| Introduction Determinism and Humility The task of historical research is to find the "what", the "why" and the "how". We want to know what happened, why did it happen and also, how did it happen. The "why" question does not seek exclusively to establish the main forces behind the events, but also for a causative chain. What has caused "what", "why" and "how", and in what sequence did the events unfold. In order to find the answers, the historian has to frame the questions within some logical matrix of coordinates, best fitted to the subject being researched. There are not many possibilities. The overriding question is whether action is the product of historical determinism or human will? Did the actors on the stage of history do as they saw fit (within the constraints of the particular events or processes they were living through), or were they marionettes, whose actions and the outcome of whose actions were predestined? If we accept that human history is deterministic, then it is one long Greek tragedy, whose scenes were written in advance and no participant could change them. If not, then each historical act is a separate theatrical performance, written by the actors themselves. Popular wisdom claims the latter to be so. After all, there is a common saying that "history does not repeat itself". This book disagrees with that popular wisdom It would be extremely gratifying for humans to say that history is shaped by human will, and by human will alone. Somehow the evidence against such a view is so overwhelming that even with human conceit, only minor roles can be assigned to human will. The limits within which we live out our very existence on this planet are so narrow, requiring such an extreme fine-tuning of our biological processes to the constraints of our environment, that the slightest change in any of the basic parameters could put an end to this existence. Determinism is one of the methods used in historical research. It selects a key, or a combination of keys, to allow the researcher to unravel the mysteries of civilizations and to view the inner driving forces that created civilizations. A key is like a password, and only by applying a proper password can one make sense of the flow of history. In the past there were many keys proposed by different historians. The great number of keys involved makes it obvious that none of them could have been completely accurate, and all of them must have been partially accurate, otherwise those who applied them would not have used them. W. F. Albright enumerated a number of keys used to unlock history, and they are divers indeed: physics and mechanics, biology, geography, climatic changes, racial theories, pathological, societal, economic and psychological factors. It is an impressive list, a compliment to the imagination of past historians. Albright 1 refers to a book by P. A. Sorokin: "Contemporary Sociological Thesis" (1929) in which he devotes 750 pages to set out all deterministic or anti-deterministic positions prior to the year of publication. Since then, he could have filled another 750 pages! The proliferation of deterministic methods and their accompanying keys points to the crux of the matter. History is such a huge mass of events, movements, ideas and people, that it does not appear possible to find a single key, a kind of philosopher's stone, which would apply all the time to all of them. The sheer size of historical data makes it necessary to put some order even into the types of research utilized.2 Fernand Braudel 3 wrote that a historian could work on three planes: The first plane is that of the traditional history. A narrative form describes the flow of events, one after another, like a chronicler of old, or a contemporary newspaper report. The second plane is that of episodes, each taken as a whole. A few obvious examples are Romanticism, the French Revolution, the Second World War. The time scale can be ten or twenty or fifty years. Long-term events are stripped of superfluous details. The third plane transcends both these planes, and measures only those phenomena that can be measured by a century or more. This is the level of civilization. It does not cover one society or one economy. It can persist through a number of economies and a number of societies. All this time we are looking at the same history. Braudel's three planes do not assume three different histories, but three different viewpoints or prisms to look at the same train of events. Braudel defined here a too schematic categorization of historical research; instead of three, there are an unlimited number of viewpoints. Within each plane the number of viewpoints and prisms are endless, and so are the possible tools. It is extremely unlikely that the same deterministic approach could be used to describe internal bickering within a contemporary political party or the ideological trends of the second half of the twentieth century. If we return to the gradations set out by Braudel, we might make a cautious statement to the effect that for the first plane of historical research there is no need for a deterministic approach. If the events described unfold within a relatively short time frame and the data is reasonably well documented, the connections should be obvious. Basing the narrative on some dubious deterministic theory would only be a disturbing factor. Testing this in depth would give us some