Every once in a while, a book appears that rattles the bars of our cultural cage.
Carefully constructed by cultural gurus and academics, this cage is intended for the rest of us as a place of safety from bad ideas, meaning ideas other than their own. Race, gender, sex, what it means to be a man and a woman, the place of a deity vis-à-vis the place of government in commanding our attention and our loyalties, free speech, democracy: The current list of terms and behavior requiring a stamp of approval goes on and on.
The “kultur kommandants” decide which definitions of these terms, and the ideas attached to them, are allowed through the bars and which ones, for the protection of the inmates, are banned.
It works, but only until someone shakes those bars.
In earlier times, writers upset the status quo for different causes. In 1887, for instance, journalist Nellie Bly wrote “Ten Days in a Mad-House” and helped change American asylums for the mentally ill forever. Photographer and writer Jacob Riis published “How the Other Half Lives” in 1890, and soon he and Theodore Roosevelt were working together to improve life in New York City’s horrible tenements. Upton Sinclair’s 1905 novel “The Jungle” described the filth in Chicago’s slaughterhouses, which led to the Pure Food and Drug Act.
Overview
The thesis of “A Short History” is simple. Ellis contends that for the past 500 years, for reasons related to exploration and greater contacts among peoples, technological developments, and consequent shifts in attitudes, human beings became far less tribal in their views of race and culture. He uses the Latin motto of the International Chess Federation, “gens una sumus,” or “we are one people,” as his general label for this profound change in our perceptions of our fellow human beings.
Before 1500, and long afterward, as Ellis shows us, human beings identified with tribes, or groups, marked by such criteria as language, custom, and territorial claims. He uses this term to cover large territories and nations, as well as what we may usually think of as a tribe. As he points out again and again in his opening chapters about these ancestors: “At the forefront of their minds was not brotherly love for their fellow man, but rather an all-consuming fear. … In a highly dangerous world, people could only expect protection from their own kind.”
Other factors also produced this insularity. “It’s hard for modern people to imagine the insecurity of life in 1500,” Ellis writes, “and how that must have affected the attitudes of people who lived then.” He reminds us that there were no social safety nets, that “infant mortality rates were horrendous,” and that “law and order as we understand it barely existed.“ He adds: ”It would take a far greater degree of security before the average person could start to worry about the welfare of other societies.”
Crucial Developments
From the 16th century, however, there emerged several trends which Ellis charts in detail, changes that would eventually produce a much broader view of humankind than tribalism. The first of these was European exploration, which, over the next four centuries, would lead to colonization and give rise to what we today call multiculturalism. Here, Ellis rightly grants Britain pride of place in planting its flag around the globe, addressing in detail the benefits the British brought to the peoples of their far-flung empire: technologies unknown to the natives, educational opportunities, and eventually democratic governments previously nonexistent in those places.The invention of the printing press and the flood of books, pamphlets, newspapers, and other print media that followed led to a rapid increase in literacy, which resulted in a greater awareness of people and events far removed from one’s own country. “And that, in turn,” writes Ellis, “meant that ideas concerning the rights and wrongs of human behavior could become a far more powerful force in human affairs.”
The third factor cited by Ellis, in this gradual transformation, was the Protestant Reformation and the consequent shift of culture and science to the northern European countries. These countries gradually became the center for advances in technology and scientific thinking, and so for modernity itself. Taking Great Britain as his primary example, Ellis demonstrates that “this new technological advance in human life was so overwhelming in its effects that it has resulted in a universal civilization, a way of life whose main elements are now common to most people in the world.”
Offtrack Today
Ellis opens his last chapter, “Damaging Myths and Delusions,” with this brief review of his thesis: “Starting off from a climate of apprehensiveness and even outright hostility between peoples and nations, we have moved to a sense of commonality of all human beings.” He then writes that if these conclusions were properly understood, “they would, or at least should, completely change the most hotly disputed issues of our time.”These issues are hot-button topics like colonialism, cultural appropriation, and what some perceive as the racism of our ancestors and our own present-day racial animosities. In large part, Ellis contends that the misconceptions of some people regarding these topics derive from our modernist conception of “gens una sumus,” of which Ellis writes: “Radicals think that it’s a value system that is timeless and permanent. … They also imagine that they are the only perfect exemplars of this anti-racist ideology.”
To sum up Ellis’s thorough examination of false interpretations, today’s radicals apply “we are all one people” to the past as if it were a universal standard throughout human history, when in fact it is a remarkable and unique idea only now coming into its own.
These current delusions regarding issues like race and colonialism in turn “fuel some of the most destructive currents in modern political and social life.” Ellis’s inventory of the harm done by these bad ideas includes the corruption of free speech and education, interference with on-the-job training and competence, and our poisonous politics. The fantasies of these leftist radicals who, according to Ellis, “remain stuck in adolescent rebellion against their own societies, and in primitive ignorance of political history,” are undermining the gains humanity has so slowly acquired in the last five centuries. “They think that modernity is riddled with racism,” writes Ellis. “The truth is that modernity has rescued us from racism.”
While acknowledging the ongoing conflicts around the globe based on ethnic and religious differences, Ellis strongly recommends ignoring or refuting, whenever possible, the supposed anti-racists who “would destroy a precious multi-racial society in which, for the first time in history, different races live side by side in harmony.” He urges us to uphold the advances we’ve made:
“A look at the sweep of history from 1500 to the present ought to make us optimistic and confident. We have made enormous strides. The truth is that we’ve long since overcome the widespread fear and loathing of other cultures characteristic of 1500. We’ve progressed especially in the last seventy-five years, during which we have become a multi-racial society in which all kinds of people work well together and have valuable friendships.”
If you’re looking for a fascinating historical account of this underreported but profound shift in human thinking, read “A Short History of Relations Between Peoples.”
