To Explain It All: Everything You Wanted to Know about the Popularity of World History Today 9781475851908, 9781475851915, 9781475851922

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Chapter One: H. G. Wells
Chapter Two: A Short History of the World for Children
Chapter Three: Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization
Chapter Four: Variations on the World Historical Approaches
Conclusion
References
About the Author

Citation preview

To Explain It All

To Explain It All Everything You Wanted to Know about the Popularity of World History Today Volume I Chris Edwards

ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL Copyright © 2019 by Chris Edwards All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data ISBN 9781475851908 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 9781475851915 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN 9781475851922 (electronic)

TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Also by the Author Beyond Obsolete: How to Upgrade Classroom Practice and School Structure (2019) Insights on Insincerity: How Educators Can Enhance the Classroom Experience (2018) Connecting the Dots in World History: A Teacher’s Literacy Based Curriculum: From the Napoleonic Era to the Collapse of the Soviet Union (2015) Connecting the Dots in World History: A Teacher’s Literacy Based Curriculum: From the Reformation to the Beginning of the Collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Volume IV (2015) Connecting the Dots in World History: A Teacher’s Literacy Based Curriculum: From the Mongol Empires to the Reformation, Volume III (2015) Connecting the Dots in World History: A Teacher’s Literacy Based Curriculum: From the Fall of the Western Roman Empire to the Death of Genghis Khan, Volume II (2015) Connecting the Dots in World History: A Teacher’s Literacy Based Curriculum: From Human Origins to Constantine, Volume I (2015) Novum Organum II: Going beyond the Scientific Research Model (2014) Teaching Genius: Redefining Education with Lessons from Science and Philosophy (2012)

Contents

Introduction

1

1

H. G. Wells: The Outline of History

9

2

A Short History of the World for Children

3

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

129

4

Variations on the World Historical Approaches

173

89

Conclusion

189

References

191

About the Author

193

vii

Introduction

World history is not a subject; it is all the subjects. This lack of clear disciplinary boundaries makes world history controversial as an enterprise and difficult to define as an endeavor. The lack of boundaries also makes world history a nexus point for all the disciplines, and would seem to be a natural nexus for a unification of all knowledge. The subject itself, therefore, needs an analysis that can lead to a greater clarity of its purpose. This book, and another volume to follow it, are designed to provide both. The word “history” means something in academia. Historians tend to ask questions about specific events, people, or things, and then exhaust the evidence while attempting to answer those questions. Those questions should have clearly defined parameters, such as “What caused the Roman Empire to fall?” or “What were the primary causes of the English Civil War?” The world historian, conversely, asks questions of such great magnitude that the answers often fall outside the parameters of the traditional historical academic methods. Where does one begin when trying to tell the story of the world? Questions link with questions until the scholar of world history must study time periods before there were documents, before there were people, before there was even a world. Biology, climatology, geology, chemistry, astrophysics, and theoretical physics must be employed to answer certain questions, hence the development of so-called Big History to connect the various disciplines into a single coherent narrative. This is the first of a planned two-volume work. The purpose of this book is to clarify the meaning of “World History,” to explain its history and the various approaches, and to apply skepticism to those approaches. In this book, I will analyze the “world histories” of H. G. Wells, Ernst Gombrich, Will and Ariel Durant, J. M. Roberts, Susan Wise Bauer, Tom Standage, and Erik Sass and Steve Wiegand. I apologize for missing or deliberately leaving out other works that might be worthy of analysis. Decisions had to be made or this book would have become redundant and overlong. 1

2

Introduction

These are only seven works but the Durants wrote eleven volumes and Bauer, as I type these words, has completed only three volumes of her grand work. I hope she finishes, but the last volume came out several years ago and she had just reached the Renaissance, which means she now must analyze the new corpus of documents that the printing press created. (If she does finish, her work will be the definitive edition for one of the approaches of world history.) When approaching a topic as big as the historiography of World History, decisions had to be made. I always made the decisions on the side of readability. The biggest decision to be made in this volume was how to handle the single volume work of J. M. Roberts and the multivolume work of Susan Wise Bauer. Both wrote brilliant world histories of a different type, and I am of the opinion that Bauer qualifies as a scholarly genius. Yet I cannot imagine that readers, after having just read a thorough treatment about the works of Wells and the Durants, would find a second quest through the heavy works of Roberts and Bauer all that appealing. I also chose not to analyze the second volume A Study of History by Arnold J. Toynbee (1859–1975) and an explanation for why will be given in volume 2. The seven works included here represent various approaches to the traditional process of “doing” history. “Traditional” history might best be defined through an exemplar. Mary Beard’s 2015 work, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, contains this paragraph in the introduction: This is a book about how Rome grew and sustained its position for so long, not about how it declined and fell, if indeed it ever did in the sense that Gibbon imagined. There are many ways that histories of Rome might construct a fitting conclusion; some have chosen the conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity on his deathbed in 337 CE or the sacking of the city in 410 CE by Alaric and the Visigoths. Mine ends with a culminating moment in 212 CE, when the emperor Caracella took the step of making every single free inhabitant of the Roman Empire a full Roman citizen, eroding the difference between conqueror and conquered and completing a process of expanding the rights and privileges of Roman citizenship that had started almost a thousand years earlier. (p. 17)

This paragraph states the scope and purpose of Beard’s book, explains the various controversies in Roman historiography with admirable succinctness, and makes a novel declaration in the history of Rome. The Roman Empire ended, argues Beard, when “the emperor Caracella took

Introduction

3

the step of making every single free inhabitant of the Roman Empire a full Roman citizen, eroding the difference between conqueror and conquered.” This insight contains the kind of brilliance that induces the reader into a forehead-slapping groan of self-deprecation. (How could I, for all this time, have missed that?!) The clarity of Beard’s writing comes as a result of her having mastered the functions of traditional history. She develops clear parameters for her narrative, and she understands her terms as they are traditionally defined. An “empire” is a political entity where a core group, defined by religion, nationality, race, ethnic origin, or some other definition, establishes an asymmetric relationship with a group or groups outside that core. The asymmetry of the relationship is usually created through war, but sometimes through trade. Those in the group or groups outside the core must supply labor or extra taxation to those in the core group. It may sound strange to praise Beard for understanding this definition, but pop historians and journalists frequently seem unable to comprehend what an empire is. The medieval Islamic caliphates, for example, operated as empires and modern commentators like to claim that the Muslims were tolerant of Christians and Jews who lived under Islamic control. Non-Muslims received “tolerance” only if they paid extra taxes and/or (usually “and”) contributed forced labor of various kinds to their conquerors. Empires cannot exist without this asymmetry; the Victorians are never described as tolerant of the peoples of India merely because those peoples were allowed to exist. Because Beard understands this definition of empire, she saw something that no other historian has: Rome ceased to meet the definition of an empire in 212 CE when Caracella made every free person a citizen. With this decree, the asymmetry disappeared, and with it the empire. She’s right and the insight gives her narrative a clear stopping point. Traditional history reminds us all of the virtue in the tradition, and nothing will be said in these volumes that criticizes traditional history or that argues for its disassembly. World history is just a different topic because of its scale and its potential uses beyond the traditional historical methods, and therefore requires a different approach from that used by Beard and other historians. World history suffers, and occasionally really suffers, from the lack of clear narrative boundaries. Where to begin and end? It also offers an opportunity to draw connections between disciplines, and to see large-

4

Introduction

scale pictures and patterns that the traditional historical approach cannot offer. The topic of this book and the book that is planned to follow is “world” history, and so none of the classical histories created before literate peoples discovered the Americas qualify. Did classical-era historians make attempts at something like a world history? Of course, and the Greek historian Polybius (264–146 BCE), who wrote of the Hellenistic era of Greece and the corresponding rise of Rome, understood the benefits of a “universal” history. Polybius is to the modern world historian what Virgil was to Dante, a writer of genius who is disqualified from entry (into the discipline of modern “World History” for Polybius and Heaven for Virgil) only because of the accident of time and geography. Polybius, like Virgil, must act as a guide. In the Penguin Classics anthology titled On Writing History: From Herodotus to Herodian, Polybius writes, Now those who think that our history, because of its size and the number of its books, is difficult to acquire and difficult to read are mistaken. How much easier is it to acquire and read through forty books, as if woven thread by thread, and thus follow clearly events in Italy, Sicily, and Africa from the time of Pyrrhus to the capture of Carthage, and events in the other part of the inhabited world from the flight of Cleomenes the Spartiate continuously to the battle of the Achaeans and Romans at the Isthmus, than it is to read or acquire the treatises of those who write on each of these events individually? Aside from the fact that those are many times the size of our history, readers cannot acquire anything certain from them, first because the majority give conflicting accounts of the same events; second, because they omit events in parallel, and it is from the comparison of these that people may examine and judge them together and so come to evaluations that differ from a partial notion. (p. 67)

Ordinary historical methods “omit events in parallel” and this is the reason why a world historical approach needs to be developed along with ordinary history. Buffs of the American Civil War (I am among them; reading the coffee-table edition of James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era ranks as one of the happiest experiences of my life) might be surprised to learn that just a few years after the update of the Missouri Compromise in 1850 and at the precise moment when Kansas was bleeding, the Japanese viewed the United States as an imperial aggressor. The U.S. commodore Matthew Perry, on behalf of President Fillmore, burst

Introduction

5

into the Japanese port of Edo Bay and forced Japan into the global trade network. At that time, Japan languished in the medieval era and they began a process of military westernization in 1868 with the so-called Meiji Restoration. This process of westernization began with a purchase of surplus weapons left over from the Civil War in the United States. A direct line of connection can be made between the end of the American Civil War and the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, but because the American Civil War and the Japanese Meiji Restoration are usually studied and written about as discrete events, the traditional methods of history “omit the events in parallel.” There is also the matter of February 19, 1861. This is the date on which Czar Alexander II of Russia issued the Emancipation Manifesto, which ostensibly freed all of the Russian serfs/slaves. That this occurred just two years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and almost four years before the Thirteenth Amendment banned slavery in the United States provokes all kinds of questions that ordinary historical methods cannot even raise. Only the world historian can ask why these two heavy chunks of parallel landmass (Russia and the United States), which had tolerated slavery for centuries, decided to be done with the practice at almost exactly the same historical point in time. Our guide, Polybius, also tells us that the comparison of events is what makes a universal history special. He refers, in his own way, to thinking via analogy. When encountering a new phenomenon, one can only compare it to something that one has encountered in the past. The comparison of the two events, and an analysis of their similarities and differences, “fuels and fires” (to borrow from the title of a book by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander) all forms of thought. Lessons from the outbreak of World War I could be applied to the Cuban Missile Crisis, but only by the kinds of universal historians who study both events, something that the traditional approach to historical research tends to disallow. This volume will analyze seven works in the chronological order in which they were published and the criteria for selection are as follows: 1. The work must be written by no more than two authors. The chief reason for including this stipulation is to avoid the various “history of the worlds” that are compiled by editors who have farmed out different eras and geographic regions to traditional specialists.

6

Introduction

Textbooks and oversized coffee-table books (the such-and-such history of the world with a time line that always seems available on the discount shelf of Barnes and Noble) get compiled in such a way. These lack the narrative and connection of a true world history. 2. The work must attempt to tell the entire story of the world, from the beginning of civilization to roughly the current era. Several admirable histories of the world exist that detail a coherent history from, say, 1750 to the present, but these are not included in either volume of this analysis because they lack the entirety of a true world history. 3. These world histories follow a traditional narrative that might be, very carefully, called Eurocentric. These histories center on the eventual development of an overwhelming Western civilization. There are alternative approaches to this narrative that focus on Asia or the Islamic world or that give a socialist history, but those will be detailed in the next volume under the auspice of “alternative versions of world history.” It is this author’s contention that those “alternative” histories cannot be understood, appreciated, or critiqued until the traditional narrative has been established in volume 1. 4. The work must be representative of an approach, and these break down as follows: (a) the single-volume, academic history of the world—this is an approach employed by H. G. Wells and J. M. Roberts; (b) the multivolume “total history” approach—employed by the Durants and Susan Wise Bauer; (c) the children’s history of the world—created first by E. M. Gombrich; (d) the attempt to trace the history of the world through commodities—used by Tom Standage; and (e) a humorous history of the world—written by the scholars employed at Mental Floss. More emphasis is given to whoever tried it first rather than best. The Durants will get much more space here than Bauer, even though Bauer’s work is far superior, partially because the Durants tried the endeavor first and partially because their failures are more valuable to helping shape the discipline than are Bauer’s successes. The reason that this overall work is designed for two volumes has to do with the purpose of the works, collectively. This volume provides definitions and a traditional approach to world historical studies that

Introduction

7

focuses on telling a narrative history of world civilization. From this core, four broadly defined schools of world historical thought develop. 1. The application of traditional historical methods to the history of the world, with Western civilization as a focus. The works in this volume follow this approach. 2. The application of traditional historical methods to the history of the world with a non-Western orientation. These will be referred to as “alternative” histories of the world and will be critiqued in volume 2. These are world histories with an orientation toward the Islamic and Asian civilizations, or that put forth a Marxist, bureaucratic, or biological conception as the primary explanatory force for understanding the development of civilizations. 3. The “Big History” approach to world history expands the definition of history to include physics, chemistry, astronomy, geology, and so on, and this branch is generally considered to have left the boundaries of traditional history and is more of an epistemological approach to unifying all knowledge. 4. World history as a curriculum for the development of analogical and cross-curricular thought that can be applied to various intellectual disciplines. This is where the secondary school curriculum and the academic movement led by William H. McNeill will be analyzed and included. Only one of the four schools is analyzed here because the lessons developed from understanding these foundations are critical for understanding the other three. A subpurpose of writing this first book, I must confess, is to redefine the reputation of H. G. Wells. He should be considered a founder of world history who also wrote science fiction novels. It was his study of the conquistadors in the New World that inspired him to write of Martian invasions of Britain, not vice versa. Wells is exemplary of the polymaths who are attracted to the profession. Another reason for including points 3 through 4 in a second volume is that the purpose of volume 2 will largely fall upon arguing that world historical studies should develop into school 4 rather than school 3. I have been developing path 4 for several years now. I have written a history of the world, but as a curriculum. My five-volume Connectingthe-Dots in World History: A Teacher’s Literacy Based Curriculum series is a world history with a specific educational purpose that is clearly de-

8

Introduction

fined and that answers the all-important “so what?” question that comes from any intellectual study. David Christian, an Australian scholar, coined the term “Big History” and the discipline badly needs to be saved from his approach. Mostly, Christian is cutting and pasting work done by scientists and trying to, from that collage, create a grand narrative picture. Christian’s enterprise mostly impresses the kind of people who like TED talks, but his actual work contains a series of flaws in method that must be addressed. In my last academic book, Beyond Obsolete: Upgrading Classroom Practice and School Structure, I included some of my critiques of “Big History” but avoided using Christian’s work because it deserves a more in-depth critique than what was allowed by the scope and purpose of Beyond Obsolete. The primary disagreement that I have with the “Big History” scholars is that they operate within a traditional mind-set that fits with the academies that nurtured them. World history could be a field where students are invited to study widely in search of novel cross-curricular connections and analogies. “Big Historians” seek to push a single narrative, topdown, onto students. This is not much different from the overtly controlling methods that academics use when advising graduate students to develop their theses papers and doctoral dissertations around narrow questions that can be answered with traditional research. The only book that I am aware of that is similar to this one is Norman Cantor’s Inventing the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (1993). Cantor’s book describes how the popular perception of the Middle Ages developed in the twentieth century through the works of several high-profile (relatively speaking) academics. Cantor’s book is almost a memoir and contains plenty of gossip and snark about his fellow academics. My book focuses almost solely on the actual written works of the authors. Still, both Cantor’s book and this one are about academics and writers who shaped a historical field. World history is not a subject; it is all the subjects. This understanding brings with it not only a series of logical dangers but also the exciting potential of an expanded—indeed new—type of intellectual endeavor. Ultimately, a thorough shaping and understanding of the field might prove to help develop a form of cross-curricular and analogical form of reasoning that could directly benefit humanity. My hope is that this volume and its sequel will foster that process.

ONE H. G. Wells The Outline of History

If writing the first work of world history had been all that H. G. Wells accomplished in his life as a writer, then The Outline of History might be better recognized for the work of scholarly genius that it is. Alas, Wells was a polymath, a man whose talents overwhelm anyone trying to understand his works. (Saul Bellow wrote an admirable novel, titled Mr. Sammler’s Planet, about a Holocaust survivor who found the collected vision of Wells as overwhelming as 1960s New York was overstimulating.) Wells was one of the inventors of modern science fiction. His name is linked more with The War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, and The Invisible Man than with The Outline of History. These are fine works to be associated with, of course, but The Outline of History is a foundational text, world history’s Principia. Wells was the founder of world history and he also happened to write science fiction, and The Outline of History is the genre’s classic. “The earth on which we live is a spinning globe. Vast though it seems to us, it is a mere speck of matter in the greater vastness of space” (p. 1). Thus begins The Outline of History, and thus begins “World History.” This is a fitting opening line, as it transposes to the reader some of the humility that must have sustained the writer through his research and writing. The Outline of History was published in 1920, at a time when the scientific upheavals that once shook the fields of biology and geology had broken the ground and settled into mountains. The date of 1920 is impor9

10

Chapter 1

tant because this meant that Wells was able to connect astronomy and geology to give a scientific account of how the earth and its features formed. Chapter 1 is titled “The Earth in Space and Time”; chapter 2 is called “The Record of the Rocks”; and the third chapter is simply named “Natural Selection.” Wells sums up Darwinism with cheerful sentences like these: Consider, then, what must happen to a new-born generation of living things of any species. Some of the individuals will be stronger or sturdier or better suited to succeed in life in some way than the rest, many individuals will be weaker or less suited. . . . It follows, therefore, from the fact that living things grow and breed and die, that every species, so long as the conditions under which it lives remain the same, becomes more and more perfectly fitted to those conditions in every generation. (pp. 14 and 15)

The evolution of life, its movement from sea to land, and the development of complex reptilian and then mammalian life-forms is given scholarly detail. Given that the book is written in 1920 and by an Englishman, a reader might be forgiven for thinking that this will all culminate in some kind of pseudo-scientific racist tirade complete with an illustration of a manacled Brit in a top hat standing atop a diagram of human evolutionary lineage. This never comes. Instead Wells introduces the evolutionary history of the human with this paragraph: The origin of man is still very obscure. It is commonly asserted that he is “descended” from some man-like ape such as the chimpanzee, the orang-utang, or the gorilla, but that of course is as reasonable as saying that I am “descended” from some Hottentot or Esquiman as young or younger than myself. Others, alive to this objection, say that man is descended from the common ancestor of the chimpanzee, the orangutang, and the gorilla. Some “anthropologists” have even indulged in a speculation whether mankind may not have a double or treble origin: the negro being descended from a gorilla-like ancestor, the Chinese from a chimpanzee-like ancestor and so on. These are very fanciful ideas, to be mentioned only to be dismissed. (p. 46)

Never have two quotation marks ever been put to better use than those which frame the word “anthropologist” in this paragraph. Students of history and anthropology both know how evolutionary arguments were twisted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to justify European imperialism, and that Herbert Spencer’s “social Darwinism”

H. G. Wells

11

concept provided a justification for the mistreatment of people of color. The idea of separate evolutionary lineages was particularly noxious as it singled out whites as a separate species from the rest of humanity, and the evidence of white superiority came from the success of “white” civilization. Wells recognized a “science” concocted for the purpose of justifying world dominance. Reading this paragraph, one wonders two things. One, did the study of world history make Wells dubious of the idea that the dominance of the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Europe and her daughter states was a matter of racial superiority? This would be a claim, after all, that the Mongols could have made in the fourteenth century. Two, why couldn’t twentieth-century science and politics have been based on something as sane and rational as the work that Wells made? The tangled fascist politics that grew over Europe in the twentieth century found nourishment in the racist scientific theories of the day. Nazism, to the extent that it was coherent at all, grew largely from the same ideological soil that produced the justification for imperialism. Herbert Spencer’s pseudo-biological history proved to be more attractive to the masses than the informed analysis of Wells. The Outline of History is a work of proper science, and by chapter 9, Wells is extolling the impressive civilization of the Neanderthals. He writes, “If the Heidelberg jaw was that of a Neanderthaler, and if there is no error in the estimate of the age of that jaw, then the Neanderthal Race lasted for more than 200,000 years!” (p. 65). Of course, everyone who studies Neanderthal history knows that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens lived side by side for centuries, which leads very quickly to the dirtyminded question that scientists with sweaty foreheads tend to frame as “Did Neanderthals and Homo sapiens interbreed?” Wells did not think so but does give weight to the opposite, and now known to be correct, opinion. There is obviously no shame in getting a scientific prediction wrong, especially when it is clear that one is engaging in a speculative enterprise pending the arrival of clear evidence. Yet, from a footnote, it is clear that Wells is not just making a scientific speculation but responding to the idea, apparently prevalent at the time, that some “people” in the world possessed an abundance of Neanderthal (and therefore inferior) characteristics. He sums up the viewpoint of the scientists who held the opposite view: “They write and speak of living ‘Neanderthalers’ in contempo-

12

Chapter 1

rary populations. One observer has written in the past of such types in the west of Ireland: another has observed them in Greece. These so-called ‘living Neanderthalers’ have neither the peculiarities of neck, thumb, nor teeth that distinguish the Neanderthal race of pre-men” (p. 65). Then later, No doubt the ancestor of Homo sapiens (which species includes the Tasmanians) was a very similar and parallel creature to homo neanderthalensis. And we are not so far from that ancestor as to have eliminated not indeed “Neanderthal,” but “Neanderthaloid” types. The existence of such types no more proves that the Neanderthal species . . . interbred with Homo sapiens in the European area than do monkey-faced people testify to an interbreeding with monkeys; or people with faces like horses, that there is an equine strain in our population. (p. 66)

Again, Wells wields a clear logic in defense of a commonality of humanity. He was wrong about the Neanderthal DNA, but so were a lot of scientists. He should be forgiven for making a slight error in scientific prediction for the noble purpose of refuting the notion that some humans evolved either directly from Neanderthals or can trace descent from a Neanderthal-human hybrid. Wells recognized these arguments regarding separate lineages to be the pseudo-scientific justification, not backed by evidence, for separating humanity into a genetic caste system. The human DNA sequence does contain splotches of Neanderthal, but the DNA obeys the chaotic laws of biology and therefore is not evenly distributed across the human race. Some people will have more and some will have less, but it’s doubtful that any DNA sequence could lead to any kind of noticeable change in a person’s facial structure or personality. Wells presents a good case that any modern human who presented Neanderthalish features to the world would more likely be connected to a common prehuman ancestor (the-yet-to-be-discovered-at-that-time Homo erectus) than to the Neanderthal from the opposite branch. By chapter 11, Wells begins a history of “early thought” (the chapter’s title) and a history of humanity’s intellectual traditions begins. Jared Diamond and other historians/anthropologists have written of a “Great Leap Forward” in human intellectual history, something that Diamond attributes to an evolutionary change in the human voice box that allowed for air coming across it to be broken into agile and meaningful bits of sounds. Of this, Wells writes:

H. G. Wells

13

Until language had developed to some extent there could have been little thinking beyond the range of actual experience, for language is the instrument of thought as bookkeeping is the instrument of business. It records and fixes and enables thought to get on to more and more complex ideas. It is the hand of the mind to hold and keep. Primordial man, before he could talk, probably saw very vividly, mimicked very cleverly, gestured, laughed, danced, and lived, without much speculation about whence he came or why he lived. (p. 92)

Is this more profound than what it appears? The master-critic Harold Bloom wrote this phrase in the thesis paragraph of his book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human: “In Shakespeare, characters develop rather than unfold, and they develop because they reconceive themselves. Sometimes this comes about because they overheard themselves talking, whether to themselves or others. Self-overhearing is their royal road to individuation (p. xix). If this is true, and who doubts that there is a line of connection between the spoken words of the Elizabethan bard and the written words of the pre-civilized bard, then the concept of the individual and personality originated with language. Language became, as Steven Pinker has stated, the “stuff of thought.” Spoken language is the mirror that allows for self-reflection, and selfreflection is the stuff of learning and cognition. The brain evolved to be adaptable to varying conditions, and neurons connect new forms of information. It is not unscientific to assume that the development of language created a new environment that, in turn, activated the development of new neuronal connections. Environmental changes, therefore, led to cognitive changes. It is hard to imagine a more significant environmental shift than the development of a complex spoken language. Wells then writes that spoken language must have given a literal voice to certain tribal notions that had likely been inherent, even if fuzzy around the edges, in the human mind. “Certain very fundamental things there may have been in men’s minds long before the coming of speech. Chief among these must have been fear of the Old Man of the tribe. The young of the primitive squatting-place grew up under that fear” (p. 94). For a twentieth-century intellectual like Wells, that fear had to be framed in the context of psychology. He follows his assertion with this: The psycho-analysis of Freud and Jung has done much to help us to realize how great a part Father fear and Mother love still play in the adaptation of the human mind to social needs. They have made an exhaustive study of childish and youthful dreams and imaginations, a

14

Chapter 1 study which has done much to help in the imaginative reconstruction of the soul of primitive man. It was, as it were, the soul of a powerful child. He saw the universe in terms of the family herd. His fear of, his abject before, the Old Man mingled with his fear of the dangerous animals about him. But the women goddesses were kindlier and more subtle. (p. 95)

By 1920, the study of religions as manifestations of certain cognitive processes that resulted from evolution had already found eloquent expression with the 1902 publication of William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. True religious belief, it seems, could not survive the new scientific chronology. First the earth, then life, then humans, then language, then the gods, then God. The interesting case that Wells makes is to state that these religions are just expressions of childhood development, extrapolations of the tribal and father/mother hierarchy out into the mysteries of the universe. Even without religion, humans must continue to deal with the underlying evolutionary principles upon which religious faith developed. In further analysis, Wells probably develops the early-human-as-child analogy too far, accusing the humans of the new stone era, for example, of harboring childish ideas that often turned into hard-to-contemplate levels of violence. Wells is too intelligent to have published such sentiments in the year after World War I concluded without expecting his readers to have smirked with irony. One must remember that Wells possessed a surfeit of imagination. Please enjoy these sentences, crafted by one of the most gifted practitioners of science fiction: Away beyond the dawn of history, 3,000 or 4,000 years ago, one thinks of the Wiltshire uplands in the twilight of a midsummer day’s morning. The torches pale in the growing light. One has a dim apprehension of a procession through the avenue of stone, of priests, perhaps fantastically dressed with skins and horns and horrible painted masks—not the robed and bearded dignitaries our artists represent the Druids to have been—of chiefs in skins adorned with necklaces of teeth and bearing spears and axes, their great heads of hair held up with pins of bone, of women in skins or flaxen robes, of a great peering crowd of shockheaded men and naked children. They have assembled from many distant places; the ground between the avenues and Silbury Hill is dotted with their encampments. A certain festive cheerfulness prevails. And amidst the throng march the appointed human victims, submissive, helpless, staring towards the distant smoking altar at which they are to die—that the harvests may be good and the tribe increase . . . to

H. G. Wells

15

that had life progressed 3,000 or 4,000 years ago from its starting place in the slime of the tidal beaches. (p. 105)

This magnificent and murderous process would move, eventually, into civilization. The title of chapter 12, written as it was before the era of political correctness, is titled simply “The Races of Mankind.” The illustrations in the 1929 edition, written at a time when few people outside of Germany would have heard of Adolf Hitler, still have the power to create a frost between the reader’s vertebrae. The illustrations of this chapter carry the following titles: Australoid Type, Bushwoman, Negro Types, Mongolian Types, Caucasian types (there are three faces presented here, including “Nordic” or “Englishman” and the man’s faraway gaze and strong jaw could be have been sketched by Goebbels.) The illustration that closes the chapter includes a familiar contortion of lines that is labeled “The Swastika.” Wells begins this discussion of race with the friendly wisdom that pervades the book: “It is necessary now to discuss plainly what is meant by a phrase, used often very carelessly, ‘The Races of Mankind’ (p. 106). His explanation for “race” fits that of modern science and may be summed up thusly: humans settled in disparate geographic regions, something that facilitated a process of evolutionary change. However, human mobility brought the separate members of the species back together before speciation could occur. Overall, humans tend not to be picky about, and could even be aroused by, engaging in sexual congress with people of different skin tones and eye shapes. Wells writes that “[c]oncurrently for thousands of years there have been two sets of forces at work, one tending to separate men into a multitude of local varieties, and another to remix and blend these varieties together before a separate series has been established” (p. 106). The words Wells writes give off barely a scent of racist ideology. Instead, he writes, “Readmixture is now a far stronger force than differentiation. Men mingle more and more. Mankind from the view of a biologist is an animal species in a state of arrested differentiation and possible readmixture” (p. 110). Nothing in the following pages indicates that Wells misunderstood evolution to be a line of lower races evolving into higher races. Wells speaks of race as a messy categorization to be used only because no other terms are handy: “[W]hen we speak of these main division we mean not simple and pure races, but groups of races, then they have a

16

Chapter 1

certain convenience in discussion” (p. 110). Just a few sentences prior to this, he chastises the idea that races could be discerned through the book of Genesis and that humans could be lumped into specific racial categories. As for that swastika, no mention is made of it in the text. Did some editor, assuming his audience to be familiar with the figure, simply add it in? The approach that Wells took to explaining the development of human races was not just humane, but also scientific. It should be examined closely because, as Stephen Jay Gould stated in Mismeasure of Man, science can be twisted for political and ideological purposes. Political theory sometimes requires, and gets, scientific justification. The writing of Wells indicates that historical analysis of the era’s science has focused too much on the pseudo-scientific notions of race that led to the big mess of Nazism. Wells indicates that a sound scientific analysis of the facts led more mature scientists to the same conclusions that scientists of the modern era find. (Darwin, too, showed little inclination to racist theories.) After humanity and race, there evolved languages and Wells states that an Ur-language of humanity likely never existed. Humans with similar anatomies, instead, likely separated and developed the broken sounds emanating from their throats into different linguistic structures. A common voice box, but not a common voice, existed across the human spectrum. Wells uses the now pejorative term of “Aryans” to distinguish a linguistic grouping. “Somewhere between Central Europe and Western Asia there must have wandered a number of tribes sufficiently intermingled to develop and use one tongue. It is convenient here to call them the Aryan peoples” (p. 119). The term Aryan once functioned as a dry academic term before impressed into the service of Nazism. Oliver Sacks once raised an interesting question in his book Musicophilia. Why, mused Sacks, is humanity’s propensity to make and enjoy music not viewed with, or in, the same respect as the development of language? Wells devoted a chapter to the history of languages and their likely movements across geographic and racial regions, but does not make the connection with humanity’s propensity to make beats with sticks and stones, or to push air from the lungs into melodic octaves. This is not a failing by Wells, merely an interesting speculation about a laryn-

H. G. Wells

17

gitic (rather than blind) spot that virtually all anthropologists and historians before Sacks shared. Only recently, a common understanding among philosophers, scientists, and historians has formed around the notion that all human thought can be described as analogical. Humans must understand any new phenomenon in reference to the phenomena encountered previously. Wells writes that “[a]bstract terms were rare . . . anything hard was ‘like a stone,’ anything round ‘like the moon,’ and so on (p. 130). Such insights from the origins of language help philosophers to understand the extrapolations of the human mind that define modern scientific theory. This will be expanded upon in volume 2 along with a more thorough argument pertaining to the importance of studying the history of the world. Wells, with foresight too frequently placed to be shocking, correctly saw that the language and analogies are the twin ropes that connect the neurons of the human mind. Civilization began in the Tigris and Euphrates and Wells presents the typical historical equation of water plus fertile soil equaling settled civilization. Wells later states: If the first stage of human communication came in the form of the spoken words, then a new epoch dawned with the sun-dried clay that surrounded the settlement of Sumer, and Wells concludes that the Sumerians “built of brick, they made pottery and earthenware images, and they drew and presently wrote upon thin tile-like cakes of clay. They do not seem to have had paper or even to have used parchment. Their books and memoranda, even their letters, were potsherds.” (p. 136)

Later on, Wells writes that “[t]he clay of the Nile is not so fine and plastic as the Sumerian clay, and the Egyptians made no use of it for writing. But they early resorted to strips of papyrus reed fastened together, from whose name comes our word ‘paper’” (p. 144). Here Wells presages the position of geographic determinism, a concept that would develop in the 1970s and last to the present day, the thinking being that while humans are equal, the geography they settled on was not. Some areas of the world provided better geographic preconditions for the development of civilization than others did, and moldable clay and papyrus, no doubt, had to be present for record keeping/writing to develop. Jared Diamond, the chief evangelist of geographic determinism, has made much of the fact that ideas, crops, and inventions spread easily

18

Chapter 1

from east to west but not so easily from north to south. Wells does not state the same point in defense of a determinist thesis, but he does conclude his chapter with this: When the Spaniards came to America, the Mexicans knew nothing of the Peruvians nor the Peruvians of the Mexicans. Intercourse there was none. Whatever links had ever existed were lost and forgotten. The Mexicans never heard of the potato which was the principal article of Peruvian diet. In 5,000 B.C. the Sumerians and Egyptians probably knew as little of one another. America was 6,000 years behind the Old World. (p. 154)

Ideas and technologies often travel from one place to another when either conquest or trade connects different regions. Often, a technology that develops in one region turns out to either have a different use in a new society or develops in tandem with other technologies that are encountered after the move. Two easy examples of this are block printing and gunpowder. Both technologies germinated in China, but only flowered in the West when combined with other factors such as a phonetic alphabet and a warlike civilization. The geography of Eurasia, rather than the geography of Africa or the Americas, facilitated this process. No “potato road” developed between Peru and Mesoamerica to rival China’s Silk Road, and the Americas never produced a Genghis Khan–like conqueror who united the entirety of the landmass under a single empire. It’s impossible to imagine horse-riding nomadic conquerors finding success in the tangled vegetation and drenching humidity of the Amazon rain forest even if the horse had evolved in the Americas. Through chapters 15 and 19, Wells connects the facts of early civilization into an impressive picture of analysis. (Sea trade, and the classical sources that detail wars, definitely maritime and possibly mythical, of the era are then connected again to the development of writing.) Wells takes a rare turn, describing the importance of another act of the pen: “Drawing presently reappeared again, for record, for signs, for the joy of drawing. Before real writing came picture writing, such as is still practiced by the Amerindians, the Bushmen, and savage and barbaric peoples in all parts of the world” (p. 169). There is much to that sentence, and if one is looking for evidence of a little English snobbishness/racism towards peoples who failed to develop

H. G. Wells

19

steam-powered ships and gunpowder-delivered bombs, well, there is Wells using “savage and barbaric” without any qualifiers. “Drawing” itself led to the expression and development of what educational psychologists call “higher-order” thinking. Chinese pictographs and useful pictures (think pictures for men’s and women’s restrooms) developed out of the joy of drawing more closely than for the joy of writing. What an interesting point! What if phonetic writing developed in relation to spoken language while pictographic writing stems from a different cognitive trunk, more closely related to drawing? The Western literary tradition, focusing as it does on wordplay, soliloquies, poetry, and the stage might be the result of different neuronal connections than is the case with China, where the landscape paintings and pictographic poetry favored by generations of Confucian scholars at the various dynastic courts may be a fire burning from an entirely different set of mental kindling. Written language surely baptized the oral traditions of the religions in ink. Literacy not only created a class of cognitive specialists (scholars) but since humanity wrote religious mythologies down first of all, these specialists tended to develop into a priesthood of the word. In the modern era, where words compose the tweets of semi-literate political figures and the blog entries of sports analysts, it might be hard to remember the mystery that writing and those who could decipher it once evoked in the nonliterate. Literacy must be understood, as an exaptation, or as a function of the brain that is not natural to the brain’s original evolutionary function. No one goes to school to learn language; the tongue and voice box receive their training from family interactions, cooing and giggling, until eventually the screams of toddlerhood get chopped up into more discernible sounds. The use of language alters the neuronal patterns of the brain. Hunter-gatherer tribes likely employed spoken language since our ancestors’ genes crossed the evolutionary line, wherever drawn, into the area of Homo sapien sapien. Humans have been speaking to each other for roughly 200,000 years but writing to one another for only a few thousand, depending on how one defines “writing.” Since our neurons feel less comfortable with symbolic writing than symbolic speech, the process of learning to write requires formal education.

20

Chapter 1

Literacy is to the brain what the skills of a gymnast are to the body. The muscles of the legs, arms, and torso can be trained to perform flips, jumps, and painful splits, but these activities express only what muscles are capable of if painfully and diligently trained over a long period of time, not the “natural” function of those muscles. Evolution selected the human brain for its plasticity, and written language can be scribed into it, but only with specialized training. This specialized training created the “specialist,” someone renowned for his cognitive skills. (As a separate point, genius might be described as someone who pushes her skills so far beyond the initial phase of the “natural” capabilities of humans that she discovers something entirely new, but this is not germane to the current point.) Of course, the new literacy specialists could read only the first texts available, and those happened to be the newly written oral mythologies of religion, the mystery of literacy and the mystery of religion intertwined with one another, but so too did religion and drawing. Wells writes, “In these temples there was a shrine; dominating the shrine there was commonly a great figure usually of some monstrous half-animal form, before which stood an altar of sacrifices” (p. 177). We are used to thinking that a work of genius requires sacrifice, but the earliest era of literary and artistic genius required sacrifice of a bloodier kind. Wells frequently alludes to the state of early man’s mind as childlike, but he means this not in a pejorative sense, but in the sense that children do not yet comprehend the rules of reality. Children, like early humans, might draw false connections, and without logic to erase the tangled and overlapping strings of religious/mythical thought, their minds became snared in mythologies. Priests and shamans, realizing their status relied on these tangled huckleberries, protected their religions and their literacy with equal veracity. Religion justifies cynicism if anything does, and Wells writes, “It was out of . . . two main weakness of all priesthoods, namely, the incapacity for efficient military leadership and their inevitable jealousy of all other religious cults, that the power of the secular kingship arose” (p. 185). Tyrannical kings and turbulent priests were there from the beginning, ordained by ever-changing gods, fed by blood colored red and then by blood colored silver, gold, or green. With religion and writing came the division of humans into classes, slaves, and peasants. Wells believed that men, by and large, prefer the

H. G. Wells

21

unthinking state of the peasant worker to the thinking state of the free person. War, on any scale, requires an unthinking state. Peasants with pointed sticks would not rush, whooping, at other peasants with pointed sticks unless some greater authority commanded it. When states fought, the losers then surrendered the bodies of their peasant warriors. “The earlier wars,” writes Wells, “did not involve remote or prolonged campaigns, and they were waged by levies of the common people. But war brought in a new source of possessions, plunder, and a new social factor, the captive” (p. 198). Freedom could be considered a modern virtue; the people of the past seem untroubled by the ever-present rattling of slave chains. Wells details the mosaic of slave systems and the myriad manner of ways that a person might become a slave. Stories of defeated soldiers made captives fail to make historians flinch, but the idea that parents sold their children into slavery, a notion whose only modern equivalent survives in the “honor killings” that some Islamic fathers inflict upon their sexually desecrated daughters, does make one question whether humans in the past possessed less compassion and emotion than modern people. Slavery of the more horrific sort requires that the slave suffer from geographic dislocation; there must be nowhere for the slave to run or he will. Large numbers of slaves, caught and distributed for the purpose of some mass labor, proved to be easier to control than a handful or an individual. “For many such purposes,” writes Wells, “gangs of captives were cheaper and far more controllable than levies of the king’s own people. . . . And the monarch also found slaves convenient for his military expeditions. They were uprooted men; they did not fret to go home because they had no homes to go to” (p. 200). Civilization produced, then, a series of codependent classes, from slaves to free workers, to skilled artisans. Less of a layered cake, and more of jumbled pie with an upper crust on top, were these early social structures. Knowledge, ill defined, could not be caged with words built from such a simple Phoenician script. Again, Wells returns to the importance of the alphabet for explaining the development of civilizations: In the Western world, as we have already noted, education nearly “slopped over,” and soaked away out of the control of any special class; it escaped from the limitation of castes and priesthoods and traditions into the general life of the community. Writing and reading had

22

Chapter 1 been simplified down to a point when it was no longer possible to make a cult and mystery of them. It may be due to the peculiar elaboration and difficulty of the Chinese characters, rather than any racial difference, that the same thing did not happen to the same extent in China. (p. 214)

Is monotheism of historical importance simply because a god attached itself (as a ride-along factor) to random historical occurrences, and, eventually to a Western civilization that rose to power more because of geography and random historical factors than because of divine favor? Or is monotheism a causal factor, something that set societies apart in a serious way from polytheistic religions and cultures? Did God possess an advantage over the gods, and not in a supernatural way, but in the sense that monotheism brought with it certain cognitive gifts that polytheism could not share? The importance of the Hebrews, the first monotheistic group (as opposed to the seemingly singular monotheist Egyptian pharaoh Akenhaton, who proved unsuccessful in his campaign against the gods) came not only from the fact that they believed differently from their neighbors: “The Jews who returned, after an interval of more than two generations, to Jerusalem from Babylonia in the time of Cyrus were a very different people from the warring Baal worshipers and Jehovah worshippers, the sacrificers in the high places and the sacrificers at Jerusalem of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. The plain fact of the Bible narrative is that the Jews went to Babylon barbarians, and came back civilized” (p. 230). What civilized them? The answer is books and the written scripture. To modern readers, the Pentateuch, or the Five Books of Moses (rather condescendingly called the Old Testament by the followers of Christ) represents a tangled set of contradictions, revenge fantasies, and bloody commandments: logic ensnared in barbed wire. However, compared to the vacuous polytheism, where the only consistency to worship included the begging of various spirits and gods to just make it rain or to make it stop raining, the fact that the Jews kept all of their rules in a neat little five-book set and that possessed a rough theology consisting of a covenant and a promised land must have looked a marvel of doctrinal consistency. According to Wells, This welding together of the Jews into one tradition-cemented people in the course of the “seventy years” is the first instance in history of the new power of the written word in human affairs. It was a mental con-

H. G. Wells

23

solidation that did much more than unite the people who returned to Jerusalem. This idea of belonging to a chosen race predestined to preeminence was a very attractive one. It possessed also those Jews who remained in Babylonia. Its literature reached the Jews now established in Egypt. (p. 232)

The publishing date of 1920 means that no bias, and the Middle East is the most biased of regions, can be attached to Wells when, in a sentiment sure not to make it into an Israeli tourist guidebook, he states that “[i]t cannot be said that the promised land was ever completely in the grasp of the Hebrews. . . . [I]n [the Pentateuch] we find the Philistines steadfastly in the possession of the fertile lowlands of the south, and the Canaanites and Phoenicians holding out against the Israelites in the north” (p. 222). The Jews, therefore, broke the bonds of Egyptian slavery but bonded themselves together in ink. Five books to rule them all, and one covenant to bind them. The theology and stories predated the writing, but the combination would prove to be important because the same factors that united people of faith can unite people for the purposes of the state. Yet monotheism existed in a world dominated by supernatural pluralities, not singularities, and so monotheism must be put away in a cognitive corner until the fourth century when the visions of the Roman conqueror Constantine will bring them on stage again. Classical Western civilization originates with the Greeks, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the academic world considered the Greeks to be descended from the Aryan-speaking peoples. Again, the word “Aryan,” once dry and academic, now carries connotations of the Third Reich. In 1920, however, “Aryan” contained no more malice than the phrase “Anglo-Saxon.” One can see, here, how a superficial reading of history (the Nazi inner circle were not, it should be said, known for their deep reading and analysis) could lead to the notion that the Aryans created Western civilization and that the Aryan peoples of Germany thus inherited civilization and, with it, the destiny of global domination. Wells says none of this, but his sober analysis is built upon the same facts that constructed a global insanity. In the chapter detailing “The Aryan-Speaking Peoples,” Wells mentions but does not analyze the Iliad and the Odyssey, the intent being that the reader understands these great works to be the product of Aryan language. The Greeks, Wells relates, differed in many important ways

24

Chapter 1

from the civilizations previously detailed. Warlike and individualistic, the Greeks possessed the fire of skepticism while other civilizations called out to the gods from the dark of superstition. Now this Greek civilization that we find growing up in South Italy and Greece and Asia Minor in the seventh century B.C. is a civilization differing in many important respects from the two great civilized systems whose growths we have already traced, that of the Nile and that of the Two Rivers of Mesopotamia. These civilizations grew through long ages where they are found; they grew slowly about a temple life out of a primitive agriculture; priest-kings and god-kings consolidated such early city states into empires. But the barbaric Greek herdsmen raiders came southward into a world where civilization was already an old story. Shipping and agriculture, walled cities and writing were already there. The Greeks did not grow a civilization of their own; they wrecked one and put another together upon and out of the ruins. (p. 255)

Nietzsche understood the Greek mentality as well as Wells did. The Greek man sought to dominate, to be revered, to treat women as trophies of war (see Briseise and Helen of the Iliad) and to cut open one’s enemies as an expression of rage. Play for stakes, believed the Greeks. Be Achilles, and take the slaves and the women, and be strong enough to accept no rewards or punishments from any other man. In these days prior to the mythology of Jesus, servants did not bear a mark of distinction, and the afterlife harbored only the warriors. Later, the meek would inhibit the earth with their groveling gospels, but this was the theology of those who lost. The Greeks would have celebrated the man holding the hammer, not the one being nailed. Wells writes: This is the social structure differing widely from that of the Eastern monarchies. The exclusive importance of the Greek citizen reminds one a little of the exclusive importance of the children of Israel in the later Jewish state, but there is no equivalent on the Greek side to the prophets and priests, nor to the idea of an overruling Jehovah. Another contrast between the Greek states and any of the human communities to which we have hitherto given attention is their continuous and incurable division. The civilizations of Egypt, Sumeria, China, and no doubt North India, all began in a number of independent city states, each one a city with a few miles of dependent agricultural villages and cultivation around it, but out of this phase they passed by a process of coalescence into kingdoms and empires. But to the very end of their independent history the Greeks did not coalesce. (p. 257)

H. G. Wells

25

In an age where those who should be defending Western civilization (with its constitutions, clean running water, and basic women’s rights) too often apologize for its successes, it is pleasant to see Wells here noting the special factors that made Greek civilization different from the others. Individuality and a hunger for public reputation and achievement, as much as the broken land of the archipelago, created the Greek mind-set and politics. Common language, common myths, and ultimately a common defense united these disparate communities. We know of the city-states, the Spartans and Athenians, and the alliance of necessity that they formed against the dictatorial threat of the Persians Cyrus and then Xerxes. Thomas Paine once wrote that the American colonists might be carving history into a sapling, but that when the tree grew, so too would the letters, until a message written in large letters could be read on the mature tree. Such is the case, too, with Wells. He founded world history, with all its brilliance, but also with its dullness. Details, paragraphs and pages of them, choke the wind out of the story: “Now while one series of Aryan-speaking invaders had developed along the lines we have described in Greece, Magna Graecia, and around the shores of the Black Sea, another series of Aryan-speaking peoples, whose originally Nordic blood was perhaps already mixed with a Mongolian element, were settling and spreading to the north and east of the Assyrian and Babylonian empires” (p. 266). Yes, yes, but stick with Xerxes and the Greek alliance; get to the good parts, one wants to say. It is hard to think of an activity more tedious, except perhaps having a phone book read aloud to you during a Stairmaster session, than studying Plato. Plato makes little sense but every historian of philosophy feels compelled to demonstrate a mastery of the old “if we are analyzing triangles, where is the perfect triangle upon which all of these imperfect triangles are based” discussion and then the comparison to the “allegory of the cave” with the chained cave dwellers staring at their own shadows providing a metaphor for mathematical perfection and real-world imperfection. It is to the credit of Wells, then, that he writes, There is much in Plato at which we cannot even glance here, but is a landmark in this history, it is a new thing in the development of mankind, this appearance of the idea of willfully and completely recasting human conditions. So far mankind has been living by tradition under the fear of the gods. Here is a man who says boldly to our race, and as if

26

Chapter 1 it were a quite reasonable thing to say, “Take hold of your lives. Most of these things that distress you, you can avoid; most of these things that dominate you, you can overthrow. You can do as you will with them.” (p. 301)

Did Plato write the equivalent of this? Probably not, but Wells sums up Plato in four invigorating sentences and then moves on. For that the reader is grateful. Early history, dominated as it was between this-empire-of-somewhere and that-empire-of-somewhere-else fighting for watering holes and slaves, is hard to narrate in a meaningful way. The question of what to summarize and what to detail, hard enough for fiction writers, is doubly difficult for writers of world history. It is a big story, after all, this history of the world. If Wells employs a guiding analogy it is that human civilizations go through a process that is like the growth of a human, and in his chapter on Greek thought, he writes, “Mankind is growing up. The rest of history for three and twenty centuries is threaded with the spreading out and development and interaction and the clearer and more effective statement of these main leading ideas. Slowly more and more men apprehend the reality of the human brotherhood, the needlessness of wars and cruelties and oppression, the possibilities of a common purpose for the whole of our kind” (p. 309). All socialists, and Wells called himself one, are optimists. No man who ever studied Alexander the Great, ever felt quite adequate afterward. The fact that he slashed his name into history with a bloody spear, at a time when legend and myth could still make a man into a god, means that he never suffered the same ills and daily humiliations of mortal men. Adolescent boys, whatever their chronological age, waste their lives controlling pixels in video games that are designed to let them pretend they are doing the kinds of things that Alexander actually lived. When one learns that Alexander walked into the world as a kind of war god, that he seemed to possess none of the sniveling self-doubt of the modern man, and that he nakedly craved glory and conquest . . . well. Then he did it. He conquered Greece, and showed the world how obsolete the Spartan and Athenian modes of warfare had become. Then he took North Africa and the Middle East. Only the inclement conditions of India, the exhaustion his troops, and the sudden and disturbing appearance of war elephants (if world history prior to the development of gun-

H. G. Wells

27

powder provides a single important lesson, it is always retreat from war elephants) prevented him from becoming master of India. Wells grew up in poverty and contended with a sickly body his whole life. He may have only participated in a single athletic contest, a soccer match during a brief stint as a schoolteacher in his youth, and he suffered a blow from some healthy young lad that clearly wrecked him forever. Was this why he sought to diminish Alexander? “The true hero of the story of Alexander,” he writes, “is not so much Alexander as his father Philip” (p. 310). Oh, there’s truth to this, of course. While imprisoned in Egypt, Philip learned siege techniques and other clever forms of warfare. He made the army that Alexander would lead, and he arranged for Aristotle to tutor the young Alexander. But armies don’t lead themselves, and it is hard to see how Aristotle influenced Alexander; Egypt was not conquered with syllogisms. Alexander, twenty years old, inherited the army his father built when a servant assassinated Philip. By giving Philip too much credit, Wells ignores the creative destruction of Alexander. That army that Philip made only gets credit now because of what Alexander did with it, and who remembers now the sons of Napoleon and Cromwell? Alexander seized the army after his father’s death and remade the world. The thing about Alexander is this: he never, as far as we know, faced any of the routine humiliations that tear us briefcase-carrying mortals down. No coworker ever secretly ate his sandwich; no boss passed him over for promotion. His father groomed him for leadership and, then, at the age when his muscles just started to truly ripple, fate made him the commander of the world’s most impressive army. Doubt and guilt troubled him not. He led that army from the front in a glorious period of conquest and then died, Jesus-like, in his early thirties before middle age could dull his aggression and before gravity could damage his body. Alexander would not suffer from a stabbing death by politicians, as did Caesar, nor would he die chubby and isolated as did Napoleon. He drank himself to death on a military campaign and was spared the degradation of middle age. Wells concedes that Alexander built better siege engines than Philip, but then, when speaking of Alexander in Egypt, writes, So the son of Philip of Macedon, the master-general of Greece, was made to feel a small person amidst the gigantic temples. And he had an abnormal share of youth’s normal ambition to impress everybody.