surprising results. A well-known example would suffice. Taking the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars together, we know that there are a number of elements which should be considered. Psychology, economics, and mainly demography should certainly be among the elements. That Napoleon was one of the major actors cannot be in doubt. Nevertheless, while some historians saw in his personality the prime mover of events, others saw him as no more than the visible froth on a stormy sea. He is there, but when one examines the actual roles he plays, he is not the leading actor. Despite their conviction that Napoleon was the 'prime mover of events' even historians from the schools of Carlyle and von Ranke must pay attention to the factors of psychology, economy and demography. In 1812, Napoleon has crossed the Niemen, invaded Russia and after a bloody battle at Borodino has reached and occupied Moscow. Up to this point it is known history with different interpretations as to why he decided to invade and whether his will was the only factor in the decision. However, when one has to consider his decision to remain in the Kremlin and wait for the approaches of Czar Alexander which failed to materialize, then this decision was Napoleon's and perhaps that of a few of his advisers. They decided to wait while Moscow was burning round them. Most history books assign the loss of the Grand Army to that unfortunate decision. But what would have happened if they had left earlier? It would seem that an earlier departure could not have altered much of the actual outcome. The Napoleonic myth was broken, the Grand Army was demoralized. The Russian and German countryside were up in arms. The straggling army fleeing homeward would have been annihilated just as it was a few weeks later. General Moroz (Frost) was not the decisive factor. Russian and German patriotism and the shaky moral of the French army were. It is true that a unified Germany was still far in the future, but one cannot discard the notion that the citizens of the German principalities saw themselves as Germans. Fichte and the Tugendbund were first of all Germans. It is doubtful whether below the ruling elite anybody saw themselves as anything but German. Napoleon might have been aware of these factors and probably came to the conclusion that the only safe way out of that adventure was through some agreement with Russia. The Russians did not negotiate, so the result was inevitable. This short example of an individual decision within a wider historical episode demonstrates an important point, which is the crux of the matter. If human history, at the level of entire civilizations and major episodes (as defined by Braudel) is shaped by forces greater than individual will, no individual decision can change the eventual outcome however great and important the bearer of that will. This book is based on the theory of historical determinism. In so doing, it uses a commonsense approach. History is the interaction between two primary factors. The first of these is the environment, in which we live and operate. The second is our nature as human beings, developed, shaped and altered through millennia after millennia. The history of our specific branch of the family of hominids, homo sapiens sapiens, which originated in Africa some 200,000 years ago, moved to Asia some 70,000 years ago and reached the Middle East and Europe in approximately 50,000 BC, gives some idea of the time span in which our nature developed, not to speak of our environment. In terms of the keys to historical determinism, environment and biology are the prime movers of human history. The unknown factor is always the relationship between those two prime movers. "It is clear," writes A. J. Toynbee "that the geneses of civilizations are not the results of biological factors or geographical environments acting separately, they must be the result of some kind of interaction between them. In other words, the factor which we are seeking to identify is something not simple but multiple, not an entity but a relation." 4 Examining the list of possible keys enumerated by W. F. Albright it is obvious that all of them, other than geography and biology are derivative. And since they are derivative from the two principal ones, they cannot be utilized as keys to understanding historical determinism. One entry on W. F. Albright's list requires closer scrutiny. He has separated climatic change from geography that may be correct - however, if we replace geography with environment, we reach a better sense of the two major keys. This book asserts, therefore, that all human history, as it has developed in the last 10,000 years, happened under the direct influence of those two factors (environment and biology) and those two alone. We live in a world formed by a chance climatic accident at the end of the Ice Age, called Wurms in Europe and Wisconsin in America, which show the southern limits of the glaciers covering the continents. Human nature adapted itself to the ensuing changes. Similar accidents might change our future in a way that we cannot even foresee. If there are only two principal keys, the history of civilizations must inevitably be deterministic. It is difficult to imagine that the will of a single person, or even the collective will of many individuals, can affect the development or the decline of a civilization. The