Introductory Essay 9

Comments on the American Experience - A Problem in Understanding History

In general, the history that is presented to us, in America, (again not in the advanced classes, but in general education) is that of the linear transition from the Ancient to the Classical to the Christian world, with a final transition in the Age of Modernism.

• Under this standard rubric, the Ancient world supposedly faded into the Classical world some time between 325 BC Ð 100 AD with the invasion of the Near East under Alexander, and the solidification of Roman power in that area. The Classical world subsequently faded into the Christian world beginning sometime in the mid third century.

However, this concept is again greatly tainted by the Christian and American world view. In both the books, Religion of the Occident, and in The Closing of the Western Mind, the authors argue that the concepts of liberty and freedom of thought developed by the Classical mind view lost out to the concepts of absolutism and control of the deity over nearly a 1,000 year period.

• Both works state that the Europe of the Post-Roman Empire period (that which is called the Dark Ages, and the early Medieval period) looked like the world of the Ancients (with its absolute rulers, its religious domination, and its use of God as the answer to all events (God wills it). Furthermore, both books show how the Classical world lost out in Europe, to the Ancient’s world view.
• The authors of these books would say that the great victories of the Greeks at Marathon and Salamis were revered over the course of some 1000 years with the development of the absolutist Roman rulers, supported by the absolutist Christian church.

Both books generally conclude that the Europe of the 6th- 10th centuries looked more like Hindu India of say 1000 BC (a major source of the Ancient world view), than any other culture in history.

• While this process of the eventual reverse triumph of the Ancient world view over the Classical view is also a major foundation of this work, we cannot go into the details of these events to the extent needed, and I highly recommend that the readers of this work also read these two stated books as well.
• Throughout world history, today, the vast majority of the world’s people view history based on religious “beliefs” and not historical “facts”.

In the US, most persons assume that the events of history in the Bible (or other sacred books) are true to some (greater or lesser) degree. Even if we get beyond a rejection of the Eden story and the flood, most people, at least in America, think, that the Exodus from Egypt took place in some form of other, that “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho,” and that David and Solomon were mighty kings.

Despite mounting evidence that the history listed above is not supported by fact, most people still accept them as “facts” because it was taught to them through religion and also through public schools. Even with the development of non-church based schools, or public education, in the West, much of what was taught in the new school systems had to be accepted and approved by the various churches.

In addition, the concept of the “White Man’s Burden” still prevails in the minds of most Americans today if in somewhat different forms. Americans still believe that it is their role to “Bring Democracy to the world.” Perhaps we should say that the “White Man’s Burden has evolved into the “American burden.” The belief in some form of “manifest destiny” though somewhat dated, still prevails in this country. Most people (or at least most politically active people) in this country still think of the US in the same context as the old Christian view of the “Shining City on the Hill”, or, the only hope for human kind.

Americans tend to see the world as almost predetermined and continual in the process. We tend not to be a cynical people, but one that believe in the notion that “right will prevail”, and events will occur to assure continuation and progress. This concept of predetermination and progress is actually, strangely enough, manifested in the fact that some 40% of Americans think that the second coming of Jesus will occur in their lifetimes, and that the end of the world as we know it will come about as described in the Bible.

Perhaps it’s because so many people in the United States are religious and believers in the eventual triumph of good over evil, (no matter how devastating this triumph, as described in “Revelations” will be for most people) we as a people have a distorted view of world history. We tend to see things as a chain of events always progressing, with perhaps a few bumps along the road, but always progressing towards the enviably positive outcome.

• We as a people tend to gloss over the “bad points in history” and only look at the “good” (which is perhaps a normal process). However, by doing so we miss what really happened in history, and perhaps more importantly, why it really happened. This ignorance of “real history” leaves us without the ability to project how others in the world will react to our actions.

Take for example the Crusades. If Americans know anything about the Crusades, it is that the wonderful Christian knights, driven by divine spirit, were able to gain control of the “Holy Land” back from the Muslim infidels, who had been preventing Christian pilgrims from going to pray at the holy places in the area.