28

Chapter 1 How gratifying then for him to discover presently that he was no mere successful mortal, not one of these modern vulgar Greekish folk, but ancient and divine, the son of a god, the Pharaoh god, son of Ammon Ra! (p. 325)

Here, Alexander is a silly youth made into a cynical god. No, surely this is wrong. In an age when disease and battle swept away life, surely youth meant less in a land of the young. Socrates is the only old man of Greece. Alexander, youth incarnate, was the son of the morning, and even the Muslims later worshiped him as a valid prophet before Mohammed, in the same league as Christ. There is more evidence of the distaste that Wells felt for Alexander. Here the war god is made to seem petty and murderous: There was much flattery of the “young god,” much detraction of Philip, at which Alexander had smiled with satisfaction. This drunken selfcomplacency was more than the Macedonians could stand; it roused Clitus, his foster-brother, to a frenzy. Clitus reproached Alexander with his Median costume and praised Philip, there was a loud quarrel, and, to end it, Clitus was hustled out of the room by his friends. He was, however, in the obstinate phase of drunkenness, and he returned by another entrance. He was heard outside quoting Euripides “in a bold and disrespectful tone”: “Are these your customs? Is it thus that Greece rewards her combatants? Shall one man claim the trophies won by thousands?” Whereupon Alexander snatched a spear from one of his guards and ran Clitus through the body as he lifted the curtain to come in. . . . One is forced to believe that this was the real atmosphere of the young conqueror’s life. . . . If it is true, or in any part true, it displays a mind ill-balanced and altogether wrapped up in personal things, to whom an empire was no more than opportunity for egoistic display. (p. 334)

This is a lengthy, but necessary quote. Wells does to Alexander with his pen what Alexander did to Clitus with his spear. The gods might tolerate aggressiveness against them, but not passive aggressiveness. Modern men swallow indignities because we must; they come with the mother’s milk and just keep coming. Alexander embodied the law and would brook no disrespect to himself. Clitus mouthed off not to Alexander but within hearing distance of him, and a spear pierced his stomach without delay. We hate Alexander where we should despise Clitus. We, all of us, would rather be Alexander than what we are.

H. G. Wells

29

The Greek peninsula and archipelago produced three great periods of philosophical achievement. The first, created by the pre-Socratics, produced Thales and Anaximander, men who asked questions about the fundamental elements of matter. Thales believed that everything in the world consisted of variations of water, but his philosophy proved to be just one specific variation of an answer. Other Greeks thinkers conjured up fire, air, or mysterious indivisible particles as the essential essence of all matter. Then, after the Peloponnesian War, came Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Then philosophy, like everything and everyone else, got out of the way of Alexander. After Alexander’s death, however, philosophy returned, and it did so, appropriately enough, at a city in Egypt named after Alexander. Alexandria’s original Greek governor came in the form of Ptolemy, Alexander the Great’s foremost general, who buried his ruler there. Wells thinks fondly of Ptolemy, who salved his empire with philosophy and learning. “Ptolemy,” writes Wells, “was a man of very extraordinary intellectual gifts, at once creative and modest, with a certain understandable cynicism towards the strain of Olympias in the mind of Alexander” (p. 343). Ptolemy established the first true center of learning in the ancient world, a “library” before the name existed, and something that really was more than that. “The Museum he set up in Alexandria was in effect the first university in the world. As its name implies, it was dedicated to the service of the Muses” (p. 343). The Muses, pleased at this flattery, inspired Archimedes to his water displacement theory, Euclid to his geometry, Hero to his steam experiments, and Hipparchus to his study of the stars. Too much thought occurred in an era before it could be effectively recorded, thus creating a bottleneck of ideas. For all that has been said about the importance of the printing press to the history of humanity, still not enough has been said. The press allowed for ideas to “stick” in society in a way not possible before its development. Wells, keen as always, sees this: “No attempt seems to have been made at Alexandria to print anything at all. That strikes one at first as a very remarkable fact. The world was crying out for books, and not simply proclamations and the like. Yet there is nothing in the history of the Western civilizations that one can call printing until the 15th century A.D. It is not as though printing was a recondite art, or dependent upon any precedent and preliminary discoveries” (p. 347).

30

Chapter 1

The concept of block printing came about during the Song Dynasty (960–1279) and traveled westward after the Mongols connected eastern and western Eurasia with a bridge of corpses. Block printing, goes the analysis, could not be organized well in China because of the massive size of the pictographic alphabet. Yet Wells indicates that printing should have been an obvious solution for a society crying out for books. No other factor democratizes a society like books do, not even the internet, too amorphous to be useful for genuine study, can reshape someone’s mind like a coherent argument nestled between covers. Did the Greeks after Alexander really want printing? This is a significant question, and it must be remembered that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Ottomans banned the printing press largely because the scribes objected and because it brought up religious questions about the validity of a printed Qu’ran. It seems that many scholars simply could not conceive of the idea of a printing machine; they may have seen it in the way that modern readers might look at a novelwriting machine. The art of calligraphy took time, and the development of handcrafted books or scrolls took the form of high art. Did Archimedes intend that his ideas would spread to the masses? Did it occur to anyone before the Renaissance-era printer Aldus Manutius (1452–1515), who put out cheap editions of the classics, that the barefoot and toothless peasants might want to wander about with equations and ideas? Probably not. Wells sees the need for printing, but this does not mean that Euclid did. Alexandria provides history’s first great example of intellectual synthesis, and Wells sees this immediately. “The Museum and Library represented only one of the three sides of the triple city of Alexandria. They represented the Aristotelian, the Hellenic, and the Macedonian element. But Ptolemy I had brought together two other factors to this strange centre. First there was a great number of Jews, brought partly from Palestine, but largely from those settlements in Egypt which had never returned to Jerusalem” (p. 35). More Orthodox Jews resented the acculturation that accompanied life in Alexandria. Cities tend to force people to assimilate, to question their prejudices and assumptions, and cities therefore present a danger to the religious fundamentalist. Jewish history records a significant ideological battle inside of the Judaic community over just how much tolerance could be tolerated.

H. G. Wells

31

Wells argues that the gods all started to run together, like different colors of paint dumped into a bowl, until it began to seem like “[w]here there had been many gods, men came to think there must be really one god under a diversity of names” (p. 351). Gods synthesized just as cultures do, but the orthodox believers in Judaism resisted the synthesis, insisting upon the purity of the literary character that had been developed in their Five Books of Moses. The history of the Jews, again, looks important only because of hindsight. Prior to Constantine, the monotheism of the Judaic peoples seems unimportant; they were just another group of believers in the diverse city of Alexandria. Monotheism’s day, if not that of the Jews, would come but not for a few centuries. The philosopher Daniel Dennet, in Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (2014), has argued that placing the monotheistic religions in the same category as Hinduism, Taoism, and Buddhism amounts to a categorization error. The god(s) of the big three monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (the prophets of all three claim to worship the same god, but since He seems to give radically different messages to all three groups of believers, this idea remains logically problematic) require obedience and this is ensured through operant conditioning. Yahweh, God, and Allah, or his oneness, doles rewards and punishments based on the behavior of his followers, or occasionally, and just to keep them guessing, he kills a bunch of people through a natural disaster and leaves the survivors to figure out what they did to deserve it. The Eastern religions, argues Dennet, might be better understood as practices as opposed to religions, and should therefore be placed in a different mental category entirely. Wells begins his story of Buddhism by noting how geography placed then insurmountable mountains and deserts in between India and the societies of the Mediterranean. Although historians of India routinely grit their teeth in frustration over the lack of sources regarding India’s early period, Wells is content to mix a little water of conjecture into small amount of paint. He describes an India filled with romantic stories, good hunting, and tame elephants. This type of environment would produce a Buddha. According to Wells, It was somewhere between 500 and 600 B.C., when Croesus was flourishing in Lydia and Cyrus was preparing to snatch Babylon from Na-

32

Chapter 1 bonidus, that the founder of Buddhism was born in India. He was born in a small republican tribal community in the north of Bengal under the Himalayas, in what is now overgrown jungle country on the borders of Nepal. The little state was ruled by a family, the Sakya clan, of which this man, Siddhartha Gautama, was a member. . . . The institution of caste was not yet fully established in India, and the Brahmins, though they were privileged and influential, had not yet struggled to the head of the system; but there were already strongly marked class distinctions and a practically impermeable partition between the noble Aryans and the darker common people. Gautama belonged to the former race. His teaching, we may note, was called the Aryan Path, the Aryan Truth. (p. 355)

This is worth quoting at length for two reasons. Wells places the birth of Gautama in a European and Middle Eastern time line, beneficial for understanding history. His book is titled The Outlines of History, and the sequence of global history must be understood either geographically or chronologically. Wells presents this history geographically, but reestablishes the chronology based on already-studied facts. Wells employs here the methods of great teaching. Secondly, that word “Aryan” with all its creepy connotations-that-itdid-not-yet-have appears again in the narrative. Hitler’s garbled historical understanding somehow connected the Germans to a master caste in India. The Buddha and the Fϋhrer both believed in very different Aryan paths. Wells, an atheist, never shows much reverence for the great religious figures (just wait until we get to Mohammed), but he treats Gautama with something close to respect. The story of the Buddha, well known, includes a wealthy young man who decided, in his late twenties, to abandon his comfortable life in favor of a pursuit of wisdom and the ultimate state of mind. India has had more than its share of poor holy men, and the myth of the wise man on the mountain pervades the culture. R. K. Narayan, India’s great twentieth-century novelist, wrote a sendup of the Indian holy ideal in his comedic novel The Guide. The protagonist, Raju, hangs out at a train station, and when asked questions gives vague responses. This qualifies him for holiness, and “Raju soon realized that his spiritual status would be enhanced if he grew a beard and long hair to fall on his nape. A clean-shaved, close-haired saint was an anomaly. He bore the various stages of his make-up with fortitude, not minding the prickly phase he had to pass through before a well-authenticated

H. G. Wells

33

beard could cover his face and come down to his chest. By the time he arrived at the stage of stroking his beard thoughtfully, his prestige had grown beyond his wildest dreams” (pp. 39–40). So much for the deep spirituality of Buddhism! Wells writes more kindly of Gautama and he declines the opportunity to judge Gautama’s famous abandonment of his wife and infant child for the purpose of attaining enlightenment. This episode of the Buddha’s life, as hard as Mohammed’s polygamy to justify in modern ethics, reveals the self-centeredness at the heart of the Buddhist mission. A lifetime spent pursuing enlightenment is a life lived in silence, far away from the responsibilities of a job and the noise of children. “The Indian mind has always been disposed to believe that power and knowledge may be obtained by extreme ascetism, by fasting, sleeplessness, and self-torment” (p. 359). As statues of the potbellied Buddha would imply, Gautama rejected this, as he rejected worldly attachments as the source of suffering. Desires cause pain, and so one had to purge oneself of desire in order to be rid of pain. Gautama found his insights inside himself, supposedly while sitting under a famed tree. Then he decided to teach these insights and the means by which one can attain them; thus Buddhism came into the world. Again, Wells anchors his story in the narrative already established: We must remember that in the time of Buddha it is doubtful if even the Iliad had been committed to writing. Probably the Mediterranean alphabet, which is the basis of most Indian scripts, had not yet reached India. The master, therefore, worked out and composed pithy and brief verses, aphorisms, and lists of “points,” and these were expanded in the discourse of his disciples. It greatly helped them to have these points and aphorisms numbered. The modern mind is apt to be impatient of the tendency of Indian thought to a numerical statement of things, the Eight-fold Pat, the Four Truths, and so on, but this enumeration was a mnemonic necessity in an undocumented world. (p. 361)

What a brilliant paragraph! In just a few sentences, Wells connects the Buddha’s life to already-learned facts, thus incorporating the history of Buddhism into the time line, and he reminds the reader of the importance of numbers in a world absent of printing. Numbers, a “mnemonic necessity,” possessed the same function as poetry in Western traditions; the memory seizes words that rhyme more tightly than it does words that

34

Chapter 1

don’t. The brain categorizes and connects things, and words that sound alike or follow numerically intertwine. Wells likes the Buddha, likes his mind and his teachings, the notion of transcendence. Then, there is this weird section: “The teaching of history, as we are unfolding it in this book, is strictly in accordance with the teaching of Buddha. There is, as we are seeing, no social order, no security, no peace or happiness, no righteous leadership or kingship, unless men lose themselves in something greater than themselves. The study of biological process again reveals exactly the same process—the merger of the narrow globe of individual experience in a wider being” (p. 362). These words, written in an age of conflict, show a belief in a human process that, in the early twenty-first century, seems to be correct. The Western literary canon rarely admits a new member, but Steven Pinker should gain entrance for The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. Pinker’s thesis, that peace dominates the modern world in comparison to the past, receives too much backing from clear evidence to be wrong. Wells, with his genius, intuited this trend in the period between the world wars. Pinker declares that the modern era of peace has more to do with the power of Hobbes’s Leviathans than Buddha’s eightfold paths, but in the aftermath of World War I, Wells managed to sense a historical trend that must have seemed mangled in the gears of mechanized war. Wells, perhaps uncomfortable with the mumbo jumbo of karma, dismisses it as part of a bygone era of Buddhist thought. Wells the biologist knows that spirits don’t pass from body to body, generation to generation, but it feels as if Wells is trying hard to justify Buddhism: it was primarily a religion of conduct, not a religion of observances and sacrifices. “[Buddhism] had no temples, and since it had no sacrifices, it had no sacred order of priests. Nor had it any theology. It neither asserted nor denied the reality of the innumerable and often grotesque gods who were worshipped in India at that time” (p. 364). If only one could forget the Buddha’s abandonment of his wife and child, and ignore the unscientific and socially damaging aspects of karma, Buddhism’s brilliance comes from the fact that the Buddhist conjures up no gods, and therefore creates no priesthood. If the history of early civilizations has a law, it is this: no religion did well without the backing of the state. Buddhism’s Constantine came in

H. G. Wells

35

the form Chandragupta Maurya (r. 321–297 BCE). Chandragupta conquered northern India shortly after Alexander the Great’s retreat (perhaps he got the idea of conquest from Alexander’s incursion?). Not only did Chandragupta impose his military will on the various provincial rulers in northern India, but he imposed an outline of history upon them as well. Chandragupta also—and this is crucial—imposed Buddhism precisely because it lacked a priesthood: “[T]his King Chandragupta came into much the same conflict with the growing power of the Brahmins, into the conflict between crown and priesthood, that we have already noted as happening in Babylonia and Egypt and China. He saw in the spreading doctrine of Buddhism an ally against the growth of priesthood and caste. He supported and endowed the Buddhistic Order, and encouraged its teachings” (p. 369). Are the world’s great religions “great” merely because they helped rulers wage political war against recalcitrant priests from nongreat religions? Are the religions simply effective means of establishing cultural unity on disparate peoples and mind control over those who might question the current order? Wells does not relate the legend of Chandragupta’s death through religious fanaticism. Chandragupta supposedly became a Jain. Jains, as readers of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral know (the book features the main character’s daughter as a leftist radical turned Jain), appealed to people with the temperament of an extremist. Jains try not to eat anything, and do not bathe, and then eventually fade into nothing. The thinking here, supposedly, is that since the world requires the death of other living beings for our nourishment, anyone who starves himself to death has reached the summit of selflessness. (Presumably, Jains are unaware of the now oft-quoted statistic that roughly 90 percent of the cells in a human body may be described as nonhuman. Microbiologists like to point out the teeming diversity of bacterium in the human gut. Starving oneself to death could be considered an act of microgenocide.) Asoka, Chandragupta’s grandson, conquered the Kalinga peoples but then felt badly about it. He did not feel badly enough to actually give back the land his armies took, but badly enough to build rock pillars all over his territory. On these pillars, Asoka etched his sorrows and regrets, and his conversion to a more humanitarian philosophy of rule seems

36

Chapter 1

sincere. “For eight and twenty years Asoka worked sanely for the real needs of men. Amidst the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the columns of history, their majesties and graciousnesses and serenities and royal highnesses and the like, the name of Asoka shines, and shines almost alone, a star. . . . More living men cherish his memory to-day than have ever heard the names of Constantine or Charlmagne” (p. 371). Yet another reminder of how the vast populations of the East overawe that of the Europeans. By connecting Buddhist history to the history of the Mauryan Dynasty, Wells develops the story of India and brings about a sense of the region’s culture and politics. His attention then turns to Roman history, which actually paralleled that of early Greece, with Rome having been mythically founded by Romulus and Remus about the same time that the first Olympic athletes in Greece stripped themselves naked for their competitions. Wells announces that he intends to resurrect the reputation of Carthage by naming chapter 26 “The Two Western Republics.” The history of Carthage is usually detailed only for the purpose of giving the Roman protagonist a worthy antagonist, but Carthage produced more than just Hamilcar Barca and Hannibal. The fact that the Carthaginians lost three wars to Rome, the third being a genocide of biblical proportions, has reduced the reputation of the Carthaginians in history. Wells sought to correct that. The Roman Republic feared outsiders to a degree that might be called paranoia if that republic had not been built at a time when barbarians routinely battered down the gates of civilizations. For the Romans, the event that etched fear into their psyche came in 390 BCE, when the Gauls (from the area that roughly corresponds to modern France) pillaged the city of Rome. Wells writes of the catastrophe: The leader of the Gauls who sacked Rome was named Brennus. It is related of him that as the gold of the ransom was being weighed, there was some dispute about the justice of the counterpoise, whereupon he flung his sword into the scale, saying, “Voe vitcis!” (“Woe to the vanquished!”) a phrase that has haunted the discussions of all subsequent ransoms and indemnities down to the present time. For half a century after this experience Rome was engaged in a series of wars to establish herself at the head of the Latin tribes. For the burning of the chief city seems to have stimulated rather than crippled her energies. However much she had suffered, most of her neighbours

H. G. Wells

37

seem to have suffered more. By 290 B.C. Rome was the mistress city of all Central Italy from the Arno to the south of Naples. She had conquered the Etruscans altogether, and her boundaries marched with those of the Gauls to the north and with the regions of Italy under Greek dominion to the south. (p. 385)

Rome’s expansion, driven by a fear passed down in the collective DNA of her citizenry, would eventually drive her borders south across the Mediterranean into the land of Carthage and, eventually, to an outbreak of war. Wells begins his history of Rome with an explanation of Rome’s foreign policy and leaves off at that point to analyze the intricacies of the republic’s internal politics. Wells describes the interactions between the plebians (lower class) and the patricians (upper class). A law code called the Twelve Tables came quickly to govern the interactions between these two peoples, and a senate with two consuls to govern Rome. Rome’s republic is then compared to that of Carthage, which differed in that “Italy under Rome was a republican country; Carthage was that much older thing, a republican city.” (p. 399). The governing system of the Roman Republic is familiar to the point of boring, but students of history rarely study the intricacies of Carthage, and to read Wells develop Carthaginian history seems similar to the tactic that writers of fiction sometimes adopt where they take a well-known fictional villain (Grendel, the Wicked Witch of the West, the Big Bad Wolf) and tell his or her side of the story. Two kings, an assembly of citizens, and a senate governed Carthage. However, a few hundred aristocrats held power and used close confidences and their connections to keep it. Wells sees in Carthage a mirror of Rome, that is to say a “republic” in name that suffered under the heavy influence of a small minority of the wealthy in fact. Wells ponders the possibility that if not for the greed and aggressiveness of the elites that governed these rival republics, then an alliance might well have been possible. History records no alliance between Rome and Carthage, only a seemingly inevitable drive to war. The First Punic War (264–241 BCE), where Hamilcar Barca lost to the Romans, seems important only because Hamilcar’s young son, Hannibal, vowed, in pulp-fiction fashion, to impose his will on the Roman people. Was this a war of revenge, or a war of necessity? Hannibal’s decision to invade Rome from the north, through the

38

Chapter 1

impassible Alps, seems to be a conclusion that could have come through answering either question. Hannibal brought elephants, of course, but in those days before animal rights protections, most of them died. They had little effect on the war, at any rate, unless it was perhaps to inflict upon the Roman people the notion that their invader was not quite right in the head. The Roman’s sense of security and sense of self-esteem grew from a belief in the aggressive competency of the Roman legions. At Cannae, that aggressiveness became arrogance. Hubris and insecurity, a bad combination in any people at any time, led the Romans into Hannibal’s trap at Cannae. The legionnaires attacked, Hannibal flexed his line backward, and his men encircled the Romans. Then there was blood and guts and all of that. Since this is a history of the way that Wells presented history, and not a world history in itself, a summation of what followed chronologically is enough. In a puzzling nonmove, Hannibal failed to attack the city of Rome after Cannae (only the Wehrmacht’s failure to advance on the British and French soldiers trapped at Dunkirk in 1940 provides an adequate analogy). Suddenly, the consul Fabius Cunctator, who had advised that the Romans should try to avoid the large and well-trained Carthaginian army so ably led by Hannibal, seemed a lot smarter. Then, a lightbulb (or perhaps a torch) went off over the head of the general who came to be known as Scipio Africanus. Scipio realized something important: if Hannibal was in Rome, then he was not in Carthage. That insight ended the war, as Scipio’s invasion of Carthage destroyed the political will of the Carthaginians. “A Numidian king was taken prisoner; two camps were burned and destroyed; and in them a vast number of men, arms, and horses; and the Carthaginians sent orders to Hannibal to quit his fruitless hopes in Italy, and return home to defend his own country” (pp. 410–411). All generals carp about politics and its effect on their abilities to wage effective wars, but a nonpolitical war never existed and Hannibal could not fight without the support of his government. Scipio Africanus ended the war, and Hannibal turned fugitive. Suicide saved him, finally, from Roman capture. He would not live to see the effect that defeating Carthage for a second time had on Rome. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) that “America will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man who swallowed the arsenic and is poisoned in turn. Mexico will poison us” (as

H. G. Wells

39

quoted in The Illustrated Battle Cry of Freedom [McPherson 2003]). The Roman elite squabbled over the land and wealth newly accumulated via conquest, and the Senate increasingly seemed to be less a representative of the people, and more of a meeting place where the elite and corrupt could dissect the spoils of war. Wells wrote, The history of Rome for the fifty-six years that elapsed between the battle of Zama and the last act of the tragedy, the Third Punic War, tells of a hard ungracious expansion of power abroad and of a slow destruction, by the usury and greed of the rich, of the free agricultural population at home. The spirit of the nation had become harsh and base; there was no further extension of citizenship, no more generous attempts at the assimilation of congenial foreign populations. Spain was administered badly and settled slowly and with great difficulty. Complicated interventions led to the reduction of Illyria and Macedonia to the position of a tribute-paying provinces; Rome, it was evident, was going to “tax the foreigner” now and release her home population from taxation. After 168 B.C. the old land tax was no longer levied in Italy, and the only revenue derived from Italy was from the state domains and through a tax from overseas. . . . At home men of the Cato type were acquiring farms by loans and foreclosure, often the farms of men impoverished by war service; they were driving the free citizens off their land and running their farms with the pitilessly driven slave labour that was made cheap and abundant. (p. 412)

Nothing justifies the Third Punic War. The elites who controlled Rome feared that Carthage might grow again and threaten Rome’s control of the Mediterranean trade routes. If not that, then surely a resurgent Carthage would start some kind of trouble. The Carthaginians realized that their military could not match the might of their northern enemies, but when they tried to make peace by submitting to Roman demands, the Romans only made their demands more ludicrous. The Senate stated that the Carthaginians could avoid destruction if only they would move their city somewhere further from the Mediterranean. The Carthaginians failed to comply. By 149 B.C., the Roman legions butchered the Carthaginians, took the survivors as slaves, burned the cities, and then salted the earth and buried the rubble. This Carthaginian genocide was a result of a Roman civilization overcome by its own hatred and greed. Wells writes of another Roman victim from that time period: “In the same year (146 B.C.) the

40

Chapter 1

Roman Senate and Equestrians also murdered another great city that seemed to limit their trade monopolies, Corinth. They had a justification, for Corinth had been in arms against them, but it was an inadequate justification” (p. 417). Coupled with Rome’s greed came another evil: the paid soldier. Wells singles this change out as one of the most significant factors of change in Roman history. Prior to the Third Punic War, Roman farmers took up arms when necessary. Men fought for defense or for the good of the republic but they were mostly interested in turning seeds into crops than men into corpses. Interestingly, Wells even compares these Romans to South Africa’s boers (farmers) who gave the British Empire a tussle at the turn of the twentieth century. Paid soldiers fight for reasons different from farmers. The republic began to look diseased. Increasingly, corrupt politicians found they could mollify public discontent by pitting captured slaves against one another in gladiatorial combat. A society’s entertainments reveal the people’s true obsessions, and in Rome the people craved violence. One can only imagine the mindset of the Roman gladiators, men whose fingers twitched over their weapons and who fought to kill or maim as the only means to avoid being killed or maimed themselves. Wells sees the gladiatorial shows as a symbol of past barbarity: This organization of murder as a sport and show serves to measure the great gap in moral standards between the Roman community and our own. No doubt cruelties and outrages upon human dignity as monstrous as this still go on in the world, but they do not go on in the name of the law and without a single dissentient voice. For it is true that until the time of Seneca (first century A.D.) there is no record of any plain protest against this business. The conscience of mankind was weaker and less intelligent than now. (pp. 423–424)

In defense of Rome, they pitted only grown men against one another in combat. They did not, as we do, entice children and young adults into brain-scrambling activities and call it sport. Wells, the atheist, credits the spread of Christianity for ending these human cockfights, and for eliminating slavery. Or perhaps, Christianity simply began to spread at time when the citizenry became bored with the fashionable murder of the time. As has been stated, world history is not a subject; it is all the subjects. Wells does more than just detail the traditional story of wars, senates,

H. G. Wells

41

and emperors. He includes the importance of economics. “Another aspect,” he writes, “in which the Roman system was a crude anticipation of our own, and different from any preceding political system we have considered, was that it was a cash and credit-using system. . . . In republican Rome, the financier and the ‘money’ interest began to play a part recognizably similar to their roles to-day” (p. 427). Credit allows for one to live a life in the present that can only be imagined in the future if one saves enough for it. Free-floating money, a part of capitalism, gave ordinary workers some purchase power and allowed them to develop personal interests in their leisure time. Money, more than any of the traditional factors, brought about Rome’s downfall, according to Wells. Everyone who studies Rome asks why it fell, and Wells says, “We who can look at the problem with a large perspective, can see that what had happened to Rome was ‘money’—the new freedoms and chances and opportunities that money opened out” (p. 429). We who can look at the problem with a large perspective—we historians of the world, he means. The analytical powers that Wells displays in this narrative impress the reader; and the fact that he includes bald assertions of opinion only enhance the reading. He is not a godlike narrator, but a human antagonist and he gives you a little something to get piqued about. The factors of Rome’s collapse have more or less been detailed here; there’s more of course, about the Gracchus brothers and the First Triumvirate, and so forth, but one of the points of this chapter is to highlight the genius of Wells, not to recount all of world history. Three major figures, two of whom might even be mythic, reshape the world. They are Caesar, Jesus Christ, and Mohammed. The way in which Wells treats their biographies and eventual effects on human civilization shape the narrative of world history and reveal the methods of “World History’s” first great chronicler. As was established with Alexander the Great, conquerors do not seem to impress Wells very much. Wells begins his treatment of the caesars by attacking any previous attempts at historical deification. “In particular the figure of Julius Caesar is set up as if it were a star of supreme brightness and importance in the history of mankind. Yet a dispassionate consideration of the known facts fails altogether to justify this demigod theory of Caesar. Not even that precipitate wrecker of splendid possibilities,

42

Chapter 1

Alexander the Great, has been so magnified and dressed up for the admiration of careless and uncritical readers” (p. 440). Caesar is not a “he” but an “it,” a figure created through historical magnification. Before moving on, any critic should pause and reflect upon the phrase “that precipitate wrecker of splendid possibilities”; it is simply beautiful, a good fit for the Oxford book of quotations or for a Tshirt for a toddler. Every page reminds the reader that the English language has only rarely been molded with more skill. Wells can also use his words as knives, as when he lacerates the notion that Caesar, because he refused a crown from Marc Antony, possessed some kind of humility. Wells notes that while Plutarch tells us that Caesar declined to become a king (the subject of Shakespeare-speakingthrough-Antony’s frighteningly powerful funereal speech in Julius Caesar), Caesar had already “adopted the ivory scepter and throne, which were the traditional insignia of the ancient kings of Rome. His image was carried amidst that of the gods in the opening pompa of the arena, and his statue was set up in a temple with an inscription ‘To the Unconquerable God!’” (p. 442). A man who declines to eat the last bite on his plate should not be praised for refusing the cake. And that’s almost it for Julius Caesar. Wells damns the man not with faint praise but with faint description; Caesar’s death receives a few more words, but the ensuing battle between Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian (Caesar’s nephew and adopted son) receives greater treatment. Perhaps because he reacted to the situation in which he found himself rather than creating the situation through his own desire for power, Octavian receives easier treatment from Wells even when he morphs into a dictator and adopts the title of Augustus. “All things considered, he was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to Rome at that time” (p. 445). Greed and the Punic Wars doomed the republic, so a good emperor in that situation did not seem so bad. Why did Caesar, rather than Alexander, lend his name to power? Wells notes that the word caesar has been corrupted in Russian to “czar” and German to “kaiser.” Perhaps this is simply because Alexander did not spawn any political heirs that absorbed his name into a title. By the fourth century, the idea of a political empire would be rivaled by the concept of an internal kingdom of God. Christianity, conceived in the era of Augustus, came to reign during the era of Constantine.

H. G. Wells

43

Since Christianity evolved from Judaism, Wells first explains the Judaic concept of the Messiah. The Jews, a suffering people more than a conquering people, believed their god Yahweh would send someone to rescue them from the deplorable state of life: “The Jews looked for a special savior, a Messiah, who was to redeem mankind by the agreeable process of restoring the fabulous glories of David and Solomon, and bringing the whole world at last under the benevolent but firm Jewish heel” (p. 493). This revenge fantasy, common to the religions practiced by conquered people, provided the philosophical background for the message of Jesus of Nazareth. Stubbornness in the face of authority, a Jewish trait tested mightily by the caesars who insisted on being worshipped, would become an important feature of Christianity as well. With this background established, Wells introduces Jesus: In the reign of Tiberius Caesar a great teacher arose out of Judea who was to liberate the intense realization of the righteousness and unchallengeable oneness of God, and of man’s moral obligation to God, which was the strength of orthodox Judaism, from that greed and exclusive narrowness with which it was so extraordinarily intermingled in the Jewish mind. This was Jesus of Nazareth, the seed rather than the founder of Christianity. (p. 496)

Modern historians of religious figures rarely begin with disclaimers about the potential of offending the religiously minded, but Wells does explain that his history of Christianity is designed to appeal to the historically minded. Part of this disclaimer, no doubt, shielded Wells from becoming ensnared in the tangled theological debates that mar the history of Christianity. His approach to the gospels may be described as historically friendly, in the sense that the four canonical gospels may not agree entirely but create a synoptic picture that can allow the reader to derive that Jesus actually existed as a historical, if not a magical, figure. As was the case with his treatment of the Buddha, Wells seems more skeptical of the slicksters who packaged the original teachings (preachers and Buddhist teachers) than with the originators of the philosophy. Wells wants, it seems, to rescue the basic message of Christianity from the oppressive variations of its practice, but this would require some type of belief in the basic message of Jesus, and therefore in the story of the gospels. Skepticism, the key mark of intelligence, prevents Wells from that belief.

44

Chapter 1 The miraculous circumstances of the birth of Jesus, the great star that brought wise men from the east to worship at his manger cradle, the massacre of the male infant children in the region of Bethlehem by Herod as a consequence of these portents, and the flight into Egypt are all supposed to be such accretionary matter by many authorities. At the best they are events unnecessary to the teaching, and they rob it of much of the strength and power it possesses when we strip it of such accompaniment. . . . We are left, if we do strip this record of these difficult accessories, with the figure of a being, very human, very earnest and passionate, capable of swift anger, and teaching a new and simple and profound doctrine—namely, the universal loving Fatherhood of God and the coming of the Kingdom of Heaven. He was clearly a person—to use a common phrase—of intense personal magnetism. (p. 498)

This is something less than poetic, and while Wells strains to present a historical Jesus as a teacher of merit, his words represent the fairly typical liberal view of pan-religionists who lean toward the teachings of Jesus. It’s a kind of watery, hippy-drippy religious liberalism. Wells cannot bring himself to employ a full intellectual honesty when it comes to Christianity, and his treatment of Mohammed will reveal that he can employ the cognitive skills of a skeptic with furious precision. Jesus, stripped of the miraculous addendums that later scribes tied to his cross, is an earnest teacher but with a message primarily of nonsense and hatred. No one, for example, speaks of Hell in the Bible more than Jesus does. If any other ancient huckster preached that a “lake of fire,” an imagined place of eternal torment, would inflict infinite suffering on even a single individual, then historians would ignore or vilify them. Yet the teachings of Jesus condemned billions of souls to a lake of eternal fire. Relieved from its miracles, the message of Jesus’s teachings fails to impress as well. The Golden Rule, “Do unto others as they would do unto you,” cannot survive a moment’s worth of hypothetical situations. “What if someone is a masochist and enjoys, more than anything, being horse whipped?” Should this masochist then horse whip other people? A philosopher might reply that each individual’s rights should be respected in general, but that would then oblige each of us to learn what other people like and then do that to them as well? What exactly are the requirements here? The skeptics-for-Jesus crowd, and it’s hard to believe that Wells really carried their card, like to imagine a core Jesus message of love and friend-

H. G. Wells

45

ship, but then ignore the hateful remarks about Hell and the rants about a coming “End of Days.” How do we know that this nonsense was not the core message of Jesus while the Sermon on the Mount was the addition of some well-meaning but anonymous later chronicler who wanted to add a little sunlight to an otherwise dark message? Of this, Wells writes, Now it is a matter of fact that in the gospels all that body of theological assertion which constitutes Christianity finds little support. There is, as the reader may see for himself, no clear and emphatic assertion in these books of the doctrines which Christian teachers of all denominations find generally necessary to salvation. (p. 499)

He goes on like this, noting that the gospels do not present a Jesus who seems all that concerned about stating, “I am the awaited Jewish Messiah,” nor does Jesus toss about any highfaluting theological concepts like atonement or the Trinity. Stripped of its politeness, one can see that the golden rule in the “Gospel According to Wells” is that Christianity represents a tangled mess of myths and half histories recorded by unknowns and distorted by theologians. One might, however, after recognizing this, pick out a few passages where Jesus said a few things that don’t sound so bad. This, one day, will be the legacy of religion. Some group of rationalists will scour all the teachings of the great religions and will ignore the ghastly laws, the mindless commandments, and the horrific teachings. They will chuck the stories of the Buddha abandoning his family, censor out everything Jesus said about the lake of fire, and turn the Qu’ran into a pamphlet by removing the phrase “kill the unbelievers.” What is left will be compiled into a book called A Few Things That Don’t Sound So Bad. Still, nothing in the book will be as valuable for humanity as the scientifically derived commandment of “Wash your hands every now and then.” Wells saves Jesus by focusing on the notion of the Kingdom of Heaven: This doctrine of the Kingdom of Heaven, which was the main teaching of Jesus, and which plays so small a part in the Christian creeds, is certainly one of the most revolutionary doctrines that ever stirred and changed human thought. It is small wonder if the world of that time failed to grasp its full significance, and recoiled in dismay from even a half apprehension of its tremendous challenges to the established habits and institutions of mankind. . . . For the doctrine of the Kingdom of

46

Chapter 1 Heaven, as Jesus seems to have preached it, was no less than a bold and uncompromising demand for a complete change and cleansing of the life of our struggling race, an utter cleansing, without and within. To the gospels the reader must go for all that is preserved of this tremendous teaching; here we are only concerned with the jar of its impact upon established ideas. (p. 500)

This, again, produces questions. If the virgin birth of Jesus can be dismissed for its miraculous nature, then why does the concept of the Kingdom of Heaven deserve to be called a “tremendous teaching” and afforded so much respect? Wells himself declines to describe it and instead recommends the reader to the source material. What is the Kingdom of Heaven without its miracle? The whole enterprise of biblical interpretation can only be described as literary, as any attempt to understand the Bible as some combination of metaphor and truth will collapse into an infinity of arguments over the process of that judgment. Wells could think as well as any human who ever lived and his life and writing hardly leave room for such intellectual dishonesty. His words about Jesus appear as tortured as the logic of theology and it leads one to ask, Why did Wells sacrifice his intellect in the reputation of Jesus? Was he afraid? Did he think that a full-on logical assault on Christianity would destroy book sales or distract from the monumental undertaking of describing the history of the world that he had tasked himself with? Probably not. This paragraph may explain: And not only did Jesus strike at patriotism and the bonds of family loyalty in the name of God’s universal fatherhood and the brotherhood of all mankind, but it is clear that his teaching condemned all the gradations of the economic system, all private wealth, and personal advantages. All men belonged to the kingdom; all their possessions belonged to the kingdom; the righteous life for all men, the only righteous life, was the service of God’s will with all that we had, with all that we were. Again and again he denounced private riches and the reservation of any private life. (p. 591)

Already, in his treatment of the Buddha, Wells revealed an affinity for teachings that invited people to stretch beyond themselves, beyond their individual greediness and pettiness, and into a larger concept of humanity. In Buddhism and Christianity, Wells sees a secular socialism germinating. Jesus, it should be added for the sake of fairness, liked to condemn sinners to eternal torment but no record exists of him running a

H. G. Wells

47

friend through with a spear in the fashion of Alexander the Great. He led no armies, climbed no ladders, stabbed no one in the back, and seemed uninterested in carnal pleasures or political power. Unless one reads the book of John, where Jesus comes across as a spiritual Alexander, demanding the respect of his position wherever he walks, it is possible to see a Jesus that would appeal to Wells greatly enough that the first world historian seemed willing to let his logical faculties sleep a while so that he could dream. Unlike students, disciples do not question the teaching passed to them. Disciples function as vessels whose purpose is to carry a purified teaching to other peoples. Asking uncomfortable questions about the teaching is disallowed, with the only form of intellectual dissent coming in the form of declarations about the state of the original teaching itself. Each interpretation, then, must be “right” or else that interpretation risks spoiling the purity of the original. The fiction in crucifixion comes in the form of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. This Easter miracle even supposedly lent so much authority to the words of Jesus that Christians believe it set his message apart from that of the other religious teachers of the era or any other era. The disciples of Christ, considered by Catholics to be the original church organization, then spread the message of Jesus throughout Rome for nearly three centuries. The message of Jesus, however, did not win over Rome. The monotheism inherent in Christianity appealed to a single emperor, Constantine, who suddenly made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire when he won the war for the control of Rome after the previous emperor, Diocletian (the author of a relatively mild persecution of the Christians) retired to become a farmer. Constantine, more than the disciples, spread Christianity throughout Rome. Wells states that “[t]he figure of Constantine the Great is at least as cardinal in history as that of Alexander the Great or Augustus Caesar” (p. 520)

