Tag Archives: history

I Stand Amazed

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C. R. Hallpike, How We Got Here: from bows and arrows to the space age (2008).

Until about 10,000 years ago our ancestors lived in small exogamous groups consisting of 25-50 persons each: men, women and children. Inside each group all members were tied to each other by blood or marriage. All were in daily contact with each other, and all were almost indistinguishable in terms of wealth of which, in case, case, there was only as much as peo0le could carry or preserve. Having long mastered fire and learnt to cook food, and armed with stone tools as well as wooden spears and bows and arrows, they roamed over what, to them, must have looked like almost limitless space. As a result, except under exceptional circumstances such as droughts and the like, most of the time they had enough, not seldom even more than enough, to eat. The same factor, i.e the abundance of available space, prevented warfare from doing serious, long-time harm to those who engaged in it. The more so because the normal objective was prestige and revenge, not extermination or permanent subjugation. The last of which, given the way these societies were structured, was impossible to establish in any case.

Fast forward to the early years of the twenty-first century. Our numbers, which 7,000 years ago are said to have reached perhaps 5 million people, have increased to the point where the earth’s population is around 8 billion and growing still. Practically all of them live in millions-strong states where only a very small percentage are related by bloodlines and/or have personal knowledge of each other except, perhaps, in the form of sounds and images emitted by some piece of electronic wizardry. Far from our wealth being equally—let alone, equitably—distributed, we range from penniless beggars always on the verge of starvation to the likes of Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. In terms of the technology at our disposal we have reached the point where we are now actively drawing up plans for colonizing not just the moon but Mars as well. All this within what in evolutionary terms, let alone geological ones, amounts to a mere blink of an eye.

How could it, how did it, happen? This is the question that Christopher Hallpike, a long retired Canadian professor anthropology who at one point moved to Oxford, took it upon himself to answer. Not that he is the first to do so. One is reminded of the Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (TV series, 1973), Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything (2003), and Yuval Harari’s Sapiens (2011), among many others. Equating cultural development with biological evolution, almost all of them drew on Darwin as their source of inspiration. With him in mind, almost all started with two basic ideas. First, that cultural change—mutation, to use the language of evolutionists—is more or less accidental, taking place spontaneously now here, now there. Second, that whether or not any innovation persists and spreads depends on how useful it is—the extent to which it makes those who are in charge of it, more comfortable, more powerful and, last not least, wealthier.

By contrast, Professor Hallpike takes it as his starting point that human development, aka culture is not blind. True, some minor changes may have come about more or less by accident. However, he says, for them to persist and to spread there is a need for a conscious effort on the part of both originators and beneficiaries. First, it requires the kind of mind needed to contemplate a new and different reality—precisely the one that, as far as we can see, animals ranging from mosquitos to chimpanzees do not possess. Second, it requires an open society in which different people, coming from different directions and possessing different skills, can meet, exchange ideas, cooperate and, where necessary criticize each other. Third, it requires an investment. If not of money, which only appeared around 600-700 BCE, long after some of the most important discoveries and inventions were made, then at any rate of time and effort. Very often, and this is a point that Hallpike does not emphasize as much as he could and perhaps should have, it also involves taking a risk. The story of the monk Berthold Schwarz inventing gunpowder and being blown up for his pains may not be rooted in fact. Nevertheless, it does present people with a “lesson learnt.”

Another basic point with which Hallpike takes issue is the common belief, famously caricatured by Charles Dickens and his infamous creation Mr. Gradgrind, that it is only material “facts” that either cause change or are affected by it. Standing in front of the blackboard—after all, Gradgrind is a teacher—swish, and away goes religion. Swish, and away goes our senses of beauty, of order, of awe in face of the mysterious and the unknown. Swish, and away go curiosity and inspiration. Swish… Never, so Hallpike, has there been a human society which did not have all those things. Judging by the expression on the face of my cat when he first discovered a new opening we had made in a kitchen wall, even many animals experience some of them.

Finally, judging by his books, including some of his (very funny) fiction I have read, I trust that Hallpike would not have been the man he evidently is, i.e one who loves to play devil’s advocate, if he had overlooked the greatest provocation of all: namely the idea of distinguishing “primitive” from “modern” man. Had he not been long retired, no doubt that alone would have brought on his head severe sanctions on the part of the politically correct thought-control mob. In fact, though, his use of the term is perfectly reasonable. Lacking as they did modern, observation-experimental-mathematically based science, our pre-literate ancestors perforce had no choice but to base much of their understanding of the world on folk wisdom much of which in turn rested on symbolism, religion, magic and intuition as well as every kind of contrast or affinity, real or imagined. It is in this sense, and in this sense alone, that Hallpike calls people and the societies they formed “primitive.” But not once in some 650 pages does he suggest that they were mentally retarded.

I cannot end this essay without noting two other points. First, as an anthropologist who has spent some years living with some of the “primitive” societies he mentions—first in East Africa, then in Papua-New Guinea—Hallpike, discussing such societies, has the immense advantage of knowing exactly what he is talking about. This alone is a good reason for taking what he has to say about them seriously. Second, I find his knowledge of societies, material objects and processes truly incredible; starting with metallurgy—and ending with the history of the alphabet, mathematical notation, alchemy, government, warfare, philosophy, monotheism, astrology and the scientific method there is hardly any field about which he does not have something interesting to say.

The book’s title notwithstanding, its journey through history ends about 1914. As a result, subsequent developments such as relativity, quantum mechanics and chaos theory are mentioned barely if at all. That is a pity; could anyone come up with better examples of sheer curiosity, rather than material gain, driving history into new and unexpected directions? Still I stand amazed. And also, I confess, a little jealous in front of so much knowledge so engagingly presented.

Change and Continuity (Again)

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As a few readers may recall, this is the third time I’ve addressed this topic, which has now been haunting me for several years, in this blog. Partly that is because I believe, with Nietzsche, that the fact that everyone thinks something does not prove it is true. If anything, to the contrary. And partly because, if the study of history, to which I have devoted my life, is to go beyond mere incoherent tales and be of any use at all, some things must remain the same.

What I wanted to know is this: against the background of the constant and often tumultuous change that everyone keeps talking about, is there anything that does not and will not change? Originally I hoped to write a book about that question; having already published a volume about the history of man’s attempts to see into the future, at first I thought the task would be fairly easy. Never have I been more mistaken! In the event writing the new book proved to be beyond my powers, at least for the moment. So I let it go, more or less.

Doing some shopping earlier this morning, for some mysterious reason I found myself thinking about the topic. As many others have also noted, often the best ideas seem to come out of nowhere. Especially during exercise; and especially if the exercise is neither too strenuous to allow for thought or too light to make a difference to the heart and lung system in particular. Think of James Watt who had the idea of a separate boiler, leading to the modern steam engine and thus to the industrial revolution, come to him, completely unexpected, during a Sunday walk in Edinburgh Common.

So what I am going to do today is draw up a list, however incomplete and however superficial, of some propositions that, as far as I can see, have been, are and presumably always will remain true. Such as form a sort of skeleton, or chassis, or framework, for social life to hang itself on, so to speak.  As I do so, maybe, just maybe, one thing will lead to another. Until, probably by working by fits and starts, one day I shall have something to say on the topic that is more inclusive, more solid, and more worth publishing in some other suitable format.

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The laws of physics the laws of physics provide just what I’ve been looking for: namely, a sort of skeleton, or chassis, or framework, for social life to hang itself on. The laws of physics do not change—or else they would not be laws.

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Emotion, Thought, Knowledge and Understanding

Just how emotion, thought, knowledge and understanding grow out of, and interact with, our biological makeup on one hand and the surrounding physical world is unknown. And unknown it will almost certainly remain until the end of time.

Now as ever, so much of our thought is governed by our cultural background on one hand and wishful thinking on the other as to make “objectivity” very difficult, often all but impossible.

Everyone believes he is the most intelligent, except for a few who agree with him (Thomas Hobbes).

The more we learn about the world, the more numerous and more difficult the questions that present themselves and demand an answer.

Obtaining a good picture of the past is hard enough; obtaining a good picture of the future, all but impossible.

Economic Life

Man does not live by bread—here broadly understood as nutrients of every kind—alone. That said, the need for bread goes a long way—though never all the way—to govern the shape and functioning of every individual and every society. And the other way around.

There never has been a human society whose members, or at any rate many of them, did not produce/work for a living.

Where an army cannot go, an ass loaded with gold will (Philip II, father of Alexander the Great).

