by Dan Carlin
The mid-twentieth-century historian Chester G. Starr wrote about Sparta, an entire society geared toward creating some of the finest fighting men in the ancient world. The soldiers of Sparta propelled this agrarian Peloponnesian Greek city-state to heights it had no right to expect given the size of its population and its relatively modest economic output. But the entire society and culture in Sparta supported and reinforced the army and soldiery. Every male citizen was trained for war and was liable for service until age sixty.
The trained citizen militia approach was common to many societies, especially in ancient Greece, but Sparta took it to extremes. There, it was nothing less than a human molding process that started at the very beginning of life: newborns were deemed the raw material of the military, and a Spartan baby was subjected to judgment by a council of Spartan elders who would decide whether the baby was fit enough to live. “Any child that appeared defective was thrown from a cliff of Mt. Taygetus, to die on the jagged rocks below,” wrote Starr.*
The infants who were deemed worthy of living were subjected to “the Spartan habit of inuring their infants to discomfort and exposure.” At seven years old, children were taken from their families and sent to a camp to train. As young adults, Spartans ate in communal military mess halls with their brethren, never knowing the comforts of home. They were deliberately underfed to encourage them to steal food and be resourceful, but then they were harshly punished if caught. These Spartan children grew up to be the best fighting men in Greece precisely because their whole culture worked to create them that way. Supposedly, the Spartans even eschewed money during their heyday,* because they thought it corrupted their upstanding morals and martial values.*
Then over time, according to the traditional narrative, the Spartans became “luxury-loving and corruptible,” as Starr wrote, and this eroded their toughness and military superiority, eventually leading to their downfall on the battlefield. The Spartans of 380 BCE might not have beaten their very formidable grandfathers of 480 BCE, but the Spartans of 280 BCE would definitely not have beaten their grandfathers.* The hated Persians are sometimes credited with deliberately contributing to this. The “Great Kings” of Persia, who could not defeat the Spartans on the battlefield, found that gold was a more effective way to neutralize them. Over time, the premodern sources portray Spartans, especially some Spartan kings, as a good deal more materialistic and money loving than the more “spartan” Spartans of old. It’s as if these “soft” Persians, as the ancient Greeks often portrayed them, spreading their softness like a virus, equalized the toughness between the two sides.*
There are other ways to explain Sparta’s rise and fall than “toughness”—better training and conditioning, for example—but it seems strange to assign no value to it at all.
War and poverty are not constants. They may create a heightened resilience on the part of the humans affected by them, but not all people are. Some people get lucky and avoid combat and economic privation. But everyone gets sick.
It may seem strange to suggest that high levels of illness might make human beings tougher, but the effect on a society of relatively regular and lethal epidemics and the mortality they cause certainly might have created a level of resilience that most of us today probably don’t possess. A husband and wife who have lost several of their young children to disease and have stoically pushed forward with their lives would probably seem tough and resilient to us. People around the world still do this, and we consider it one of the great tragedies of life to lose even a single offspring. But it has been only relatively recently in human history that this experience has become less than commonplace. Before the modern era, the number of people who lost multiple children to illness was astonishing. One wonders what effects this might have had on individuals and their society as a whole. The historian Edward Gibbon, who wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was one of seven children. All six of his siblings died in infancy. That was a pretty high rate even in the early eighteenth century, but the terrible regularity of losing children before they reached adulthood was common. However, focusing on what disease might do to children is to ignore the wider effects that high levels of illness can have on a society. A really bad epidemic might kill everyone.
When it comes to disease, the world is a vastly different place in the modern era than it was at any previous time in history.* Yes, there are parts of the developing world that have been virtually unchanged since the Middle Ages and are still disease ridden, but by and large the technologically advanced societies of the modern world have scant concept of the way human existence was affected by disease from the beginning of humankind until just a generation ago. It’s startling to think of the many pandemics that have erased large percentages of the global population over the ages. Reading the contemporary accounts is like reading very dark science fiction. If we lost a quarter of the human population to a modern plague, it would seem obscene to suggest there was the positive side effect of making us more resilient.
In some ways, illness makes us tougher, because immunities often develop in those who have been sick. That’s hard science. But do people who suffer the regular loss of loved ones to disease become tougher or more resilient individuals? Do societies with large numbers of such people living in them become tougher societies? These questions fall into that gray area of things that we intrinsically feel might be important, but that can’t really be measured or proved. Clearly, there were times in our history when only the strong survived, so a person had better be tough. But a case might be made that toughness isn’t as important a qualification for survival as it used to be.
Connecting this to the wooden shoes–silk slippers ladder, one might suggest that timing is important. If tough times call for tough people, what if the times are less tough? In addition, the silk slippers stage can come with some potentially offsetting benefits.
