Once upon a time...
Sep. 10th, 2004 02:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbA fable of culture history and other nonsense.
Once upon a time there was a country called England. England was part of a big group of islands on the edge of a densely populated continent full of quarrelling cities and kingdoms.
Now England had a special kind of luck: it was just too big for any of her quarrelling continental neighbours to conquer, but not big enough to be able to interfere in their quarrels. It's not that England did not try. She tried very hard, but she ended up, every time, getting her butt kicked out.
Now this was lucky for England because her Continental neighbours expended an enormous amount of resources fighing each other. And so they never had quite enough resources or persistency to assault her. So England was left to get on with her insular neighbours; which she did by bribing one neighbour (Scotland) into a permanent alliance, and by forcing two others (Wales and Ireland) into a frightful bondage and then pretending that they had assented of their own free will. One way or another, England had no more enemies on land; and the thing bored her so much that, for a while, she ended up fighting herself.
Now it so happened that, in spite of all their wars, the countries of the Continent were growing in strength to an extent that history had never before seen. Their ships covered the seas of the world. This process had until then gone unnoticed, because most of the world was divided among large alien empires; few people had bothered to reflect that, in a distant continent, small European forces had already demolished two empires, and that, in distant seas, they had utterly destroyed the local fleets. But the little European states fought and quarrelled and plundered and bled each other white; and the fury of their mutual hatreds even served as an engine to throw their regiments and their fleets all across the world.
For a long time, England did not seem to notice the growth of her neighbours; but, kept out of the European quarrels she would dearly have loved to enter, her energy was naturally turned outwards. And a strange thing happened. Suddenly England found that she was strong. Wherever the English went, they were victorious. They bore the energies of their continent, but did not waste them in internal fights; and it became clear that the other great empires, which had seemed so unbreakable only a century or two before, were no stronger than blancmange before the unleashed, mature energies of England and Europe. The English swarmed across the face of two continents and altered them for ever, turning them into imitations of their own mother country; they conquered an alien empire, then another, then another; and the only time they were defeated, it was by their own flesh and blood. Only England, it seemed, could conquer England.
Obviously, this run of good luck turned their heads. They started writing histories in which civilization is established by conquering hordes of racially pure male warriors who subdue or destroy the indigenous populations; because that is what they saw happen before their eyes. A man who lived at the height of the Empire of England could, during his lifetime, watch a wilderness that was unknown, let alone unconquered, when he was a child, be turned into a prosperous empire dense with cities and ploughed field, by men of his own blood. It was an age in which men could fancy themselves members of a whole race of Alexanders, Caesars, Napoleons.
Of course, they were dazzled by the light of these events. They did not see the blood and horror on which these empires upon empires were built; such things were distant from their minds, easily dismissed with formulae that implied that those who were disinherited and displaced by their empires were condemned by some sort of historical justice, that they were doomed to disappear in the face of higher and more elaborate civilizations. They were not cruel, except in the result of their actions; but in their intentions, they were merely blind.
And then a strange thing happened. At the height of their imperial grandeur, as they were breaking the greatest enemy they had ever fought, as a quarter of lands and a third of mankind was counted their subject, the will of the English was broken - by the dead. The first and most utterly destroyed of their conquests, their island neighbour, a country whose leadership had been destroyed, whose law had been deleted, whose land had been stolen, whose citizens had been reduced to helots and worse, raped and murdered and plundered and settled and betrayed and lied to again and again - a country that had been reduced to the utter depth of deprivation, ignorance and dependency, and then visited by a a famine that had killed a quarter of its population with the active collaboration of the English leadership and driven most of the survivors to flight - a country, in short, that had no business even existing before the centuries of hatred and destruction visited upon it by her larger neighbour - a ghost of a dead country rose and fought; and the will of the nation which, twenty years before, had confronted a similar emergency in South Africa by jailing the whole enemy civilian population and reducing them to mass starvation - that will suddenly broke. The measures that could have subdued the faded ghost of Ireland as they had broken India and China, were used tardily or never; and England, without so much as one battle, crept shame-faced out of a country that she had dominated and commanded for five centuries.
That will was never restored. The generation that was growing up had taken in all the stories of their fathers, that vision of history as one long series of ethnic invasions and conquests, and found itself disgusted by it. Rebelling against their fathers, they started to decide that that whole history of invasions and massacres, of enslavements and ethnic replacements, was simply a nightmare; and they proceeded to write a new version of it, in which invasions never happened at all, and culture was slowly spread across the globe by collaboration, small-scale settlement, and peaceful imitation. In a world in which three continents had been totally ethnically altered by European and to a lesser extent Chinese settlement, they insisted that ethnic change is never dramatic or cruel at all.
