“Embrace the World” public domain from i2Clipart.com
History, as an Academic Subject, is a tough nut for most people to crack. All those names, all those dates, were you one of the millions who suffered though uninspired history teaching in your early schooling? Lots of people sat through those classes and lost any possibility of having positive feelings about learning about all those folks that came before us. It was crushed out of them in boring Tuesday morning and Wednesday afternoon classrooms, lots of people learned to respond to history with a “so what?”, or a “doesn’t affect my life,” or “I don’t need that stuff.”
I can’t promise you that a better understanding of the French Revolution (or any other specific situation) will help you understand our complex social changes today. Our problems today are unique to our era, yet all of our ancestors did have to live through and struggle with all the same types of problems that seem so difficult today – prosperity and poverty, tyranny and freedom, getting along with neighboring tribes, and getting along with your actual neighbors, and the always difficult struggle of making a world that might be better for one’s children – no matter how you envision that better world.
There aren’t any easy answers to all the difficult problems of human beings living in human societies, however I am here to tell you that there are a few approaches that can make it easier to find some “gold” of wisdom out of the “mud” of all those folks who lived in the past and created all these conflicting structures and attitudes that seem so difficult today.
I can try to help you with some guidance, because I am one of the few people who never lost my curiosity about all those other people, all those other countries that existed in the past and still manage to have lives going on with millions of people in places we still know very little about in the present.
I was privileged to grow up in the pro-science atmosphere of the Eisenhower administration, in the Southern California suburbs where nearly all the dads were white World War II vets, nearly all were doing well with jobs and professions, and to a child it seemed like the economy was growing every year.
It was as a child that I developed the one best skill I’ve always had, which has mostly served me well all these decades: I can read non-fiction (and all other types of) books and get lots of ideas and learning out of them, even if, as an adult, I can still get a bit of understanding of myself and others when I reject a particular book for any reason. It also helps that I’ve not lost my curiosity about actual people I may be encountering, and my curiosity about historical characters of all types that seem interesting.
It’s a long story, told elsewhere right here at my long-established, no-clickbait site (where the lead article is a longer version of the points I want to make now), but here I am: a guy who is really serious about History, I do have a nice degree in the subject, and I’ve kept up with it for fifty years despite having a lot of jobs in the lower half of the economy and often working two jobs to better support my family.
I was so serious about the study of Human History, it was back in the 70’s, I already knew I wasn’t going to be a History professor, yet I was having so much intellectual fun with my ghostwriter job, I was a sort of human AI summing up any question for you, with a library card at UC Berkeley and a typewriter, I considered it my “grad study in universalism.”
And after a lifetime of wondering about “the most important thing in history,” I was coming to some innovative conclusions about how human beings organize their minds and build their societies, and I had the means and motive to write and self-publish MY first History Book. I was also realizing that my interest and motivation for History has always been the individual people, all the smart and wild individuals in all times in every land, all the people in my own life I wanted to investigate more.
I have been working for a living, still today, and I haven’t investigated the work of other scholars, yet I do believe that my book coming out in 1980 was the first, or one of the first, to argue that the science of Human History needs to be concerned about every human person who ever lived, throughout the course of Human History, and I’m proud to make that argument.
Of course we’ll never get or have the data on all those prehistoric humans, yet archaeology can give us a lot of clues. We hardly have any data on who we are (in all our social and cultural ramifications) right now, and I personally totally condemn the Chinese Communist surveillance state that does seek to coercively gather all the thoughts and actions of their subjects, even while I’d love an ideal world where future historians could consider all the thoughts and actions of the last few decades of Chinese citizens who decided to offer them voluntarily, without fear of police action.
So that’s the context of how I see Human History. Having studied it for many decades, I can tell you what History is all about. The simple answer is that Human History, the many nations and cultures and situation we now see in the world with our 8 billion fellow human beings, is basically the sum total of all the thoughts and actions of all the human beings who have ever lived.
Yet that’s not very helpful, is it, as it’s hard to investigate the thoughts and actions of any one person, whether the most prominent power-holder or the lowliest destitute sufferer in the poorest culture, without a lot of effort.
After a lifetime wondering and considering all the ideas of “the most important thing in history,” was it religion or economics or military power, the breakthrough was realizing that there are no “rules,” no structures or patterns of economics or religion that are guiding or causing our behavior. It is the constantly changing thoughts and actions of all the people in any group that are constantly creating and re-creating all those sciences and skills (and all the arts and culture, too.)
