by Andrew Marr
Or, to put it briefly, civilization works.
Anyone who has read at all carefully accounts of city life in earlier centuries, or noted the frequency of murders and assaults in so many of the books we have come to call ‘classics of literature’, will feel the force of this. Western-style democracy has not spread in the way post-1989 optimists predicted, but most of the world is more ordered, more curbed and regulated, than ever before. (Smokers, adventurers and others often say, too much so.) If we hold that the first job of government is to protect the lives of its citizens, then surely politics has advanced, rather impressively.
We can add to this some notable successes at the global scale, in disarmament, in bringing war criminals to justice; and in dealing with specific problems such as the outlawing of CFC gases (which thin the ozone layer. Through international agreements from the late 1970s to 1995 these were reduced by 80 per cent, and abolished in the major countries. The United Nations is a slow-moving, pompous and often infuriating organization, but its Universal Declaration of Human Rights still sets a basic standard around which most of the world rallies, at least in theory; and few would really like to see it gone. As individual countries compete for water resources, argue about deforestation, the ice caps and the oceans, and struggle to change to greener forms of energy, international agreements are becoming the essential politics of the new century. Some fail, as did the 2009 UN Copenhagen summit on climate change. Some supranational systems, such as the European Union, have failed to bind themselves into a democratic culture. But we are part of a much more interconnected and mutually aware human family than at any time since the migration from Africa.
We also have some, at least, of the skills we need to deal with the problems caused by our success. Global warming is a profound worry but it is not – probably – our doom. It can be checked. Lovelock is not alone in being a leading ‘green’ thinker who champions nuclear power as a vital way to reduce carbon emissions. It remains to be seen whether the current fashion for wind-farms is passing folly, but there is an increasing range of alternatives to coal and oil. Solar energy holds great promise. Nuclear fusion, though not yet a workable technology, also has great potential. Equally far ahead, though certainly thinkable, are the technologies known as ‘geo-engineering’, including putting reflecting aerosols or shades into space to cool the planet. These would require major new international agreements, since different countries would be differently affected. But history suggests that, with so much of our resources and brainpower concentrated on alternative forms of energy, breakthroughs will come. Any aliens looking down and betting on human ingenuity will not have lost much money so far.
There is another reason for moderate optimism: wherever societies have grown wealthier and female education has advanced, the birth rate has fallen. In agricultural societies, where human muscle was wealth but infant mortality was high – that is, through most of our social history – the shrewd thing to do was to have as many children as possible. But we are fast learners; and as infant mortality has fallen, contraception has become more available and women have had more opportunities, that ‘instinct’ has rapidly reversed. So the very fast spike in population, which probably has another forty years to go simply because of the youth of many people currently alive, ought to gently reverse.
Here, however, is the problem. Today’s population is growing in the wrong places. When we read about a famine in Ethiopia, it is worth knowing that Ethiopia’s population has grown from around five million people at the beginning of the twentieth century to some eighty million today, and is estimated to double by the middle of this century – by when the number of people in Africa is expected to have risen by another billion. The likelihood of human populations falling not benignly by choice, but through war, disease and famine remains high. The countries with the youngest populations – tens of millions of young men, many of them unemployed – are the countries at most danger of a violent future.
The truth is that to cope with the failures of success we will need to utilize everything we can muster: the scientific and technical fixes, the international agreements – and changes to our own behaviour and expectations. Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, believes mankind will now find itself braving the rapids for two generations, a make-or-break hurtle during which we will have a fifty-fifty chance of survival. But he has also argued, in his 2010 Reith Lectures for the BBC, that talk of an optimum world population is senseless because
we can’t confidently conceive what people’s lifestyles, diet, travel patterns and energy needs will be beyond 2050. The world couldn’t sustain anywhere near its present population if everyone lived like present-day Americans . . . [but] more than ten billion people could live sustainably, with a high quality of life, if all adopted a vegetarian diet, travelling little but interacting via super-internet and virtual reality.
This may be unlikely and unappetizing, but today’s parents in the West are the first generation to worry that their children will live more meagre, if less wasteful, lives than they have. A world population of around today’s size, or bigger, is plausible; and a wide range of scientific fixes, such as those mentioned for tackling global warming, and genetically modified food, would help the planet cope. What is not plausible is the notion of a bigger population enjoying the new freedoms of car use, air travel and foods flown in from around the globe that many of us enjoy now.
But apart from the bleak precedent of the interwar years, the democracies have not had to cope with any period when material life got significantly poorer. Their party systems, electoral cycles and political rhetoric are so fixed on the offer of better times ahead that it is hard to imagine the alternative. There are other ways of living usefully and happily, as people have demonstrated throughout history. Greater concentration on family and community life, on spiritual life, on education and the arts – the ways we have lived through the lulls – are all part of the story. Unfortunately, our willingness to believe the promises of rabble-rousers and our greed, our capacity for anger and violence, are part of the story too. Homo sapiens is sometimes translated as ‘clever man’. We are a clever ape, a very clever ape, albeit in a spot of bother. But a better translation is ‘wise man’. We have a little way to go.
