, the power that is a direct expression of a kind of theology. In the story, a homeowner challenges the lightning-rod man, challenges his credit, his character, and at one point she says, Get out, leave my house and shut the door, you Tetzel! In Luther’s Europe, Tetzel was the big indulgence salesman. By alluding to Tetzel, the guy that focuses Luther’s ire, Melville makes a direct connection between priests and lightning-rod salesmen—they’re both selling protection from divine wrath. The lighting-rod man is a Tetzel for a Protestant America and for a scientific America too, because the lightning rod is a scientific product, an expression of efforts to understand the invisible, awesome power of electricity, linked to Ben Franklin himself.