Constantine’s historical presence is more significant in many ways than either Alexander’s or Caesar’s, but no scribes recorded even a questionable biography of Constantine and so his life can only be measured by its effects. Wells leaves out the traditional story of Constantine: that he saw a Greek Cross in the sky before the Battle of Milvian Bridge (312 A.D.) and that later he defeated his brother-in-law Maxentius for the

48

Chapter 1

control of Rome. In point of fact, narrative generally seems less important to Wells than analysis of historical impacts. There may be the assumption that readers have some basic understanding of the traditional narrative of Roman Christianity, or Wells may simply feel a preference for analytics. After giving a chronology of the major councils that structured early Christian theology (neither a New Testament so-compiled nor a Holy Trinity existed in the first three centuries after Jesus), Wells writes, “And it is very manifest that in much of the history of Christianity at this time the spirit of Constantine the Great is as evident as, or more evident than, the spirit of Jesus. He was, we have said, a pure autocrat” (p. 523). Jesus may have preached the Kingdom of Heaven, but Constantine invented the idea of Caesaropapism, or the union between religion and emperor in Rome. Caesaropapism (a twelve-cent word) might more easily be described as “One God, One Emperor.” Over time, the church’s hierarchy would evolve away from the authority of the emperor, but the church structure would evolve to mimic the hierarchy of imperial Rome; it still does. As the late John Julius Norwich has pointed out in his history of the papacy, the last absolute monarch in the world goes by the title of pope. The figure of Jesus, historically inseparable from Constantine, then redefines Western civilization through the development of Christendom, or land of the Christians, which could geographically be described as Europe. With Constantine, Christianity redefined Western civilization and, because of this, the message of Jesus could in fact be seen as nearly irrelevant. Any message that had attached itself to the kind of monotheism that advanced the interests of the state could have become deeply held. In the twenty-first century, historians and journalists tend to revere the Prophet Mohammed almost as much as those who actually worship his words do. The liberal journalistic version of the forehead bruise (a proud sign of devotion that is displayed by those who routinely touch their forehead to the ground five times a day in Islamic prayer) is to spout something about “true Islam,” which is a peaceful variation of the religion, as opposed to “radical Islam,” which is the variation that espouses violence. These characterizations make people feel good, but nothing in Islamic doctrine or history validates them. “True Islam” exists in the

H. G. Wells

49

same cloud empire as “true Christianity,” supported only by cloudy thinking. Historians of Western civilization might be tempted to declare Mohammed, Islam’s founder, as a combination of Caesar and Christ. Mohammed not only made religious declarations but used his words and charisma to form and lead a military that eventually installed him into power in his home city of Mecca. Mohammed’s law called for cohesion within the ranks of Muslims, called the Umma, and further developed rules to keep that unity. The Qu’ran explained to Muslims the best means to deal with the people they encountered outside that community. Non-Muslims who approach Islam might have a hard time taking Mohammed seriously. Wells certainly has a hard time doing so. In fact, Wells explains that the political situation of the Middle East likely left a slight opening for a religion that emphasized military unity to establish itself. By the early seventh century the Eastern Roman Empire, or Byzantium, had exhausted itself and its rival after decades of warfare with the Persians. The Emperor Justinian (525–565 A.D.) proved to be the last Byzantine emperor to wield the imperial power of Rome with anything like the strength of Augustus Caesar. The town of Mecca was already significant because of its oasis and because it housed a dark stone (a meteorite) considered sacred to the Arabs in a holy spot called the Kaaba. The Arabs were mostly nomads, or Bedouins, and they came to Mecca for the purpose of worshipping this stone that fell from the sky. As Wells notes, Mecca and the neighboring town to its west, Medina, both housed Jews, although more of them dwelled in Medina and the inhabitants of both towns routinely encountered Christians and Zoroastrians. The Arabs, mostly animistic as most peoples were prior to the arrival of one of the monotheisms, lived in a world of sophisticated and well-developed religions that often had the backing of an imperial state. The Arabs, as of this time, had no religious doctrines or institutions to rival them. With Jesus, Wells did analyze the canonical gospels that give an account of Christ’s life, but said nothing of the noncanonical gospels. He preferred to develop the story rather than analyze the source material and the same is true of Mohammed’s life. The well-told chronicle of Mohammed’s life actually comes from some questionable source material. The major texts of Islam are the Qu’ran, the Hadith, and the Sira. All

50

Chapter 1

three make up what Muslims call the Sunnah, or the Way of the Prophet. The Qu’ran reads like what it purports to be, a series of orally transmitted teachings that came to Mohammed periodically over the course of a little over two decades. It is not a memoir and it is not a story; Mohammed does the mentioning, but he is not mentioned. The Sira, written by Ibn Ishaq (704–773), details Mohammed’s life. This is the source, but most secondary writers of Islam’s history decline to include any analysis of the Sira, choosing instead to simply impart the story of Mohammed as the beginning of a larger history about the rise, spread, and development of Islamic civilization. Again, it is Wells we are trying to understand here, not Mohammed, and so this history of Islamic sources is included only so that we may ask why Wells declined to include it. Here is what Wells says about Mohammed as a man prior to his revelations: Until he was forty he did indeed live a particularly undistinguished life in Mecca, as the husband of a prosperous wife. There may be some ground for the supposition that he became partner in a business in agricultural produce. To anyone visiting Mecca about A.D. 600 he would probably have seemed something of a loafer, a rather shy, goodlooking individual, sitting about and listening to talk, a poor poet, and an altogether second-rate man. (p. 571)

At some point in the year 610, Mohammed claimed that the angel Gabriel seized him in a cave and began channeling the revelations of God through Mohammed. Mohammed told his wife, then some relatives and friends, but the polytheistic priests of Mecca could not embrace a message from a “second-rate man,” especially when that message radiated from a monotheistic core. Wells may be winking to the reader when he notes, “Like Mani, Muhammed claimed that the prophets before him, and especially Jesus and Abraham, had been divine teachers, but that he crowned and completed their teaching. Buddhism, however, he did not name, probably because he had never heard of Buddha. Desert Arabia was a theological backwater” (p. 572). The implication that Mohammed failed to connect Islam to Buddhism because Mohammed had likely not heard of it, indicates that Wells believes that the teaching of Islam originated in Mohammed’s mind, not from Allah’s. It’s a fair point; the Qu’ran contains no wisdom and no knowledge that would not have been available to an average illiterate

H. G. Wells

51

person living in a desert trading town in Arabia. God never tells anyone he talks to about knowledge unknown to the prophets. Ten years of revelations and hardships followed. Mohammed’s wife died and the elite of Mecca grew more aggressive toward the Prophet. Mohammed exited the city after that same elite attempted to kill him. He went to Medina, where Mohammed decided to work with the city’s elite rather than to rail against the injustices inherent in a class system. Mohammed acted as an outside arbiter who could help solve internal disputes, and by the year 622, he governed the city. Muslims consider this event, where Mohammed wielded genuine political power, to be of such great importance that 622 became the first year in the Muslim calendar. Certainly some of Christianity’s appeal comes from the counterintuitive notion that Jesus acted as a sacrifice; his disinterest in attaining political power and his willingness to die on a cross provoke, at the very least, those who study the religion to ponder its meaning. Jesus acted in a way that seemed designed to ensure that he would not gain political power; the powers-that-be in Rome at the time executed Jesus for crimes. Jesus never governed anything. Jesus may very well be a literary character, but if this is the case, then he came from a long Western literary and philosophical tradition. Socrates, too, died at the behest of the state and the horrific-deaths-for-a-causegreater-than-oneself theme features in many classic Greek works. Antigone, by Sophocles, might be the most extreme example of the genre. Islam contains none of this nuance; Muslims revere Mohammed not just for his words, but for his political and military leadership. The Qu’ran reflects Mohammed’s three roles as a man: he was a prophet, a military leader, and a governor. Mohammed led his Islamic followers in eight years of warfare against Mecca. Then, in the year 630, he overtook the city and established Islamic dominance over the Umayyad clan that had previously controlled it. Muslims, then and now, viewed this military victory as a sign of God’s favor. Mohammed died in 632, not at the hands of authority but with authority in his hands. This outline and explanation of Mohammed’s life allows us to see the treatment that Wells gives to Mohammed with greater clarity. While describing the war between Mecca and Medina, Wells writes of this unsettling moment in the life of Mohammed: Near Medina was a castle of Jews, against whom Muhammed was already incensed because of their disrespect for his theology. They had

52

Chapter 1 shown a disposition to side with the probable victor in this last struggle, and Muhammad now fell upon them, slew all the men, nine hundred of them, and enslaved the women and children. Possibly many of their late allies were among the bidders for these slaves. Never again after this quaint failure did Mecca make an effective rally against Muhammed, and one by one its leading men came over to his side. (p. 576)

This well-known incident does mark Islam as different from the other major religions. Moses killed a slaver, but that was one man and likely by accident. The killing of the Egyptian army by the Red Sea is an act attributed to the Jewish God, even as a mythology. The Buddha abandoned his family, Jesus went on and on about Hell, and the Greek and Roman gods themselves committed misdeeds. Mohammed stands alone as the founder of a religion whose believers think he perpetuated a real slaughter on real people. This butchering of the Jews, and Wells leaves out the more lurid details, ultimately helped Mohammed in his conquest of Mecca. No sign of reverence can be found in the way in which Wells treats Mohammed, especially when it came to Mohammed’s love life. Consider these lines written about Mohammed’s attitude toward women after his first wife died: Until the death of Kadija, when he was fifty, he seems to have been the honest husband of one wife; but then, as many men do in their declining years, he developed a disagreeably strong interest in women. He married two wives after the death of Kadija, one being the young Ayesha, who became and remained his favourite and most influential partner; and subsequently a number of other women, wives, and concubines, were added to his establishment. This led to much trouble and confusion, and in spite of many special and very helpful revelations on the part of Allah, these complications still require much explanation and argument from the faithful. (pp. 577–578)

Other than the fact that Wells leaves out Ayesha’s reported age at the time of marriage (that would be nine years old), one can sense the sarcasm here. What, exactly, did Wells mean by “special and very helpful revelations”? He surely is referring to the fact that Gabriel occasionally sanctioned Mohammed’s extra interests in women by allowing Mohammed to have a few extra wives than the average Muslim. An extensive literature exists about this aspect of Islam, but this does not need to be rehashed here; one feels certain that Wells was aware of it. The verdict on Mohammed comes thusly:

H. G. Wells

53

Because he, too, founded a great religion, there are those who write of this evidently lustful and rather shifty leader as though he were a man to put beside Jesus of Nazareth or Gautama or Mani. But it is surely manifest that he was a being of commoner clay; he was vain, egotistical, tyrannous, and a self-deceiver; and it would throw all our history out of proportion if, out of an insincere deference to the possible Moslem reader, we were to present him in any other light. (p. 579)

It was probably for the best that The Outline of History never appeared in an Arabic translation. Critical commentary and analysis can only work on a thinker’s nuances; they have no power when the actual writer is as blunt as this. Nothing needs to be added to the words Wells has written. Yet he does later say, “Can a man who has no good qualities hold a friend?” (p. 579). The loyalty that Mohammed inspired in Abu Bakr, his righthand man and later the first of the so-called rightly guided caliphs, is used as evidence that Mohammed possessed something of merit in his personality. If one can only forget that the allegiance between Mohammed and Abu Bakr was forged when Mohammed married Bakr’s nine-year-old daughter, then the relationship between the two men can only be described as touching. Not even a watery believer in Islam would allow that Wells could get away with criticizing Mohammed while praising the religion he founded, yet this is precisely the analysis that Wells puts forth: “[T]he personal quality of Muhammed is one thing and the quality of Islam, the religion he founded, is quite another. Muhammed was not pitted against Jesus or Mani, and his relative stature is only a very secondary question for us; it is Islam which was pitted against the corrupted Christianity of the seventh century and against the decaying tradition of the Zoroastrian Magi with which the historian has the greater concern” (p. 579). Yes, historical debates over the biography of Mohammed do not improve anyone’s understanding of the seventh century. And, while it is valid to compare Islamic values, many of which stem from the example of the Prophet, with modern secular values regarding human rights this does little to explain the rise and spread of Islam as an historical force. In the seventh century, Islam provided an ethical system that successfully united the Bedouin tribesman of the Arabian Peninsula into a military force that managed, within just a few decades, to conquer an empire roughly the size of Rome at its height. These victories, certainly more

54

Chapter 1

than the words of Mohammed, generated the belief that Allah favored the Muslims. At this point, it is useful to ask this question: What can be determined by analyzing the way in which Wells treats Caesar, Jesus, and Mohammed? It’s hard to see that Wells shows much favoritism to Jesus, although his treatment of the life and teachings of Jesus seems to tilt in a favorable direction. Wells considers Caesar to be a junior Alexander and analyzes his life with the same disdain reserved for other conquerors. Wells seems to compartmentalize Jesus with the Buddha as a man who preached a doctrine that encouraged others to see beyond their own desires and wants. Mohammed, a shyster by the reckoning of Wells, nonetheless germinated a movement that would eventually produce an impressive culture and one that appeared, at one time, to be fairer and more progressive than what the Christian empires offered. Let us give chronology a break for a moment and look at the way in which Wells not only approaches East Asia, but also answers some of world history’s most significant questions. After Constantine, the next major historical shift took place with the arrival of Islam. Wells turns away from the West with a chapter titled “Seven Centuries in Asia,” but the clear purpose of this chapter, beyond a chronicle of the various emperors and empires of the Middle East, is to prepare the mind geographically to understand the impact of the religion of Islam. Wells writes, [B]efore we go on to tell of the rise of Islam in the world, it will be well to complete our survey of the condition of Asia in the dawn of the seventh century. And a word or so is due to religious developments in the Persian Community during the Sassanid period. (p. 545)

This is followed a few pages later by this important analysis: It becomes fairly evident that in the fifth and sixth centuries A.D. not merely Persia, but the regions that are now Turkestan and Afghanistan were far more advanced in civilization than were the French and English of that time. The obscurity of the history of these regions has been lifted in the last two decades, and a very considerable literature written in languages of the Turkish group has been discovered. (p. 547)

Only in the early twentieth century did Europeans, who by then still held imperial sway over most of the world, begin to discover that many of the regions of the world that they considered to be inferior had, in fact, once surpassed Europe in all the important markers of civilization. It must be noted that two impressive world historical forces, both of them

H. G. Wells

55

Eastern, developed with a sudden ferocity in the seventh century and at almost exactly the same time. China’s Tang Dynasty formed in 618 and Islam’s calendar begins with the year 622, when Mohammed came to govern the Arabian city of Medina. Confucianism and Mohammedism held every advantage in the seventh century and this, of course, creates a question in the mind of anyone who studies the history of that time period. Bernard Lewis, focusing only on the Islamic world, summed up the question in the title of his book What Went Wrong? (Lewis 2003).The title of that book could be just as easily applied to China as to the Islamic world. Wells answers that question, and there are no finer lines in his book than these: For a long time [China] certainly did keep ahead. It is only a thousand years later, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with the discovery of America, the spread of printed books and education in the West, and the dawn of modern scientific discovery, that we can say with confidence that the Western world began to pull ahead of China. Under the Tang rule, her greatest period, and then again under the artistic but rather decadent Sung Dynasty (962–1644), China presented a spectacle of prosperity, happiness, and artistic activity far in front of any contemporary state. (p. 558)

The traditional questions associated with China—why did they not “discover” the Americas and develop science—by 1920 had developed pat answers. Blame for China’s failure to conquer the world could be assigned to the conservatism of the Chinese mind. As is typical of Wells, he strongly refutes any notion that a racial difference (still an argument taken seriously in the early twentieth century) could be the key explanatory factor. Instead, Wells sees the Chinese alphabet as the cause of China’s gradual decline. “The peculiarities of the Chinese script, and the educational system arising out of that script, must have acted age after age as an invincible filter that favoured the plastic and scholarly mind as against the restive and originating type, and kept the latter out of positions of influence and authority. There is much that is plausible in this explanation” (p. 559). Here is an explanation that agrees with modern historical analyses: China’s script required a long process of memorization and did not work well with the printing press because of the number of characters, and the

56

Chapter 1

kind of people who ended up in control of political and educational institutions were the kind of people who spent their lives etching the Chinese characters into their neurons—hardly training for innovation. As the modern writer Eric Weiner puts it in his book The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World’s Most Creative Places, from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley: Written Mandarin consists of thousands of characters, or ideograms. The only way to learn them is by rote memorization. Starting at age six, Chinese children are required to learn five new characters every day. With so much cerebral space required to retain all of those characters, perhaps the Chinese simply have fewer neurons freed up for creative thinking. And unlike in, say, English or French, the Chinese language does not lend itself to improvisation or wordplay. The character is the character. Period. How different this is . . . from ancient Athens, where language didn’t hinder creativity but drove it. (p. 87)

The reasons why the scientific method and eventually a secular and philosophical concept of ethics evolved in Western civilization must be given more detail than can be described here. Suffice it to say, for now, that Wells gives no greater indication of his genius than he does in the analysis presented regarding China’s alphabet. In the version of The Outline of History being analyzed here, there are 1,101 pages of text, not including a useful chronological table at the end. By page 605, with a chapter titled “Christendom and the Crusades,” Wells turns his attention to Western civilization and with the exception of a chapter devoted to “Jengis Khan,” the rest of the book analyzes Europe and her daughter civilizations. Not a lot was known about East Asia at this time and what was known frequently came through a lens of racist gobbledygook of the sort that Wells continually refutes. Nonetheless, the decision made by Wells to focus on Western civilization beginning with the Crusades may be describe as justified by the rules of writing. Good novelists make the actions of their protagonists drive the story. Later world historians, trying to present a history of the world from a neutral or non-Western perspective, inevitably run into a problem. The main character is always the character who causes other people in the story to respond to him or her. Like it or not, Europe ends up as the main character of world history by the eighteenth century, and the antecedents to that movement do begin with the Crusades.

H. G. Wells

57

One can fish out a phrase from anywhere in chapter 22 and pull out a prize. Consider this analysis: By the time of the Third Crusade, the magic and wonder had gone out of these [crusading] movements altogether. The common people had found them out. Men went, but only kings and nobles straggled back; and that often only after heavy taxation for a ransom. The idea of the crusades was cheapened by their too frequent and trivial use. Whenever the Pope quarreled with anyone now, he called for a crusade, until the word ceased to mean anything but an attempt to give flavor to an unpalatable civil war. (p. 645)

In no other chapter does Wells function so much as a “traditional” historian. He writes beautifully and quotes from Gibbon liberally, but perhaps the above paragraph was all that needed to be written about the Crusades. Someone looking for a basic understanding of how the Roman Empire became Christendom, and of how the Holy Roman Empire formed under Charlemagne in 800 A.D., and eventually of why Pope Urban II called (from France, no less) for a holy war against the Muslims who held Jerusalem would do well to read this chapter. However, the major consequences of the Crusades may have been the exhaustion of the divine spirit behind them. The Crusades had originally inspired a sense of holy purpose in the faithful warriors who took up the banner, but there is only so much holy water in the well, and the powersthat-were went to that well too many times. In the end, the Crusades inspired in the people only a deep cynicism in the state and the church. Up until the invention of gunpowder, and eventually the kind of weaponry that could only be supported by structured states that embraced science and engineering, military innovation came from the plains. Horse- or camel-riding nomads, if they could be united, possessed skill sets that were easily transferrable to fighting. Unless one counts the Manchu conquest of the Chinese Ming in 1644, the last, and most significant, of these nomadic conquests came from Mongols under the leadership of Jengis Khan (we will stick with the spelling that Wells uses for continuity’s sake) and his successors. Modern analysis of world history makes the Mongol empire world history’s most significant. Here’s why. If we can think of the earliest civilizations as “dots” and then think of trade and conquest as lines of connection, then it is possible to view the history of civilization in Eurasia as an expanding “connect-the-dots” game where the bigger picture continues to expand. Alexander, Rome,

58

Chapter 1

the Silk Road, and the Muslims all connected population centers. Jengis Khan became the biggest dot connector of them all and facilitated a process of international trade that would eventually bring the big three world-changing inventions of block printing, the compass, and gunpowder to Europe. The Black Plague, coupled with new gunpowder weapons, erased the big Eurasian picture in the fourteenth century, but this likely only sped up the process of European intellectual development. The old authorities lost power at the same time that new technologies made it possible for new ideas to spread. Few biographies are more intensely interesting than that of Jengis Khan, but many of the details of his life come from a book with the exciting title of The Secret History of the Mongols. Among historians, the book is something rather less than a secret now (Jack Weatherford’s biography Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World is a cracking good read that details what’s in The Secret History) but remained unavailable at the time that Wells wrote. This is too bad as the reader can only imagine what a writer with the talent of a Wells could have done with this material. Alexander and Caesar provoked Wells into paragraphs of eloquent diatribe, but no words are spent condemning the character of Jengis. Wells writes, “The career of conquest of Jengis Khan and his immediate successors astounded the world, and probably astounded no one more than these Mongol Khans themselves.” This introductory sentence, written in words that might begin the essay of a high-achieving high school freshman, is followed by just seven paragraphs. The most in-depth of which is this one: The opening years of the career of Jengis were spent in developing his military machine, in assimilating the Mongols and the associated tribes about them into one organized army. His first considerable extension of power was westward, when the Tartar Kirghis and the Uigurs (who were the Tartar people of the Tarim basin) were not so much conquered as induced to join his organization. He then attacked the Kin empire and took Pekin (1214). The Khitan people, who had been so recently subdued by the Kin, threw in their fortunes with his, and were of very great help to him. The settled Chinese population went on sowing and reaping and trading during this change of masters without lending its weight to either side. (p. 670)

H. G. Wells

59

Then, on the next page, “In 1227 Jengis Khan died in the midst of a career of triumph. His empire reached already from the Pacific to the Dnieper. And it was an empire still vigorously expanding” (p. 672). Did this era of history simply not engage Wells? Did the person of Jengis Khan appear as such an alien character, coming from the otherworldly Mongolian steppes, that Wells did not feel the need to analyze his character and conquests? By the time of Wells, Jengis Khan’s name certainly held the type of historical connotations that Adolf Hitler’s was soon to take on, but his life and military career receive nothing but a curt summation, and much of this is dressed up in lazy and passive writing that seems out of place in a work of such brilliance. Later, instead of developing his own analysis of the Mongols, Wells includes a lengthy quote from another scholar. Shakespeare had his Titus Andronicus, and Wells his Jengis. Then, suddenly, Wells perks up. It’s a long business, this writing of the history of the world, and maybe his intellect and hands needed a rest. A modern analysis of the Mongols and their importance was presented a few paragraphs ago. Wells, again, managed to see the importance of the Mongol connections. Now this story of Mongolian conquests is surely the most remarkable in all history. The conquests of Alexander the Great cannot compare with them in extent. And their effect in diffusing and broadening men’s ideas, though such things are difficult to estimate, is at least comparable to the spread of the Hellenic civilization which is associated with Alexander’s adventure. For a time all Asia and Western Europe enjoyed an open intercourse; all the roads were temporarily open and representatives of every nation appeared at the court of Karakorum. The barriers between Europe and Asia set up by the religious feud of Christianity and Islam were lowered. . . . Envoys of the Pope, Buddhist priests from India, Parisian and Italian and Chinese artifices, Byzantine and Armenian merchants, mingled with Arab officials and Persian and Indian astronomers and mathematicians at the Mongol court. We hear too much in history of the campaigns and massacres of the Mongols, and not enough of their indubitable curiosity and zest for learning. Not perhaps as an originative people but as transmitters of knowledge and method their influence upon the world’s history has been enormous. And everything one can learn of the vague and romantic personalities of Jengis or Kublai tends to confirm the impression that these men were built upon a larger scale, and were at least as understanding and creative monarchs as either that flamboyant but egotistical figure Alexan-

60

Chapter 1 der the Great, or that raiser of political ghosts, that energetic but illiterate theologian, Charlemagne. (p. 675)

Ah, so there it is: the Mongol massacres, all those horses, and arrows, and sieges, just did not interest Wells. Interestingly, Wells makes the same assessment of the Mongol impact of philosophical life as Bertrand Russell would later make about the Muslims during the Abbasid era. These were transitional intellects; they preserved old knowledge so that European philosophers could later make that knowledge do something. As invincible as the Mongols originally seemed, the peoples they conquered eventually did learn how to use battle tactics that would allow for them to break away from Mongol control. The rate at which the conquered peoples cast off Mongol dominance had a lot to do with how strong the original civilization had been to begin with. The Turks fought in a ride-and-slash fashion similar to the Mongols, and so they managed to become independent under a leader named Osman (who lent his name to the Ottoman Empire) in the early fourteenth century, just a few decades after the Mongols took control. The Chinese overthrew a weak Mongol emperor not long after the death of Kublai Khan in 1294, largely because the Mongols evolved a sedentary lifestyle that turned them into bureaucrats. The Russians, inarguably the weakest military power the Mongols conquered, did not drive away their usurpers for two and a half centuries until the reign of Ivan the Great (r. 1462–1505). Warfare simply evolved away from the Mongols and international power began to evolve away from the horse and arrow and toward the ship and the cannon. In the fourteenth century, following the Black Plague, a devil named Timur the Lame (Timurlane or sometimes spelled Tamerlane) claimed to be descended from Jengis Khan and rode back and forth through Central Asia like the Black Plague on horseback. (Timurlane would have come of age during the worst of the plague years, and one wonders if his generation simply related to death differently.) Of Timurlane, Wells writes, He spread destruction far and wide; the Ottoman Turks—it was before the taking of Constantinople and their days of greatness—and Egypt paid him tribute; the Punjab he devastated; and Delhi surrendered to him. After Delhi had surrendered, however, he made a frightful massacre of its inhabitants. At the time of his death (1405) very little remained to witness to his power but a name of horror, ruins and desolated

H. G. Wells

61

countries, and a shrunken and impoverished domain in Persia.” (p. 691)

The year of Timurlane’s death just happens to be the same year that the Ming Dynasty dispatched the famous Treasure Fleet under the leadership of Admiral Cheng Ho. Horse-riding nomadic conquerors, by definition, are not ship-sailing conquerors (Kublai Khan produced a navy but it never did much except crash into Japan during violent storms), and so the era of the horse began a gradual process of military displacement that can be considered more or less complete by the middle of World War II. Previously, Wells displayed an affinity for India’s earliest known rulers, and he will do so again when discussing the Mogul Empire that formed a century after Timurlane’s death in northern India under the warlord Baber. In this era, Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors used their guns, germs, and steel to subdue the Aztec and Incan societies of the Americas, but Baber’s conquests in the Punjab region look almost as impressive. He died in 1530 and power soon passed to his grandson Akbar (l. 1542–1605), another fascinating Indian potentate who wielded intelligence and compassion during his reign. According to Wells: To Akbar it is necessary to give the same distinctive attention that we have shown to Charlemagne or Constantine the Great. He is one of the hinges of history. Much of his work of consolidation and organization in India survives to this day. It was taken over by the British when they became the successors of the Mogul emperors. . . . All the other great administrations of the descendants of Jengis Khan, in Russia, throughout Western and Central Asia and in China, have long since dissolved away and given place to other forms of government. . . . If India is now anything more than a sort of rag-bag of incoherent states and races, a prey to every casual raider from the north, it is very largely due to him. (p. 694)

You just knew that Wells would approve of Akbar, a man whose leadership and compassion put him in the same category of just political figures such as Abraham Lincoln and Catherine the Great. Of Akbar, Wells writes, “His distinctive quality was his openness of mind. He set himself to make every sort of able man in India, whatever his race or religion, available for the public work of Indian life. His instinct was the true statesman’s instinct for synthesis. His empire was to be neither a Moslem nor a Mongol one, nor was it to be Rajput or Aryan, or Dravidian, or Hindu, or high or low caste; it was to be Indian” (p. 694).

62

Chapter 1

At one point, Akbar became tired of the Muslim and Hindu division that seemed to get in the way of uniting India. In a stroke of brilliance, he must have thought the equivalent of “I have an idea! Let’s just make a new religion and everyone can be that!” Brilliant as this was, Akbar’s invented religion of Din-i-llahi converted few away from the more traditional belief systems. Wells blames this failure on the rigidities of Islam. “The Moslem teachers in India were not so much teachers as conservators of an intense bigotry; they did not want a common mind in India, but only a common intolerance in Islam” (p. 697). This same attitude, practiced by the leaders now of Pakistan (Indian, and therefore British, territory at the time that Wells wrote) has turned that country into the paradise of tolerance and prosperity that it has become. Akbar’s descendants embraced an aggressive Islam and made war on the Hindus and their gods. This attitude, mixed with an unhealthy sense of royal privilege (world history does not lack for spoiled rotten royals) and what might be described as good old-fashioned psychopathy (see Jahghir, Shah), led eventually to the collapse of the Mogul after the fiftyyear reign of the puritanical Aurangzeb ended with his death in 1707. By then the British and the French East India Companies looked to the subcontinent as a source of raw materials and markets and the fact that it was Europeans coming to India, rather than the other way around, indicates that Europe had become the protagonist of this global history. Before leaving Akbar and India to trace the arc of Western civilization, Wells leaves the reader with this: Civilization is so new a thing in history, and has been for most of the time so very local a thing, that it has still to conquer and assimilate most of our instincts to its needs. In most of us, irked by its conventions and complexities, there stirs the nomad strain. We are but half-hearted home-keepers. The blood in our veins was brewed on the steppes as well as on the ploughlands. (p. 698)

Western civilization’s ascent over her neighbors can be traced to 1492, the year in which the center of the global trade network shifted away from the Mediterranean and toward the Atlantic. The known world expanded and the Europeans suddenly controlled it. Here’s the irony: Columbus sailed westward across the Atlantic precisely because the Ottomans controlled the Mediterranean trade route so completely that the

H. G. Wells

63

only way to access the Asian suppliers of such lucrative items as silk, spices, and tea was to try to sail around the world to the other side. As was mentioned earlier, the biggest question in world historical studies has to do with why Europe suddenly rose to global power by the mid-eighteenth century. Wells begins his study of Western civilization’s ascent by noting, quite correctly, that in comparison to the impressive Islamic and East Asian civilizations, that Christendom seemed a little lacking in the world-domination department. “A man of foresight surveying the world in the early sixteenth century might well have concluded that it was only a matter of a few generations before the whole world became Mongolian—and probably Moslem. . . . Few people seem to realize how recent a thing is this European ascendancy” (p. 700). What follows this analysis is the sort of solid historical work that provides the scaffold throughout the book. Wells neither lionizes nor demonizes Christopher Columbus; he just provides a narrative of how he managed to convince the Spanish sovereigns of Ferdinand and Isabella to finance his explorations, and then Wells tells of how the voyages of Columbus inspired other sailors. The Spanish and Portuguese conquered the Americas, established silver mines, and built an empire of waves that propelled the Iberian Peninsula, briefly, into the status of a major world power. Although he lightly condemns the Aztecs for creating a loose empire based on terror, few words are spent detailing the social structures of the new world. The impact of European diseases on native societies, something that not only eradicated Indian societies but also opened up a labor shortage in the Americas that only an African slave trade could fill, receives no treatment at all. The exchange of slaves and silver, key components of what would later be dubbed the Columbian Exchange by Alfred Crosby (1973) in a book by the same name, is mentioned. How did Wells miss the waves of murkily defined diseases that destroyed the natives given that it could be argued that the largely one-way migration of deadly microbes from Europe to the Americas proved to be the most important occurrence in the history of the world? Likely, insights from epidemiology simply had not yet crossed outlines with the discipline of history at the time that Wells wrote. Insights about disease and invasion would be inserted into his novel about a war of worlds, not into his history of the world.

64

Chapter 1

By this time, the printing press had created generations of readers. The first men to craft world-changing sentences belonged to an era where religion and theology dominated the intellectual and practical world. Machiavelli crafted an anti-Christian theology: the Bible taught one how to be like Christ, but Machiavelli taught his readers how to be like Pontius Pilate. The biblical stories contained a message: good behavior will not be rewarded in this world but will be in the next. Paradoxically, acting like Jesus can bring persecution. Machiavelli studied political power by looking at historical examples of how political power worked, and he advised princes to think of nothing but the military. The peasants won’t hate a prince for applying torture and terror; they will hate a prince only for hypocrisy. If a prince says he feels a Christian love for his people and then burns the village down when the peasants don’t listen, then the prince becomes a hypocrite. The solution to hypocrisy, then, is simply to tell the peasants up front that you don’t love them and if they mess around with you then you will send in the troops and burn the village down. This way, when it happens, no one is surprised. Schopenhaur, and especially Nietzsche, would later expand upon Machiavelli’s original work by building an entire philosophy of power that ran antithetically to New Testament principles. Nietzsche’s The AntiChrist (1895) was just that, a New Testament for power where the mythical ubermensch (superman) featured as the new messiah. As has been articulated here, Wells gives praise to philosophers who expound a philosophy of joining something bigger than oneself. Machiavelli does not qualify for praise. Much has been written to show that Machiavelli had wide and noble intentions behind his political writings, but all such attempts to ennoble him will leave the scepitcal reader, who insists on reading the lines instead of reading imaginary things between the lines of Machiavelli’s work, cold towards him. This man manifestly had no belief in any righteousness at all, no belief in a God ruling over the world or in a God in men’s hearts, no understanding of the power of conscience in men. Not for him were Utopian visions of world-wide human order, or attempts to realize the City of God. Such things he did not want. It seemed to him that to get power, to gratify one’s desires and sensibilities and hates, to swagger triumphantly in the world, must be the crown of human desire. Only a prince could fully realize such a life. (pp. 751–752)

H. G. Wells

65

Martin Luther, the chief destroyer of Catholicism, receives no such condemnation. Wells mentions him only as a wayward priest who came to write in German rather than in Latin, and maybe this is just as well. Luther, Charles V, Henry VIII, and Jean Calvin broke down the catholic religious and political principles of the era and invented, by their opposition, the modern Catholic Church. The Renaissance and Reformation took place in the shadow of the Ottoman Empire, and Wells does not miss this, but his narrative treats Suleiman the Magnificent and his Turkish military force as offstage characters that add tension to the main theater. Although he probably controlled more men and territory, and commanded more respect, than any man since Timurlane, Suleiman’s life and conquests feature only as just another stress factor that Europeans of the sixteenth century lived with. The twin pillars of Christendom were the state and the church. These remained separate but both possessed the same medieval power structure and both were dependent on a variation of political philosophy known as the “divine right of kings” (a philosophy that fits well on the pope to this day). Both the state and the church now shook under the weight of philosophy and the printing press. Luther could write in the crude humor of a farmer, but still deliver the important parts of his anti-authoritarian philosophy. The Bible, not the church, had the last say on all questions of faith. The “good works” of charity, confession, baptism, and the like that the church prescribed would not send anyone to Heaven; only belief in the grace of Jesus alone could do that. Oh, and then there was the part about the pope being the Antichrist. It did not take long for this religious logic to transfer itself to politics, a fact that the unfortunate King Charles I, the runty son of King James I, discovered for himself on January 30 of 1649. That would be the day that his own parliament separated the royal head of Charles from his royal neck. By that time, few people west of the English Channel or south of Hadrian’s Wall seemed to put much truck in the old divine right of kings business. The problem with bloody revolutions is always the same; when successful, they put bloody revolutionaries in charge. Nobody much liked the puritanical Parliamentarians, led and protected by Oliver Cromwell, when they controlled England; canceling the theaters in the land where

66

Chapter 1

Shakespeare had lived and canceling Christmas in the land where Dickens would live just did not suit the English temperament well. Eventually, the English people decided they wanted a king back; then, not long after that, they decided that a leash on the neck of the king might be more effective than an ax through it. In 1688, Parliament invited an invasion from William, the prince of Orange, and his wife, Mary. They were Protestant, and King James II was not only Catholic but a little too forward about it. The fact that King James II was Mary’s dad did not seem to matter anymore in this case than it did in any other case of royal power grabs. The 1688 Glorious Revolution may fairly be described as one of the most important political events in history. It turned England into a parliamentary monarchy and ensured that the English, who had already responded to the calls for political change that flowed through the coffeehouses and the veins of republicans, would not face a French-style Terror. Wells simply misses the importance of the moment, writing of the Glorious Revolution as if it was just another long ago quarrel between a king and “great lords, merchants, and gentlemen” (p. 781). Maybe he was in a hurry to get to King Louis XIV, to whom Wells dedicates several paragraphs, as a way of setting up the French Revolution. None of this is to take away from the genius of Wells, who in this one magnificent chapter, synthesizes the westernization policy of Peter the Great and the early era of British and French colonization into India, while explaining how China’s Ming Dynasty fell to the Manchus in 1644 and how Japan “set her face resolutely against the interference of foreigners in her affairs. She was a country leading her own civilized life, magically sealed against intruders. We have told little of her hitherto because there was little to tell” (p. 312). Soon enough after 1920 there would be more to tell about the Japanese, but interest in the history and culture of that archipelago to the east would not arise until after World War II, and one can hardly blame Wells for viewing Japan as a dot unconnected from his global narrative. Historians of the world must make more choices than historians of more manageable subjects. Primarily, the historian of the world must make a choice to either set the narrative chronologically or geographically. To tell the story chronologically involves setting a time line and then just explaining, for example, what happened every year during that time

H. G. Wells

67

period. To explain the history of the world geographically, one must stay in one region, tell its entire history at least up to a certain point, and then move to a new region and repeat. For the most part, Wells uses the chronological approach. However, the American Revolution makes this approach problematic, as the story of the United States and its creation takes place not only on a new stage but in an entirely different theater. This may matter more for historians than lay readers, but much is revealed through transitional sentences such as “since the North American peoples are now to play an increasingly important part in our history, it will be well to devote a little more attention than we have hitherto given to their development” (p. 828). Here Wells switches his tactic and moves from the chronological approach so that he can connect the American and French revolutions; it is a necessary authorial decision, and deftly handled. Nowhere in his book does Wells reveal much sympathy for the British Empire or the justifications that buttressed it. Still, any reader should be curious as to how an Englishman true would view this American insurrection of the eighteenth century. In describing the colonial venture, Wells frequently uses the term “Red Indian” to describe the Native American tribes, but Wells surely meant no offense. Likely, he was trying to differentiate between American Indians and the actual Indians of India, a distinction that would have been important for British readers who were used to daily reminders that the jewel in the British imperial crown came in the form of their Indian colony. Wells notes what a mess the English settlers had made with their thirteen colonies and overlapping and contradictory political and religious aims. The French came, as well, but mostly just looking for adventure or furs or just for the opportunity to live somewhere where people didn’t put lead-based makeup on their faces. Earlier, Wells failed to study the impact of European diseases on the native tribes of Latin America. This disease omission further clouds his analysis of the Native resistance, or lack of it, to English settlement: [T]he Indians were a constant evil, but never more than a threat of disaster. They remained divided amongst themselves. Yet they had shown possibilities of combination upon a larger scale. The Five Nations of the Iroquois was a very important league of tribes. But it never succeeded in playing off the French against the English to secure itself,

68

Chapter 1 and no Red Indian Jengis Khan ever arose among these nomads of the new world. (p. 832)

Jengis Khan never had to contend with a body covered by smallpox pustules, and the thick forest covering of North America would make horse-riding nomadic conquering difficult for people not dying of whatever random supergerm happened to be tearing through the village this week. Furthermore, while the Americas contained abundant grasslands, no horses grazed there until they were brought over from Europe. Wells possessed immense analogical skills, fully displayed in the earliest chapters of his book, and his training as a biologist would certainly have trained his mind to look for ways in which evolutionary factors shaped human civilizations. Yet Wells left this historical niche open. What does Wells make of the American Revolution? He was dubious of its philosophical origins: “[M]en do not begin to act upon theories. It is always some real danger, some practical necessity that produces action; and it is only after action has destroyed old relationships and produced a new and perplexing state of affairs that theory comes to its own” (p. 835). Locke and Rousseau affected American revolutionaries quite less than disputes over taxation or cross-Atlantic chest bumping in an era where things like “national honor” still carried some heft. His ultimate verdict sounds almost like an endorsement: From the point of view of human history, the way in which the Thirteen States became independent is of far less importance than the fact that they did become independent. And with the establishment of their independence came a new sort of community into the world. It was like something coming out of an egg. It was a western European civilization that had broken free from the last traces of Empire and Christendom; it had not a vestige of monarchy left and no state religion. It had no dukes, princes, counts, nor any sort of title bearers claiming ascendancy or respect as a right. Even its unity was, as yet, a mere unity for defense and freedom. It was in these respects a clean start in political organization such as the world had not seen before. The absence of any binding religious tie is especially noteworthy. It had a number of forms of Christianity, its spirit was indubitably Christian; but as a state document of 1796 declared, “The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.” The new community had in fact gone right down to the bare and stripped fundamentals of human association, and it was building up a new sort of society and a new sort of state upon those foundations. (pp. 840–841)

H. G. Wells

69

Did you get stuck at “It was like something coming out of an egg”? What a wonderful phrase from the eventual author of The War of the Worlds. U.S. history, an industry in and of itself in the land where the primary book-buying market for history comes in a white male and middle-aged package (the author here counts among those ranks), is a narrative that is usually disconnected from the rest of world history. Unfortunately, this often means that the global impact of the American Revolution can be overlooked. Wells, too much a realist to get misty eyed over the declarations of freedom found in the Declaration of Independence, sees the United States as an imperfect shade of an idealized form: a republic that valued human freedom. (Note: Wells seems as perplexed as everyone else about the phrase “All men are created equal.” I have argued in print that this phrase was never intended to be read as a universal truth, but as a reminder to King George III that he, as a king, was not born unequal. The Declaration of Independence, after all, was written to him specifically.) Women and slaves, disenfranchised from America’s beginning (as everyone knows), do get mentioned as classes of individuals not considered full citizens. “The most noteworthy point in a modern view is the disregard of women as citizens. The American community was a simple, largely agricultural community and most women were married; it seemed natural that they should be represented by their men folk. But New Jersey admitted a few women to vote on a property qualification” (p. 844). Was the American vision of itself already so intolerable by the early twentieth century that Wells felt the need to write, “If one were to write a true, full, and particular history of the making of the United States, it would have to be written with charity and high spirits as a splendid comedy. And in no other regard do we find the rich torturous humanity of the American story so finely displayed as in regard to slavery” (p. 850). American independence, a comedy on a new stage? Well, the fact that such an impressive constitution with so many grand words about freedom and its protections came to be written in a land whose capital and economy were built upon slave labor does seem a bit funny. The humor and complexity of the situation get an impressive and fair analytical treatment. Wells saw America for what she was and is: a series of patchwork communities divided along ideological lines but united by an idealistic sense that destiny will send this grand republic gradually

70

Chapter 1

closer to the ideal concept it was founded upon. One other funny thing about the American Revolution, it came before the French Revolution. Why? One could argue that the American Revolution provided an example to the French that a republic based on the Enlightenment era concepts could indeed exist. Yet the Frenchmen had lived just a short boat ride away from a limited monarchy for a century and could see that the English people seemed perfectly happy now that their king knew his place. For most of the English colonists in prerevolutionary America, the king was just an abstraction, some loony old white-haired Hanoverian in tight knickers. For the French, the king was the state, a heavy central presence holding real political power. Noting this right away, Wells writes, During the years of the American War of Independence there were few signs of any impending explosion in France. There was much misery among the lower classes, much criticism and satire, much outspoken liberal thinking, but there was little to indicate that the thing as a whole, with all its customs, usages, and familiar discords, might not go on for an indefinite time. It was consuming beyond its powers of production, but as yet only the inarticulate classes were feeling the pinch. (p. 854)

Those “inarticulate classes” deserve a word here, since they might be described (particularly in this era where Russia had already clocked three years of a “worker’s paradise”) as a proletariat. Wells believed in socialism but not in Marxism, and it should be noted that he repeats a crucial sentiment in this chapter: “We have already remarked that hitherto no human community has begun to act upon theory. There must first be some breakdown and necessity for direction that lets theory into her own” (p. 856). All at once here, Wells repudiates the idea, either Marxist, or quasiMarxist depending upon one’s interpretation of Marx, of a politicized class of workers while at the same time making a statement that is directly in alignment with the key modern idea of historical political theory that is called “creative destruction.” More will be said about this concept in volume 2, but creative destruction occurs when an old system collapses, thus allowing something newer and more inclusive to form. It should be noted, however, that the French system may not have been as stable as historians sometimes present it to be. The “Sun King,” after all, built his palace at Versailles with a dozen miles of buffer zone

H. G. Wells

71

between it and Paris and the king never much liked the capital city because in his youth a mob had busted into his bedroom and terrified the Sun King when he was but a faint dawn of a child. Any comparison of the American and French revolutions must begin with a statement of conditions between the two regions. Wells does in a paragraph what some historians take a book to do: The French National Assembly was far less fortunate in the circumstances of its task than the American Congress. The latter had half a continent to itself, with no possible antagonist but the British Government. Its religious and educational organizations were various, collectively not very powerful, and on the whole friendly. King George was far away in England, and sinking slowly towards an imbecile condition. Nevertheless it took the United States several years to hammer out a working constitution. The French, on the other hand, were surrounded by aggressive neighbours with Machiavellian ideas, they were encumbered by a king and court resolved to make mischief, and the church was one single organization inextricably bound up with the ancient order. The queen was in close correspondence with the Count of Artois, the Duke of Borboun, and the other exiled princes who were trying to induce Austria and Prussia to attack the new French nation. Moreover, France was already a bankrupt country, while the United States had limitless undeveloped resources; and the revolution, by altering the conditions of land tenure and marketing, had produced an economic disorganization that has no parallel in the case of America. (p. 859)

Philosophers make too much of the French Revolution (and historians too, it might be added). Any lessons derived from the revolution itself must be understood in terms of its context; nothing about universal human values can be derived from studying it. Beyond human nature, the French Revolution might be better understood by comparing France not just to the United States, but also to Great Britain and Russia. Historical forces such as the discovery of the Americas, the development of capitalism, and the spread of literacy created a new class of people all over Western civilization who just seemed a little harder to fool than the barefoot medieval peasant. Medieval political systems, parasitic and militaristic in the best of circumstances, no longer served Western civilization’s new class. In 1688 and 1689, England (which joined with Scotland only in 1707 under Queen Anne to become Great Britain) morphed into a parliamen-

72

Chapter 1

tary monarchy. The people suddenly possessed power and the king seemed not so much divinely inspired as popularly tolerated. The chief complaint of Britain’s American colonists came, later, from the fact that they paid taxes but did not share in the parliamentary democratic activity shared by their cross-Atlantic cousins. There was also the fact that, suddenly and en masse, most of the American colonists realized that they stood on a landmass many times the size of Britain and that the British actually were, well, an ocean away. Even the Russians figured out that a slight change in the political structure might be useful, and no European empire stood with its feet so firmly in the muck of the medieval mind-set. It took a German woman, now known as Catherine the Great, to alter Russia’s politics. Personally, Catherine possessed liberal ideas and had a mind and pen that interacted with the greatest of the Enlightenment philosophes. Yet several basic facts constrained Catherine from implementing a large-scale process of change. They were, in no particular order of importance, that she was a woman, she was German, and she had come to power when her boyfriend beat her husband, the true czar, to death. This latter action sounds more significant than what it probably was; everyone hated Catherine’s husband Peter III (1728–1762). Peter III brings us to an important point, not just about Catherine and Russia, but about the nature of aristocracy and therefore, the nature of prerevolutionary France. What kind of governmental system allowed someone like Peter III, who often stuck his tongue out at people and enjoyed nothing more than playing with toy soldiers on his bed, to be in charge of anything? During the funeral procession of the Empress Elizabeth (Peter the Great’s daughter), Peter III giggled and skipped around while knocking off people’s hats. He hailed from one of the many German provinces and worshiped Frederick the Great to such a degree that he ordered the Russian military to halt rather than have them take the Prussian capital and therefore defeat Frederick. Such was the nature of aristocracy that individuals like Peter III, and a lot of them, ended up making important decisions that affected the fate of the world. Monty Python once produced a television skit about an “upper-class twit of the year” competition. It featured, as might be expected, upper-class twits demonstrating their myriad deficiencies. Had Monty Python’s competition been staged in eighteenth-century Russia,

H. G. Wells

73

Peter III would have proudly stood on the medal podium for a few moments before falling off. Outside of North Korea, which is not exactly evidence for the cause, the modern world provides no examples of true ruling aristocracies. Still, those of us who sat open mouthed and wide eyed, truly aghast, for the eight years of the George W. Bush presidency know what can happen when someone who has lived a life of unthinking privilege finds himself in a position of power. At any rate, Catherine managed to institute enough liberal changes to Russia (including a virtual ban on government-sponsored torture) that her empire faced no middle-class uprising during her reign. A Cossack named Pugachev made a mess in the wild east, but, this being Russia remember, the revolt carried no connotations of an underclass uprising. Illiterate and pugnacious, Pugachev looks more like a warrior chieftain of the steppes who had no idea what it meant to fight a modern military. He found out when Catherine’s loyal army took care of the rebellion. Catherine governed Russia with her mind and her body, using both to beguile philosophers and important military men of the era and made a few important liberal reforms to Russia. She belongs, with Akbar and Lincoln, in the pantheon of humane and intelligent political leaders. No one inside of France’s government possessed her qualities and when the masses revolted, the aristocrats simply ran around like chickens with their—oh, it’s too easy. Wells is too smart to use the French Revolution for philosophical and psychological purposes; nothing about the nature of man can be determined from this bloody event, only about the nature of France. He does credit the National Assembly, instituted after the fall of the monarchy, with doing “a very remarkable amount of constructive work. Much of that work was sound and still endures” (p. 865). Probably enough historical humiliation has been piled upon Louis XVI. If his grandfather was the Sun King, then Louis was the Sunset King, the last of the powerful kings of France. He oscillated, Louis did, between giving in to the revolutionary demands and standing manfully against their wills. When he bravely ran away the revolutionaries captured him. Wells knows how to write a farce: “The king surrendered without a struggle. The little party was taken into the house of some village functionary. ‘Well,’ said the king, ‘here you have me!’ Also he remarked that

74

Chapter 1

he was hungry. At dinner he commended the wine, ‘quite excellent wine’” (p. 868). Modern conservatism, as a political movement, originated as a British ideological response to the French Revolution. Edmund Burke (1729–1797) could be described as the first political conservative as it might be defined today. Perhaps this is why Wells, no Tory, shows some sympathy to the revolution itself: It witnesses to the immense vitality and the profound rightness of the flood of new ideas and intentions that the French Revolution had released into the world of practical endeavor, that it could still flow in a creative torrent after it had been caricatured and mocked in the grotesque personality and career of Robespierre. He had shown its deepest thoughts, he had displayed anticipations of its methods and conclusions; through the green and distorting lens of his preposterous vanity and egotism, he had smeared and blackened all its hope and promise with blood and horror, and the power of these ideas was not destroyed. They stood the extreme tests of ridiculous and horrible presentation. After his downfall, the Republic still ruled unassailable. Leaderless, for his successors were a group of crafty or commonplace men, the European republic struggled on, and presently fell and rose again, and fell and rose and still struggles, entangled but invincible. (p. 851)

These are the words of a cynical idealist, one who believes in the higher power of ideas to change human civilization for the better but realizes that ideas can only be engineered through human beings, too many of whom act like Robespierre. As the chapter on the Napoleonic era begins, one might pause to realize that Wells published his book just 105 years after the Battle of Waterloo, and that veterans of the American Civil War could still be found in large numbers telling stories on the finest porches of the United States. The British, understandably, never cared much for Napoleon, and he is hard to characterize under current political understandings. No other figure in European history invites so much historical argument as Napoleon. His name does not conjure up the same image of evil as that of Adolf Hitler, as Napoleon did not seem to revel in nihilism and his political ideology did not call for the eradication of entire ethnic/religious groups, yet the military ambitions of Napoleon and Hitler seem almost identical.

