The former president of the university where I teach once confessed that, when he had been an undergraduate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his mother had implored him to take at least one history course. The brilliant young economist replied cockily that he was more interested in the future than in the past. It is a preference he now knows to be illusory. There is in fact no such thing as the future, singular; only futures, plural. There are multiple interpretations of history, to be sure, none definitive – but there is only one past. And although the past is over, for two reasons it is indispensable to our understanding of what we experience today and what lies ahead of us tomorrow and thereafter. First, the current world population makes up approximately 7 per cent of all the human beings who have ever lived. The dead outnumber the living, in other words, fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril. Second, the past is really our only reliable source of knowledge about the fleeting present and to the multiple futures that lie before us, only one of which will actually happen. History is not just how we study the past; it is how we study time itself.
Let us first acknowledge the subject’s limitations. Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even try to) establish universal laws of social or political ‘physics’ with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility of repeating the single, multi-millennium experiment that constitutes the past. The sample size of human history is one. Moreover, the ‘particles’ in this one vast experiment have consciousness, which is skewed by all kinds of cognitive biases. This means that their behaviour is even harder to predict than if they were insensate, mindless, gyrating particles. Among the many quirks of the human condition is that people have evolved to learn almost instinctively from their own past experience. So their behaviour is adaptive; it changes over time. We do not wander randomly but walk in paths, and what we have encountered behind us determines the direction we choose when the paths fork – as they constantly do.
So what can historians do? First, by mimicking social scientists and relying on quantitative data, historians can devise ‘covering laws’, in Carl Hempel’s sense of general statements about the past that appear to cover most cases (for instance, when a dictator takes power instead of a democratic leader, the chance increases that the country in question will go to war). Or – though the two approaches are not mutually exclusive – the historian can commune with the dead by imaginatively reconstructing their experiences in the way described by the great Oxford philosopher R. G. Collingwood in his 1939 Autobiography. These two modes of historical inquiry allow us to turn the surviving relics of the past into history, a body of knowledge and interpretation that retrospectively orders and illuminates the human predicament. Any serious predictive statement about the possible futures we may experience is based, implicitly or explicitly, on one or both of these historical procedures. If not, then it belongs in the same category as the horoscope in this morning’s newspaper.
Collingwood’s ambition, forged in the disillusionment with natural science and psychology that followed the carnage of the First World War, was to take history into the modern age, leaving behind what he dismissed as ‘scissors-and-paste history’, in which writers ‘only repeat, with different arrangements and different styles of decoration, what others [have] said before them’. His thought process is itself worth reconstructing:
a) ‘The past which an historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present’ in the form of traces (documents and artefacts) that have survived.
b) ‘All history is the history of thought’, in the sense that a piece of historical evidence is meaningless if its intended purpose cannot be inferred.
c) That process of inference requires an imaginative leap through time: ‘Historical knowledge is the re-enactment in the historian’s mind of the thought whose history he is studying.’
d) But the real meaning of history comes from the juxtaposition of past and present: ‘Historical knowledge is the re-enactment of a past thought incapsulated in a context of present thoughts which, by contradicting it, confine it to a plane different from theirs.’
e) The historian thus ‘may very well be related to the nonhistorian as the trained woodsman is to the ignorant traveller. “Nothing here but trees and grass,” thinks the traveller, and marches on. “Look,” says the woodsman, “there is a tiger in that grass.” ’ In other words, Collingwood argues, history offers something ‘altogether different from [scientific] rules, namely insight’.
f) The true function of historical insight is ‘to inform [people] about the present, in so far as the past, its ostensible subject matter, [is] incapsulated in the present and [constitutes] a part of it not at once obvious to the untrained eye’.
g) As for our choice of subject matter for historical investigation, Collingwood makes it clear that there is nothing wrong with what his Cambridge contemporary Herbert Butterfield condemned as ‘present-mindedness’: ‘True historical problems arise out of practical problems. We study history in order to see more clearly into the situation in which we are called upon to act. Hence the plane on which, ultimately, all problems arise is the plane of “real” life: that to which they are referred for their solution is history.’
A polymath as skilled in archaeology as he was in philosophy, a staunch opponent of appeasement and an early hater of the Daily Mail,* Collingwood has been my guide for many years, but never has he been more indispensable than in the writing of this book. For the problem of why civilizations fall is too important to be left to the purveyors of scissors-and-paste history. It is truly a practical problem of our time, and this book is intended to be a woodsman’s guide to it. For there is more than one tiger hidden in this grass.