Resources, whether in the form of nutrients, or living space, or mates, or allies, or honors, are always limited. Those who pursue them will face competition and pay a price; those who own them will have to defend them.

Prices are governed by the interaction between supply and demand.

Gresham’s law: Bad money will drive out good.

Wealth is always relative. That is why poverty will never disappear from the face of the earth.

Psychology

The essence of life (not just human life, but that is beside the point in the present context) is the quest for growth/power in its endlessly varied forms (Nietzsche). Conversely, when the quest comes to a halt death cannot be very far away.

Freud was right. Not only does the sub-consciousness really exist, but it strongly influences everything we are, think and do.

Given the right circumstances, almost any person on earth is capable of extreme tenderness and extreme cruelty. Not seldom, both.

As often as our senses tell us the truth, they deceive. Ditto, our memory.

Very often, when circumstances prevent us from venting our anger on others we will direct it at ourselves. And vice versa.

The one thing we humans cannot do is sit still and alone in a room and do nothing (Blaise Pascal).

Social Life

Everything in social life is interwoven with everything else and impacts on everything else,

Man is a social animal (said Aristotle). No man can live on his own.

Absolute freedom can only exist in a desert.

If only because they cannot cope on their own, the young are always subject to some kind of education.

No society has ever been, or ever will be, without religion, art, music, fashion, ceremonies, feast days, games, etc.

No society has ever been, nor will be, completely egalitarian in the sense that every one of its members occupies a similar position, owns the same amount of goods, is addressed in the same manner, and always treats all the rest equally.

Politics

Man is the conspiring animal (Lyndon LaRouche).

Politics is the art of the possible (Otto von Bismarck).

It is politics that determine who gets what (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin).

Any government is better than no government (Thomas Hobbes).

Telling truth to power is always difficult, often dangerous.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely (Lord Acton).

Success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.

Had it been possible to open a tyrant’s soul, it would be found covered with scars.

Niccolò Machiavelli: Amidst so many who are bad, how can a good one maintain himself?

Aside: Gender and Sex

Women form half of humanity, and not the least important half.

So powerful and potentially so disruptive is the drive to mate that no society has ever existed that did not do its best to regulate it in one way or another.

Everything about women is a riddle, and the riddle has one solution: pregnancy (Nietzsche).

The relationship between the sexes is highly asymmetrical. The more manly a man, the more women will like him. The more a woman tries to become/behave like a man, the less men will like her (Jean-Jacques Rousseau).

Now as ever, women do most household work. Ditto childcare, nursing, social work, etc.

Society is run by men and strong women (Margaret Mead).

Women on average are smaller, lighter, weaker, less robust and more vulnerable than men. That is why they need the protection of men. Not only does that need go a long way to govern the relationship between men and women, but it guarantees that, in the future as in the past, women will be dependent on men. And, to some extent, subordinate to them.

A man who sacrifices himself for a woman will be admired. A man who allows a woman to sacrifice herself for him will be ridiculed, despised, or both.

A man who competes against a woman and loses, loses. A man who competes against a woman and wins, also loses.

A man’s pleasure is in a woman’s hand (Aristophanes).

Where women are respected, the gods dwell (Hindu proverb).

War

No known human society has ever been, nor ever will be, without some form of legalized group violence. Aka, war.

If you want peace, prepare for war (Roman proverb).

A centralized state is hard to conquer but easy to hold. With a decentralized one the opposite applies (Machiavelli).

Dulce bellum inexpertis (Desiderius Erasmus: sweet is war for those who have not experienced it). But don’t get me wrong: terrible as war is, and precisely for that reason, it can also provide the greatest joy there is.

War is motivated by a combination of interest—hence Clausewitz’s famous dictum—on one hand and emotion on the other. The two can, and sometimes do, pull in opposite directions.

War is a moral and physical struggle waged by means of the latter (Clausewitz again).

The essence of war is fighting around which everything else revolves. No fighting, no war.

The cardinal coordinates of war are violence, pain, danger, fatigue, uncertainty and friction.

War is a duel on an extended scale. Ancient or modern, large or small, it is governed by the rules of strategy just as many games are.

The principles of war—intelligence, deception, surprise, concentration, economy of force, and the like—are eternal. Not one of them has changed, and not one of them ever will.

The larger the distance between base and front, the more expensive and the more difficult waging war becomes.

Other things equal, the stronger form of war is the defense. Still, no war has ever been won by a pure defense.

A stream of water pouring out of a bucket will only spread for so long before coming to a halt. Similarly, attackers only have limited time at their disposal. Either they win within that time, or else they will be forced on the defense. For the defender, provided only he can hold out long enough, the opposite is the case.

A sword, plunged into salt water, will rust!

The longer a war, the less profitable it is likely to be.

Only the dead will see the end of war.

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Given these and tens of thousands of other truths, how can anyone seriously maintain that nothing ever changes?

Old Man, What Next?

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Maath, the Egyptian goddess of Justice

As those who read my autobiography, History and Me, know, I first discovered history in 1956 when I was ten years old. Rummaging in a sack full of books that my parents had put away in a storeroom that served all the neighbors in our building, I came across a volume entitled, Wereld Geschiedenis in een Notedop (Dutch: World History in a Nutshell). Probably published around 1932, it was meant for children about my age and was full of interesting stories as well as illustrations. To provide just two examples, there was the story of France’s Louis XIV. So conceited was he that he maintained a special claque to laugh at his jokes as he told them. And there was a black and white drawing of a monk, Berthold Schwarz, who had invented gunpowder and had his cap blown off for his pains. Almost there and then I decided I wanted to know more. In other words, become a historian; even though I had no idea of what historians actually did.

Ten or so years later I was a student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem with history as my most important subject (the other was English, but that is a different story). Working under the supervision of teachers like Prof. Shlomo Avineri, a famous political scientist who, aged 100, left us just a few days ago. An expert on Hegel and Marx, Avineri drew our attention to the fact that there is more—much more—to history than simple stories, good or bad, entertaining or otherwise. The shift was gradual and never quite complete. Going on 78 as I do I still like stories: whether by way of illustrating an argument or simply because they are entertaining.

As time went on I came to look at the matter in a different way. History, Hegel and Marx taught, was not just a question of joining stories like beads on a string—once upon a time there was such and such a person or persons who did such and such things. It was, rather, a vast tapestry which, as it was being unrolled, brought to light, in the form of the patterns woven into it, not just events but the laws that governed them. To be sure, the laws in question were not as rigid as those governing the natural sciences. Still they were real enough. Going along with them brought success; trying to resist them, the opposite. Given hard work, lots of patience, and, on occasion, a touch of genius, they could be discovered, observed in action, understood, and, to some extent, used to look into the future. As it happened, rerum cognorscere causas—to know the causes of things—was the motto of the London School of Economics where I later wrote my dissertation.

The cardinal pillar in all this was truth. Absolute or fuzzy, to be of any use the laws that governed the course of history had to be based on truth. Veritas liberabit vos, truth will set you free (St. John). Sine ira et studio, without anger and without flattery (Tacitus) Wie es eigentlich gewesen [ist], as things really happened (Leopold von Ranke). Truthfulness was the cardinal quality by which history, here understood not as the past itself but as the record of the past, was judged. Much more important than style, or poignancy, or entertainment value, and serving as the granite foundation on which everything else was, or ought to be, built.

The theory, or perhaps it was merely an approach, served me well. Partly because I firmly believed it was the only correct one. And partly because it fitted marvelously well into my chosen field of study, i.e military history. In my experience soldiers, kept busy by their superiors, rarely have much use for military history. If they study it, then that is mainly because they are made to—at military academy, at a staff college, and at a war college. However, ignoring the warnings of commanders such as Napoleon and Moltke, and except when it comes to all kinds of odd traditions, few of them really take it to heart. To the extent that they do so they tend to focus on recent history, often the more recent the better. In a fast-changing world where new technologies and techniques succeed each other at breakneck speed, why waste time on a Caesar, or a Napoleon, or even a Pershing? By following the path I did, I made military history relevant for my students and my readers. As one of the former, an American major, wrote, my course just grew on him. The fact that I often used anecdotes to illustrate what I was saying helped.