H. G. Wells

75

Despite the obvious comparisons to Hitler, Napoleon’s personality is best understood, probably, as being similar to that of Peter the Great. Neither man sought to kill other human beings for ideological reasons; death was not the goal. However, if people died in pursuit of their own personal glory or if people died collaterally through the imposition of grander schemes, then so be it. Napoleon inspired loyalty and élan in his troops while simultaneously sending them off to be butchered in many cases for the lost cause of his own personal glory. Even a statement such as this is just to be thrown on the constantly burning fire of Napoleonic interpretation, and, as with Alexander, we all must realize that no one is condemning or defending those of us whom have never led a regiment in pursuit of global conquest. Yet Napoleon could be described as a liberal dictator with genuine political power, perhaps the first such person since Augustus. He fought for his own glory, but liberal values tagged along for the victory. No biography is as well picked over as Napoleon’s, so just a few words will be spent here for the purpose of informing the lay reader: he was born on a little island called Corsica, later joined the French military during the revolutionary era, gained a reputation for shooting grapeshot into a crowd of counterrevolutionaries who threatened a garrison he stood in charge of, then invaded Egypt, and in 1804 crowned himself the emperor of France. In 1808 he sent armies into the Iberian Peninsula, and in 1812, having whipped most of the big powers of the continent multiple times, he marched an allied force into Russia. This abbreviated timeline should not abbreviate Napoleon’s importance for modern world history. When he invaded Egypt in 1798 with the proclaimed purpose of upsetting British supply lines (he most likely wanted to keep his name in the papers and to play Alexander the Great), his army whipped a group of Arab horsemen called the Mameluks. At one time, the scimtars of the Mameluks had cut through crusader knights and, in the thirteenth century, a Mameluk army defeated the Mongols in a battle at a time when the Mongols seemed capable of riding over and cutting up the whole world. Still, six centuries is a long time to live on a reputation. The French simply lined up in squares and used rifles, engineering, and discipline to shoot the Mameluks into defeat. The whole thing took about an hour.

76

Chapter 1

The Ottoman Empire, built on gunpowder and held together through the force of military coercion and Sunni Islam, collapsed in sections in the years that followed. It survived only because later, with Napoleon defeated, the British feared the Russians would grasp the former Ottoman territories in a bear hug and never let go. Similarly, Napoleon’s decision to send an attack against the Iberian Peninsula in 1808 caused such a distraction and disturbance for the Spanish and Portuguese crowns that the colonies of Latin America all became independent, one way or another, by 1825. None of this even mentions the transformative effect that Napoleon, his ego, and his armies had on Europe. For all his importance, there is something absurd about Napoleon. He seems to have been, because of a little lovemaking, forever mad for the toothless and unfaithful Josephine. He was an atheist supported by the Catholic Church, and in his late years put on so much weight that he resembled a penguin (an emperor penguin, no doubt). Neither his first wife, Josephine, nor his second wife, Marie Louise of Austria, seems to have been all that much in love with him. In 1804, when he became emperor of France, he placed the crown on his own head. This statement might be full of historical significance since 1,004 years before this, the pope had placed a crown upon Charlemagne’s head, thus declaring that while Charlemagne might be a king, the pope was the kingmaker. The incident still seems childish. Putting a crown on one’s own head is a bit like typing up some certificate of recognition as an award, signing it yourself to yourself, and then presenting it to yourself at a ceremony. Other historians focus on the significance of the event, but Wells, again, knows a farce: We will not detail the steps by which Napoleon became Emperor. His coronation was the most extraordinary revival of stale history that it is possible to imagine. Caesar was no longer the model; Napoleon was playing now at being Charlemagne. He was crowned emperor, not indeed at Rome, but in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris; the Pope (Pius VII) had been brought from Rome to perform the ceremony; and at the climax Napoleon seized the crown, waved the Pope aside, and crowned himself. The attentive reader of this outline will know that a thousand years before this would have had considerable significance; in 1804 it was just a ridiculous scene. (pp. 903–904)

H. G. Wells

77

The damned English Channel defeated Napoleon. The British navy mastered it and a French invasion across the channel, or from any other direction at sea, simply could not occur. The British navy, a historymaking force, had not only humiliated Napoleon in Egypt and decisively defeated the French at Trafalgar, but forced Napoleon to try and fight them economically. By 1812, Napoleon had married a little Habsburg cutie (Marie Louise) as a way of solidifying his alliance with Austria and he had bullied the major empires of Europe into alliances with him. He would defeat the British through a policy of economic strangulation by ordering his allies not to trade. Enforcing his embargo undid Napoleon; he invaded Iberia in 1808 because the Spaniards traded a little wine with the British and in 1812 he decided to punish Czar Alexander I for reestablishing trade relations with the British; hence the Grande Armée that marched eastward on June 22, 1812. What a drama the next few years would bring! Napoleon captured Moscow, only to find that he governed an empire of ash. The Russians turned their capital orange with flame, and when Napoleon finally realized he could do nothing but march home, winter froze and the Cossacks mutilated his troops. Napoleon got home, but soon everyone got tired of fighting for him. Napoleon never did see sense and sat making plans for future battles even as his enemies (including the Austrians that were led by his fatherin-law) occupied Paris. Napoleon’s generals arrested him. The former emperor always kept a vial of poison around his neck in case things went badly; he drank it down only to find that time had diluted the poison. He couldn’t even kill himself properly and Napoleon found himself in the custody of his enemies. Here is how Wells treats this famous invasion (made more famous after 1941’s Operation Barbarossa) and the unbelievable events that followed: The breach came in 1811, when Alexander withdrew from the “Continental System.” In 1812 a great mass of armies, amounting altogether to 600,000 men, began to move towards Russia under the supreme command of the new emperor. About half this force was French; the rest was drawn from the French allies and subject peoples. It was a conglomerate army like the army of Darius or the army of Kavadh. The Spanish war was still going on; Napoleon made no attempt to end it. Altogether, it drained away a quarter of a million men from France. He fought his way across Poland and Russia to Moscow before the win-

78

Chapter 1 ter—for the most part the Russian armies declined battle—and even before the winter closed in upon him his position became manifestly dangerous. He took Moscow, expecting that this would oblige Alexander to make peace. Alexander would not make peace, and Napoleon found himself in much the same position as Darius had been in 2,300 years before in South Russia. The Russians, still unconquered in a decisive battle, raided his communications, wasted his army—disease helped them; even before Napoleon reached Moscow 150,000 men had been lost. But he lacked the wisdom of Darius and would not retreat. The winter remained mild for an unusually long time—he could have escaped; but instead he remained in Moscow, making impossible plans, at a loss. He had been marvelously lucky in all his previous flounderings; he had escaped undeservedly from Egypt; he had been saved from destruction in Britain by the British naval victories; but now he was in the net again, and this time he was not to escape. Perhaps he would have wintered in Moscow, but the Russians smoked him out; they set fire to and burnt most of the city. (pp. 52–53)

Napoleon’s decision making from 1808 to 1812 does not just condemn the man so much as it condemns the entire concept of authority. The fact that people listened to Napoleon for as long as they did, taking orders all the way to the point of a devastating French defeat, seems ludicrous. In Greek tragedy, the nemesis always follows hubris, but this is supposed to happen only once. Napoleon had his hubris and nemesis but then another hubris and nemesis right after it. The victorious allies, rather generously, made Napoleon the emperor of an adorable little island called Elba off the southern coast of France. Most people would love to be the emperor of a Mediterranean island; Napoleon wandered around for a while and spruced the place up. Then he escaped. No other story in history provides the drama of Napoleon’s second hubris and nemesis, but Wells, the fiction writer, simply misses the moment. After eleven months at Elba Napoleon judged that France had had enough of the Bourbons; he contrived to evade the British ships that watched his island, and reappeared at Cannes in France for his last gamble against fate. His progress to Paris was a triumphal procession; he walked on white Bourbon cockades. For a hundred days, “the Hundred Days,” he was master of France again. His return created a perplexing position for any honest Frenchman. On the one hand there was this adventurer who had betrayed the republic; on the other the dull weight of the old kingship was restored.

H. G. Wells

79

The allies would not hear of any further experiments in republicanism; it was the Bourbons or Napoleon. (p. 914)

The story of Napoleon’s “Hundred Days” involves him and his small entourage sneaking off Elba. Then, when Napoleon encountered the royal army sent to kill or capture him, Napoleon tore open his shirt and said something to the effect of “Who amongst you will kill your emperor?” Cheers rose up from the ranks, and this happened time and again, until the armies sent to confront Napoleon suddenly marched behind him and he headed for Paris. This all led, of course, to the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium where Napoleon suffered his second nemesis. The British then exiled the onetime emperor on a godforsaken rock in the Atlantic Ocean called St. Helena. British ships constantly circled the island and their prisoner. Napoleon wrote his memoirs, which became the best-selling book of the century, and then died in 1821. Wells states these events with a textbook factuality that deserves comment. Why did a fiction writer miss the drama here (for the record, Bernard Cornwell’s fabulous book on Waterloo shows what a writer of fiction can do with such excellent real historical material) and choose instead to develop a fact-after-fact approach? It could be that Napoleon’s story was so well known that to restate it would appear to be superfluous. Or it could be that this late in the story Wells simply felt a need to get on with it. The history of the world, it can never be stated enough, is a big topic. Will and Ariel Durant got to the story of the Napoleon and then died before finishing the nineteenth century. Decisions must be made and sometimes facts put down like footsteps on a march if one is to finish. Wells already has shown a tendency to disdain history’s conquerors, and his ultimate judgment of Napoleon is negative: “[H]e was an interruption, a reminder of latent evils, a thing like the bacterium of some pestilence. Even regarded as a pestilence, he was not of supreme rank; he killed far fewer people than the influenza epidemic of 1918” (p. 922). Wells certainly knows how to insult a man; Napoleon was nothing but a killer bacteria and not even all that great at being one of those. This judgment, as has already been stated, is too harsh to an outlandish degree. Latin America, the Middle East, Russia, and Europe looked considerably different as a direct result of Napoleon’s life and military ventures. He was consequential.

80

Chapter 1

A strain of optimism runs throughout The Outline of History, and in a chapter placed between the Napoleonic wars and World War I, he reminds the reader of this by describing, in the nineteenth century, “a wave of universal change in human power and the material conditions of life that the first scientific efforts of that liberated mind had made possible” (p. 923). The nineteenth century provided plenty of evidence of technological progress with the development of the steam engine. Morality progressed as well, with the anti-slavery movements proving to be legally successful in Europe and, by 1888 (when Brazil outlawed slavery), in the Americas as well. Both of these successes gave many Europeans the belief that Western civilization had the duty and the means to transport moral superiority to the darker areas of the world such as Africa and India. Women’s rights, social improvements, Marx, Darwin, and Lincoln all featured in this glorious century. Wells, like everyone else at the time, felt enamored at the new technologies that liberated humans from their own feet and from their horse’s hooves while making large-scale travel possible. Anyone with a scientific mind, of course, found the taming of electricity fascinating, and of course, so does Wells. Peter Watson, an analyst of world history and categorizer of ideas (his work will be discussed in volume 2) wrote a great book about the history of German genius in the eighteenth century, something which caused, in Watson’s words, a second scientific revolution. Wells did not miss the importance of Germany and the way in which the German educational system differed for the better from Britain’s. The British credited their advances to the wonders of capitalism and the idea that money could be made from technological advance. Wells writes, In this matter the Germans were a little wiser. The German “learned” did not display the same vehement hatred of the new learning. They permitted its development. The German business man and manufacturer again had not quite the same contempt for the man of science as had his British competitor. Knowledge, these Germans believed, might be a cultivated crop, responsive to fertilizers. They did concede, therefore, a certain amount of opportunity to the scientific mind; their public expenditure on scientific work was relatively greater, and this expenditure was abundantly rewarded. By the latter half of the nineteenth century the German scientific worker had made German a necessary language for every science student who wished to keep abreast with the latest work in his department, and in certain branches, and particu-

H. G. Wells

81

larly in chemistry, Germany acquired a very great superiority over her western neighbors. The scientific effort of the sixties and seventies in Germany began to tell after the eighties, and the Germans gained steadily upon Britain and France in technical and industrial prosperity. (p. 929)

There has been some discussion among historians and philosophers that the German language, expandable and interconnected, might allow for the development of new ideas and provides the necessary linguistic material for constructing new ideas and words. The German university system invented, in the late eighteenth century, the research-based PhD, which later hybridized with the British liberal arts college to form the modern university system. These changes in science and higher education, likely, have had a more enduring impact than even colonization and the world wars. Obviously, Wells wrote his book while the smoking plumes of a recently destroyed civilization still rolled around him. After the Great War, the concept of nationalism looked to be a prime causal agent. The creation of a German nation in 1871, intellectually dynamic, militarily formidable, and geographically uneasy (settled as she was between two enemy states in Russia and France), unsettled Europe’s power structure and led to the climate of suspicion that enhanced the process that led to the outbreak of war, about which Wells has this to say: Throughout the nineteenth century, and particularly throughout its latter half, there has been a great working up of this nationalism in the world. All men are by nature partisans and patriots, but the natural tribalism of men in the nineteenth century was unnaturally exaggerated, it was fretted and overstimulated and inflamed and forced into the nationalist mould. Nationalism was taught in schools, emphasized by newspapers, preached and mocked and sung into men. Men were brought to feel that they were as improper without a nationality as without their clothes in a crowded assembly. Oriental peoples who had never heard of nationality before, took to it as they took to the cigarettes and bowler hats of the of the west. (p. 960)

National characteristics make no more sense than racial characteristics do, which is not to say that either makes no sense at all, but just that not too much can be read into either concept. In the twenty-first century, nations cover every part of the globe where humans live and one is no more free to “not believe” in nationality than medieval peasants were to not believe in the catholic Christianity that ruled men’s minds. Power,

82

Chapter 1

not rationality, is the governing agent of the world and when nationality came to be associated with superiority, well, “[t]hese two ideas of nationality and, as the crown of national success, ‘empire,’ ruled European political thought, ruled indeed the political thought of the world, throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, and ruled it to the practical exclusion of any wider conception of a common human welfare” (p. 963). Although the West necessarily dominates this chapter on the nineteenth century, Wells does not neglect the “Scramble for Africa” and passes judgment on what must have at that time been the very recent scandals involving the rubber sap trade that devastated the Congo. Little heed was given to the welfare of the natives in this scramble. The Arab slaver was indeed curbed rather than expelled, but the greed for rubber, which was a wild product collected under compulsion by the natives the Belgian Congo, a greed exacerbated by the pitiless avarice of the king of the Belgians, and the class of the inexperienced European administrators with the native population in many other annexations, led to horrible atrocities. No European power has perfectly clean hands in this matter. (pp. 984–985)

No justification leaks from the pen of Wells. The woes of China, and they were many, are detailed but it is interesting that Wells addresses one of the more peculiar aspects of Chinese fashion as he writes about China’s transition from a dynasty to a republic: “In 1912 the emperor abdicated, and the greatest community in the world became a republic. The overthrow of the emperor was also the overthrow of the Manchus, and the Mongolian pigtail, which had been worn by the Chinese since 1644, ceased to be compulsory. It continues, however, to be worn by a large proportion of the population” (p. 990). Surely this interested an audience in 1920, who might have wondered why Chinese men wore their hair in such distinctive fashion. The story goes that when Manchu invaders from the north overtook the Ming Dynasty in 1644, they forced the Chinese to wear pigtails as a sign of humiliation and submission—the Chinese would be metaphorically ridden like the Manchu horses. Nothing in the annals of nineteenth-century politics astounds the student of history like the rise of Japan. The shoguns of this archipelago sealed their borders to outsiders in the seventeenth century, after the powers-that-were recognized the threat that Jesuit-brought Christianity

H. G. Wells

83

posed to the social and political order. The Japanese xenophobia reached such an extent that they allowed only a handful of Dutchmen, trusted because they didn’t seem all that religious, to live on a little island off the coast of Nagasaki. The result of this was that by 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry of the United States forced Japan into international trade, the Japanese still lived in what amounted to a feudal society where they possessed only rudimentary gunpowder weapons and samurai swords. In 1941, the Japanese used a modern air force and navy to attack Pearl Harbor off of Hawaii. Japan compressed several centuries of modernization and westernization into the span of a single lifetime. Wells, of course, did not know that the Japanese would prove to be so aggressive and important in World War II, nor did he know that the Japanese mentality would eventually lead the Japanese to pick a fight that their nation could not win. When Perry entered a forbidden port off of Edo Bay in 1853, he demanded that the Japanese open themselves up to international trade or else the U.S. Navy would take over the island in a few months. Then Perry spun on his heels, went back to his ships, and steamed away across the Pacific. The proud Japanese held their swords impotently and held their tongues prudently, but they learned an important lesson in nineteenth-century international relations. The way to gain global respect, clearly, was to burst into other people’s ports, treat them with racial disdain, and force them into unequal trade agreements. The Japanese, incidentally, got that part right and Wells knew it: The humiliation of the Japanese by these events was intense, and it would seem that the salvation of peoples lies largely in such humiliations. With astonishing energy and intelligence they set themselves to bring their culture and organization up to the level of the European powers. Never in all the history of mankind did a nation make such a stride as Japan then did. In 1866 she was a medieval people, a fantastic caricature of the extremist romantic feudalism; in 1899 hers was a completely Westernized people, on a level with the most advanced European powers, and well in advance of Russia. She completely dispelled the persuasion that Asia was in some irrevocable way hopelessly behind Europe. She made all European progress seem sluggish and tentative by comparison. (p. 993)

When Japan won the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, they became the first Asian peoples to defeat a European power in war, even if it was in just a far-flung naval battle far from the Russian center of power. The

84

Chapter 1

defeat humiliated Russia and invigorated the Japanese. Russia would soon face another military humiliation at the hands of the Germans, while Japan’s surge would continue industrializing until strange shapes falling from the sky stopped their military progress in the summer of 1945. The final words on the nineteenth century, appropriately, are used for Britain and her navy. They made and maintained a global empire, treating the waves as the Mongols had once treated the flatlands of Eurasia. In 1920, the direction of world history would have seemed to culminate in the near destruction of the world. Modern historical analysis tends to treat World War I as an aberration, while the general trajectory on international relations trends toward peace. This must have been hard to see at the time that Wells wrote, but Wells was a genius and shows an understanding of these trends immediately. Wells introduces his chapter on World War I (he calls it the Great Catastrophe for obvious reasons) by discussing the over three decades of peace after the Franco-Prussian War of 1871 that preceded the hostilities: “The mechanical revolution was giving constantly more powerful (and expensive) weapons by land and sea, and more rapid methods of transports and making it more and more impossible to carry on warfare without a complete dislocation of the economic life of the community” (p. 1000). Steven Pinker’s brilliant 2012 work on the outbreak of peace in the modern era refers constantly to the importance of central governing organizations for holding back violence. Wells sees this as well, and notes its absence: “[N]othing was done in a way of setting up a federal control to prevent human affairs drifting towards war” (p. 1001). For years after the Great War, the pat analysis was that war somehow represented the worst of humanity’s irrationality. The trenches and gas were our darkest psychological impulses made manifest and it all proved to be a wonderful feast for the rats. In 2014, the centennial of the war’s outbreak drew interest back to the war itself, and new analysis. In an era when historians suffer from none of the red and raw psychological wounds of the war, a clearer perspective emerged. Perhaps the best analysis came from Max Hastings, who in his Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (2013), argues that Germany provoked both World War I and World War II and that the British and French could hardly be declared irrational for fighting back against a foreign invasion.

H. G. Wells

85

Germany’s decision to attack Belgium, also, can hardly be described as irrational. Since they sat between Russia and France, waiting to be attacked could prove fatal to the entire country. The Germans could not afford to wait to be hit first, and in an era where communication across international lines moved slowly, and where no international mediators could be established, the Germans assumed the worst and acted on that assumption when they invaded Belgium. Given the fact that Well wrote thirteen years before the arrival of the Third Reich, his words carry a sepia-colored eeriness to them. Consider these passages: A teacher, a professor, who did not teach and preach, in and out of season, the racial moral, intellectual, and physical superiority of the Germans to all other peoples, their extraordinary devotion to war and their dynasty, and their inevitable destiny under that dynasty to lead the world, was a marked man, doomed to failure and obscurity. German historical teaching became an immense systematic falsification of the human past, with a view to the Hohenzollern future. All other nations were represented as incompetent and decadent; the Prussians were the leaders and regenerators of naming. The young German read this in his school-books, heard it in church, found it in his literature, had it poured into him with passionate conviction by his professor. It was poured into him by all his professors; lecturers in biology or mathematics would break off from their proper subject to indulge in long passages of patriotic rant. (pp. 1004–1005)

Then there is this passage: It cannot be too clearly stated, it is the most important fact in the history of the last century, that the German people was methodically indoctrinated with the idea of a German world-predominance based on might, and with the theory that war was a necessary thing in life. The key to German historical teaching is to be found in Count Moltke’s dictum: “Perpetual peace is a dream, and it is not even a beautiful dream. War is an element in the order of the world ordained by God.” Without war the world would stagnate and lose itself in materialism.” And the anti-Christian German philosopher, Nietzsche, found himself quite at one with the pious field-marshal. “It is mere illusion and pretty sentiment,” he observes, “to expect much (even anything at all) from mankind if it forgets how to make war.” (p. 1005)

Take the sentiments parlayed in these two quotes, mix them with some blood-and-soil racial psychobabble, and one suddenly has Nazi ideology. These are crucial statements by Wells, because after he details

86

Chapter 1

the Great War and the flawed peace process that took place at Paris in 1919, he writes this: “No European Government will ever get the same proportion of its people in the ranks and into its munition works again as the governments of 1914–1918 did. Our world is very weak and feeble still (1920), but its war fever is over. Its temperature is, if anything, subnormal. It is doubtful if it will take the fever again for a long time” (p. 1085). No one, not even a genius, could have foreseen the string of unlikely circumstances that led a little Austrian vegetarian to control Germany. That story and its aftermath, however, do not appear in this great book by Wells. Historians should not act as prophets; doing so tends to invite disaster as the ability to analyze the past should lead to only one firm conclusion. Events can be so unpredictable that humility before the future is the only acceptable position. Yet Wells ends this great work with a chapter titled “The Next Stage of History.” He opens this chapter with these sentences: “We have brought this Outline of History up to the threshold of our own times, but we have brought it to no conclusion. Nobody believes that the system of settlements grouped about the Treaty of Versailles is a permanent arrangement of the world’s affairs. These treaties were the end of the war and not the establishment of a new order in the world. That new order has now to be established” (p. 1086). This new order would not come from the newly formed League of Nations, thought Wells, because “[t]he League does not even seem to know how to talk to common men. It has gone into official buildings, and comparatively few people in the world understand or care what it is doing there” (pp. 1090–1091). One only needs to think of the condescending Woodrow Wilson to understand the League’s problems; it was his idea and in some ways his approach to peace made manifest. Wilson, a pedantic racist with a messiah complex, envisioned that the world could be remade through conversations in Paris between him and two other old white men. They didn’t let the world speak and so the world again made noise. Wells suggested, somewhat vaguely, that “[w]hat the world needs is no such league of nations as this nor even a mere league of peoples, but a world league of men. The world perishes unless sovereignty is merged and nationality subordinated. And for that the minds of men must first be prepared by experience and knowledge and thought. The supreme task

H. G. Wells

87

before men at the present time is political education” (p. 1091). Did Wells suggest that a new world order would only come when a new generation, educated in liberalism and believers in globalization, came to political power? Question upon question follows if this is truly what Wells suggested. What about women, what about Islam, what about China? Here, Wells reveals at the same time both a lack and a surfeit of imagination. He writes of men, and writes of a world organization of economics and writes this: Let us ape Roger Bacon in his prophetic mood, and set down what we believe will be the broad fundamentals of the coming world state. 1. It will be based upon a common world religion, very much simplified and universalized and better understood. This will not be Christianity nor Islam nor Buddhism nor any such specialized form of religion, but religion itself pure and undefiled; the Eightfold Way, the Kingdom of Heaven, brotherhood, creative service, and self-forgetfulness. (p. 1093)

The chapter goes on like this, each sentence sadder than the next. Wells, for all his brilliance, could not escape the great British evangelism of his age: the belief that an empire of liberal intentions would eventually embrace the world into a single communal brotherhood tied together with education and prosperity. This was not the story of the twentieth century, and the opening chapters of the twenty-first century do not seem to contain this story either. Wells created “World History” with this work of genius, and his decision to finish his book with a prophecy could be considered brave. It is better considered to be a mistake. Like many liberals, Wells believed too much in the power of education as a means to improving humanity. After all, Woodrow Wilson acted as the administrative head of Princeton, Nazism grew in the country with the world’s best universities, and George W. Bush received diplomas from America’s finest Ivy League institutions. Conversely, Abraham Lincoln and Catherine the Great were self-educated. That Wells failed to see the growing power of feminism and underestimated the power of religion and hyper-nationalism is no condemnation. Wells founded a field of thought and he ended it with a chapter so flawed that it provides a lesson for future historians of the world: do not make predictions. Genius sometimes instructs through its own overreach.

TWO A Short History of the World for Children

After The Outline of History, the next two world history books written both promised an abbreviated version of the topic. The book titles, in order of publication, are A Short History of the World (1922) by H. G. Wells and A Little History of the World (1936) by E. H. Gombrich. Wells never seemed to intend that A Short History should stand by itself and in the preface wrote that this book should be “found useful as a preparatory excursion before the reading of the author’s much fuller and more explicit Outline of History is undertaken. But its especial end is to meet the needs of the busy general reader, too driven to study the maps and time charts of that Outline in detail.” An acknowledgment of the work, for the purposes of this book, should suffice as an analysis of it after a mammoth first chapter might prove exhausting for the reader. The second book, and therefore the third history of the world published, bore a title with just one word’s worth of difference from that of Wells. A Little History of the World by E. H. Gombrich came out in Vienna, Austria, in the year 1936. At one time, A Little History of the World could be called rare, and it would be nice to report that a dusty copy was found on an excursion to some faraway bookshop in Europe, stacked under a couple of heavy volumes and a sleeping cat. In fact, an English translation of it came out in 2005 and did well enough to appear on Big Bestseller Lists with all the cookbooks, celebrity biographies, and whatever story about vampire teenager wizards with bows and arrows that was in fashion that week. The copy of Gombrich’s 89

90

Chapter 2

book read for purpose of this analysis was found on a display table in a chain bookstore. The inside book cover states this about Gombrich and his motivation: “In 1935, with a doctorate in art history and no prospect of a job, the twenty-six year old Ernst Gombrich was invited to attempt a history of the world for younger readers. Amazingly, he completed the task in an intense six weeks, and Eine kurz Welgeschicht fur junge Leser was published in Vienna to immediate success and is now available in twentyfive languages across the world.” That’s a pretty typical story for most writers: You get challenged at some point while languishing through your twenties and then dash off something in a month and a half that keeps the ol’ translators scribbling away in a couple of dozen different languages for a few years. Then you stack the money in a safe, read the rave reviews, and have a nice rest. It’s a wonder, really, that anyone chooses any other profession. With the books now introduced, and with a mutual understanding between author and reader that to critique another Wells book after that lengthy first chapter would feel a little like swimming out of the ocean only to be told its time to take a few laps in the lake, we will begin with Gombrich’s book. It’s a little cutesy. Take this opening: “All stories begin with ‘Once upon a time.’ And that’s just what this story is all about: what happened, once upon a time. Once you were so small that, even standing on tiptoes, you could barely reach your mother’s hand. Do you remember?” (p. 1). This, of course, announces that the book will cater to younger readers and Gombrich doesn’t so much shatter the two-way mirror that is supposed to separate reader and author as he just steps through it with a plate of cupcakes. Modern readers might pause, at this point, to wonder whom this book is for exactly. Gombrich begins with a tone that would appeal to the eleven and under crowd, but the reading level and material seem more appropriate for a kid in her mid-teens. Maybe he simply wrote in an era where publishers did not obsess over target audiences, or maybe in the 1930s, despite the deprivations and horrors of that era, teenagers could still be considered children. Like Wells, Gombrich considers world history itself to predate human civilizations and this means not skimping on what the scientific method had revealed about the planet earth. After an opening that includes a brief mention of the dinosaurs, Gombrich writes, “But we still haven’t

A Short History of the World for Children

91

reached the beginning. It all goes back much further—thousands of millions of years. That’s easy enough to say, but stop and think for a moment. Do you know how long one second is? It’s as long as counting: one, two, three. And how about a thousand million seconds? That’s thirty-two years! Now, try to imagine a thousand million years! At that time there were no large animals, just creatures like snails and worms” (p. 3). It goes on like that; hard science brought to the reader in soft sentences. This tone may be too sweet on the eyes for older or less sentimental readers, but maybe it helped to develop a sense of wonder to a young person new to the topic. Whatever the case, Gombrich served dessert first. In the second chapter, about human evolution, he describes the bones found in the Neander Valley in Germany that belong, of course, to the Neanderthals: Now, if all our thinking goes on behind our foreheads and these people didn’t have any foreheads, then perhaps they didn’t think as much as we do. Or at any rate, thinking may have been harder for them. So the people who examined the skull concluded that once upon a time there were people who weren’t very good at thinking, but who were better at biting than we are today. But now you’re going to say: “Stop! That’s not what we agree. When did these people live, what were they like, and how did they live?” Your questions make me blush, as I have to admit that we don’t know, precisely. But we will find out one day, and maybe you will want to help. (pp. 5–6)

It sort of goes on like this, with the “caveman” inventions of fire, talking, and painting being explained in this tone of a twenty-something trying to write like a kindly grandfather. It’s not bad, necessarily, just a bit jarring after the detailed analysis offered by Wells. Only so much will stick in the brain of any reader, particularly of young readers who are still trying to knit their neurons together and sentences like this are more than adequate: “Copper has a nice shine, and you can use it to make arrowheads and axes, but it is soft and gets blunt more quickly than stone. But once again, people found an answer. They discovered that if you add just a little of another, very rare, metal, it makes the copper stronger. That metal is tin, and a mixture of tin and copper is called bronze” (p. 9). These are pills crushed up in the mashed potatoes, and good enough history. Much of the earliest history, all that discussion of Sumer and Sargon, and so on, gets chronologically rerouted at the discretion of Gombrich

92

Chapter 2

and the chronicle of civilization begins with a short chapter on Egypt. Egyptologists, like paleontologists and geologists, can sometimes get tangled up in the terms that classify eras. Gombrich mercifully avoids treating the reader to phrases such as “Early Dynastic Period” and “Middle Kingdom,” classifications largely built upon the study of archaeological remains. Instead he writes, Thanks to the great stone statues, and the wonderfully bright and vivid wall paintings, we have a very good idea of what life in ancient Egypt was like. True, these paintings do not show things as we see them. An object or a person that is behind another is generally shown on top, and the figures often look stiff. . . . But the Egyptians knew what they were doing. Every detail is clear: how they used great nets to catch ducks on the Nile, how they paddled their boats and fished with long spears, how they pumped water into ditches to irrigate their fields, how they drove their cows and goats to pasture, how they threshed grain, made shoes and clothes, blew glass—for they could already do that!—and how they shaped bricks and built houses. And we can also see girls playing catch, or playing music on flutes, and soldiers going off to war, or returning with loot and foreign captives, such as black Africans. (p. 13)

With this last sentence, the peril of writing a world history for children can be seen; this subject really does not suit itself for kids. Slaves and sex and war and greed drive humans, and these factors built empires and civilizations. Speaking of slavery in baby talk does not ameliorate its horror; the subject matter brings into question the entire enterprise of presenting the subject to young people. Does it not misrepresent history to do this? Only one major Egyptian figure receives any kind of analytical treatment. Akhenaton, the pharaoh who introduced the notion that would come to be known as “one god, one emperor,” probably tired of the way in which the polytheistic priests influenced society and limited the power of the pharaoh. The best way to get rid of priests, as it turns out, is simply to get rid of their gods. Akhenaton announced that the sun god, Ra, now ruled alone. “The ancient temples were shut down, and King Akhenaton and his wife moved into a new palace. Since he was utterly opposed to tradition, and in favor of fine new ideas, he also had the walls of his palace painted in an entirely new styles. One that was no longer severe, rigid, and solemn, but freer and more natural. However, this didn’t please the people at all. They wanted everything to look as it had always done for thou-

A Short History of the World for Children

93

sands of years” (p. 15). These words detail the changes inaugurated by Akhenaton and seem to be based on no actual facts at all. Here, a religious and political dispute gets reduced to a king’s artistic whims, and the resistance to monotheism is blamed only on the conservative cultural tastes of the masses. YouTube watchers can easily find a rather popular series of videos that star John Green, better known as the author of teenage melodramas. The videos are titled “Crash Course” histories (https:// www.youtube.com/user/crashcourse) and feature not really history, but Green himself, who talks over the history so fast that the real point seems to be to get to the funny little asides that he peppers throughout. The problem with history as entertainment for kids is the same with Green’s programs as it is for Gombrich: the authors tend to frame events with the half-formed ideas of adolescents. Green, for example, makes a point to state that the major cause of World War I had to do with the human tendency to separate each other into “us versus them.” It would be nice to reply, “Not really. You might look at the unification of Germany or the fact that the era lacked rapid communications systems. Please turn the camera off and go back to writing tearjerkers for the braces-andacne-cream set.” Gombrich sometimes evokes the same thoughts. For some reason, the other river valley civilizations that predated the Egyptians come in the following chapter. Gombrich really does possess writing talent and hooks his young readers with a question about the days of the week and where they came from. It follows that these days of the week became established in the Middle Eastern societies of Mesopotamia. From this platform, Gombrich explains the development of cuneiform and the creation of Hammurabi’s Code from Babylon. The uncomplicated relationship between rulers and ruled gets a few words: “The Babylonians, and the Assyrians after them, were disciplined and hardworking, but they didn’t paint cheerful pictures like the Egyptians. Most of their statues and reliefs show kings out hunting, or inspecting kneeling captives bound in chains, or foreign tribes-people fleeing before the wheels of their chariots, and warriors attacking fortresses. The kings look forbidding, and have long black ringlets and rippling beards” (p. 19). This is first-rate writing: the early civilizations turned into fairy tale stories of provocative horror. Not only did the Mesopotamians live free from light pollution, but clouds rarely blew in between the earliest gazers and their stars. Some

94

Chapter 2

attentive person or persons eventually realized that the stars in the sky appeared to move in patterns, and that certain events, such as the flooding of a river, occurred when a certain pattern configured itself in the sky. As a side note, modern research into learning theory indicates that people remember information best when it is presented in a narrative form and when it connects to other forms of information. The sky-based mythologies and arbitrarily drawn constellations of ancient peoples might be considered very early mnemonic devices: examples of early people couching important information into forms of thought that could be recalled by interconnected neurons. Rhyming words stick in the mind better, which is likely why the earliest bards used poetry to etch the epics into their brains. The stars aligned with predictable seasonal events, and this led to the creation of various connections between the sky and worldly events. Some of these connections, such as the star pattern and the flooding of the Nile, proved to be consistent and useful. Other connections proved to be more spurious, but this concept of connection led eventually to the days of the week: “Some planets were believed to bring good luck, others misfortune: Mars meant war and Venus, love. To each of the five planets known to them they dedicated a day, and with the sun and the moon that made seven. This was the origin of our seven-day week. In English we still say Satur (Saturn)-day, Sun-day, and Mon (moon)-day, but the other days are named after different gods” (p. 20). Among these different gods a tribe finally arose that worshiped a singular god, and these Jews rate at least a short chapter. “All other peoples prayed to many gods—you remember Isis and Osiris, Baal, and Astarte. But these herdsmen only prayed to one god, their own special protector and leader. . . . Their god, they sang, was better and stronger and more exalted than all the gods of the heathen put together” (p. 25). Enter the shambling old figure of the Judaic-Christian-Islamic god, always too early to the stage, always eager to turn every play into Titus Andronicus. The problem with introducing the Jews at this early stage of history, where they chronologically belong, has to do with their importance. Monotheism simply cannot be considered a significant world historical force until the early fourth century, when Constantine elevated Christianity in Rome. It’s not as if Yahweh cannonballed into the faith pool with all the other gods and splashed them all out. He sat in a corner by himself

A Short History of the World for Children

95

for centuries until an emperor decided he would be useful for holding Rome together. By then Jehovah wasn’t even a single god anymore but a poor logical construction that mashed him together with his son and some other vague concept into Trinity-That-Is-One notion. Few people paid any attention to the Jews in their early era, and the Old Testament mostly amounts to a fiction that reveals a persecution complex/revenge fantasy for the murky origins of a desert tribe. Then, abruptly, the narrative turns away from the Jews and toward the Greeks and their alphabet. At this point, the book is revealed to be something other than a coherent narrative, and it could be argued that Gombrich failed to write an actual world history and instead simply wrote short sections about various aspects of world history and placed them in chronological order. The connections between the narratives look weak upon inspection. So the narration moves from the Jews to the Greeks and the phonetic alphabet receives an entire “chapter” composed of less than two pages. Separate from this comes the history the early Greeks, who are described this way: When the Greeks came to Greece, they were not yet Greeks. Does that sound strange? Yet it is true. For the fact is that when the tribes from the north first invaded the lands they were to occupy, they weren’t yet a unified people. They spoke different dialects and were obedient to different chieftains. They were tribes rather like the Sioux or the Mohicans you read about in the stories of the Wild West, and had names such as the Dorians, Ionians, and Aeolians. Like the American Indians they were warlike and brave, but in other ways they were quite different. The native Americans were familiar with iron, while the people of Mycenae and Crete—just as the songs of Homer tell us—had weapons made of bronze. And so these tribes arrived, with their wives and their children. The Dorians pushed furthest, right down into the southernmost tip of Greece which looks like a maple leaf and is called the Peloponnese. (p. 35)

Sections such as this redeem the book. The readers can see the tribal Greeks as early settlers stripped of myth and compared to the American Indians, and they move to a place that “looks like a maple leaf.” With the Greeks established in this maple-leaf like paradise, attention focuses on their early antagonists, the Persians, who are perfect villains for their fairy tale–like telling of world history.

