The Great Democracies, by Winston Churchill
Our Kind, by Marvin Harris
Here, as the title suggests, are two very different takes on historical non-fiction. It’s a stretch to pair them, but I suppose they can be united thematically as something other than the usual American style of political mythology or narrative, and both books aim for a more comprehensive, broad-viewed survey of how man (or a broad swath of man) has exerted himself on the earth. I don’t want to suggest that Churchill lacks an underlying subjectivity, nor that he lacks a correspondent’s viewpoint–those things define his style–but for all that American patriots find the guy agreeable, he’s not one of them.
Marvin Harris looks at history of humankind for an anthropological perspective, and as impartially as he can, driving at a top-down description of recurring themes throughout history (and pre-history), observing the evidence of human coexistence and making inductive generalizations from the pattern of the data. This empirical view has suited my recent mental tangents very well. It’s been my growing conviction that for all the myriad ways we’re fucked up on an individual level, or even on a society level, human behavior in the aggregate is a lot more predictable and explainable than six billion partisans would have you believe.
The Great Democracies is the last volume of Churchill’s longer A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. (I didn’t read the other three, although I’ll go back eventually if only to catch the overlap between his and Harris’s ideas of early civilizations and Churchill’s.) It covers the period between the end of the Napoleonic wars and the death of Queen Victoria, focusing on British and American history mostly, gliding over (like everyone else) Canada and Oceania, and covering the affairs of the other peoples in Europe, Africa, and Asia so far as Churchill saw that it affected the goings-on of those treasured progeny of the British Empire.
It’s well known that Winston Churchill had done time as a war reporter and as a fighting man, and he esteemed himself highly as a writer and a historian. He does have some strengths. Churchill ably puts realistic human faces on the historical big men of those hundred years. Even though the individuals are pumped up to towering proportions, the style often feels a lot like modern journalism, and over the space of a century or two, these figures come off less like mysterious primitives in powdered wigs than they do twentieth-century celebrities, like us, but better than us. Churchill carries on their narratives in a conversational tone that makes for a comfortable read, almost as if he’s storytelling. He describes the heads of states, especially the famous British prime ministers of this period, as foundering on uncertain international and domestic waters, to be navigated well or badly, with aggression or avoidance as the circumstances dictated. He paints pictures of men who rise or fail to the occasions, and while great movements may have circulated among the masses, it is the prerogative of the leaders to ignore or respect them. It’s not a world without principles (Churchill waxes obnoxious on his principles, harping against Protectionism some, for a sort of Democracy, honoring commitments, and some confused stances on monarchy and colonialism), but there are no slices of life of the little guy in this history. The small theaters of human experience are traded off for a moving sense of large-scale drama, and parts of it are genuinely gripping.
Like many authors of American histories (and commentary), Churchill sees his own country as having attained the closest thing yet to a perfect system, and the past is interpreted in the context of where we have arrived. I can’t much agree with it: modern politics looks awfully similar to the old game, and making contemporary parallels when reading history is damn near unavoidable. Churchill opens up in the Britain in 1815 or so, where after the defeat of Napoleon, the British parliament wrestled with a half-century of moribund two-party politics and defective kings. He takes us in sections through the various evolutions of the Tory and Whig governments, which differed mainly in their effectiveness within the system, their justifications for foreign intervention, and the extent to which they included Radical (more Burke than Marx) elements. On American shores, the dynamic looks familiar too. Churchill outlines the then-new demographics of the antebellum U.S.A., pitting free-spirited and democratic rubes from the west against northeastern con artists and business Brahmins, the still-familiar strawmen that are nearly as ugly and as banal as the nasty old English class categories. He treats American radicals a lot more contemptuously than he does the British variety, and while so much of American Reconstruction was rotten, I don’t think I can get behind the author’s universal views on the horrors of a weakened the executive.
U.S. history from this period is actually a good half of the book, and it’s interesting to see it told from the English perspective. Churchill isn’t shy, for example, at pointing out the flagrant land-greed of the nineteenth-century states (even as he’s cautious about discussing British colonialism), which at points made Canada uneasy and Mexico bereft. The U.S. Civil war looms large through that century, and as Churchill’s preferred perspective is a military one, there are great exciting swaths of text describing maneuvers, strategy, and execution. His version is not overly susceptible to Lincoln hagiography: although the take-charge moves are presented as necessary, the cause (both with respect to slavery and preserving the union) just, and his altruism commendable, Churchill also blames the mess of Union political pressures, to which Lincoln often caved, for extending the war.
If Churchill is comfortable with politics as a gentlemen’s club (and he is), he positively loves him his generals too, and his respect for Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee is deep. Americans tend to forget that there was a lot of other military action going on in the world in those decades, and it’s particularly interesting to compare Churchill’s laudatory treatment of Jackson and Lee to that of Otto von Bismarck, whom he respected but obviously deplored. Even as Churchill complains about failure to trust the generals, and tries to find a unified version of British imperialism, he criticizes German realpolitik as without honor. We, of course, do it for the right reasons. Always the diplomat, eh?
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Marvin Harris is much less tempted toward double standards. Our Kind is mostly a book describing cultural evolution, and is working at parallels from the start. Cultural evolution is different than the biological sort, faster, and even if it’s not working through genetics, it’s force is similarly powerful. Harris describes cultural development as an unconscious, collective means to most efficiently realize our various biological imperatives. The species is, more or less, equally endowed, but we react in different ways to the externalities of different communities: different availability of proteins, vitamins, and heat sources, different population density, different history, and varying degrees of feasibility that somewhere else exists to go. The outlines of politics and culture derive from these parameters, and similar environments produce similar evolutionary trends.
