If history of humanity feels a lot like the following video
to you, then you need to read this book, or at least my review of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3Jhikj-djo
(PG-13 for violence and some language, but it is VERY relevant!).
The premise of this monumental work of H.G. Wells’ is
staggering: sketch all of history as succinctly as possible while critiquing
major figures and events, noting their contributions to the evolving story and
progress of humankind, and imagining for the reader the trajectory along which everything
is barreling. Wells pulled it off quite nicely, although it was inevitable that
sections of the work would became bogged down by a litany of names, dates, and
places; but I’m assuming there were critics to please, and people who would
feel he was doing history buffs a disservice by leaving out names and events
that meant a lot to a particular demographic. His chronological table alone
spans 15 pages. You can’t please them all, but Wells did as well as anyone I’ve
read.
I have been asked a couple of times why I am reading an
out-of-date historical work. The last revision to the Outline in Wells’
lifetime was published in 1937. Later, Raymond Postgate updated it, trying to
preserve the ‘voice’ of Wells (which I think he did a fine job of); and Wells’
son, G.P. Wells, updated the final edition in 1971. It appears that since the
last update in 1971, more has been added to our understanding of history than
overturned. Mostly, Wells was timeless in the unique way he chose to
outline and summarize happenings and, more importantly, ideas, for he believed
that “all human history is fundamentally a history of ideas.” His remarkable
storytelling stands out far beyond other histories that are a mere recitation
of facts.
The goal of this review is to accomplish at least one of two
things:
1)
I hope to interest people to read the Outline
for its insight, if not for factual information.
2)
I hope to distill the insights that I’ve
gathered to offer them in condensed form for those who will never be interested
enough to read the entire two-volume work. The work as a whole may better
represent historiography or philosophy of history instead of history per se,
so, as much as I hate to say it, it is most likely already going the way of the
dinosaur as far as a plain chronicle of episodes is concerned. This is an
assumption, but there are probably other works out there that can do that job
better. So, I want to share my gleanings. There is so much rich stuff here. I
wish people could make the connection between what they love in H.G. Wells’
other writings, and infer that the same creative mind is at work in this
Outline to help readers understand the deep meaning of humanity’s experiences, but
that isn’t likely. So, my peeps, allow me to regurgitate for you.
Wells fully commits to the story of early humanity in a way
that few seldom know to do. He seems to really understand all that was and is
hanging on humanity’s evolution, and all the ramifications of the nuanced
changes and milestones. His grasp of the origins of religion is especially
illuminating. He reduces much early religion to a fear of the Old Man in a
tribal culture who was the dominant male that ensured the survival of the
tribe, monopolized the females, and demanded the fear, servility and absolute reverence
of the other males. The taboo associated with tampering with any of the
belongings of the Old Man carved deep grooves in the tribe’s psyche—“the fear
of the Old Man was the beginning of social wisdom”—and probably influenced
posterity’s fear of the Old Man coming back, since a fetish-awed mentality
shrouded the dead in supernatural possibilities. Slowly but surely, “The fear
of the Father passed by imperceptible degrees into the fear of the Tribal God.”
There are traces here of Herbert Spencer’s ideas, one of the fathers of
evolution who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”, which developed the
idea that religion’s root lies in the chief of a tribe whose mastery over his people
and environment began to be understood by his contemporaries and successive
generations as a difference that is “not of degree only, but of kind” (from Universal Progress). The chief was a superman to his ordinary
brethren, and the dead chief became the archetype of the aboriginal deity.
Wells stretches this theory further to account for the
growing fear and respect for priest-craft, which cultivated a hegemony of power
by forging “secrets in order to have secrets to tell.” This groping veneration culminated
in what we now consider to be the most barbaric of rituals and self-sacrifice.
The blood-letting which characterized many of the primitive cultures was a
matter of course. “To lift curses, to remove evils, to confirm and establish,
one must needs do potent things. And was there anything more potent in
existence than killing, the shedding of life-blood?” What began as fetishism in
the late Paleolithic period morphed over the epochs into full-blown animism and
later, as language developed in the Neolithic stage, into crudely systematized
and heavily ritualized religious belief.
“Out of all these factors, out of the Old Man tradition, out
of the emotions that surround Women for men and Men for women, out of the
desire to escape infection and uncleanness, out of the desire for power and
success through magic, out of the sacrificial tradition of seedtime, and out of
a number of like beliefs and mental experiments and misconceptions, a complex
something was growing up in the lives of men which was beginning to bind them
together mentally and emotionally in a common life and action. This something
we may call religion. It was not a simple or logical something, it was a tangle
of ideas about commanding beings and spirits, about gods, about all sorts
of ‘musts’ and ‘must-nots’. Like all other human matters, religion has grown.
