History Readings

President Obama’s campaign in Libya may be the most deceptively sold U.S. military policy since Franklin Roosevelt’s “all aid short of war” policy in 1941. In his speech to the nation Tuesday night, the president described a military action in Libya where the main U.S. military commitment had already ended, where NATO was relieving the U.S. of operational responsibility, where the U.S. mission was limited to protecting civilian populations, where the U.S. goal is strictly humanitarian, and where the U.S. took no view about Libya’s future government beyond a vague preference that Muammar Qaddafi move on. As described, this is a preposterous policy. Fortunately, the president is giving every sign of not believing a word of it.

In fact, the U.S. mission is aimed at the overthrow of Qaddafi. The U.S. is engaged in sophisticated propaganda operations urging Qaddafi’s troops to turn on him. And it’s reported that the U.S. is negotiating with Qaddafi about a secure exit from Libya. In fact, the U.S. mission is as deeply concerned with European energy security as with the humanitarian crisis. Critics correctly point out that the US has managed to ignore many other humanitarian crises – and is in fact ignoring one right now in the Ivory Coast. This particular crisis is occurring in a country from which NATO ally Italy buys more than one-fifth of all its net oil imports and in which Britain has a very large investment. We are not going to war for oil. But we very rarely go to war without oil.

Henry Kissinger used to contrast the Bush 43 and Clinton administrations: “Under Clinton, the explanations were much better than the policies; under Bush, the policies were always much better than the explanations.” The Libyan war takes the Bush frailty to extremes: the explanations are laughable on their face – but the policy seems astute and promising.

First, it can hardly be a cause of celebration that students in independent schools are almost twice as likely to study GCSE history as those in maintained schools. In 2010, more than a hundred state secondary schools entered no students for GCSE history.Second, as the inspectors' report acknowledges, England is the only country in Europe where history is not compulsory for students beyond the age of 14. Worse, many state schools now offer a two-year key stage 3 course, which allows some pupils to stop studying history at the age of 13.

• 25% of all schools no longer teach history as a discrete subject in year 7• 30% of comprehensives spend less than one hour a week on history in the years up to age 13• More GCSE candidates took design and technology than history last year• More A-level candidates took psychology.It is a paradox indeed. History has never been more popular outside schools than it is in Britain today. Yet history has never been so unpopular in British schools.

Even more disturbing is the evidence of widespread historical ignorance among school-leavers.

The Harvard academic Niall Ferguson has warned that too few pupils are spending too little time studying history – and what they do study lacks a sweeping narrative.

His plan aims to give pupils an overview of the years 1400 to 1914, and encourage them "to understand and offer answers to the most important question of that period: why did the west dominate the rest?"

directs the teacher to show their class a map of the world circa 1913 "showing the extent of the western empires".The class then divides into groups to defend the merits of six ingredients of western success, ranging from "competition" to – perhaps more controversially — "the work ethic".

he wrote a letter to his five children: "How many lives might have been saved if appeasement had given way to force earlier in the late 30s or earliest 40s?" it read.

I look at today's crisis as 'good' vs. 'evil'-yes, it is that clear."

we can ask, as Lincoln did, for God's blessing. But seeking God's blessing is not the same as being God's country - with all the hubristic aggression that can lead to.

Why, after all, did America need a Second Founding under Lincoln - almost a century after it was born? Which other advanced country remained so devoted to slavery until the late nineteenth century? Which other one subsequently replaced  slavery with a form of grinding apartheid for another century? Besides, much of the thought that gave us the American constitution can be traced back to European thinkers, whether in Locke or Montesquieu or the Enlightenment in general. Seeing America as the sole pioneer of human freedom is to erase Britain's unique history, without which America would not exist. It is to erase the revolutionary ideas of the French republics. It's historically false.

this kind of power had its usual effect, and the establishment of a massive global military machine, as Eisenhower so presciently noted, created the risk of a permanent warfare sustained by domestic interests. Throw into the mix a bevy of intellectuals busy constructing rationales for a uni-polar world - on the neocon right and the neoliberal left - and we slowly became, at best, the indispensable nation and at worst, a benign imperial bully.

America is an increasingly conservative nation, by ideology and by political affiliation,

Conservatives outnumber liberals in even the most liberal-leaning states (excluding the District of Columbia): Vermont, (30.7% conservative to 30.5% liberal), Rhode Island (29.9% to 29.3%), and Massachusetts (29.9% to 28.0%).

what factors account for the growing conservatism of Americans and American states?