While there are no “rules” out there that exist without human action, it is very strong pattern that humans will gather in groups, and these groups will develop overall tribal or national cultures (and most of the subgroups within these larger groups will often develop specific subcultures). And these larger national cultures and specific subcultures certainly do result in social “rules” for that group of people, rules that will be affecting the choices that you and your group partners will be making with your thoughts and actions. This represents the basic social sciences working together, as they are expressed in the daily lives of those people to create a “culture” for that group, where one’s reasons for doing things becomes “that’s just the way my people do things.”
But it’s just a pattern; you the individual always has the right and the opportunity to change your mind (if you’re willing to face the social consequences), the cultures and subcultures that wish to build are themselves always shifting and changing over time with the choices of their members, there are patterns in history but there are no patterns that you can’t be determined to break for yourself (again, if you’re willing to accept the consequences).
The simple introduction to the complex answer of what History is all about, is that we are constantly creating and re-creating the four basic social sciences (and all the other human sciences and cultural specialties) with our every thought and action. Through all human time, every human thought and action has at least four dimensions, expressing wide definitions of the four basic human social sciences for the individual expressing them. I tried my best to put this in elegant academic language for this site in 2010.
As I wrote then, “The four sciences that are at work in every human situation are the sciences of Psychology (the creation and distribution of personalities and personality structures), the science of Philosophy/Science/Religion (the creation and distribution of explanations, explanations of all types of what the world is and how it operates), the science of Politics (the creation and distribution of honor, rank, and status and the elaboration of these into tribal and governmental structures), and the science of Economics (the creation and distribution of systems of value and the creation and distribution of physical goods and services that express those values).”
Modern psychology has many branches, and all of us are free to investigate any particular case with any particular theory, yet for the stories of history I strongly believe the emphasis should be on the (lifelong) creation of personality, how particular personality patterns are passed along in families and communities, yet also on the specific things that make you an individual in your family and community, the points where you didn’t adopt the attitudes that others around you had. So for the purpose of making sense out of historical situations that you may be involved in or interested in, it is fairly safe to assume that learning as much as possible about the personalities of the persons involved is an excellent place to start.
Yes, I am taking the unusual and perhaps unscientific step of lumping the formal subjects of Religion, Philosophy, and Science all together in a general “science of explanations” (together with all the other idiosyncratic ideas people have that affect their behavior.) Because, yes, I am trying to look over hundreds of thousands of years of human behavior in all the incredibly varied tribes and cultures that may have existed, it doesn’t really whether the explanations they use for their situation are more religious or more scientific or whatever – that explanation is the explanation they are using to understand their situation and to explain their world. Having a group to share that explanation makes it all the stronger, and people just don’t change their basic explanations of what the world is meant to be very often (though of course that can happen, and it happens more often in our unstable modern societies).
To me, the rise of conspiracy theories in recent years, and both well-financed deliberate sabotage of the truth for selfish purposes, and intellectual arguments against the concept of truth, gives a great reason to consider all these things under a general “science of explanations” as we try to get know who people are, as we study historical situations. I’m not saying that one needs to adopt the explanations of some crazy sect in order to interact with them, yet if you do wish to understand them, it would be good to study and understand the explanations they themselves are using for understanding the situation they’re in.
For me it is a certainty that nearly all of your, and everyone else’s, thoughts and action are highly influenced by the explanations of the world that you are using. If you think you don’t have or know any explanations of how the world works, that absence is still serving as your (very unhelpful) explanation of how the world works, which does affect your thoughts and actions.
History and historians do recognize a formal science of Politics dealing with governmental systems in the modern world, and of course the boring old history textbooks put far too much attention on formal governmental politics – yet it is an area that does need to be focused on at times, and it’s an area of study where the insistence on historical truth is extremely important, precisely because of all the anti-social behavior that conflicts and controversies over governmental politics can help bring about.
I too live and study in the world of formal politics, but for the overall history of Human Beings though time, I want to stress that this world of formal politics, which in the 21st Century is often completely divorced from all other aspects of social life, and is too often under the control of very small cliques of people who are very unlike the people they rule over, did indeed grow of our normal social behavior that everyone engages in at some time or another.
This social behavior can start in the smallest isolated families and tribes, it starts simply with thinking “I like this person more than that person,” and that’s the first step on the journey of creating the concept of honor and creating the idea that “this certain person or type of person” deserves that honor. With a community population anywhere over 25 or so, it is not long before there are recognized “ranks” and “statuses” of various sorts that give these persons certain privileges over certain group decisions. As all the conventional histories describe, the idea of kingship over territories has been known for at least 4000 years now in the Eastern Mediterranean and neighboring areas, and the simple social preference of one person over another long ago “crystallized” into the state structure we have now, with the concept of (highly political) states (with highly specialized “rules” for gaining status) governing territories with unlimited authority, the concept of sovereignty.
