I've been promising this one for a while now, and I appreciate your patience. I present, for your criticism, your compliments, and your solutions(?), my essay...
History
I think part of the problem with today's world is History. Let me re-phrase that: I think
most of the problem with today's world is History.
Before I get all of those History Professors and all of their associated students mad at me, let me explain.
History used to be limited by the number of stories that could be told in a man's lifetime. The farthest back anyone could remember was the "Beginning of Time". Nothing important existed. But History is still marching and events are still occurring whether there are people in that place and time with the leisure to remember it in an organized way or not. (Just ask the dinosaurs.) Oftentimes, in the early years of pre-recorded history, many stories were lost because the ones who could tell the stories were wiped out, root and branch, by invaders. (It is often said that History books are written by the winner. But I'm getting
waaaay ahead of myself.)
It was, after all, part of the way the warriors of that era conducted warfare, because they saw it as much easier to be utterly victorious over your enemies without having to watch their backs for vengeful relatives a few years down the road. Even in recent American history, there were cautionary tales of the gunfighter who was suddenly confronted with a gun-wielding teenager, demanding to meet the "Man Who Murdered My Father". In previous centuries, religious invaders pretty much warred back and forth across continents wiping out whole villages - killing all the men, enslaving the women and children and hauling them across thousands of miles to be sold to disinterested strangers. It was, after all, just the way things were done.
In the centuries Before the Common Era (BCE), even the Bible stories show the methods of warfare used by the people of those times. Anyone who has ever attended Sunday School would remember (at least vaguely) the story of the walls of Jericho. Briefly, though: The city of Jericho was protected by walls that were so strong they had never been breached. Ever. They had a good water supply (the river Jordan), an excellent strategic location, good forage and crops, and the home field advantage.
Along comes this tribe of nomads, secure in their belief that they were "Chosen by God", and they lay siege to the city. After some religious ceremonies, and some decidedly non-military maneuvering, the invading force miraculously leveled the walls with sound. They blew their horns, shouted at the top of their lungs, and (as the Bible tells it) "the walls of Jericho came tumbling down". My interest in this story begins at this point. Once the city lay vulnerable to their troops, what did this tribe do with the previous residents of Jericho, whose only fault lie in believing a different religion and just "getting in the way"?
"And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword." {Joshua 6:21, KJV}
This was standard operating procedure for most armies, up until fairly recently. Others in the Blogosphere have reported on the concept of "civilian non-combatants", and it struck me that this mentality (that civilians are to be protected in a combat zone) is a VERY recent invention. Only in the past hundred years or so has it been considered uncivilized to target those who were not perceived as a military threat. But it has become so well ingrained in the Western psyche that we have crippled ourselves by allowing our concern for "non-combatants" to influence our military planning, and the "human shields" are attempting to encourage our enemies by offering themselves up as protection for the Iraqi "non-combatants". They were welcomed gleefully, since Saddam knew that nothing else that he had in his arsenal would so much as slow us down for even a moment. It simply wasn't going to happen.
But these human shields are neither "innocent" nor "non-combatants". They just don't happen to be carrying any weapons. The few dozen troops at a SAM (Surface-to-Air Missile) site are often armed with nothing heavier than a pistol or maybe a rifle. The General Staff of the Iraqi army are probably not even carrying that much, and their junior staffers and civilian secretaries are
guaranteed to be unarmed. No one can conceivably argue that an enemy soldier is not a target, no matter how he may be armed.
But because there
is a restriction on the targeting of the innocent, it has been made a crime for military members to hide among civilians. It is so serious a crime that any enemy combatant caught wearing civilian clothing, trying to pass as a civilian, would be subject to summary execution as a spy. Which, as most people are never told, is what happened to
this guy. (He was a North Vietnamese officer, found in South Vietnam, pretending to be a civilian. He got caught. Nuff said.)
So since we can accept the idea that enemy combatants don't have to be carrying anything immediately deadly to be considered valid military targets, I will say that these people are miscalculating, based on an incomplete misunderstanding of only a very short period of our nation's history.
History has gotten too good at recording our failures. I mentioned above that the limits of History lay in the ability to pass that history on to the next generation. The cutesy little bumper sticker-like saying "Those who forget History are doomed to repeat it" misses the point that is so deeply ingrained in our understanding of the world that it is like trying to explain water to a fish.
That point is this: humans have the ability to learn from the mistake of others. The catch lies in whether the root causes of those mistakes can truly be understood while the participants are actually living through them as they occur, or whether they only become obvious in retrospect. For example, we dug into our archives and saw, in the harsh blinding spotlight of blame and failure, all the little hints and indicators that added up to the major lapses in security that permitted 19 men to take over four American airliners, and steer those aircraft into three buildings. But who among us would have seriously considered that anyone would attack us on our own soil? To use another Biblical phrase, "Pride goeth before a fall..." That day took us to our knees in grief and pain.