So we gloss over the bad points, which are many. When it comes to the Crusades; we know little of the following points:

• The history of religious intolerance in the West and that the Muslims actually were among the most tolerant of rulers in so far as religion went.
• The Crusaders slaughtered Jews and Eastern Orthodox Christians, and almost everyone they encountered along the way who was not Roman Catholic, and
• When they finally reached Jerusalem, and took the city, they killed almost all of the inhabitants, regardless of age and religions.

Since we look at the history from the European Christian perspective, we think of the Crusades as the foundation for the Renaissance, since the Crusaders learned so much from going East. In doing so, we tend to ignore:

• The devastating impact the Crusades had on the overall history of culture, and especially on the political entity that the Crusades were originally intended to help, the Byzantine Empire (the remnants of the Roman Empire). In addition, the fourth Crusade did what no Muslim army had been able to do, take and sack Constantinople, and to establish for sixty years a Latin Empire in its place.
• The Crusades, by destroying Byzantium, actually helped to unlock the door to Europe, which enabled the Ottoman Turks to occupy the Balkans for close to 500 years, and almost led to the complete conquest of Europe by the Muslim Turks.

Since we don’t really know history – what really happened – we can not really understand what others’ perspectives are concerning the present. The average American may know that the Crusades failed and see them as a noble effort of noble knights, but they fail to understand that the Muslim’s successful resistance to the Crusades over a one hundred and fifty year period continues to play out in current world politics. The Muslims see their history of resistance to the Crusaders as a model for today. It undoubtedly gives Muslims a historical basis for supporting “terror” as a means to resist.

• Osama Bin Laden modeled himself after the founder of the sect know in English as “the Assassins,” who during the Crusading period, were able to use “suicide” attacks against leaders of both the Muslim and Christian sides to force political and military confrontations.

In addition, we simple do not get that the people of the region see the Crusades as a precursor to modern day European Imperialism. From this perspective we can see why they view Israel, and the invasion of Iraq as just a continuation of a war that has been raging for over 1600 years.

• We, in America, simply do not understand that the Crusades mostly had little to do with religion. We can’t see how it was mainly a pretext for the younger nobility of Europe, who could not gain land in the Europe, to establish their own fiefdoms and kingdoms in new lands away from their older siblings.

In the minds of many of the current residents of the area, events look the same now as they did then. But we don’t get this because we don’t “get history.”

A few years ago a movie was released call “The Kingdom of Heaven” which portrayed the Crusading period far closer to reality than any other cinematic effort. Although the story line was “Hollywoodized” to include a love story that never took place, the main story line of the Christians losing control of Jerusalem to the Islamic forces was fairly accurate (leaving out the fact that the Christians actually paid a huge ransom to get all the people safely out of Jerusalem). The movie mainly made the Christians, or at least the Christian knights, the bad guys, and, Muslims, under SaLaden, if not the good guys, at least the far more noble guys.

The movie had everything going for it; great action, Orlando Bloom, etc, and it bombed at the box office in the U.S. I would suggest that the failure was due to that fact that the Christians lose, and SaLaden (played by an actor who bore an amazing resemblance to Bin Laden,) enters Jerusalem in triumph, replacing Christian signage with Islamic ones (while showing respect for the Christian imagery). In a time of “war on terror,” and with the rise of Christian fundamentalism, this movie never really had a chance in the US.

Almost at the same time another movie came out called “Passion of the Christ” created by Mel Gibson. The movie had almost “nothing” going for it, in so far as a film that generally appeals to Americans. It had no super stars, no major action, and the dialogue was spoken in relatively dead languages (Latin and Aramaic), which required subtitles (something most Americans hate). It also has a long scene of torture done in gruesome realism (ok, maybe, it had that going for it). This movie based on a very strict reading of the Bible, on the last day of the life of Christ, despite mixed reviews, and protests for its anti-Semitic bias, broke all kinds of box office records. It almost became a mandatory event for fundamentalist Christians to attend in order to see how “Christ died for our sins.” It appears that the more gruesome the death, the more that it seems to appeal to those types of Christians.

