BEFORE we proceed with the systematic comparison of our twenty-one societies, which is the purpose of this book, we must meet certain possible objections a limine. The first and simplest argument against the procedure we propose may be stated thus: ‘These societies have no common characteristic beyond the fact that all of them are “intelligible fields of study”, and this characteristic is so vague and general that it can be turned to no practical account.’
The answer is that societies which are ‘intelligible fields of study’ are a genus within which our twenty-one representatives constitute one particular species. Societies of this species are commonly called civilizations, to distinguish them from primitive societies which are also ‘intelligible fields of study’ and which form another, in fact the other, species within this genus. Our twenty-one societies must, therefore, have one specific feature in common in the fact that they alone are in process of civilization.
Another difference between the two species at once suggests itself. The number of known civilizations is small. The number of known primitive societies is vastly greater. In 1915 three Western anthropologists, setting out to make a comparative study of primitive societies and confining themselves to those about which adequate information was available, registered about 650, most of them alive to-day. It is impossible to form any conception of the number of primitive societies which must have come into and passed out of existence since man first became human, perhaps 300,000 years ago, but it is evident that the numerical preponderance of primitive societies over civilizations is overwhelming.
Almost equally overwhelming is the preponderance of civilizations over primitive societies in their individual dimensions. The primitive societies, in their legions, are relatively shortlived, are restricted to relatively narrow geographical areas and embrace relatively small numbers of human beings. It is probable that if we could take a census of the membership of the five living civilizations up to date, during the small number of centuries through which they have yet lived, we should find that each of our Leviathans, singly, has embraced more human beings than could be mustered by all the primitive societies taken together since the emergence of the human race. However, we are studying not individuals but societies, and the significant fact for our purpose is that the number of societies in process of civilization known to have existed has been comparatively small.
The second argument against the comparability of our twenty-one civilizations is the contrary of the first. It is that there are not twenty-one distinct representatives of such a species of society but only one civilization—our own.
This thesis of the unity of civilization is a misconception into which modern Western historians have been led by the influence of their social environment. The misleading feature is the fact that, in modern times, our own Western Civilization has cast the net of its economic system all round the World, and this economic unification on a Western basis has been followed by a political unification on the same basis which has gone almost as far; for though the conquests of Western armies and governments have been neither as extensive nor as thorough as the conquests of Western manufacturers and technicians, it is nevertheless a fact that all the states of the contemporary world form part of a single political system of Western origin.
These are striking facts, but to regard them as evidence of the unity of civilization is a superficial view. While the economic and poli’cal maps have now been Westernized, the cultural map remains substantially what it was before our Western Society started on its career of economic and political conquest. On the cultural plane, for those who have eyes to see, the lineaments of the four living non-Western civilizations are still clear. But many have not such eyes; and their outlook is illustrated in the use of the English word ‘natives’ and of equivalent words in other Western languages.
When we Westerners call people ‘natives’ we implicitly take the cultural colour out of our perception of them. We see them as wild animals infesting the country in which we happen to come across them, as part of the local flora and fauna and not as men of like passions with ourselves. So long as we think of them as ‘natives’ we may exterminate them or, as is more likely to-day, domesticate them and honestly (perhaps not altogether mistakenly) believe that we are improving the breed, but we do not begin to understand them.
But apart from illusions due to the world-wide success of the Western Civilization in the material sphere, the misconception of ‘the unity of history’—involving the assumption that there is only one river of civilization, our own, and that all others are either tributary to it or else lost in the desert sands—may be traced to three roots: the egocentric illusion, the illusion of ‘the unchanging East’, and the illusion of progress as a movement that proceeds in a straight line.
As for the egocentric illusion, it is natural enough, and all that need be said is that we Westerners have not been its only victims. The Jews suffered from the illusion that they were not a but the ‘chosen people*. What we call ‘natives’ they called ‘gentiles’, and the Greeks called ‘barbarians’. But the finest flower of ego-centricity is perhaps the missive presented in A.D. 1793 by the philosophic emperor of China, Chien Lung, to a British envoy for delivery to his master, King George III:
‘You, O King, live beyond the confines of many seas; nevertheless, impelled by your humble desire to partake of the benefits of our civilization, you have despatched a mission respectfully bearing your memorial. ... I have perused your memorial; the earnest terms in which it is couched reveal a respectful humility on your part which is highly praiseworthy. . . .