So things remained for about four decades. Hard-working decades, decades during which I was able to learn a great deal and visit a great many people, universities, militaries and countries, opportunities for which I have always remained grateful. Still the point came when I began to have my doubts. The key development that triggered off everything else, albeit that I got to it much later than many others, was my encounter with the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. To put it in a nutshell, he taught that texts—old texts, new texts, and future texts as far as the eye can see—say not just what they say but whatever the reader, on the basis of his/her interests and his/her personality and will, chooses to put into them. Truth, the one thing I had been looking for throughout my professional life, did not exist. Instead there were as many truths as there were readers. Some interesting, others not. Some well written, others not. But none superior to any of the rest.

This was the opposite of what I had always believed. To make things even worse, Derrida and his countless followers effectively obliterated the distinction between history and literature/fiction. Do not misunderstand me: I have always liked reading fiction, as I still do. It can inspire, it can entertain, it can teach. Provided it clearly defines itself and does not deliberately try to mislead and pretend to be something it isn’t, fiction is no less valuable than any other form of intellectual endeavor, including not just history but the hard sciences too. But to present things that did not happen as if they did—no.

Marching hand in hand with deconstructionism, or postmodernism, or whatever people called it, came the revolution in electronic communications. Instead of a handful of TV stations, there were suddenly hundreds if not thousands to choose from. Instead of focusing on relatively nearby events that were most likely to affect the viewer, they connected each of their users with the furthest corners on earth. To say nothing about the social media, which made it possible for anyone to spew his/her own truth, as well as computers which enabled that truth to be stored and transmitted and brought to life on some kind of screen. And altered and manipulated, of course: when Goebbels claimed that “pictures do not lie,” that itself was the greatest lie of all.

Worse still, many of these things themselves are done in the name of truth. Whether or not that was the case, truth was stifled, drowned, and overwhelmed until it expired by a thousand cuts. To the point where, among the young in particular, many simply gave up. This left me hanging between two cliffs. On one side was the kind of history I had admired, studied and done my best to write during most of my life. On the other, my belief in the factor that used to both justify and underpin this kind of history, namely truth. That belief has now been shattered. Not only because, compared to the vast number of questions that remain to be studied and answered, my efforts had been puny—of course they had been. But because truth does not exist in the first place.

Old man, what next?

Where Does All That Put AI?

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At some time between 2,000,000 and 500,000 BCE, men (and, lest we forget, women-lesbians-gays-transgenders-queer people-bisexuals-asexuals) exchanged animals’ cries/roars//barks/howls etc. for true speech with all its infinite nuances and complexities. Doing so, they became capable of much better interspecies cooperation and changed the course of history. Forever.

At some time between 500,000 and 200,000 BCE they learnt how to control and use fire. Doing so they greatly expanded the range of possible habitats and edible foods and changed the course of history. Forever.

At some time between 500,000 and 100,000 BCE they invented clothing, enabling them to spread into a great many environments that had previously been uninhabitable and stay in them throughout the year, regardless of season or weather. Doing so they changed the course of history. Forever.

At some time around 10,000 BCE they invented agriculture, enabling much larger numbers of people to live together and be fed. Doing so, they changed the course of history. Forever.

It is said that, at some time around 10,000 BCE, they invented war, meaning the use of coordinated violence by the members of one group of people against those of another. Doing so, they changed the course of history. Forever.

At some time around 4,000 BCE they invented the wheel, thereby enabling not merely people but much larger and heavier loads to be moved much farther, faster, and at lower cost. Doing so, they once again changed the course of history. Forever.

Around 3,500 BCE they invented writing, thus enabling much larger numbers of people to form polities, cooperate, and undertake tasks far greater than anything their predecessors could. This invention, too, changed history. Forever.

Around 2,500 BCE they learnt to work iron, thus laying the foundation of much subsequent technology and changing the course of history. Forever.  

And so on, and so on. Leading through the invention or discovery of bow and arrow (ca. 70,000 BCE), weaving (in eastern Anatolia, ca. 7,000 BCE), astronomy (in Egypt and Mesopotamia, ca. 4.000 CE), high-sea navigation (4,000-2,000 BCE), gunpowder (in China, ca. 1,000 CE), print (1450), modern observation-experiment-mathematics-based science (1650), the steam engine (1729), the railway (1825), the telegraph (1830), the dynamo (1831), the electric motor and internal combustion engines (1860 and 1873 respectively), the telephone (1875), radio (1895), quantum mechanics and relativity (1900 and 1905 respectively), heavier than air flying machines (1903), penicillin (1928), TV (1936), electronic computers (1948), and the structure of DNA (1953), to mention but a few out of tens if not hundreds of thousands.  Starting at least as far back as when the Emperor Vespasian had an inventor executed lest his invention, a new kind of crane, should rob many citizens of their livelihood, many of them were initially seen as absolutely catastrophic. The introduction of gunpowder, print, and mechanical weaving all brought about similar reactions (including some that were violent), by various groups of people. Ditto the advent of nuclear weapons (1945) which, many authors, both military and others, keep telling us will inevitably lead to Armageddon and must therefore be combatted by every means.

Fast forward to the present. Writing for the Economist Yuval Harari has put himself at the head of entire herds of pundits. His argument? Artificial intelligence, by learning to use language in ways that are sometimes almost indistinguishable from those hitherto reserved for humans, is on the threshold of doing so again. And, as it does so, may take the rudder out of our hands and lead us into a new catastrophe much worse than all previous ones.

Far be it from me to dispute the significance of these and any other number of ground-breaking inventions and discoveries. Had it not been for them, then presumably we would still have been living on the African savanna in nomadic or semi-nomadic groups of between 50 and 150 individuals. Gathering fruits, tubers and berries; hunting birds and small animals; trying to avoid being eaten by crocodiles as well as any number of big cats; and watching every second child die before it could reach puberty. Or else, going back still further in time, crying out to each other while swinging from tree-branch to tree-branch as some of our ape-like ancestors are believed to have done.

But consider.

First, suppose it is true that each of these and other inventions and discoveries has pushed history onto a radically different “new course.” In that case, how come that, after thousands upon thousands of years of innovation, so many of our earliest traits, both psychological and social, both individual and collective, are still with us? Including our need for company; our craving, partly successful but partly not, to try and understand how things work; our ability to recognize the comic and laugh; our enjoyment of play; our capacity for extreme cruelty; our ability to create artefacts of every kind; our attraction to beauty and to music; our frequent anxiety about what the future may bring; and as many others as you may care to list.

Second, suppose it is true that history’s course has undergone any number of truly fundamental changes. In that case, how come that some ancient items—e.g. Egyptian wall-paintings, the game of Go, the Bible, Greek art, the Platonic Dialogues, Confucius’ Analects, Laotzu’s Book of Tao, Euclid’s Principles of Geometry, Shakespeare’s plays, the works of Rembrandt and Vermeer, to mention but a few, are not only with us still but appeal to us just as much as they did to our ancestors?

In other words: Isn’t history a fabric made up of both the warp–the threads that run lengthwise — and the woof — the threads that run across? And isn’t it true that, without the both of them, it could not exist?

There have indeed been many changes: but have they really been as fundamental, let alone as disastrous, as the drumbeat of so many pundits suggests? If so, how did we increase from perhaps as few as 600 breeding individuals during the last ice age to 8 billion people today?

Where does all that put AI?

Not as New as It Seems

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While the world is going ape over chatgpt, the possibilities it opens and the dangers it carries, I recall that this device is by no means the first of its kind. Indeed stories about so called “brazen heads,” as they were called, have been with us for a millennium, if not more. What follows is a short list of the best known men (there seems to have been no women among them) who were rumored to have built or otherwise obtained such heads, each one complete with a few details.

The Roman poet Virgil (70-18 BCE). Widely recognized as perhaps the greatest Roman poet, he entered the picture in January 1245. That was when a French priest, Gautier of Metz, published Imago Mundi, later translated into French as L’Image du monde. Mixing facts with fantasy, it is an encyclopedic work, based on a great many different sources, about the creation, the earth and the universe. Gautier credited Virgil with having created an oracular head that answered questions. Seventy-four years later, in 1319, the story was retold by Renard le Contrefait. The latter may also have been the first to specify that the head was made of brass.

Pope Sylvester II (original name Gerbert of Aurillac). Pope from 999 to 1003. A true polymath who had plenty to say about both ecclesiastical and secular topics, he studied in Spain, a country then under Muslim rule which was considered the cutting edge of civilization. The English historian William of Malmesbury in his History of the English Kings (ca. 1145) says that he took with him a load of secret knowledge whose owner, who went in pursuit, he was only able to escape through demonic assistance. Among the “secrets” was a bronze head that would answer yes/no questions on a variety of topics, but only after having been spoken to first. Later it told Gerbert that if he should ever read a Mass in Jerusalem, which at that time was controlled by the Crusaders, the Devil would come to get him. Whereupon Gerbert cancelled a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. To no avail: reading Mass in Rome’s Church of the Holy Cross of Jerusalem, he fell ill and died soon afterwards.

