Book Review #4

On another blog that I read, and occasionally contribute to, a poster wrote that his university professor had once told him that History “is both multi-causal and complex.” I feel something akin to despair when someone, usually a journalist, says ‘History tells us…” History cannot ‘tell’ us anything, it is an interpretation of the past. The word ‘History’ comes from the Greek word ‘historia’ meaning ‘inquiry’ or ‘knowledge gained from investigation.’ Any historian worth his salt knows that his conclusions are tentative and open to challenge. Anyone who claims to have found a overarching explanation for all of the human past is deluding themselves and indulging in teleological (from the Greek ‘telos’ meaning ‘goal’ and ‘logos’ meaning ‘reason’) fantasies more suited to religions than to a serious and secular subject like History.

 

As a British History teacher transplanted to Australia, I am well aware that all nations have their historical obsessions. The study of History in schools in the UK has been distorted by a fixation on Henry VIII and Adolf Hitler. Here in Australia the national obsession is with the Gallipoli campaign against Turkey during the First World War. I like to challenge the orthodoxy that sees this sideshow as a pivotal event in Australian History, which is much easier to do as an outsider. I have started units on the Great War with the statement ‘A Serbian killed an Austrian in Bosnia and ten months later Australians were killing Turks.’ This is not some childish determinism (‘For want of a nail…’) but a thought experiment to understand the bewildering complexity of the First World War.

 

With this in mind, I would like to recommend On Grand Strategy by US historian John Lewis Gaddis.

John Lewis Gaddis is an Yale University professor who has previously taught at the US Naval War College. His book is a grand sweep through the human past from Xerxes’ invasion of Greece in 480BC to the Cold War. It is not an easy book to read and assumes a great deal of background knowledge in its readers. It is also full of the author’s inexplicable hero-worship of the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin; Gaddis devotes the entire final chapter of his book to Berlin’s experiences in the US during and after the Second World War. Many times the author returns to an observation made in a fragment attributed to the Ancient Greek poet Archilochus…

 

“A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one important thing.” 

 

This quote was used by Isaiah Berlin to divide people in the past into ‘foxes’ and ‘hedgehogs’ (in a tongue-in-cheek manner). ‘Foxes’ know a great deal but can be overwhelmed by detail, thinking about all the things that can possibly go wrong. ‘Hedgehogs’ have laser-like focus on one objective but can ignore the problems of achieving that objective. Gaddis compares the second Persian invasion of Greece with America’s ill-fated war in Vietnam. In both cases, the objective blinded those trying to achieve it to the problems associated with the trying to do so. Xerxes was defeated at Salamis and Plataea and the less said about Vietnam, a war that poisons US politics to this day, the better.

 

Gaddis’ book is the absolute opposite of the obsession with Tudor England and the Second World War that dominates schools in the UK or with a minor campaign in the First World War here in Australia. I am a big fan of large-scale history and I am suspicious of anyone who claims to have found an overarching explanation for the past; give me Niall Ferguson before Karl Marx any day. Gaddis’ book is rather like Sapiens by Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari in seeking to understand History across time and space rather than focusing on individual nations, wars or people. This does require a thorough knowledge of the past and, as I have already said, Gaddis’ book is not an easy read. Nor does great knowledge of the past help someone make predictions for the future. On my bookshelf in a copy of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy where the author attempts to understand the link between economic success and military power. The book contains a chapter on ‘The Soviet Union and Its ‘Contradictions” (the title is a nice poke in the eye for dogmatic Marxists) – it was first published in 1988, the year before the Soviet empire began to crumble. So much for the ideas that ‘History tells us…’

 

This ‘hedgehog’ mentality is very much in vogue in 2018. There are huge numbers of people who believe that mouldy collections of Jewish or Arabic myths contain all the knowledge required. This attitude has spread to politics and is very popular amongst the Owen Jones type of ‘Everything is Racist‘ journalist at Guardian Towers and Jimmy Savile House. And the default setting of much of the Western media and political class appears to be ‘it’s all Russia’s fault, so let’s bomb the Middle East.’ The alarming drift to war in Syria is pure ‘hedgehog’ – Bashar al-Assad is a bad guy and we must do something about him. I put it to the supporters of the UK and others intervening in the interminable Syrian civil war that Britain has no vital interests in Syria and should stay out of this multisided nightmare. In fact, I would go further and suggest that the UK stay out of the Middle East in general; with apologies to Otto von Bismarck, the whole of the Middle East is not worth the bones of a single British grenadier.

 

History is a consciousness-raising subject (if I may be permitted such a pretentious phrase). It helps you to understand how fellow human beings have reacted to similar situations in the past. Any ‘lessons’ are a matter of interpretation.