People automatically accept the statement that it was the bravery of the men aboard Flight 93 that caused them to sacrifice their lives for the lives of countless others. That was partly true, but it came about because the men aboard that plane had been given the chance to learn from the mistakes of others. Prior to that September morning, the role of an airplane passenger caught up in a hijacking was to sit back and passively wait to be released, either through negotiation or surprise attack by the "good guys" (such as was done by the IDF at
Entebbe).
Because of that History, mistakes were made, with the very best of intentions, by the passengers aboard the two planes that rammed the WTC towers and the one that hit the Pentagon. Through a frantic cell phone conversation, the difference between the price of passivity (being one of many thousands of deaths) and the price of active resistance (being just one of a few dozen deaths) was made clear, and it struck home to Todd Beamer that he had nothing left to lose. He knew that no matter what happened in the next few minutes, everyone aboard that airplane was going to die. He chose to save the lives of people he had never met. He gathered up those around him and chose to
take back that aircraft! God Bless Those Brave People.
The passengers that dealt with Richard "Shoe Bomber" Reid had also learned that lesson. Richard set out to get past the increased security at international airports with the purpose of destroying yet another airplane. And while he may have succeeded in getting past the still inattentive security forces at the airport overseas, the improved (and
much more paranoid) watchfulness of the passengers around him stopped him cold. He got caught. He'll never leave prison again.
But I started this with the intention of explaining how History is the main problem. Let's lay the groundwork for this by explaining the basic stages of History: Pre-Verbal, Verbal, Writing, and Storage.
Pre-Verbal was that period of our history from when our language (or proto-language, if you prefer) was more concerned with "Who" and "What" and "Where", rather than with "Why" or "How". It was only when we started to ask those two questions that we started to figure out ways to explain what people remembered. It leads inexorably to the next stage, Verbal. Any creature physically capable of verbalizing cannot help but do so, with every type of sound corresponding with a different message. Barks, hisses, chirps, tweets, songs, purrs, you name it, it is all intended to convey a message.
Verbal was the time of the Storyteller, the "One Who Remembers". Examples include the Australian Aboriginal "oral traditions" and the Bards of northern Europe. It was the time when the oldest member of the tribe was the most revered for the number of things that they knew, for the wisdom of having already survived some of the trials that the younger tribe members were going to face, and the best way to survive that threat. ("If you use a pointy stick and jab them lots of times, they will fall down dead.") Memories were the only measure of history. Memories became such a treasure to have, that those who could remember all the stories of their father and
his father gradually became a prized member of society, and in passing along the "ways things should be done", those men grew to dominate the questions of "why" and "how" with the answer of "because The Great Spirit/God/Allah/Buddha/Jahweh/Jehovah/Isis/Odin willed it to be so."
These were the shamans, the rulers of the non-military side of life, the ones who had learned that when they ground up pieces of plants and mixed them into hot water, those drinks could be used to magically cure headaches. Since many of them realized that anyone could find and use these powders and herbs, they used lots of ceremonies and grand gestures to make it seem more difficult than it actually was.
Today, we might humorously refer to these men as "witch doctors", but they were the scientists of their age and the priests of ours. They read the bones and entrails, foretold the future, and "prayed for divine revelation", attributing what we would consider to be natural phenomenon (lightning, thunder, floods, earthquakes) to the "gods" (and Their children). Questioning their edicts would be cause for punishments (from "curses" and banishment or worse to a ritual death) for committing a "sin".
At about that time, the very first artists started trying to reproduce the world around them, so that they could brag. Scratching images in the dirt may have helped to impress those gathered around that particular fire, but one frustrated warrior might have gotten the idea that if he could find a way to deliberately stain a piece of leather, perhaps with berry juice and animal blood, he could just pull the leather out of his pouch instead of having to work so hard to impress the ladies every night. But leathers wear out and fade, or (not infrequently) just rot away. That was possibly the very first purpose behind
painting the walls of caves, so that the warriors could point to a particular image and say, "Here is how our warriors captured and killed the great beast. See how brave we were!"
The shaman then took over the method and used it to tell the tales of the ancestors and how they interacted with the animals and the gods. In the shaman's tales, the warrior could be elsewhere, or even else
when, but the images on the wall began ingraining the concept of "image = story" into the common man's mindset. The caves became sacred places of story-telling, as the masks and re-enactments and bits and pieces of the ancestor's belongings (and, eventually, bit and pieces of the ancestors themselves) became a part of the multimedia display that was nothing more than the very first attempt at a permanent version of History.