‘As to your entreaty to send one of your nationals to be accredited to my Celestial Court and to be in control of your country’s trade with China, this request is contrary to all usage of my Dynasty and cannot possibly be entertained. ... If you assert that your reverence for Our Celestial Dynasty fills you with a desire to acquire our civilization, our ceremonies and code of laws differ so completely from your own that, even if your envoy were able to acquire the rudiments of our civilization, you could not possibly transplant our manners and customs to your alien soil. Therefore, however adept the envoy might become, nothing would be gained thereby.
‘Swaying the wide world, I have but one aim in view, namely, to maintain a perfect governance and to fulfil the duties of the state. Strange and costly objects do not interest me. If I have commanded that the tribute offerings sent by you, O King, are to be accepted, this was solely in consideration for the spirit which prompted you to despatch them from afar. Our Dynasty’s majestic virtue has penetrated into every country under Heaven, and kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As your ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious, and have no use for your country’s manufactures.’ 1
In the course of the century following the composition of this dispatch the pride of Ch’ien Lung’s countrymen suffered a series of falls. It is the proverbial fate of pride.
The illusion of ‘the unchanging East’ is so obviously a popular illusion without foundation in serious study that a search for its causes has no great interest or importance. Perhaps it is due to the fact that ‘the East’, which in this context means anything from Egypt to China, was at one time far ahead of the West and now seems to be far behind; ergo, while we have been moving it must have stood still. More particularly we must remember that for the average Westerner the only familiar chapter of the ancient history of ‘the East’ used to be that contained in the narratives of the Old Testament. When modern Western travellers observed, with mingled astonishment and delight, that the life lived to-day on the Transjordanian border of the Arabian desert corresponded, point by point, with the description of the lives of the patriarchs in the Book of Genesis, the unchanging character of the East seemed proved. But what such travellers encountered was not ‘the unchanging East’ but the unchanging Arabian Steppe. On the Steppe the physical environment is so hard a taskmaster to human beings that their ability to adapt themselves is confined within very narrow limits. It imposes upon all human beings in all ages who have the hardihood to be its inhabitants a rigid and unvarying way of life. As proof of an ‘unchanging East’ such evidence is puerile. There are, for example, in the Western World Alpine valleys untouched by modern tourist invasion whose inhabitants live just as their predecessors must have lived in the days of Abraham. It would be as reasonable to deduce from these an argument for an ‘unchanging West’.
The illusion of progress as something which proceeds in a straight line is an example of that tendency to over-simplification which the human mind displays in all its activities. In their ‘periodizations* our historians dispose their periods in a single series end to end, like the sections of a bamboo stem between joint and joint or the sections of the patent extensible handle on the end of which an up-to-date modern chimney-sweep pokes his brush up the flue. On the brush-handle which our modern historians have inherited there were originally two joints only— ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’, roughly though not exactly corresponding to the Old Testament and the New Testament and to the dual back-to-back reckoning of dates B.C. and A.D. This dichotomy of historical time is a relic of the outlook of the internal proletariat of the Hellenic Society, which expressed its sense of alienation from the Hellenic dominant minority by making an absolute antithesis between the old Hellenic dispensation and that of the Christian Church, and thereby succumbed to the egocentric illusion (much more excusable in them, with their limited knowledge, than in us) of treating the transition from one of our twenty-one societies to another as the turning-point of all human history. 1
As time has gone on, our historians have found it convenient to extend their telescopic brush-handle by adding a third section, which they have called ‘medieval’ because they have inserted it between the other two. But, while the division between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ stands for the break between Hellenic and Western history, the division between ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ only stands for the transition between one chapter of Western history and another. The formula ‘ancient -f- medieval + modern’ is wrong; it should run ‘Hellenic + Western (medieval + modern)’. Yet even this will not do, for, if we honour one chapter-division of Western history with a separate ‘period’, why refuse the same honour to the others? There is no warrant for laying greater stress on a division round about 1475 than for one round about 1075, and there is ample reason for supposing that we have recently passed into a new chapter whose beginnings may be placed round about 1875. So we have:
Western I (‘Dark Ages’), 675-1075.
