History: My Non-Woke Personal Library and Its Saving Virtues

An Essay Series for Readers - Part Seven

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(For new Woke Watch Canada readers: Welcome! This series is for serious readers and lovers of Great Books and the Great Ideas found in them. Please start at Part 1.)

By Geoffrey Clarfield

When I was bored in my science classes in high school, I would hide a history book inside, let us say, my physics or chemistry textbook and read about the ancient world, the Roman Empire, or the spice trade while my teacher droned on about the periodic table or how we know that weight is not the same as mass.  

History appeals to me, for it is a story, as the word itself implies. But it is not a personal narrative, novel, or mythical epic. It is a combination of chronicles, documents and physical evidence that tell of and interpret human behavior in different places and at different times. 

Each history tries to grasp  “the spirit of an age,” for this may go a long way to explaining, at the deepest level, phenomena like the motivation and events that  drove the Spanish and Portuguese conquest of Central and South America, for example, or the eventual English dominance north of the Rio Grande. 

 It was the Mexican poet and diplomat, Octavio Paz, in his very short book, The Labyrinth of Solitude, who distinguished the essential difference between the two European civilizations that divided up the New World, one Catholic and hierarchical, and bent on conquest and wealth extraction; the other Protestant, egalitarian, family and community oriented, and driven by a desire for religious and political freedom as well as wealth creation that would create a new “City on a Hill.” But of course, much more was going on and that is why I have read books with titles like, “An Unfinished History of the World,” and others of a similar ilk such as Fernand Braudel’s high school text on world history, A History of Civilizations.  

 I would like to think that I have attained an above average sense of historical perspective, for I have read a variety of histories and prehistories of various parts of the world, both academic and popular, as well as hundreds of popular and academic articles on historical topics, including the methodology and philosophy of history. As a young undergraduate when I often visited the history “stacks” of my University library, I despaired at the sheer quantity of historical scholarship and wondered whether anyone could become “world historical” in their outlook. I know I have tried.

The first writer who began to give me clarity when I was a young reader of history, was William McNeill who attempted various forms of World History, but most of all emphasized the concept of “Periodization,” meaning that across the lifetimes of many generations, men and women often live their lives within ecologies, social structures, economic and political systems that seem to have a life of their own, with a beginning, middle and end, as exemplified by the “Fall of Rome” or “The Waning of the Middle Ages” or “The Birth of Science,” “The Industrial Revolution” and the “The Modern World.” It is a startlingly good example of an almost pure metaphysical notion that is thought of as common sense by most people.

For example it took much study and reflection for me to realize that everything I do is related to the fact that we are living in a world that has been transformed by the rise of modern science and technology, the industrial revolution, representative democracy, and secular modernity. A world that is still dominated by the dark shadow cast by Hitler, the Holocaust, and Stalinism. 

Indeed, Stalinism remained institutionally alive and well during my youth, and today, Putin is determined to restore the Soviet empire. Nor have the Nazis yet been defeated, for Nazism has been revived in the various Jihad movements, which are  deeply influenced by 20^th century Nazi ideology. 

They thrive across the Middle East, in North African Ghettos, and in the “no go zones” of Western Europe, and now on college campuses throughout the West. Jihadis are dedicated to infiltrating their representatives into Western parliaments and have successfully done so in France, Britain and the left wing of the Democratic Party in the USA. Nor has communism been defeated. It never really died out in China, where there is an ongoing genocide against the Uyghurs; eventual  genocidal scapegoating being a structural feature of any Marxist inspired government.

Until the early 20^th century, most history was written from the point of view of the rulers. It was political, military, economic in the macro sense, and institutional  history (histories of the “Church,” for example”). Then came the French. 

Influenced by early 20^th century social anthropology —and Marxism — French historians invented “social history,” a history that focuses on the life of commoners, their ecological predicaments, their economic networks, trade routes, folk beliefs, urban symbiosis, underlying long term climatic and other patterns. It combines the repetition of short-term events with what they called “le longue durée,” patterns that have maintained themselves for centuries, if not for thousands of years. Then and only then is it permissible to write about the elites. 

This approach to history is a reaction against 19^th century and earlier theories of history that centered on earth-shattering, era-changing efforts of the “Great Man” as espoused by the Scottish historian, Carlyle. The dean of this  new post war French school of social history, called Annales, was Fernand Braudel. His detailed, magisterial two volume history, The Mediterranean, about the Mediterranean during the time of Philip II changed the way I thought about history. 

Braudel has had many imitators, but few reach his breadth and depth. Now when I read  history at least I ask Braudelian questions. His books have a prominent place on my history shelf. 

Nevertheless, I incline to Carlyle’s “Great Man” approach to history. Carlyle would have been the first to point out that while Braudel was writing his ground up history as a French Prisoner of War of the Nazis during WWII,  Hitler was plunging the world into the greatest war ever fought,  which ended with the atomic bomb being dropped on the Nazi’s ally in the Pacific, the military state of Japan. Social history rounds out our understanding of the past, but the actions of great men (and women)— for good or for ill— also  need to be addressed by historians.

 So, there are some good historical works on my shelf by historians who are not on the left, like Hugh Thomas, J. M. Robarts, Odd Arne Westad, and Peter Frankopan. I have read Thomas’ A History of the World, Roberts and Westad’s Penguin History of the World, and Frankopan’s The Silk Roads cover to cover. 