The Nobel laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his collaborators have found that there are two kinds of happiness -- how you evaluate your life, and how you experience it from hour to hour, often very different.

It’s easy to understand a traditional Chinese drive for perfection in children: it is a huge nation with a long history of people thriving at the top and scraping by at the bottom without much in between. The appeal in contemporary America stems from a sense that our nation is becoming stratified in similar ways and is about to get steamrolled by China. If you can’t beat them, join them.

Aside from being a much cheaper option than babysitters, sleepovers also help children learn to sleep anywhere, in any bed, with any pillow. This is not an ability to be scoffed at. It is, in fact, one of three goals everyone should realistically set for raising their kids: get them to adulthood with no sleeping, eating or sexual hang-ups. Do that and you will have done your job, launching them off with the foundation needed to thrive.

this way of approaching the decision does make sense. If you doubt it, don't just list the policy's all too obvious dangers: test it against the alternatives--something I have not seen Obama's critics do. One option would have been to do nothing. In other words, abstain with China and Russia on the UNSC resolution. What a splendid message to the world that would have sent. Or maybe vote for the resolution, then commit no resources to enforcing it--the usual European approach to global leadership. Thankfully, the US is better than that. Alternatively, go all in, make regime change the goal, and target Gaddafi--but now without international backing. That would have been a heavier burden and an even bigger gamble. The course of action Obama chose is risky, to be sure, but when you think them through the alternatives look worse.

He posed the cultivation of virtue as a superior alternative to the manipulation or coercion of behavior through policy.

I'll highlight three virtues from Confucius's thought that I believe are the basic building blocks for all other virtues: One is rén (仁), benevolence or compassion. Another is self-control, which Confucius believed was enforced and nurtured by adhering to proper forms of behavior, or lǐ (礼). And, the third is wise judgment about how to turn benevolent intention into action of a kind that avoids the proverbial road to hell.

public discourse about virtue is muted. To abuse a recent parlour game, below is a graph of the rate of occurrence of the words "virtue" and "technology" in Google's Ngram Viewer, which plots frequency of words occurring in books over time. We see a rapid rise of technology in the last forty years against a two-century slide in virtue. (Is it a coincidence that the crossover happens around 1970, the same year I called out in yesterday's graph? Somewhat similar results are had with "virtue" against "institutions," "policies," and "systems.")

"It's not a book for a number of reasons," says Philip Nel, a professor of English and director of the children's literature program at Kansas State University. "One is that in a traditional reading experience, the reader is in charge," Nel says. "The reader acts on the book. With an interactive e-book, the reader does still act on the book, but the book also acts on, and depending on the adaptation, against the reader. So I would say it's not a book, it's maybe a relative of the book. But it's not quite a book."

"Reading may be involved, but there's more to it than that, and it's different than that," he says. "We don't read a film, we watch a film. We don't read a video game, we play a video game. And I was trying to think, what's the verb to describe what the enhanced e-book experience is like; is it 'work,' is it 'use'? Do we 'play' an enhanced e-book?"

East and west have always been geopolitical constructions whose shifting cultural meanings - from the conflict between Catholic and Orthodox Christianity in the early Middle Ages to the current obsession with China - reflect changing patterns of power. A classical archaeologist by training, Ian Morris begins this highly ambitious volume by returning to prehistoric times, when east and west were geographical expressions. For Morris, "the west" means the societies that expanded "from the original core in south-west Asia to encompass the Mediterranean Basin and Europe, and in the last few centuries America and Australasia, too", while "the east expanded from its original core between China's Yellow and Yangtze rivers, and today stretches from Japan in the north into the countries of Indochina in the south".

he offers a materialist explanation, with the aim of developing nothing less than a law-governed science of history.

In Morris's account, the ultimate origin of the west's primacy is to be found in the domestication of plants and animals that occurred in the western core around 9500BC, some 2,000 years before it did in the east. He is far from claiming that geography is destiny in any simple sense. As he points out, the meaning of geography changes along with technological and social development. Five thousand years ago, society was developing most rapidly in Egypt and Mesopotamia, and the geographical location of Portugal, Spain, France and Britain - "stuck out from Europe into the Atlantic" - was a great disadvantage. But when, 500 years ago, new kinds of ships appeared that could cross what had always been impassable oceans, sticking out into the Atlantic became highly advantageous

This book could have been titled The Measure of History because that is the seminal new idea in the book. Morris creates an objective measure for comparing civilizations’ ability to get things done. He attempts to make his rules for measuring civilizations as simple as possible, but no simpler. He seeks objective qualities for measuring social development, and after analyzing several of these  qualities he settles on: 1. Energy capture per person, 2. Size of the largest city, 3. War-making potential, 4. Information technology. Morris sums these qualities together equally, year by year, over a 16,000-year period; then he charts and compares them.