Notes
Introduction
1 David Gilmour, The Pursuit of Italy (Allen Lane 2011), p. 33.
2 Niall Fergusson, Civilization (Allen Lane 2010), p. 43.
3 J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web (W.W. Norton 2003), p. 4.
4 McNeill and McNeill, op. cit., p. 7.
Part One: Out of the Heat, towards the Ice
1 Tim Flannery, Here on Earth (Text Publishing Company 2010), ch. 4.
2 Stephen Oppenheimer, Out of Eden, pp. 343–6.
3 Mark Pagel, Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (Allen Lane 2012), pp. 216–17.
4 Chris Stringer, The Origin of Our Species (Allen Lane 2011), p. 245.
5 Brian Fagan, Cro-Magnon (Bloomsbury Press 2010).
6 Stringer, op. cit., p. 242.
7 Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History (W.W. Norton & Company 2007), p. 52.
8 Flannery, op. cit., quoting C.P. Groves, Perspectives in Human Biology (1999), ‘The Advantages and Disadvantages of being Domesticated’, and M. Henneberg, ‘Decrease of Human Skull Size in the Holocene’, Human Biology 60, pp. 395–405.
9 The theory of Steven Mithen, quoted in Brian Fagan, op. cit.
10 See, for example, Lawrence H. Keeley, War before Civilization (Oxford University Press 1990).
11 Steven A. LeBlanc with Katherine Register, Constant Battles: Why We Fight (St Martin’s Griffin/Macmillan 2004).
12 See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (W.W. Norton 1997), ch. 5, and Spencer Wells, Pandora’s Seed: The Unforeseen Cost of Civilization (Allen Lane 2010).
13 Diamond, op. cit., p. 139.
14 Spencer Wells, op. cit., pp. 37–41
15 Ian Hodder, Catalhoyuk: The Leopard’s Tale (Th
ames & Hudson 2006).
16 Rodney Castleden, Stonehenge People ( Routledge 1987)
17 Castleden, op. cit.
18 Gwendolyn Leick, Mesopotamia: The Invention of the City (Penguin Books 2001), p. 163.
19 Leick, op. cit., p. 59.
20 Ian Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now (Profile Books 2010), p. 206.
21 J.A.G. Roberts, A History of China, 2nd edition (Palgrave Macmillan 2006), p. 3.
22 Wen Fong (ed.), The Great Bronze Age of China (Thames & Hudson 1980), p. 70.
23 David P. Silverman (ed.), Ancient Egypt (Duncan Baird 2003).
24 See Dr William Murnane in David Silverman, op. cit.
25 The best book on Deir el-Medina is Morris Bierbrier, The Tomb-Builders of the Pharaohs (American University in Cairo Press/British Museum 1982).
26 Cathy Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (University of Chicago Press 2009), opening pages.
27 Evelyn Waugh, Labels (1930), quoted by Mary Beard in her review of Cathy Gere, op. cit., at www.martinfrost.ws
Part Two: The Case for War
1 My information here relies on many secondary sources, including most obviously Herodotus and Thucydides, but also Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World (Penguin 2005); Raphael Sealey, A History of the Greek City States, 700–338 bc (University of California Press 1976); and J.K. Davies, Democracy and Classical Greece (Fontana 1978), plus J.M. Roberts, History of the World (Penguin 2007) and William McNeill, World History (Oxford University Press 1998).
2 Caroline Alexander, The War That Killed Achilles (Faber 2009), has much influenced this thought.
3 Alexander, op. cit., p. 5.
4 See Michael Wood, In Search of the Trojan War (BBC Books 2005), p. 182.
5 Alexander, op. cit., p. 13.
6 Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: God, Science and the Search for Meaning (Hodder & Stoughton 2011), ch. 4, 7.
7 See Mark S. Smith, The Early History of God: Yahweh and the Other Deities in Ancient Israel (HarperCollins 2002), ch. 1.
8 Karen Armstrong, The Bible: The Biography (Atlantic Books 2007), p. 24.
9 See Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2011), pp. 40–6.
10 See Ilya Gershevitch, The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 2 (1985), ch. 7, pp. 392ff
11 All Herodotus quotations are taken from the Penguin edition, translated by Aubrey de Sélincourt in 1954.
12 Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World (Allen Lane 2005), p. 61.
13 J.K. Davies, Democracy and Classical Greece (Fontana 1978), p. 88.
14 Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi (Macmillan 2007), pp. 115–16.
15 The story is told in John Keay, India Discovered (HarperCollins 2001), ch. 1.
16 John Keay, India: A History (HarperCollins 2002), pp. 24ff.
17 Keay, India, op. cit., p. 35.
18 See Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India (Penguin Press 2002), ch. 5, and Trevor Ling, The Buddha (Temple Smith 1973), pp. 66ff.
19 Keay, India, p. 64.
20 See Jacques Gernet, A History of Chinese Civilisation (Cambridge University Press 1992), pp. 41ff.
21 John Keay, China: A History (HarperPress 2008), p. 53.
22 Karen Armstrong, The Great Transformation (Atlantic Books 2006), p. 35.
23 Benjamin Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Belknap Press 1985), p. 56.
24 Lionel M. Jensen, ‘The Genesis of Kongzi in Ancient Narrative’, in On Sacred Grounds . . . the Formation of the Cult of Confucius, ed. Thomas A. Wilson, Harvard East Asian Monographs 217 (2002).