Western II (‘Middle Ages’), 1075-1475.
Western III (‘Modern’), 1475-1875.
Western IV (‘Post-Modern’?), 1875-?
But we have strayed from the point, which is that an equation of Hellenic and Western history with History itself—’ancient and modern’, if you like—is mere parochialism and impertinence. It is as though a geographer were to produce a book entitled ‘World Geography’ which proved on inspection to be all about the Mediterranean Basin and Europe.
There is another and very different concept of the unity of history which coincides with the popular and traditional illusions, so far discussed, in being at variance with the thesis of this book. Here we confront HO idol of the market-place but a product of modern anthropological theorizing: we refer to the diffusion theory as set forth in G. Elliot Smith’s The Ancient Egyptians and the Origins of Civilization and W. H. Perry’s The Children of the Sun: a Study in the Early History of Civilisation. These writers believe in ‘the unity of civilization’ in a special sense: not as a fact of yesterday or to-morrow which has just been accomplished by the world-wide diffusion of the one and only Western Civilization, but as a fact which was accomplished thousands of years ago by the diffusion of the Egyptiac Civilization—which happens to be one of the few dead civilizations to which we have attributed no ‘offspring’ whatsoever. They believe that the Egyptiac Society is the one and only instance in which such a thing as a civilization has ever been created independently, without assistance from outside. All other manifestations of civilization derive from Egypt, including those of the Americas, which Egyptiac influences must be supposed to have reached by way of Hawaii and Easter Island.
Now it is, of course, true that diffusion is a method by which many techniques, aptitudes, institutions and ideas, from the Alphabet to Singer’s sewing machines, have been communicated by one society to another. Diffusion accounts for the present ubiquity of the Far Eastern beverage tea, the Arabic beverage coffee, the Central American beverage cocoa, the Amazonian material rubber, the Central American practice of smoking tobacco, the Sumerian practice of duodecimal reckoning as exemplified in our shilling, the so-called Arabic numerals which perhaps came originally from Hindustan—and so on. But the fact that the rifle attained its ubiquity through diffusion from a single centre where it was once, and once only, invented, is no proof that the bow and arrow attained its early ubiquity in the same manner. Nor does it follow that, because the power-loom spread all over the world from Manchester, the technique of metallurgy must be likewise traceable to a single point of origin. The evidence in this case is all the other way.
But in any case civilizations are not, in spite of the perverted notions of modern materialism, built of such bricks as these; they are not built of sewing-machines and tobacco and rifles, nor even of alphabets and numerals. It is the easiest thing in the world for commerce to export a new Western technique. It is infinitely harder for a Western poet or saint to kindle in, a non-Western soul the spiritual flame that is alight in his own. While giving diffusion its due, it is necessary to emphasize the part that has been played in human history by original creation, and we may remind ourselves that the spark or germ of original creation may burst into flame or flower in any manifestation of life in virtue of the principle of the uniformity of nature. We may at least go so far as to place the onus probandi on the diffusionists’ shoulders in cases where it is an open question whether or not diffusion is entitled to claim credit for any particular human achievement.