Robert Grosseteste (1168-1252) was an English clergymen who rose to become bishop of Gloucester. Of him John Gower, in his long didactic poem Confessio Amantis (1390), wrote the following lines (1390):

For of the grete clerc Grossteste
I rede how besy that he was
Upon clergie an hed of bras
To forge, and make it for to telle
Of suche thinges as befelle.
And sevene yeres besinesse
He leyde, bot for the Lachesse,
Of half a minut of an houre,
Fro ferst that he began laboure
He loste all that he hadde do.

The lesson is clear. Lovers, do not tarry but seize the moment. Or else you may lose everything just as Grosseteste lost his talking head.

Roger Bacon (1220-1229) was an English monk who was credited, among other things, with the invention of gunpowder as well as a number of other devices. An anonymous 16th-century prose romance,The famous historie of Fryer Bacon, describes one of those as a precise brass replica of a “natural man’s head.” Including, not least, “the inward parts.” It tells how Bacon, struggling to give it speech, summoned the Devil to ask him for advice. Satan announced that the head would speak after a few weeks, as long as it was powered by “the continuall fume of the six hottest simples,” a selection of plants used in alchemical medicine. Over the next few centuries the story caught on and was retold many times. In 1589 it was adapted for the stage by Robert Greene and incorporated into The Honorable Historie of Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay, one of the most successful Elizabethan comedies. Greene’s Bacon spent seven years creating a brass head that would speak “strange and uncouth aphorisms” to enable him to encircle Britain with a wall of brass that would make it impossible to conquer.

Unlike his source material, Greene does not cause his head to operate by natural forces but by “nigromantic charms” and “the enchanting forces of the devil“:[i.e., by entrapping a dead spirit or hobgoblin. Bacon collapses, exhausted, just before his device comes to life and announces “Time is,” “Time was,”” and “Time is Past” before being destroyed in spectacular fashion: the stage direction instructs that “a lightening flasheth forth, and a hand appears that breaketh down the Head with a hammer.”

As late as 1646 Sir Thomas Browne in Pseudodoxica Epidemica wrote that “Every ear is filled with the story of Frier Bacon, that made a brazen head to speak”.

*

I doubt whether many people alive today take the story seriously (if our predecessors ever did). Still it is nice to know that Dublin boasts a pub named The Brazen Head, said to go back all the way to 1198. May chat gpt one day play a similar role?

Big Questions

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Skimming my way through Amazon.com, as I often do either in search of interesting books to read or simply to pass the time, I came across the following description of my former student, best-selling author/historian Yuval Harari. Here is what it said:

Born in Haifa, Israel, in 1976, Harari received his PhD from the University of Oxford in 2002, and is currently a lecturer at the Department of History, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He originally specialized in world history, medieval history and military history, and his current research focuses on macro-historical questions such as: What is the relationship between history and biology? What is the essential difference between Homo sapiens and other animals? Is there justice in history? Does history have a direction? Did people become happier as history unfolded? What ethical questions do science and technology raise in the 21st century?

I cannot claim to have researched these questions in any depth. Let alone sold books by the million as Harari did and does. As so often, though, I considered the questions interesting. Sufficiently so to try and provide my readers, and myself, with some off the cuff answers. The more so because, as a historian, in one way or another I’ve been thinking about them throughout my life. As, indeed, most people, though not historians, have probably done at some point or another.

Off the cuff my answers may indeed be. Still, if anyone has better ones I’d be very happy to see them. Not wishing to have my thoughts censored, not even by Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, I refuse to join the so-called social media. But my email is mvc.dvc@gmail.com.

A. What is the relationship between history and biology?

Q. There is no question but that many of our most basic qualities are biologically determined. Including the need to eat, drink, rest, sleep, and have sex; but for them, we could not exist. Including the quest, if not for happiness, which is both a modern idea and hard to define, then at any rate for avoiding pain and sorrow and having “a good time.” Including the desire for security, recognition and dominance. Including the desire to do what we consider good and right (this desire even Adolf Hitler, talking to a small and intimate circle, claimed to feel). Including the need to “make sense” of the world around us. And the desire for sex, of course.

The number of humans who have ever lived on this earth is estimated at 90-110 billion, of whom almost one tenth are alive today. With very few and very partial exceptions, all have experienced these needs and these desires. To this extent biology and history, meaning cultural change, are independent of each other.

But history, meaning social and cultural change, does affect the way these needs and these desires are experienced and expressed by people belonging to different cultures at different times. An ancient Chinese living, say, 3,000 years ago would instantly understand both what food is and why we stand in need of it. What he would not understand is why we in our modern Western society consider some foods (e.g seafood) fit for consumption and others (e.g. insects) not.

A. What is the essential difference between homo sapiens and other animals?

Q. Historically speaking, the answers to this question have varied very much. For the authors of the Old Testament, later followed by any number of adherents to the other two so-called Abrahamic Religions, it consisted of our belief in God as well as the ability to distinguish between good and evil; whoever could or would not do these things was considered in- or subhuman and deserved to be treated as such. For Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes and the thinkers of the Enlightenment it was our ability to use reason in order to both understand the world and achieve the goals we have set for ourselves. For Rabelais it was our ability to laugh; for Marx, our ability to create and sustain ourselves by means of work; for Nietzsche, out concern with beauty and with art in general; and for Johan Huizinga, our willingness to engage in play both for fun and on the way to exploring the world and creating something new.

This organ has the ability to make love and satisfy your partner. viagra generika 50mg How Fast usa cialis Does Kamagra Work Normally, Kamagra is effective with an hour of its consumption. Thus, the man is guaranteed strong erection until generic levitra professional the medication ingredients are present in the system. Because ultimately if you can sort it out cialis online discount http://greyandgrey.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/Court-of-Appeals-Ruling-in-Shutter-NYLJ-1997.pdf don’t you think the direct consequence could be that you will get bigger and longer lasting erection. Each of these views have been elaborated in mountains of publications of every kind. Each one has also been questioned at some length. Never more so than over the last two decades or so. The primatologist Frans de Waal, widely acknowledged as the world’s greatest expert on bonobos, in his 2013 book The Bonobo and the Atheist even went so far as to argue that the members of this species show something like religiosity, however rudimentary it might be.

A. Is there justice in history?

Q. Without going into detail as to what justice may mean, let me say that I doubt it very much. However, this question reminds me of a story I once heard about Israel’s former Prime Minister, Menahem Begin (served, 1977-1983). This was not long after he had concluded a peace agreement with Egypt and, by way of recognition, received the Nobel Peace Prize.

The story, which was told by an ideological rival of his, went as follows. Back in the summer of 1939, just weeks before the outbreak of World War II, twenty-five year old Begin was in Warsaw attending a meeting of Betar, a right-wing and rather belligerent Jewish movement of which, in Poland, he was the chief. Doing so he got into an argument with his mentor Zeev Jabotinsky, the equally right-wing leader and ideologist of Betar, world-wide. Then and later Begin was a fiery orator who tended to be swept away by his own words. On this occasion he spoke about might governing the world, called on Jews to use might and even violence in order to counter it, etc., etc. Whereupon Jabotinsky took the floor and said, “The world is run by judges, not robbers. And if you, Mr. Begin, do not believe that is true, then go and drown yourself in the Vistula.”

To repeat, whether there is justice in history I do not know. However, I do know one thing: but for the belief that there is such justice we might indeed drown ourselves in the nearest river.

A. Did people become happier as history unfolded?

Q. Some people today, including Harari himself in at least one of his books, have argued that, far from people becoming happier as history unfolds, they have become less so. As by having to work harder, being subject to greater stress, losing the intimacy that only members of small societies can experience, watching the world around us being polluted and nature destroyed, etc. This is a modern version of the Pandora story; except that, instead of Pandora (literally, “all blessings”), people speak of civilization.

To me, much of this seems to be based on nothing but nostalgia. More to the point, there is no way this question can be answered with any degree of certainty. Public opinion surveys aimed at doing so only started being held over the last few decades, and even they are hardly reliable. So I’ll skip.

