New Books In History

Historians don’t generally like the idea of “human nature.” We tend to believe that people are intrinsically malleable, that they have no innate “drives,” “instincts,” or “motivations.” The reason we hew to the “blank slate” notion perhaps has to do with the fact—and it is a fact—that we see remarkable diversity in the historical record. The past, we say, is a foreign country; they do things differently there. But there are also political reasons to hold to the idea that we have no essence, that everything is “socially constructed.” Where, for example, would modern liberalism be without this concept? If our natures are fixed in some way, then what should we do to improve our lot?

Given the strength and utility of the “blank slate” doctrine, anyone hoping to question it successfully must possess considerable political savvy and, more importantly, an overwhelming mass of evidence. When the first modern challenge was issued—by the Sociobiologists of the 1970s—they had the latter (I would say), but not the former. Happily, their successors—principally the practitioners of “evolutionary psychology”—have both (again, in my opinion). Azar Gat is a good example. In his pathbreaking War in Human Civilization (Oxford UP, 2006), he explains in politically palatable and empirically convincing terms just why, evolutionarily speaking, our evolved natures guided the way we have fought over the past 200,000 years. He rejects the notion that we have anything like a “violence instinct.” Rather, we have a kind of “violence tool,” given to us by natural selection. In certain circumstances, we are psychologically inclined to use it; in others, not. In this way we are no different than many of our fellow species, the primates in particular. Of course, unlike them, our use of collective violence has an (extra-genetic) history. Azar does a masterful job of describing and explaining how, even while our nature has remained the same, the way we fight has changed. And here the news is good: believe it or not, we—humanity as a whole—have been becoming more peaceful over the past 10,000 years, and radically more peaceful (at least in the developed world) over the past 200 years. Azar can explain this too, and does in the interview.

I cannot emphasis enough how important this book is, both as a model of what I would call “scientifically-informed” history and a sort of guide to those of us who, despite having abandoned the “blank slate,” believe that we have the capacity to create a better world.

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Tags: Anthropology, Biology, Comparative History, Evolution, Genetics, Globalization, Historiography, Homo sapiens, Militarism, National Identity, Nationalism, Natural Experiments, Natural Selection, Neanderthals, Population genetics, Prehistory, Science, Social Evolution, Soldiers, Violence, War, Weapons, World History by Marshall Poe
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The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 was the most important political event of the twentieth century (no Revolution; no Nazis; no Nazis, no World War II; no World War II, no Cold War). It’s little wonder, then, that historians have expended oceans of effort and ink trying to explain why and how it happened. The answer is complex, but it boils down to this: Nicholas II’s armies had a rough time of it in World War I, his regime lost credibility, the hungry cities revolted, and the Bolsheviks usurped power in an armed coup. The key event was, then, the Russian loss to the Germans on the Eastern Front. Surprisingly, the Russian defeat —arguably the second most important political event of the twentieth century because it triggered the first—has not been widely studied. For my generation of Russian historians (and, I should add, the one that preceded it), the Revolution—the last, best hope of mankind to many—was a sexy topic indeed; the failure of the Russian Imperial Army, not so much. So we were left in the dark (or, rather, left ourselves in the dark). There were, however, historians who went against this grain. Among them are (to name only a few and those who write in English): John Bushnell, William Fuller, Peter Gatrell, Hubertus Jahn, Eric Lohr, Bruce Menning, David Rich, David Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, Norman Stone, Allen Wildman and our guest today John Steinberg. Steinberg’s wonderful new book All the Tsar’s Men: Russia’s General Staff and the Fate of the Empire, 1898-1914 (Johns Hopkins/Wilson Center) is a significant contribution to our understanding of the roots of the Russian defeat in World War I. His focus is the Imperial General Staff and its struggle (failed, as it turned out) to reform itself and the army that it commanded. As Steinberg points out, their task was a difficult one, made much more so by Russia’s all-encompassing (and to a considerable degree self-imposed) backwardness. The leaders of the General Staff were smart people. They knew what to do to make the Imperial Army a first-rate fighting force. Under other leadership, they might have succeeded in modernizing the army. But Nicholas did not lead, and so nothing could be done. Autocracies depend on autocrats, and Russia had none when it needed one most.

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Tags: 19th Century, 20th Century, Aristocracy, Conservatism, Crimean War, Militarism, Modernity, Modernization, Nationalism, Nicholas II, Reform, Russia, Russian Empire, Russo-Japanese War, Schools, Soldiers, War, Weapons, World War I by Marshall Poe
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Long ago, historians more or less gave up on “theories of history.” They determined that human nature was too unpredictable, cultures too various, and developmental patterns too evanescent for any really scientific theory of history to be possible. Human history, they said, was chaos.

The problem is that human history isn’t chaos at all. The “hard” human sciences–evolutionary biology and anthropology in particular–have shown that human nature is quite predictable, cultural variability is strictly constrained, and ongoing patterns of social development have ancient roots. Historians can ignore these facts all they like, but that doesn’t make them any the less true. It does, however, impoverish their discipline by ceding the search for a satisfying theory of history to scientists. Neither Paul Bingham nor Joanne Souza are historians. The former is a molecular biologist and the latter an evolutionary psychologist. But they have formulated an elegant theory of human history in Death From a Distance and the Birth of a Humane Universe (2009). Like any good theory, it explains a lot with a little. To put it briefly, human society has gone from simple/small to massive/complex because humans alone among animals were/are able to suppress intra-group conflicts of interest by means of low-cost coercion. Bingham and Souza point out that the big “jumps” in social size and complexity–the neolithic revolution, the growth of archaic states, the birth of the nation-state, the rise of globalization–have all been associated with the evolution/introduction of new, more powerful coercive abilities. Paradoxically, it was new weapons that created more and better lives over the course of the last several hundred thousand years.

This brief summary cannot do justice to the richness of Bingham’s and Souza’s theory. You need to read it for yourself. When you do, I guarantee you will see the past and present in a new way.

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Tags: Anthropology, Biology, Comparative History, Cooperation, Evolution, Genetics, Globalization, Homo sapiens, Natural Experiments, Natural Selection, Population genetics, Science, Social Evolution, Theory, Violence, War, Weapons, World History by Marshall Poe
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