start of all civilizations, the Neolithic Revolution, the beginning of agriculture and the building of the first cities, are therefore the result of climatic changes and the adaptation to them of humans. We know the true reason now. We even accept the verdict of the poet: " for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight Where ignorant armies clash by night." Matthew Arnold: Dover Beach5 The hypothesis that environment and biology are the only keys on the plane of civilization may be borne out by Fernand Braudel again. According to Braudel, every civilization is tied to a particular geographical area6, which means that their creation is also tied in the same way. However, on the level of historical episodes, the application of secondary or derivative keys such as demography and economics might be preferable. They may, indeed, be derivatives of the two primary factors, but they give clarity to an analysis.7 In addition to this discourse on the validity of historical determinism, a few sentences should be added on the need for humility. It is difficult to accept, but it is nonetheless true, that in history there are no victors and no victims, there is no good and no evil. Such notions, wherever they may belong, are not part of history. History is a flow of events, controlled by forces much greater than we are. These forces have no ethical dimension. It means, in the context of this book, or in any assessment of history, that we have to look at events as they were, and not as we were taught or as we think they ought to have been. So why the need for humility? Because until a comparatively short time ago, mankind saw itself as the center of the Universe, created by God in His own image. God may be the Master of creation, but there was no doubt that people made history of their own free will. God was accepted as a Prime Mover, but not involved in the details. His earthly representatives took care of that. As there were always plenty of self-appointed nominees for the position of earthly representative, history was always in human control, so went the theory. Our self-esteem underwent a profound deterioration in the last few centuries. It started with Copernicus, Kepler and Newton, who plucked our globe out of its preeminent position in the center of the Universe and demonstrated that it is a small planet revolving round a fifth-rate sun somewhere on the outskirts of a nondescript galaxy, hurtling in the vast expanse of empty space.8 Some center! Some Universe! Together with the devaluation of our physical centrality, our spiritual viewpoint has changed as well. Prior to Copernicus, we knew that above us was Heaven (with all good things for good people) and below was Hell (vice versa). It was beyond question that whoever was good went to Heaven, otherwise to Hell. More often than not, being good meant following our religion, but it did not diminish the place of Heaven and Hell in human consciousness. After Copernicus, Heaven and Hell become metaphysical rather than physical entities. Metaphysical concepts tend to become subject to much more rigid inquiry. Heaven and Hell, absolute good and evil, all went down the drain of scientific inquiry and the enlightenment. Then came the period of accelerated industrialization, which took away most people's individuality, turning farmers, craftsmen and peddlers into minor cogs in large machines. After that the experts, who turned mankind's soul into an elementary calculating machine made to follow instructions over which we have no control or much understanding either. There were now experts trying to set the rules for human interrelationships. And so Freud, Adler, Jung and others claimed that we do not know what is inside us, and hence have no control over whatever it is. Marx and his ilk taught us that our place in society is set not by what we want, need or are able to do, but by what we are and where we are. The final stab at the murder of our self-esteem was probably at the onset of the Space Age, when we found that all our endeavors, magnificent buildings, bridges, dams, even our sprawling megalopolises were invisible at a distance of a few hundred kilometers. Not much has remained of our erstwhile pretension that beings from outer space are falling over each other in their haste to get into contact with us. There is no sign that anybody knows, or cares that we are here. We can listen with our huge antennas for a murmur of acknowledgment, but so far without any success. We hear only the static from the background noise of the Universe. We do not even know, whether we are really alone, or live in a teeming Universe, or whether there are other worlds and nobody cares to acknowledge our presence. Of our previous pretensions, only a few films and TV series, some better, some worse, remain. Of course it is entirely possible that there are, indeed, other living creatures in the Universe, and that they might even be interested in us. The problem is that the units of our measurements are of human earthly proportions, and those of the Universe are astronomical. It is possible that far ahead of us, in our future, some answer will come to our inquiries. The measure of our time and patience is set by the scale of our lifetime, a few decades, not thousands or millions of light years, making it difficult for us to calculate now the possible effects of such answers then We have