A. What ethical questions do science and technology raise in the 21st century?

Q. I doubt whether science and technology raise any new ethical questions at all. To mention a few only, people have always confronted the question how evil—however defined–should be dealt with. They have always been forced to deal with the gap between the desires of the individual and the dictates of society. They have always been forced to decide what, from an ethical point of view, means should or should not be used to attain what ends. They have always done their best to influence the minds of others by whatever means at their disposal. And they always had to decide whether, and at what point, the deformed, the handicapped, the sick, and the old should (or should not) be killed or left to die.

In the words of Ecclesiastics, nothing new under the sun.

How I Became a Historian

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I am seventy-four years old. Going on seventy-five. Time to look back—especially for me, a historian not only by profession but by vocation too. A vocation that got under way when I was ten and, as my more or less steady flow of books I’ve written since shows, has never abated. Today, not having a better idea coming into my mind, I want to tell you how I became a historian, how and what I saw in it.

I was born in the Netherlands in 1946, meaning that my native language was Dutch. To this day I tend to speak all languages with a Dutch accent. Except that, seventy years having passed since our parents took my two younger brothers and me to Israel, my Dutch, though pretty fluent, is not exactly accent-free either. I grew up in Ramat Gan, then a leafy suburb of Tel Aviv. We live in an apartment house with three stories. Downstairs on the ground floor there was a large room that served all the residents—just four families, ourselves included—for storing their discarded belongings. And what belongings they were! I distinctly remember odd pieces of old-fashioned furniture, broken-down electric lamps, framed pictures, various utensils, curtains, porcelain, cutlery, heaps of old newspapers, and God knows what else. To get at many of them, one had to climb over some items and crawl into the nooks and crannies that separated them. Which, of course, added to the attraction.

One day a sack appeared in the room. I remember its exact location: on the left, near the door. I opened it and was surprised to find a few dozen books. All of them, in Dutch. Most were meant for adults and I did not find them interesting. I can only recall two titles. One was a historical novel about the first South African War (1881), written for juveniles from the point of view of the brave Boers who had defeated the wicked British at the Battle of Majuba Hill. Still dressed in red coats, the Brits, at that time. The other and, to me, much more important one, was called Wereldgeschiedenis in een Nootedop (World-History in a Nutshell). It was a book of general—meaning, at that time, almost exclusively European—history designed for children my age.

The book opened with King Menes of Egypt who reigned so long ago that it was almost unimaginable. And yet, as the author explained, if you took fifty hundred-year old people and linked them hand to hand they would reach back as far as him. The text mentioned World War I which in good Dutch fashion was presented as a tragedy for European civilization. But not Hitler and National Socialism. Hence it must have been published between 1924 and 1933, which was when my parents, who were born in 1918 and 1920 respectively, went to school. Most attractive of all, each chapter ended with a black silhouette that illustrated one of the themes just discussed. Among them, if I am not mistaken, was the legend of the monk Berthold Schwarz inventing gunpowder and being blown up for his pains.

I remember, or think I can remember, the chapter on Henry VIII who had no fewer than six wives. Also the one on Louis XIV who was so conceited he had an entire claque to laugh at his jokes. I also remember, or think I can remember, the last chapter. Its subject was twentieth-century technical progress. The acme of that progress was represented by a picture of a streamlined electric train of the kind that, in the nineteen twenties, was starting to replace the old steam-driven ones.

The story that impressed me most, though, was the one about the wars fought by the Greeks against the Persians in 490-480 B.C. Here was a people, small but brave. Their freedom was threatened by this great foreign king who, however, was so foolish that he had the Hellespont whipped for destroying a bridge he had built over it. They fought against much stronger enemies, made the supreme sacrifice at Thermopylae—I remember reading the famous verse about Leonidas and his 300 Spartans—and ended up victorious. They fired my imagination with their heroism; next, they went on to build all those magnificent temples with the beautiful capitals. In the evenings, helping my parents do the dishes, I used to lecture them about what I had read. Almost then and there I decided I would become a historian. As to what historians actually did, it took me years to find out. In a way, I am still finding out more with every passing day.

NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) such as aspirin and ibuprofen aren’t painkillers, but they are effective in reducing inflammation, which in turn can provide a certain degree of pain relief if done right. 3. cialis stores viagra prescription It basically refers to the condition where the facial nerve loses function or gets damaged. Phytonutrients are what make up the Saw Palmetto berries, and these act as interrupters of cialis where the process where hormones cause the prostate to enlarge. Both men as well as women face some sexual problems that are cialis order occurring due to some psychological roots. Years later my parents, considering Wereldgeschiedenis in a Nootedop too childish for me, asked and got my permission to lend it to some acquaintances of theirs who lived in Dimona, far from Ramat Gan. The book was lost, a fact I have regretted ever since. Much later still a Dutch student of mine explained to me that it was not a one-time creation but part of an ongoing educational series that was re-issued in updated form every few years. She gave me a more recent edition, published in the late nineteen sixties or early nineteen seventies, but I was grievously disappointed by its contents. They seemed jejune, ill-organized, and not nearly as entertaining as I remembered. Though there were some illustrations, the silhouettes, which to me had been the best part of the book, were missing. Perhaps because I was afraid of further disappointments, I did not try to locate the original volume. There are situations when trying to refresh one’s memories will only destroy those that already exist.

My interest in history was an open secret. For my Bar Mitzvah, which was celebrated in 1959, my parents presented me, in addition to a tennis racket, with a Hebrew edition of Caldwell and Merrill’s Popular History of the World. It was a big, green volume and I received it on the evening before the actual ceremony of reading from the Torah. By the next morning I had already finished half of it, with the result that, arriving at the synagogue, I could hardly keep my eyes open. This time the chapter that impressed me most was the one on the early years of World War II. It was called “The Mighty Offensive of the Axis Powers.” Looking back, it probably formed the real beginning of my interest in military history.

My family was not orthodox by any means. But my mother had vague feelings of guilt that my brothers and I might not be learning as much about our Jewish heritage as we ought to. To correct this problem I, my brother, and our downstairs neighbor were sent to a rabbi who gave us private lessons in Judaism. About the only thing I can remember was his telling us that, as part of the events commemorated in the festival of Purim, the wicked Persian Queen Vashti used to strip Jewish girls naked, whip them, and make them work on the Shabbat. Referring back to the book of Esther, I claimed that the story had no basis in the Bible, causing our studies with him to come to an abrupt end. As I learnt much later, incidentally, our teacher was right. Such a tradition does indeed exist. Though where the rabbis took it from God knows; apparently some of them are not as pure as they claim to be.

It was probably my mother’s concern, too, which accounts for the fact that, along with Caldwell and Merrill, I was given an equally big volume on Jewish history. It had been authored by a well-known historian, Simon Dubnow (1860-1941). Its title, in Hebrew, was A History of the Eternal People. I took one look at it and put it aside. For one thing, it was older and was printed in an unattractive, out of date, font. More important, we young Israelis had our fill of the Eternal People, a phrase we had often heard and detested with all our hearts.

To the extent that we studied Jewish history at all, it seemed to consist of little but an endless list of rabbis. Until the emancipation—which we knew was supposed to be something great and wonderful, though only half-understood, thing, they lived in ghettoes. There they spent their time writing incomprehensible books about incomprehensible topics and trying to escape frequent pogroms. What, for example, was one to make of a ninth-or tenth century “genius” (in the Rabbinic tradition, almost anyone with a beard is a “genius”) named Sa’adia who, living in Mesopotamia, had the bright idea of compiling a dictionary of rhyming words so as to help poets in their works?

Our teachers, drawing on what one can only call anti-Semitic stereotypes, imbued us with the idea that Diaspora Jews were despicable and cowardly types. Now they tried to please the gentiles, now they ran from them. Having failed to do either, when the Holocaust came they went “like cattle to the slaughter,” as the saying went. We actually had to memorize and sing a song that compared them to “calves.” No wonder we looked down on them and did not want anything to do with them. So bad was the teaching that, reading about the “Aryan” part of Warsaw, I had no idea what “Aryan” meant. To me it had something to do with lions, given that one of the Hebrew terms for that animal is “ari.”

Want to know more? Take a look at Clio and Me.

Then I Shall Change My Mind (Expanded)

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It’s now two decades since I, in my capacity as a military historian, began working on a book dealing with women. As I told a friend of mine—unfortunately she is long deceased—about my decision, she smiled and said that it was high time.