This madness reached its height in the fifties and sixties. It became notorious that English history and archaeology departments tended to specialize in theories that denied that there had ever been a Celtic invasion of Britain, a Celtic invasion of Ireland, any kind of ethnic conquest and/or population replacement at all. For all the dominant theories could see, people had always just stayed where they were. In a world where the whole continents of North America and Australia were inhabited by population groups that had arrived within historical memory, the theorists of the British isles struggled to eliminate the distasteful notion of invasion from the very idea of history.
What this amounts to is not an acknowledgement of the historical evils of conquest, but a sheer escape into fantasy. Any history that actually wants to do justice to the victims of conquest, indeed to the phenomenon of conquest itself, must begin by acknowledging its reality: by having a frank and unflinching look at what actually happened at the interface between two groups, two political systems, two economies, and often but not always two opposing ideologies, when one triumphed and another went under. Instead of which, the generation of the British fifties and sixties simply tried to pretend that no such horrors ever happened. Just as the politicians who were abandoning the ancient colonies liked to pretend that the locals were not the victims of conquest but the willing participants in a Commonwealth of Nations, so historians and archaeologists who were, after all, part of the same educated class, who had studied at the same universities and under the same teachers, and rebelled against the same fathers, pretended that the only significant factors in history are collaboration.
It may be that the climax of this consensus, and the beginning of its breakdown, came with Colin Renfrew's ARCHAEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE, in which this archaeologist, an establishment figure if there is one, tried to prove that the whole picture of the Indo-European expansion (a fundamental fact of prehistory and early history, which resulted in the rise of a couple of dozen cultures from Celtic Ireland to India) had never taken place in the commonly accepted way at all, that the Indo-Europeans had moved not from Central Asia but from Anatolia, that their expansion had begun millennia earlier than commonly thought, and that it had been slow and incremental, based on contacts and exchange rather than conquest. This theory was untenable, and it was based on untenable linguistic arguments and an utter misunderstanding of Georges Dumezil's methods and theories.
I don't know whether this was the clarion call that woke a new generations in the faculties and departments, but the fact is that the consensus has been breaking up swiftly and painfully in the last couple of decades. The English prejudice against migration and conquest is now a common joke, escoriated in Amazon reviews and in mock graduation theses purporting to prove that no Celt ever came from outside Britain at all. Books that, in this day and age, stick to the old views, are apt to receive hostile reviews.
What is the point of this story? It is as follows. Just as the anti-migration prejudice seemed to have been, if not relegated to the mists of history, at least convincingly and broadly challenged, an archaeologist called Francis Pryor produces a TV programme which proposes a particularly extreme version of the theory, claiming that - in despite of a good dozen written sources and contemporary accounts, of the evidence of language and legend, and of everything that can be deduced from succeeding recorded history - there never was a Teutonic invasion of Britain; that the ancestors of the English were settled in Britain before the Romans came; and that on the strength of some dubious interpretations of a number of little-known excavations!
The style he adopts is as significant as the content. The average TV watcher, even if educated, is not likely to have any idea of the ideological battles taking place in the cloistered world of university departments, is at the receiving end of a program that is the last, most extreme, and most obviously unacceptable manifestation of an outdated consensus. But this program presents itself as challenging established ideas and presenting cutting-edge new evidence! And one cannot even exactly say that Pryor is consciously lying. He has grown up in an environment where this sort of thinking was presented as the bright new challenge to established theory. Now he is old and so is his mind-set; but it is still his natural way of thinking, and certainly his natural strategy of argument - to build up an Aunt Sally of supposedly outdated prejudices which he can proceed to knock down. His arguments are outlandish enough to seem strange, and therefore probably cutting-edge, to the average educated person: "hey, I haven't heard this before, so it must be new!" (I am not blaming the average educated persons. I am blaming the programme-makers who in effect misrepresent the state of the question to them.)
And the moral of the fable? It is this: when a historical or cultural theory has become thoroughly outgrown and is no longer at home in research departments and among those who actually know something about it, it crosses over into the realm of pop culture and becomes what is known as popular science. That is what happened to social Darwinism, to the cluster of ideas developped in the mid-nineteenth century around the words "Aryan" and "Semite", to a number of other ideas about history and sociology that are no longer taken seriously and perhaps never were. This one seems about to do the same jump. Look for it next in the DAILY MAIL.