His objective method tracks the total power of civilizations. There will be endless quibbling over the details, which are perforce a little vague, but the overall charts would probably change very little even if a perfect measure were found.

The importance of the ability of humans to extract power from natural resources becomes apparent with these charts. Throughout all but the last few hundred years of history people were dependent upon muscle power to create the goods and services they needed; but with the advent of coal-powered steam engines humans were able to multiply their energy production and consumption at any location, which was then converted into more and better things. This has created tremendous abundance for a vastly larger human population.

This book is different from others that I have read on the subject. Its scope is massive, for a start, covering over ten millennia of human history via painstaking analysis of archaeological records, an incredibly ambitious sweep which is essential to Morris’ thesis. At the very beginning, Morris separates the ‘East vs West’ speculators into two rival camps: the ‘long-term’ theorists (i.e. Westerners have always been preternaturally or genetically born to rule others); and the ‘short-term’ theorists (i.e. Westerners gained some breakaway advantage in the relatively recent past that allowed them to decisively break away from their Eastern competitors). He then contends that both of these theories are wrong.

Dividing the world into its ‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ cores of industrial civilisation, he pits the Mediterranean-based core (encompassing the Assyrian, Persian, Roman, and ultimately British and American empires) against the Chinese core (encompassing China, Japan, Korea and other powers).

So, what about China and the West? Again, Morris puts this down to time. Agriculture first arose around 10 000 BCE in the so-called ‘hilly flanks’ of Asia; it was not invented in China until around 8500 BCE. This one and a half millennium advantage—combined with a more diverse variety of animals and crops capable of domestication—was enough to give the West its required head start. After this favourable beginning, the West has retained its small technological lead over the East (with one relatively brief exception around the first millennium AD, when China briefly grasped the lead).

His theorem runs as follows. There is no biological reason why the West came to dominate. People in large groups are much the same everywhere – lazy, greedy and scared, and always looking for easier, more profitable and safer ways to do things, “in the process building stronger states, trading further afield, settling in greater cities”. He portrays the rise and fall of empires as amoeba-like movements, in which individuals have little long-term influence. Collapses follow the same cruel pattern: conquest, riches, babies, competition, starvation. The struggle to control the core brings in people from the margin, who then take over – viz the Phoenicians, the Mongols, the Goths, the Huns.

Geography, Morris argues, is the main reason why the West rules. An early lead was established at the end of the last Ice Age by nomadic hunter-gatherers from Africa who settled in an agriculturally benign area known as the Hilly Flanks (modern Israel, Syria, Iraq). Farming replaced foraging; from then on, Western rule by 2000 was “a long-term probability”. Not that China didn’t catch up. In fact, for 1,200 years (between 550 to 1776), China pulled ahead of the West. Marco Polo described China’s commerce as being “on such a stupendous scale that no one who hears tell of it without seeing it for himself can possibly credit it”. Sound familiar? Long before we did, the Chinese had compasses, paper, guns – and maritime superiority. Between 1405 and 1433 a fleet of 300 ships sailed as far afield as East Africa. So why weren’t there Chinese conquistadors? Geography again. America was twice as far away as from Europe – and in 1424 long-distance voyages were banned.

Morris takes on theories which "suggest that there is something unique about western culture". His argument is simple: "from the Mediterranean to the Yellow Sea," there were philosophers wrestling with the same questions "and finding similar answers" as Socrates. "Socrates was part of a huge pattern, not a unique giant who sent the West down a superior path". What can I say? Does Morris, a specialized Professor of Classics, seriously believe that Indian and Chinese thinkers were reasoning in ways similar to Europeans? First of all, one of the exceptional qualities about the West is the continuous sequence of original thinkers in ancient Greece, in Rome, in Christian and in Modern Europe. The mere appearance of a Socrates at one point in time is not the issue. Find me in ancient Asia a continuous line of original thinkers

Morris brings up the Renaissance only to tell us that there were renaissances everywhere. The revivals ones sees in Asia history were always revivals of the same traditional ways of thinking; imagine Europeans for ever writing textual studies of Plato