It must be clear from what has gone before that primitive man—much less his
ancestral apes and his ancestral Mesozoic mammals—could have had no idea of God
or religion; only very slowly did his brain and his powers of comprehension
become capable of such general conceptions. Religion is something that has
grown up with and through human association, and God has been and is still
being discovered by man…Hitherto a social consciousness had been asleep and not
even dreaming in human history. Before it awakened, it produced nightmares.”
Wells makes the fascinating observation that the appearance
of civilization and temples are simultaneous in history. “It was in the early
temples that the records and tallies of events were kept and that writing
began. And knowledge was there.” It was there that people put their trust for a
good crop, or health, or a better life for their children. People invested in
the temple, it drew the creativity and intelligence of the community, and
people paid homage and dues to it of a substantial kind. It was the wealth of
the village. While the common people worked out in the fields and toiled in
mind-numbing, exhausting labor, the priests had leisure and sanction to think
at a more complex level. This does not necessarily imply that the priests and
religious leaders were always conscious of deception or manipulation, but they
were in a position of power, privilege, and convenience, and the lower level of
their culture could have no integral part in the ideation and decision-making
of the priests because they believed, and contributed to the priests’ belief,
that the temple leaders were part of a higher order of beings and therefore
completely justified and inscrutable in how they handled their responsibilities
as community rulers par excellence. The disparity would only increase over
time, with an exaggerated intensity during crisis or war.
As civilization advanced, the administrative/political tasks
of the community became specialized beyond the interests or abilities of the
priest, and ultimately separated out the role of a king; and the priest and
king led the community together, albeit with frequent clashes. As people
settled into civilized life under these authorities, free from constant nomadic
wandering, hunger, war, and fear, there was a certain sacrifice that had to be
made. “A certain freedom and a certain equality passed out of human life when
men ceased to wander. Men paid in liberty and they paid in toil, for safety,
shelter, and regular meals.” The road to stability with a 3-meal plan, within a
sphere of limited freedom, has been slow and arduous. “All animals—and man is
no exception—begin life as dependents. Most men never shake themselves loose
from the desire for leading and protection. Most men accept such conditions as
they are born to, without further question.”
It is interesting to see the development of the
back-and-forth conflict between the settled/civilized, and the nomads, which
Wells imputes to a fundamental difference in mentality and practices between
the two types who attempt in different ways to reconcile freedom with
civilization. “It seems as inevitable that voyaging should make men free in
their minds as that settlement within a narrow horizon should make men timid
and servile.” Rome, we know, fell to the nomadic ‘barbarians’: Visigoths in
Spain, Lombards in Italy, Anglos/Saxons in England, Celts in Scotland and
Ireland, Vandals in Tunisia, and Franks in France. Then the Monguls came from
Asia, and gave Eurasia a spanking like it had never experienced. Wells
addresses the ending of the era of nomad-city conflict:
“For thousands of years the settled civilized peoples…seem
to have developed their ideas and habits along the line of worship and personal
subjection, and the nomadic peoples theirs along the line of personal
self-reliance and self-assertion. Naturally enough, under the circumstances,
the nomadic peoples were always supplying the civilizations with fresh rulers
and new aristocracies. That is the rhythm of all early history.”
The cycles of
invasion, settlement, opulence, decadence, and fresh conquest continued until a
new blend of civilized people came about who were zealous for their freedoms
while committed to an idea of social collaboration and security.
The industrial revolution was another watershed in the rise
of equalitarian ideals and human progress in terms of, well, people not killing
each other so much. It is very interesting to read Wells’ differentiation
between the mechanical revolution and the industrial revolution, both of which
happened simultaneously in the late 18th/early 19th
century first in England, and later in Western Europe and the United States.
Though this era is usually referred to simply as the Industrial Revolution, Wells
is emphatic in helping the reader understand that a mechanical or technological
revolution, with new and improved machines for production of goods and
efficiency of labor, was not the same thing as an industrial revolution,
although it may influence or be influenced by the latter, including new ways to
structure labor and financial processes. The factory method, for instance, came before the actual new-fangled machines
and consisted of a new division of collective labor, “herding poor people into
establishments to work collectively for their living.” But there was a definite
redeeming value to an industrial revolution’s concurrence with a mechanical
revolution. Because machine power was being harnessed to do the work of human
beings, it became more necessary to educate the common man to secure
‘industrial efficiency’, and his intelligence was slowly distinguished from and
valued above the muscle and drudgework of manual labor which was left to the
machine-works. This higher valuation of
the common laborer didn’t happen immediately (read any Dicken’s novel for a
sense of how the immediate confusion the machines brought with them precipitated
much suffering and death until their role was better understood), but it was
only a matter of time before the human asset was clearly seen as wasted
potential when competing with machine labor. “If, for a generation or so,
machinery had to wait it’s turn in the mine, it is simply because for a time
men were cheaper than machinery”, and, I would add, men, women and children
were better understood, traditionally entrenched, and more readily available
for the moment. Wells even dares to imagine some dubious benefit to children involved
in factory labor who were always obligated to find what work they could to
support their family, but now could do it in an environment which would make
child-labor in general more “systematic, conspicuous, and scandalous.” This is
an instance in which the industrial changes “challenged the quickening human
conscience.” The industrial revolution,
as opposed to the mechanical revolution, would have happened regardless of
coal, steam and new machines, but without the machines it may have shared a
similar end as the social and financial developments (revolutions) of the later
years of the Roman Republic in “dispossessed free cultivators, gang labor,
great estates, great financial fortunes, and a socially destructive financial
process.”