arrived at an understanding of the limits to our temporal and spatial senses. We can relate to measurements that are in some proportion not too far from our own. This is why we can relate to earthly mountains and intercontinental distances, but not to astronomical distance, nor to molecular or atomic measurements. In our temporal perception, we can relate to a span of 3 - 4 generations, from that of the old age of our grandparents to the early days of our grandchildren. Earlier than that, any memories of our ancestors are the products of pictures or photos on our mantelpiece, without any deep understanding by us. As regards the future of our descendants, that is purely within the realm of science fiction. Frankly, we cannot relate to anything personally which occurred before our birth, or even our consciousness, nor to something that will occur after our departure. Limitation in time perception, accompanied by tunnel vision, gives historians many problems. Details of past events become blurred and clear borders in time dissolve if not for historians, certainly for their readers. The further back in time we go, the more that blurring occurs. Unrelated events and people fuse. Distances in time fuse to appear closer. We put Julius Caesar and Tiberius together, despite the fact that five generations separated them, and even in ancient Rome things changed in five generations. We know that Clovis and Charlemagne were both rulers in the Middle Ages and so, despite the 300 years and more between them, they are close in our minds, To telescope historical events is a very common habit, difficult to avoid for historians, next to impossible for laymen. Such telescoping of historical events sometimes reaches ridiculous proportions, being most apparent in prehistoric times. Andrew Collins claimed that agriculture did not start, as was previously believed, some time around 8,500 BC in the mountains of Kurdistan, but put forward the contention that as early as 12,500 BC there were agricultural settlements along the banks of the southern Nile and in northern Sudan.9 These communities, he said, continued to develop at a steady pace until 10,500 BC, wen suddenly they stopped farming. No obvious reason is given. 2,000 years pass and farming has developed in the mountains of Kurdistan. Andrew Collins poses the question, whether it is possible that "teachers of the Nilotic communities departed Egypt for Kurdistan sometime between 10,000 and 9,000 BC?" It looks very innocent until we translate 2,000 years into 80 - 100 human generations, which is an extremely long time by any standard human proportions. It cannot stand up to serious scrutiny. It can be put forward only because of the lack of any archeological or historical testimony by which the statement could be disproved. Scientific, economic, social and cultural changes may alter our present and affect our future, but at least they left us our past. With all the uncertainties in our position in the Universe, our globe, our society, even our families, we still had our familiar past. If we lost control over many aspects of our existence, at least we had our history. So we had the Anglo-Saxons in their long ships devastating the shores of England, in hot pursuit of King Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. Then there were the Normans imposing order on the descendants of the Anglo-Saxons. Doubters only had to reread Ivanhoe or see the latest epic of Robin Hood at the local cinema. If our interest lay elsewhere, we could interest ourselves in the intrepid northern tribes bearing down through the Balkans upon Greece to establish the Golden Age of Mycenae. Doubts could be resolved by reading Homer, or looking at Schliemann's excavations. We were proud that we invented agriculture, monotheistic religions and established civilizations. We never bothered to ask why and why then and why there? The creation of the great monotheistic religions were centered upon names: Moses and the burning bush, Jesus on Golgotha, Mohammed under the starry desert sky, Zarathustra teaching in eastern Persia. To be sure, God was present in all these happenings, but only through personalized interpreters were God's orders made known. The personalized account of history still made sure that despite mankind's diminished status, we still had our familiar past. There were dissenting opinions and Tolstoy could express doubt that it was Napoleon alone who had decided that 600,000 obedient followers would invade Russia. That was fiction, but even fiction writers can discover the truth sometimes. Despite Tolstoy and some others, history remained based on persons, depending on human will. Not the will of all humans, but those who had freedom of action. If it wasn't the will of Napoleon alone, then certainly it was the will of leading European elements that saw in Russia a danger to be eliminated. So here was a historical event, Napoleon's onslaught on Russia that stemmed from his will (or the will of his European allies). What about the mainspring of the Napoleonic wars? That was the French Revolution. And the French Revolution? Why, it was the direct result of a French demographic explosion in the second half of the eighteenth century, a few bad harvests following one another, generally unstable economic conditions. Add to these the ambitions of the prosperous French middle class and the moral bankruptcy of the Ancien Regime, and it is obvious that there is no need for individual will or action. The same demographic bulge that fueled the French Revolution manned the revolutionary armies. Armies have one profession: the making of war. As in any profession, they tend to occupy themselves with what they know best. Add to this the well-known adage that each soldier in the revolutionary armies carried a marshal's baton in his knapsack, there is no need to look for additional reasons why the Napoleonic wars extended to all parts of Europe. The main driving force was that for most soldiers, and especially for their officers, war was the only opportunity for a career. