The History of Mankind

Everything that we call the arts and the humanities comes out of some natural desire and acquires value by satisfying it. Painting and music and literature are important not because there are museums and concert halls and libraries to be kept supplied but because human beings want to draw and sing and tell stories as well as enjoy seeing others fulfill these native and universal impulses.

Among the humanities, history holds a special place in that its origin within each of us is not even dependent on impulse. A person may lack altogether the wish to sing or the knack of telling a story, but everybody without exception finds occasion to say: “I was there; I saw it; I remember it very well.” In saying (or even thinking) these words, every man is a historian. History is inescapably a part of consciousness. The Greeks expressed this truth by describing Clio, the muse of history, as the daughter of memory.

Without going into the subtleties of how we are able to remember and what the contents of memory actually are, it is clear that as soon as we take thought about our experiences, whether the farthest back or the nearest and most immediate, we are dealing with what is past. The so-called present vanishes in the very act of reflecting upon it, and the future is all surmise and imagination. Hence the greater our interest in the facts and truths of human existence—our own existence included—the greater, necessarily, is our concern with the past. “To live in the past” ought not, therefore, to be the phrase of reproach that it commonly is. The larger part of the thoughtful life that one leads during the intervals of action cannot be anything but some form of living in the past. If this part of our lives is to be criticized, it should be in words different from the cliché. One should ask, How does he or she live in the past? What past does he or she recall, prefer, imagine?

It is at this point that history as the organized story of the whole human past comes in to contribute its pleasures and its illumination to the thoughtful life. A person who remembered only his own past would be pretty poor indeed—living on a starvation diet. Actually, it is a question whether such a life is not an impossible supposition. Everybody remembers pieces of other people’s pasts; everybody, whether he means to or not, finds that he has learned about his country, his town, his street, his business office, or his factory many things that came to pass well before his time. To possess that information, if it is accurate, is in essence a knowledge of history. It differs in extent but not in kind from a knowledge of how Rome rose and fell. And this relation tells us what reading history affords in the first instance. Just as knowing about our neighbours’ and friends’ histories adds to our sense of reality, so does reading history: it gives us vicarious experience.

If we add to the habitual, unconscious intake of personal and local history the daily filling of the mind by news reports—which is contemporary history and which usually brings with it fragments of a remoter past—we begin to see that every man who lives in a modern, communicative society is forced to become in some sense a conscious historian. His interest begins with himself and his environment, but it is soon stretched out, haphazardly, into such domains of history as chance or special interests have developed. And special interests need not mean explicitly intellectual ones; baseball and chess, model trains and furniture, pottery and boat-building have their heroes and revolutions too, and whoever cares about these activities or artifacts for themselves inevitably becomes engrossed in their histories.

It is of course true that when we ordinarily speak of someone having an interest in history we mean the political, social, or cultural history of great civilizations; and for a long time history was arbitrarily taken to mean the sequence that leads from the ancient civilizations of the eastern Mediterranean to the modern ones of the West. It is a tremendous spectacle, even though concentrated on a relatively small territory. But now that certain dynamic elements of Western civilization have aroused the rest of the world to both imitation and resistance, it has become imperative to widen the panorama and see behind the vast and confused modern scene the several histories of the great Eastern civilizations as well as the traditions and vicissitudes of the African societies.

Two questions readily occur at the mere thought of so much to know. Can a reader who is not a professional historian find his way in this huge maze of names, dates, and facts? And if he can, why should he? The answer to the first question is the old reply of the mathematician to the nervous student: “What one fool can do, another can.” A real compliment is concealed in this gruff retort, for what it implies is that given an interest, a motive, any man can inform himself about any part of world history through secondary accounts such as are digested in an encyclopaedia. There is no obligation to master every detail, to dispute or criticize sources—in a word, to ape the professional, who, for the best of reasons, limits himself to a small segment of the whole. A reader of history is one who follows with his mind the steps another took on his voyage of discovery; and this is easier in history than in mathematics, for history is told in plain words and deals with ordinary human relationships.

So the main difficulty lies in the second question: Why embark on the journey? The answers are numerous and varied, for temperaments differ, as do “special interests” in the sense referred to above. But there is one answer that covers the rest; it is the answer suggested by what was said earlier about every man’s unconscious absorption of haphazard fragments of history. The best motive for reading history deliberately is curiosity about the portions missing from one’s own picture of the past. Curiosity: How did things come to be as they are? How was it when they were different? Is it true that once upon a time men did thus and so? History deals with particulars, and most recorded particulars contain puzzles, contradictions, enormities, all of them spurs to curiosity: the Hudson River in the state of New York was named after the navigator often called Hendrik Hudson, who first sailed up the stream. But why Hendrik and not Henry? Well, Henry was his baptismal name; how did he acquire the other and why? The full answer leads really to a comprehensive view of exploration and colonization by the national states at the dawn of the modern age—the aims, drives, desires, errors, follies, cruelties, and incalculable consequences of a great movement that occupies two and a half centuries and that has continued in different forms down to the landings on the Moon.