96

Chapter 2

The Persians “worshipped light and the sun and believed it to be in a state of constant warfare with the dark, that is, with the dark powers of evil” (p. 37). Gombrich never mentions the source material for this history; in this case the chronicler of the Persian Wars is the notorious Herotodus, who may or may not have been making the story up. Mostly likely, Herodotus constructed his narrative from various orally transmitted stories and spackled it together with fiction. This, in fact, is the story of history more or less up to the development of the printing press. Young people will, inevitably, ask, “How do we know this?” when confronted with early history, but no answer can be found in this little history. Few books rival The Histories by Herotodus for phantasmagoria. Cyrus, the originator of the Persian state, was also likely the first person to ever have the old “dangerous baby” narrative attached to his legend as a prophecy foretold that he would overthrow his grandfather, who then tried to have the infant Cyrus killed, and so on and so forth. Astyages, the grandfather, got upset at the general who failed to kill cute little Cyrus and fed the unknowing man his own son at a banquet. None of this appears in the Little History and too much of a good story ends up cut out for brevity. The Battle of Marathon is summed up as follows: [The Persians] conquered many islands on their way and destroyed a lot of cities. They finally dropped anchor not far from Athens, at a place called Marathon. There, the whole great Persian army disembarked, ready to march on Athens. It is said that they numbered seventy thousand men, as many as the entire population of Athens. With roughly ten thousand soldiers the Athenian army was outnumbered seven to one. Their fate was surely sealed. But not quite. For the Athenians had a general named Miltiades, a brave and able man, who had lived for many years among the Persians, and knew their fighting tactics. Added to which, the Athenians knew what was at stake: their freedom and their lives, and those of their wives and children. So there at Marathon they formed ranks, and fell upon the startled Persians. And they were victorious. The Persians suffered heavy losses. Those remaining took to their ships and fled. (p. 39)

The word “many” rarely adds much literary flourish to a sentence and if Gombrich sought brevity, why then do the math involving the number of soldiers for the reader? One must be careful, when seeking to summarize, not to try and write like Tarzan talks: “And they were victorious. The

A Short History of the World for Children

97

Persians suffered heavy losses.” Writers should be more careful with their sentences, lest the drama and significance be lost from events. Words wasted on the imagined motivations of the Athenians fighting for their lives, are words that could have been used elsewhere. Here, for example, is how the Battle of Thermopylae is told: “In northern Greece, a small army of Spartans, who had made an alliance with the Athenians, tried to block the Persian advance in a narrow pass called Thermopylae. The Persians called on the Spartans to throw down their weapons. ‘Come and get them yourselves!’ was the reply. ‘We’ve enough arrows here to blot out the sun!’ threatened the Persians. ‘So much the better,’ cried the Spartans, ‘then we’ll fight in the shade!’” (p. 41). Thermopylae ranks three more sentences, but such treatment threatens to turn a magnificent history into nothing but a Cliffs Notes set of summaries. A longer chapter details, very slightly, the important bits involving Spartan and Athenian life, a few paragraphs a piece for philosophy and the gods (maybe that’s all either deserves, who knows?), and then a strange statement, “I could tell you lots more about the Athenians—about their historians and their doctors, their singers, their thinkers and their artists, but I think it would be better for you to find out about them yourself, one day. Then you’ll see that I haven’t exaggerated” (p. 50). Again, it makes sense to ask about the intent of the book, which may not have been to write a world history itself but to compile sets of interesting stories about history in a chronological way in the hopes that the reader will then go and delve more deeply into each historical section. Or maybe Gombrich just wrote and didn’t worry about it, letting his conversational tone slip away from him sometimes. Traditionally speaking, historians usually divide Greek history up into the period before and after Alexander the Great. The term “Hellenistic era” denoted the impressive artistic and philosophical period that followed his death. So Gombrich leaves Greek history just before this boundary and moves eastward to the Asian civilizations of India and China. “[A]bout the same time as the Sumerians were holding sway at Ur—that is around 2500 BC—there was a mighty city in the valley of the Indus. (The Indus is a great river which flows through what is Pakistan today.) It had well-drained streets, canals, granaries, and workshops and was called Mohenjo Daro, and until its discovery in the 1920s nobody had even dreamt of its existence” (p. 51).

98

Chapter 2

Obviously, a book published in 1936 could not have referenced Pakistan, a country that did not come into being until India fractured along religious identification in 1947 when the British left. This, therefore, must be the work of a liberal translation, and, it should be added, no big deal. This quote appears here only to note that Gombrich uses the same chronological technique that Wells utilized; throwing out an occasional time line is useful for readers trying to get or keep their bearings. Gombrich sort of mangles Buddhism by writing, “Think of it like this. If you are sad because you can’t have something you want—maybe a book or a toy—you can do one of two things: you can do your best to get it, or you can stop wanting it. Either way, if you succeed, you won’t be sad anymore. This is what the Buddha taught. . . . He who ceases to wish for anything ceases to feel sad” (p. 55). Sort of. We must remember, it cannot be stated enough, that the Buddha saw his own wife and infant as obstacles to Enlightenment. To abandon all wants, to master one’s desires, all this sounds great in a kung fu movie wisdom sort of way, but skip a few meals and see how solid that meditation feels on your belly. Buddhist practice works well enough as a stress reliever for people with stocked refrigerators who can cross their legs in the air-conditioning, but let’s not make it into a major school of thought, please. China, the glorious kingdom to the east, is introduced in the same fairy tale style as other topics: “When I was a schoolboy, China was to us, as it were, ‘at the other end of the world.’ At most we had seen the odd picture on a teacup or a vase, so that we imagined a country of stiff little men with long plaits down their backs, and artful gardens full of humpbacked bridges and little turrets hung with tinkling bells. Of course, there never was such a fairyland, although it is true that for more than two hundred years, until 1912, Chinese men were made to wear their hair plaited in a pigtail” (p. 57). The Chinese male in a pigtail must have solicited quite a lot of interest from white people in the twentieth century, as Wells commented on this hair fashion as well. China’s philosophical foundations developed during the Zhou Dynasty, and Gombrich makes the point of comparing Confucius to the Buddha, who taught at roughly the same time. Of Confucius, Gombrich writes, “He didn’t become a hermit, but an adviser and teacher. Rather than helping individuals not to want things, and therefore not to suffer, what mattered most to Confucius was that

A Short History of the World for Children

99

everybody should live peacefully together—parents with their children and rulers with their subjects. That was his goal: to teach the right way of living together. And he succeeded” (p. 59). Critics of religion tend to focus their skepticism on the words and deeds of Jesus and Mohammad, while the Buddha and Confucius sometimes avoid the worst of the skeptical attacks. Confucianism lacks a supernatural element, but this does not necessarily make the philosophy rational nor does it guarantee that people will live together in the “right way.” In fact, Confucian ideology might be understood as standing in opposition to natural rights theory upon which modern Western civilization is built. Natural rights theory posits the idea that all individuals come born with a desire to express their freedoms through choice. Therefore, all people should have a reasonable opportunity to achieve happiness through legal means. For Confucius, stable societies outranked individual happiness and an expression of individuality could unravel society. He distrusted the spontaneous. This meant that he distrusted youth, which in many people is an era of spontaneity. As a result of Confucian ideology, Chinese society developed into something stable and hierarchical, but one can imagine how deeply frustrating life for people who dwelled in the sizable bottom floor of that Confucian pyramid must have felt about the lack of opportunities. Perhaps these emotions simply found no voice in a culture where a concept of natural rights did not evolve, or perhaps the ideas only make sense in a westernized cultural sense. It should be said again, however, that no one in Western civilizations take to the streets to protest on behalf of having rights taken away (unless, sometimes, those rights belong to someone else). No such analysis comes from Gombrich, but he does leave open the idea that some contradictory ideas might come from studying Confucianism: “What Confucius proposed is quite simple. You may not like it, but there is more wisdom in it than first meets the eye. What he taught was this: outward appearances are more important than we think—bowing to our elders, letting others go through the door first, standing up to speak to a superior, and many other similar things—for they had more rules in China than we have” (p. 59). No one disputes the importance of good manners, but if Confucianism is just politeness philosophically justified, then what’s its historical significance?

100

Chapter 2

At no point in his book does Gombrich engage in criticism of other cultures nor does he tug off the mystical cloaks of some of the ancients. For all of his good manners, one detects that Taoism, with all its confusion-as-the-secret ideology, fails to impress him very much. Lao-tzu, the perhaps mythical founder of this practice, did the whole “leaving society for a cave in the mountains” thing and spread his wisdom with wacky aphorisms. “This teaching, as you see, is hard to grasp and harder still to follow. Perhaps, in the solitude of the distant mountains, Lao-tzu was able to take ‘doing nothing’ so far that the law began to work within him in the way he described. But maybe it is just as well that it was Confucius, and not Lao-tzu, who became the great teacher of his people. What do you think?” (p. 61). With India and China checked off, the story turns back to Greece and the rise of Alexander the Great. Whereas H. G. Wells despised Alexander, Gombrich introduces him with a chapter titled “The Greatest Adventure of All.” The history of Alexander must be framed between his father Philip and the Persians: At Caheronea, in 338 BC, the Greeks, who hardly a hundred years before had held their own against the gigantic Persian host, were defeated by King Philip and tiny Macedonia. So ended the freedom of the Greeks—not that it could be said that they had made good use of it lately. But it wasn’t Philip’s intention to enslave or plunder Greece. He had other ideas: he planned to create a great army made up of Greeks and Macedonians with which to invade and conquer Persia. (p. 63)

In the earlier chapters about Greece, Gombrich avoided the philosophers, which might be considered a curious choice until one considers the vast abyss of thought and argument chiseled out by the Greeks. The Chinese and Indians developed philosophies and religions, but failed to ask basic “scientific” questions about the nature of matter, and so on. The Greeks did, but also created so much impressive philosophy that to say too much about them, or in their defense, in the modern era threatens the orthodoxy of political correctness; nothing else that anybody in the rest of the world ever thought quite matched what the Greeks accomplished. Alexander and Aristotle both get fanboy treatment from Gombrich: Now Alexander wasn’t just a brave and ambitious warrior—there was much more to him than that. He was exceptionally handsome, with long curly hair, and he knew just about everything there was to know at the time. His tutor was the most famous teacher living: the Greek

A Short History of the World for Children

101

philosopher Aristotle. And if I tell you that Aristotle wasn’t just Alexander’s tutor but—in a matter of speaking—the teacher of mankind for 2,000 years, you’ll have an idea of what I mean. In the 2,000 years that followed, whenever people failed to agree on one thing or another, they turned to his writings. He was their referee. What Aristotle said must be right. (p. 64)

Alexander, with his tangled ringlets, high cheekbones, and superior intellect, conquered much of the known world. Gombrich devotes most of this chapter to the legends about Alexander, how he supposedly stood in front of the great cynic Diogenes, and told the philosopher that he would grant him anything he wanted. Diogenes, apparently a tanning devotee, growled that he would like for Alexander to get out of the way of his sun. Alexander and Diogenes later exchanged compliments, with both claiming that if they could not be who they were then they would prefer to be the other. Like most ancient Greek legends, this story is unverifiable and probably should be classified with Aesop’s Fables, with the moral of the story being that one should always try to avoid being stuck in middle management. Either be the emperor or be homeless, because people at the top and people at the bottom both control their own lives. The tale of the Gordian Knot, an early sword-in-the-stone legend where Alexander either unties an epically tied knot or else hacked it through with his sword, is recounted, as well as the glorious victories won against the Persians. Like Genghis Khan, Napoleon, and Hitler, Alexander seemed possessed of a gambler’s mentality. The winnings ranked as less important than the winning. Gombrich notes that after the major conquests, “[t]his probably would have been enough for you or me, but Alexander was far from satisfied. He wanted to rule over new, undiscovered lands. He longed to see the mysterious, far-off peoples merchants talked about when they came to Persia with rare goods from the East” (p. 67). Like Wells, Gombrich seems to attribute Alexander’s conquests solely to his ambition (greed?) and personality attributes. However, the analysis of both historians fails to include the fact that Alexander very likely had to conquer or be overthrown. In this era, warriors only received payment when they divided up the spoils of conquest. Any military leader who failed to march his army into foreign lands would likely be overthrown. Genghis Khan and his descendants, for example, had to lead their armies

102

Chapter 2

in conquest in order to keep the booty flowing in and to prevent the tribal alliances from breaking down from a lack of common purpose. The whole spear-through-Clitus incident that so troubled Wells fails to even gain a mention, and the details of Alexander’s (likely) drunken death are concealed. “He had great plans. He wanted to find many more cities like Alexandria. He wanted to build roads, and change the face of the world with his military campaigns, whether the Greeks liked it or not. Just imagine, in those days, to have a regular postal service running from India to Athens! But in the midst of all of his plans he died” (p. 69). Alexander was a fairy tale conqueror in this telling who died without an ending appropriate to the tone of this tale. The rapes and conquests that make up the early history of Rome, all frankly expressed in histories written by Romans, hardly provide the raw material for a world history told in such a pleasant tone. Gombrich doesn’t mention this, but the original Roman settlement, for example, supposedly lacked for women. The Roman men simply raided a neighboring town and brought back their “Sabine” women and raped them into marriage. The outdated wedding day tradition of carrying the new missus through the doorway of the home dates back to this time and supposedly symbolizes the fact that the woman didn’t want to go. Historians generally credit the Gaulish conquest of Rome in the early era of the republic with engendering a fear, and therefore the importance of military aggression, in the Roman people and their institutions. Gombrich chooses to turn the history into a lesson about perseverance: “They never gave up. Not even when their city was captured and burnt to the ground by tribesmen from the north called Gauls in 390 B.C. They just rebuilt it, fortified it, and gradually brought the small surrounding towns back under their control” (p. 75). A similar approach is applied to China’s first emperor, Shi Huang-ti (usually spelled “Huangdi” now, but it’s probably best to stick with Gombrich’s spelling for clarity’s sake). Huang-ti unified China after the Warring States period, then, having conquered the known world, decided he also needed to conquer the natural life cycle. A series of quack physicians prescribed various cures for death and Huang-ti supposedly even went out in search of a magical talking fish that could grant him immortality. This may just be too much history for a “little history” and so Gombrich reduces Huang-ti’s story to a cautionary tale about trying to burn

A Short History of the World for Children

103

books, which the emperor did as an attempt to erase all of the history he didn’t approve of. “Shih Huang-ti’s burning of the books was all in vain, and if you thought he was right, you were mistaken. It’s a bad idea to try and prevent people from knowing their own history” (p. 82). Huang-ti’s propensity for violence put him in power, his willingness to use excessive brutality through the governing philosophy of legalism kept him there, and he died surrounded by riches, cloaked in power, and with a grave full of terra cotta warriors meant to accompany him into the afterlife; he intended to conquer the next world if he could not avoid it. Rome interests Gombrich more, and his explanation of the Gracchus brothers and Rome’s descent into political corruption contains the most nutritive history of the entire book. Then, of course, came Caesar: After the conquest of Gaul, Caesar turned his army towards Italy. He was now the most powerful man in the world. Other generals who had previously been his allies he attacked and defeated. And after he had seduced Cleopatra, the beautiful queen of Egypt, he was able to add Egypt to the Roman empire. Then he set about putting it in order. For this he was ideally suited, for he had an exceptionally orderly mind. He was able to dictate two letters at the same time without getting his thoughts in a tangle. Imagine that! (p. 89)

These are the sort of sharp little summaries, complete with an interesting fact, that appear sporadically throughout the book and make it worth reading and recommending. Then, of course, one gets to the section on Jesus and the rather tiresome misstatement of the New Testament creed: “You probably know the essentials of what he taught: that it doesn’t matter if a person is rich or poor, of noble or of humble birth, a master or a slave, a great thinker or a child. That all men are God’s children. And that the love of this father is infinite. That before him no man is without sin, but that God has pity on sinners. That what matters is no judgment but mercy” (p. 92). That Jesus teaches nothing like this in any of the gospels must be beside the point. When not sending demons into pigs (there’s a psychological technique that’s been lost to time), Jesus mostly prattled on about judgment and Hell for anyone who seemed disinclined to believe that the end times loomed just around the next cloud. This is the Christian psychological complex: the desire to rule with God’s word while at the same time desiring to be persecuted for believing in it. This all finally ended when Constantine turned the cross from a

104

Chapter 2

symbol of Roman persecution of Christians to a symbol of Roman persecution by Christians. The treatment of Constantine and the ascension of Christianity are curious. First, there is this sentiment regarding Diocletian: “Diocletian renounced his imperial title and retired, a sick man, to his palace in Dalmatia. There he lived long enough to see the futility of his battle against Christianity” (p. 102). Here is a picture of the aged emperor, impotently watching his vicious work undone by the inevitable rise of a great religion. Constantine, of course, killed his brother-in-law and brought Christianity (and his brother-in-law’s severed head on a pike) to Rome. Gombrich avoids the violence, sidesteps any criticism, and chooses a short hagiography: “Victorious in that battle he issued a decree in 313 that Christians should no longer be persecuted. He himself remained a pagan for a long time, and was only baptized on his death-bed. Constantine no longer ruled the empire from Rome” (p. 102). None of the Ten Commandments prohibit lying for the good of the faith, and Constantine’s deathbed conversion likely never happened. His children, however, received a thorough indoctrination in Christian theology and they did more than Constantine to embed the religion in Rome. Constantine seemed more interested in what a monotheistic religion could do for the political power structure than in any actual theology. Barbarian invasions ended the rather short existence of a Roman Empire united under Christianity. In the west, Germanic tribes flowed into the empire and created a complicated scenario where some converted to Christianity and settled in Rome and some did not. Barbarians often acted as European shoguns, possessing the real military power while allowing puppet Italian emperors to pretend to possess power. With western Rome dead, the carrion-eating barbarian tribes perched on the corpse and pulled the body into various pieces: So the date 476 marks the birth of a new era, the Middle Ages, given its name for no other reason than that it falls between antiquity and modern times. But at the time no one noticed that a new era had begun. Everything was just as confusing as before. The Ostrogoths, who had previously fought alongside the army of the Huns, had settled in the Roman Empire of the East. The Roman Emperor of the East, wishing to be rid of them, suggested that they might do better if they went to the Empire of the West and conquered Italy. So in 493, led by their great king, Theodoric, the Ostrogoths went to Italy. There, the battle-hardened soldiers made short work of a wretched, war-torn land. Theodoric

A Short History of the World for Children

105

captured Odoacer, but he promised to spare his life. Instead, he invited him to a banquet and stabbed him to death. (p. 108)

Actually, the story has it that Theodoric swung a broad sword that caught Odoacer on the trapezius muscle just beside his neck and cut him straight to his groin. This sounds exaggerated a little, though. Cleverly, Gombrich refers to the middle part of the Middle Ages as “the starry night” because of the bright spots of theological and philosophical work that shone forth from the dank monasteries that dotted Europe, particularly in France. Indeed, the development of the monastery as a center of worship and learning may be the most important historical development of the era, as the monks engaged in a series of translations that kept alive the work of the Greeks that came up through Muslim-controlled Spain in the form of Arabic translations. It’s curious, therefore, that this chapter occurs before Gombrich details the rise of Islam. The copying of ancient texts, likely, seemed at the time like one of the less important tasks that the literate monks performed. Gombrich includes this function along with the work of translating books about farming: “[T]hey laboriously copied other ancient works on the natural sciences and agriculture, over and over again, taking infinite care not to make mistakes. For, apart from the Bible, what mattered most to them was to be able to cultivate the land properly so that they could grow cereals and bread, not only for themselves but for the poor” (p. 112). The translation of Aristotle probably did rank of secondary importance compared to actually having something to eat. Does Gombrich stretch too far by writing that the monks “frequently acted as advisers to the Christian kings of the Franks. . . . And because they were the best at reading and writing they wrote down the law and did all the king’s written work for him. Now the work of writing was also that of ruling: they composed letters to other kings and kept in touch with the Pope in Rome. Which meant, in fact that beneath their plain hooded cloaks those monks were the real masters of a still very disorderly kingdom of the Franks” (p. 113)? There is a tendency, sometimes, to think of the pre–printing press era as being one of almost total illiteracy. The truth of this is not clear, nor is it clear that reading can only be done with the eyes or writing with the hand. Technically, for example, Charlemagne may have been illiterate, but his advisers read letters to him and he certainly dictated correspon-

106

Chapter 2

dence. The thirteenth-century Mogul ruler, Akbar, could not read printed words but delighted in being read to, and to call him illiterate simply does not hold up to logical scrutiny; a blind person who listens to audiobooks can read, just differently. Bureaucrats who never get but a few chainlinks away from e-mail may actually spend less time in correspondence with each other than their medieval predecessors, who spent hours of each day handwriting their letters, did. Still, power everywhere in this era stemmed from control of the swords, not the pens. Sima Qian, of the Tang Dynasty, lost his genitals when he forgot this, and the brilliant mind of Boethius lay splattered on the floor after one of the “barbarian” Roman emperors felt threatened by his intelligence. It’s never smart to act too smart around those in power. Then again, maybe the majority of the monks understood this and ruled in a way. Wells mocked Mohammad from the security of Western civilization, in an era before the jihad made inroads into merry old England. Gombrich introduces Mohammad with these words: “Strong and vigorous, with black hair and a beard, eagle nose and heavy, loping gait, Mohammad was highly respected. He was known as ‘the Trustworthy One’” (p. 116). Then comes the traditional story of Mohammad receiving his revelations in the cave, his early years of preaching, and his governance of Medina. Gombrich details the basic message of Mohammad as being one that promised paradise for those who heeded Mohammad’s words and Hell for those who ignored them. Then, after an explanation of how the earliest Muslims conquered Mecca, come these surprising words: Shortly before his death, he preached before a gathering of forty thousand pilgrims, insisting for the last time that there was no God but Allah and that he, Muhammad, was his Prophet; that the fight against infidels—or unbelievers—must go on. He also urged them to pray five times a day, facing Mecca, to drink no wine and to be brave. Soon afterwards, in 632, he died. In the Qu’ran it is written: “Fight the infidel until all resistance is destroyed.” And in another passage: “Slay the idolatrous wherever you shall find them, capture them, besiege them, seek them out in all places. But if they convert, then let them go in peace.” The Arabs obeyed their Prophet’s words, and when all the infidels in their desert had been either killed or converted they moved on to nearby countries. (pp. 119–120)

A Short History of the World for Children

107

Allah, through Mohammad, commanded unrestrained and perpetual violence against anyone who did not convert. War spread the religion to every part of the world where it now dominates, save for Indonesia. In 1936, before the Western world cared much about Islam or sought not to provoke its more fervent believers, scholars simply understood that war and violence were endemic to the Islamic religion. Arabic-Islamic civilization quickly dissipated as this new religious/political system spread across the Middle East and took over Persian, Turkish, and Indian territories. The best passage of Gombrich’s book comes in this chapter when he writes of how Indian mathematics, superior to Roman numerals, made its way to the Islamic world. This is a lengthy but deserving quote: There are two things for which I am especially grateful to the Arabs. First, the wonderful tales they used to tell and then wrote down, which you can read in A Thousand and One Nights. The second is even more fabulous than the tales, although you may not think so. Listen! Here is a number: “12.” Now why do you think we say “twelve” rather than “one-two” or “one and two”? “Because,” you say, “the one isn’t really a one at all, but a ten.” Do you know how the Romans wrote “12”? Like this: “XII.” And 112? “CXII.” And 1,112 “MCXII.” Just think of trying to multiply and add up with Roman numbers like these! Whereas with our “Arabic” numbers it’s easy. Not just because they are attractive and easy to write, but because they contain something new: place value— the value given to a number on account of its position. A number placed on the left of two others has to be a hundred number. So we write one hundred with a one followed by two zeros. Could you have come up with such a useful invention? I certainly couldn’t. We owe it to the Arabs, who themselves owe it to the Indians. And in my opinion that invention is even more amazing than all the Thousand and One Nights put together. Perhaps it’s just as well that Charles Martel defeated the Arabs in 732. And yet it was not such a bad thing that they founded their great empire, because it was through these conquests that the ideas and discoveries of the Persians, the Greeks, the Indians and even the Chinese were all brought together. (p. 122)

Was Gombrich the first to see this, or did he relay these thoughts from existing scholarship about the Abbasid Dynasty (750–1258)? The Abbasid was centered in Baghdad and did indeed produce an impressive period of translation and scholarship at the now-famous “House of Wisdom” that came to be the successor to the fabled Library at Alexandria. Gom-

108

Chapter 2

brich’s book contains no references. It should be noted that for two paragraphs, Gombrich produced an analysis of an era superior to anything found in the work of genius by Wells. The synthesis of Greek, Indian, Chinese, and Arabic ideas in the Islamic world were facilitated by an intellectually inspired variation of the Islamic creed. The superiority of the Indian/Arabic system of mathematics to the Roman numeral system is a mainstay of world historical analysis now, but to see it in a book from 1936 brings up the question of where the analysis arose. This blending of cultures and its effects amount to a true world historical insight and establish the importance of the field. Gombrich devotes a chapter to Charlemagne and notes his cross-cultural importance even as he overstates his global power: “The mighty emperor of the Roman Empire of the East in Constantinople was not the only one anxious to be on good terms with him. So was the great Arab prince, Caliph Harun al-Rashid, in far-off Mesopotamia. From his fabulous palace in Baghdad, near ancient Nineveh, he sent precious gifts to Charlemagne: sumptuous robes, rare spices and an elephant, and a water clock with the most amazing mechanism, unlike anything seen before in the kingdom of the Franks” (p. 128). Few Islamic caliphs possessed such an easygoing demeanor as AlRashid, and he governed an empire from Baghdad, which could be considered the capital of the world. Charlemagne, likely, sought to be on “good terms” with his more powerful contemporary to the east. There’s more to the story about the water clock than Gombrich lets on. Here’s how the clock worked: water dripped from a pail into a receptacle and as the water got deeper a little floater with a pointer attached to it rose up and pointed at different numbers—clever. This novel invention worked fine in the arid heat of the Middle East, but time froze during the chillier French winters. Some historians attribute the idea of mechanical timekeeping to this Arabic gift to Charlemagne. No other piece of technology has affected the human mind and human society like the mechanical clock. We are its prisoners; there is a reason that the wristwatch wraps around the same part of the body as a handcuff. It’s not surprising that Charlemagne receives the royal treatment from Gombrich; medieval European history traditionally benefits from enthusiastic historians eager to study this epoch of swords, church, and plagues. What is surprising is that Gombrich, despite noting Charle-

A Short History of the World for Children

109

magne’s interest in languages and his intelligence, fails to include his most important contribution. Charlemagne instituted something called the “Carolignian Renaissance.” Perhaps because he witnessed the importance of scholarship for the Abbasids in Baghdad, Charlemagne thought his own realm would do well to have a little more learning. Charlemagne sent book scouts throughout his domain and they brought back scrolls that filled the monasteries and instituted the process of book translation and copying. Probably no other term receives so much abuse from the pseudo-intellectual set (they can be seen nightly in their natural habitats on various news outlets) than “paradigm shift.” Thomas Kuhn, who originated the phrase in a serious work on the history and philosophy of science, never meant for the term to be used in reference to, say, a change in the marketing policies for a company, but used the phrase to explain an overhaul of the way in which humans interpret the universe. That being said, the Carolignian Renaissance, as much as anything before Columbus, helped to facilitate the medieval paradigm shift that gradually led to the Scientific Revolution. Anyway, Gombrich didn’t mention this and he probably should have. Gombrich also probably should have written more about the actual world. After the brilliant section about Islam and the intellectual effects of its empire in the ninth century, Gombrich focuses on Western civilization and never again really turns his gaze to the east. Also, while Charlemagne ranks a chapter and the tiresome breakup of Charlemagne’s empire following his death rates another, only a few words ever get thrown to the starving masses living on the wrong side of the moat. For example, [m]ost of the peasants who lived on these lands were no longer freemen, as German peasants had been in earlier times. They belonged to the land of the king bestowed, or to land owned by a nobleman. Like the sheep or the goats that grazed there, like the deer, the bears and the wild boar in the forest, like the streams and the woodland, the meadows, the pastures and the fields, the people belonged to the land they tilled. They were known as serfs, or bondsmen, because they were bound to the land. Nor were they free citizens of the kingdom. They had neither the right to go where they wished nor the right to decide to till or not to till their fields. (pp. 131–132)

This sounds, for a moment, like a more inclusive world history as it includes a few words about the toiling masses that formed the platform for the development of feudal society.

110

Chapter 2

Then, however, Gombrich writes this: “Were they slaves, then, like in antiquity?” Well, not exactly. For as you remember, the coming of Christianity had put an end to slavery in our lands. Serfs weren’t slaves, because they went with the land, and the land still belong to the king even after he has bestowed it on a nobleman. A nobleman or prince was not allowed to sell or kill serfs as masters once could their slaves. But he could make them carry out his orders. The serfs had to cultivate his land and work for him, when he told them to. They had to send regular supplies of bread and meat up to the castle for him to eat, because a nobleman didn’t work in the fields. Most of his time was spent hunting, whenever he felt like it. The land the king had bestowed on him, known as his fief, was his land, and would be inherited by his son, as long as he did nothing to offend the king. In return for his fief all a prince had to do was to take his lords of the manor and his peasants with him into battle to fight for the king, if there was a war. And of course, there often was. (p. 132)

The coming of Christianity ameliorated some of the splashier phantasmagoria of Rome; all those people fed to lions in the Coliseum ended, as did the gladiatorial games. It could be argued, however, that the collapse of Roman authority had more of an effect on this because the games could hardly operate if the city governments failed to function. Christian doctrine simply doesn’t ban slavery. Serfdom as an institution likely developed as a result of the collapse of political authority. To understand the manorial conditions, one must really think of the Dark Ages as being like an apocalyptic B-movie where some calamity has destroyed everything. What would happen without public schools, city councils, or police and fire departments? Without any rule of law, those with wealth would likely build high walls and stockpile weapons and food. Those without wealth could chance living in the wilds with the ruffians and highwaymen, but they might think it a better deal to try and get behind some high walls themselves. At this point, the wealthy person behind the walls might grant access to a few members of the Great Unwashed, but would expect the newcomers to chip in some labor in exchange for the protection. This, more or less, describes the conditions of the early medieval period. After a generation or so, serfs could no more leave the manor than an angry eight-year-old can stomp off down the road away from home with a knapsack full of potato chips and Legos. The lords offered protection and a basic standard of living and received labor and the privileges of

A Short History of the World for Children

111

power in response. The situation might not have amounted to slavery, but slavery in such conditions would not have made sense as the serfs received something tangible for their efforts and it could be argued that the arrangement actually benefited the feudal lords to a greater degree than slavery as an institution would have. These factors all get smooshed into a chapter that includes several crucial medieval events including the Investiture Controversy between Henry IV and Pope Gregory. This amounted to a petty debate over who had the authority to create bishops. In those days, a pope’s excommunication cut with twin barbs. First, the excommunicate could not take communion, and to be shut out from the church also meant to be shut out of Heaven if one should be unfortunate enough to die in such a state. It’s not clear just how much anyone, especially Holy Roman emperors, really bought into this notion. Secondly, all contracts that the excommunicate held with Christians in good standing suddenly became void. The medieval social contract included the whole “thou shall not kill” business. Excommunicates amounted to nonpeople, existing outside of Christian law, and sometimes could be killed without any legal repercussions being visited upon the murderer. Henry IV supposedly marched to the pope’s palace, dragging his pride in a bloody trench in the snow behind him. Gombrich writes, “Some say the king came dressed as a penitent, wearing a rough, hooded cloak, and that the pope made him wait three days in the castle courtyard, barefoot in the snow, before he took pity on him and lifted the ban. Contemporaries describe the king as whimpering and begging the pope for mercy, which the pope, in his compassion, finally granted” (p. 135). If this was true, seventy-two hours of constant exposure to the cold failed to inflict frostbite on either poor Henry’s pigglie-wigglies or on his attitude. Later, when the political situations shifted toward the emperor’s favor, Henry IV put together an alliance and drove the pope away, leaving the balance of power in Western civilization still balancing. Gombrich leaves this part of the story out, which is not surprising as it lacks the interesting detail of a king standing in the snow. In the following chapter, many words get spent describing the life of a knight and his duties. Modern scholarship tends to verify author George R. R. Martin’s vision of knighthood more than it does those of traditional fairy tales, but one can see why young people would be enamored of all that armor. Gombrich writes, “As you know, a knight’s first duty was to

112

Chapter 2

fight for God and for Christendom. And it wasn’t long before they found a wonderful opportunity to do so. Christ’s tomb in Jerusalem, was, as was the whole of Palestine, in the hands of Arab unbelievers” (p. 141). These sentences transition the narrative from the role of the knight to the history of the Crusades. Despite the fact that Gombrich rather uncritically claims that the Jerusalem held the tomb of Christ (no evidence exists that does not require a fervent belief that evidence need not exist), this should not be seen as a totally unbalanced account as he later writes, “Once inside Jerusalem, however, [the Crusaders] behaved neither like knights nor like Christians. They massacred all the Muslims and committed hideous atrocities. Then they did penance, and, singing psalms, proceeded barefoot to Christ’s tomb” (p. 142). Since Europe forms the center of Gombrich’s narrative, the impact of the Crusades on the Islamic world seems to be of less importance than the eventual arrival of Arabic learning in Christendom. The Crusaders essentially stuck a straw into the intellectual and cultural well of Islam and drank deeply. “All that the Arabs had learnt and experienced in the course of their conquests around the world was now brought back to Europe by the crusaders. In a number of ways it was the example of those they looked on as their enemies that transformed the barbaric warriors of Europe into truly chivalrous knights” (p. 143). One can see, from sentences like this, that Gombrich does not write with any intent to slander other cultures, but neither can a “little history” afford to explore the ramifications of something as crucial as the Crusades on more than one region. Even with his book’s special limits, Gombrich’s narrative does sometimes get tangled in the byzantine labyrinth of medieval names of kings and popes in the West while ignoring the importance of the Byzantine Empire. Much happened in Eastern Europe, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire during this age of chivalry but these histories never get intertwined with the narrative of Western European history. The Mongol villains ride onto the stage only to be booed and hissed at, and then they disappear. New hordes of mounted warriors arrived from Asia. This time it was the Mongols, the most fearsome of them all. . . . Sowing terror and destruction, they raged first through Hungary and on through Poland. Finally, in 1241, they reached the German frontier town of Breslau,

A Short History of the World for Children

113

which they seized and burned to the ground. Everywhere they went there was slaughter. No one was spared. Their empire was already the greatest the world had ever known. Just imagine: from Peking to Breslau! Moreover, in the course of their invasions their troops had changed from savage hordes to well-trained warriors with very cunning leaders. Christendom could do nothing to stop them. A great army of knights fell before them. (p. 154)

This passage raises several questions, a red flag, and a point about world historical studies. What caused the Mongols to rather suddenly congeal into the warriors who could be considered “the most fearsome of them all,” and who sent this “great army of knights”? No explanation comes from this book, but the story of the ascent of Genghis Khan from a poor boy on the edge of Mongolian steppe society to perhaps the single most powerful individual that ever commanded troops, reads like one of those awful young adult novels about some “chosen” child born into wayward circumstances who somehow saves the world. Only Genghis Khan did not save the world; he destroyed a fair bit of it. Still, it was not the case that “no one was spared” (this constitutes the red flag mentioned in the clever topic sentence of the last paragraph), as the Mongol successes in battle often came as a result of their mercy rather than their military innovation. Urban dwellers who looked over the walls of some dusty Eurasian city and got an eyeful of the dust billowing on the horizon and felt the tremor of hoof beats shake the bricks in the city walls, could almost always surrender to the Mongol hordes. Once the spoils got handed over, the Mongols would be on their way and the city would often be spared, even if suddenly it seemed a little light on wealth and absent a few fair maidens. Yet the effects of the Mongol empire and its decline cannot be explored in a little world history and so the vast importance of the Mongol conquests and collapse cannot be detailed. Timurlane, the scourge of God and muse of Christopher Marlowe, does not even get mentioned as the story moves on to Columbus. Gombrich reveals that he knows that his little history cannot be described as a true world history, but a history of Europe with a few mentions of places that existed elsewhere: What until now we have called the history of the world is in fact the history of no more than half the world. Most of the events took place around the Mediterranean—in Egypt, Mesopotamia, Palestine, Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, Spain and North Africa. Or not far from there: in Germany, France, and England. We have cast the odd glance east-

114

Chapter 2 wards, towards China’s well-defended empire, and towards India, which, during the period that now concerns us, was ruled by a Muslim royal family. But we haven’t bothered with what lies to the west of old Europe, beyond Britain. No one bothered with it. (p. 172)

After Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980) and James Loewen’s Lies My Teacher Told Me (1995), Christopher Columbus became less of a brave discoverer and more of a white supremacist who brought slavery, massacres, and disease to an untouched new world. Columbus himself, then, could not be described as being all that important. He simply became a stereotype in the history-as-identity politics that has dominated schools of liberal learning from the 1960s to the present. A revision of Columbus’s “great man” history could not be described as a bad thing, but it is refreshing to read a 1936 account of Columbus before all of this happened. Gombrich, free from the politics, presents Columbus as a flawed hero on a great adventure, one that culminated with this moment: “At last, on 11 October 1492, at two o’clock in the morning, a cannon fired from one of the ships signaled ‘Land ahoy!’ Columbus was filled with pride and joy. The Indies at last! The friendly people on the shore must be Indians, or, as the Spanish sailors called them, ‘Indios!’ Now, of course, you know that he was wrong. Columbus was nowhere near India, but on an island off America” (p. 174). Great narrative, of course, but one suddenly wonders how the natives felt upon seeing the red cross on the Spanish ships come up on the horizon. Columbus and his men rampaged over the Caribbean islands like the Crusaders through Jerusalem, or the Turks through Constantinople, but these details are left out even as Columbus faces a mild condemnation: “[D]uring his later voyages his pride and his ambition, his greed and his wild imaginings made him so unpopular that the king had his own viceroy and admiral arrested and brought home from the West Indies in chains” (p. 176). The conquistadores that followed in search of gold and glory, and often justifying their actions because of a belief in a superior god, “were indescribably brave and indescribably cruel. And the saddest thing of all is that not only did these men call themselves Christians, but they always maintained that all the atrocities they committed against heathens were done for Christendom” (p. 177).

A Short History of the World for Children

115

The idea that Christianity might actually condone the forced conversion, or outright destruction, of nonbelieving peoples never sees print in Gombrich’s book. It is always convenient to call those who act badly in the name of any religion hypocrites; it certainly is easier than actually analyzing religious doctrines. The conquistadores could consider themselves to be good Christians, fully justified in all their atrocities, backed enthusiastically by church and state. With this, Gombrich commits the great sin of religious or semi-religious (the secular apologists count here as well) chroniclers of religious history in that he criticizes Christian people rather than their doctrine and texts. He therefore makes the assumption that all of those who act in ways that might be described as unsavory come across as heretics rather than as people expressing a genuinely valid interpretation of the religion. This same approach can be found in the chapter regarding the Protestant Reformation. “As you will remember, there were popes ruling in Rome after 1400 who cared more for might and magnificence than for their role as priests, and it was they who commissioned the most famous artists to build beautiful churches” (p. 180). Then, in a puzzling sentence, he writes, “[I]n their desire to please the pope, priests and monks collected money in a way which did not conform with the teachings of the Church. They made the faithful pay for the forgiveness of their sins” (p. 180). The selling of indulgences did not originate in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, but had evolved into a practice several centuries before this and the selling of indulgences did not violate church teachings but could be considered the fullest expression of those teachings. The violence of the medieval period caused the church to pass a requirement that all those who killed others, even in the context of war, must pass through a long process of prayer and penitence. Since warriors in this dark era made a living by taking lives, they could not pause for long and so the practice of paying monks to pray on their behalf evolved. The selling of indulgences could not be described as a planned moneymaking scheme, but by the early sixteenth century, when Pope Julius II issued a special sale for the purpose of rebuilding St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, it sure looked that way. Next in Gombrich’s narrative comes the march of characters in the Protestant Reformation Parade: Charles V, Henry VIII, Luther, and Calvin. They have great big Disney-sized heads, and their stories are rele-

116

Chapter 2

vant and well known and need not be recounted here. Gombrich acts competently enough as a parade marshal, and the whole proceeding can probably still fascinate children who have not seen one before, and Gombrich knows when to turn the parade down a side street and out of sight. “If I wished,” he writes, “I could write many more chapters on the wars between Catholics and Protestants. But I won’t. It was a dreadful era” (p. 193). Dreadful it was, but also crucial, and the interpretation and reinterpretation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries will have great importance in the twenty-first century, but that will be a subject for volume 2. Authority died in the fighting, and this allowed for new ideas and methods for building ideas to be born. The process of science’s creation, the means of which form the current greatest debate in historical circles, is summarized in this way by Gombrich: The first man to understand the extraordinary magical power of applying mathematical calculation to things in nature was an Italian called Galileo Galilei. He had devoted many years to observing, analyzing and describing such things when, one day, someone denounced him for writing exactly what Leonardo had observed but not explained. What he had written was this: the sun does not move—on the contrary, it is the earth which moves round the sun, together with the planets. This discovery had already been made by a Polish scholar named Copernicus, after many years of calculation. . . . So in 1632, when he was nearly seventy years old, Galileo, who had devoted his whole life to scholarship, was brought before the religious tribunal known as the Inquisition, and made to choose between being burned as a heretic or renouncing his theory about the movement of the earth around the sun. He signed a declaration saying that he was but a poor sinner, for he had taught that the earth moved round the sun. In this way he avoided being burned. (p. 198)

Galileo’s sarcasm and arrogant mannerisms got him into trouble as much as his astronomical observations; nonetheless the fact that he recants rather than boldly striding to the stake should make anyone who has studied the seventeenth century stand up and cheer. When Luther refused to recant before the might of the church and the Holy Roman Emperor at the Diet of Worms in 1521, he set an example of recalcitrance that millions of martyrs and murderers would seek to emulate. Dying for one’s beliefs sounds good in a kind of sports coaching cliché sort of way, but when one really stops to examine the concept, neither the dying nor

A Short History of the World for Children

117

the excessive labor in pursuit of arbitrary athletic goals really seems all that important. Galileo, a man of reason, chose not to be burned to death. The church authorities found, to their dismay, that bullying an old man into intellectual submission did not alter the composition of the universe. The earth spun around the sun both before and after Galileo’s recantation. Although the connection is not made explicit, the Scientific Revolution contributed to the general collapse of medieval authorities that in turn contributed to the outbreak of the American and French revolutions. This type of causal analysis goes beyond the scope of any little history. Gombrich, leaving this out, does detail the coming class conflicts of that era while discussing the exorbitant lifestyle of Louis XIV, the Sun King: “[T]he true cost fell on the peasants, who were burdened with crippling taxes and duties of all kinds. And while at court people ate off gold and silver dishes, piled high with the choicest delicacies, the peasants ate scraps and weeds. But it wasn’t life at court which cost the most. Far more expensive were the wars that Louis XIV kept waging” (pp. 204–205). These sentiments sound nearly Marxist and perhaps almost certainly socialist. Should the peasants be made to suffer for wars perpetuated by the nonworking classes? The answer always seems obvious when it is addressed to another time, another nationalism, and another people. It becomes less comfortable when applied to whatever time period one happens to be knee deep in at the time. This period of European history makes little sense unless one includes a connection with the Ottoman Empire. Gombrich gives the failed Turkish attack on Vienna, Austria, a few words. After failing to take the city that could be considered a porthole into Western Europe, “[t]he Turks continued to retreat. Had they succeeded in taking Vienna, the situation would have been almost as bad as if the Muslim Arabs had defeated Charles Martel at Tours and Poitiers a thousand years earlier” (p. 208). The reference to Charles Martel (that last name means “hammer” in French) has to do with the second time the Muslim armies faced defeat from Christian powers in the eighth century. The Muslims primarily wrested territory from the Byzantine Empire, but when they tried to take Constantinople itself in 707, the Greek-speaking Romans used their superior naval tactics and the mysterious “Greek fire” to claim a defensive victory. The recipe for Greek fire is as mysterious as its effects on that

118

Chapter 2

battle are contentious, but it would have undoubtedly been pretty cool to watch ships burning with a fire that was impervious to water. In 732, Muslim armies crossed north out of Al-Andalus (the Iberian Peninsula) into France under the leadership of a commander named AlRachman. The Muslims, undoubtedly, felt the unfamiliar element of the cold and the medieval forests, too, must have closed in on them. Martel figured he knew how to defeat the Muslims encroaching on his territory. He ordered his men to give the same treatment to the Muslims and the horses they rode in on. This treatment, simply enough, involved standing in a line and swinging thick-bladed axes at the necks of the attacking horses. Men on foot always faced a disadvantage when fighting cavalry, but this “ax-hacking at the horses” tactic apparently always worked when pulled off correctly. One can imagine how difficult it would be to hit a horse with an ax, a feat made many orders of magnitude more difficult by the fact that some foreign-born professional killer was in the active process of trying to decapitate you while you engaged in this act. This is probably why more people did not try it. Anyway, the (disputed) story goes that Martel and his men drove back the Islamic advance and the Muslims never tried again to capture Christendom by attacking through southern France. After 707 and 732, the boundaries of Christendom and of Dar-al-Islam could be described as more or less complete. In the thirteenth century, a less doctrinaire version of Islam called Sufism expanded southwest, via trade into Indonesia (a story of great importance that involves millions of people but receives no words from Gombrich), but that story can wait. It is mentioned here only to note that Gombrich’s “world” history really isn’t. Islam’s initial military burst settled down by the mid-eighth century and the Byzantine Empire recovered from their losses to the southwest by expanding northwest into Eastern Europe and eventually into Russia. Gombrich chooses the defensive victory at Vienna as a chance to introduce the history of the Rus. “Until now,” he writes, “we have heard nothing about Russia. It was a vast wilderness of forests, with great steppes in the north” (p. 209). Ivan the Terrible gets a mention, although an explanation of his cruelties is reduced in detail to “[b]eside him Nero was mild” (p. 209). Peter the Great as a force of westernization then enters the narrative, rushed along with the short but powerful tide of Russian history: “In

