The Bloody Road From The City State To The Nation State
By Eric Le Roy
An Essay in Two Parts: Part 1 
Content 18+ Artem recently posted a blog called “From Ancient Tolerance to Modern Nationalism.” As I read it, I was once again reaffirmed in my opinion that there are many ways to view history.
I was never officially certified as a history teacher, but I have been doing it online now for several years with Chinese students, most of them adolescents and young teenagers. I have always loved history, probably in large part because it is a story, isn’t it? A narrative which varies according to who is telling it and when. Like a lot of stories, especially those invented by husbands arriving home at 3am, most of them are lies, but they certainly can be interesting.
Anyway, before I start in on Artem, here are my takeaways from the intense study of world history I have embarked on:
(1) History is by no means a chronicle of the human race as a whole, but rather the biographies and achievements of a very select few ‘game-changers’. This bias changed a lot in the mid-to late 20th century and the process is still in force, even more energetically and often driven by political agendas, especially as regards ‘identity politics’. The internet is the main instrument of ceaseless information, ‘breaking news’ and mass confusion. Like the old Sly and the Family Stone song: “Everybody is a Star.”
But in the past, the only people who mattered were monarchs, popes, military generals and martyrs. Maybe some famous inventors, scientists and a collection of tyrants notorious for murdering everyone they could get their hands on. And that was about it. The other 99% of all the people who have tread upon the earth have remained forever invisible. We know more about ‘Lucy’, the 3.2 million year old hominid discovery (in 1974) than we do about the general population of Rome in the time of Caesar or the Egypt of Cheops. Who in the world were they, that cavalcade of servants tramping through time? Everybody and nobody. But absent en masse from the history books.
(2) History is written by the winners. Well, we all know that one, don’t we? But it makes perfect sense that those who live to tell the tale are going to explain it in a way that makes them look good. It would be bizarre if it were any different. Imagine the conquering heroes saying something like this: “Yeah, we murdered all those innocent people, beheaded the men, raped the women, and threw the babies from the towers because We are nasty motherfuckers who kill for GOLD and SILVER. Yep, that was US all right. You have a PROBLEM with that???”
Or do they say instead: “We desperately wanted to avoid conflict but enemy aggression finally forced us to defend ourselves, to liberate the population suffering under that inhuman regime, and implement new and just laws by which the people of their nation could go forward in peace and prosperity. And so we finally had to liquidate the village in order to liberate it.”
???? What do you think?
(3) And THIS is the most important. It is unfair, even impossible, to assess history justly and with any degree of accuracy from a great distance in time if you insist on thrusting your own contemporary principles on people who lived hundreds or even thousands of years ago – and presume to judge them according to your own ‘enlightened’ standards. A famous historian named Barbara Tuchman wrote a book about the 12th century in Europe called A Distant Mirror. One of the best book titles ever, and why? Because in those three words, she summed it up: Those people were basically the same as us: their brains were the same, they had the same personality traits for the most part, and they looked exactly like us (maybe not as tall) when they removed their clothes.
But those people believed in burning heretics at the stake, chopping off the heads of traitors, torturing suspects on the rack to get confessions, leaving unwanted babies by the side of the road, and wearing hair shirts and flagellating themselves to further humble themselves before ‘God’. They also owned slaves, seldom bathed, and flung buckets of piss and shit from their balconies every morning. Women were treated less well than horses. A bunch of slavering savages, right? Not really. They carried in their hearts much of what we carry in ours. If we sat down with them, having teleported back five or six centuries, we would feel uncomfortable for 10 minutes and completely on common ground for the next 10 hours. Or 10 years. Probably we would start to see their point.
Instead, we look at them and feel justifiably superior, right? But trust me, please, when I say that this is absolutely the WRONG WAY to study history. In order to make the connection, it is IMPERATIVE that we try to imagine how those people thought and what they thought about. For example, back in the days when Protestants and Catholics were putting each other to death in Europe – and very intelligent men and women among them – they were convinced that they were doing the right thing and carrying out God’s will. I could use Thomas More, the famous Englishman who wrote the original Utopia, as an example. More was infinitely more intelligent than me and probably you as well. He convened many times with a widely heralded philosopher of the day, Erasmus of Rotterdam. A film was made of him centuries later called “A Man for All Seasons.” That should give you some idea. Yet More, a staunch Catholic, rejoiced in sending Protestants to the stake. How does that add up?
