The Undivided Past

by David Cannadine

  CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS

  Ever since the late eighteenth century, the notion that civilizations (and, sometimes, barbarians) constitute the ultimate, most capacious, and most significant form of collective human identity has been an arresting and appealing one, because it offers the most comprehensive yet also the most simplified account of the diversity and complexity of the peopled past. Such a view of human identity was shared in the nineteenth century by the British philosopher John Stuart Mill and the French statesman and historian François Guizot, and since then it has been especially arresting and appealing to pundits, policymakers, and political leaders seeking to mobilize popular support for a particular international cause or overseas venture: in defense of civilization against barbarism, or in defense of one version of civilization against another.117 But across the last two hundred years, the evidence is clear that when political leaders derive their aggregated categories from authors such as those discussed here, they invariably compound the original literary licenses and scholarly liberties that had been taken by adding further simplifications of their own. The resulting collective identities are almost invariably misleading to the point where they may, as in the case of the so-called clash of civilizations, be simultaneously convincing to some while wholly unconvincing to others, and the accumulated evidence strongly suggests that the skeptics are more correct than the believers.118

  To be sure, the notion that civilizations and barbarisms, or civilizations and civilizations, are predestined to confront each other and go to war with each other, as the ultimate manifestation of competing human identities, consciousnesses, and agencies, is one that can be easily articulated, both rhetorically and cartographically. The Manichean simplicities of “us” versus “them,” and of “good” versus “bad,” can be inflated to a global scale by messianic wordsmiths, and they look good on paper, as depicted on visually persuasive maps of the world. Yet if there are such entities as civilizations, this is not, pace Gibbon, Toynbee, and Huntington, how they function and interact with each other in the long run. And even if such entities as civilizations actually do exist, there is little evidence that they are, pace Gibbon, Toynbee, and Huntington, self-confined or prone to clash in the long run. As Felipe Fernández-Armesto writes in his own study of the subject, “Even when locked in what appears to be mutual hostility—like Ancient Rome and Persia, or medieval Christendom and Islam—civilizations tend to develop relationships which are mutually acknowledging and sometimes mutually sustaining.… Though there are occasional exceptions,” he concludes, “it seems to be hard for any civilization to survive at a high level of material achievement, except in contact with others.”119 With civilizations, as with religions, nations, classes, genders, and races, we neglect at our peril the conversations that go on across what some mistakenly think to be impermeable boundaries.

  Indeed, in recent years the United Nations has deliberately sought, in the name of promoting a global sense of common humanity, to encourage such transcivilizational dialogues and encounters, an endeavor that culminated in November 2006 in the publication of a report entitled The Alliance of Civilizations. The history of relations between cultures, it concluded, was not only characterized by “wars and confrontation”; it was also a “history of mutual borrowing and constant cross-fertilization,” since civilizations “overlap, interact and evolve in relationship with one another.” In its humane internationalism and its well-intentioned liberalism, such a document seems light-years away from the belligerent unilateralists who appropriated—and corrupted—Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis.120 Yet in one significant sense, made plain in its very title, the UN document shared the presumptions of Huntington and those who had invoked his work to justify the “war on terror,” namely that the world was divided into different civilizational groups that constituted the highest form of collective human identity. While diverging from the neocons over whether civilizations clashed or conversed, they concurred with them in the belief that civilizations undoubtedly did exist.121

  But did they, and do they, exist? After making thirteen television programs on the subject, the art historian Sir Kenneth Clark concluded that civilization was extremely difficult to define and describe.122 How right he was—and is. Despite the uncounted scholars from many disciplines who have tried their hand at the question, there is no agreement as to how many civilizations there have been in the past, or how many exist today. Just as it is clearly inadequate to define an individual on the basis of only one criterion, such as religion, so, too, do civilizations defy such reduction; yet to define them on the basis of many criteria avails a meaningless category for the very opposite reason. Still, despite its deep flaws as the largest and most inclusive form of collective human solidarity, civilization has continued to appeal to those who wish to sort reality into the simplest possible categories and identities—categories and identities that retain their currency so long as their incoherence and contradictions are not betrayed by practical experience. It would be flying in the face of the evidence to hope that a word in such ready common usage for two hundred years might now be given up. But future world leaders who invoke “civilization” ought to be more circumspect about doing so than many who have recently and irresponsibly been bandying it around to such baleful effect. Of all collective forms of human identity, civilization is the most nebulous, and it is this very vagueness that makes it at once so appealing and so dangerous. As Dr. Johnson realized, it is a word, a concept, a category, and a version of human aggregation and conflict we would be much better off without.123

  Conclusion

  “Wasn’t it the chronic danger of our time, not only practical, but intellectual, to let the world get divided into two halves?”