Civilization had begun. People began to band together in groups larger than immediate families. They became groups that were so large that they could subdivide a bit, and pick the best hunters to do all the hunting, the best gatherers to gather, the best spearmakers to making spears, and so on. The younger people could tend a few herd animals, and help to watch over the very youngest. People began to specialize and look to those who were the best and brightest among them. People also began to trade and co-mingle belongings, safe in the knowledge that if they needed "that really good leather-scraping stone", it was in the next cave over, being used by their grandfather's youngest son's wife's sister.
Mathematics started at about the same time as the alphabet. The idea of trade began when (for the first time) the tribe produced more of a product (food, good wood, strong oxen) than it needed for its own uses. A means was found to trade the tribe's excess for something it may have needed or wanted from a nearby tribe. Some simple means of keeping track of the resulting Commerce had to be found. The concept of "image = symbol" began for the very first time. Add in the realization that almost all alphabets (even English) are nothing more than phonetically based lists, and the idea that "image = sound" becomes an easy mental leap. Once knowledge could be passed as a series of spell-sounds (letters) which combine to make words, written down, it was no longer required to go to the man who knew the story. You could read for yourself about how Igg and Ook had killed the great brontosaurus.
Writing became the ability to transfer information with ease between the generations and to other tribes. It allowed for knowledge to be combined, and built upon, and copied down. Various methods were used to copy this information, from the heiroglyphs of ancient Egypt to cuneiform writing to chiseling into stone, on into using ink on leather and papyrus. Cheaper and longer lasting inks were created. The first things written down were the common myths from the era of the Verbal Tradition. The Legends of Gilgameth and Beowulf. Of how the world was created, and how powerful that tribe's personal Diety was (especially when compared with the
other tribe's Diety). Basic rules of polite behavior. Warning tales of morality and virtue. Punishments for various crimes against others. You know, "the care and feeding of civilization" kinda stuff.
The major problem with the collectors of such kinds of knowledge is that the materials used in writing this knowledge were volatile. They were subject to decay, to being devoured by insects, and
worse. Only in the past few decades has society taken any serious strides in preserving the printed information in forms that will not decay with time and weather. CD-ROMs. Acid-free paper. Climate-control. Cyclic Redundancy Checks.
Which defines the present stage,
Storage. I am under no illusions that this is by any means the "top of the ladder", nor that this is as high as mankind has come in the past. I am perfectly willing to admit that my imagination cannot postulate the shape of the world even so much as fifty years in the future (one I am quite likely to see for myself), never mind 500 or more.
The Information Age means that anyone with a computer has access (more or less instantaneously) to any information or data that has been uploaded to the web. Anything that has ever been added to the sum total of information known to mankind is frozen, perfectly preserved. It's just a matter of finding it.
There is just one problem. Any attempt to go back and study about a culture (even one that is no longer existing) is going to find that the written history will have been biased by the fact that the ones writing it will always portray themselves as "being on the side of the angels", and that any attempt to counter that information will only be looking at it from a differing point of view that is equally distorted, but in another direction. One cannot know about the day-to-day gestalt of ancient Rome without going into trade alliances and military disputes and the worldview of all the subjugated people that actually survived the encounter, and one can't understand
them without going into their history and alliances and military, etc., etc., and on to the next
ad infinitum.
And just because it might be possible to understand about a small portion of history does not necessarily lead in any logical fashion to the next part of History. Given the conditions that existed when Ronald Reagan left office, it might be easy to see (even though only in retrospect) that the Soviet Union might be on the verge of collapse. But did anyone at that time ever expect that it would take less than four relatively pain-free years later to have reduced a once mighty Empire, that very same Empire made into a friend and trading partner, a divided Germany made whole again, people dancing atop the rubble of the wall that once separated a continent, and NATO expanded to include former members of the Warsaw Pact (that group whose sole purpose was to deter NATO)? Not even the most optimistic of estimates allowed for such a speedy transition.
It has been said that "Hindsight is 20/20." This is true, but because of all the millions of bits of data available to modern man, there is no way to judge the importance of any given piece of information, except after the fact. Most often the importance can only be seen when looking back over decades rather than just a few weeks.
A hundred years ago you might have been made aware of the fact that some guy and his brother had managed to create a machine that could actually get off the ground and fly - just like a bird! -
any time it wanted to. The wisest minds of the age had widely proclaimed it a worthless toy that would never be more than a waste of money. How much weight would you have given to claims that this new machine would have an incalculable impact on societies all around the world?