Wells had such a unique way of summarizing a culture’s
beginnings and meanings. I felt like I was learning some historical lessons for
the first time, even with narratives that I had believed I was thoroughly
familiar with. The customs of ancient Egypt, which I have always viewed as
highly creative and idealistic in many ways, he characterized as mostly
practical and unimaginative, and even their approach to an afterlife was
supremely pragmatic in that they primarily helped the deceased prepare essentials
for the next part of a journey. For them, metaphysics was a packing list.
When commenting on the early history of Israel, Wells continued
to shoot straight about the ‘Holy Land’, although it was clear he was cognizant
of the possibility of offending religious readers. “[The story of Israel’s
civil wars] is a tale frankly barbaric…For three centuries the life of the
Hebrews was like the life of a man who insists upon living in the middle of a
busy thoroughfare, and is consequently being run over constantly by omnibuses
and motor-lorries…The plain fact of the Bible narrative is that the Jews went
to Babylon barbarians, and came back civilized. They went a confused and
divided multitude, with no national self-consciousness; they came back with an
intense and exclusive national spirit.” Why did Wells care about what happened
with this small nation of people? Because he saw in it a seed of something far
greater that would one day grow so large and global that it would ignite the
passion and imagination of all people in the world to see themselves as part of
something larger, and this theme of world unity would be later spearheaded by
Jesus of Nazareth himself.
“The jealous pettiness that disfigures the earlier tribal
ideas of God gives place to a new idea of a god of universal righteousness…From
this time onward there runs through human thought, now weakly and obscurely,
now gathering power, the idea of one rule in the world, and of a promise and
possibility of an active and splendid peace and happiness in human affairs.
From being a temple religion of the old type, the Jewish religion becomes, to a
large extent, a prophetic and creative religion of a new type…Two thousand four
hundred years ago, and six or seven or eight thousand years after the walls of
the first Sumerian cities arose, the ideas of the moral unity of mankind and of
a world peace had come into the world.”
It is very evident that Wells loved the dirty, bold,
revolutionary Jesus that believed in universal peace and preached a united
kingdom of peoples of all types in which there were no lower class citizens.
But much in the same way that Gautama Buddha, who left his palace to mingle
with the poor and speak about earthly peace, has been transfigured into a
teacher of metaphysics and detached escapism—a “stiff squatting figure, the gilded idol of
later Buddhism”—so Jesus has been emasculated by an attempt to make him and his
down-to-earth, revolutionary teaching more palatable. “The lean and strenuous
personality of Jesus is much wronged by the unreality and conventionality that
a mistaken reverence has imposed upon his figure in modern Christian art. Jesus
was a penniless teacher, who wandered about the dusty sun-bit country of Judea,
living upon casual gifts of food; yet he is always represented clean, combed,
and sleek, in spotless raiment, erect, and with something motionless about him
as though he was gliding through the air. This alone has made him unreal and
incredible to many people who cannot distinguish the core of the story from the
ornamental and unwise additions of the unintelligently devout.”
The core teachings of Jesus as propagated by Christians
certainly took at turn by the 4th century CE. The Roman Emperor
Constantine was brilliant in taking advantage of the passion and
solidarity represented in the Christian faith to unite the
empire. He is cited by Wells as being extremely authoritarian and
autocratic, but he shrewdly harnessed the energy of a movement that was
obviously a force greater than his politics alone could muster. The First
Council Of Nicaea was an opportunistic attempt by Constantine to increase
this solidarity because theological rifts were diminishing the swell of
religious fervor he wished to tap. He was a pagan following after the
Roman pantheon of gods, and his involvement in the council was a major conflict
of interest, though it was overlooked in his day and in our own by many traditions
that refuse to be uprooted from his council’s decisions. The church leaders
wanted stringency of doctrine, while the Emperor wanted more
political power through unity. He probably would have
proclaimed vampirism as the official Roman religion if they
would all have agreed on that! Constantine most likely couldn't care less about
Christianity as a personal awakening but more as a “unifying moral force.” He was
a shrewd autocrat, and established church council meetings to “stamp out
controversy and impose a dogmatic creed upon all believers” which would stop
the doctrinal fighting and give him free reign to make peremptory decisions,
“free from opposition and criticism.” The church councils all amount to what
Wells keenly labels a “rough summons to unanimity” to establish the authority
of the emperor.