25 Annping Chin, Confucius: A Life of Thought and Politics (Yale 2008).
26 Arthur Waley (tr.), The Analects of Confucius (Allen & Unwin 1938).
27 Armstrong, The Great Transformation, op. cit., p. 206.
28 Plato, Phaedo, in the 1892 Benjamin Jowett translation, usefully republished by Sphere Books in 1970.
29 I.F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (Cape 1988), p. 66.
30 Stone, op. cit., p. 146.
31 William H. McNeill, A World History (Oxford University Press 1998), p. 148.
32 See Robin Lane Fox, Alexander the Great (2006).
33 Arrian, Anabasis Alexandri (Life of Alexander), Book VII, part 4.
Part Three: The Sword and the Word
1 Rome and China: Comparative Perspectives, ed. Walter Scheidel (Stanford/Oxford University Press 2009).
2 See S.A.M. Adshead, ‘Dragon and Eagle’, Journal of South-East Asian History, vol. 2, October 1961.
3 John Hill, The Peoples of the West (2004), translation from the Weilüe of Yu Huan: see Washington.edu/silkroad/texts.
4 Romila Thapar, The Penguin History of Early India (Penguin Books 2002), p. 321.
5 Ramachandra Guha, India after Gandhi (Macmillan 2007), pp. 378–9. I am also indebted to Toby and Saurabh Sinclair for their help in this passage.
6 Sima Qian, quoted in John Keay, China: A History (HarperPress 2008), p. 89, and in sundry other places.
7 See for example the competing views of Derk Bodde and new evidence quoted in John Man, The Terracotta Army (Bantam 2007), pp. 118–19; and John Keay, China: A History, pp. 75–6. They are differences of emphasis rather than fact.
8 Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity (Allen Lane 2009), pp. 70–1.
9 Norman Cantor, The Sacred Chain: A History of the Jews (HarperCollins 1995), p. 61.
10 Shlomo Sand, The Invention of the Jewish People (Verso 2009), pp. 166–9.
11 Sand, op. cit. p. 151.
12 I am indebted to Mary Beard for putting me right on some of this, though she bears no responsibility for my anti-Roman-religion prejudices!
13 Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World (Allen Lane 2005), p. 306.
14 Mary Beard describes this, however, as ‘sheer Greek fantasy’.
15 Nigel Bagnall, The Punic Wars (Pimlico 1990), ch. 1.
16 See Barry Cunliffe, The Ancient Celts (Oxford University Press 1997), and Terry Jones and Alan Ereira, Barbarians (BBC Books 2006).
17 Robin Lane Fox, The Classical World, op. cit., p. 379.
18 Ian Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now (Profile Books 2010), pp. 296–7.
19 Morris, op. cit., p. 306.
20 Karen Armstrong, The First Christian: St Paul’s Impact on Christianity (Pan Books 1984), p. 45.
21 Acts 9: 3–5.
22 Charles Freeman, A New History of Early Christianity (Yale 2009), p. 210.
23 For more on this see Peter Watson, The Great Divide (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2012).
24 My information is drawn from Helaine Silverman and Donald Proulx, The Nasca (Wiley-Blackwell 2002), and Michael Mosley, The Incas and Their Ancestors: The Archaeology of Peru (Thames & Hudson 1992).
25 Joe Nickell, Unsolved Mysteries (Kentucky University Press 2005).
26 See the work of David Beresford-Jones of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University.
27 J. Armitage Robinson, The Passion of St Perpetua (Cambridge University Press 1891), and Freeman, op. cit., p. 205.
28 David Woods, ‘On the Death of the Empress Fausta’, Greece & Rome, vol. xlv, pp. 70–83.
29 Freeman, op. cit., p. 237, quoting Eusebius.
30 Tom Holland, In the Shadow of the Sword (Little, Brown 2012), pp. 40–1.
31 See Hugh Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2007), p. 56.
Part Four: Beyond the Muddy Melting Pot
1 John Julius Norwich, The Popes: A History (Chatto & Windus 2011), ch. V.
2 John Keay, China: A History, p. 231.
3 Ian Morris, Why the West Rules – For Now (Profile Books 2010), p. 337.
4 Norman Davies, Europe: A History (Oxford University Press 1996), pp. 222ff.
5 Quoted by Jonathan Lyons, The House of Wisdom (Bloomsbury 2010), p. 15.
6 Lyons, op. cit., ch. 3.
7 Lyons, op. cit. My account of al-Khwarizmi and Averroës rests heavily on his book.
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sp; 8 Jonathan Clements, The Vikings (Robinson 2005), p. 103.
9 Geoffrey Hosking, Russia and the Russians (Allen Lane 2001), p. 31.
10 Clements, op. cit., pp. 12–13.
11 Jonathan Shepard in Maureen Perrie (ed.), The Cambridge History of Russia, vol. 1, pp. 54–6.
12 Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity (Allen Lane 2009), p. 507.