The most striking feature of history is its fusion of purposeful direction and unexpected drift. For example, read about Plato, Aristotle, and the ancient mathematicians, and you will discover how their speculations and discoveries have been transformed and amplified into the methods and systems that we still work with. But you will also be told how at various times these same streams of thought or belief generated entirely new and remote, strange and absurd consequences. Again, ancient astrology led to the science of astronomy, and science (as we think) replaces superstition. Yet astrology fills columns in 20th-century newspapers and the minds of their millions of readers. What is the explanation? We lack the pythoness of Delphi, in whom Socrates believed or affected to believe, and we have no official college of augurs to scan the entrails of birds as a guide to future political action, but fortune-tellers are never out of business and we do have Gallup polls. Truly, the wonders of cultural history are infinite.

To conjure up these beliefs and institutions in this comparative fashion is not to equate them with one another or across the centuries; it is rather to stress the identity in diversity that is the principle of human affairs and that makes human history accessible to any willing reader. In different times and places, men are the same and also different. The differences are due to the varying emphases given by one people at one time to some element of life and feeling or to some form of its expression. This is most easily seen in the plastic arts. Think of the representations of the human body in Egypt, Greece, medieval Europe, the west coast of Africa, pre-Columbian America, and the art galleries of world capitals in the second half of the 20th century: is it the same human body or different? The question is really idle, for it is both and neither. In paint or marble there is strictly no human body, only a view of it, a feeling about it. Similarly, what we see in history is not so much Man distorted in one way or another as men who existed only as we see them; that is, in their society and culture, under their skies and gods, never staying put for more than a short time, never to be reduplicated elsewhere or at a later time, even when the effort to imitate is strong and shrewd—as in the Italian Renaissance, which tried to restore the ancient culture of Greece and Rome.

Despite this irreducible plasticity, diversity, and restlessness, we draw historical parallels, we make comparisons. That we can do so is what persuades us of the unity and continuity of history. When we find the Celtic druids and the Aztecs making human sacrifices to their gods we say we recognize a human tendency, though we profess to abhor it. Yet some future reader of history might be tempted to compare with those ancient peoples our contemporary revolutionists, who sacrifice 400,000 kulaks (or some other hapless group) for the good of the tribe and its eternal prosperity. But we also notice a strange difference: we know that fanatical faith presides over each type of human sacrifice, ancient and modern, but even as we condemn we think we understand the modern more readily: we know its background, have heard its advocates. It is one of the illuminations of history, not merely to know abstractly, but, by learning the local shape of things, to feel how the reality of each time and place differs; how the faiths diverge in contents and origins and thus in persuasiveness. We may now lump together the Celts and the Aztecs, but they were far apart in thought and character: in short, nothing is truly comparable; in history everything is sui generis.

The wise reader of history keeps his equilibrium between these two extremes of likeness and difference. He tries to see the unfamiliar in the familiar, and vice versa. He stands away from his own prejudices and satisfies his curiosity by trying to sympathize with what is farthest away or most alien. This is very hard to do when what is before us is a bloody sacrifice, a massacre, a piece of treachery or cynical greed that violates our sensibilities as well as our moral principles. But to sympathize is not to condone or approve, it is only to acknowledge in oneself the ever-present possibility of the same feeling or action. Certainly the enlightened 20th century has no warrant for looking down on times and places where treachery and massacre were commonplace. And it is a sobering observation to find in both past and present the evidence that inhumanities have been and are being committed by the brutish and civilized alike, the ignorant and the educated, the cynical and the devout, the selfish and the heroic.

A principal good derived from history is thus an increase in self-knowledge, through a fellow-feeling with men singly and in groups as history tells about them. That self-knowledge in turn makes the reader of history less ready to find “monsters of error” in his own time and place. Let it be said again, he need not condone or accept with indifference, but he is spared one of the very errors that perpetuates man’s inhumanity to man—fanatical self-righteousness.