In general Wells actually treats religious history very
fairly and sympathetically, and sees in religious expansion a growth of
education, a concept of unity, and a dispossessing of social orders and
political systems that had grown defunct.
“Throughout all its variations and corruptions, Christianity
has never completely lost the suggestion of a devotion to God’s commonweal that
makes the personal pomps of monarchs and rulers seem like the insolence of an
overdressed servant, and the splendors and gratifications of wealth like the waste
of robbers. No man living in a community which such a religion as Christianity
or Islam has touched can be altogether a slave; there is an ineradicable
quality in these religions that compels men to judge their masters and to
realize their own responsibility for the world.”
Muslims, for instance, conquered and ruled in some areas
which were quite happy for the change in government, and fundamentalism may
have helped to provide strict order and consistency until a people felt a secure
enough foundation beneath them to be able to make changes and explore new ideas.
Islam offered a sense of equality “that made the believing negro the equal of
the Caliph” and Islamic societies were “more free from widespread cruelty and
social oppression than any society had ever been in the world before.” That is
not to say that oppression and tyranny wasn’t a problem, especially for those
who resisted Islam, Christianity, and other invading religions; but Wells sees a
lot of meaning in the timing of religions and revolutions. Even the Papacy of
the12th/13th century he viewed as a “first clearly conscious attempt
to provide such a government [of universal peace] to the [entire] world”,
though he believed the buttresses of ancient religious forms would eventually
fall away so that “communities of faith and obedience” could grow into
adulthood as “communities of knowledge and will.”
The true wealth of this outline is in the way Wells
interprets, and not merely reports, history. He has such a great balanced
perspective, and has a good idea of what it all means. His imagination is
profound, and often he seems not only informed, but, dare I say, prophetic.
He’s as much concerned with the ‘why’ of history, and the ‘what now’, as he is any
dry fact. History is not information for Wells, it is inspiration and a loud
clarion of warning. He looks at ancient Israel and sees a world peace that is
the moon half-hid by the clouds of religious forms. He refuses to revere, only
appreciate, the works attributed to Homer. Of Plato and Aristotle he marks the
quintessence of bravery and consistency. He says of them, “[Aristotle] was
terribly sane and luminous…Plato says in effect: ‘Let us take hold of life and
remodel it’; this soberer successor [Aristotle says]: ‘Let us first know more
of life and meanwhile serve and use the king.’ It was not so much a
contradiction as an immense qualification of the master.” In Alexander The
Great he sees a garish façade (“that precipitate wrecker of splendid
possibilities”) eclipsing the light of his brilliant luminary of a father,
Philip, who did most of the work towards Greek unification, and trained his
military in the use of cavalry charges, catapults, and artillery preparation. He
was disgusted with the return of the ‘red eyes of the ancestral ape’ in the
Punic Wars between Rome and Carthage, of which he says, “The history of the
Second and Third Punic Wars (between 218 and 146 BCE), it is plain, is not the
history of perfectly sane peoples…the true spirit of the age is shown in the
eager examination for signs and portents of the still quivering livers of those
human victims who were sacrificed in Rome during the panic before the battle of
Telamon.” That, along with slavery, incensed Wells enough to write, “If
republican Rome was the first of modern self-governing national communities,
she was certainly the ‘Neanderthal’ form of them.” He was also unimpressed with
the exaggerated stability of the later Roman Empire, and attributes the modern
well-faring reputation of Rome as mostly legend. The Crusades were a joke, with
states kings and popes waging crusades against each other (I laughed out loud
when reading this for the first time)! In his perspective, the later European
‘Powers’ were nations with capriciously set and flexible boundaries which
changed constantly forming ‘entirely fictitious unities’. The scuffle over North American ground is
highly embarrassing to all nations involved in the power/money grab, and all are
incriminated for the annihilation and oppression of native groups they came
into contact with.
He wasn’t a big fan of the Apostle Paul for turning
Christianity back to a priestly-atonement idea of Christ as high priest, who
had actually freed his followers from the priestly tyranny; or of Rudyard
Kipling’s misunderstanding of Darwinian principles and literary effort to “lead
the children of the middle and upper-class British public back to the Jungle to
learn ‘the law’” which Wells’ thought amounted to a ‘might makes right’ sort of
doctrine; Lord Byron was a “doggerel satirist with the philosophy of a
man-about-town”; Sir Walter Scott wasted his powers on “regretful fiction”
recalling the romantic, chivalrous past; he wants us to get it very clear in
our heads that Napoleon was an neurotic momma’s boy (no, really) with only
intermittent strokes of genius whose disastrous career obviously nauseates
Wells as “an interruption, a reminder of latent evils, a thing like the
bacterium of some pestilence…Even regarded as a pestilence, he was not of
supreme rank”; and I’m sure Wells would surely have included Hitler on his
black list, if he had been around long enough to see that young toadstool blossom.