‘There can be little doubt,’ wrote Freeman in the year 1873, ‘that many of the most essential inventions of civilized life have been invented over and over again, in distant times and countries, as different nations have reached those particular points of social advancement when those inventions were first needed. Thus, printing has been independently invented in China and in medieval Europe; and it is well known that a process essentially the same was in use for various purposes in Ancient Rome, though no one took the great step of applying to the reproduction of books the process which was familiarly used for various meaner purposes. What happened with printing we may believe also to have happened with writing, and we may take another illustration from an art of quite another kind. There can be no doubt, from comparing the remains of the earliest buildings in Egypt, Greece, Italy, the British Islands and the ruined cities of Central America, that the great inventions of the arch and the dome have been made more than once in the history of human art. . . . Nor need we doubt that many of the simplest and most essential arts of civilised life—the use of the mill, the use of the bow, the taming of the horse, the hollowing out of the canoe—have been found out over and over again in distant times and places. ... So it is with political institutions also. The same institutions constantly appear very far from one another, simply because the circumstances which called for them have arisen in times and places very far from one another.’ 1
A modern anthropologist expresses the same idea:
‘The resemblances in man’s ideas and practices are chiefly traceable to the similarity in structure of the human brain everywhere, and in the consequent nature of his mind. As the physical organ is, at all known stages of man’s history, substantially the same in constitution and nervous processes, so the mind has certain universal characteristics, powers and methods of action. . . . This similarity in the operation of the brain is seen in the nineteenth-century intellects of Darwin and Russell Wallace, which, working on the same data, arrived simultaneously at the theory of Evolution; and it accounts for numerous claims in the same age to priority with respect to the same invention or discovery. The similar operations of the common mind of the race— more fragmentary in their data, more rudimentary in their powers, and vaguer in their results—explain the appearance of such beliefs and institutions as Totemism, Exogamy, and the many purificatory rituals in most widely separated peoples and portions of the globe.’ 2
We have now dealt with two incompatible objections to our plan of comparative study: on the one hand that our twenty-one societies have no common characteristic save that of being ‘intelligible fields of historical study’; on the other, that ‘the unity of civilization’ reduces the apparent plurality of civilizations to one.
Yet our critics, even if they accept our answers to these objections, may make a stand at this point and deny that our twenty-one civilizations are comparable on the ground that they are not contemporary. Seven of them are still alive; fourteen are extinct, and of these at least three—the Egyptiac, the Sumeric and the Minoan—go back to ‘the dawn of history’. These three, and perhaps others, are separated chronologically from the living civilizations by the whole span of ‘historical time’.
The answer is that time is relative and that the spell of something less than six thousand years which bridges the interval between the emergence of the earliest known civilizations and our own day has to be measured for the purpose of our study on the relevant time-scale, that is in the terms of the time-spans of the civilizations themselves. Now, in surveying the relations of civilizations in time, the highest number of successive generations that we have met with in any case is three, and in each case these three, between them, more than cover our span of six thousand years, since the last term in each series is a civilization that is still alive.
The fact that, in our survey of civilizations, we have found in no case a higher number of successive generations than three means that this species is very young in terms of its own time-scale. Moreover, its absolute age up to date is very short compared with that of the sister species of the primitive societies, which is coeval with man himself and has therefore existed, to take an average estimate, for three hundred thousand years. It goes without saying that some civilizations go back to ‘the dawn of history’ because what we call history is the history of man in a ‘civilized* society, but if by history we meant the whole period of man’s life on Earth we should find that the period producing civilizations, far from being coeval with human history, covers only two per cent, of it, one-fiftieth part of the lifetime of mankind. Our civilizations may, then, be granted to be sufficiently contemporaneous with one another for our purpose.
Once again our critics, supposedly abandoning their argument on the time-span, might deny the comparability of civilizations on the ground of their differences in value. Are not most of what have been claimed as civilizations so nearly valueless, so ‘uncivilized’ in fact, that the establishment of parallels between their experiences and those of the ‘real’ civilizations (such as, of course, our own) is mere waste of intellectual energy? On this point the reader may be asked to suspend judgement until he has seen what comes of such intellectual exertions as we propose to demand of him. Meanwhile let him remember that value, like time, is a relative concept; that all our twenty-one societies, if measured against primitive societies, will be found to have achieved a good deal; and that all of them, if measured against any ideal standard, will be found to have fallen so far short that none of them is in a position to throw stones at the others.
In fact, we maintain that our twenty-one societies should be regarded, hypothetically, as philosophically contemporaneous and philosophically equivalent.