The early-twentieth-century German military historian Hans Delbrück* had a theory that everything that characterizes the modern military—the organization, tactics, drill, logistics, and leadership—is designed to help offset the natural advantage of the toughness that people at a lower level of civilization possess. “Compared to civilized people,” he wrote about the ancient Germans who kept getting beaten by the more refined Romans, “barbarians had the advantage of having at their disposal the warlike power of the unbridled animal instincts, of basic toughness. Civilization refines the human being, makes him more sensitive, and in doing so, it decreases his military worth, not only his bodily strength, but also his physical courage. These natural shortcomings must be offset in some artificial way. . . . The main service of the standing army consists of making civilized people through discipline capable of holding their own against the less civilized.”*
By Delbrück’s way of thinking, the whole reason that city-states first started organizing their farmers—who generally tended to be more peaceable than the barbarians right outside their borders—was to create a superior military, which requires training and discipline, so that they could hold their own against people whose harsher environment made them fiercer or more warlike.* “If a given group of Romans normally living as citizens or peasants had been put up against a group of barbarians of the same number,” Delbrück wrote, “the former would undoubtedly have been defeated; in fact, they would probably have taken flight without fighting. It was only the formation of the close-knit tactical body of the cohorts that equalized the situation.”
The seemingly softer society’s use of technology, superior organizational capabilities, and money against a potentially tougher and hardier society is a dynamic that’s visible in many historical eras. The modern Afghans may be one of the toughest people on the planet right now, but their individual and societal resilience is offset by Western military forces that might as well be playing the part of the Romans in this story. However, if the Western militaries were forced to fight using the same weapons as the Afghans—AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and IEDs—and th
ey, in turn, used our drones, fighter planes, and cruise missiles, then the question of our toughness versus theirs might be crucial. Remember, the Afghans have been a people at war for forty years, against a multitude of opponents. In some ways, they might be more like our grandparents when it comes to toughness than we are.
The weapons and technology are so advanced now that we can have a modern warrior engaging his foe in Afghanistan from an air-conditioned room in Kansas—a virtual pilot whose skills were likely honed growing up on video games the same way that a Japanese youth two centuries ago practiced for a future of sword fighting in kendo class. Instead of combat weapons drill, today’s trained killers, many of whom may never see a dead enemy up close, fly drones that shoot tough-as-nails tribal soldiers in the harsh, mountainous terrain.* Modern militaries have, like Delbrück’s Romans, found ways to work around the toughness deficit.* Yet toughness may still make a difference in who wins or loses the war. It may be the key factor that decides who has the willingness to continue the ongoing body count and financial costs indefinitely.* But if it were, how could a historian prove it conclusively in a peer-reviewed paper?
Chapter 2
Suffer the Children
History is akin to traveling to a distant planet, but one inhabited by human beings. Biologically the same, but culturally alien—and a major reason is that they were raised differently.
The importance of parents and parenting is almost universally accepted. Like toughness, it is an aspect of humanity that we almost intrinsically understand to be extremely influential in how a person turns out as an adult, but it’s challenging to assess its impact on individuals in the past or on human history as a whole. Yet it would seem strange to suggest that the way parents reared children was of no great historical import at all. What if they reared everyone wrong?
“Wrong” is a culturally determined concept, of course. Every age and culture has its own ideas on the best way to raise progeny. But while parents in any place or time usually try to do what’s best for their offspring, in the past much of the information they had was fallacious. Out of ignorance they may have harmed children while doing things they believed would be beneficial. Today the modern understanding of health and science, and the widespread dissemination of parenting information, has probably created the most knowledgeable generation of parents ever. Of particular emphasis is early childhood development. The effects of poor childhood nutrition, prenatal damage from alcohol and drugs, bad hygiene, child abuse, and just awful parenting during a child’s formative years are well known. Parents deemed unfit or abusive or who can’t meet minimum societal standards often lose custody of their children. In very bad cases, they can go to prison.
There’s no doubt that these measures have, over time, tremendously improved the child-raising climate in our modern societies. The benefit to individual kids is incalculable. But trying to determine how this adds up at the societal level is extremely difficult. It’s obvious that it has to make a large difference, and yet it’s almost impossible to say exactly how or to what degree it actually has. Do huge cultural improvements in child rearing create a better society? Conversely, how much did poor childhood environments affect the societies of the past?
Some of the theories on the subject can seem far-fetched, but they definitely prompt us to think about things that might have slipped below the radar scanning for the traditional names, dates, and events we usually seek out when we’re trying to understand history. Could you, for example, suggest that child-rearing practices can affect a nation’s foreign policy? If it seems unlikely, imagine a world where half the adults are child abuse victims, and then consider the many strange and unforeseen consequences that might manifest. It’s a fascinating question.