A Short History of the World for Children

119

1689—that is, six years after the Turkish siege of Vienna—a new tsar came to the throne. This was Peter, known as Peter the Great. He was no less barbarous or cruel than many of his predecessors. Nor was he any less fond of drinking or less violent. But he was determined to model his empire on western states, like France, England, or the German Empire” (p. 209). Having Russia enter the story of the world so late might be a bit jarring, but Gombrich does an adequate job of picking the history up at an important point without gumming things up with too much backstory. If one must introduce the character of Russia at any point in this grand play, it should be done when Peter the Great instituted the process of westernization and therefore acted to “increase his empire’s might, expanding in all directions: into Europe, into Turkey, into Persia, and into the countries of Asia” (p. 212). At this point, Gombrich has woven in enough impressive analysis that it should not surprise the reader when he occasionally diverts from the flow of historical names and places to include thoughts about the mindset of educated men in the late seventeenth century: [N]othing could prepare you for the shock you would have if he were to begin to air his views. All children should be thrashed. Young girls (no more than children) should be married (and to men they barely know). A peasant’s lot is to toil and not complain. Beggars and tramps should be whipped and put in chains in the marketplace for everyone to mock. Thieves should be hanged and murderers publicly chopped into pieces. Witches and other harmful sorcerers that infest the country should be burnt. People of different beliefs should be persecuted, treated as outcasts or thrown into dark dungeons. A comet seen recently in the sky must mean bad times ahead. As protection against the coming plague, which has already claimed many victims in Venice, it would be sensible to wear a red armband. And finally, a Mr So-and-so—an English friend—has an excellent and well-established business selling negroes from Africa to America as slaves: a brainwave of that most worthy gentleman since, as we all know, American Indian convicts don’t take well to manual labour. (p. 214)

Yes, the mind-set of humanity must be analyzed from time to time, and this kind of analysis performs one of the most important functions of history; it makes the reader start looking around for things in our own time that future generations will marvel at. Future meat eaters will consume food grown from cells in labs, gloriously free of the raise-and-hack

120

Chapter 2

methods of agriculture currently employed. It is even possible that humans of the future will not glory in watching truly enormous men finding novel ways to give each other head trauma. This may not be the case, however, as humanity tends to trade one vice for another while hoping for the best in the future. Gombrich’s successful analysis, however, is followed by a thorough mangling of the anti-slavery movements and the Enlightenment. He somehow links both to Christianity by stating this about reason and Christianity: Reason alone could explain the appearance of nature and the workings of the universe. Reason, which is given in equal measure to all mankind the world over. Now if reason is given to all, it must follow that all people are of equal worth, and as you remember, that was just what Christianity had taught: that all men are equal before God. But those who preached tolerance and reason took this argument one step further: they didn’t only teach that all people were essentially equal; they demanded that they be treated equally as well. (p. 215)

Trying to reduce a complex history to a concise summation, particularly with too liberal a use of the word “they,” leaves the reader not with a little history, but with no history at all. Who is “they”? Is he talking about the Quakers? What about the role of climate, geography, industrialization, and the rise of free labor as forces in the antislavery movements? And when, exactly, did Christianity ever preach anything like equality before God in anything except the equal opportunity that everyone has to live out eternity immersed in the lightless flames of Hell? Reason and faith, as both Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther both understood, oppose one another. With the spurious notion that Christianity and reason somehow connected to develop a mysterious “they,” the whole concept of the Enlightenment then becomes a success story: “Because of them [new thinkers?] we no longer take someone suspected of having committed a crime and torture them inhumanly on the rack until, half out of their wits, they confess to anything we want. Reason has taught us that there’s no such thing as witchcraft, so no more witches are burned at the stake” (p. 216). In an era where parents, mostly of a religious persuasion, routinely deny their children lifesaving vaccines and frequently try to subvert the teaching of science in favor of indoctrination with fairy tales, and where

A Short History of the World for Children

121

perfectly safe genetically modified foods are refused on no intellectual basis, one wonders just how far reason continued to rise. African American historians might note that, while the witch hunts did end, the lynching of black people continued on well into the perfectly reasonable twentieth century. The French Revolution gets a rather tame and rational treatment. Gombrich makes no attempt to extrapolate beyond the evidence of the revolution into evidence about the nature of man and society. Of Napoleon, little beyond the ordinary makes it into the narrative. Gombrich does choose to include an excerpt from a condescending and insulting letter that Napoleon sent to one of his brothers, who was also the nominal ruler of a province in Germany. He writes, “This was how the emperor treated his brothers, the kings of Europe. But he treated the people even worse. He cared nothing for what they thought or what they felt. To him they were merely a source of money or, better still, soldiers. But as time went on they became less and less willing to obey him” (p. 233). As has been stated before, historical analyses of Napoleon never ends, and offering any interpretation of this contradictory individual is hardly worth the time; no definitive book has ever been or ever will be written about him. Still, Napoleon did develop meaningful changes in France’s government, and the soldiers only stopped fighting for him on two occasions and only then after being buried under the combined weight of the conservative European militaries. The chapter on Napoleon goes by the title of “The Last Conqueror,” and like the use of the word “Aryan” in the book by Wells, this comes across as a bit eerie. It is worth revisiting the publication date of 1936 for the “little history” and remembering that three years still would pass before the Nazi invasion of Poland. All of Gombrich’s chapters were, however, written firmly within the era of the Third Reich. He also wrote, it should be noted, during the era when Stalin forced Russia to industrialize while starving the Ukrainians of their grain. The horrors of Stalinism avoided being recorded even on the black and white reels of the day, and so Gombrich likely did not know of them, writing in the comforts of Western Europe. In fact, as right-wing journalists bring up every week for some reason, a good number of old-fashioned American and European liberals supported the Communist experiment in Russia in hopes of seeing an alter-

122

Chapter 2

native politics to those offered by states dominated by capitalist economies and nationalist sentiments. Gombrich, writing about Marx, hardly did so in a neutral environment in 1936. While getting lucky break after lucky break (for him, not for anyone else) on his way into power, Hitler spent most of his time railing against the Communists rather than the Jews. Although, Hitler may have considered the two groups to be synonymous, the fact remains that hardly any Jews lived in Germany. A large and active Communist party formed Hitler’s only significant opposition inside of Germany. Who knows how this affected Gombrich, but here’s what he wrote: Among the many socialists in France and Britain in the 1830s there was one who became particularly famous. He was a scholar from Trier in Germany, and his name was Karl Marx. The ideas he had were rather different. In his view it was pointless wondering how things might be if only the machines belonged to the workers. If they wanted the machines, the workers would have to fight for them, for the factory owners would never give up their factories voluntarily. And it was equally pointless for groups of workers to go round destroying mechanical looms now that they had been invented. . . . So the workers must support each other. And not just those from one district, or even one country. All the workers of the world must unite! Then they would not only have the power to say how much they should be paid, but they would end up by taking over the factories and the machines themselves, and so create a world that was no longer divided into haves and have-nots. (p. 245)

At the core of the twentieth century’s largest ideological, and what would become history’s largest military, conflict was the idea of selfidentification. Nationalists wanted for humans to arrange themselves by geography, culture (including religion), and often race. Socialists thought all those nationalist and religious ideas got in the way of class identification and prevented the general awakening of the exploited peoples to the reality of their exploitation. The most interesting passage in Gombrich’s book, therefore, comes when he explains the failed 1848 revolutions: In 1848, there was a new revolution in Paris, which spread to many other countries, in which citizens tried to obtain all the power of the state so that nobody could any longer tell them what they might or might not do with their factories and their machines. In Vienna, Metternich found himself dismissed and the emperor Ferdinand was forced to abdicate. The old regime was definitively over. Men wore black

A Short History of the World for Children

123

trousers like drainpipes that were almost as ugly as the ones we wear today, and stiff white collars with complicated knotted neckties. Factories were allowed to spring up everywhere and railways transported goods in ever increasing quantities from one country to another. (p. 247)

Thus ended, he might have added, the last opportunity for a genuinely revolutionary upheaval. By the early twentieth century, liberal forms of thought often found expression in anti-imperialism and by resistance to racist ideologies. The modern liberal movement, whose proponents tend to focus on the importance of minority rights and who see some kind of racist/nationalist plot in most forms of foreign policy, can be traced back to this era. Gombrich expresses an anti-imperialist sentiment in the following passage after explaining how the clueless Chinese emperor tried to intimidate the British emissaries who came to his court looking to trade: So that was what the emperor of China had to say to the king of the little island of Britain. But he had underestimated the barbarity of the inhabitants of that distant island, a barbarity which they demonstrated several decades later when they arrived in their steamships. They were no longer prepared to put up with the limited trade allowed them in the province of Canton, and they had found a ware that the Chinese people liked too well: a poison—and a deadly one at that. When opium is burnt and the smoke is inhaled, for a short time it gives you sweet dreams. But it makes you dreadfully ill. Anyone who takes up smoking opium can never give it up. (p. 250)

Probably, this paragraph should not be taken as a full condemnation of British imperialism. Only the most frightfully unthinking of social Darwinists could muster up a justification for the British actions in the Opium Wars. The British citizenry all but lusted for Chinese tea and the upper classes liked to sip that tea from Chinese porcelain. The Chinese never quite adjusted to a market economy and the traditional structures of their empire’s history simply did not allow for peasants to transition into consumers. Few Chinese people desired the kind of consumer baubles that lured the masses to the London markets. Also, and this might sound something less than politically correct, the Chinese had a long-standing habit of crippling upper-class women through foot binding and thus confining them to the home. Upper-class women, it might be slightly suggested, do

124

Chapter 2

like to shop and the fact that they really could not do so in China likely did not help a capitalist economy to develop. The British responded by forcing demand onto the Chinese through the sale of opium. At this time, evangelical Christians reached their glory in Europe by taking a stance against the slave trade. The anti-slavery, change-the-world impulse behind that particular movement led an awful lot of evangelicals to believe they could reform not just Europe but also India and China. Missionaries demanded that they receive protected status in China, and the Chinese government and people found that they could neither ban opium nor the missionaries. Any attempt to do so invited the British to come in and militarily bully in whatever laws and policies they chose to implement. Drugs and Christianity flowed into the Chinese ports. The implications of British dominance and control came in the form of the Taiping Rebellion. One might see in the rebellion itself some combination of China’s problems. Their society no longer dominated the world; the world instead dominated their society. The Chinese could no longer rely on Confucian ideology to support their structure. It would be like Americans finding out that constitutional government no longer sufficed, and that some new and foreign type of economy proved itself to be superior. As a separate point, a world historical perspective adds to the American historian’s ability to understand U.S. history in a larger global context. How many people know that China suffered a likely 20 million deaths during the Taiping Rebellion during the era of the American Civil War? Does it make sense to view the American Civil War in context with the emancipation of the Russian serfs, an act that took place on February 19, 1861, during the first year of hostilities in the United States? Alexander II, after all, issued the Emancipation Manifesto because the slavery in his own country held back military innovation, something that the Russians discovered during their loss in the Crimean War (1850–1853). For Americans interested in the history of Lincoln, the opinion of foreign historians is of interest. Gombrich writes, In the long run, however, the shame of an economy based on slave labour was intolerable. And yet it seemed that little could be done. The southern states, with their huge plantations, were far stronger and richer than the northern farm lands and were determined not to give in at any cost. But they met their match in President Abraham Lincoln. He

A Short History of the World for Children

125

was a man with no ordinary destiny. He grew up as a simple farm boy in the backwoods, fought in 1832 in a war against an Indian chief called Black Hawk, and became the postmaster of a small town. There in his spare time he studied law, before becoming a lawyer and a member of parliament. As such he fought against slavery and made himself thoroughly hated by the plantation owners of the southern states. Despite this, he was elected president in 1861. The southern states immediately declared themselves independent of the United States, and founded their own Confederation of slave states. (p. 254)

This passage contains a few obvious mistakes. Lincoln, obviously, never served in an American parliament since nothing of the sort ever existed in the United States. “Parliament” is a term with a specific definition and cannot be used as a synonym for just any kind of representative democracy. This may sound pedantic, but Lincoln was not “elected president in 1861,” as he was elected in 1860 but took office in 1861. A few other points fail the nuance test. Lincoln admitted that his service in the Black Hawk war mostly amounted to riding around in the forest and not fighting any Indians. Lincoln, a melancholy man and perhaps a depressive, deserves a less heroic paragraph. Sometimes, the analytical powers of Gombrich fail to impress, and this dismal paragraph should be quoted in full: Seventy-five thousand volunteers made themselves available to Lincoln straight away. Despite this, the outlook was very bad for the northerners. Britain, which had abolished and condemned slave labour in its own colonies for several decades, was nevertheless supporting the slave states. There was a frightful and bloody civil war. Yet, in the end, the northerners’ bravery and tenacity prevailed, and in 1865 Lincoln was able to enter the capital of the southern states to the cheers of liberated slaves. Eleven days later, while at the theatre, he was murdered by a southerner. But his work was done. The reunited, freed, United States of America soon became the richest and most powerful country in the world. And it even seems to manage without slaves. (p. 254)

The British government never formally declared an alliance with the Confederacy. The moral conscience of the British public, shaped over the decades by sugar boycotts, the Enlightenment, and new variations of Christianity could not be covered in a blanket of cheap cotton. A series of economic factors, including the impact that cheap cotton pumped into the northern states had on the development of industry and railroads,

126

Chapter 2

and therefore immigration, could explain how the North won that war. Gombrich simply does not allow for the space for, nor does he seem inclined to devote the time to, an American epoch that should be seen as being connected to larger world historical events. Oddly enough, Gombrich chooses to narrate European colonialism as a factor that exacerbated the tension in Europe, but that which could not be considered a direct cause of World War I itself: “When war finally did break out, however, it wasn’t where it had been expected. . . . Nor was it on account of some distant dispute in Africa or Asia. It was caused by another country, the only great state in Europe to have no colonies at all: Austria” (p. 267). As the Ottoman Empire receded from the Balkans, both the Russians and the Austrians believed themselves to be the natural inheritors of the region. In Serbia, a good many of the newly liberated citizens thought that that they might be able to get along okay without being lorded over by foreign nobility. Wells wrote his world history among the smoking psychological rubble of World War I but nonetheless believed that human civilization moved in a direction toward some kind of great consciousness. Gombrich draws this analogy: “Imagine time as a river, and that we are flying high above it in an aeroplane. Far below you can just make out the mountain caves of the mammoth-hunters, and the steppes where the first cereals grew. Those distant dots are the pyramids of the Tower of Babel” (p. 271). Gombrich continues on with the aerial view of history by pointing out the major historical landmarks that his “little history” already explored. He ends this section with “All we know is that the river flows onwards. On and on it goes, towards an unknown sea” (p. 271). Anyone who pens a history of the world, even a little one, faces the temptation at the end to carve out a few grand declarations. Perhaps because he wrote less about history than Wells, Gombrich also wrote less about the future. It’s a wise decision; historians should always quit while they are behind. In the final chapter, Gombrich notes that his age had not yet reached double digits when the Great War concluded in 1918, and this final chapter must be an addendum to an earlier version. The author lived in England at the outbreak of World War II and in this section first gives name to the German terror of the era: “For, although I did not foresee it, the fact that all those who had been defeated were convinced that their suffering was the result of a gross deception was very easily exploited and transformed by ambitious and fanatical agitators into a raging thirst for ven-

A Short History of the World for Children

127

geance. I am reluctant to name them, but everyone will know that the one I have most in mind is Adolf Hitler” (p. 276). Certainly, as World War II concluded, just about everyone in the world tended to attribute powers to Hitler that he simply did not possess. Gombrich writes, “He was a brilliant popular orator and drew huge crowds. He knew there was no better way to incite a mob to action than to give them a scapegoat, someone they could blame for their sufferings, and he found one in the Jews” (p. 276). Again, the analysis comes across as too simplistic for the facts. Hitler could speak well, but he hardly transfixed the German people. He never won an election and his rise to power could not be described as being facilitated by a popular rage felt by the newly defeated Germans. Luck, luck, luck, and more luck brought Hitler to power. The facts indicate this and it must be so. Historians must not assume that large results (World War II) have equally large causes. This brings us to the biggest question: Can a “little history” of the world actually be written? The answer is this: not for a scholarly audience. Traditional historians of this-or-that battle, era, or region likely would toss Gombrich’s book away in disgust. It lacked detail in too many significant places and could, in fact, give a reader the wrong impression entirely not only about a certain battle, era, or region but about the process of “doing” history itself. For a young reader of the era with some interest in a short introduction to the history of the world, this book would suffice as it reads with a dreamy sort of narration that would appeal to children who enjoy fairy tales and narrators who speak directly to them. A few brilliant paragraphs of insight make Gombrich’s work a significant contribution to the very young field of world history at that time. The book is a little too little, however. Yet, for all the faults that plague Gombrich’s book, it holds a place of tremendous importance for the history of world history. In many ways, Gombrich’s condensed history is more of a direct ancestor of “Big History” than is the Outline of World History by Wells. This notion will be picked up in volume 2 where the following question is raised: Is “Big History” really all that big?

THREE Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

There will come a point while reading Will and Ariel Durant’s elevenvolume Story of Civilization, oh say somewhere in volume 8 when one is being treated to a thorough analysis of seventeenth-century French art, when even the most enthusiastic reader will have to wonder if the word “graphomania” applies. These eleven volumes, published over four decades from 1935 to 1975, represent an attempt to tell the story of “World History” by applying the traditional means of the historian to each aspect. The Durants call this “integral” (sometimes called “total”) history, and their failed lifelong project proves that world history cannot be subject to the traditional historical approach. The result of their lives and labors are eleven self-contained volumes, each of which might be described as an exhaustive (and occasionally exhausting) historical survey of each era. It’s audacious, occasionally brilliant, and ultimately unfinished. Will and Ariel Durant only made it to the Napoleonic era before the last grains of sand in their long-stemmed hourglass fell to the bottom. Interestingly enough, the covers of the books tell a story of historical change in themselves. The first six books feature only the name of Will Durant but after the seventh, his wife Ariel’s name is included as a coauthor. The women’s rights movement not only affected world history but the writing of it as well. These books probably make more sense if one puts them in the context of their era. They were begun at a time before the arrival of paperback books, when many homes of educated people likely 129

130

Chapter 3

sported the “five-foot shelf of knowledge” that was the Harvard Classics. The Story of Civilization, for Will and Ariel Durant, amounted mostly to the story of classical Western civilization and they would tell that story without sparing any words. VOLUME I: OUR ORIENTAL HERITAGE The Durants, in the most critical decision of their historical enterprise, chose to write the entire history of the world outside of the West in their very first volume. A journey of (over) a million words begins with a single paragraph, and although this chapter will be judicious in quoting the Durants’ work, this section demands the reader’s attention: Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life. (p. 1)

Civilization does, occasionally, need a robust defense. The Durants waste no time establishing the foundations of world history in geography and biology. They identify “geographical conditions” as the shaper of human civilization: “The heat of the tropics, and the innumerable parasites that infest them, are hostile to civilization; lethargy and disease, and a precocious maturity and decay, divert the energies from those inessentials of life that make civilization” (p. 1). This came from a time where the ability to create and appreciate artwork remained a central part of a civilization’s definition of itself. The Nazis, by connecting such a notion to racism, left the civilization-as-culture concept vulnerable to multiculturalism. We now celebrate rather than appreciate, and tolerate rather than create, but the Durants suffered only through a portion of those societal changes and their book reflects aesthetics from an earlier era. Let’s get to the sex. Discovering chapter 4, the “Moral Elements of Civilization,” is as surprising and delightful as finding a dusty stack of vintage pornography in your grandfather’s attic. “Zulu medicine-men fried the genitals of a man who had died in full vigor, ground the mixture into a powder, and strewed it over the fields” (p. 65). There’s more: soilfertilization rites that involve kings and queens in public copulation.

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

131

More of the same, only among the ordinary fold, can be found in the rice fields of Indonesia. Ancient people everywhere seemed to enjoy an orgy now and then, usually in honor of some god conjured up for the occasion. The Durants do not succumb to the belief, as did Wells, that history trends in a direction, but they do sometimes smirk knowingly at the past while analyzing ancient religion. “The philosopher accepts gracefully this human need of supernatural aid and comfort, and consoles himself by observing that just as animism generates poetry, so magic begets drama and science” (p. 68). Probably not. Alchemy did not beget chemistry, as is sometimes thought, but new concepts do create new words and analogies, all of which drive the process of civilization in a herky-jerky way toward the modern era of science. (A deeper explanation must wait for volume 2.) As was the case with Wells, one wonders at how the Durants could evade some of the nastier societal conceits of the time, sexism being one of them. Sentences such as “The molders of the world’s myths were unsuccessful husbands, for they agreed that woman was the root of all evil; this was a view sacred not only to Hebraic and Christian tradition, but to a hundred pagan mythologies” (p. 70). Cultural taboos flowed with the menstrual blood, and likely led women to a short monthly period of ostracism from the tribe. A focus on art pervades all the volumes and the Egyptians are celebrated because “[u]nder the Empire the tombs became a riot of painting. The Egyptian artist had now developed every color in the rainbow and was anxious to display his skill. On the walls and ceilings of homes, temples, palaces and graves, he tried to portray refreshingly the life of the sunny of the fields—birds in flight through the air, fishes swimming in the sea, beasts of the jungle in their native haunts” (p. 191). At its best, The Story of Civilization is like having a conversation with someone who has a radio-quality voice and knows it. He talks in longer sentences than necessary as a way of displaying the voice, but you don’t always mind. The Durants are people with no feeling of enamor toward religion; the topic of world history all but forbids the scholar from holding any serious belief (so many origin stories, so many prophets). Of Siddartha Gautama, the authors write, “At times this most famous of Hindu saints passes from agnosticism to outright atheism. He does not go out of his way to deny any deity and, occasionally he speaks as if

132

Chapter 3

Brahma were a reality rather than an ideal, nor does he forbid the popular worship of the gods” (p. 434). Such statements are typical of the forced religious analogy. Gautama could not be a saint because he dedicated himself to no doctrine, and when he thought about prayer, it was only to note its futility. Gautama worshiped no god, but atheism cannot be spoken of as if it should be categorized with religion or agnosticism; atheism should be thought of as the proper conclusion when logic is applied to religious claims. If someone believes in a god, then he or she has not learned to reason properly. We assign no special title to people who master mathematics and then conclude that five plus five equals ten. This nitpicks, but the Durants sometimes draw false conclusions from false precepts: If there is no soul, how can it pass into other existences, to be punished for sins of this embodiment? Here is the weakest point in Buddha’s philosophy; he never quite faces the contradiction between his rationalistic psychology and his uncritical acceptance of reincarnation. This belief is so universal in India that almost every Hindu accepts it as an axiom or assumption, and hardly bothers to prove it; the brevity and multiplicity of the generations there suggests irresistibly the transmigration of vital force or—to speak theologically—of the soul. (p. 435)

Reincarnation functions for individuals in the same way that belief in an afterlife does for Christians and Muslims: the belief itself provides comfort in a time of distress. Criticism fails to dispel the belief, and even might do damage to a grieving person. Yet the Durants, in this section, seem to suggest that generations of Hindu practitioners mistook a transference of the Christian-defined soul as the process of reincarnation. Religious thinking traps even the finest of intellects. Historians who laud historical Islamic “tolerance” toward subjugated people not only misunderstand the nature of empire but also usually fail to acknowledge the phantasmagoria that was the Islamic conquest into India. Hindus failed to qualify as “people of the book” and, although they later formed a tax base for the Muslim rulers, they never learned to live happily as subjugates. The Durants do not shy from this history, writing, “The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace,

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

133

may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying from within” (p. 459). Butchery, parasitic taxation, and religious persecution became the legacies of Muslim rule in India, with the enlightened reign of Akbar proving to be the exception. Of Aurangzeb (r. 1657–1707), the Durants write that he “converted a handful of timid Hindus to Islam, but he wrecked his dynasty and his country. A few Moslems worshiped him as a saint, but the mute and terrorized millions of India looked upon him as a monster, fled from his tax gatherers, and prayed for his death. During his reign the Mogul empire in India reached its height, extending into the Deccan; but it was a power that had no foundation in the affection of the people, and was doomed to fall at the first hostile and vigorous touch” (p. 475). One cannot be converted from Hinduism to something else; Islam enforced an insincere belief as a way of forcing a psychological burka onto the Hindu practitioners. The attempt at moralization at the end of that excerpt is too much; Aurangzeb ruled as a tyrant for fifty years and died wealthy and powerful; the collapse of the dynasty after his death harmed him not at all. Far better for Aurangzeb to have received his comeuppance in this world rather than for the collapse of his empire to trouble him in Islam’s loaf-around afterlife. Yet too many modern historians, blinded by political correctness and choking on the smoke of falling towers, have failed to recognize Islam’s history as a slaughter-and-subjugate narrative. The Durants recognized Islam’s history for what it was. The Durants seem possessed of the idea that they could write forever, piling minute detail upon minute detail. It’s as if they set out to build a full-sized Egyptian pyramid out of Legos. Instead of providing an overview for Hinduism they write: As Gautama is the Aristotle of India, so Kanada is its Democritus. His name, which means the “atom-eater,” suggests that he may be a legendary construction of the historical imagination. The date at which the Vaishesika system was formulated has not been fixed with excessive accuracy: we are told that it was not before 300 B.C., and not after 800 A.D. Its name came from vishesha, meaning particularity: the world, in Kanada’s theory, is full of a number of things, but they are all, in some form, mere combinations of atoms; the forms change, but the atoms remain indestructible. (p. 536)

134

Chapter 3

Respect for any religious traditions dies out quickly upon the inspection of all religious traditions and even the Durants have a limit. They reach that limit with yoga and the tradition that yogis can engage in astral projection. “The sceptic must admit there is nothing impossible in all this; fools can invent more hypotheses than philosophers can ever refute, and philosophers can often join them in the game. Ecstasy and hallucinations can be produced by fasting and self-mortification, concentration may make one locally or generally insensitive to pain, and there is no telling what reserve energies lurk within the unknown mind” (p. 545). You can probably sense a “however” coming, which it does, and the point is made that the yogis tend to be beggars and likely charlatans. The depth of detail extends to Christianity’s presence in India where “the fascinating figure of Christ has had far more influence . . . than may be measured by the fact that Christianity has converted six per cent of the population in three hundred years” (p. 613). The evidence for this influence was the influence of a nineteenth-century evangelist named Ram Mohun Roy, who studied all the religions and liked Christianity best. The Hindus, write (lament?) the Durants, are simply not very likely to convert and Hinduism remains a cultural mainstay in the subcontinent. “Once everything changed except the East; now there is nothing in the East that does not change” (p. 814). These words describe China as it was in the 1930s, during a time when the cyclical yin-yang rounded its way into darkness. The 1644 collapse of the Ming Dynasty from nomadic Manchus ranks as the last time that China’s dynasty, or anyone’s dynasty, changed over in medieval fashion. Horse-riding nomads became less of a factor after the development of gunpowder weapons and the Qing Dynasty founded by the Manchus survived until the early twentieth century only through the stability brought by a succession of long-lived rulers, and, eventually, when the British decided to protect the Manchu mandate in the nineteenth century against a would-be usurper named Hung Hsiu-chuan (sometimes spelled Xichuan). Hung is described as an “enthusiast” who “came to the conclusion that he had been chosen by God to rid China of idolatry and convert it to Christianity.” He actually claimed to be the brother of Jesus, a delusion sometimes blamed on his having repeatedly failed the Confucian civil service exam. The Durants write,

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

135

Beginning with this modest purpose, Hung finally led a movement to overthrow the Manchus and establish a new dynasty—the T’ai P’ing, or Great Peace. His followers, actuated partly by religious fanaticism, partly by a desire to reform China on Western lines, fought valiantly, smashed idols, slaughtered Chinese, destroyed many old libraries and academies and porcelain works . . . captured Nanking, held it for twelve years (1853–1865), marched on Peking while their leader wallowed in luxury and safety behind them, broke into disorder because of incompetent generalship, were defeated, and fell back into the indiscriminate ocean of Chinese humanity. (p. 805)

Take the last statement as more of a lamentation than insult; Western world historians attempting to understand Asia often find the sheer accumulation of all that DNA to be daunting. Christianity’s missionary outreach has never been held fully accountable for the mess made in China. Few religious leaders who see Asian Communism’s outlawing and persecution of Christian missionaries bother to learn of the damage done by introducing a foreign and individualistic doctrine into a society that valued Confucian Chinese ideals and community. Christianity is to most Chinese what socialism is to most of the people in red-state America, and it is that way for a reason. Still, an estimated 20 million people died in this Christian-inspired rebellion and the topic never receives the attention it deserves. Perhaps Hung should be paired with the midwestern “prophet” Tenskwatawa, the brother of Tecumseh, who also led a failed (but not Christian) rebellion against white encroachment. The problem, perhaps, with studying failed prophets comes from the realization that military failure at the outset equals the death of the religion, and that failed prophets make the successful ones look historically arbitrary in the same way that countless lifeless planets show us that the probabilities indicate life must exist on at least one of these spinning rocks. In 1864, the British saved China from the Heavenly Rebellion, but China no longer controlled her destiny, and when the Qing finally collapsed and the Chinese Revolution of 1911 inaugurated a republic, so too did China’s faith in herself as the Middle Kingdom. The military leader Yuan Shikai died before he could make himself a new emperor. The republican Sun-Yat-sen “proved too idealistic, too good an orator and too poor a statesman, to take the reins and guide his nation to peace. He passed from one plan and theory to another, offended his middle-class

136

Chapter 3

supporters by his apparent acceptance of communism, and retired to Canton” (p. 811). In the days of this volume’s publication, before Mao, the purges, and the tens of millions of bellies bloated in starvation, Sen’s lack of leadership in this time of transition must have seemed egregious. Unfortunately, the Durants turned out to be unlucky in the date of this first volume’s publication. In 1935, China’s worst suffering, from a Japanese military bent on raping and killing a helpless Chinese population in Nanking, was still two years away. The Durants trace the history of Japan, note the militaristic direction of the country since the Americans bullied them into international trade in 1853, and then they write this: Must America fight Japan? Our economic system gives to the investing class so generous a share of the wealth created by science, management, and labor that too little is left to the mass of producers to enable them to buy back as much as they produce; a surplus of goods is created which cries out for the conquest of foreign markets as the only alternative to interrupting production—or spreading the power of consumption—at home. But this is even truer of the Japanese economic system than of our own; it too must conquer foreign markets, not only to maintain its centralized wealth, but to secure the fuels and raw materials indispensable to her industries. By the sardonic irony of history that same Japan which America woke from peaceful agriculture in 1853, and prodded into industry and trade, now turns all her power and subtlety to winning by underselling and to controlling by conquest or diplomacy, precisely those Asiatic markets upon which America has fixed her hopes as potentially the richest outlet for her surplus goods. Usually in history, when two nations have contested for the same markets, the nation that has lost in the economic competition, if it is stronger in resources and armament, has made war upon its enemy. (p. 933)

This passage generates an eerie pleasure in the reading. It also marks the Durants out as astute and brave—they make a clear prediction based on historical analysis that turned out to be true. In this, they mark off a particular style unique to them; at a time when non-Western nations labored through a history that was in a state of flux, the Durants did not just write the history of the East. They engaged with it.

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

137

VOLUME II: THE LIFE OF GREECE Perhaps the Durants wrote their long volume 1 as a way of getting the less interesting work out of the way in the beginning. The depth of attention paid to the nuances of Eastern society argue against that notion, but the fact remains that the next ten volumes of their Story of Civilization focus on the West. Western civilization does offer something special, and it is the case that democratic institutions and the formalization of the scientific method occurred there, and not elsewhere, so the Durants’ decision seems justified. Besides, a case can be made that neither of them had any idea just how long their narrative would be; they both died after the volume about Napoleon, and the ten volumes might just be evidence of the “graphomania” mentioned earlier. In this era where every undergrad who learns the word “Eurocentric” turns it into a rotten tomato to be thrown at academics, this defense of the Durantic approach seems necessary. They begin with Crete, and as was the case with the Middle East, survey the geography first. “Why was it that the second group of historic civilization took form on the Mediterranean, as the first had grown up along the rivers of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and India, as the third would flourish on the Atlantic, and as the fourth may appear on the shores of the Pacific?” (p. 3). Greece, meaning the Peloponnese and surrounding islands, seems less suited for civilization than either the banks of the Tigris and Euphrates, or the Indus River Valley, or the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. Yet the Durants write, “What drew men into the Aegean was its islands” (p. 4). They cite the beauty of the islands as the attractant; a rare case where aesthetics, as opposed to seed sizes and river flooding patterns, get mentioned as an historical shaping factor. Women are involved in the activity of society in Greek life more than elsewhere: “The Minoan woman does not put up with any Oriental seclusion, any purdah or harem; there is no sign of her being limited to certain quarters of the house, or to the home” (p. 10). Women worked with men and shopped with them in the marketplace. Was this because Greek women were simply more independent minded, or did something occur in Asian civilizations that early on mangled the relationship between the sexes and left women in a state of confinement?

138

Chapter 3

Perhaps the reason that Greek civilization developed into something special was because “[a]t its height this civilization is surprisingly urban. The Iliad speaks of Crete’s ‘ninety cities,’ and the Greeks who conquer them are astonished at their teeming populations; even today the student stands in awe before the ruined mazes of paved and guttered streets, intersecting lanes, and countless shops or houses . . .” (p. 11). By now, you can probably guess that the ellipses used in the quote here stand in for a long train of polysyllabic words. The point stands, though, even if it’s not expressly stated: the Greeks lacked the endless rice fields and desert plains that characterized Eastern civilization, and cities create the most impressive cultures. Greece certainly did give Western civilization a classical inheritance but not because they wanted to. The Greeks valued the phalanx and power more than philosophy and plays. “Like the Romans a thousand years after them, the Achaeans look down upon literary culture as effeminate degeneration; they use writing under protest, and the only literature they know is the martial lay and unwritten song of the troubadour” (p. 45). This confirms the suspicion that Greek men mostly acted like meatheads. Marvel at this sentence-as-paragraph: Homer shows them to us tilling the soil, sniffing with pleasure the freshly turned dark earth, running their eyes with pride along the furrows they have ploughed so straight, winnowing the wheat, irrigating the fields, and banking up the streams against the winter floods; he makes us feel the despair of the peasant whose months of toil are washed out by “the torrent at the full that in swift course shatters the dykes, neither can the long line of mounds hold it in, nor the walls of the fruitful orchards stay its sudden coming.” (p. 45)

The sentence seemed a bit much even before the semicolon after the phrase “winter floods” but somehow stretches on to include a whole other idea followed by a quote. The pages that follow include detailed accounts of the Greek form of currency and the legal codes created by Draco and Solon. Philosophy makes its appearance on page 134 with the Ionian city-states. “It was in this stimulating environment that Greece first developed two of its most characteristic gifts to the world—science and philosophy” (p. 135). Again, the reader must wade through three and a half long paragraphs to reach a follow-up connection between this sentence and an actual statement about Greek science and philosophy.

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

139

Even then, when the subject turns to Thales, the founder of pre-Socratic philosophy, the reader is treated to a thorough biography of the man, and then this: “The world, [Thales] thought, was a hemisphere resting on an endless expanse of water, and the earth was a flat disk floating on the flat side of the interior of this hemisphere. We are reminded of Goethe’s remark that a man’s vice (or errors) are common to him with his epoch, but his virtues (or insights) are his own” (p. 137). When reading classics of any kind, one must be patient. Moby Dick, for some reason, includes the random insertion of fish soup recipes. The Durants seemed to finally be getting to their point when Goethe’s insight gets dropped, fish-souprecipe-like, into the narrative. The descriptions of Greek government impress the most. Did you know that, in Athens the Council divides itself into ten prytanies, or committees, each of fifty members; and each prytany presides over the Council for the day; this position, the highest in the state, is therefore open by lot and turn to any citizen; Athens has three hundred presidents every year. (p. 257)

The Athenians chose their heads of state in the same way that modern Americans select people for jury duty, the thinking being that society should keep all people (all men, at least) prepared to serve in government. Furthermore, one can read sections of this volume and see how ahead of their time the Durants were, as in their treatment of Greek mathematics, which “never achieved a symbol for zero. Like our own it betrayed its Oriental origin by taking from the Egyptians the decimal system of counting by tens, and from the Babylonian, in astronomy and geography, the duodecimal or sexagesimal system of counting by twelves or sixties, as still on our clocks, globes, and charts” (p. 338). The sheer number of insights included in their books works against any individual section receiving the attention it deserves. The connection between the watch on one’s wrist and the Babylonians reveals the means by which cultural achievements become absorbed and passed on. Inexplicably, the Durants conclude this treatment with “All in all, the Greeks were as excellent in geometry as they were poor in arithmetic” (p. 338). This is a sentence for a seventh-grade short essay. Small sentences like this grow like mold under the surface of the heavy paragraphs in all of the Story of Civilization volumes, but to point out more than one would be petty.

140

Chapter 3

Petty because, after that moldy sentence, the next full paragraph is this one: It was part of the struggle between religion and science that the study of astronomy was forbidden by Athenian law at the height of the Periclean age. At Acragas Empedocles suggested that light takes time to pass from one point to another. At Elea Parmenides announced the sphericity of the earth, divided the planet into five zones, and observed that the moon always has its bright portion turned toward the sun. At Thebes Philoalaus the Pythagorean deposed the earth from the center of the universe, and reduced it to the status of one among many planets revolving about a “central fire.” Leucippus, pupil of Philolaus, attributed the origin of the stars to the incandescent combustion and concentration of material “drawn onward in the universal movement of the circular vortex.” At Abdera Democritus, pupil of Leucippus and student of Babylonian lore, described the Milky Way as a multitude of small stars, and summarized astronomic history as the periodical collision and destruction of an infinite number of worlds. At Chios Oenopides discovered the obliquity of the ecliptic. Nearly everywhere among the Greek colonies in the fifth century saw scientific developments remarkable in a period almost devoid of scientific instruments. (p. 339)

Friends, there’s a footnote to that paragraph. The phrase “obliquity of the ecliptic” could belong to Yeats and is starred in the text so that the reader can scan to the bottom and see that “[t]his is the Vortex that Aristophanes, in The Clouds, so effectively satirized as Socrates’ substitute for Zeus.” Were the Durants worried that one of their readers, upon reading “obliquity of the ecliptic” would, lightbulb hovering over her head, immediately run to the closest collected works of Aristophanes to see the satire of Socrates and, then, return to the The Story of Civilization Volume II with a knowing grin while thinking “Will and Ariel you missed that one”? Such a throwaway footnote reveals the authors to be two of the most genuinely educated people to have ever lived. Greek politicians appreciated philosophy no more than any other bureaucrats in history. They turned against one philosopher named Anaxagoras who “[h]aving no taste for hemlock . . . fled to Lampasacus on the Hellespont where he kept himself alive by teaching philosophy.” Socrates, aged seventy during his trial, decided that whatever years he might have had left allotted to him were not worth the shame of either running away or issuing an “I’m sorry” to his fellow Athenians. Anaxagoras

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

141

chose to take what remained of his natural years and died at aged seventy-three. Socrates gained literary immortality for his decision, but Anaxagoras got the better deal. Nothing that comes posthumous is worth a thing to a “humous” person. Greek individuality was, in some cases, rather too individual: “There was no general Greek calendar: every state had its own; and each of the four possible points for beginning a new year was adopted somewhere in Greece; even the months changed their names across frontiers” (p. 341). The tension between local and imperial control hardly existed in these days before the Delian League; no central power could claim any power. In such facts, one can foresee the tension in the modern European Union. Europe seems to be historically unsuited for unity. Any discussion of Greek disunity ultimately leads to the Persian Wars as detailed by Herodotus, who gets this treatment: “His ignorance is as wide as his learning, his credulity as great as his wisdom. He thinks that the semen of Ethiopians is black, accepts the legend that the Lacedaemonians won battles because they had brought the bones of Orestes to Sparta, and reports incredible figures for the size of Xerxes’ army, the casualties of the Persians, and the almost woundless victories of the Greeks” (p. 431). Yes, yes, yes, but Herodotus is a joy to read precisely because of the gossipy details and the nonsense; reading Herodotus is like switching back and forth between PBS and reality television. What can the reader make of a statement like this: Greek literature is “modern,” or rather contemporary; we find it hard to understand Dante or Milton, but Euripides and Thucydides are kin to us mentally, and belong to our age. And that is because, though myths may differ, reason remains the same, and the life of reason makes brothers of its lovers in all times, and everywhere. (p. 436)

The willingness to criticize Milton might be a test to weed out literary poseurs from those who really engage with a work. Samuel Johnson wrote, “Paradise Lost is one of those books which the reader admires and lays down, and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is. Its perusal is a duty rather than a pleasure” (p. 711). The public seem to prefer the idea of Dante’s work more than the work itself. Video games, popular novels, and several movies all have grown out of a general interest in Dante’s work, but one can imagine that very few of the gamers who enjoyed the 2010 Xbox game titled Inferno made any attempt to read Dante’s classic.

142

Chapter 3

Perhaps, though, we recognize the Greeks as being closer to us in philosophy, temperament, and literary tastes because modern Americans simply connect better with people who recognized the importance of being public. The Christian era, roughly from the time of Constantine to the Renaissance, produced too much self-hating gloom. Herotodus was more fun than the Apostle Paul, and Achilles a better literary character than Jesus. Dante and Milton, their literary talents shaped by different variations of a self-hating creed, wrote like they believed: Christian life is an endurance where the reward is completion; the pagans lived more for the moment than for eternity, more for the page than for the volume. Chapter 8, “The Suicide of Greece,” is titled to provoke. Suicide means to kill “one” self, not a collection of selves. The Durants choose words with deliberation; the statement here indicates that Greek civilization should be studied as a whole in the sense that it contributed to the creation of Western thought. A single entity in that regard, its destruction is the tragedy that the Spartans and Athenians could not see their unifying connections. This chapter is introduced with “Let us, before facing the melancholy spectacle of the Peloponnesian War, glance at the Greek world outside of Attica” (p. 437). This section is reminiscent of the way in which Benjamin Franklin, in his autobiography, both lamented the death of his four-yearold son to smallpox and regretted not having the boy vaccinated, all in one paragraph. The reader can feel the desire in the writer to be done with the topic, to verify the existence of something painful in just a few words before moving on. History can only be a “melancholy spectacle” if the historians establish an emotional connection with the time period, yet this emotional unwillingness to face the “suicide of Greece” leads to the most succinct and dramatic writing of the volume. The destruction of such a culture should bring about some wailing. The thought of how “[t]he Athenian fleet laid waste the coastal towns of the Peloponnesus, while the Spartan army invaded Attica, seized the crops, and ruined the soil” (p. 411) invokes horror. Having driven out the Persians, the Greeks then inflicted a greater destruction on each other than what either Darius or Xerxes could have. Pericles brought the Athenians inside the city walls, but plague destroyed his plan to simply wait out the Spartan phalanx.

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

143

Enter Alcibiades, the original personification of the word “flamboyant,” someone who was “the most famous man in Athens, admired for his eloquence, his good looks, his versatile genius, even his faults and crimes” (p. 44). Sexy beasts who behave badly always pull the most attention and “[t]he wit and pranks of the young man became the shocked and fascinated gossip of Athens” (p. 444). We then read of what kind of shoes Alcibiades wore, but just before the narrative path gets choked by the word-weeds, there is a clearing: “It was the imagination of Alcibiades that ruined the work of Pericles. Athens had recovered from the plague and war, and trade was again bringing her wealth of the Aegean” (p. 445). Sicily, thought Alcibiades, could be conquered by the Athenian navy and this would bring in the riches that would allow Athens to dominate over the Spartans: Athenian money would defeat Spartan masculinity, and trade would beat the tirade. But Alcibiades seemed suspended in adolescence; he and his sailors got drunk and, the night before they set sail, they defaced some of the sacred Athenian statues and even hacked off the wieners of the gods. He said he didn’t do it, but the whole episode seemed to dampen enthusiasm for the Sicilian venture. Alcibiades set sail, but back home in Athens new evidence was found and Athenian rage festered into action. The Athenian Assembly “sent the swift galley Salaminia to overtake Alcibiades and bring him back for trial. Alcibiades accepted the summons and went aboard the Salaminia; but when the vessel stopped at Thurii, he secretly made his way to shore, and escaped” (p. 447). A man of dubious patriotism, Alcibiades presented himself as a traitor to the Spartans and proposed to them essentially the same plan that he had presented to the Athenians. The Spartans implemented Alcibiades’s idea and they overtook the lucrative precious-metals mines of Syracuse; this deprived the Athenians of their major source of war funding. An understanding of economics was at the center of the plan, and this reveals its brilliance. Alcibiades realized that if a Spartan victory looked likely, then the city-states that were already inclined to hate paying Athenian taxes would declare for the Spartans. The plan worked but Alcibiades seduced a Spartan queen and duly knocked her up. He might have gotten his jollies with some slave woman, but Alcibidaes’s lover “proudly whispered to her friends that he was the father. He excused himself to his intimates on the ground that he could not resist the chance to establish his race as kings over Laconia” (p.