Just over sixty years ago, a team had managed to create the
world's first real computer. It was called the 'UNIVersal Automatic Computer', or UNIVAC I. Assuming that you knew of this great-great-grandfather of the modern computer, and with important people saying things like "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" {Thomas Watson, Chairman of IBM, 1943}, would you have believed that you would be reading this essay on your own personal computer, having found it on a world-wide network of computers numbered into the hundreds of millions? That was just sixty years ago.
Just thirty years ago, every telephone in the world was attached to a wall plug. Now there are phones with satellite access that can be folded up and stuffed into a pocket. (Shades of
Star Trek!) And as recently as ten years ago, the Internet was such a new thing that it was rare to see a company include a web site address on their commercials, and you could thoroughly confuse people by referring to your e-mail account ("Your
what?") Now there are people I communicate with from countries and places I've never even been, and large companies simply
cannot survive without their IT Departments.
All this information is available to us, but we have to know which parts are important (and which are just passing fads) to know how society will be shaped from today's situation.
Which, finally, bring us to my main point. History keeps us at each other's throats because of that permanent storage. Arabs hate the Jews for reasons that go back thousands of years, to that original assault on Jericho, despite the fact that a careful study of that area's history showed that those citizens of ancient Jericho had invaded and taken the land from yet another tribe, whose name has been lost to history. Archaeological digs in the region show at least three different cultures (and as many as
ten in some areas), who were wiped out to the last goat by a new arrival with superior forces, who were only to be wiped out in their turn by the next guy to come along.
The Torah and the Qu'ran show that both religions believe in a single diety, with the difference in names being more a product of the different languages than any philosophical differences. The Muslim believes in Jesus ('Issa') as a major prophet, and the main sticking point between most Christian religions and Islam is that Islam has another prophet, hight Mohammed. A small point, but enough of a difference to permit a distinction between the groups to be made, and each religion (in its Holy Fervor) to declare the other as "apostate heretics" or "infidel unbelievers" (depending on the point of view). No matter what label was used, it was an easy matter to convince the warriors that they were doing "God's Will" for either "destroying the infidels" or by converting him to "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth". So, as far as Jehovah or Allah was concerned, they weren't killing him, they were saving his immortal soul. They were doing him a favor, no matter how merciless it might seem.
Which is where we see the influence of the shaman (now called "rabbis", "imams", and "priests") continue to show up. That man who, in the early tribal unit, claimed to have intimate knowledge of the Diety's personal position on such diverse issues as the timing of the planting of the crops and what happens to bad little boys and girls. At least once a week, the faithful were expected to come to a building built by common effort, and pay for the privilege of hearing how buddy-buddy they were with the Almighty, and how much that heathen fellow down the street was going to "burn in hell-fire for all eternity". That last mind-set is the cause of the worst slaughters in recorded history.
Islam was spread "at the point of a sword" (either a village converted to Islam or it ceased to exist), and the Crusades were supposed to be the freeing of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem from the grip of the apostate, with murder, rape and plundering happening while the bishops cheered them on, all "to the Greater Glory of God". The slightest doubt in the rightness of a religious edict (on either side) usually led to excommunication and (not infrequently) execution for "heresy".
Let's add one other flavor of reality to the mix.
Everything around us affects everything else, in ways both obvious and very, very subtle. There is a theory regarding Chaos that says that a startled butterfly can cause a storm that ravages half of Europe. It's kinda long and somewhat convoluted but its basic premise is that a small change can create a large difference. Add that to one large dollop of Adam Smith's argument that everything is done because of self-interest. Now fold into these the fact that History is being recorded with perfect fidelity (even though it is distorted through the prism of human ideologies).
Can you imagine anything emerging from this recipe that will solve the crises erupting on almost a daily basis around the globe? People in Northern Ireland are killing their neighbors for the Capital Crime of attending a different church, despite the fact that their churches believe in almost exactly the same things. No, it likely started as a perceived insult from a member of one group to a member of the other group, just for being different. A few guys defend their personal religious practices using fists instead of words. Things escalate. A few weeks or months or even years later, things might have blown over, but people were writing stuff down. The newspapers report the story without really getting into the insults involved, so the fight is reported as basically just 'Protestant and Catholics killing each other'. It continues until someone finally says, "What the hell are you folks doing?". People were forced to take a step back and realize that there are more things in common that are different. (That truce is an uneasy one, but it's holding... For now.)
