Last weekend I started reading The
Last and First Men by Olaf Stapleton. The book is a future history written from the perspective of one of the last men in a far distant future age. The book doesn’t have a conventional plot but is written like a history book, telling you what happened in different ages.
The opening section–the only part I’ve gotten through just yet–makes for particularly interesting reading, because it covers the period between when the book was written (1930) and the present, so we get to see Olaf Stapleton’s imaginary history of our own period.
Of course, actualy history didn’t unfold the way that Stapleton envisioned–and he knew it wouldn’t before he started writing–but it’s fascinating to see how much he got right. Even if the elements didn’t come together in precisely the way he envisioned, he was at least playing with the right elements that actually did–and continue to–shape our history. For example, he predicted a period of wars in Europe, leading to its decline, followed by a period in which Russia, China, and the United States were the dominant global players, with Russia dropping by the wayside, leading to tension between China and America and and eventually America as a global hyperpower and an Americanized world culture, with America being intensely resented internationally. That’s pretty close to what did happen, only the Chinese conflict has yet to be fully engaged (expect that to happen in coming decades).
Reading Stapleton’s analysis of the various forces shaping this history was quite interesting, and it made me want to read a similar analysis of what really did happen in world history.
Lo and behold, yesterday I ran across THIS ESSAY that does just that–or does a lot of it at least. It’s not an analysis so much of recent history as a whole, but it analyzes the major wars of the 20th century and what led to them.
The author–a Harvard history professor–seeks to look past the conventional explanations that are given for why large scale conflicts happen and identify the factors which really did lead to them.
For example, the author sets aside the canard that the 20th century was so bloody because we had bigger and better weapons, pointing out that many of the bloodies conflicts were fought not with WMDs but with individual and even primitive weapons.
(He also doesn’t do much more than touch on this, but at some point soon I plan on blogging about the fact that your chance of dying in a war has actually gone DOWN in the developed world–way down compared to what it is in primitive societies. The development of more powerful weapons does not–or at least has not yet–led to an increase in the percentage of people who are killed in war. Just the opposite. Thus far it’s correlated with a dramatic decrease in the likelihood that you’ll get killed in one.)
By questioning why the wars of the 20th century occurred when and where they did–as opposed to other places or the same places in other decades–the author identifies three factors that at least in recent history seem to have led to large scale wars:
1) Ethnic disintegration (that is, the falling apart of multi-ethnic societies such that the different ethnic groups become alienated from one another),
2) Economic volatility (not the same thing as poverty; he’s talking about dramatic fluctuations in the local economy, both down and up), and
3) Empires in decline (since the empire that previously kept peace in the area loses the interest or the ability to keep peace there)
Then, like Stapleton, he dusts off his own crystal ball and looks at where the next series of major conflicts are likely to errupt.
The difference is we probably won’t have to wait 75 years to see if his future history is right.