As you my readers, may well imagine, over the years I have often been asked what it would take to make me change my reactionary, archaic, patriarchal, male-chauvinist, and well-nigh criminal views on women and feminism. To wit, first, that basically very little has changed in the relationship between the sexes; and second, that almost the whole of modern feminism, both practical and theoretical, is an illusion at best and pure nonsense at worst. Need I add that the two questions are linked?

Being the hopeless egghead I am, I have always considered the matter intriguing. So here goes.

Anatomy and Physiology

If and when women grow as strong and robust, physically, as men, then I shall change my mind.

If and when men, accepting the vulnerability involved, start squatting to pee as women do, the then I shall change my mind.

If and when women stop growing breasts (or using every conceivable means to enhance them when nature does not do its part), then I shall change my mind.

If and when women start speaking in tenor, baritone or bass voices, then I shall change my mind.

Psychology and Behavior

If and when women stop vacillating and decide whether they want to be more like men—in which case no man will want to come close to them—or different from them, then I shall change my mind.

If and when most women give up their desire to have children, then I shall change my mind.

If and when any number of women stop reading “romantic” literature but study the dry-as-dust works of Spinoza instead, then I shall change my mind.

If and when men (other than gays and those freaks, trans-genders) start putting on female dress, walking like women, and mincing like women, then I shall change my mind.

If and when women stop trying to get rid of their body hair, then I shall change my mind.

If and when women stop undergoing the vast majority of surgical procedures to enhance their looks, then I shall change my mind.

If and when women no longer buy the vast majority of cosmetics and “accessories” of every kind, then I shall change my mind.

If and when women get rid of penis envy and stop desiring whatever men have (including, according to one German self-declared feminist philosopher, “potency”) then I shall change my mind.

If and when more women than men die in industrial accidents and while engaged on emergency and rescue operations, then I shall change my mind.

If and when more men than women start attending church, then I shall change my mind.

If and when women stop visiting doctors and ask for medical treatment far more often than men do, then I shall change my mind.

Ditto, in reference to psychologists, psychiatrists, and similar professionals.

If and when women stop lamenting the sad fate men have inflicted on them, then I shall change my mind.

Sex and Mating

If and when most women stop looking for men who can provide for them and protect and defend them, then I shall change my mind.

If and when powerful women become as attractive to men as powerful men are to women, then I shall change my mind.

If and when as many women as men express their readiness to have sex with strangers, then I shall change my mind.

If and when any number of female brothels succeed in staying open for any period of time, then I shall change my mind.

If and when women start earning kudos for having had numerous sexual encounters with men, then I shall change my mind.

At least the partner of the man must be aware of cialis vs levitra them. Leave viagra samples enough time, if possible an hour, for the discussion. Doctor appointments are essential to maintaining your health once you decide to bring supplements and medicines into the picture. tadalafil viagra The viagra samples for sale time of ejaculation is not the actual cure to remove this disorder. If and when most women stop marrying men who are older than they are, then I shall change my mind.

If and when a great number of women, turning into “cougars,” start marrying younger men and staying with them for long, then I shall change my mind.

If and when fewer women than men start initiating divorce proceedings, then I shall change my mind.

Literary Talent

If and when female writers start exploring the essence of womanhood as we as male ones such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Shakespeare did, then I shall change my mind.

Work and Career

If and when Plato’s maxim that, though no profession or field is the sole province of either men or women, on the average in every profession or field men do better than women, then I shall change my mind.

If and when the number of male nurses exceeds that of female ones, then I shall change my mind.

Ditto, concerning male kindergarten and elementary school teachers.

If and when female professions (meaning, such as are exercised mainly by women) are held in higher regard and become better paid than male ones, then I shall change my mind.

If and when as many women as men work in hard, dirty, and dangerous jobs, such as repairing cars, or forestry, or mining, or diving, or even garbage-collection, then I shall change my mind.

If and when the list of the fifty, or hundred, people with the highest salaries in America (or any other country) contains more than a few women’s names near the bottom of the list, then I shall change my mind.

If and when women come to form more than a negligible fraction of heads of state and prime ministers (currently they are about 6 percent), then I shall change my mind.

If and when Margaret Mead’s principle that, in any society, what matters is what men do, ceases to apply, then I shall change my mind.

Facing the Law

If and when as many women as men are arrested for the same offenses, then I shall change my mind.

If and when as many women as men, arrested for the same offenses, are refused bail, then I shall change my mind.

If and when as many women as men are indicted for the same offenses, then I shall change my mind.

If and when as many women, indicted for the same offenses as men, are convicted, then I shall change my mind.

If and when women and men, having been convicted for the same offense, get similar sentences then I shall change my mind.

If and when women, having been imprisoned, are treated as harshly as men are, then I shall change my mind.

If and when proportionally as many women as men, having been sentenced, get an early release or parole, then I shall change my mind.

Sports

If and when women start running and swimming as fast, jumping as far and as high, throwing the javelin and the discuss as far, and hitting a tennis ball as hard, as men do, then I shall change my mind.

If and when men and women start boxing against each other in earnest, rather than by way of training or burlesque, then I shall change my mind.

If and when co-ed teams consisting of grown men and women are formed and start playing football or soccer or basketball against each other, then I shall change my mind.

If and when organized bands of male drum majorettes are formed to encourage female team players, then I shall change my mind.

War

If and when as many women are drafted to enlist in the military and fight in war as men are, rather than being permitted to volunteer if they like doing so, then I shall change my mind.

If and when proportionally more women than men are killed while on active military operations, then I shall change my mind.

Famous Last Worlds

Unless and until most of these propositions are no longer true, Porsche Power courtesy of German painter Udo Lindenberger, will prevail.

On Footnotes

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As all of you who have taken a look at this website, even the most causal one, will know, throughout my adult life I have been a scholar. And the one thing that is most characteristic of a scholarly text, as opposed to one that is not so, is the use of footnotes. I well remember the first time, in late 1965 or early 1966, when I was required to submit a seminar paper. My teachers made me look upon footnotes as if they were the gates to paradise. Nor, as I learnt both at the time and later, when I became a teacher myself, was I by any means the only one to see them in this way.

As a young student of the humanities, you learn is that footnotes are very important even though, to say the truth, not many people bother to read them. As a young student of the social sciences you also learn that footnotes are very important even though the kind of footnotes you are expected to put into your work is somewhat different. The difference is that historians care who wrote the sources they cite, where, when, and why. Social scientists often don’t. For them, (John Nobody, 2020) is no different from (Adam Smith, 1776). Nor does it matter whether the source they are quoting is (Aristotle, 350 B.C) or (Aristotle, 1999). Some of them, I suspect, do not even know that by the time the latest edition of his work came out its author had been dead for some twenty-three centuries.

What both disciplines have in common is that they use footnotes to certify that a given piece of work is, in fact, “scientific.” The more footnotes you have, the more “scientific” your work. I’ve also noticed that, the less is known about a subject or period, the larger the number of footnotes that attend the text dealing with them. I too, peppered my books with footnotes. Like many other young students I used to count them with considerable pride. Not only did I want to see how many I had, but I also wanted to know how many there were per page.

The best footnotes contain material that is “unpublished” or “archival.” Accordingly I loved writing things like “Captain von und zu Verschwind to Lieutenant Colonel Suchmir, 6.8.1941, OKH [Oberkommando des Heeres]/Genst.d.H [Generalstab des Heeres] /Org.Abt. [Organisationsabteilung] II, Nr. 10962/41, Gkds [Geheime Kommandosache], GMR [German Military Records] T-706/0001131.” Looking back, heaven knows where I found the patience. Before computers came to the rescue, each time you typed in a mistake you have to re-do the entire page.

Technology and War was the first of my books that did not have any footnotes. In part, this was because I wrote it on my new Apple IIe—which, since it did not have an automatic re-numbering command, turned the task of revision into a nightmare. In part, it was because the subject was too large. For each sentence it would have been possible to come up not with one reference but with twenty. As with the mythological hydra, each source only pointed the way to many others. Had I read everything available on the subject, the project would still have been going on today, thirty years after the book was published. As I said, instead of always searching for new sources my difficulty was how to decide which ninety percent of the available ones not to read.

Yet the above difficulties only formed part of the story and not necessarily the most important one. Years ago, in class, somebody who may have been a follower of Popper said that the purpose of studying history was to disprove myths. I answered that, in my opinion, that was wrong. To be sure, disproving myths is a fine occupation for young historians eager to hone their skills and make a name for themselves. In fact one of my own earliest published articles carried the subtitle, “the destruction of a legend.” But mature scholars should aim higher. Much higher. Instead of disproving myths others have created, they should try to produce work so good as to become myths. As, to provide just one example, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire did.