Unfortunately, this response to the Kingdom of Heaven” and “Passion of the Christ” is typical to the Americans response to history in general. We as a people do not want to know much that runs counter to our world view, which is greatly tainted by our own positive experiences, as a people, and our own national views on (the Christian) religion. To greatly generalize this American view is to say;

• The general feeling of the traditional Americans is that it is okay to mainly forget about the past, and to more forward, into the wilderness or into the future, (and with one more line from Bob Dylan) “with God on our side.”

However, this world view is primarily an American view, not shared by most peoples of the world. Unlike the history of the United States, most of the rest of the peoples of the world have known chaos and despotism as the norm throughout their history. If there was ever a “rise” of a people or nation, it was surely followed by a great fall. Throughout history, we see time and again, that which was a rich and stable society wiped away and often expunged from existence.

If there was a recovery in these societies, it could take generations and epochs before the return of stability and growth. Often the return of stability was at the cost of the elimination of freedoms and a great demand for conformity. Other times stability came only because the culture was stimulated by foreign wars. For the history of humanity, in general, until very modern times, the statement of Hobbs that life was “nasty, brutish and short” was mostly, if not nearly completely, true. We can think of exceptions such as the periods of Inca and Maya rule in the Americas, at other times at the height of some Chinese and Indian rulers, for about one hundred years during the Roman Empire (only in some parts of the Roman Empire) and of course now in modern day America.

• For most of the peoples, and history of the world, nothing seemed inevitable except chaos and destruction, and tyranny of one form or another. (Our cynical view of “death and taxes” is something so very mild compared to others experiences.)

The extent of this world wide horror will be explored more as part of the second book of this effort; but;

What is clearly different from American history and that of most of the peoples of the world is that the US to date:

• Has never been destroyed or occupied (except for the Southern states in the Civil War), its peoples have never been sent off into servitude, nor has it experienced the collapse of its ecological systems, its central government. To date, we have never lived through periods of great plagues, with huge die offs, either.

The concept of the “end of the world is near” in America seems more like a punch line of a joke, than the real, often horrific experiences of most peoples of the Ancient and Classical world.

The “end of time” was not only” near”, it came for the Jews losing to the Babylonians, and the Romans (three times), In addition, we can see how the end of the world came for the peoples of the numerous beautiful cities throughout the Roman Empire that were destroyed by waves of German, or Hunnic invaders. The end of the world did come for ? of the people of the Roman World who died during the plague of Justinian or 1/3 of the population of Europe who died during the Black Death; and on and on to the present day. For the peoples in cities that were exterminated and cultures and peoples that were enslaved and then driven from history, the world did, in fact, end.

• This living with the dread of the end, and an apparent inability to fend off the end, greatly shaped the view of the people under threat, and also the view of those remnants who did survive to build a world all over again.

In these “endings” we lost not only people, and art, but great knowledge of what was known and what had been known. Culture is not always maintained, and as we study history, we find not a direct line of advancement, but a hodgepodge of loops and currents leading all over the place. A great deal of knowledge is gained and then lost again. Therefore, we see periods of time where study and knowledge is fostered and developed, only to see that knowledge lost and forgotten for centuries. Yet, for some unknown reason, safety, and the pursuit of knowledge, in some places, begins again. (With our technology, and the use of the internet, our current upsurge in knowledge is clearly the most wide spread in history.)

To help the reader who is a modern American, who has never tasted these types of historical events of extensive disasters and social collapse, I will, to the extent possible, add allegorical modern events to perhaps give a flavor of what was going on in people’s minds of the time. The use of allegory and parallel events is difficult at best, but I will try to give the reader something, in our history to relate to, as best I can.

It is important, however, for American readers to understand what a great privilege and oddity the history of the United States to date has been in comparison with the history of the world. This is not to say that we don’t have a great deal of our own horrible acts (such as slavery or Indian wars and expulsions), we do. It is unclear how long this privilege will continue, but as long as it does, the American’s perspective of world history is greatly obstructed.