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars were not the only events shaped by greater forces than individual or even collective will. A demographic explosion in Western Europe in the late fifteenth to early sixteenth centuries caused the extension of European power beyond Europe. We know the names of Cortez, Magellan, Balboa, Drake and others who led this expansion. They were strong, talented, resolute and unscrupulous men. They left behind them great many equally strong, resolute and talented men who would have done the same ... if given the chance. Where processes and events could not be personified, the explanation was proffered of Divine Intervention ... or chance accident. Henri Frankfort, an archeologist, has written in 1950 in his book "The Birth of Civilization in the Near East" that "we shall not, therefore, consider the question how civilization in the abstract became possible. I do not think there is an answer to that question; in any case it is a philosophical rather than a historical one." 10 Henri Frankfort was wrong. There is nothing philosophical about civilizations. They govern people's lives. They set down rules of relationships between people. They provide a road map by which to comprehend life in a certain area and within a particular time frame. Admittedly, they cannot be personified, although in ancient times the names of those who brought fire, invented agriculture and so on, were handed down. Personification was in a mythological sense. We discarded mythology long ago, probably together with the Ptolemaic picture of the world. With or without personification, mankind seemed to be in firm control of the past. But that control has since been undermined. The writing had been on the wall for a long time, and we should have known that it would happen, just as we have to admit to ourselves that our remaining illusions will soon be shattered. It is said that at present the number of scientists and scholars working on extending the boundaries of knowledge is greater than their total number in all past history. This estimate is probably correct. If we add to their number the power of the tools scientists have themselves developed, computers, carbon dating, DNA testing etc., then scientific knowledge and power is growing exponentially. Most of this knowledge is addressed to the natural and certain social sciences, but historical, archeological and anthropological research is benefiting too. The results of the new research tools and methods are revolutionary, to say the least. This may not be so in the field of historical research per se (though the effect is far from negligible), but certainly in archaeology. To show the force of the changes that came about from the application of scientific discoveries a few examples are given below. Carbon dating of prehistoric settlements brought Colin Renfrew to postulate a theory that Indo-European language and probably Indo-European peoples reached Europe not from the north but from the southeast, from the Middle East through Anatolia. The conquering bands of warriors from the north were superseded by humble peasants from Anatolia, looking for virgin lands to cultivate. How seriously do we take Colin Renfrew's scenario explaining the spread of agriculture in Europe? 11 He did not explain that if agriculture spread from south to north taking about 5,000 years to do so, what did they eat up north during the leisurely stroll of the southerners, bringing agriculture with them. One kilometer per annum is not a very strenuous exercise! This theory of the spread of agriculture from south to north implies certain hypotheses. People were already living all over Europe. If new inhabitants moved into their area, either the arrivals superseded the older inhabitants, probably not very peacefully, or mixed with them, peacefully or not. In any case it does mean that people of Middle East origin should be spread throughout Europe. This simple picture of events did not last very long. When the results of DNA testing of archeological burial grounds were set alongside the results of DNA testing of the current population, it was discovered that there is, indeed, a trace of Middle Eastern origins in the population of Europe. But this was no more than 5% of the whole. In addition, it was found that the Basques have the same DNA composition as the rest of Europe, despite the fact that the Basques are probably the descendants of the original European aborigines. Having lost the image of thundering war hordes from the north, we must also lose the image of a creeping invasion of farmers from the south/south-east. We have remained with more questions than answers. And not only in the dispersion of Indo-European languages and the origin