Palestine was brushed aside to give the Israelis a land of their own. Despite the fact that archaeological evidence indicated that Israel had existed here for hundreds of years before the Muslim religion was even conceived, from the time of the original Babylonian Empire (in what is modern Iraq), every Arab nation immediately declares a state of hostility against the "usurpers" and "Zionist invaders". The historical claim that Yasser Arafat uses is based on History, rather than the current state of affairs. The participants cannot take a step back and see the problem from the outside, which is why all Accords (such as those at Camp David and Oslo) are usually made with the efforts of a powerful third party.
Before World War II, the U.S. and many other nations (in a futile attempt to keep the peace) tried to appease Hitler, while the trains into Auschwitz arrived fully loaded and left empty. The stench of those ovens has wafted through the decades and has given us a reason to so faithfully support the Israeli State. We are now (and will be in the foreseeable future) the ultimate guarantor of Israel's safety.
This has been a bone of contention with the Arab world for the past six decades, and even up to today. Why else would Saddam have threatened to lob missiles at Israel? To pick a fight with a nation whose armed forces had never been beaten while still engaged with the largest multinational military force the world had ever seen? To draw the whole Arab world into the conflict when Israel retaliated, and only some fast talking by President George H.W. Bush keeps the Israelis from responding when it happened the first time. Again, it took someone who neither fired the shot nor took the hit to resolve the issue.
Why was there a savage "ethnic cleansing" in Bosnia? In Rwanda? In Serbia and Croatia? In Somalia? In China and Tibet and Cambodia and Columbia and Brazil and Indonesia and East Timor and Sri Lanka, and in thousands of villages over thousands of years with a death toll probably into the hundreds of millions? Because the victims were (finally) in charge and in power. They wanted to reduce their enemies/oppressors to the same moral level as the citizens of ancient Jericho. No matter what the original cause was, from the right to feed your goats the grass on the north side of a particular to religious or familial insults ("Yer mudda wears combat boots!"), the stronger imposed his will on the weaker, and now the weaker gets his day in control. "Let's make sure that we never lose this power..." "Of course,
El Presidente, but how?"
However
El Presidente decides to enforce his edict, you can be sure that it is not one that a disinterested third party would have come up with.
Look back a few thousand years to another Lesson from History: that the best way to eliminate a threat is to eliminate the person(s) who could pose a threat, as well as everyone related to him. Rather than try to solve the root problem, the all-too-human urge to get the best of the other guy (Ego) kept perpetuating the problem. The cost of peace was just seen as higher than the cost of kicking the crap out of the other guy.
History coming around again.
Now, what can we do with this? An attempt was made to force the world into arguing out their differences in a single forum, with specific rules of behavior. The problem is that it was intended that all parties would follow those rules for the greater cause of peace. Peace was seen as the overriding goal of civilization, the ability to take that "step back". But while it takes the efforts of everyone to keep the peace, it only takes one to start a war. The League of Nations went the way of the Passenger Pigeon.
Once that War was over, Mankind tried again to "beat their swords into plowshares", with a similar lack of substantive results. Not a single war has ever been averted by the United Nations, because History and its lessons are everywhere. In the fields of Korea. In the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia. In the internecine warfare between rival gangs for the right to be the only ones who get to hang out at a local
bodega. More Historical evidence that violence
does solve problems, but only one side's problems get solved...
Human beings are built to handle only so much knowledge of failure and regret before we start to try and fix the failures that got us to the quagmire we currently find ourselves occupying. But that knowledge is at the heart and soul of everything we do as a people, as a nation, as a tribe. from our religion and politics to the colors we choose to paint our houses, and any attempt to correct those issues only shows where your personal (or societal) bias is located. For example, if you think 'Up' is your biggest problem, then you will try to correct that issue by pulling 'Down". So to speak.
But what of the group that believes that 'Upper Left' is the problem? All you've managed to do is pull his problem to the side, without actually fixing it. Any attempt to correct the weave of the Tapestry of Time is just going to cause graver distortions elsewhere in the fabric. We can't go back and correct the mistakes caused by a particular taboo would be inexorably influenced by the most basic knowledge of what a taboo is. The pull would only reveal the distortions perceived by the one doing the pulling, without actually solving the problem.
But that is precisely why History shows us repeating the same mistakes over and over. Not because we cannot learn those lessons, but because the participants cannot separate themselves from the problems while actually going through it. They cannot just step back and see the problem from other than the "Me vs. You" that it always boils down to.
But I've run into my own version of this phenomenon. I can't step back far enough from the problem to offer a solution, no matter how pretty the phrasing might be. Due to (and despite) the depth and breadth of my interests and information, I have always prided myself on being able to conceive a rational solution, even if I were incapable of implementing that solution, but I admit that I cannot solve this one. It's just too big for me.
I am open to suggestions...
Anyone have any ideas?