144

Chapter 3

447). This may be greatest excuse ever for cuckolding a husband, but surely the romantic Alcibiades knew his Iliad; Spartan kings don’t take this sort of thing lightly. Menelaus called in his Greek alliances to make war with Troy over Paris and Helen. King Agis, the Spartan king who was away at war, was unlikely to raise a child of dubious parentage. Alcibiades, once an Athenian and then a Spartan, suddenly discovered his true alliance was with Persia. He should be better known as an example of insincerity in politics. Later, in a chapter titled “The Life of Greece,” the Durants drop a line that reveals the entire work to be a great product of genius: Plato himself professed never to have written any technical treatises, and Aristotle refers to the teaching in the Academy as Plato’s “unwritten doctrine.” How far this differed from the teaching of the Dialogues we do not know. Probably these were undertaken originally as a recreation, and in a half-humorous vein. It is one of the playful ironies of history that the philosophical works most reverenced and studied in European and American universities today were composed in an attempt to make philosophy intelligible to the layman by binding it up with a human personality. (p. 513)

Plato, frustrated by the inability of the masses to make sense of his opaque philosophies, generated the Socratic dialogues so that ordinary people might find them more accessible. The academicians of the modern universities read these secondary works, playfully intended, as weighty classics. In this way, we can categorize Plato as a modern physicist who writes in analogy and prose for the purpose of “popularizing” dense mathematical concepts. Maybe the student of history must be always aware of context. A philosophical dialogue might, today, be seen as secondary to the hard work of reading and study. In the days of the Greeks, not much existed to study, except what could be gleaned from the natural world through the five senses and what could be understood by sharing any of those insights with someone else over a cup of wine. Socrates talked so much because there was so little to read, and he could tear down the “learned” so easily because they had so little to learn. This was not an information age. Volume 2 catalogues Alexander, but it’s clear that conquerors rate less than philosophers and artists. “It is not necessary to our purpose to tell again the story of [Alexander’s] victories. He met the first Persian contin-

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

145

gent at the river Granicus, and overwhelmed it” (p. 544). Such a truncated statement, about a character who receives too many words from “sham-pow!” military enthusiasts, reveals the horror that a cultivated couple must have felt regarding the lionization of conquerors. After Alexander’s death, Egypt, governed by Alexander’s general, Ptolemy, became a center for ideas. Too many ideas exist in the past to waste time on the study of conquest. “By far the most interesting aspect of Ptolemaic Egypt is its extensive experiment in state socialism” (p. 587). Surely this was interesting in the 1930s, when this volume and other extensive experiments in state socialism came into being. The Egyptians needed socialism because “the conditions of tillage in Egypt required more co-operation, more unison of action in time and space, than individual ownership could be expected to provide” (p. 588). To those of us who understand socialist agriculture through the prism of Five-Year Plans, and Great Leaps Forward, a statement of its efficacy can be jarring. Too much has been written about socialism’s failures. Capitalism’s agricultural heyday occurred because of the Haber process in Germany in the early twentieth century. Nitrogen now could be taken from the air and put into the ground, which increased crop yields. This should be seen as a delineating moment in history, but it’s not as politically sexy as the capitalism versus socialism debate. Socialist agriculture, for the Ptolemies, amounted to “[t]he centralization of economic management in the hands of the government, and the institution of forced labor made possible great public works of flood control, road construction, irrigation, and building, and prepared the way for the engineering feats of Rome” (pp. 588–89). Small attention must be paid to this because some modern academics believe that “Big History” may still end the way that Marx sort of thought it would, because nothing else can stave off climate change. Sun-scorched Ptolemaic Egypt might provide an historical analogy for socialist agriculture in at least two ways. At this point, only two volumes into the analysis, an authorial decision must be made (and made with even the most devoted reader in mind). Nine more volumes, each roughly as thick as the J. M. Roberts single-volume History of the World, await. The reading sometimes feels like walking through a marsh, where one’s foot gets sucked down into the words, tangled in a dense vegetation of verbiage.

146

Chapter 3

VOLUME III: CAESAR AND CHRIST Volume 3 contains only 672 pages and ends with the words, in all caps, THANK YOU, PATIENT READER. The politeness is endearing, but the sentiment indicates a realization that the narrative lacks boundaries. “The Carthaginians were Semites, akin in blood and features to the ancient Jews. Their language now and then struck a Hebraic note, as when it called the chief magistrates shofetes—the Hebrew shophetim, or judges. The men grew beards, but usually shaved the upper lip with bronze razors” (p. 41). Word translations, details about facial hair, and even the metal used when shaving the septum are covered in a couple of sentences. We learn of Sulla, who first marched an army into Rome (Caesar later copied this), and gossipy details about his life. “Men had long since called him Sulla Felix, Sulla the Happy, because he had won every battle, known every pleasure, reached every power, and lived without fear or regret. He married five wives, divorced four, and eked out their inadequacy with mistresses” (p. 127). They repeat the Plutarchian narrative, probably apocryphal, that Sulla’s stomach erupted from an infestation of lice. Sulla’s dictatorship only served to belabor a point: Roman democracy was finished. The players then took their positions on the stage, Pompey in Rome and Caesar in the barbarian north where he “took it for granted that his liberation of Gaul was also a conquest of it: he began at once to reorganize it under Roman authority, with the excuse that in no other way could it be protected against Germany” (p. 175). Rome needed rescuing, as “[a] century of revolution had broken down a selfish and narrow aristocracy, but had put no other government in its place. Unemployment, bribery, bread and circuses had corrupted the Assembly into an ill-informed and passion-ridden mob obviously incapable of ruling itself, much less an empire” (p. 180). Caesar crossed the Rubicon, then double-crossed Pompey, who himself crossed the Mediterranean to the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt. Of Cleopatra, the Durants tell us that she “was a Macedonian Greek by origin, and more probably blonde than brunette. She was not particularly beautiful; but the grace of her carriage, the vivacity of her body and her mind, the variety of her accomplishments, the suavity of her manners, the very melody of her voice, combined with her royal position to make her a heady wine even for a Roman general” (p. 187). Such lines

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

147

must have gotten snuck in by Will Durant while the missus was out of the room. This is Cleopatra the nymphet, and when Caesar, old enough to be Cleopatra’s grandfather, leaves a little Caesar in her womb, we modern readers must justify this either with the conceit of “times were different” or with the thought that Caesar’s overwhelming biography overwhelms the incident into a small detail. (The latter is too often used as an excuse for history-shaking.) At any rate, Cleopatra came to rule a shabby Greek kingdom in one of the world’s more god-forsaken regions. Shakespeare, in Antony and Cleopatra, conjured her into a character in early middleage who struggled to jog up the street, all while struggling to keep her looks. In that play, she died a diva, after (girlishly, according to Harold Bloom) inquiring whether the poisonous asp she intended to use as means of suicide would eat her. The orgy of stabbing that ended Caesar’s ambitions “was one of the major tragedies of history. Not merely in the sense that it interrupted a great labor of statesmanship and led to fifteen years more of chaos and war; civilization survived and Augustus completed what Caesar had begun. This was a tragedy in the sense that both parties were right: the conspirators in thinking that Caesar meditated monarchy, and Caesar in thinking that disorder and empire had made monarchy inevitable” (p. 198). Ambiguity can be tragic; historians are in the judgment business and only rarely can one side with both the knifer and the knifed. About 350 pages fit between Caesar and Christ. Caligula, Nero, and Aurelius all make their appearances, as does a “total history” of the working classes of Rome. When Jesus is finally introduced it’s with this paragraph: Did Christ exist? Is the life story of the founder of Christianity the product of human sorrow, imagination, and hope—a myth comparable to the legends of Krishna, Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Dionysus, and Mithras? Early in the eighteenth century the circle of Bolingbroke, shocking even Voltaire, privately discussed the possibility that Jesus never lived. Volney propounded the same doubt in his Ruins of Empire in 1791. Napoleon, meeting the German scholar Wieland in 1808, asked him no petty question of politics or war, but did he believe in the historicity of Christ? (p. 553)

148

Chapter 3

The question “Did Christ exist?” threatened (and threatens) to remove Christianity entirely from Western civilization. It credits the Durants that they begin their study of Jesus by examining, first, the historical argument for the existence of Jesus. This episode of history receives less attention than it deserves, with American historians tending to see biology and not history as being in opposition to biblical literalism. That fact alone indicates that evolutionary theory might actually be the safe way to publicly criticize the Bible. Such a tack allows one to disbelieve in the already hard-to-believe tales of the Old Testament, while leaving the good parts intact. Between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, Jesus was put on trial again and “[t]he result of two centuries of discussion seemed to be the annihilation of Christ” (p. 554). Ancient Rome took no notice at all of the life, trial, and execution of Jesus. The Durants point out that no nonChristian writer took any notice of the Christians until Josephus in about the year 93, and that reference in itself has been taken apart by historians who believe that the timing of the praise “renders the passage suspect, and Christian scholars reject it as almost certainly an interpolation” (p. 554). By “Christian scholars” one assumes that what is meant is “scholars of Christianity” rather that believers who are scholars. Yet the Durants seek to protect a mustard seed, stating that early references to believers in Jesus “prove the existence of Christians rather than of Christ; but unless we assume the latter we are driven to the improbable hypothesis that Jesus was invented in one generation, moreover, we must suppose that the Christian community in Rome had been established some years before 52, to merit the attention of an imperial decree” (p. 106). Two dozen gospels exist that we know of, and the four that made it into the Bible tell a contradictory tale. Jesus, like Mohammad, did not seem to know anything outside the boundaries of what an average person living in the desert during that era would have known. “Did Jesus exist?” and “Did Christ exist?” turn out to be two very different questions, and the Durants err considerably by equating them. It could very well be that a person named Jesus created a small following and it might even be the case that the Romans crucified him, but neither of these can be definitively proven given our current sources. Even if they were proven, neither fact would make Jesus a messiah or Christ.

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

149

The authors ultimately conclude “[t]hat a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels” (p. 557). On the contrary, Jesus preached hellfire and damnation for those who refused to listen; his was a passive-aggressive message that, if believed, condemns billions of individuals to torment for eternity. This fearsome creed provided, later, the foundations for the papacy’s powers of excommunication. The church would claim that it could feed the fires of Hell with anyone who took a heretical position. Constantine melded this doctrine with Rome’s military power, and Christianity then adopted a medieval feudal structure. This structure, more than any core message, allowed the church to develop into the most influential single institution of the Middle Ages. Rome’s borders weakened and its internal energies seemed spent. When the Huns rose in Central Asia, they drove the weaker “barbarians” of the steppes westward: Externally the fall of the Western Roman Empire was hastened by the expansion and migration of the Hsiung-nu, or Huns, in northwestern Asia. Defeated in their eastward advance by Chinese armies and the Chinese Wall, they turned westward and about A.D. 355 reached the Volga and the Oxus. Their pressure forced the Sarmations of Russia to move into the Balkans; the Goths, so harassed, moved again up the Roman frontiers. They were admitted across the Danube to settle in Moesia (376); maltreated there by Roman officials, they revolted, defeated a large Roman army at Adrianople (378), and for a time threatened Constantinople. In 400 Alaric led the Visigoths over the Alps into Italy, and in 410 they took and sacked Rome. (pp. 669–70)

The paragraph, as you probably guessed, extends for several more sentences. Summation be damned, every small group of new immigrants into Rome must be detailed and dated. What happened was this: Migrant peoples flowed westward as they ran from the Huns, and the Romans could not assimilate them. The Roman government tried to arm the barbarians and use them for defense against other barbarians, but the newcomers often turned weapons against Rome itself and this brought down the empire. When the Western Roman Empire collapsed, the church remained, and Islam was about to be created. An “Age of Faith” awaited Europe, North Africa, and Central Asia.

150

Chapter 3

Volume 4 debuted in 1949, and Will Durant’s dedication now includes his wife, son, daughter-in-law, and grandson. Did the authors feel any urgency at this point to finish their project before old age and/or death interrupted the narrative? Hindsight tells us that the Durants are not yet halfway through their work, and, if you welcome a grandchild into the world at the halfway point in your multivolume work on world history, would you not feel a little uneasy about the prospect of finishing? VOLUME IV: THE AGE OF FAITH Volume 4, “The Age of Faith,” begins with Julian the Apostate. The previously mentioned discussion of Jesus/Christ’s historical existence seems lost in the irony of the fact that Christianity only spread, seemingly arbitrarily, by synthesizing with Rome’s traditional paganism. Only Julian the Apostate, the figure who introduces volume 4, made an effort on behalf of Rome’s traditional polytheism. “In this Mediterranean world of the fourth century, where the state depended so much on religion, ecclesiastical affairs were in such turmoil that the government felt called upon to interfere even in the mysteries of theology” (p. 7). Christianity, still amorphous, needed the Roman state more than vice versa. The Roman hammer and nail that had once supposedly executed Jesus was now used to carve out a coherent theology from a block of contradictions. As Roman emperors called council after council, Christian theology slowly took on a shape, and, like humanity and God, the Christian Church also took on the image of its maker. The church, male dominated and hierarchical, looked like Rome. For that matter, Christianity started to look a lot like paganism: Fourth-century paganism took many forms: Mithraism, Neoplatonism, Stoicism, Cynicism, and the local cults of municipal or rustic gods. Mithraism had lost ground, but Neoplatonism was still a power in religion and philosophy. Those doctrines to which Plotinus had given a shadowy form—of a triune spirit binding all reality, of a Logos or intermediary deity who had done the work of creation, of soul as divine and matter as flesh and evil, of spheres of existence along whose invisible stairs the soul had fallen from God to man and might ascend from man to God—these mystic ideas left their mark on the apostles Paul and John, had many imitators among Christians, and molded many Christian heresies. (p. 9)

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

151

Some historians argue that paganism molded the orthodox doctrine as well as the heresies. Beloved gods simply became saints. Was the Holy Trinity really considered to be a doctrine central to belief, or was proclaiming a belief in this Nicene Creed instead a statement of loyalty to the powers-that-be? Authority everywhere does seem to value displays of obedience to arbitrary doctrines and symbols. Remember that volume 1 detailed Islam’s arrival and movement; chapter 8 of volume 4 reintroduces the reader to Mohammad. The theme of pre- and post-monotheism remains relevant here. Before Mohammad, “[t]he pre-Moslem Arab was usually illiterate, but he loved poetry only next to horses, women, and wine. He had no scientists or historians, but he had a heady passion for eloquence, for fine and correct speech, and intricately patterned verse” (p. 158). Was this passage a proxy description for Mohammad? Again, it may simply be that non-Muslim historical scholars simply have trouble taking Islam seriously. The claim that the Qu’ran was delivered to Mohammad from the mouth of God seems less credible than that the Qu’ran originated in the imagination of Mohammad. Consider this passage: As the style of the Qu’ran is modeled on that of the Hebrew prophets, so its contents are largely an adaptation of Jewish doctrines, tales, and themes. The Qu’ran, which excoriates the Jews, is the sincerest flattery they have ever received. Its basic tenets—monotheism, prophecy, faith, repentance, the Last Judgement, heaven and hell—seem Jewish in proximate origin, even in form and dress. (p. 184)

These words, published just two years after the foundation of a Jewish state, amount to a perfumed insult as great as a cartoon depiction of Mohammad. Is the Qu’ran a copy of the Torah? Is this holy book really just a compilation of half-understood religious ideas cobbled together with repetitive statements? The tone of the Qu’ran does differ from the Torah and the New Testament in the sense that its repetitiveness makes sense given the context. Mohammad supposedly spoke the Qu’ran between 610 and 632, with each passage being spoken, presumably, to different groups of people. Some of them would not have heard all the words. In that sense, the Qu’ran reads like what it claims to be: the spoken words of one man over a period of time slightly longer than two decades.

152

Chapter 3

In another sense, the Qu’ran claims to be the word of Allah, so what is not in the Qu’ran—nothing about germs, North America, physics, or how to build a nuclear submarine—draws the claim itself into question. Much of this volume rewrites content already presented in volume 1, a necessity for a world history that purports to make each volume discrete and self-contained. Islam’s military rise led to the “Grandeur and Decline of Islam” (chapter 14), which thoroughly (how else?) describes the period of falsafah or Islamic philosophy and learning, which took place, in fits and starts, between 800 and 1300. After 9/11, scholars and philosophers discovered an interest in Islam. Books about the House of Wisdom and about Islam’s “tolerant” Abbasid history came replete with lazy assumptions and shoddy history. New atheists, philosophers in a new movement that enjoyed public acclaims (the joy of the movement died with its wittiest proponent, Christopher Hitchens, in 2011), criticized Islam as a hateful and medieval creed that glorified suicidal martyrdom while hating the progress created through science and the Enlightenment. The Durants got to the first movement first, and they did so in a scholarly manner far more impressive than anything developed by Islam’s apologists. Islam was a religion that catered to the worst elements of masculinity: The Moslem had no respect for celibacy, and never dreamed of perpetual continence as an ideal state; most Moslem saints married and had children. Perhaps Islam erred in the opposite direction, and carried marriage to an extreme. It gave the sexual appetite so many outlets within the law that prostitution diminished for a time under Mohammed and the Successors; but exhaustion requires stimulation, and dancing girls soon play a prominent role in the life of even the most married Moslem male. Moslem literature, being intended only for male eyes and ears, was sometimes as loose as male conversation in a Christian land; it contained a superabundance of deliberately erotic books and Moslem medical works gave much attention to aphrodisiac. In strict Mohammedan law fornication and pederasty were to be punished with death; but the growth of wealth brought an easier ethic, punished fornication with thirty strokes, and winked at the spread of homosexual love. A class of professional homosexuals (mukhannath) arose who imitated the costume and conduct of women, plaited their hair, dyed their nails with henna, and performed obscene dances. The Caliph Suleiman ordered the mukhannath of Mecca castrated; and the Caliph al-Hadi, coming upon two women attendants in Lesbian rela-

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

153

tions, beheaded them on the spot. Despite such discouragement homosexualism made rapid progress; a few years after al-Hadi it was prevalent at Harun’s court, and in the songs of his favorite poet Abu Nuwas. The Moslem male, separate from women before marriage by purdah, and surfeited with them after marriage by the harem, fell into irregular relations; and women, secluded from all men but relatives, slipped into similar perversions. (p. 220)

Keep your House of Wisdom scholars, your development of mathematics, and your Arabic translations of Aristotle and give readers more of this. This treatment of Islamic sexual mores (written with mid-twentiethcentury prejudice against same-sex relations, where the phrasing was not yet even exact) indicates that scholars tended to alternatively view Islamic sexuality as both permissive and restrictive. At the same time, the Durants possess a grandparently wisdom regarding sexuality; there’s no holding it back. Sexual separation and repression simply results in the cultivation of homosexual behavior. It’s something that happens whenever the sexes are separated for prolonged periods—in prison, in boarding schools, or on long-sailing ships. This discussion of Islamic sexuality remains relevant. Arabic men frequently hold hands in public as a sign of friendship. In a society where homosexuality remains wholly unacknowledged, the sight of two men holding hands can only send a message of close friendship. In 2010, the admirable PBS program Frontline ran an episode titled “The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan,” which showed that the grooming and prostitution of pubescent boys remains a staple feature of the sexual lives of Islamic men from all stations of life. The show is too repulsive to watch, and displays a depraved culture that, apparently, has existed for over 1,200 years. There are insights here that matter for historians. “The Hanseatic League was for a century an agency of civilization. It cleared the Baltic and North Seas of pirates, dredged and straightened waterways, charted currents and tides, marked off channels, built lighthouses, ports, and canals, established a codified maritime law, and in general substituted order for chaos in northern European trade” (p. 618). The significance of the Hanseatic League does not always feature in historical narratives of the time, and one can easily imagine that historians might have chosen the league, rather than the House of Wisdom, as a more significant causal agent for the “rise of the West” that was coming.

154

Chapter 3

That’s enough about volume 4; it’s too long to encapsulate effectively without falling into a “Moby Dick is about hunting a white whale” summation fallacy. VOLUME V: THE RENAISSANCE: A HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION IN ITALY FROM 1304–1576 AD Volume 5, published in 1953, includes this uneasy paragraph in the introduction: If circumstances permit, a sixth volume probably under the title of The Age of the Reformation, will appear three or four years hence, covering the history of Christian, Islamic, and Judaic civilization outside of Italy from 1300, and in Italy from 1576 to 1648. The enlarged scale of treatment, and the imminence of senility, make it advisable to plan an end of the series with a seventh volume, The Age of Reason, which may carry the tale to the beginning of the nineteenth century. (p. viii)

Just when the reader is ready to start refraining the phrase “Are we there yet?” the Durants inform us that their volumes will suddenly upscale and that they intend at least another comprehensive volume on the same time period. Then, there’s the bit about “the imminence of senility.” With this phrase, the Durants announce to us that they intend to keep this going right up to the point when they buy a dozen cats and start mumbling about the tapioca pudding being too hard. (We now know that their project was not even halfway finished!) We have seen, in previous volumes, intimations of the esteem in which the authors held classic art, and volume 5 begins with Petrarch and Boccacio, the first a poet laureate and the second a prose artist of the plague. Oh, yes, there is detail and, at times, the narrative loses any sense of literature. We are watching facts intertwine with facts, and words send spores into the wind, only to grow more words: It was in Florence that Italian literature achieved its first and greatest triumphs. There Guinizelli and Cavalcanti, in the late thirteenth century gave the sonnet its finished form; not there, but longing for it, Dante the Florentine struck the first and last true note of Italian epic poetry; there Boccacio composed the supreme work of Italian prose, and Giovanni Villani wrote the most modern of medieval chronicles. Visiting Rome for the jubilee of 1300, and moved like Gibbon by the ruins of a mighty past, Vilani thought for a while of recording its history; then,

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

155

judging that Rome had been sufficiently commemorated, he turned back to his native haunts, and resolved “to bring into this volume . . . all the events of the city of Florence . . . and give in full the deeds of the Florentines, and briefly the notable affairs of the rest of the world.” (p. 28)

These are well-known histories now; the Medicis feature here as the banking family that funds the creation of new artistic techniques. At the beginning, art “was still groping and immature” (p. 99), but painters began to focus their attention on dimension. Historians are right to focus on the Renaissance as a period of artistic change that somehow speaks to a general broadening of intellectual perspective. Medieval art, constrained to two dimensions, often features figures with “halos” that look like space helmets, and ladders that appear to be held up by nothing but empty space. Angels often pop their heads in from above to see what’s going on. Facial characteristics vary not at all from person to person. Byzantine art, with its mosaics, looks little better than what their less civilized Christian counterparts of the West could create. When Mary is depicted with an infant or toddler Jesus, the proportions are all off and this has the effect of making the images of Mary with Christ child (Jesus, at any age, was always depicted with a cross in his halo/space helmet) seem abnormal. In real life, the heads of babies and toddlers are enormous in proportion to the body; their heads practically boggle back and forth. The body does not become proportional with this big noggin until the early teen years. Byzantine artists, however, depicted Jesus with the proportions of a shrunken adult, which makes him look not at all like a cute infant. If medieval art tells us anything, it’s that art is hard to make, particularly when the human form is represented. One suspects that the artists of Muslim civilization may have played up the prohibition on depicting humans simply as a way of avoiding the whole enterprise. To compare a medieval painting with, say, Raphael’s School of Athens (1511) is to see an artistic change so profound that it must have been produced by a deeper societal shift. It’s the equivalent of watching a science-fiction movie from the 1950s back-to-back with a science-fiction movie from sixty or seventy years later. When special effects move from actors as aliens in rubber suits to screen-filling terrors created by computer graphics, and when UFOs

156

Chapter 3

evolve from pie plates on strings to three-dimensional crafts that penetrate your brain, this signals that some kind of larger revolution must have occurred in society. Thorough treatments of lesser-known historical figures (looking at you, Francesco Sforza) follow in sections about Savanorola and Milan. Long biographical sentences introduce the reader to historical figures with no psalms given to the gods of succinctness. Da Vinci gets an entire chapter, as he should. Da Vinci is generally described by the public as a “Renaissance Man” only to differentiate him from the content-area specialists who become prominent in specific fields after the Scientific Revolution. This description aptly captures Da Vinci’s all-encompassing intellect: But indeed he was interested in everything. All postures and actions of the human body, all expression of the face in young and old, all the organs and movements of animals and plants from the waving of wheat in the field to the flight of birds in the air, all the cyclical erosion and elevation of mountains, all the currents and eddies of water and wind, the moods of the weather, the shades of the atmosphere, and the inexhaustible kaleidoscope of the sky—all these seemed endlessly wonderful to him; repetition never dulled for him their marvel and mystery; he filled thousands of pages with observations concerning them, and drawings of their myriad forms. When the monks of San Scopeto asked him to paint a picture for their chapel (1481), he made so many sketches for so many features and forms of it that he lost himself in the details, and never finished The Adoration of the Magi. Nevertheless it is one of his greatest paintings. (p. 201)

Da Vinci could not concentrate for long on one thing. His was a passion of fractals; it shattered and came together, his attention diverting into endless possibilities. Only occasionally could he hold the center long enough to actually accomplish anything of merit. We celebrate the man for what he was, a skittish intellectual who mostly sketched and who only occasionally managed to fill in his work with paint and attention. To wish that he could have done more is pointless. (On an unrelated point, should educated people adhere to an unspoken agreement to never declare anything as “the greatest” as the Durants do here? It comes across sounding like a fourth-grader declaring a “best friend”; it should have no meaning for adults.) On we go, with every region getting a thorough history—Tuscia and Umbria, Mantua, “Venice and Her Realm”—and then chapter 15, “The

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

157

Renaissance Captures Rome,” where we learned that “[i]n 1475 the Vatican Library contained 2527 volumes in Latin and Greek; Sixtus added 1100 more, and for the first time threw the collection open to the public” (p. 398). One wonders if the printing press suddenly made books more abundant, and, therefore, less valuable. Bibliophiles might find the fact that what one assumes was one of the largest libraries of the era still contained such a small number of works. It’s a reminder that Western civilization had yet to reach an Information Age. What about women? In chapter 20, “The Moral Release,” the authors declare that “[t]he emergence of woman was one of the brightest phases of the period. Her status in European history has usually risen with wealth, though Periclean Greece, too near the Orient, was an exception. When hunger is no longer feared, the male quest turns to sex; and if man still despoils himself for gold, it is to lay at a woman’s feet, or before the children she has given to him” (p. 581). Such sentences can only be written by people too immersed in the content. Again, we see the Durants were apparently worried that their grand declaration about the status of European women might be challenged by someone who could say, “Well, what about Periclean Greece?” Luckily, the answer came in the form of corruption from the Orient, where women never enjoyed much in the way of status. The rest of the section celebrates the feminine arts, dyed hair, “feminine dress” (p. 583), and the fact that “[a] good girl of the family was carefully trained for success in getting and keeping a prosperous mate; this was the major subject of her curriculum” (p. 582). No doubt this was true, but it’s hard to imagine that Da Vinci or Michelangelo cared much, as their sexual preferences trended toward the less conventional. Volume 5 ends with a lamentation based on sober history and explains the historical importance of the Renaissance beyond the aesthetic: “The Renaissance, by recalling classic culture, ended the thousand-year rule of the Oriental mind in Europe” (p. 728). Yes, no longer would the West be reinvigorated by Arabic science or Chinese technologies. Instead, novel analogies and new technologies developed right in the West itself. But it was all too much, and the printing press would now unleash over a century and a half of resentment toward the church that had been building since the Black Plague, and [f]or a time, the tensions of the Reformation and Counter Reformation, the debates of theology and the wars of religion, overlaid and over-

158

Chapter 3 whelmed the influence of the Renaissance; men fought bravely through a bloody century for the freedom to believe and worship as they pleased, or as pleased their kings; and the voice of reason seemed stilled by the clash of militant faiths. But it was not altogether silent; even in that unhappy desolation men like Erasmus, Bacon, and Descartes echoed it bravely, gave it fresh and stronger utterance; Spinoza found for it a majestic formulation, and in the eighteenth century the spirit of the Italian Renaissance was reborn in the French Enlightenment. From Voltaire and Gibbon to Goethe and Heine, to Hugo and Flaubert, to Taine and Anatole France, the strain was carried on, through revolution and counterrevolution, through advance and reaction, somehow surviving war, and patiently ennobling peace. (p. 728)

Edward Gibbon, in his History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, once wrote of gunpowder, By the Venetians, the use of gunpowder was communicated without reproach to the sultans of Egypt and Persia, their allies against the Ottoman power; the secret was soon propogated to the extremities of Asia; and the advantage of the European was confined to his easy victories over the savages of the new world. If we contrast the rapid progress of this mischievous discovery with the slow and laborious advances of reason, science, and the arts of peace, a philosopher, according to his temper, will laugh or weep at the folly of mankind. (p. 1168)

It’s horribly unfair to pull this one fallacious paragraph from Gibbon’s otherwise flawless work, but the idea expressed in it is simply too pertinent to not be included. Gibbon separates the development of gunpowder and weapons technology from that of “reason, science, and the arts of peace,” which is to say that he sees philosophy as a separate strain of thought that progresses despite advances in military technology. This is a common fault in reasoning, where people tend to connect “good” behavior only to “good” outcomes (an idea expressed in almost every major religion through either Heaven or karma, or some variation). Historians should be more careful. Gunpowder technology, in fact, created modern physics. If one can explain how small spheres (cannonballs) move in relation to gravity then one can superimpose that same physics on big spheres (planets). A cannonball arc is just a partial orbit and if one shoots a cannonball high enough into the air and with enough velocity, it can receive enough separation from earth’s gravity to complete its spin all the way around (think Sputnik).

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

159

Likewise, it’s hard to see the seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century philosophers continuing on a strain of Renaissance philosophical thought despite the violence of religious and political wars. More likely, the chaos of the time broke old systems of hierarchy and allowed new ideas a chance to reshape a medieval society. This entire movement, of course, was propelled by the anarchy-making machine that was the printing press. Oh, my, speaking of the printing press, we’ve just now gotten to it in the Durants’ narrative. Here we are, five volumes in, and proper history, the kind that gives the historian corroborating documents to work with, hasn’t even begun yet. On to volume 6, The Reformation, where we will finally reach the halfway point of this History of Civilization. The introductions, titled “To the Reader,” always provide some of the most fascinating reading. One can only assume that the Durants, lucid people surely, recognized that they were enabling each other in a mutual bout of unending graphomania. “The prospective reader deserves friendly notice,” they begin, “that The Reformation is not quite an honest title for this book. An accurate title would be: ‘A History of European Civilization Outside of Italy from 1300 to 1564, or Thereabouts, Including the History of Religion in Italy and an Incidental View of Islamic and Judaic Civilization in Europe, Africa, and Western Asia’” (p. vii). Reader, pause to reflect on this. The final paragraph of this introductory note includes “If the Reaper will stay his hand, there will be a concluding Volume VII, The Age of Reason, which should appear some five years hence, and should carry the story of civilization to Napoleon. There we shall make our bow and retire” (p. viii). VOLUME VI: THE REFORMATION The Catholic Church—still small “c” catholic at this time, but the capital “C” will now be used to avoid confusion with the reformers soon to be known as Protestant—became addicted to office selling: “It was unusual for impecunious merit to mount in the Church of the fifteenth century. From the moderate fee charged for priestly ordination to the enormous sums that many cardinals paid for their elevation, nearly every appointment required the clandestine lubrication of superiors” (p. 19). World

160

Chapter 3

history, as a discipline, could have gotten along nicely without that last sentence. Well before Luther, church practices brought internal condemnation from reformers who did the on-the-ground labor. “The power of the priest lay in his right to administer the sacraments. Wyclif turned to these with a full anticipation of Luther and Calvin” (p. 35). Wyclif, a century before Luther, may have felt emboldened by the church’s failure to stop the Black Plague. The church, faced with all those bloated and blackened faces, all those ossuaries and collapsing lungs, could no longer claim, without hiding a snicker, to possess any magical powers. Somehow, Chaucer has something to do with all of this, as the title of chapter 2, “Wyclif, Chaucer, and the Revolt,” indicates. At first, the inclusion of Wyclif and Chaucer in the same schema seems to stretch historical credibility, but this paragraph (referencing Chaucer), clears things up: Probably in 1387, he began The Canterbury Tales. It was a brilliant scheme—to join a varied group of Britons at the Tabard Inn in Southwark (where Chaucer himself had emptied many a tankard of ale), ride with them on their vacation pilgrimage to the shrine of Becket at Canterbury, and put into their mouths the tales and thoughts that had gathered in the traveled poet’s head through half a century. Such devices for stitching stories together had been used many times before, but this was the best of all. Boccaccio had assembled for his Decameron only one class of men and women; he had not made them stand out as diverse personalities; Chaucer created an innful of characters so heterogeneously real that they seem truer to English life than the stuffed figures of history. (p. 50)

It does seem, in the course of reading these volumes, that the better insights come wrapped in plainer prose. Chaucer created individual characters out of the down-and-out ordinary people and gave them voices, piccadillos, humor, and personality. By doing so, he delivered the force of personality to the masses. From Chaucer, we can see the connection to Wyclif and Luther, who both sought to release power from the undeserving church elites, and return that authority (and with it, humanity) to the individual believers. It’s also the case that, from Chaucer, one can see the ancestors of Shakespeare’s characters. When Harold Bloom argues that Shakespeare “invented the human” he refers specifically to consistent personality characteristics, often concerning characters of ordinary social standing

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

161

who are slipped into plays named after kings (Falstaff, not Henry IV, wins the affection and interest of the audience). The gray and illiterate masses suddenly developed both color and consistency in their actions. One feels that this volume is building up to the works of Shakespeare more than it is building to the consequences of the Reformation. Chapter 5, “England in the Fifteenth Century,” details the life of Henry IV (Henry Bolingbroke), who notoriously came to power after engineering the murder of Richard II. Henry IV, having reached the throne, found himself challenged by revolt. In Wales Owain Glyn Dwr overthrew the English domination for a moment (1401–1408), but the future Henry V, now Prince of Wales, overcame him with dashing strategy; and Owen Glendower, after leading a hunted life for eight years in Welsh fastnesses and crags, died a few hours after receiving full pardon from his gallant conqueror. Synchronizing his rebellion with Glendower’s, Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, led some nobles of the north into an uprising against a king unable to keep all the promises he had made to them for their aid in deposing Richard II. The Earl’s reckless son Harry “Hotspur” (unwarrantably lovable in Shakespeare) led a hesitant and inadequate force against the king at Shrewsbury (1403); there the youth died in foolish heroism, Henry IV fought manfully in the front ranks, and his gay wastrel son, “Prince Hal,” displayed the bravery that would win Agincourt and France. (p. 106)

The mention of four historical characters, depicted by Shakespeare in the most male oriented of his plays (The Henriad features fathers and sons, sons and surrogate fathers, alcohol, whores, swords, etc.) might rouse any reader with a passion for Shakespeare from a word-induced slumber. Yet the Durants bore even those familiar with the play by including the circumstances surrounding the death of Owen Glendower. Again, no authorial decisions get made. Subsections on the wealth of England include factoids such as “Real wages, in relation to prices, were apparently higher in the late fifteenth century than in the early nineteenth” (p. 110); that make no sense upon further inspection. What exactly does the term “real wages” mean when comparing preindustrial and industrial marketplaces? If this is a critique of free-market capitalism it runs into problems of historical analysis, as the same capitalist system that creates inequality also tends to develop innovations that make the inequalities less important. Capitalism created a proletariat, but in the twentieth century it also

162

Chapter 3

led to the Haber process and birth control, and together these produced less mouths and more food. Another subsection includes “Morals and Manners,” where we learn that the English “swore so heartily that even Joan of Arc regularly called them Goddams” (p. 111), and that “Girls were brought up in protective demureness and modesty, for men were beasts of prey, and virginity was an economic asset in the marital mart” (p. 112). Surely this is all true and interesting, but it’s followed with “Beds were sumptuous with carving, flowered coverlet, and canopy” (p. 113), and again, the narrative loses focus. A world history, however defined, need not ever include the architecture of beds. But the treatment of the Inquisition in chapter 11 (titled “Spain”) does give a straighter history. “How numerous were the victims? Llorente [a Spanish priest] estimated them, from 1480 to 1488, at 8,800 burned, 96,494 punished; from 1480 to 1809, at 31,912 burned, 291,450 heavily penanced. These figures were mostly guesses, and are now generally rejected by Protestant historians as extreme exaggerations. A Catholic historian reckons 2,000 burnings between 1480 and 1504, and 2,000 more to 1758” (pp. 215–16). More numbers, more words, nothing can be dismissed by authorial decision. The numbers must be included and the evidence for their exclusion also included. The section ends with a platitude: “A supreme and unchallengable faith is a deadly enemy to the human mind” (p. 217). This should have ended the “History of Civilization,” as it is evidence that the Durants could no longer offer a serious analysis of history. Instead, that phrase represents, roughly, the halfway point. Were they afraid that if they quit writing they might die? Was the authorial act something that gave them daily purpose in their old age? Is the dedicated reader now just a subjugate to the late-in-life crisis of two elderly people who just can’t stop? A chapter on “Germany on the Eve of Luther” must come before Luther. Small biographies of minor figures and succinct summaries of books no one else has heard of (anyone cracked open Heorides Christianae lately?) fill up pages. Then comes everything about Luther, and the traditional story of the spread of Reformation ideology into both Switzerland and the mind of John Calvin. By chapter 30, on page 663, the Protestant Reformation seems to be all summed up. It was time to move the narrative to the Middle East with a chapter titled “The Genius of Islam:

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

163

1258–1520.” But, as Will and Ariel should have realized, enough has been said. VOLUME VII: THE AGE OF REASON BEGINS The best part of reading The Story of Civilization really is the act of watching the “To the Reader” introductory notes evolve into full-scale apologetics: I had hoped to conclude my sketch of the history of civilization with a seventh volume to be called The Age of Reason, which was to cover the cultural development of Europe from the accession of Elizabeth I to the outbreak of the French Revolution. But as the story came closer to our now times and interests it presented an ever greater number of personalities and events still vitally influential today; and these demanded no mere lifeless chronicle, but a humanizing visualization which in turn demanded space. Hence these reams. What had begun as a final volume has swollen into three, and one of the present authors, at an unseemly age, becomes a prima donna making a succession of farewell tours. (p. vii)

In other words, we can’t stop writing, so God help all of us. This grand project suffered both from a lack of vision and from too much of it. What are the boundaries of world history? What did these volumes hope to do? Were the Durants now trapped into thinking that the raw bulk of material they wrote would somehow be seen as an achievement? One thinks of these ultra-something-or-other athletes who waste their days in some form of self-torture and then write books trying to convince the rest of us that their self-flagellation contains some deeper meaning or lesson. The publication year for volume 7 was 1961 and the note to the reader concludes with this sentence: “Mrs. Durant’s part in these concluding volumes has been so substantial that our names must be united on the title page” (p. viii). This may be the one case where Will Durant embraced the notion that much can be said with a succinct sentence. Imagining the smile on Ariel’s face on seeing her name on the cover of volume 7 almost makes the reading of The Story of Civilization worth the chore. Fittingly enough, volume 7 begins with a bit of feminist history. Chapter 1 is titled “The Great Queen: 1558–1603” and is about Queen Elizabeth of England. This biography of Elizabeth stretches on for forty-five pages, enough that it would fit nicely into a book that just focused on England’s

164

Chapter 3

sovereigns from the time of Elizabeth on, but the writing feels exhausted as the concluding line of the chapter indicates: “Denied husband and child, [Elizabeth] mothered England, loved it devotedly, and used herself up serving it. She was the greatest ruler that England has ever known” (p. 45). This is a simplistic analogy (replete with an assumption that being queen of England failed to provide the same kind of fulfillment that motherhood would have) followed by the kind of platitude that sportstalk radio hosts are usually given to when describing people who throw balls of different shapes for some reason or another. Throughout the previous volumes the reader might be periodically struck by the notion that the Durants, being aesthetes, wrote on and on with the hopes of one day having the opportunity to chronologically come across Shakespeare. This brings us to chapter 3, “On the Slopes of Parnassus: 1558–1603.” For those not in the know, “Parnassus” refers to the Greek mountaintop that supposedly infused its climbers with a sense of inspiration. The long historical journeyers now can look up at the Northern Renaissance, with Shakespeare at the peak. But first, a bunch of subsections. Let’s start with Christopher Marlowe, 1564–1593, the Caravaggio of playwrights. Marlowe’s talent could not be separated from the erratic behavior that the imbibing of alcohol certainly made worse, hence the short life span. It’s disappointing, but not surprising, that Marlowe’s life is introduced with this: The dramatists did not fare so well as the actors. They sold their plays outright to one of the theatrical companies for some four to eight pounds; they retained no rights to the manuscript, and usually the company prevented publication of the text lest it be used by a rival troupe. Sometimes a stenographer would record a play while it was being acted, and a printer would publish from this report a pirated and garbled edition, which brought the author nothing but hypertension. Such editions did not always bear the author’s name; hence some plays, like Arden of Faversham (1592), have survived centuries of anonymity. (p. 81)

Marlowe “was christened just two months before Shakespeare” (p. 81), and he made his reputation in his twenties with the extravaganza of a two-part play called Timurlane the Great, both parts of which “are crude with immaturity” (p. 83), which is what one would expect from a playwright in his twenties. Something should be said about the era and its

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

165

relationship with an audience. Shakespeare and Marlowe belonged to a time period when the written word could suddenly be broadcast directly into the minds of readers, rather than through a stage play into the eyes of a theater audience. Marlowe and Shakespeare, writing for their supper, had to write fast and write for theatergoers who would only spend their money on novelty. Marlowe’s opus was The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, which was likely produced in 1588, a year where the English had more than enough actual drama to contend with in the form of Philip II’s attacking the Spanish Armada. Faustus opens his veins and uses his own blood for ink when he signs his soul away to Lucifer and uses his newfound leverage to make “the fairest maid in Germany to come to be his wife” (p. 83). As is well known in Marlowe, and generally believed at the time, the Devil came first and then the Jew. Marlowe’s “Barabas the moneylender is again one quality personified, greed raised to hatred of all who hinder his gains, an unpleasant caricature redeemed by majestic vices” (p. 84). All English majors know that Shakespeare took a pound of flesh from Barabas and used it to grow Shylock. The question about Marlowe that gnaws is this: What would this twenty-seven-year old dramatist have accomplished had he matured? At that age Shakespeare was writing trifles like Love’s Labor Lost, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and A Comedy of Errors. In The Jew of Malta Marlowe was learning to make every scene advance in an orderly plot; in Edward II he was learning to conceive character as more than a single quality personified. In a year or two he might have purged his plays of bombast and melodrama; he might have risen to a broader philosophy, a greater sympathy with the myths and foibles of mankind. (p. 85)

Maybe, but as any fan of speculative fiction knows, no change in the past can be truly imagined because all factors are tied together in a causal chain. If Marlowe had not died at twenty-seven, then Shakespeare almost certainly would have impregnated his wife with a different sperm at a later time, and he would have had children other than his twins. Without Hamnet, we cannot conceive that there would have been a Hamlet. As it is, Marlowe gets a subsection and Shakespeare gets a chapter. At twenty-two pages, the Bard gets a lesser treatment than did Queen Elizabeth by almost half. Like a lot of historians, the Durants get piqued at how casually people of the recent past took the act of spelling. This af-

166

Chapter 3

fected, especially, the name of William Shakespeare, as that name took on at least half a dozen different configurations. Shakespeare’s genius is of such intensity that one almost wonders if his less-than-stellar plays provided the important function of giving critics something to criticize as a balance to what they praise. If Titus Andronicus and The Merry Wives of Windsor had been crisped beyond reading in a fire or had some late-medieval invasion by one of the period’s honked-off Catholic royals ended in the destruction of these two plays, then critics would be forced into hagiography. The Durants provide an example of the important function of Shakespeare’s lesser works: Then, in Titus Andronicus (1593), genius flagged; imitation took the lead and presented a repulsive dance of death. Titus kills his son, and others kill his son-in-law, on the stage; a bride, raped behind the scenes, comes on the boards with her hands cut off, her tongue cut out, her mouth bubbling blood; a traitor chops off Titus’ hand before the groundlings’ avid eyes; the severed heads of two of Titus’ sons are displayed; a nurse is killed on stage. Reverent critics have labored to burden collaborators with part or all of the responsibility for this slaughter, on the mistaken theory that Shakespeare could not write nonsense. He wrote reams of it. (p. 89)

The manufactured controversy around the authorship of Shakespeare’s work is too absurd to reflect on here; it’s like wasting words in refutation of creationism, but there is a controversy regarding Shakespeare’s authorship of his plays that runs in the other direction. Why did someone so brilliant write, in Titus Andronicus, what amounted to a sixteenth century snuff film? This is especially puzzling given that Titus Andronicus debuted right after the admirable Henry VI. It’s not the case that Jane Austen wrote a porny horror-romance novel just after cranking out Pride and Prejudice. In volume 7, Shakespeare’s artistic low points are essentially blamed on his inexperience, as they are early works. A subsection titled “Mastery: 1595–1608” looks to Shakespeare’s sonnets as the highest manifestation of his genius. The Durants drop the interesting fact that “[o]n June 7, 1594, Elizabeth’s Jewish physician, Rodrigo Lopez, was executed on the charge of having accepted a bribe to poison the Queen. The evidence was inconclusive, and Elizabeth long hesitated to sign the death warrant; but the London populace took his guilt for granted, and anti-Semitism ran hot in the pubs” (p. 91).