His favorites in history seem to be Jesus and Buddha, who he
believed inaugurated freedom from caste systems, and religious/political oppression;
12th century German Emperor Frederick II who challenged and
excoriated the Pope, and brought together people of different religions in his
court; Roger Bacon in the 13th century, forerunner of William of
Occam; 16th century essayists Montaigne and Rabelais; Robert Owen,
the founder of experimental socialist methods and communities in the early 19th
century; Shakespeare, of course; Charles Darwin who connected us to the
significance of our pre-historical roots; Lincoln who bore the weight of the
world on his shoulders to attain higher ideals of human fraternity and peace;
and President Woodrow Wilson who worked to grow the embryo of the idealistic United
Nations in the form of the League Of Nations.
Wells reminds us again and again that human development is
extremely complex, but we have come a long way. Everything we see in
civilization’s history is only the tip of the iceberg. “Half the duration of
human civilization and the keys to all its chief institutions are to be found before Sargon I [king of the
old-Assyrian empire 1920 BCE].” That’s why he spent a lot of time narrating prehistoric
human evolution and tracing the branching out of the human species.
Wells sees that social unity is a primary goal that has been
slow in coming, but is coming nonetheless. “[Humanity is] feeling its way
blindly towards some linking and subordinating idea to save it from the pains
and accidents of mere individuality.” And though progress has been long in
coming, it could also go out in the blink of an eye. It is apparent near the
end of the Outline that Wells’ bubble was officially burst at the outset of WWI,
and perhaps it is fortunate he wasn’t around long enough to see the terrors of
WWII, which would probably have pushed him to the brink of despair. He states
that up until the beginning of WWI it was possible to look at the world and see
that much progress had been made, “interrupted but always resumed, towards
peace and freedom.” But the illusion shattered, and Wells sensed the extremely
fragile nature of human progress, “Progress [is] not automatic. It must be
fought for, not even the most elementary rights were secure.”
Wells continually circles back to three areas in which
progress has often been delayed, but has struggled on consistently,
precariously, and necessarily.
1. Language
Language has been a key to the advancement of civilization
and intellectual development for many reasons. Wells states that language has a
far greater purpose than merely signaling our intentions or desires to another.
Words and language helps to solidify our thought. “Speech gave man a mental
handhold for consecutive thought, and a vast enlargement of their powers of
co-operation.” Without language, thoughts and ideas faded away with faintly
imprinting intuitions, and fell prey to the phantasmagoric feelings of the
moment which were only ‘true’ as long as they lasted. A concept of truth or
reality beyond transitory emotional experience was easily shoved behind the
freshest sensations of pain or elation. Over time, language as ‘mental
handholds’ grew more impermeable and developed a substantial thought life for
individuals, and the effect increased cumulatively in community. “Human
thinking became a larger operation in which hundreds of minds in different
places and in different ages could react upon one another; it became a process
constantly more continuous and sustained.”
The 20th century philosopher Susan Langer wrote
in her essay Language And Thought
that the purpose of symbolic language is to “bring an object to mind” and
“transforming all direct experiences into imagery.” Words as symbols spoken or written add
permanence to quickly dissipating thoughts, and help to record the quality and
behavior of the objective world by steadily monitoring it across temporal
changes. Language, then, is humanity’s notepad and file system for experiences
that can be drawn upon in the future for helpful advice. One can understand why
this was such a prodigious achievement that is enough on its own to separate
man from the animals.
2. Large Scale Communication and Education
Once language developed, one would think that community-wide
communication would be valued and increased at a rapid pace. Not so. It took a
long time for societies to develop methods and understand the importance of
communication, especially communication with what was considered superfluous
peasantry. We must not forget that most people, for a long time, “knew nothing,
except for a few monstrous legends, of the rest of the world in which one lived.
We know more today, indeed, of the world of 600 BCE than any single living
being knew at that time.” Imagine the ramifications of an inability to share
information and failing to bring your citizens up to speed on societal events
on a regular basis. It may be argued that an uncommunicative autocracy is
efficient, but it isn’t most effective in the long run. Writing, railroads, steam engines and the
like eventually provided the tools necessary, but the understanding of the
importance of communication to all citizens which would speed along technology was
delayed. The failure of the Roman Empire can be reduced to a few factors, one
of the most gaping holes being the absence of “any organization for the
increase, development, and application of knowledge”, and this included the
neglect to expand the road system that the Roman Republic had begun in earnest.