Harris works past the ideas of biological evolution quickly. He certainly doesn’t reject it in fact, but puts it rightly on a different, much slower, timescale than cultural development. For example, he refutes biological fertility as the means that societies populate themselves, digging up anthropological evidence and biological analogies to show that humans are more wired more for sex than we are for babies, and develops the population development from there, with reproduction as more an act of culture than necessity. He pokes at race as an artificial construct, too. Our body shapes and colors over the generations correlate more to local geography than our ethnic heritage, both because of cultural selection and because of extensive interbreeding (Jews, he notes in an example that made me chuckle, generally look more like the locals than they do Jews elsewhere, which is maybe one hint that journalists should be careful not to casually conflate ethnography with genomes.)
It gets touchy in parts. Harris outlines ways in which early societies dealt with population pressures, reducing the idea of war to a means to deal with them, and further correlating conflict with misogyny. Preservation of a warrior class limits population more than in the obvious way, Harris says, and includes selection for male heirs for the patriarchy, pushing toward female infanticide as a remarkably common device, even in modern times. Historically, life has officially begun at the point parents decided to keep the child, sometimes months ex utero. He questions the cost of misogyny in terms of male life expectancy (along with the contemporary unwillingness to address this), paints government as an inevitable consequence of animal domestication.
I don’t think any of the above discussions are comfortable, but the cases are strong. His religious angle is perhaps the most sensitive. He describes “killing” religions, the ones that perform ritual animal and human sacrifice, as the development of a means of protein redistribution, drawing patterns across the globe from Aztec to the Vedic to the Pacific island traditions. The non-killing faiths he paints as reactionary creeds that were developed to address the failure of the faiths that passed out meat, usually in response to specific political pressures. He draws a line from here directly to subjugation and empire, implicating the gentler religions as a direct enabler of military powers. Why? Because making a virtue of poverty and delaying material rewards past death suits would-be emperors brilliantly. The first act of conquest of non-killers, cites Harris, is to convert to the non-killing faith, as true of Christianity, as of Jainism, as of Buddhism. The proscription against killing, historically, has been easy enough to circumvent, but the faith in ethereal rewards much harder to shake, and murderous zealots have always been useful tools of tyrants. (One amusing point: even as Harris constructs a general condemnation of religion that quite clearly includes the Pauline faiths, he sticks with the western conceit of weighting Biblical history toward the factual, using Christian-formal terms like ‘year of Our Lord’, and citing that holy book, and only that one, using chapter and verse. It’s got to be force of habit.)
Stylistically, Marvin Harris both worked for me and didn’t. His ultra-short sections–the book is five hundred pages long, but every third page was a blank title–got right to the point, but they were so brief and un-footnoted, that it lent to a less than scholarly feel. It’s not that the sections are unresearched: the author has done his share of influential work the field himself, and there is a detailed bibliography for each tiny chapter in the back. He just doesn’t point to it. He also has a penchant for scribbling over his weaker points with anecdote or irritable analogy. For example, he’s probably out to lunch on his message of gender identity–not so culturally controlled between sexes as all that–but on the other hand, his message that cultural selection usually satisfies the biological preferences in the aggregate is almost certainly true, and biologically, he’s largely divorced sexuality from both reproduction and gender anyway. I admit that I’d be more bothered by his idiosyncratic style if I agreed with less of it.
We all know how short the timeframe of civilization is compared the earth’s history, but even our species is young, only around for a hundred thousand years or so. By contrast, our various hominid ancestors populated the earth for about 3 million years. (Our most recent evolutionary analog, the Neandertals were a short-lived species, only lasting about 200 thousand altogether). Even given the age of our genome, sapient, language-using humans have only been evidenced for a fraction of that, about 35,000 years. I can’t accept that early humans were any differently intellectually gifted (and neither can Harris, which is why he describes evolution in the cultural sphere). In that short time, we’ve graduated from the stone tools that our ape-plus ancestors and cousins had used, and covered the earth in dense societies, razed mountains and forests, and erected countless evidence that we have lived. Although we may still fight like animals, we’ve made a hell of a mark in the short time our kind has been civilizing.
And the big question remains this: are we going somewhere, or have we achieved our niche? According to ideas of punctuated equilibrium, species persist for a long damn time, but originate and fill in their ecological space very quickly. In terms of biological evolution, the fossil record and all that, 35 kiloyears ain’t much, and I suspect that we humans are still spreading into our role. As a conclusion, Harris calls our penchant for empire and evil as the inevitable cultural consequences of our nature. Our failures to will into being benevolent governments are a result of the unfortunate statistical average of human action, which has led down a similar path each time so far. Is there hope, he wonders, an existence beyond the state? I have to think that there’s not going to be any success in regressing. The factors that pushed governments into existence–food dependence, population, and circumscription–seem to only drive one way. But here’s the thing, the catch: trying to will cultural evolution forward is how our biological imperative works, and there may be a point we haven’t yet achieved with it. We’re certainly on different ground this time in terms of communication, size, and boundaries. Is there still time to realize a better existence than empire?
I’m not very optimistic actually–existential brinkmanship can’t continue forever–but the idea of a better future beyond nation-states is the hope I can find. Maybe we’ll get there.