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

167

Was The Merchant of Venice a brilliant piece of race-baiting that tapped into a fashionable hatred of the time? The public, worked into a frenzy over a Christ-denier who plotted regicide, must have felt vindicated by both Barabas and Shylock. Shylock is a superior character to the Jew of Malta, however, and Shakespeare “gave Shylock some lovable qualities that must have made the injudicious grieve, and he put into his mouth so bold a statement of the case for the Jews that competent critics still debate whether Shylock is pictured as more sinned against than sinning” (p. 92). Shakespeare, like Chaucer, imbued ordinary people with personality and required that audiences understand the complexity of human character and actions. The Bard also seemed to intuit, in an era before psychology and sociology, that human interactions are subject to insincerity. One can only see the totality of a person’s character when one acts as an audience member, subject even to the private thoughts of the players onstage. Characters in Shakespeare’s plays are forever hiding and overhearing (the “nothing” in Much Ado about Nothing, meant “to overhear”) as a way of understanding (or misunderstanding) each other. When Hamlet sticks a sword through the curtain and punctures Polonius, more is going on than just the “accidental” killing of a character. The Durants mention none of this; they are not literary critics but historical chroniclers, and this is the reason that historians tend to avoid an excessive study of the arts; these are specialty subjects with centuries of analysis and reanalysis that cannot be adequately analyzed as parts of larger world historical narratives. This is a weakness of world history as a discipline, not of The Story of Civilization specifically. Firmer analysis comes at the end of the chapter in a subsection titled “Post-Mortem,” which discusses the spread of Shakespeare’s works into the rest of Europe: It was Germany’s first great dramatist, Gotthold Lessing, who in 1759 informed his countrymen that Shakespeare was superior to all other poets, ancient or modern. . . . August von Shclegel, Ludwig Tieck, and other leaders of the Romantic school raised the Shakespearean banner, and Goethe contributed an enthusiastic discussion of Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister (1796). Shakespeare became popular on the German stage; and for a time German scholarship snatched the lead from England in the clarification of Shakespeare’s life and plays. (p. 109)

The significance of such an international embrace is in the fact that Shakespeare’s themes could be translated into German experience and

168

Chapter 3

remained transformative even in this new culture and new time. Genius does that. Unlike previous volumes, this seventh incantation includes a series of these small biographies. After Elizabeth and Shakespeare, there’s Mary Queen of Scots and James I and the VI. The former lost her wig (not a euphemism here) just before she lost her head (a reminder that Elizabeth realized the calming effect that a beheading now and then had on the peasantry). James VI accomplished, perhaps, more of significance than any other English sovereign. The Durants include the typical points about James, his love of handsome courtesans, the Bible named after him, the anti-smoking pamphlet, but missed what may be the most interesting thing about him. James appeared unthreatened by new ideas. In 1620, Francis Bacon presented James VI with Novum Organum, which argued that scientific experimentation, rather than the study of ancient philosophers, should be at the core of the Western educational system. James seems not to have understood the book, which is the best argument for the king’s greatness. He did not persecute what he did not understand. This is the best that any sovereign, anywhere, can do for his or her people. But the Durants create a thread in this seventh volume that helps to guide the reader through the swamp of words, and it should not be let go of. Let’s continue with the treatment of English theater, picked up on later with “The Age of Reason Begins” in chapter 8. Well before Cromwell, [t]he first victory of the Puritans was in their war against the theater. Everything that distinguished them—their theology of “elect” and “reprobate,” their strict morality, their solemn mood and Biblical speech—had been ridiculed on the stage with gross and unforgivable caricature. And in 1629 came the culminating crime: a French actress dared to replace a boy in taking a female part in a play at the Blackfriars. She was pelted with apples and rotten eggs. (p. 192)

Nobody likes a puritan, least of all the Puritans themselves. Preachers of a creed of self-deprecation, they could not tolerate being made fun of by others. Ridicule is the opposite of persecution in the sense that the latter indicates that faith should be taken seriously. In the absence of persecution, the tenets of faith cease to lack meaning, which is why persecution must be invented when it fails to exist.

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

169

Book 2 of volume 7 is titled “The Faiths Fight for Power: 1556–1648,” but chapter 9 begins with a chapter titled “Alma Mater Italia: 1564–1648.” The 1556 date, not usually accepted as significant in world history, is not explained until later. It happened to be “[w]hen Phillip II (1556) came to the throne” and “the Spanish monarchy ruled Spain, Roussillon, FrancheComet, Ceuta, Oran, the Netherlands, the duchy of Milan, the Kingdom of Naples, Sicily, Sardinia” (p. 274). The list of Spanish possessions goes on for several more letters, but “etc., etc.” will serve this survey well enough. Militant Christianity remains underrated as a shaping force in history, but the title of this section indicates that the wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were over faith. In fact, militant Christianity, which began with the crowning of Charlemagne in the year 800, had spent its energies by 1589. The year 1589 is when Henry of Navarre, previously a Protestant, accepted the crown of France. He also accepted Catholicism into his heart, apparently, by converting to the mother faith. Henry may or may not have said, “Paris is worth a mass,” but the sentiment is accurate enough. Book 2 of volume 7 becomes a caricature of the Durant style. They simply cannot hold together a narrative. In a section that was supposed to be about the faiths fighting for power, the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) is not given a chapter and is treated only residually. Meanwhile, chapter 11 goes by the title “The Golden Age of Spanish Literature.” Biographies of Henry IV and Cardinal Richelieu fill up pages and then, chapter 17, “From Rubens to Rembrandt,” contains this in a subsection about the Dutch economy: What a leap it is from those perfumed English lords to the stout, tough burghers of Haarlem, the Hague, and Amsterdam! It is a unique world behind the dykes, a world of water rather than land, a life of ships and commercial ventures rather than of courts and chivalry. There is hardly anything more startling in economic history than the rise of the Dutch to world power, or more comforting in cultural history than the way in which this wealth was so soon graduated into art. (p. 476)

The population of the Netherlands, their division into the city and country, and their outreach into Indonesia are all detailed here but it’s just a mass of facts. No points are made. This is just a never-ending story. They can’t keep their dates straight. The second section of the book advertises an era between 1556 and 1648, but they start with a different date

170

Chapter 3

and conclude the volume with “Looking back over those ninety years from 1558 to 1648, from Elizabeth to Richelieu, from Shakespeare to Descartes, we perceive that the absorbing issues were still within the confines of Christianity, between competing varieties of religious faith based upon a Bible that all accepted as the word of God. Only in stray voices was there a suggestion that Christianity itself might be put on trial, and that philosophy might soon reject all forms of supernatural belief” (p. 647). It’s hard to see even the Thirty Years War as occurring between competing varieties of religious faith. Catholic France backed the Protestants in Germany as a way of countering the influence of the hated Habsburgs; the fact that the Habsburgs also professed Catholicism makes the Thirty Years War and everything it touched about something other than Christian identification. Four more volumes await us, but detailing them all would smother the reader. VOLUMES VIII–XI Volume 8, The Age of Louis XIV, published in 1963, includes a “Dear Reader” section that begins with this mournful phrase: “This volume is Part VIII in a history whose beginning has been forgotten, and whose end we shall never reach.” It ends, after only three paragraphs, with a note about the future of this history: “We hope to preset Part IX, The Age of Voltaire, in 1965, and Part X, Rousseau and Revolution, in 1968. Some difficulties have arisen, partly from the wealth of material offered by the eighteenth century, all demanding study and space” (p. vii). At this point, the grand experiment in integral world history must be declared a failure. Volumes 8 through 11 all centrally relate to France, and the Durants are reduced to writing mini-biographies of the great literary figures of the era. (Few people like to read Milton, and fewer more, one supposes, about Milton, and this writer imagines that no one wants to read about someone else writing about Milton.) Volume 9, The Age of Voltaire, contains the unintentionally hysterical subtitle of “A History of Civilization in Western Europe from 1715 to 1756, with Special Emphasis on the Conflict between Religion and Philosophy.” Volume 10, also about France, is Rousseau and Revolution. This was published in 1967, and the first “book” of this volume contains four chapters about Jean-Jacques Rousseau. With the exception of a section about “Islam and the Slavic East,” everything else in the volume is about the

Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization

171

rich culture of France and Western Europe in the eighteenth century. This is not a world history any longer, and the narrative and style seem disconnected from the first volume begun so many years ago. Volume 11, The Age of Napoleon, is the last one. Published in 1975, the preface includes this statement: “By the middle of the twentieth century,” says Encyclopedia Britannica (XVI, 10a), “the literature on Napoleon already numbered more than 100,000 volumes.” Why add to the heap? We offer no better reason than to say that the Reaper repeatedly overlooked us, and left us to passive living and passive reading after 1968. We grew weary of this insipid and unaccustomed leisure. To give our days some purpose and program we decided to apply to the age of Napoleon (1789–1815) our favorite method of integral history—weaving into one narrative all memorable aspects of European civilization in those twenty-seven years: statesmanship, war, economics, morals, manners, religion, science, medicine, philosophy, literature, drama, music, and art; to see them all as elements in one moving picture, and as interacting parts of a united whole. (p. vii)

As suspected, somewhere in the midst of their work, the Durants wrote more to keep themselves occupied rather than to make a meaningful contribution to the field of history. One should not start writing and then keep writing until death ends the project. This, more than anything, signals the key problem with integrative history: depth and detail never end and to try and describe everything, right down to the architecture of the beds, can only end with the death of the authors. James Joyce turned a single, rather ordinary, day in Dublin into an epic of detail in Ulysses. World civilization is rather a bigger topic than one person’s day on walkabout in an Irish city. Any historical study should begin with clear parameters and purpose, and as the Durants’ volumes indicate, to simply declare that the purpose is to develop an integrative approach to history is to declare nothing at all. One could make that statement about a day, hour, or minute in one’s own house and spend a lifetime in description. What’s the purpose? The Durants did win the Pulitzer Prize in 1968 for The Story of Civilization volumes. Was it deserved? If the Pulitzer is an award for authorial endurance, then, yes, it was deserved. The Durants did make a significant contribution to the field of world history, but it was in the sense that “failed” experiments make a contribution to scientific advancement. The Durants demonstrated what would not work. Of course, the 1968 Pulitzer

172

Chapter 3

committee would not have thought this way any more than the Durants would have, but this book is about the development of world history as a discipline and that means making judgments. World history could not be and cannot be what the Durants envisioned it to be. They lost their discipline and the narrative consumed them, manifesting itself in a graphomania that was misdiagnosed by the authors as a purpose for living.

FOUR Variations on the World Historical Approaches

After the Durants, world history can be seen as clearly branching off into two disciplines. One is the attempt at a single-volume history of the world, which will eventually lead to “Big History.” The other branch continued on with the traditional application of historical methods and has led to a multivolume approach. A third approach, world history as an educational tool connected to new “old” views of epistemology, will be highlighted in the next volume. It should be repeated that most historians, and therefore most history books, focus on relatively manageable topics such as wars, social movements, or (increasingly) commodities and technologies. Not many decide to spend a career writing the history of the world. The scarcity of historical writers who make the attempt to write a thorough world history, therefore, makes the publication of the following all the more important: a new sixth edition of J. M. Roberts’s The History of the World (2013) and, by Susan Wise Bauer, the first three volumes of a history of the world titled The History of the World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome (2007), The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (2010), and The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople (2013). The authors each offer very different scholarly approaches to the discipline that are useful in different ways. Where Roberts offers grand connection, Bauer offers specifics; where Roberts focuses on Western civilization, Bauer provides rigorous balance with the civilizations of Islam and 173

174

Chapter 4

East Asia; and where Roberts occasionally sails high above his source materials, Bauer reminds her readers constantly of how closely tied her narrative is to classical sources. Since Bauer has written three volumes so far, enough material exists to discuss the different tactics used by the authors. The differences to Roberts exist throughout Bauer’s work, but for the sake of brevity, only three examples will be used. The single Roberts volume will be compared with excerpts from each of the three Bauer books. When Roberts writes about ancient Sumer, he summarizes the content and keeps his source material hidden: Sumerian civilization had deep roots. The people had long shared a way of life not very different from that of their neighbors. They lived in villages and had a few important cult centres which were continuously occupied. One of these, at a place called Eridu, probably originated in about 5000 BC. It grew steadily well into historic times and by the middle of the fourth millennium there was a temple which some have thought to have provided the original model for the Mesopotamian monumental architecture. (p. 52)

Bauer’s approach is more specific, and she cites the source materials in her text: After the Great Flood, the Sumerian king list tells us that the city of Kish—to the north, surrounded by cornfields—became the new center of kingship. The list begins over again, with a series of kings generally known as “The First Dynasty of Kish.” The first ruler of Kish was a man called Gaur; next came the magnificently named Fulla-Ndapaannapad; after that, another nineteen kings led right to Enmebarggesi, the twenty-second king after the flood. Thanks to inscriptions, we know that Emmebaraggesi ruled around 2700, the first date that we can assign to a Sumerian king. (p. 17)

The treatment of non-European civilizations represents the most striking difference between the world history of Roberts and that of Bauer. The sixth edition of Roberts contains thirty-six chapters, and twenty-two are arguably about Europe and the West. Bauer’s work is rigorously chronological and balanced. Her chapters are short, and each ends with a graphic time line showing the key events from each region discussed. On page 214 of The History of the Medieval World, for example, Bauer provides a time line including the major events in Arabia, the Persian Empire, Byzantium, and Western Europe.

Variations on the World Historical Approaches

175

Roberts devotes about three pages (from 438 to 441) to China’s Sui Dynasty, whereas Bauer devotes seven (pp. 223–30) in The History of the Medieval World, including a time line. Roberts writes from the sky when talking about the Sui collapse: One reason for the trouble was overstretch in terms of wars. A conflict with Vietnam in the first decade of the seventh century ended badly, as conflicts with Vietnam often do. A war with Korea also ended badly. The Sui had clearly overreached themselves. (p. 440)

In her second volume, Bauer writes from the ground on the same topic: [Yangdi] grew obsessed with completing the conquest of Goguryeo pouring the remaining treasury into it and sending troops into the Korean peninsula over the bodies of their fallen comrades. The war had now dragged on for nearly twenty years; the standing Sui army of three hundred thousand soldiers had been reduced to less than three thousand. Sui Yangdi drafted, conscripted, and enslaved enough men for one final push. In 612, he took an army reported to be more than a million men strong into tiny Goguryeo, where Eulji Mundeok made his stand at the capital city Pyongyang. In a fierce, epically bloody battle, the Korean soldiers surrounded and obliterated the Chinese troops. (p. 229)

Finally, Bauer constantly presents fragments of source material in her narrative for the reader, something Roberts almost never does. Consider their different treatments of the Fourth Crusade. Roberts writes, The fatal blow came in 1204, when Constantinople was at last taken and sacked, but by Christians, not the pagans who had threatened it so often. A Christian army which had gone east to fight the infidel in a fourth crusade was turned against the empire by the Venetians. It terrorized and pillaged the city (this was when the bronze horses of the Hippodrome were carried off to stand, as they did until the early 1980s, in front of St. Mark’s cathedral in Venice), and enthroned a prostitute in the patriarch’s seat in St. Sophia. (p. 373)

In The History of the Renaissance World, Bauer’s narrative presents the reader with the source materials: On the morning of April 13, Constantinople lay under Crusader control, and the Crusaders began to strip the city clean. “Gold and silver, table-services and precious stones, satin, and silk,” writes Villehar-

176

Chapter 4 douin, “mantles of squirrel fur, ermine and miniver, and every choice thing to be found on this earth. (p. 180)

Bauer goes on to include a full paragraph from this account and then another full paragraph from an Islamic source about the same event. Only rarely does a reader encounter a historical writer who makes such extensive use of primary evidence. World history as a subject remains a relatively young field. Roberts published the first edition of The History of the World in 1976 and spent much of the rest of his life updating and revising the work. Shorter versions of the original were published, as were sections dealing only with Europe. Roberts, an Oxford professor, became a recognizable public figure in Britain when he presented his ideas about Western history on a BBC documentary in the mid-1980s. Roberts’s work did more to popularize world history than any other. His book, despite its intimidating page count, sold over a million copies. The gaps he left, chronicled above, have more to do with the lack of source materials than a lack of scholarship. O. A. Westad, the editor of the sixth edition, explains in his introduction that Roberts continued updating his world history and was in the process of adding more about Eastern history when he died in 2003. Westad’s additions to the sixth edition mostly include the addition of material only recently available to historians about Eastern and Islamic societies. Because of the relative youth of world history as a discrete approach, and because of the incompleteness of the Roberts text, it is tempting, then, to look at Bauer’s work as another step in the evolution of world history. Her work is undoubtedly more comprehensive, her story more detailed, and her mastery of the source material more impressive. That interpretation is fallacious, however. Although both Roberts and Bauer wrote for a general audience, they seemed to have different aims. We might understand the Roberts book as being character driven and the West features as the protagonist. Bauer’s volumes are plot driven and lack a central character. The story is the main character, and she is not constrained by the single-volume format as Roberts was. Bauer may be one of only three people to attempt what the Durants called an “integral” approach to history (the other two being Will and Ariel). If she finishes the work, and manages to continue with the same methods, it will be world history’s Sistine Chapel. The Renaissance, however, was where the Durants lost their sense of direction and purpose.

Variations on the World Historical Approaches

177

Nothing in her first volumes indicates that Bauer will do the same. Still, she has a lot more to write before her conclusion. Can world history be written about through a commodity and can it be written with comedy? These are questions that will conclude the analysis of world history in this volume. Not long ago, one could find any number of books with titles like Random Item: The True Story of a Random Item That Changed the World at the library or bookstore, quite a lot of them really. None of these books qualify as actual world histories because they did not actually attempt to tell the entire story of the world, but instead chose something (any item, really, would do) and traced the development of that item across a few cultures and civilizations. This trend of tracing the history of commodities and items actually began promisingly with a 1985 book called Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History by the appropriately named Sidney Mintz. Since then, however, the trend continued in a dismal direction. A History of the World in 6 Glasses (Standage 2006), provides a slightly more comprehensive history than the average work in this genre, but mostly serves as a dismal exemplar. Finally, there is The Mental Floss History of the World: An Irreverent Romp through Civilization’s Best Bits (Sass and Wiegand 2008), the cover of which promises a bonus section on global crisis. In the introduction, Erik Sass begins with “We know that 99 percent of ‘history,’ as they teach it, is mind-numbingly boring. And we’re sorry about that; we can’t change what happened in your youth.” This sentence indicates that the Mental Floss History of the World will contain a countercultural element to it, a mockery of the heavy and amorphous textbooks forced upon the little bricks in the walls who suffer daily in the public school system. This countercultural kind of history uses voice, entertainment, blood, sex, and all the “best bits” of history as a counter to the classroom variations of history that inevitably bring out the sighs and tears of boredom. This book, therefore, really is the world history version of James Loewen’s 1995 classic Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. World history as a subject just doesn’t conjure up the same kind of controversy, however, as U.S. history, as even the perpetually offended groups who plan their days around being outraged find little to get upset about involving, say, the Mogul Empire.

178

Chapter 4

Chronologically speaking, Tom Standage’s A History of the World in 6 Glasses (2006) can be considered the next small history of the world to be published after Gombrich. It came out in 2005, and its placement in this particular chapter might seem to do violence to the analytical process of understanding world history. In between Gombrich and Standage, an awful lot happened in world historical studies. In the introduction of his book, Standage makes the case that the history of beverages must be intertwined with the history of humanity since humans require hydration. He writes, Drinks have had a closer connection to the flow of history than is generally acknowledged, and a greater influence on its course. Understanding the ramifications of who drank what, and why, and where they got it from, requires the traversal of many disparate and otherwise unrelated fields: the histories of agriculture, philosophy, religion, medicine, technology, and commerce. The six beverages highlighted in this book demonstrate the complex interplay of different civilizations and the interconnectedness of world cultures. (p. 6)

Maybe. The book might be viewed as an attempt to trace the history of capitalism by handpicking a few commodities, six types of drink in this case. Mildly clever in its inception, the conceit that six beverages can be considered the focal point for world history is, well, a little watery. Almost all bad ideas begin with beer, and so does this one. Chapter 1 features the creation of the beverage in Mesopotamia: A short history of humanity, complete with, you guessed it, the growing of the kinds of grains used for making beer. The first brew cannot be determined accurately since it certainly came before writing but “[b]eer is a liquid relic from human prehistory, and its origins are closely intertwined with the origins of civilization itself” (p. 11). This could be said about anything, a history of oxygen, or a history of human childbirth, or bread, or whatever. The history of the cereal grains, useful because they can be stored for long periods, is then cut and pasted before we find that “beer was not necessarily the first form of alcohol to pass human lips. At the time of beer’s discovery, alcohol from the accidental fermentation of fruit juice (to make wine) or water and honey (to make mead) would have occurred naturally in small quantities as people tried to store fruit or honey” (p. 15). Insights like this abound in the book. Beer became civilization’s first drink since it came from fermentation of civilization’s first crops.

Variations on the World Historical Approaches

179

Is it interesting to know that bread and beer are evolutionary cousins? They share an ancestor and because of this “[t]he Mesopotamian use of bread in brewing has led to much debate among archaeologists, some of whom have suggested that bread must therefore be an offshoot of beer making, while others have argued that bread came first and was subsequently used as an ingredient in beer” (p. 17). Ah, the old philosophical saw of “Which came first, the bread or the beer?” (Three archeologists got knifed once at a conference at MIT over this very question. Look it up.) Standage links beer to all the major characteristics of early civilization. It is important because “unlike food, beverages can be genuinely shared. When several people drink beer from the same vessel, they are all consuming the same liquid; when cutting up a piece of meat, in contrast, some parts are usually deemed to be more desirable than others” (p. 18). Um, what? This nonsensical statement reveals Standage’s well-founded insecurity. There really is no point in creating a history of beverages since there’s nothing unique about fluid ingestion to warrant separating it from food or any other object prevalent in human societies. It’s entirely possible to imagine a tribe equally sharing all the best cuts of meat together, then all the less prime cuts, and so on. One should not assume that a hierarchy of meats existed prior to the creation of the modern supermarket deli and meat counter. Buffalo hunters on the nineteenth-century American frontier often butchered their prey, ate the brains and maybe the liver raw, and left the “choice” cuts on the flank and ribs for the carrion birds and scavengers. What does this have to do with anything? Beer, you might guess, also featured in the supernatural rituals of early people. “Since beer was a gift from the gods, it was also the logical thing to present as a religious offering” (p. 19). It might be too much to assert that modern beer worshippers often offer their half-digested sacrifices to a porcelain god, but a low analysis deserves low humor. The first chapter ends with these two strained paragraphs. They deserve to be quoted in full because they represent the danger of this kind of bubble gum history: Keeping surplus food in the storehouse was one way to ward off future food shortages; ritual and religious activity, in which the gods were called upon to ensure a good harvest, was another. As these two activities became intertwined, deposits of surplus food came to be seen as

180

Chapter 4 offerings to the gods, and the storehouses became temples. To ensure all villagers were pulling their weight, contributions to the common storehouse were recorded using small clay tokens, found throughout the Fertile Crescent from as early as 8000 BCE. Such contributions were justified as religious offerings by administrator-priests who lived off the surplus food and directed communal activities, such as the construction of buildings and the maintenance of irrigation systems. Thus were sown the seeds of accountancy, writing, and bureaucracy. The idea that beer provided some of the impetus for this dramatic shift in the nature of human activity, after millions of years of hunting and gathering, remains controversial. But the best evidence for the importance of beer in prehistoric times is its extraordinary significance to the people of the first great civilizations. For although the origins of this ancient drink inevitably remain shrouded in mystery and conjecture, there is no question that the daily lives of Egyptians and Mesopotamians, young and old, rich and poor, were steeped in beer. (p. 23)

Again, Standage cuts and pastes a traditional history of grain storage and record keeping and then says, “And people drank beer too.” The reason that “the idea that beer provided some of the impetus for this dramatic shift in the nature of human activity . . . remains controversial” is because beer played an insignificant role in the entire process. Alcoholic beverages, as Standage already admitted, likely featured in preurban societies, most of which developed neither cities nor record keeping nor irrigation systems. The Mongolian people of Genghis Khan’s time (in the thirteenth century) and before never developed cities or bureaucracies or even a structured religion, but they gorged themselves on fermented mare’s milk. No one argues that the fermentation of mare’s milk had anything to do with the creation of the Mongol empire, nor has this bit of trivia about Mongol society caused anyone else to write a book. It’s just a side fact about Mongol society, and the fact that people in early cities brewed beer is of no more importance than the fact that Mongols enjoyed alcoholic milk. Beer, a feature of early social and political realities, became a feature of the earliest forms of literature, including what may be the first written work, the Epic of Gilgamesh. Standage writes of one character that “Enkidu’s primitive nature is demonstrated by his lack of familiarity with bread and beer; but once he has consumed them, and then washed himself, he too becomes human. . . . The Mesopotamians regarded the consumption of bread and beer as one of the things that distinguished them

Variations on the World Historical Approaches

181

from savages and made them fully human” (p. 27). If civilization’s fruits involved grain-based foods and liquids, then the consumption of those fruits would make someone “civilized” by those standards. This would have been enough to say, but Standage continues to repeat the point that beer somehow featured as a major component of civilization and religion, stating “Mesopotamians and Egyptians alike saw beer as an ancient, god-given drink that underpinned their existence, formed part of their cultural and religious identity, and had great social importance” (p. 29). Was beer somehow more important to Mesopotamian religious rituals than cookies are to Christmas? Christmas would go on, presumably, without the cookies. The connection to beer and writing becomes spurious. He writes, “Compared with early pictograms, the cuneiform symbol for beer is barely recognizable as a jar shape” (p. 34). It should be obvious, at this point, that Standage simply finds these drinks in every traditional stage of civilization and then, through force of repetition, insists that they must have been important. Here is another example: “Beer permeated the lives of Egyptians and Mesopotamians from the cradle to the grave” (p. 39). The sentiment here, as unimportant as the sentence is unoriginal, could be repeated for the next several chapters. Greeks and Romans drank wine (recipes are included) while philosophizing: “After an entire night’s drinking, everyone has fallen asleep except Socrates, who remains apparently unaffected by the wine he has drunk and sets off on his day’s business. Plato depicts him as the ideal drinker: he uses wine in the pursuit of truth but remains in total control of himself” (p. 63). Romans, including the classical physician Galen, sought out the medicinal uses for wine: “As a young doctor he had treated gladiators, using wine to disinfect their wounds, a common practice at the time” (p. 82). Fascinating, to be sure, that alcohol has been used to disinfect wounds, but it’s hard to see how this fact could be considered anything other than a side point. Neither beer nor wine could be described as altering history in any serious manner, but rum, first discussed on page 115, did generate serious world historical change. More specifically, the sugar in the rum drove the history of large-scale capitalist development in the Atlantic region. Columbus brought sugarcane to the Caribbean on his second voyage in 1493 and it grew well in a balmy climate. While Spanish cruelty

182

Chapter 4

and Eurasian diseases destroyed the native population of the Americas, gold and silver from the New World flowed back into Europe. This gold not only caused the development of new economic institutions and mathematical concepts, but devalued the very commodity that West Africans once traded with Europeans on a global market. While New World gold and silver caused a price collapse in precious metals, the depopulation of the Americas and the need for cheap labor to grow the high-demand sugar led to a surge in the demand for African slaves. The “gold coast” on West Africa became the “slave coast.” Sugar, therefore, can be considered a world-altering substance. However, since Sidney Mintz already wrote the book about sugar (and it is included in the “sources” section of Standage’s book) a comparison of passages from Mintz and Standage about tea and sugar reveals something interesting. Mintz writes, The success of tea, like the less resounding successes of coffee and chocolate, was also the success of sugar. In the view of the West Indian interest, increasing the consumption of any of these exotic liquid stimulants was highly desirable, for sugar went with them all. Tea was pushed hardest by British trade, and its victory over competing beverages was conditioned by factors quite unrelated to its taste. That it was a bitter stimulate, that it was taken hot, and that it was capable of carrying large quantities of palatable sweet calories told importantly in its success. But unlike that of coffee and chocolate, the production of tea was developed energetically in a single vast colony, and served there as a means not only of profit but also of the power to rule. The same could not really be said of chocolate or coffee at the time; the better analogy, if any, would be with sugar. (p. 114)

Standage: The political power of the British East India Company, the organization that supplied Britain’s tea, was vast. At its height the company generated more revenue than the British government and ruled over far more people, while the duty on the tea it imported accounted for as much as 10 percent of government revenue. All this gave the company both direct and indirect influence over the policies of the most powerful nation on Earth. The company had many friends in high places, and many of its officials simply bought their way into Parliament. Supporters of the East Indian Company also cooperated on occasion with politicians with interests in the West Indies; the demand for West Indian sugar was driven by the consumption of tea. All this ensured that in many cases company policy became government policy. (p. 203)

Variations on the World Historical Approaches

183

Standage is acquitted of the count of plagiarism but guilty on the count of unoriginality. Mintz wrote a brilliant book on the history of sugar, brilliant because he simply wrote a single history of this one substance and didn’t try to turn his subject into the Forrest Gump (present at the big events) of world history. Mintz wrote a proper historical book using the traditional techniques of the discipline and included original research. Standage, by contrast, simply looked back at some of the major epochs of history and tried to explain what people drank at the time. Consider this passage as one final piece of evidence. After a short section on the development of the Industrial Revolution, Standage writes, Just as deskbound clerks, businessmen, and intellectuals had taken to coffee in the seventeenth century, the workers in the new factories of the eighteenth century embraced tea. It was the beverage best suited to these new working arrangements and helped industrialization along in a number of ways. Mill owners began to offer their employees free “tea breaks” as a perk. Unlike beer, the drink traditionally given to agricultural workers, tea did not gently dull the mind but sharpened it, thanks to the presence of caffeine. Tea kept workers alert on long and tedious shifts and improved their concentration when operating fast-moving machines. A hand weaver or spinner could take rests when needed, a worker in a factory could not. Factory workers had to function like parts in a well-oiled machine, and tea was the lubricant that kept the factors running smoothly. (p. 200)

Must we really consider tea a major factor in the development of industrialization? If this is Standage’s suggestion, for he hardly states this clearly, then solid evidence should be presented as proof. The idea that “[t]ea kept workers alert on long and tedious shifts and improved their concentration” stinks of conjecture and assumption. Maybe tea did not do this but instead made workers too hyper to focus. Those of us who imbibe too much coffee know that its effects dull with time; maybe tea had no effect at all or a negative effect on worker productivity. No evidence exists for any conclusion. To say this probably misses the point. A History of the World in 6 Glasses reads like an unserious book, the point of which seems to be that people during various important epochs of history imbibed different kinds of alcohol. World history is a drink not well taken in a shot glass. This is not to say that a small history, designed to provide a theoretical framework for understanding, cannot be useful nor is it to say that world

184

Chapter 4

history is a subject of so much gravity that it crushes any attempt at humor. The cover for The Mental Floss History of the World: An Irreverent Romp through Civilization’s Best Bits (2008) looks like a still screen shot from a Monty Python episode. It includes a knight, a czar, a serious-looking African, a blank-faced queen of some sort, a solemn-looking man with one of those tall “I’m-in-the-hierarchy-of-the-Catholic-Church” type hats, and an Arab blowing into a horn: all of them are crammed into half a globe. Oh, and there’s an old-fashioned biplane flying in the background for some reason. It’s the “Bonus: New Global Crisis Section” advertisement at the top that sells the book, however. Comedian/historians have been humorizing over the delicate bits of U.S. history for decades now, but The Mental Floss History of the World is the only book that currently tries to see the humor in the history of the world. To belabor an earlier point, world history is a really big topic that does not fit well with the traditional degree programs offered by America’s august academies, and so world histories are often written by people with nontraditional backgrounds. Four authors have their names attached to the cover; they are Erik Sass, Steve Weigand, Will Pearson, and Mangesh Hattikudur. Actually, it’s not clear what role Pearson and Hattikudur played in the writing of the book. The cover says Erik Sass and Steve Wiegand with Will Perason and Mangesh Hattikudur. What does that mean? Did they just hang out and smoke weed while the other two actually wrote the book? What does it mean to be with a couple of authors while they write a book? Anyway, nobody here is a world historian, or even a historian, or even has a doctorate. Wiegand possesses an undergraduate degree in “American literature and U.S. history” according to his short biography. He mostly works as a journalist and contributor to Mental Floss’s magazines and other publications. Everything in the packaging of the book seems intended to sell its humor rather than its substance, yet it contains over 400 pages of text and reads like a comprehensive survey on the topic of world history. It’s historical first and hysterical second. Although all of us have been repeatedly warned not to judge a book by its cover, there appears to be no law against taking a book for what it claims to be by the cover (with a peek, perhaps, at the introduction as well). The Mental Floss History of the World promises to be entertaining.

Variations on the World Historical Approaches

185

Erik Sass writes, “A natural question about any single-volume history of the world should be: ‘Is everything here?’ The straight answer is: no. Not that we didn’t try . . . while this version does omit a few details, we think we did alright. There’s a wealth of fun facts here, and maybe threequarters of the ‘important’ stuff. Luckily, there’s a surprising degree of overlap” (p. ix). While it’s not clear why the use of humor should make a scholarly book less scholarly, or whether or why humor can be used to shield a book from serious analysis, it still just seems right to treat this book differently from the others given that the authors make no claim to be busting any paradigms. Let’s just pull out some of the “best bits” from throughout the book and have a gander at them. Little salmon-colored insets that include fun facts are placed throughout the book, something that breaks up the “regular” lumps of text and that allows for the authors to sprinkle interesting asides throughout. Here’s a good one about what Babylonian kings had to endure on the New Year festival: “According to protocol, the king would enter the temple of Marduk, Babylon’s chief god . . . the high priest then slapped the king but good” (p. 6). Oh, that’s good to know. Also interesting is the fact that Egypt’s god Osiris was supposedly butchered, at which time his wife and sister, in the form of one person, rebuilt him “except for Osiris’s penis, which she replaced with a wooden replica” (p. 9). So old Osiris had a peg-penis, eh? Interesting. Yet most of the book reads like this section on India: Not much is known about Harappan civilization, which blossomed around 2600 BCE along the Indus River in present-day Pakistan and India. But in some ways it is the most impressive of all early cultures because Harappan cities were incredibly well-organized. Mohenjo-Daro is a good example. Like the cities of Sumeria, this city was built out of mud-brick and wood. It probably had about thirtyfive thousand inhabitants, and they clearly valued cleanliness, building a sewage system, aqueducts to bring fresh water to neighborhood fountains, and a communal bath, where an underground furnace provided hot water. Wide streets were planned in a grid formation, with “zoning” separating residential and commercial activities. MohenjoDar had a large granary, a public well, and a citadel with an impressive “castle” structure. There were also two large assembly buildings for town meetings. (p. 11)

186

Chapter 4

Still laughing? The Mental Floss History of the World reads like a textbook spliced with occasional bits of historically derived humor. This is probably a good thing; to go too far with the attempts at humor would have been too destructive to the historical material. Readability is the book’s best asset, as the text contains several insets, small illustrations, and clever section headings: “China: Building Walls, Making Pots, Sacrificing Children” (funny, in the past and in the abstract) and “Sparta: One Badass City-State” are but two examples. The humor functions as a spice throughout the book: it provides a little zing here and there but mostly just makes everything go down a little easier. Each section ends with an “In a Nutshell” summary. One begins, “Human sacrifice. Socially sanctioned infanticide. The invention of algebra. This was mankind at his most classical” (p. 97). That does sum it up nicely. One might be curious as to how humor can be injected to the nastier bits of world history, which to be honest, does seem to feature a good many bouts of war and destructive sicknesses. The heading for the Black Plague section reads, AND THANKS, BUT NO THANKS, FOR… Black Death

Yes, no thanks for that since “it’s safe to reckon that as many as twenty-five million of the European population of about eighty million were killed by the disease between 1347 and 1351” (p. 151). One wonders if even this mild joke would be accepted in some of the more intellectually resistant universities on the chance that that a discussion of the Black Death might trigger some long-buried Jungian archetypal memories in the oppressed students. Or something. The Holocaust just isn’t funny, and the authors steer away from trying to make it so. The closest injection of humor comes from the title of the section dealing with this history: “Jews: Down, but Never Out.” Anne Frank’s story just isn’t funny either, and the authors are smart enough to treat her biography with seriousness as it appears in an inset titled “A Face in the Crowd.” One distinctly nonhilarious paragraph reads as follows: In August 1944, German security police raided the Franks’ hiding place, apparently having been tipped off by an informant. The family was sent first to the Auschwitz concentration camp, then to BergenBelsen. There Anne died, apparently of typhus, a few weeks before the camp was liberated by British troops. (p. 345)

Variations on the World Historical Approaches

187

Solemnity has its place, but if one cannot have a little fun with Adolf Hitler, then where can one have it? A discussion of Adolf is included in one of the “And Thanks, But No Thanks, For” sections. Adolf Hitler was a sexually repressed incestuous gay or bisexual sadomasochist with an Oedipus complex and only one testicle and probably had syphilis. At least that’s the amalgamated opinion about the German dictator propagated by amateur and professional head shrinkers. How much, if any of this is true is unknown, but it hasn’t stopped a vast herd of people from trying to find a sexual explanation for Hitler’s monstrous behavior. For example, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the CIA, speculated in 1943 that Hitler had “possibly even a homosexual streak in him.” The report also stated Der Fuehrer liked to have women urinate on him. (p. 355)

Historical verification of Hitler’s sexual proclivities is never coming, if indeed he had any (it’s entirely possible that Europe was nearly destroyed by a vegetarian virgin). If the intent of the authors here is to poke a little fun at some of the sensationalistic Hitler scholarship, then kudos to them. Too many pseudo-psychologists and low-rent historians have found out that they can slap Hitler’s name on a cover, speculate on Der Fϋhrer’s intimate life, and sell a few thousand copies. The world’s most boring perpetual market is made up of middle-aged white men (this author is a member of this market and fits the demographic) who will buy just about any book involving Nazi Germany or the American Civil War. We will never have too many speculations about Hitler’s testicles, nor too many scholarly examinations about the effect that the relationship between Grant and Sherman had on forcing the surrender of the Confederacy. The authors don’t seem, however, to be intent on analyzing the foibles of Hitler scholarship; they probably just wanted to inject some dirty factoids and speculations to tantalize the reader. “Did you know,” someone might say to a friend, “that Hitler may have enjoyed being pissed on?” It’s not clear how something like this would enhance anyone’s understanding of how the Nazis came to pursue the Jewish Question in murderous fashion, but hey. The most inventive sections of the book come when the authors include sections that get away from the traditional narrative of world history. On page 180, a section titled “Forks!” can be found that indicates that

188

Chapter 4

fork usage likely began in the Mideast for the purpose of holding meat to the plate while it was cut (people with children will be familiar with this original function), but then “[a] Byzantine princess reportedly introduced a two-tine model in Tuscany, where the clergy roundly condemned it: God-provided fingers . . . using forks didn’t become common in much of Europe until the eighteenth century—and even then they were sometimes used to spear food, shake off the excess sauce, and then steer the food past the lips with the fingers” (p. 180). That’s good to know. For a book published in 2008, The Mental Floss History of the World commits a world historical sin by omission. Nothing is said about the great plagues, likely made of smallpox, that destroyed the native tribes of the new world. Smallpox is mentioned only once in the book, and that is not in a section about exploration and conquest but rather in a section about the mark of medical progress. Smallpox, maybe the single greatest shaper of human demographics in world history, gets only this treatment in a salmon-colored inset: “In 1979, after more than a century of vaccination campaigns around the planet, the World Health Organization certified that smallpox had been eradicated. To date it is the only human infectious disease to be wiped out” (p. 392). Again, humor should not exclude a work of scholarship from being serious. Likewise, humor cannot be held up as a shield against criticism. The Mental Floss History of the World failed to include an epochal transformation wrought by disease evolution and failed to include the most significant new facts regarding global change, that of the evolution of disease and its impact on native societies. This is akin to reading a humorous book on the history of physics that does not mention the arrival of quantum theory. Nonetheless, the history included in the book can be trusted and the humorous presentation makes for engaging reading. The book merely lacked a simple thesis and narrative arc for all the facts, a common problem for books about the history of the world.

Conclusion

There are a couple of books that were not analyzed in this volume, mostly because I was not entirely sure what to do with them. The phrase “A History of the World” featured in the title of both works, and both made for enjoyable and informative reading, but neither seemed to actually be about world history. The first of these was A History of the World in 12 Maps (2012), by Jerry Brotton, and the second was A History of the World in 100 Objects (2013), by Neil MacGregor. The former is about cartography and the latter about different museum pieces. Both presented historical artifacts (exclusively maps in the case of Brotton’s book) from different areas and eras of the world, and then gave historical backgrounds regarding those artifacts. Why not include these? Well, a book about maps and a book about museum pieces are not exactly books where the primary focus is the narrative and connection of world history. These are good books, both, but the loose usage of “A History of the World” in their titles speaks to the field’s lack of clear definitional boundaries. All fields of scholarship should begin with clear definitions and world history just does not have them. One could argue, and both of the books mentioned in this conclusion would be evidence for the cause, that this lack of boundaries has allowed authors and researchers a certain amount of creative freedom that is lacking from traditional forms of historical scholarship. No doubt part of this is true, but the development of “Big History” as the lead candidate for a unified field of knowledge brings world history’s troubles into clear sight. “Big History” is not ready for the big time and that’s because it has evolved from unclear beginnings in world history and because big historians (David Christian especially) have ventured into the world of theoretical physics without a true understanding of how physics and probability work. In the desire to develop a fully structured narrative, Christian has left out too much history and misunderstood too much science. This must be addressed and world history must have some parameters that can be protected by scholars. The field’s full applications 189

190

Conclusion

for education and scholarship show too much potential to collapse in this early era. The conclusion of a first volume of a two-volume work should include a transitional link that can be picked up on in the introduction of the second volume. After a long period of reading and writing, the greatest link between the two volumes is the feeling that both will ultimately be inadequate to the massive subject at hand. Nevertheless, I set out on this venture with the belief that a study of the history of the world as a discrete subject is better than no study of the history of the world as a discrete subject. As this volume ends, I continue to believe that this is true and this is the conviction, more than anything else, that connects the first and second volumes.

References

Bauer, Susan Wise. The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. Bauer, Susan Wise. The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. Bauer, Susan Wise. The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople. New York: W.W. Norton, 2013. Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. New York: Liveright, 2015. Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human. New York: Riverhead Books, 1999. Brotton, Jerry. A History of the World in 12 Maps. New York: Penguin Books, 2012. Crosby, Alfred. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westfield, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1973. Dennett, Daniel. Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. New York: W.W. Norton, 2014. Durant, Will. Our Oriental Heritage: The Story of Civilization. New York: MJF Communication, 1935. Durant, Will. The Life of Greece: The Story of Civilization II. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939. Durant, Will. Caesar and Christ: The Story of Civilization III. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1944. Durant, Will. The Age of Faith: The Story of Civilization IV. New York: MJF Books, 1950. Durant, Will. The Renaissance: The Story of Civilization V. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1953. Durant, Will. The Reformation: The Story of Civilization VI. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957. Durant, Will, and Ariel Durant. The Age of Reason Begins: The Story of Civilization VII. New York: MJF Books, 1961. Durant, Will, and Ariel Durant. The Age of Louis XIV: The Story of Civilization VIII. New York: MJF Books, 1963. Durant, Will, and Ariel Durant. The Age of Voltaire: The Story of Civilization IX. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965. Durant, Will, and Ariel Durant. Rousseau and Revolution: The Story of Civilization X. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967. Durant, Will, and Ariel Durant. The Age of Napoleon: The Story of Civilization XI. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975. Gibbon, Edward. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 1776. New York: Modern Library, 2003. Gombrich, E. H. A Little History of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Hastings, Max. Catastrophe: 1914: Europe Goes to War. New York: Random House, 2013.

191

192

References

Lewis, Bernard. What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East. New York: Harper Perennial, 2003. Loewen, James. Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. New York: Touchstone, 1995. MacGregor, Neil. A History of the World in 100 Objects. London: Allen Lane, 2010. McPherson, James. The Illustrated Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin Books, 1985. Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1895, reprint 1999). The Anti-Christ. Tucson: See Sharp Press, 1999. Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Penguin, 2012. Polybius, “On History.” In On Writing History: From Herodotus to Herodian, edited by John Marincola, 53. New York: Penguin Classics, 2017. Roberts, J. M. The History of the World. 6th ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain. New York: Vintage, 2008. Sass, Erik, and Steve Wiegand. The Mental Floss History of the World: An Irreverent Romp through Civilization’s Best Bits. New York: Harper, 2008. Standage, Tom. A History of the World in 6 Glasses. New York: Walker Publishing Co., 2006. Weiner, Eric. (2016). The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World’s Most Creative Places, from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley. New York: Simon and Schuster. Wells, H. G. The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind. New York: Garden City Publishing Co., 1920. Wells, H. G. A Short History of the World. New York: Penguin Classics, 1922. Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. 1980. New York: Harper Perennial, 2014.

About the Author

Dr. Chris Edwards is a veteran teacher of AP World History, World History, and English. He is the author of several books, including the five-volume Connecting the Dots in World History (2015) series published by R&L Education, and, most recently Beyond Obsolete: How to Upgrade Classroom Practice and School Structure (2018). He is a frequent contributor to Skeptic magazine on the topics of law, logic, psychology, theoretical physics, and education. Chris has directed numerous educational grants and is the primary investigator through Ball State University for a summer institute and workforce outreach program that is for math and science teachers. His teaching methodology and scholarship have been published by the National Council for Social Studies (NCSS) and the National Council for History Education. He has presented his teaching methodology to a national audience through a two-part webinar series hosted by the NCSS.

193