In contrast to this neglect Wells applauds the early United States efforts to
connect and inform all of its territories, without which he believes The U.S.
would have become another disunited Europe.
State-wide education as a close corollary to communication
and was also set aside for millennia as a matter that didn’t concern the state
because its dividends were slow in coming, and mostly not recognized at all. Wells
admits his amazement again and again that the world continued so long without
taking seriously the need to instruct the masses. From the second century BCE
writers and thinkers were commenting on the lack of education for the common
man, and yet no one did anything about it. Until Christianity. “It was only
with the development of the great propagandist religions in the Roman world, of
which Christianity was the chief and the survivor, that the possibility of such
a systematic instruction of great masses of people became apparent in the
world.” Evangelism was, in Wells’ mind, the first real attempt of wide-scale
instruction, education, and indoctrination on any subject. Even religious
controversies sped the process along by developing competition for adherents,
though for many centuries to an unhealthy extreme. Wells goes so far as to
believe that “massive movements of the ‘ordinary people’ over considerable
areas only became possible as a result of the propagandist religions, Christianity
and Islam, and their insistence upon individual self-respect.”
Some religion-bashers see the promulgation of religion as a
bad thing in history with devastating effects even today, but in the bigger
picture, something was sparked by religion that may never have happened without
a deeply personal passion to reach large numbers of people with a message that people
felt mattered. For instance, let’s not forget the first Western printing press
published Bibles and doctrinal theses! “We may think [Christianity and Islam] did
their task of education in their vast fields of opportunity crudely or badly,
but the point of interest to us is that they did it all. Both sustained
world-wide propaganda of idea and inspiration. Both relied successfully upon
the power of the written word to link great multitudes of diverse men together
in common enterprises.” This was a huge step in human evolution.
The industrial/mechanical revolution in the late 18th
century also gave rise to an understanding of the importance of education. As
mentioned earlier in this review, the mechanical revolution prompted the more
insightful people in society to view human labor as a waste when it was
utilized for mere drudge work which a machine could accomplish more quickly and
cheaply. Education of workers from the top down became important to ensure
efficiency in industry, and from the bottom-up unionized labor began to speak
for itself and force the state to listen to the concerns of the lower classes
to be educated. The education of the masses could no longer be ignored by
forward thinking people. People were forced to view their fellows at any
station in life, not merely as a tool, but as a partner in rising above the
insensate earth and drudgery of machines to establish a unity of purpose and,
in the words of Charles Dickens, “to think of people below them as if they
really were fellow passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures
bound on other journeys.”
3. Unity
The idea of a world unity is by far the most recurrent them
in this Outline, and I believe that Wells saw this as one of the most necessary
things to work towards in any age, not the least our own. The most recent hope Wells
rejoiced over was the dawn of the League Of Nations, seed of the United Nations,
which is still far from a full realization. Wells writes like an optimist, but
he is shaken to the very core in considering the cataclysmic blows to progress.
Nevertheless, his hope is firm in humanity’s forward movement, even if that
progress is erratic and at times temporarily regressive. “The last twenty-three
centuries of history are like the efforts of some impulsive, hasty immortal to
think clearly and live rightly.”
I can see how Wells grieved to witness human beings refusing
to acknowledge the power that two minds have over one. Besides the obvious
benefit of teamwork, humanity is so much happier and fulfilled in relationships
in which each person feels expanded by connection to another being. Wells’
elegiac utterances of impatience and disappointment with the roller-coaster
progress of humanity and nature is truly striking:
“It is barely a matter of seventy generations between
ourselves and Alexander; and between ourselves and the savage hunters our
ancestors, who charred their food in the embers or ate it raw, intervene some
four or five hundred generations. There is not much scope for the modification
of a species [in] four or five hundred generations. Make men and women only
sufficiently jealous or fearful or drunken or angry, and the hot red eyes of
the cavemen will glare out at us today. We have writing and teaching, science
and power; we have tamed the beasts and schooled the lightning; but we are
still only shambling towards the light. We have tamed and bred the beasts, but
we have still to tame and breed ourselves.”
Nations beginning to think as one people may seem like a
step in the right direction, but even this can produce a false sense of
accomplishment, given that a ‘nation’ is a concocted notion designed to create
artificial boundaries which are always shifting. Wells’ cynicism here is clear,
and his words are a blinding light of revelation to the absurdity of chauvinistic
patriotism:
“We may suggest that a nation is in effect any assembly,
mixture, or confusion of people which is either afflicted by or wishes to be
afflicted by a foreign office of its own, in order that it should behave
collectively as if its needs, desires, and vanities were beyond comparison more
important than the general welfare of humanity…[when in reality] the affairs
and interests of every modern community extend to the uttermost parts of the
earth.”