Again, in our modern world where we all born into societies where these formal political structures (that don’t change that much even with formal changes of state) were “crystallized” into human societies long before any of us were born, and in which one must generally make an effort to make a career in the paths the lead to state governance in order to have the even the slightest influence on political/governmental decisions, it is easy for 80 or 90% of citizens to say “oh, politics, that doesn’t involve me too much, I’m not political.” My point here is that you are most likely very political in your family or other small groups, you do prefer some people over other people, which will be influencing your thoughts and actions in complex ways.
I do maintain that these informal politics of small groups does represent a historical root in the ordinary behavior of our ancestors, which historically did lead to the centuries of thought and action which evolved this specific state sovereignty system that the world has settled on (even though it seems that no one is 100% happy with this state sovereignty system we have evolved). I also believe that for learning the truth about historical situations, these informal, small-group “familial” politics deserve at least some of the attention that is usually being placed on formal political arrangements.
While formal Politics is the social science that is most likely to lead to conflicts with other cultural arrangements, it does seem that Economics is the social science that is most likely to be woven intimately together with psychologies and explanations into a cultural whole. All pre-industrial societies struggled with gathering, hunting and growing food sources, they all struggled with basic manufactures – and all of them were being strongly affected by the plants and animals and weather conditions of their specific locations, which strongly affected human thoughts and actions: “we gather these nuts, not those; we hunt these animals this way, not those animals that way; we grow these plants this way, not those plants that way.” When survival depends on following nature’s patterns, it is easy to imagine how the need for a specific behavior develops into explanations that give that behavior high status, and develops psychological patterns that help the son become the same successful hunter or farmer that his father was earlier.
In trying to understand economic relationships in complex societies, I do prefer to start with “systems of value” — something that humans create in their heads, not anything inherent in the physical environment of our natural world, a world that does define and limit our economic possibilities. A stick, a vegetable, a wild or domesticated animal is what it is, and humans can’t change that status easily; yet humans can and do look at those objects and have quite different ideas of the economic value of those objects.
For nearly all of us, the economic values and typical material goods of the culture we are born into determines our reception and replication of the economic values of the people that surround us. Nevertheless, we can and do develop new values as we age, and it is the ability of particular people at the margins of society to reject those accepted values and try to create new values, the ability of innovators to see and build new sets of values, the ability of traditionalists to re-discover and re-new older values that may have been forgotten, and just the incredibly wide variety of values that various people may place on particular items or specific economic behaviors, that validates my contention the our individual systems of value are the primary factor in studying economic change over the years and centuries. Here in America, homeless folks may be assessing the usefulness of a dilapidated mattress; billionaires may be contemplating using their millions to achieve specific governmental actions to bring themselves more millions.
And while most conventional treatments of economic history celebrate the incredible industrial and technological revolutions that have made our most recent hundred years so completely different than all past history, there are two counterpoints I like to make to that argument (without trying to deny the truths of economic achievement). First, the hi-tech computer systems we now celebrate do save work and money for specific actors; yet in the 2020’s I am getting much agreement when I tell people that computers are no longer a convenience for average workers/consumers, mostly due to bad software writing and the general refusal of hi-tech companies to provide meaningful customer service — a responsibility that is necessary for capitalism to function without creating too many social problems. I also think that modern social media has a huge responsibility for allowing and accelerating the culture of deliberate lies and purposeful disinformation that is especially destructive to social cohesion in modern industrial democratic societies, a cohesion that depends on trust and accountability by social actors –and which may be necessary to the survival of relatively “free and democratic” nations.
Again, while the most exciting story of recent economic history is the story of modern industrial systems spreading ever onwards, it nevertheless remains true that most of the other important economic value systems of humanity’s last few millenniums, and the physical work-practices to achieve them, do remain in existence and continue to rule the lives of tens or hundreds of millions of persons in the portions of the world that have NOT yet been conquered by high-tech modern capitalism. I believe that there are still a few sharecropping landlord-and-tenant-farmers in America’s deep South, and the H1B-visa system for immigrant tech workers may be a modern office-based system of indentured servitude; apparently the law of these visas the hi-tech companies desire specifically states that these immigrant workers must be offered “prevailing wages;” but companies are quite openly paying these workers only 50% or less than similar native workers, and there is no enforcement of this whatsoever.