And lastly the critics, even if we suppose them to have gone along with us so far, may take the line that the histories of civilizations are nothing but strings of historical facts; that every historical fact is intrinsically unique; and that history does not repeat itself.
The answer is that, while every fact, like every individual, is unique and therefore incomparable in some respects, it may be also in other respects a member of its class and therefore comparable with other members of that class in so far as it is covered by the classification. No two living bodies, animal or vegetable, are exactly alike, but that does not invalidate the sciences of physiology, biology, botany, zoology and ethnology. Human minds are even more elusively diverse, but we admit psychology’s right to exist and exert itself, however much we may differ as to the value of its achievements up to date. We equally admit a comparative study of primitive societies under the title of anthropology. What we propose is an attempt to do for the ‘civilized’ species of society something of what anthropology is doing for the primitive species.
But our position will be made clearer in a final section of this chapter.
There are three different methods of viewing and presenting the objects of our thought, and, among them, the phenomena of human life. The first is the ascertainment and recording of ‘facts’; the second is the elucidation, through a comparative study of the facts ascertained, of general ‘laws’; the third is the artistic re-creation of the facts in the form of ‘fiction’. It is generally assumed that the ascertainment and recording of facts is the technique of history, and that the phenomena in the province of this technique are the social phenomena of civilizations; that the elucidation and formulation of general laws is the technique of science, and that, in the study of human life, the science is anthropology and the phenomena in the province of the scientific technique are the social phenomena of primitive societies; and, lastly, that fiction is the technique of the drama and the novel, and that the phenomena in the province of this technique are the personal relations of human beings. All this, in essentials, is to be found in the works of Aristotle.
The distribution of the three techniques between the three departments of study is, however, less watertight than might be supposed. History, for example, does not concern itself with the recording of all the facts of human life. It leaves alone the facts of social life in primitive societies, from which anthropology elucidates its ‘laws’; and it hands over to biography the facts of individual lives—though nearly all individual lives that are of sufficient interest and importance to make them seem worth recording have been lived, not in primitive societies, but in one or other of those societies in process of civilization which are conventionally regarded as history’s province. Thus history concerns itself with some but not all the facts of human life; and, on the other hand, besides recording facts, history also has recourse to fictions and makes use of laws.
History, like the drama and the novel, grew out of mythology, a primitive form of apprehension and expression in which—as in fairy tales listened to by children or in dreams dreamt by sophisticated adults—the line between fact and fiction is left undrawn. It has, for example, been said of the Iliad that anyone who starts reading it as history will find that it is full of fiction but, equally, anyone who starts reading it as fiction will find that it is full of history. All histories resemble the Iliad to this extent, that they cannot entirely dispense with the fictional element. The mere selection, arrangement and presentation of facts is a technique belonging to the field of fiction, and popular opinion is right in its insistence that no historian can be ‘great’ if he is not also a great artist; that the Gibbons and Macaulays are greater historians than the ‘Dryasdusts’ (a name coined by Sir Walter Scott—himself a greater historian in some of his novels than in any of his ‘histories’) who have avoided their more inspired confreres’ factual inaccuracies. In any case, it is hardly possible to write two consecutive lines of historical narrative without introducing such fictitious personifications as ‘England’, ‘France’, ‘the Conservative Party’, ‘the Church’, ‘the Press’ or ‘public opinion’. Thucydides 1 dramatized ‘historical’ personages by putting ‘fictitious’ speeches and dialogues into their mouths, but his oratio recta, while more vivid, is really no more fictional than the laboured oratio obliqua in which the moderns present their composite photographs of public opinion.
On the other hand history has taken into her service a number of ancillary sciences which formulate general laws not about primitive societies but about civilizations: e.g. economics, political science and sociology.