Christianity? -- well, Morris says that all religions are the same. Christianity and Islam are fundamentally different religious traditions, and not only because the former has exhibited a far richer scholarly tradition, which is rather visible in the immediate fusion of Greek philosophy, Roman Law, and Christian theology in the first centuries AD, not to mention the Middle Ages, but because in Islam the idea that Allah has limits to his own powers, by making an everlasting covenant, with human beings, is unthinkable, in that Allah is viewed as absolutely transcendent; whereas for Christianity the authority of the earthly rulers is limited by God's law, which both grants rights to every person and holds that God is conterminous with Reason. There is no self-limitation to the sovereignty of Islamic rulers, and for this reason Islam has faced great difficulties producing a secular political order subject to constitutional checks and balances.

There are two broad schools of thought on why the West rules. Proponents of ‘Long-Term Lock-In’ theories such as Jared Diamond suggest that from time immemorial, some critical factor – geography, climate, or culture perhaps – made East and West unalterably different, and determined that the industrial revolution would happen in the West and push it further ahead of the East. But the East led the West between 500 and 1600, so this development can’t have been inevitable; and so proponents of ‘Short-Term Accident’ theories argue that Western rule was a temporary aberration that is now coming to an end, with Japan, China, and India resuming their rightful places on the world stage. However, as the West led for 9,000 of the previous 10,000 years, it wasn’t just a temporary aberration. So, if we want to know why the West rules, we need a whole new theory. Ian Morris, boldly entering the turf of Jared Diamond and Niall Ferguson, provides the broader approach that is necessary, combining the textual historian’s focus on context, the anthropological archaeologist’s awareness of the deep past, and the social scientist’s comparative methods to make sense of the past, present and future – in a way no one has ever done before.

“The nearest thing to a unified field theory of history we are ever likely to get. With wit and wisdom, Ian Morris deploys the techniques and insights of the new ancient history to address the biggest of all historical questions: Why on earth did the West beat the Rest?

It is not, he reveals, differences of race or culture, or even the strivings of great individuals, that explain Western dominance. It is the effects of geography on the everyday efforts of ordinary people as they deal with crises of resources, disease, migration, and climate.

For Ian Morris, an archeologist by training, "maps versus chaps" is what it's about, and if we accept his perkily scientistic premise that "chaps" are the same the world over, "maps" – geography – is all that is left.

As a work of synthesis the book is phenomenal, but breadth isn't everything, and the closer we get to modernity the more insecure Morris's expertise, and the weaker his theory. Any suggestion that the west may have entrenched its lead for anything other than material reasons is studiously avoided.

fear recognition and the fight-or-flight reflex embedded in our neurochemistry is part of what has enabled our survival and evolution from chest-pounding primates to iPad-wielding bipeds

major catastrophes spark widespread anxiety in the countries where they hit. A great example of this is how incredibly overinflated Americans' fears about terrorism grew after 9/11. In one poll that was conducted in the aftermath of the attacks, respondents said that the average American had a 48 percent chance of being injured in a terrorist plot over the next year. As it turned out, the odds were more like 0 percent.

Americans have become extremely vulnerable to the pressures of the 21st century. For the past 50 years, we've been getting progressively more anxious in good economic times and bad, so we can't even blame it on the recession. As I was conducting research for the book, psychologists pointed to three basic reasons why our psychic state is deteriorating. The first is a simple matter of social disconnection. As we spend more time with our electronic devices than we do with our neighbors, we lose our physical sense of community. Social isolation flies in the face of our evolutionary history. The second major cause is the information overload that we're experiencing with the Internet and the 24-hour media cycle. We're all aware of it, but I'm not sure we realize how big an impact it's having on our brains. The third explanation can be attributed to what one psychologist refers to as a culture of "feel goodism" -- the idea that we shouldn't ever have to be upset and that all our negative emotions can be neutralized with a pill. This to me feels like a distinctly American phenomenon.

Perhaps the most puzzling statistics are the ones that reveal that we're significantly more anxious than countries in the developing world, many of which report only a fraction of the diagnosable cases of anxiety that we do. One of the reasons for this is that the people in many of these third-world nations are more accustomed to dealing with uncertainty and unpredictability.

people in "less developed" nations have lives which are actually more uncertain and unpredictable;  what happens to them is actually beyond their rational control.  But they're used to it. 

Our lives actually are more predictable and secure than lives have ever been; we have less reason than ever, for example, to be anxious about a child dying. But it seems parents are more nervous than ever.