In dutifully reconstructing past thought, I have tried always to remember a simple truth about the past that the historically inexperienced are prone to forget. Most people in the past either died young or expected to die young, and those who did not were repeatedly bereft of those they loved, who did die young. Consider the case of my favourite poet, the Jacobean master John Donne, who lived to the age of fifty-nine, thirteen years older than I am as I write. A lawyer, a Member of Parliament and, after renouncing the Roman Catholic faith, an Anglican priest, Donne married for love, as a result losing his job as secretary to his bride’s uncle, Sir Thomas Egerton, the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal.† In the space of sixteen impecunious years, Anne Donne bore her husband twelve children. Three of them, Francis, Nicholas and Mary, died before they were ten. Anne herself died after giving birth to the twelfth child, which was stillborn. After his favourite daughter Lucy had died and he himself had very nearly followed her to the grave, Donne wrote his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624), which contains the greatest of all exhortations to commiserate with the dead: ‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.’ Three years later, the death of a close friend inspired him to write ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day, Being the Shortest Day’:
Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death – things which are not.
Everyone should read these lines who wants to understand better the human condition in the days when life expectancy was less than half what it is today.
The much greater power of death to cut people off in their prime not only made life seem precarious and filled it with grief. It also meant that most of the people who built the civilizations of the past were young when they made their contributions. The great Dutch-Jewish philos
opher Baruch or Benedict Spinoza, who hypothesized that there is only a material universe of substance and deterministic causation, and that ‘God’ is that universe’s natural order as we dimly apprehend it and nothing more, died in 1677 at the age of forty-four, probably from the particles of glass he had inhaled doing his day-job as a lens grinder. Blaise Pascal, the pioneer of probability theory and hydrodynamics and the author of the Pensées, the greatest of all apologias for the Christian faith, lived to be just thirty-nine; he would have died even younger had the road accident that reawakened his spiritual side been fatal. Who knows what other great works these geniuses might have brought forth had they been granted the lifespans enjoyed by, for example, the great humanists Erasmus (sixty-nine) and Montaigne (fifty-nine)? Mozart, composer of the most perfect of all operas, Don Giovanni, died when he was just thirty-five. Franz Schubert, composer of the sublime String Quintet in C (D956), succumbed, probably to syphilis, at the age of just thirty-one. Prolific though they were, what else might they have composed if they had been granted the sixty-three years enjoyed by the stolid Johannes Brahms or the even more exceptional seventy-two years allowed the ponderous Anton Bruckner? The Scots poet Robert Burns, who wrote the supreme expression of egalitarianism, ‘A Man’s a Man for A’ That’, was thirty-seven when he died in 1796. What injustice, that the poet who most despised inherited status (‘The rank is but the guinea’s stamp, / The Man’s the gowd [gold] for a’ that’) should have been so much outlived by the poet who most revered it: Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who died bedecked with honours at the age of eighty-three. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury would be the better for more Burns and less Tennyson. And how different would the art galleries of the world be today if the painstaking Jan Vermeer had lived to be ninety-one and the over-prolific Pablo Picasso had died at thirty-nine, instead of the other way round?
Politics, too, is an art – as much a part of our civilization as philosophy, opera, poetry or painting. But the greatest political artist in American history, Abraham Lincoln, served only one full term in the White House, falling victim to an assassin with a petty grudge just six weeks after his second inaugural address. He was fifty-six. How different would the era of Reconstruction have been had this self-made titan, born in a log cabin, the author of the majestic Gettysburg Address – which redefined the United States as ‘a nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal’, with a ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ – lived as long as the polo-playing then polio-stricken grandee Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whom medical science kept alive long enough to serve nearly four full terms as president before his death at sixty-three?
Because our lives are so very different from the lives of most people in the past, not least in their probable duration, but also in our greater degree of physical comfort, we must exercise our imaginations quite vigorously to understand the men and women of the past. In his Theory of Moral Sentiments, written a century and half before Collingwood’s memoir, the great economist and social theorist Adam Smith defined why a civilized society is not a war of all against all – because it is based on sympathy:
As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though our brother is on the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither can that faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to us what would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions of our own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. By the imagination, we place ourselves in his situation.
