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.
Father Jonathan Morris has written something similar on his blog at foxnews.com
Too bad the professor forgot to mention the organized killing perpetrated by Communism which netted over 100 million deaths in peace time (60 million in the USSR, 30 million in China, 5 million in SE Asia and the rest in Africa and Latin America). At least if one call life under Communism peaceful…
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.
I suppose then that we should forget about the War Between the States, the First World War and the Second World War. Let us forget about the Battle of the Somme, where over 10,000 men died in a single day. Let us forget about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of the awesome might of the atom bomb which, if unleashed upon the world, could snuff out western civilization as we know it.
In truth any new weapons technology brings with it greater loss of life, until we either find a way to refine or counter it. When armies are just throwing bombs randomly at one another, then many, many people are going to die. When he can created a “smart” bomb that can find its way toward its target, than fewer people will die. And if we can find a way to shoot bombs out of the sky before they hit us, than even fewer and fewer people will die. This, I think, is why our most contemporary wars seem to result in less deaths than those in the former half of the 20th century.
Also, is our “developed” world really so much less violent than the “undeveloped” world? How many died in “peace” under the various “developed” Communist regimes? How many die in “peace” every year in the United States, where children are routinely slaughtered in their mother’s wombs, where the sick and the infirm are butchered in the name of “compassion” where gangs of children roam the streets of our cities murdering innocent bystanders as well as one another? Did not “developed” Europe begin the First World War? Did not “developed” Germany start the Second World War? I wonder.
There’s so many predictions that have been made about the future, one is bound to at least appear similar. But I have read so many false predictions about the future in the past, compared to that single apparently accurate past. So I am very skeptical about any predictions of the future. I think it comes down to pure chance of who will turn out to be right.
Well, we know that Arthur C. Clarke was not accurate in his predictions (2001, 2010, etc.). But then again, how many accurate atheist prophets have there been?
Randolph,
You hit the nail on the head! It’s very sophisticated for a professor to pontificate about wars abroad while millions of children are murdered in otherwise peaceful countries.
I’m a tad tired of listening to the same litanies about the horrors of war as though there weren’t any organized killing outside of it. Communism rule and abortion proved otherwise and actually more deadly.