But even state-wide unity, not to mention global, is
extremely difficult to realize. Wells, a socialist in the broad sense of the
word (would anyone with a perspective as sophisticated as his misuse the word
of socialism in a restricted, specific sense as manifested in any of the myriad
regimes and expressions of an ideal in an un-ideal world?), pressed for
‘oneness’ and human solidarity more than anything, yet he realized that there
are no easy answers to vast economic disparities regarding property, currency,
and international collaboration. Ownership is a huge obstacle to overcome, but the
very point of society is that it challenges a less effective, isolated
individualism. Wells was sufficiently stirred on this subject to say quite
profoundly, “Society, therefore, is from its beginnings the mitigation of
ownership.” However, he wasn’t a communist, or what he called a “primitive
socialist”, who wanted to abolish property. People in time began to see that
“Property was not one simple thing, but a great complex of ownerships of
different values and consequences, that many things (such as one’s body, the
implements of an artist, clothing, tooth-brushes) are very profoundly and
incurably personal property.” How do we decide what is mine and what is ours?
Every society in every time will decide a little differently, but it must be
decided for any civilization to make progress.
Wells felt like one of the greatest blows to stagnant
thought and old religion which was fast becoming the moribund foundation for human
solidarity was struck by the critical thought introduced by the discoveries of
Charles Darwin. It was good news for the world, though some struggled with how
to push forward through the immediate sense of a loss of faith. Soon, it became
apparent that a new faith must replace the old.
“The new biological science [Darwinism] was bringing nothing
constructive as yet to replace the old moral stand-bys. A real demoralization
ensued…Prevalent peoples at the close of the nineteenth century believed that
they prevailed by virtue of the Struggle for Existence, in which the strong and
cunning get the better of the weak and confiding...They soon got beyond the
first crude popular misconception of Darwinism, the idea that every man is for
himself alone.”
Now, on to some good meaty controversy about H.G. Wells. Many
people, especially in his day, were/are pretty irked with Wells. The writer of
this article for instance: http://www.discovery.org/a/516. Frankly, it’s not badly
written, and it shows how much C.S. Lewis felt compelled to dedicate of his
Space Trilogy to responding to Wells’ ideas (even G.K. Chesterton wrote The Everlasting
Man in response to Wells’ decentralized role of religion in history).
It appears from this article that Wells went through phases
in his life in which he overcommitted to his understanding and persuasions
about the future of humanity, and proposed some radical and
racist measures to establish world peace and more specifically a world
state. However, I did not gather ANY of this from Well’s Outline. I can attest
to the fact that his ideas in this work, though at times unpleasant to admit,
were, as far as I have understood, completely egalitarian, compassionate,
selfless, and pretty fairly balanced. I see there only an authentic concern
for individuals and humanity, not merely an abstract and detached regard for
humanity as an idea as the article appears to contend. Wells even writes,
“The idea of the world-State, the universal kingdom of righteousness of which every
living soul shall be a citizen, was already in the world two thousand years
ago, never more to leave it.”
He definitely believed our future was in our hands, and
it was up to us to care for our kind in the absence of a manifest God.
Maybe he became desperate and, as I said, overcommitted to his ideas and became
a bit fanatical, but I question whether the extent of his fanaticism was as severe
as the article claims based on other biographical information on Wells,
including the Wikipedia article about him which mentions a softening of Well’s
position towards the Jews, and his apology for pre-war statements of specific
forms of utopian strategies. Though none of Wells’ fanaticism or racism was
evident in the Outline, that is not to say that it couldn’t have been edited out
in one of the later editions; but the tenor of this work in its final form is
completely and utterly hopeful for peace for all people and all races.
It seems to me that humanists like Wells have always been criticized by
the religious right for trusting in man-made solutions, but critical theists
haven’t come close to offering any long-term solutions. Rather, they trust in a
miracle in which God makes everything right in the end, which, in my
understanding, amounts to a form of pessimism regarding humanity’s potential
for harmony. In one case you have thinkers like Wells that hope for a better
end and are doing everything in their power to help bring people around to try
and actualize their possibilities; and on the other hand you have those who hold
no hope whatsoever that we can make a better world, and they expect God to come
and do it for us. The latter appears to be an abdication of responsibility
while criticizing those who toil and bleed for what may be a noble dream. Who’s
the more valiant and honorable? Granted,
any human solution will be finite, short-sighted, and fraught with problems and
setbacks...but will we use that as an excuse to close our eyes to the suffering
around us and neglect to plan for the reduction of long-term evil because that
is humanistic and an abstraction? I think Wells got his hands dirty trying to
care for his fellow human beings in distress...and some find his courage
as offensive simply because he may be doomed to failure? Who's proud? Who's
fanatical? Lewis and Chesterton were brilliant, to be sure. But so was Wells.