This, of course, is precisely what Collingwood says the historian should do, and it is what I want the reader to do as she encounters in these pages the resurrected thoughts of the dead. The key point of the book is to understand what made their civilization expand so spectacularly in its wealth, influence and power. But there can be no understanding without that sympathy which puts us, through an act of imagination, in their situation. That act will be all the more difficult when we come to resurrect the thoughts of the denizens of other civilizations – the ones the West subjugated or, at least, subordinated to itself. For they are equally important members of the drama’s cast. This is not a history of the West but a history of the world, in which Western dominance is the phenomenon to be explained.
In an encyclopaedia entry he wrote in 1959, the French historian Fernand Braudel defined a civilization as:
first of all a space, a ‘cultural area’ … a locus. With the locus … you must picture a great variety of ‘goods’, of cultural characteristics, ranging from the form of its houses, the material of which they are built, their roofing, to skills like feathering arrows, to a dialect or group of dialects, to tastes in cooking, to a particular technology, a structure of beliefs, a way of making love, and even to the compass, paper, the printing press. It is the regular grouping, the frequency with which particular characteristics recur, their ubiquity within a precise area [combined with] … some sort of temporal permanence …
Braudel was better at delineating structures than explaining change, however. These days, it is often said that historians should tell stories; accordingly, this book offers a big story – a meta-narrative of why one civilization transcended the constraints that had bound all previous ones – and a great many smaller tales or micro-histories within it. Nevertheless the revival of the art of narrative is only part of what is needed. In addition to stories, it is also important that there be questions. ‘Why did the West come to dominate the Rest?’ is a question that demands something more than a just-so story in response. The answer needs to be analytical, it needs to be supported by evidence and it needs to be testable by means of the counterfactual question: if the crucial innovations I identify here had not existed, would the West have ruled the Rest anyway for some other reason that I have missed or under-emphasized? Or would the world have turned out quite differently, with China on top, or some other civilization? We should not delude ourselves into thinking that our historical narratives, as commonly constructed, are anything more than retro-fits. To contemporaries, as we shall see, the outcome of Western dominance did not seem the most probable of the futures they could imagine; the scenario of disastrous defeat often loomed larger in the mind of the historical actor than the happy ending vouchsafed to the modern reader. The reality of history as a lived experience is that it is much more like a chess match than a novel, much more like football game than a play.
It wasn’t all good. No serious writer would claim that the reign of Western civilization was unblemished. Yet there are those who would insist that there was nothing whatever good about it. This position is absurd. As is true of all great civilizations, that of the West was Janus-faced: capable of nobility yet also capable of turpitude. Perhaps a better analogy is that the West resembled the two feuding brothers in James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) or in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Master of Ballantrae (1889). Competition and monopoly; science and superstition; freedom and slavery; curing and killing; hard work and laziness – in each case, the West was father to both the good and the bad. It was just that, as in Hogg’s or Stevenson’s novel, the better of the two brothers ultimately came out on top. We must also resist the temptation to romanticize history’s losers. The other civilizations overrun by the West’s, or more peacefully transformed by it through borrowings as much as through impositions, were not without their defects either, of which the most obvious is that they were incapable of providing their inhabitants with any sustained improvement in the material quality of their lives. One difficulty is that we cannot always reconstruct the past thoughts of these non-Western peoples, for not all of them existed in civilizations with the means
of recording and preserving thought. In the end, history is primarily the study of civilizations, because without written records the historian is thrown back on spearheads and pot fragments, from which much less can be inferred. The French historian and statesman François Guizot said that the history of civilization is ‘the biggest of all … it comprises all the others’. It must transcend the multiple disciplinary boundaries erected by academics, with their compulsion to specialize, between economic, social, cultural, intellectual, political, military and international history. It must cover a great deal of time and space, because civilizations are not small or ephemeral. But a book like this cannot be an encyclopaedia. To those who will complain about what has been omitted, I can do no more than quote the idiosyncratic jazz pianist Thelonious Monk: ‘Don’t play everything (or every time); let some things go by … What you don’t play can be more important than what you do.’ I agree. Many notes and chords have been omitted below. But they have been left out for a reason. Does the selection reflect the biases of a middle-aged Scotsman, the archetypal beneficiary of Western predominance? Very likely. But I cherish the hope that the selection will not be disapproved of by the most ardent and eloquent defenders of Western values today, whose ethnic origins are very different from mine – from Amartya Sen to Liu Xiaobo, from Hernando de Soto to the dedicatee of this book.
Civilization: The West and the Rest Page 2