On the Study of History

When I was about seven or eight years old, I became obsessed with airplanes, specifically World War I biplanes. I’m not sure how this obsession came about. Seeing Snoopy fight the Red Baron in the Sunday comics? Seeing King Kong on TV? Whatever caused the obsession, the obsession sent me on a quest for knowledge. I wanted to know everything about these planes. As a byproduct of that quest, I learned about the war. Suddenly, I knew who Archduke Franz Ferdinand was. I knew who the Central Powers and the Allied Powers were. I knew what trench warfare was. I was learning history.

I read—or attempted to read—library books about the planes and the war, some of which were well beyond my reading level. But, the books usually had maps, illustrations, and photos, and I could learn from them. Also, I distinctly recall finding some special edition of an aviation magazine featuring planes of World War I. I think it was in that magazine that I learned the Red Baron—Manfred von Richthofen—flew a Fokker DR1 triplane and shot down 80 Allied pilots before allegedly dying at the hands of Canadian Sopwith Camel pilot Roy Brown.

These books and magazines not only fed my curiosity to know more about airplanes but also fed my growing curiosity about the greater world around me. That’s something the study of history does. It widens your horizons, as Yuval Noah Harari writes in Sapiens.

“So why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions,” he writes. “We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have more possibilities before us than we imagine”.

Of course, at seven or eight, I was unaware that my situation was “neither natural nor inevitable” and I doubt I was entertaining what possibilities were before me. I was gaining knowledge for knowledge’s sake. I just wanted to know more about the planes or the war they were flown in. I wasn’t following a narrative thread. I didn’t have any questions about the causes of the war or its consequences—as far-reaching as they continue to be. That interest would come later.

Reading Harari’s book, however, reminded me why I ended up studying history at university and why I still love history. Harari is right. Possibilities open up. When I studied history at university, possibilities opened up. One possibility was the thought of a career: I intended to get my bachelor’s degree in history and teach high school history. While that didn’t happen, studying history changed my life in other ways. A course on the Renaissance, for instance, gave me a greater understanding of my growing humanist outlook. I was discovering the foundations of a belief system, one that I continue to explore and develop. Later, I was drawn to the Enlightenment thinkers and their influence on the development of the United States: studying that era opened up the possibilities to me of what the U.S. could be and perhaps still strives to be.

Harari’s Sapiens is a history of our species—Homo sapiens—as a whole. While the genus Homo evolved about 2.5 million years ago and Homo sapiens about 200,000 years ago, Harari believes it was only about 70,000 years ago that our species really began to “stand out from the myriad other organisms with which [we] shared [our] habitats”. It was then that distinct human cultures began to form in an age Harari labels the Cognitive Revolution (not to be confused with the psychological movement of the same name that began in the 1950s). It’s this era when history began.

The Cognitive Revolution is one of three revolutions—the Agricultural and Scientific Revolutions are the other two—that changed everything and “shaped the course of history,” Harari tells us.

As you might expect, packing 70,000 years of human history into more than 400 pages, you get a pretty broad sweep. But Harari successfully navigates readers through time from the moment we developed cultures to the moment “about 10,000 years ago when Sapiens began to devote almost all their time and effort to manipulating the lives of a few animal and plant species” to the moment when it became possible for us to create medicines that save countless lives or to end everything in a mass of atomic fireballs. He draws from multiple disciplines—evolutionary biology, theology, and anthropology to name a few—as he plots his course to the future, concluding by examining what might lay ahead for Sapiens with artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and cybernetics.

From what I can gather, Harari believes the course of history isn’t necessarily a good thing, at least up to the present. Threaded through the eye of his story is a dark narrative, a pessimistic “I’ve-met-the-enemy-and-it-us” needle. That whatever happened in our brains 70,000 years ago to cause us to create cultures and our myriad imagined orders and the notion of history itself has broken the world. Homo sapiens has made everything worse, including Homo sapiens.

We excel it seems, for instance, at genocide. Well before the atrocities of Cambodia’s killing fields, or Stalin’s purge, or Hitler’s final solution, Sapiens in one way or another eliminated the other human species—the Neanderthals, the Denisovans—we once shared the planet with. One theory has it that we starved them out. Our proficiency at hunting and gathering took away the resources the Neanderthals needed to feed themselves. As a result, Harari writes, “[t]heir population dwindled and they slowly died out, except perhaps for one or two members who joined their Sapiens neighbours”.

Another theory suggests, as Harari notes, “that competition for resources flared up violence and genocide. Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect, or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group”.

This isn’t to say that Harari doesn’t acknowledge our species’ achievements or even our ability to cooperate at times, enough to come up with imagined constructs such as religion, law codes, science, or empires. It’s just that those constructs aren’t necessarily as great as we’d like to believe. That’s not wholly untrue: Empires, science, law codes, and religion have been equally destructive. Harari, though, just doesn’t seem to like his species.

“Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of,” he writes. “We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires, and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world? Time and again, massive increases in human power did not necessarily improve the well-being of individual Sapiens, and usually caused immense misery to other animals”.

For all of the book’s many charms and insights, Harari’s species loathing left me numb and nihilistic after I finished reading the book. Early reviewers, too, were critical of Harari’s deprecating tone. Charles C. Mann, for instance, notes briefly something I picked up on: Harari’s scant reference to art or music or literature, those accomplishments that we can be proud of, that have brought to our species contentment, joy, entertainment, the realization of possibilities.