Early industrial machinery is still banging away in corners of the developed nations, and is still prominent in the less-developed world. Tens of millions of people may be suffering from Leninist economic-command systems in North Korea, and perhaps also in places like China, Russia and Cuba (we need more data on that). Traditional non-industrial farming still rules in vast regions of South America, Africa and parts of Asia, and places like Brazil and Papua New Guinea still have a few tribes whose hunting-and-gathering lifestyles have not yet been disrupted by modern societies overflowing onto them. So the world we are living in today, is the world with most variety and diversity of systems of value, and the most variety and diversity in the way we fill our bellies by economic interaction with our fellow human beings.
Throughout human history, the economic struggle has always taken the majority of our time and attention, and until recently children have always been close to the economic activity of the community; in past centuries only the most elite privileged children were kept apart from work going on all around them, it’s only in the most developed nations in the last century that most children are purposely isolated from the knowledge of the struggles their parents are enduring to put food on the table. For just about everyone else in the world, however, hunger and privation are never far away, the vast majority of adults dedicate the majority of their time to their economic activity, and many come to define their personalities in terms of their work specialties. The economic “dimension” of our thoughts and actions may not always be at the forefront of a more personal or political social conflict; nevertheless, the demands of the economic dimension of our lives is never far from our concerns. Again, the economics of an individual or a community will be affected by the psychologies and explanations they use, and the psychologies and the explanations of individuals and communities will be affected by the events and demands of their economic affairs. In our modern industrial nations, where the majority of us are “wage-slaves” without a lot of immediate choices for changing our situations, doesn’t it seem that every other problem eventually comes with a question, “how will (all these other things) affect my job?”
Humans beings exist in time; and human beings create communities and societies and they ultimately create cultures and nations. This creates history; I firmly believe that at any moment of time, throughout our corner of the universe, there is only one exact arrangement of bodies and molecules and energy patterns and sound vibrations at any particular second, constantly changing into next second’s exact arrangement of masses and energies, there is only one actual truth of actual human actions in history.
But the human observers and recorders of the “important” events in human history (that give rise to great conflicts among communities and nations) are inconsistent and often confused, a physical action may look like one situation from one viewpoint, and seem to be another situation from another viewpoint. In times of crisis, there are always lots of folks who only know one aspect of the situation, and thus say and do things that may be false or confusing out of ignorance; there are too often people making up fantasies and lies about what they saw or heard, in service of some motive of their own. That’s where the great controversies of history come from: misunderstandings, mistakes, stories made up to fit the explanations of one party to the problem. It can be next to impossible to try track down disputed events that are decades old, and it is probably a worthless search, since there are likely deeper problems in the differing explanations and the differing political views that the two communities hold “against each other” because there are likely numerous points of difference and conflict between the two communities.
And that’s why we need historians, and reasoned historical analysis of situations that concern us. You can and should be the historian of situations that concern you, and I hope that I have been able to give some suggestions of investigatory tools that you can use to analyze the data you are able to find, to help you in the situations you are concerned with. It is hard to understand just one person; to understand groups and their changes is many times harder. Yet we often have a need to try.
Our modern industrial nations have made an astonishing evolution from the conditions of our prehistoric ancestors, creating a new man-made environment that shapes all our experiences and attitudes. Yet the same types of hard-to-solve problems that confronted our ancestors still confront us: prosperity and poverty, tyranny and freedom, getting along with neighboring tribes, and getting along with your actual neighbors, and the always difficult struggle of making a world that might be better for one’s children – no matter how you envision that better world.
If anything, the sheer mass of 8 billion individuals in today’s humanity and the extreme dependence that large industrial nations have developed on the basic functioning of the industrial economy make it harder and riskier to attempt great changes. Human beings can become suddenly more adaptable in times of crisis. I fear, however, that if any future crisis means that the trucks cannot deliver the industrial food products from the mass warehouses to the urban markets for like more than two weeks or so, our modern industrial nations might cease to exist in ugly ways.
We have a lot of problems to solve, a lot of possible improvements we could be making. Confronting and solving these problems will involve our inner sense of ourselves, our psychology, and of course it will also involve our explanations of what the world is about, it will involve our attitudes about who we honor and give status to, and who we disrespect, and it will involve our senses of economic value, and our efforts to produce goods and services that might help the problems and conflicts that will arise.
Human beings create societies. Keeping these societies healthy as we transition into a future we can live in will require us to adapt all our thoughts and actions, as we interact with our fellow humans. I hope I have been able to give you some perspective, some tools that will help you – and all of us – as we navigate into the future that we will construct, with the sum total of our thoughts and actions.
Let’s try to stay positive, to stay hopeful.