  —C. P. Snow, The Affair

  There has not, so far as I know been any previous age in which the common humanity of all human beings, just in virtue of our all being human, has been so widely recognized and acted upon as it is today.

  —Arnold J. Toynbee, Experiences

  DESPITE THEIR UNDENIABLE DIFFERENCES and variations, the collective identities investigated in this book share significant characteristics. A first is that each is invoked and deployed to promote particular group interests: religions compete in their claims to uniquely privileged access to their respective deities; every nation stresses its special characteristics and admirable virtues vis-à-vis any or all others; classes go to war to decide which of them should enjoy the greater share of the profits of the means of production; women do battle with men to undo centuries of exploitation and discrimination; whites enforce their supremacy over blacks, and blacks fight to free themselves from it; and civilizations clash on the basis of differing perceptions as to which are good and evil. A second is that many leaders and writers have claimed that one of these six solidarities is both more homogeneous and more important than any other form of human aggregation, thereby resembling a winning squash or a victorious turnip or a triumphant pumpkin in a horticultural competition, being bigger, better, and more important than any of its rivals. A third is that these identities are presented as being so innate, intrinsic, adversarial, and confrontational that the world must properly be understood in Manichean terms, as a cosmic battleground between religions or nations or classes or genders or races or civilizations. A fourth shared characteristic is that these battling solidarities are sustained by affirming memories, reinforcing stories, and historical accounts that reject any greater sense of common humanity.

  As the foregoing pages often concede, tensions and conflicts have indeed arisen across the centuries between different groups that have sought to define themselves, or else have been defined in relation to, one of the six categories of identity explored here.1 Battles have been fought and conflicts have been waged to protect or promote religions or nations or civilizations, and class, gender, and race have given rise to a host of social and political upheavals, from civil disobedience to civil wars. But it is also the case that these aggregations,
constructed and pitted against one another, and often accompanied by extravagant claims as to their primacy and significance, need to be treated with healthier skepticism than they all too often receive. To begin with, they are rarely as homogeneous, monolithic, or all-encompassing, or as naturally belligerent and as adversarially entrenched, as their leaders and apologists, propagandists and historians like to claim: how often, it behooves us to ask, have (for example) most Christians, most Germans, most workers, most women, most blacks, or most inhabitants of the West felt a common identity against most pagans, most Frenchmen, most employees, most men, most whites, or most barbarians? Claims made for the homogeneity, the unanimity, and the innate bellicosity of such groupings invariably break down under scrutiny, into myriad fragments, significant exceptions, and many alternative competing identities. The combative mobilization of such collective categories has always depended on making totalizing claims to uniformity and all-inclusiveness that are never actually true, and these identities belong to those “fictions” that seem regrettably inseparable from the processes of politics and realities of government.2

  As for the claims made by figures ranging from Marx and Engels, via Robert Knox, to Germaine Greer and George W. Bush, to the effect that one of these six identities is paramount, trumping and incorporating the others as the explanation of human behavior, past, present, and future: it follows, self-evidently, that these claims cannot all be true. Conceivably, one of them is right, and the other five are wrong, but to judge by the ample evidence against each of them, it seems more plausible to conclude, in the spirit of W. S. Gilbert’s aphorism, “When everyone is somebody, then no-one’s anybody,” that no exclusive and hegemonic assertion made on behalf of any of these six aggregations is ever true. Both individually and collectively, we are all creatures of multiple rather than single identities, we inhabit many different and diverse groupings at the same time, and they vary in their significance, and in their claims on our attention, depending on particular contexts and specific circumstances. As Amartya Sen has rightly observed, it is an “odd presumption” that “people of the world can be uniquely categorized according to some singular and overarching system of partitioning,” and this misguidedly “solitarist” approach to the many identities we all simultaneously possess is not only intrinsically wrong and empirically incorrect, but it also disregards and undermines the broader and more encompassing collective category of our “shared humanity.”3

  Such claims also mistakenly assume that the world is divided and polarized between single, all-encompassing collectivities. Yet it cannot be too often repeated that while conflicts between those whom Matthew Arnold famously described as “ignorant armies” clashing by night “on a darkling plain” are undeniably a significant part of the story of humanity, the Manichean view of the world frequently deployed to proclaim, ignite, and promote confrontations between “us” and “them,” between the “good guys” and the “bad guys,” and between the forces of light and those of darkness, fails to recognize or describe the messy, complex, contingent, multifaceted, interconnected, joined-up reality of human relations.4 As these pages have shown time and again, conversations across these allegedly unbridgeable divides—between (for example) Christians and pagans, or Germans and Frenchmen, or workers and capitalists, or women and men, or blacks and whites, or the West and the rest—make up a substantial, perhaps even preponderant, part of the whole human experience. Whether envisaged individually or collectively, the reality of the human past has always been informed by dialogue, interaction, connection, borrowing, blending, and assimilation, at least as much as it has been by disagreement, hostility, belligerence, conflict, separation, or unlikeness. That our sense of the past, and of the present, has been too often dominated by an exaggerated insistence on the importance of confrontation and difference is not only a disservice to the cause of knowledge but also misrepresents the nature of the human condition, and misidentifies the best paths by which that condition has been improved—and may be further improved.