This line of thought explains why, at the age of forty-something. I was developing an obsession—one which, in retrospect, seems almost megalomaniac—with my books’ ability to withstand the proverbial hand of time. To the point where, dedicating Technology to Dvora, I did so eis aeona. To obtain an idea of how it was done, I spent considerable time and energy looking at some famous books and analyzing them for “eternality.” Not surprisingly, the precise nature of the latter quality escaped me then and continues to escape me today.

However, I did make some interesting discoveries. The most important one was that hardly any of them had footnotes. Thucydides has no footnotes. To pile insult on injury, he says that the speeches, which many think are the best part of his entire work, are for the most part pure invention. That should certainly make some of us reflect on the nature of historical writing. Polybius, Sallust, Caesar, Tacitus and Josephus do not have footnotes either. Nor do Augustine, Machiavelli, Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau, Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Darwin, and, in my own field, Clausewitz. To say nothing of Nietzsche; he would have laughed at the idea. And Heine poked fun at it.

Probably the reason why these and so many others dispensed with footnotes was because they were not modern academics. Not being modern academics, they did not try to be “scientific.” They did not have to compete for tenure by having their work evaluated by a committee. One whose members, instead of reading it, count (or rather, since the actual counting is done elsewhere, take note of), the number of times it is mentioned in “scientific” journals. Leonard Huizinga, who was a modern academic, in the introduction to Homo Ludens warns the reader not to expect documentation for every word. Another very good contemporary example is Humphrey Kitto’s The Greeks (1951). As unassuming little volume, so good is it that it sold over 1,500,000 copies. In the military field there is Michael Howard’s War in European History. A real tour de force that, in my view, puts all his other, far bulkier, works in the shade.

Underside of the penis shaft buy cheap levitra http://deeprootsmag.org/2019/07/25/bob-marovichs-gospel-picks-36/ is the most sensitive part. Regardless of the mind-bogglingwell being and sleepbenefits of HGH, this optionis just cheap cialis brand not cost-effective or possiblefor most. The trial was performed by Vedic cheapest prices for cialis Lifesciences Private ltd with very positive results. Vardenafil has not been mulled over with different medications for barrenness, sample generic viagra so use in mix with different medicines is not suggested. The more I reflected on the matter, the more it seemed to me that footnotes are characteristic of the mediocre book. The best books do not have them. But neither do the worst ones. Had the autos of romance literature, which sells more than most other kinds combined, tried to document its stories by this method, no doubt they would have gone bankrupt very quickly indeed. In a certain way, footnotes represent a compromise. If you think something is too important to be skipped altogether, but not important enough to be mentioned in the text, you can always put it into a footnote. Understood in this way, footnotes, far from being the mark of good scholarship, are merely a sign of indecision and, perhaps, cowardice.

To repeat, normally the very best books are those that do not have footnotes. Nor would such a book be at all improved if it were provided with them. Imagine the Bible sprinkled with brackets, or little numbers, or a variety of other signs who exact meaning is known only to a handful of experts. Each one reminding the reader that this or that fact or idea had come, not straight out of God’s mouth but from such and such a source; or else adding some kind of information that did not seem to worthy of being included in the text itself.

I, too, hoped to write such a book. If not one that would last forever, which I early on realized is beyond my powers, than at any rate one that would fuse the argument and the evidence on which it rests so tightly that, like a creeper on an oak tree, they would become indistinguishable. Not to put too fine a point on it, I wanted what I wrote to be so good as to be almost self-evident. As, to adduce just one more example, Confucius’ Analects are. Agreement was to be achieved by persuasion, not by piling on authorities many of whom would owe their presence on my pages precisely to their obscurity.

This was the guiding idea behind my best-known volume, The Transformation of War. Needless to say, its lack of footnotes did not pass unnoticed. One reviewer greeted Transformation as follows: “A tremendous challenge with van Creveld’s text is discerning where the bulk of his information comes from. His book lacks traditional citations of outside resources and he merely relies on direct quotes, inferences, but never on annotations accepted through APA, MLA or Chicago-Turabian style guides.” Here I must confess that, until I wrote the present essay, I did not even know that such a thing as “Turabian” existed. Mea culpa.

Since then I have written several other footnote-less books. Some better, some worse, but none that contained enough “eternality” to satisfy me. More than once I compromised and put in a bibliographical list—always at my editors’ insistence, never out of my own free will. In each case, perusing the book in question a few years later, I was struck by how antiquated, how irrelevant, the lists appeared. Had the books been re-issued, I would have deleted them. Who the devil cares?

And why bring up this entire topic right now? Because, over the last few years, I’ve been slowly moving towards the writing of fiction. My first attempt in this direction was Hitler in Hell (2017). Not, I repeat not, that I invented the facts with which it is crammed out of thin air. The book, if I may say so, is as well researched as any I have ever written; the paragraphs dealing with post-1945 developments, as Hitler observes them from hell, apart, everything in it is “real” or “true.” And can be “verified.” But in that I decided to try and adopt Hitler’s own point of view as far as possible; an approach which, right from the beginning, ruled out not just footnotes but any pretense at “real” scholarship. For me the book was fun to write—which, in the end, is all that matters.

When I say fun, what I mean is a kind of freedom scholars, owing to their self-imposed limitations, do not normally enjoy. Freedom to think and talk and write outside the box, as the saying goes. Freedom to use one’s imagination in somewhat different ways, and to a different extent, from that to which I have been accustomed throughout my life. Now that I think of it I find it hard to define the kind of freedom I am referring to with any precision. All I know is that I enjoy it and will never give it up again.

So what comes next? I am just working on the final draft of another volume, The Gender Dialogues. 40,000 works long, it is the record of an imaginary debate with a young, highly intelligent, female journalist. She really exists, and her questions gave me the push I needed; however, they and my answers to them only account for a small part of the material. And I am thinking about doing another book like Hitler in Hell. This time the title is going to be I, Stalin. Pinched, of course, from Robert Graves’ masterpiece, I Claudius; but much, much closer to reality.

If I were to provide some advice to young historians, it would go as follows. First, don’t throw away the baby with the bath water; ere you dispense with footnotes as well as other academic tools, make sure you have thoroughly mastered them. Second, however preposterous it may sound, do aim at eternality; even though your chances of attaining it are practically zero. In other words, do the very best you can. And third, enjoy yourself. Partly because, if you don’t, you are unlikely to come up with something others will enjoy as well; and partly because, in that case, what’s the point at all?

Seven Things That Will Not Change

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Ever since the beginning of the industrial revolution during the last decades of the eighteenth century, humanity has become obsessed with change. First in Europe, where the revolution originated and gained momentum. Then in Europe’s overseas offshoots, primarily but not exclusively the English-speaking ones in North America and Australasia; and finally in other places as well. By the middle of the nineteenth century, at the latest, it was clear that the world was being transformed at an unprecedented pace and would continue to do so in the future. Those who joined the bandwagon, as Japan did, prospered; those who refused to do so fell behind and in many cases have remained backward right down to the present day. As change accelerated there appeared a whole genre of visionaries who made it their job to try and look into that future—starting with Jules Verne and passing through H. G. Wells all the way to Ray Kurzweil and Yuval Harari.

As readers know, I am a historian. As a historian, I have spent much if not most of my working life doing what generations of historians have always done and still keep doing: namely, identifying the origins of change, tracing its development, pointing out its implications, and speculating on where it may yet lead. So with Polybius who, about 160B CE, believed that no one could be so ignorant and so lazy as to fail to take an interest in the way Rome expanded until it dominated the entire Mediterranean; and so with countless authors today.

In this post, though, it pleases me to try to put the idea on its head. Meaning, I am going to focus on some of the things that have accompanied humanity for a long, long time and which, I think are not going to change. Certainly not any time soon. Perhaps, not ever.

  1. A world without war, meaning politically motivated and organized violence, is not in the cards. To be sure, starting in 1945 much of the planet has enjoyed what is sometimes known as the Long Peace. Meaning that, relative to the size of the earth’s population, fewer people have died in war each year than was the case during any other period from which figures are available. But let there be no illusions: the most important, if not the only, reason behind the decline is not the kind of sudden wish for peace (“the better angels of our nature”) some authors have postulated. It is nuclear deterrence which, by cutting the link between victory and survival, has prevented the most important countries from fighting each other in earnest.