By the time I reached my thirties, I felt fortunate that I could read dry history books the way teenagers used to devour novels before the rise of the Internet. Although I am not a professional historian, I lament that few adult citizens have an adequate historical perspective, without which they can be all too easily manipulated by charismatic politicians —the Bill Clintons, Tony Blairs and Justin Trudeaus of the world—who promise a “ New Dawn” or a “New Eden.” This is even more worrisome because primary and secondary schools today leave students shockingly ignorant of history. 

Fortunately, I was saved once again by Anthropology, which broadened my perspective,  as American cultural anthropologists branched out from their 19^th century focus on the study of Amerindians who had been conquered and restricted to reserves, to that of unconquered Indian groups in Central and South America. 

Their study of the archaeology of these peoples rekindled my sensitivity to what is now called cultural ecology: the study of the complex ways preindustrial, tribal and peasant societies extract a living from their immediate environment. It is based on what is called input output systems theory. 

American anthropologists Leslie White and Julian Steward led the way here, followed by empiricists such as Napoleon Chagnon, who is one of the three anthropologists recommended in the anthropology installment of this essay series for general readers. Other American  anthropologists followed suit, including some who did studies in rural Africa and Asia. This trend mirrored and interacted with a new sophisticated interest in Darwin, driven by the revolution in genetics, and its application to linguistics, and to prehistoric as well as historic migrations.

Increasingly in my thirties, I began to read cultural ecology and what came to be called Macrosociology. To my surprise many of these neo-Darwinian interpretations of preindustrial society have gone “viral” through the intriguing writings of Jared Diamond, who wrote as if he had read White, Steward, and their students, but never mentioned or quoted them. 

Then I came upon the work of Macrosociologists who took Darwin, history, and cultural ecology, and attempted to create a universal typology of world history based on environment, technology, and social organization. The most intriguing of these works is Lenski and Lenski’s  textbook,  Macrosociology. If you read its latest edition,  it is wise to ignore the introduction where the authors claim that societies have evolved like species. This is such an old 19^th century, almost Social Darwinian theme, that any reasonable reader would put the book down at that point. 

But if you ignore that and absorb the data you will discover that societies seem, in some way to mirror, reflect or ape Darwinian processes as if societies were like species. The Lenskis are not really making arguments about societies as such, but about social types. They show that each social type dominated for a “period” of history until they were either marginalized or “transformed” by  forces that emerged or came after it, forces that are driven by technological innovation, thus establishing empirical connections between ecology, technology, society, and culture. Simply put, Lenski and Lenski posit that despite the existence of hundreds of different cultures there are only a few basic social types: hunter gatherers; horticultural farmers (slash and burn “digging stick” societies); plow based and paddy-based agriculture; pastoralists and agro pastoralists; maritime traders; fully industrial societies, both democratic and authoritarian, both of which are modernizing horticultural as well as modernizing agricultural societies.  

The Lenskis show that each of these types of society emerged from the previous type, very often pushing the former dominant social type to the geographic margins of their once larger territory. They also show that each of these social types has a typical or modal social organization and cultural framework. 

The Lenskis’ work is remarkably and fundamentally reductionist, but in a marvelous way. They set out “normative templates” with which one can take any incredibly detailed ethnography or sociological study and position it as a variation — or exception — to these universal archetypes. 

The contribution of the ancient Jews and the ancient Greeks to the world views of modern industrial states goes unaddressed by these kinds of studies, which suggests that their implicit Neo-Darwinism is not sufficient for the documentation and understanding of the value systems of different societies. Nevertheless, the Lenskis’ framework allows one to analyze popular historians more critically, like Jared Diamond and Noah Yuval Harari, who often make unsupported, and in the case of Harari, ridiculous and unsubstantiated predictions based on a wholly inadequate/ flawed  understanding of “World history.”

The End of History?                        

Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, many thought that with the defeat of communism, we had reached “the end of history,”  that democracy would spread world-wide, and the world would move towards a universal civilization based on the free market, human rights, and democratic values. 

Harvard’s Samuel Huntington was not so sure. In the mid-nineties he published his magnum opus, The Clash of Civilizations, and the Remaking of the World Order, arguing that the big conflicts in the world would now become conflicts between civilizational blocks such the West, the Islamic and Slavic worlds, China, and East Asia, etc. 

I read Huntington at the time and bought a number of copies of his book for relatives and friends as he seemed to have looked into a crystal ball. The attack on the US by al-Qaeda on 9/11 confirmed his dark vision of the future. What  Huntington did not anticipate was the success of Cultural Marxism among Western elites and their academic and media allies which has fully blossomed into a new dark age called Woke, where groupthink, and mental tyranny loom large. So history is not over, and I still try to keep an eye out for popular and academic writings like Huntington’s which try to discern  “the lessons of history,” or as H.G. Wells  put it,  “the shape of things to come.” 

One such lesson, a painful one, is being learnt by Israeli elites now, after the Jihad inspired pogrom by Hamas of October 7, 2023. For one hundred years, the Israeli elites have understood their conflict with the Arabs in and around the land of Israel  as Jewish versus Arab nationalism. 

It is nothing of the sort. It is in truth, a century-long, modernized version of the Jihad against Jews and Christians in the Middle East and in the wider world. Jihad is an integral part of Islam,  as that paradoxical civilization seems incapable of liberalism, and struggles against modernity altogether. 

So I continue to look at history from a macrosociological point of view, through the lens of the interplay of distinct cultures (as comparative sociologist Max Weber recommended more than a century ago), all the while noting that today, we live in a time when giant cultural and political blocs are jockeying for power, wealth, and control of people’s minds. 

History is not over, far from it, and the 21^st century clash of civilizations is well under way.

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read My Non-Woke Personal Library and Its Saving Virtues Part 1

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