“Personally,” Mann writes, “I’d say that Beethoven’s symphonies, the Kokedera moss garden in Kyoto, the Great Mosque of Djenne, classical Greek drama and the theory of quantum electrodynamics ain’t beanbag”.

Few references to art, music, or literature are worthy enough to make mention in the book’s index, although in a quick scan, Byron, Shaw, Dickens, Cicero, and Harry Potter get nods. Few works of art or music appear in the book. Harari does champion the great religions—Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity, in particular—but perhaps music, art, and literature are just extensions of religions. Or perhaps the arts, in general, don’t really matter that much to Harari because like all aspects of human culture, they are fictions, imagined social constructs we’ve created in order to survive and dominate the earth? His outlook is often postmodernist, favoring cultural relativism, I suppose, because it’s all fiction anyhow.

If a loathing of the species is what the study of history has pressed upon Harari, is history really worth studying? I thought the study of history opened up the possibilities before us? Harari concludes we’ve become self-made gods whose seemingly only possibility is psychopathic self-annihilation. He leaves readers with this question: “Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want”?

While I don’t want to read rose-tinted versions of history, I do tend to agree that studying history is worthwhile, as Harari asserts early in his book. Studying history does open up possibilities. It also helps us understand human nature better, perhaps to improve it. Studying history presents us with checks and balances to the worst of our nature, and possibilities to stifle the childlike gods that dwell in our psyche. I’ll take Hans Rosling’s view of the necessity of studying history over Harari’s.

“When we hang on to a rose-tinted version of history we deprive ourselves and our children of the truth,” Rosling writes in his book Factfulness. “The evidence about the terrible past is scary, but it is a great resource. It can help us to appreciate what we have today and provide us with hope that future generations will, as previous generations did, get over the dips and continue the long-term trends toward peace, prosperity, and solutions to our global problems”.

A Song of Ice and Reason

This past week was trying for me and millions of Texans as we endured two winter storms without power or with sporadic power, as a deregulated power grid failed. I was angered by our governor, by ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) who ordered rolling blackouts, and certainly by a certain senator who decided to flee to Cancun in the midst of it—and then lied about the trip to save his Herman-Munster face. I was angered by the “rugged individualist” culture that persists in the state—a former governor and slimeball said Texans were willing to suffer to remain free from Big Government. People in power pointed fingers. People without power looked for a warm place to take shelter. People without power also lost water as pipes burst and city water systems broke down.

At the same time, I was aware that at the very least I was failing to understand the world in a factful, rational, reasonable manner, falling victim to what Hans Rosling calls “The Blame Instinct” in his book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think. (I think this is my favorite read, so far, in 2021.) “The blame instinct is the instinct to find a clear, simple reason for why something bad has happened. . . .It seems that it comes very naturally for us to decide when things go wrong, it must be because of some bad individual with bad intentions.” The simple answer for me and thousands of others suffering without power: it’s all the fault of a corrupt government and greedy capitalists, more concerned about profits than a reliable electric grid. Finger-pointing is easy. The other side did it too. The weasley governor blamed it on a Green New Deal policy that has yet to be enacted. A cloddish mayor said we’re weak freeloaders waiting for the next handout and, in fact, deserve to suffer because we’re weak freeloaders.

Finger-pointing, however, as Rosling notes “steals our focus as we obsess about someone to blame, then blocks our learning because once we have decided who to punch in the face we stop looking for explanations elsewhere. This undermines our ability to solve the problem, or prevent it from happening again, because we are stuck with oversimplistic fingerpointing, which distracts us from focusing our energy in the right places.”

I try to think critically and think of myself as a mostly reasonable person. Of course, as humans, we can’t live in a logical paradise like the Vulcans of Star Trek. And in the midst of chaos, looking for a simple answer, for someone or some entity to blame is natural. It is an instinct, one easy to succumb to. Fingerpointing also tends to hold to ideological lines and makes us blind to other perspectives. We start following what Rosling terms “The Single Perspective Instinct,” which is another way we fail to see reality. “Being always in favor of or always against any particular idea makes you blind to information that doesn’t fit your perspective,” Rosling writes. “This is usually a bad approach if you like to understand reality.”

You can probably tell by the epithets I’m slinging like “slimeball” and “cloddish” that I lean left and live in a predominantly right-wing state. And it was hard to listen to a governor and executives of ERCOT try to explain the grid failure without wanting to strike back on ideological grounds. It was also quite hard to watch a senator decide to take a trip, rather than showing genuine leadership. There seemed to be so much indifference and lack of genuine concern as people froze to death, searched for places to stay warm, and find food and clean water. Yet, I also realize I’m guilty of succumbing to my particular perspective (I’m not quite as far left as I might seem; I tend to subscribe to a traditional liberal humanist perspective) as we all are.

I also hope that at some point conservatives and liberals sit down and figure out in the days, weeks, months, and years what the real problems are and ask questions like “Why did wind turbines freeze?” or “Why did water treatment systems freeze?” and work to find genuine solutions so the grid doesn’t break down again.

I’m sure from now on I’ll slip in my reasoning and fall prey to the 10 instincts of broken thinking Rosling examines in his book. But the book is certainly a great guide that keeps you aware that you’re drifting away from reasoned reality and off into a scrambled view of the universe. I have to recommend this book to everyone, especially those in fact-based professions like journalism—Rosling takes to task some issues in journalism—and educators. The book’s comparable to Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, another worthwhile read that helps us see reality as it is and not as we want it to be. Seeing the world factfully, as Rosling notes, helps us “see that the world is not as bad as it seems—and we can see what we have to do to keep making it better.”