Unfortunately experience has shown that, under the shadow of the mushroom cloud, there is still plenty of room left for smaller, but no less bloody, conflicts. Especially, but certainly not exclusively, of the intrastate, or nontrinitarian, kind as opposed to the interstate, trinitarian one. Such being the case, a world without war would require two things. First, a situation where every person and every community is always sufficiently content with his/or its lot to refrain from resorting to the use of organized violence against other people and other communities. Second, a world government capable of identifying and deterring those who would resort to it from doing so.

War is to a large extent a product of the emotions. As a result, such a government would have to pry into the brains of every single person on earth, monitoring the emotions in question and possibly using electrical and chemical methods to regulate them were necessary. That would apply both to the rulers and to the rulers. For good or ill, though, there is no indication that either of those conditions, let alone both, are anywhere close to being met.

  1. There is no reason to think the world in which we live is better or happier than previous ones. Not only is happiness the product of many different interacting factors, but its presence or absence depends on circumstances. Does it presuppose a minimum of physical comfort? Yes, of course, since those who are screaming with pain can hardly be happy. However, the extent of that comfort, and even what counts as comfort, is largely dictated by what we expect and do not expect. For all we know a bushman of the Kalahari, as long as his world remained intact, was quite as content with his lot as a resident of Monaco where per capita GDP stands at $ 162,000 per year and no one pays income taxes.

Does happiness require a belief in God? Possibly so, but contrary to what priests and imams and rabbis are always saying there is no proof that religious people are happier and less troubled than unbelievers. Does it require leisure, time in which to relax, enjoy, and think? Yes, of course, but the fact that, in Rome during the second century CE, almost half of the year consisted of feast days does not mean that the contemporaries of Marcus Aurelius were happier than their ancestors or their successors. Does it require an occasional dose of adrenalin? Yes, of course, but again there is no reason to think the ancient gladiatorial games were less able to provide it than modern football does. Does it require good interaction with at least some other people? Yes, of course, but there is no reason to believe that such interaction was less common and less satisfying in previous generations than in our own. Does it require purposeful activity? Yes of course, but then what does and does not count as purposeful is almost entirely up to the society and the individual in question. Some find happiness in risking their lives while trying to climb the Himalaya; others, in staying at home and looking after their flower beds or simply reading a good book.

To claim, so soon after Hitler, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and whole hosts of lesser murderers that our world is getting better and happier—that is worse than a lie. It is, rather, making a mockery of the dead.

  1. Poverty will not be eradicated. Taking 1800 as their starting point, economic historians have estimated that, in the developed world, real per-capital product has risen thirtyfold. Based on this, and assuming the benefits will keep spreading like ripples in a pond, there have been countless confident predictions concerning a golden future in which everyone will be, if not exactly as rich as Jeff Bezos, at any rate comfortably off.

However, these predictions have failed to take into account two factors. First, wealth, poverty and of course comfort itself are not absolute but relative. In many ways, what was once seen as fit for a king is now not considered suitable even for a beggar; for example, a house without a flush toilet, running water, hot water, and, in cold climates, some kind of heating system. Second, though the production of material goods has in fact increased almost beyond measure, the way those goods are distributed has not become more equal. If anything, taking 1970 as our starting point, to the contrary. The two factors combined ensure that the contrast between wealth and poverty, plutos kai penia as Plato called them twenty-four centuries ago, will persist. And so will the psychological, cultural, social and political consequences it entails.

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  1. Whatever some feminists may say, men and women will not play the same role in society, let alone become the same. Partly that is because nature has made them different—as is proved, above all, by the fact that women conceive, bear and give birth whereas men do not. And partly by other biologically-determined differences between them in respect to size, physical strength, robustness, endurance, risk-taking, aggression, and dominance. So fundamental are these physiological differences that they dictate much of the social order. For example, that men should be the maintainers and protectors of women rather than vice versa.

Not only are men and women different, but they want to be so. “The more like us you become, mes dames,” that incorrigible skirt chaser, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, is supposed to have said, “the less we shall like you.” Conversely, in all known places and societies the worst thing one can say about a man is that he is like a woman. It is the differences between men and women, as much as the similarities, which attract them to each other. On pain of humanity dying out for lack of offspring, had they not existed they would have to be invented. So it has been and so, in all appearances, it will remain,

  1. We shall not gain immortality. It is true that, starting in late eighteenth-century France and Sweden and subsequently spreading to other countries, global life expectancy has more than doubled from about 30 years to a little over 70 today. Moreover, and again taking a global perspective, the pace at which years are being added to our lives has been accelerating. This has led some people to reason that, if only we could increase it fast enough (meaning, by more than a year every year), death would be postponed to the point where we shall become immortal. The first person to live for a thousand years, it has been claimed, has already been born or is about to be born soon enough.

However, the calculation is flawed on four counts. First, most of the increase in life expectancy has resulted from a decline in the mortality of the very young. To that extent it represents, not an increase in lifespan but a simple statistical sleight of hand. Second, the term “global” masks the fact that, the higher life expectancy in any given country, the harder (and more expensive) the attempts to increase it further still. In other words, we have entered the domain of diminishing returns; starting in 2015, in twelve out of eighteen high-income countries life expectancy has actually declined.

Third, the fundamental underlying reality has not changed one iota. Now as ever, the older we grow the more errors creep into our DNA, the more susceptible to age-related diseases we become, and the greater the likelihood of us being involved in an accident; turning us into runners on a treadmill and leading up to our final collapse. Fourth, and as a result, it is true that the percentage of old people has been growing rapidly. However, there is no indication that the life span granted to us by nature has been increasing or is capable of being increased.

  1. The mind-body divide has always existed and, as far as anyone can see, will continue to exist. Starting at least as long ago as the Old Testament, people have always wondered how dead material could ever give birth to a living, sentient, self-aware, being. Especially in regard to the brain as the most important organ in which thought, emotion and, not least, dreaming take place. To answer the question, they invented a God who, to speak with Genesis, blew “the spirit of life” into man’s nostrils.

Darwin, in coming forward with his theory of evolution did not solve the problem; instead, he side-stepped it. Recent advances in neurology, made possible by the most sophisticated modern techniques, are indeed astonishing. In some cases they have enabled the deaf to hear, the blind to see, and the lame to (sort of) walk. Yet they are limited to studying the structure of the brain and tracing the patterns of activity that take place in it as we engage in this activity or that; at best, they duplicate a tiny fraction of that activity. They neither can nor do tell us how objective chemical and electric signals translate into subjective experiences. Leaving us exactly where we were thousands of years ago when our ancestors, while well aware that consuming certain substances led to increased awareness and others, to torpor, had no idea as to how those effects were produced

Computers can perform calculations a billion times faster than we can. However, they cannot experience love, hate, courage, fear, exhilaration, disappointment, hope, despair, and so on. Between them, these and countless other emotions shape our personality==in fact they are our personality. All are linked both to each other and to the “thinking” part of our brains; they influence our thought and are influenced by it. It is, indeed, probable that a thought that did not originate in some kind of emotion has yet to be born. That is why, even if computers and their programs grow a thousand times as sophisticated and as complex as they are today, they still won’t be able to develop anything like a human personality.

  1. Our ability to control the future, or even to predict what it will be like, has not improved and almost certainly will not improve one iota. There used to be a time when looking into the future was the province of shamans, prophets, oracles, Sibyls, and even the dead who, as in the Bible, were raised specially for the purpose. Other people tried their luck with astrology, palmistry, augury (watching the flight of birds), haruspicy (interpreting the entrails of sacrificial animals), yarrow sticks, crystal balls, tarot cards, tea leaves, patterns left by coffee in near-empty cups, and other methods too numerous to list.

Some of the attempts at prediction relied on ecstasy, others on the kind of technique broadly known as magic. Starting around 1800, at any rate among the better educated in Western countries, two methods have dominated the field. One is extrapolating from history, i.e. the belief that what has been going up will continue to go up (until it doesn’t) and that what has gone down will continue to go down (ditto). The other is mathematical modelling, which consists of an attempt to identify the most important factors at work and link them together by means of algorithms.

As the enormous accumulated wealth of many insurance companies shows, of the two the second, especially as applied to very large numbers of people, has been the most successful. But only, as the bankruptcy of AIG back in 2008 demonstrated all too well, as long as conditions do not change in a radical way. And only at the cost of ignoring what to most people is the most important question of all, i.e. what the future will bring for each and every one of them.

Do these considerations suffice to put change, that keynote of modernity about which everyone is talking all the time, into perspective?