  Among the partisans and proponents of divided humanity, there is often an easy presumption of cause and effect between the agitation and articulation of group identities, the resulting pressure exerted on those in power, and the furtherance of human progress: as colonial nationalists battle for freedom from imperial control, or as women worldwide seek to gain liberties and equality, or as blacks in the United States campaigned for their civil rights. But while some collective groupings are built around such virtuous claims, and achieve such admirable outcomes, not all of them are, and not all of them do, as evident in the mobilization of Aryans against Jews, or of white supremacists against blacks, for very different (and very deplorable) ends. There is an additional assumption that such mobilizations invariably achieve their aims, but the processes whereby colonies became independent, or women’s circumstances were improved, or civil rights were won for American blacks, or apartheid was ended in South Africa, were clearly much more complex than that.5 The mobilizations may well have played a part—but only a part. Moreover, some of the most successful leaders of these causes achieved their ends through appeals across these divides, rather than on the basis of adversarial identities: Martin Luther King Jr. promoted the interests of blacks that they might enjoy civil rights with whites, not at their expense; Betty Friedan sought to involve men as well as women in the pursuit of her feminist agenda; and in denouncing apartheid, Nelson Mandela was motivated by a concern not just for blacks, but for humanity as a whole.

  Even those who have sometimes advocated sectional interests, particular identities, and group antagonisms have on occasions seen the force, wisdom, and justification of a more generous, all-embracing, and inclusive view. One such individual was Rudyard Kipling, successively acclaimed and denounced as the racist poet who declared the white man’s burden and advocated the white man’s supremacy. But in a very different mood, he would urge a broader perspective on humanity, in which the differences were ultimately dissolved in the similarities:

  All good people agree

  And all good people say,

  All nice people, like Us, are We

  And everyone else is They:

  But if you cross the sea,

  Instead of over the way,

  You may end (think of it!) by looking on We

  As only a sort of They!6

  And one such institution of which the same may be said has been Christianity, which for much of its history has been belligerently and intolerantly opposed to alternative religions, as well as to heretical and heterodox versions of itself, but which has also been a powerful force in the twentieth century against such evils as racism and the mistreatment of women, in the cause of proclaiming a common humanity.7

  Yet what V. S. Naipaul once called “that missing large idea of human association” has received little attention from historians, even in our own time when world history, global history, and transnational history are more advocated and more popular than ever before.8 This is partly because the deeds and attitudes that constitute and exemplify our common humanity tend to be to historians what good news is to journalists: the default mode of human activity, a quotidian reality that rarely merits headlines, being somehow either unworthy or uninteresting.9 And this lack of appeal is evident across the political as well as the scholarly spectrum. On the left, the preferred model of human behavior and association remains that of collective identities heroically mobilized by charismatic leaders to achieve virtuous ends through struggle and conflict against implacable forces and evil foes. On the right, the vision of common humanity is also occluded, by stressing the primacy of struggle and competition among individuals, an atomistic (and antagonistic) view immortalized by Margaret Thatcher’s observation that there is no such thing as society. Neither of these perspectives leaves any room for the greater claims or larger subject of our shared humanity beyond our differences. Yet the human past needs to be approached, understood, explained, and written not just in terms of competing individuals and
the survival of the fittest, or of group identities latently or actually in conflict with each other, but also in terms of the concerns, activities, and achievements that transcend these divisions. “History and humanity,” one American scholar notes, “are not in fact enclosed in boxes, whether national, ethnic, local or continental. Good history ought to reflect this truth.”10

  As the late J. H. Plumb once remarked, history “is neither pagan nor Christian, it belongs to no nation or class, it is universal; it is human in the widest sense of the term.”11 Thus understood, the primary job of the historian is not to assist in constructing the artifice of discrete, self-contained, self-regarding, and mutually exclusive groups. This enterprise has been a priority too long unexamined to the detriment of a more complex, dynamic, and ultimately more compelling understanding based on the multiplicity of identities, by turns individual and collective, separate and shared, that animate all of us in unique and changing ways. A history that dwells only on divided pasts denies us the just inheritance of what we have always shared, namely a capacity to “live together in societies sufficiently harmonious and orderly not to be constantly breaking apart.” Surely, then, it is at least as worthwhile to take as our starting point humanity’s essential (but under-studied) unity as it is to obsess on its lesser (but over-studied) divisions?12