of agriculture and civilizations. In an English village, DNA tests were made on the remains of a 7,500-year-old burial ground and the present inhabitants. It was found that at least some of the present inhabitants are direct descendants of those who were buried 7,500 years ago. This is a country where foreign invasions within this time frame are very well documented. So, if the present English have the same DNA composition as their predecessors from prehistoric times, where then are the Beaker people, Celts, Belgae, Romans, Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Normans who have supposed to have settled there? There are other examples of scientific tools changing our perception. The past is not what it was. If scientific advance depersonified the past, there could not have been much freedom of action. This book is wholly based on deterministic principles. It cannot be otherwise. The prime mover of the narrative as of history, is a simple environmental event: a change in the average temperature of Europe and the Middle East. When we survey all that has happened as a result of this change, minor as it was, we realize the extremely narrow margin of our very existence on this planet. The climatic event occurred at the end of the last Ice Age in about 9500 BC Its main effect was the desiccation of a great stretch of land between the Atlantic coast of North Africa (what is now Morocco) all the way to the Indian sub-continent. It caused, inter alia, the invention and spread of agriculture, the creation of the first civilizations and the establishment of all monotheistic religions. It is no coincidence that all monotheistic religions emerged in that part of the world. One of the secondary effects of this climatic change is the subject of this book. The effect (and the book) is named "The Constant Feud". It seems, indeed, to be a feud and it seems to be constant. The feud started at the time when the world settled down to its present state some 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. It has continued ever since then. It may well persevere until the next climatic change, if and when it happens. Such a climatic change may upset the present relationship (or absence of it) between the feuding camps, unless it destroys humanity altogether. At this point a number of caveats have to be entered: 1) This book is a history. Ipso facto it deals with the past. But the feud has a present too, in which case it is political science rather than history. It will probably persevere into the future, which puts it in the realm of futurology. However, as this conflict does exist at the present, a survey of the current state of the world is included, in order to provide an anchor point for the conflict. It is the most important part of the research, to show how the elements of the conflict were shaped by developments in the remote past. This applies to both sides of the conflict, as the present is a sum total of the past. 2) Historical analysis is built upon primary documents or other sources relying on primary documents. Since the subject covers a very long period, starting from the very beginnings of agriculture, the major part is before the time of literacy. As the most important foundations of this feud were laid at that time, the book attempts to fill the hiatus in our knowledge by analyzing the present, to see whether the known original physical environmental conditions could have contributed to its development. In technological terms, one would call it retro-engineering, i.e. separating a finished product into its components. Retro engineering is possible because we know the present profiles of the adversaries. We have a fairly accurate picture of the climatic change, its pace and extent. From archeological sources we have an accurate picture of their way of life prior to the change in climate. It can be presupposed that they could not have been much different from the primitive tribes of our times, with their hunter-gatherer existence then as now. Retro-engineering has to demonstrate that climatic changes and the difficulties or advantages ensuing from them can change the profiles of tribes from patterns of behavior as they were then to new patterns of behavior as they are now. 3) A feud has two sides. Historical research must take into account the views of all sides. Audietur et altera pars - 'listen to both sides' is good advice before passing judgment. But in this case there is an obstacle. One party to the conflict is gifted with a greater amount of intellectual curiosity. It has an underlying principle to the effect that knowledge is power. It reads and itself produces a great amount of literature to do with the conflict in which it is involved. The other side lacks this kind of curiosity, so that its comments on the feud as well as on the adversary are far fewer. Indeed, Bernard Lewis wrote in "Islam and the West" that such an attitude makes a virtue of the absence of any corresponding Occidentalism in the East. 12 This lack of views by the East about the feud and about its adversary is felt in the book, but is not caused by an attempt to distort the picture. There are simply not enough sources. The scientific curiosity of one side of the feud, and the lack of curiosity of the other side, and the origin of these types of behavior is one of the major elements that the retro engineering has to resolve. Notes: |