Pre-written and written history is so vast. It blows my
mind. Some experts say that we can only picture a small number of separate,
concrete units in our mind at one time—I think that number is ten—and the rest
is abstraction and generalization. There are so many factors to consider in
historical surveys. What factors are we classifying in history as significant,
and what myriad elements have those factors combined with in their time, and
over the eons, that adulterate the isolated fact, making it a mélange of
influences, or an altogether different thing from the original fact? Billions
of data are interacting with billions of data, and those billions upon billions
of results interacting with old and new data to form objects, acts, events,
people, ideas, cultures, civilizations and worlds. Where does one datum end and
another begin? Where do we draw the lines for meaningful memories and studies,
and if we could draw the lines of discrete facts and interactions, how do we
hold it all in our little mind? History is infinitely complex, as is each of
our experience in history, and the best we can do is redraw our internal maps
and strategies using the most significant and reliable information as we can receive
and understand. This is one of the reasons Wells titled his book as an Outline,
a bird’s-eye-view, which, if we’re being honest, is the best any of us can do.
Even as an outline the book in places became bogged down in names, dates, and
deeds, much of which couldn’t be well-described for lack of space. The amount
of material one has to summarily skip over is in itself mind-numbing. I’m sure
the decision about what to include may not have been nearly has difficult to determine
as what to exclude.
In the end, Wells has hope for humanity, but he’s not a
blind optimist…not after the World Wars. He has been criticized over the years
for his materialistic notions, socialist leanings, and utopian ideals, some of
which he gave verbal apologies for, but his Outline Of History is a very
balanced and cautiously optimistic approach to hope and progress. He does seem
to understand the tenuous and fragile thing peace and intelligence is, and I
think he was doing his utmost to help the world realize its fullest human
potential. “Modern civilization…is an embryo, or it is a thing doomed to
die…our present civilization may be no more than one of those crops farmers sow
to improve their land by the fixation of nitrogen from the air; it may have
grown only that, accumulating certain traditions, it may be ploughed into the
soil again for better things to follow.”
I did, however, disagree with Wells on one issue that I can
think of. He hammered some philosophy as dreamy, and he referred several times
to the possibility of a pure pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
With one sweeping gesture of disdain he condemned the whole Romantic era in
literature as a “refuge of minds passionately anxious not to think.” He said he
agreed with R.L. Stevenson’s lampoon of himself as a “mental prostitute”, and
he said of European theater, novels and romances that they had a “disposition
to waste time agreeably.” But I see in the Romantic era a respite and
rejuvenation of passion, desire, and contemplative choice to fuel new empirical
pursuits! Leave our passion behind, and we risking becoming instruments of
someone else’s passion that has not yet been thrown out with the bathwater. I can
understand one finding science to be intrinsically rewarding as an adventure
full of thrilling discoveries and healthy challenges, but the thrills and mastery
ARE the rewards. Knowledge for the sake of knowledge—without mention of the
emotional satisfaction brought by the act of acquisition of knowledge which
alone brings a sense of fulfillment—is nonsense. “As scientific men tell us
continually, and as ‘practical’ men still refuse to learn, it is only when
knowledge is sought for her own sake that she gives rich and unexpected gifts
in any abundance to her servants.” Well, then, the “rich and unexpected gifts”
sort of rule out ‘knowledge for her own sake’ now don’t they? We’re not robots.
We are human beings who desire, and sensible ideas are not ever sought after by
ANYONE if they don’t satisfy a desire somewhere. Maybe he should have
emphasized the need for people to make of science and knowledge better tools to
get us all what we want, but to pretend that the Great Ones were great simply
because they were will-less, emotionless readers and experimenters is missing
the point entirely. What’s worse, emotional detachment in the scientific method
can bring murderous results and a lack of empathy may have caused more
suffering in the world than too much emotional involvement. Why or how would
people ever work towards something like world unity without a strong human
desire for relationships, and a very refined yet powerful empathy? “Pure
science” (‘purified’ from our humanity?) won’t take us there. Only acts of will
and love, and utilizing knowledge as
a tool, can bring positive change. Wells, did you learn nothing from writing
your history of the world?
So, in the big picture, have we as humans come far? I think
Wells’ answer is yes, but not without loss. His wrap-up to his chapter ending
WWI is probably how he ultimately tallies the results of wins/losses throughout
history, and how far he could see from where he last stood. “Nearly everyone
had lost too much and suffered too much to rejoice with any fervor.” Well said.
But not nearly as well said as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s (who Wells considered
out-of-touch with the other romantics) brave expression of hope in his poem, To The Autumnal Moon:
“Ah such is Hope! As changeful and as fair
Now dimly peering on the wistful night;
Now hid behind the dragon-winged Despair:
But soon emerging in her radiant might
She o’er the sorrow-clouded breast of Care
Sails, like a meteor kindling in its flight.”