One of the earlier voices exploring the potential historical importance of child-rearing practices was Lloyd deMause.* DeMause specializes in psychohistory, a controversial discipline that focuses on, among other things, child-rearing practices and the effect they might have on the way history unfolds. He takes a rather dim view of parents in the past, writing in The Emotional Life of Nations, “Parents until relatively recently have been so frightened and have so hated their newborn infants that they have killed them by the billions, routinely sent them out to extremely neglectful wet nurses, tied them up tightly in swaddling bandages lest they be overpowered by them, starved, mutilated, raped, neglected, and beat them so badly that prior to modern times, I have not been able to find evidence of a single parent who would not today be put in jail for child abuse.”
DeMause and the psychohistorians look at societies of the past in the same way psychologists and psychiatrists look at individuals today, trying to figure out if the early development of and influences on children affected the societies they created later.* DeMause believes that most children up until recent times would likely have met modern criteria as child abuse victims, which he and others like him believe may help explain why, for example, eras like the Middle Ages were so barbarous.*
But human cultures are so varied that such blanket statements seem too sweeping. While such theories might appear applicable to some complex urban societies, many premodern and tribal societies had age-old patterns of human upbringing that involved plenty of parental and extended family love and nurturing. Yet members of such societies too often involved children in practices and activities that we today would assume would cause lasting damage. But some of these things were merely aspects of living life in another era. The violence, for example, that a child growing up several thousand years ago may have seen on a regular basis may have had little or no negative effect on her compared with its effect on a modern child. It just might have been part of life in her world.
One of the important variables in this discussion concerns whether culture can be said to have shielded the children of past eras to any degree from the effects of what we today would call abuse, neglect, or emotional and psychological trauma. If a behavior that we moderns consider horribly deviant were viewed in a more positive and culturally reinforced way in the past, some argue that the effects would have been less damaging. It feels a bit like grading child abuse or bad parenting on a historical curve, but if something is more socially accepted and lacks the stigma it would have today, does that lessen its damage? Some would argue that the damage is a constant regardless of the society or era, others that it is culturally influenced. Either these people of the past were basically normal and well-adjusted adults despite their childhood experiences and the differences in parenting, or they were, as deMause argues, almost universally what we would today classify as abused children living in a society created by, operated by, and led by abused children.
The easiest way to imagine how bad things might have been for children growing up in past societies is to simply imagine what our own would look like if we removed today’s prohibitions, investigations, and enforcement concerning such things as child abuse and neglect. Even with our modern attention and efforts, children are abused, mistreated, and neglected in every society on earth. Without those rules and enforcement, such mistreatment would almost certainly be much worse. Imagine how bad it might get if a society actually encouraged such behavior.*
Beating children was a common form of discipline from the earliest days of human history to relatively recent times. Many in the Greatest Generation, for example, grew up in a culture that did not think the general practice unusual whatsoever.* In fact, beating was considered by many to be the preferred and proper way to raise good, well-adjusted adults. It was routinely done to students in schools. And while a parent today who regularly struck his child with a belt twenty or thirty times would be considered abusive by the vast majority of people, he would have been considered positively lenient by the standards of past eras, when a belt might seem a poor substitute for something designed specifically for the task of beating kids.
DeMause’s The History of Childhood describes various implements of corporal punishment, including
whips of all ki
nds,
cat-o’-nine-tails,
shovels,
canes,
iron and wooden rods,
bundles of sticks,
“disciplines” (whips made of small chains), and
“flappers” (school instruments with a pear-shaped end and a round hole, used to raise blisters).
Today there is almost no chance we would countenance the use of a discipline tool specifically designed to raise blisters on a seven- or eight-year-old child. Yet the oft-cited line “spare the rod and spoil the child” asserts that a parent who is too lenient with physical punishment on children is doing them harm. People took this admonition seriously for a long time.*
It’s hard to blame parents for not seeing the potential damage they were doing to their children, because, after all, this is how they themselves had been raised. If we are imagining what a society of abused children might be like to live in, consider for a moment how they might raise their own offspring. The historian M. J. Tucker in an essay in The History of Childhood gives an account of the harsh treatment Lady Jane Grey* endured at the hands of her parents and then writes that “Jane’s parents were typical. . . . Common usage decreed that parents who love their children will beat them.” He says that this is how the children often saw it as well: “Little girls, like Lady Jane Grey, never doubted that her beatings issued from parental concern and blessed herself that her parents took their responsibility so seriously.” Lady Jane Grey would be executed as a teenager after being caught up in a royal succession crisis. Had she lived, though, and wished to have been a good mother by the standards of the time, how would this beaten child have been likely to behave toward her own kids?