On the constructive side, what history tells is the long series of efforts to overcome the constraints of nature and the difficulties of living in society. Those efforts we call civilizations. They start small. In the West they first take the form of city-states. They clash, with one another or with the barbarians “outside.” Trade and war, war and trade expand the scope of power, government, and law. Great men introduce broader conceptions of citizenship, morals, and religions. Others invent practical devices of administration, manufacture, and—again—war. Still others discover the workings of nature, create mathematics or art or systems of philosophy. A concentration of such activities over a given territory is what is meant by a high civilization—Egypt, Greece, the Hellenistic Age, Rome, the Saracens, the High Middle Ages, the Renaissance. And also China, Japan, the Khmers, India, the Mayas, the Incas, and so on.

Along this hazardous and always violent course, innumerable characters rise and play their parts. Their fates provide stories within the story. Visibly, biographies are the bricks of which history is made, for the story of mankind can only be the stories of men. But by a paradox of man’s social existence, the life of communities is not a simple sum of individual lives. The reader of history must therefore imagine from the printed page characteristic acts, moods, errors, disasters, achievements that are nobody’s doing and everybody’s doing. This imagining is another important good bestowed by historical reading, for it dispels the illusion that H. G. Wells called the “governess view” of history: They (the bad people) are doing this terrible thing to Us (the good people). The fallacy in it is to suppose that any large group acts as with one mind, clear in purpose and aware of consequences. Such a projection of the single ego upon whole masses is a form of provincialism that is encountered in most political discussions and certainly in all social prejudices: “If the President would only act … if those people would only see reason…” A reader of history is cured of this simple-mindedness by developing a new sense—the historical sense—of how mankind in the mass behaves, neither free nor fatally pushed, and in its clearest actions mysterious even to itself.

It is this peculiarity that, while marking the difference between history and biography (where acts can be deemed individual and responsible), has led many minds to postulate a meaning in history, a meaning discoverable but obscured by the multiplicity and confusion of facts. A famous passage in Cardinal Newman’s Apologia records in admirable prose the feelings that lead to the elaboration of philosophies of history; for Newman it is of course the traditional Christian interpretation that unifies the multiplicity and resolves the confusion: To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle’s words, “having no hope and without God in the world,“—all this is a vision to dizzy and appal; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution. Other famous philosophies, from Vico’s and Hegel’s to Marx’s and Spengler’s, discover a direction in history, or a principle of action, and often a goal or terminus (as in Marx), after which history as we know it shall cease and a kind of second Eden be restored.

To the practical writer or reader of history these philosophies appeal mainly by their suggestiveness; they are valued for their scattered insights and analogies. As systems they negate the very spirit of history, which seeks the concrete and particular, the opposite of system and abstraction. True, there have been historians who took a middle course and attempted to find empirical regularities in history—again with occasionally suggestive results—but very soon their methods begin to do violence to the facts in order to group them and count them and treat them like identities in physical science. When the physical world itself has not yet been fully systematized, to assume or “find” a system in history without the means and the liberties that science uses is to think like neither a scientist nor a historian. It is in fact an attempt to remove the difficulty of history at the cost of destroying its unique merit and interest.

By the “liberties” that science takes is meant the experimenter’s elimination of all but a very few components in a given trial, so as to ascertain precisely the nature and amount of a given effect. When this is done, the result is usually stated in causal terms—so much of this, under such and such conditions, will produce so much of that. Hardly anyone needs to be told that history defies a similar treatment. Its elements cannot be exactly measured, and although each historical situation presents to the discerning eye a variety of clear conditions or factors, the isolating of a cause for what happens is beyond reach.

That is but another way of saying that history is and must remain a story. And a story, if properly told, is a whole, to be understood as a whole—synthetically, not analytically. History in this regard resembles the arts. We say we “analyze” a work of art, but that is to speak metaphorically. We can enjoy and understand the products of art only as wholes. In history, the artful story is offered as a true story, and great pains are taken to see that it is true. But except in the broadest sense, the historical wholes are not given as such in the record; they are devised by the historian, to make the welter of facts intelligible and hence able to be remembered. Clio was not only the muse of history but also of eloquence, by which the Greeks meant good, intelligible prose, to be spoken before an audience unused to books. The same requirements still hold; written history must be readable with pleasure, or Clio is defeated.

But, it will be said, from many diverse writers will come divergent stories, rival interpretations. That is true, for only a divine mind could know “how it actually happened.” But this limitation of history is also a merit, for it can thereby be written and read over and over again in as many versions as are plausible or accessible. There is and will be no final statement; the perspective forever changes, and with it the interest of history renews itself into infinity. As the philosopher William James once remarked, “What has been concluded that we should conclude about it?”