Though it is not necessary to our argument, we might demonstrate that, just as history is not innocent of using the techniques associated with science and fiction, so science and fiction by no means confine themselves to what are supposed to be their own techniques. All sciences pass through a stage in which the ascertainment and recording of facts is the only activity open to them, and the science of anthropology is only just emerging from that phase. Lastly, the drama and the novel do not present fictions, complete fictions and nothing but fictions regarding personal relationships. If they did, the product, instead of deserving Aristotle’s commendation that it was ‘truer and more philosophical than history’, would consist of nonsensical and intolerable fantasies. When we call a piece of literature a work of fiction we mean no more than that the characters could not be identified with any persons who have lived in the flesh, nor the incidents with any particular events that have actually taken place. In fact, we mean that the work has a fictitious personal foregrornd; and, if we do not mention that the background is composed of authentic social facts, that is simply because this seems so self-evident that we take it for granted. Indeed, we recognize that the highest praise we can give to a good work of fiction is to say that it is ‘true to life’, and that ‘the author shows a profound understanding of human nature’. To be more particular: if the novel deals with a fictitious family of Yorkshire woollen-manufacturers, we might praise the author by saying that he evidently knows his West Riding mill-towns through and through.
None the less, the Aristotelian distinction between the techniques of history, science and fiction remains valid in a general way, and we shall perhaps see why this is so if we examine these techniques again, for we shall find that they differ from each other in their suitability for dealing with ‘data’ of different quantities. The ascertainment and record of particular facts is all that is possible in a field of study where the data happen to be few. The elucidation and formulation of laws is both possible and necessary where the data are too numerous to tabulate but not too numerous to survey. The form of artistic creation and expression called fiction is the only technique that can be employed or is worth employing where the data are innumerable. Here, as between the three techniques, we have an intrinsic difference of a quantitative order. The techniques differ in their utility for handling different quantities of data. Can we discern a corresponding difference in the quantities of the data that actually present themselves in the respective fields of our three studies?
To begin with the study of personal relations, which is the province of fiction, we can see at once that there are few individuals whose personal relations are of such interest and importance as to make them fit subjects for that record of particular personal facts which we call biography. With these rare exceptions students of human life in the field of personal relations are confronted with innumerable examples of universally familiar experiences. The very idea of an exhaustive recording of them is an absurdity. Any formulation of their ‘laws’ would be intolerably platitudinous or intolerably crude. In such circumstances the data cannot be significantly expressed except in some notation which gives an intuition of the infinite in finite terms; and such a notation is fiction.
Having now found, in quantitative terms, at least a partial explanation of the fact that, in the study of personal relations, the technique of fiction is normally employed, let us see if we can find similar explanations for the normal employment of the lawmaking technique in the study of primitive societies and the factfinding technique in the study of civilizations.
The first point to observe is that both these other studies are concerned with human relations, but not with the relations of the familiar, personal kind which come within the direct experience of every man, woman and child. The social relations of human beings extend beyond the farthest possible range of personal contacts, and these impersonal relations are maintained through social mechanisms called institutions. Without institutions societies could not exist. Indeed, societies themselves are simply institutions of the highest kind. The study of societies and the study of institutional relations are one and the same thing.
We can see at once that the quantity of data confronting students of institutional relations between people is very much smaller than the quantity confronting students of people’s personal relations. We can see further that the quantity of recorded institutional relations that are relevant to the study of primitive societies will be much greater than the quantity of those relevant to the study of ‘civilized’ societies, because the number of known primitive societies runs to over 650, whereas our survey of societies in process of civilization has enabled us to identify no more than, at the outside, twenty-one. Now 650 examples, while far from necessitating the employment of fiction, are just enough to enable the student to make a beginning with the formulation of laws. On the other hand, students of a phenomenon of which only a dozen or two dozen examples are known are discouraged from attempting more than a tabulation of facts; and this, as we have seen, is the stage in which ‘history’ has remained so far.
At first sight it may seem a paradox to assert that the quantity of data which students of civilizations have at their command is inconveniently small, when our modern historians are complaining that they are overwhelmed by the mass of their materials. But it remains true that the facts of the highest order, the ‘intelligible fields of study’, the comparable units of history, remain inconveniently few for the application of the scientific technique, the elucidation and formulation of laws. None the less, at our own peril, we intend to hazard the attempt, and the results of it are embodied in the remainder of this book.