Well, there is only one way to guess, and that is to make a thorough and honest study – a painstaking study – of the time when More lived. Queen Elizabeth could speak eight languages and still sign off on death warrants against conspirators that resulted in them being drawn-and-quartered – a hideous way to die. How could they have been like that? So refined, so erudite, so charming, and so casually murderous? Well, they were, and it is our job as historians to find out. Without prejudice.
So what do we do? We try to understand them. NOTE the fact that I said understand – not justify. That is the secret. Enter their world and pretend you are one of them. If your research is good enough and if you have the kind of spirit that simply wants to be there, you might come close to seeing them as they were. Henry VIII beheaded Anne Boleyn, but he also played tennis with her. They rode together in the forest. An opinionated undergraduate at Columbia University who wants to sling down all statues of Thomas Jefferson because he owned slaves is missing the point. And it is NOT that owning slaves was a good thing; it is because Jefferson was a man of his times. In fact, Jefferson quarreled a lot with Alexander Hamilton: Jefferson thought that the US should remain as an agricultural nation, whereas Hamilton supported the growth of industry. Guess who was right? So Jefferson was a great but flawed man. And?
To know history you need to have been there. This being physically impossible, you have to put yourself there. It’s the only way.
(4) History as Fairy Tale. This where we take a benevolent ‘overview’ of history that basically sanitizes it and removes the stench of blood. This sort of historian tries to turn it into some kind manifest destiny promulgated on fundamentally laudatory principles: pilgrimage, pioneering spirit, and entrepreneurial purpose. Such an historian is making a Lego representation, or the kind of miniature model of cities that one finds in museums. His/Her history is a chronology. A sort of guided tour with pauses to give deference to ‘important events’. The people who teach history in this manner also believe in Exams as the best way to see if the student has managed to see the point. In my view, it is precisely the reason why so many students hate history, which, indeed, should be utterly fascinating to them if presented in the right way. For example, who cares if Napoleon lost at Waterloo, Richard at Bosworth, King Harold at Hastings, or that Caesar lost his life in the Senate, that Socrates was forced to drink the hemlock – if we don’t know ANYTHING else about them and the times they lived in? It is a waste of time. But that’s how it’s done maybe 80% of the time.
(5) History as a Moral Compass. This goes to the adage of “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (George Santayana). According to this seemingly perspicacious line of thought, people will learn from their mistakes only when they become aware that others who made the same mistakes in the past paid dearly for their errors. Alas, there is No Evidence Whatsoever that this is really true. But let’s state the argument in favor first. According to Nicholas Clairmont:
The sentiment that history repeats aspires to common sense and is hard to disagree with. In the history of the United States and Europe, wars have ended with confiscatory terms of government surrender inevitably breeding more wars. Revolutions, like those in France and Russia, that gave an individual absolute power—Napoleon and Stalin, respectively—inevitably end up as failed empires and brutal dictatorships. Even individuals are subject to this advice. Couples who do not learn from their fights break up. People who don’t learn from their mistakes don’t mature.
But what I see, in the history of nations and of couples, very often we learn nothing from our mistakes except how to camouflage them better in the future. How to tell more plausible and opaque lies. Or, as several eminent psychologists have agreed: “The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour”, an opinion attributed to everyone from mental gurus such as Albert Ellis, Walter Michel, and B.F. Skinner, to writers such as Mark Twain.”
War I was the ‘war to end all wars, and yet twenty years later an even worse one was fought. Throughout history, empires have come and gone for mostly the same reasons. Ditto with dictators. History is littered with narcissist tyrants who clawed their way to the top while whole nations of apparent fools stood by and watched as if they had been hypnotized. This has ended? It doesn’t happen any more? Look around you.
I hope that I am wrong, but as I survey the explosive dynamics of the present world, my own conclusion is that catastrophe is brewing and it is just a matter of time before somebody: terrorist, religious zealot, or even an outwardly level-headed statesman, completely loses his already half-lost mind and pulls the wrong lever. This threat exists Day and Night,, and there is nothing, NOTHING, I say in all history both recorded and unrecorded (except in bones and other artifacts) to suggest that the human race will somehow rise above itself and say STOP. Artem clearly thinks some inspired vision of what is at stake will push us over the top into a lasting plateau of sanity and good sense; I personally see no reason to believe that the human race will ever do more than destroy all that is in its path before finally destroying itself. And it is my study of history which leads me, sadly, to this conclusion.