Once upon a time there was a country called England. England was part of a big group of islands on the edge of a densely populated continent full of quarrelling cities and kingdoms.
Now England had a special kind of luck: it was just too big for any of her quarrelling continental neighbours to conquer, but not big enough to be able to interfere in their quarrels. It's not that England did not try. She tried very hard, but she ended up, every time, getting her butt kicked out.
Now this was lucky for England because her Continental neighbours expended an enormous amount of resources fighing each other. And so they never had quite enough resources or persistency to assault her. So England was left to get on with her insular neighbours; which she did by bribing one neighbour (Scotland) into a permanent alliance, and by forcing two others (Wales and Ireland) into a frightful bondage and then pretending that they had assented of their own free will. One way or another, England had no more enemies on land; and the thing bored her so much that, for a while, she ended up fighting herself.
Now it so happened that, in spite of all their wars, the countries of the Continent were growing in strength to an extent that history had never before seen. Their ships covered the seas of the world. This process had until then gone unnoticed, because most of the world was divided among large alien empires; few people had bothered to reflect that, in a distant continent, small European forces had already demolished two empires, and that, in distant seas, they had utterly destroyed the local fleets. But the little European states fought and quarrelled and plundered and bled each other white; and the fury of their mutual hatreds even served as an engine to throw their regiments and their fleets all across the world.
For a long time, England did not seem to notice the growth of her neighbours; but, kept out of the European quarrels she would dearly have loved to enter, her energy was naturally turned outwards. And a strange thing happened. Suddenly England found that she was strong. Wherever the English went, they were victorious. They bore the energies of their continent, but did not waste them in internal fights; and it became clear that the other great empires, which had seemed so unbreakable only a century or two before, were no stronger than blancmange before the unleashed, mature energies of England and Europe. The English swarmed across the face of two continents and altered them for ever, turning them into imitations of their own mother country; they conquered an alien empire, then another, then another; and the only time they were defeated, it was by their own flesh and blood. Only England, it seemed, could conquer England.
Obviously, this run of good luck turned their heads. They started writing histories in which civilization is established by conquering hordes of racially pure male warriors who subdue or destroy the indigenous populations; because that is what they saw happen before their eyes. A man who lived at the height of the Empire of England could, during his lifetime, watch a wilderness that was unknown, let alone unconquered, when he was a child, be turned into a prosperous empire dense with cities and ploughed field, by men of his own blood. It was an age in which men could fancy themselves members of a whole race of Alexanders, Caesars, Napoleons.
Of course, they were dazzled by the light of these events. They did not see the blood and horror on which these empires upon empires were built; such things were distant from their minds, easily dismissed with formulae that implied that those who were disinherited and displaced by their empires were condemned by some sort of historical justice, that they were doomed to disappear in the face of higher and more elaborate civilizations. They were not cruel, except in the result of their actions; but in their intentions, they were merely blind.
And then a strange thing happened. At the height of their imperial grandeur, as they were breaking the greatest enemy they had ever fought, as a quarter of lands and a third of mankind was counted their subject, the will of the English was broken - by the dead. The first and most utterly destroyed of their conquests, their island neighbour, a country whose leadership had been destroyed, whose law had been deleted, whose land had been stolen, whose citizens had been reduced to helots and worse, raped and murdered and plundered and settled and betrayed and lied to again and again - a country that had been reduced to the utter depth of deprivation, ignorance and dependency, and then visited by a a famine that had killed a quarter of its population with the active collaboration of the English leadership and driven most of the survivors to flight - a country, in short, that had no business even existing before the centuries of hatred and destruction visited upon it by her larger neighbour - a ghost of a dead country rose and fought; and the will of the nation which, twenty years before, had confronted a similar emergency in South Africa by jailing the whole enemy civilian population and reducing them to mass starvation - that will suddenly broke. The measures that could have subdued the faded ghost of Ireland as they had broken India and China, were used tardily or never; and England, without so much as one battle, crept shame-faced out of a country that she had dominated and commanded for five centuries.
That will was never restored. The generation that was growing up had taken in all the stories of their fathers, that vision of history as one long series of ethnic invasions and conquests, and found itself disgusted by it. Rebelling against their fathers, they started to decide that that whole history of invasions and massacres, of enslavements and ethnic replacements, was simply a nightmare; and they proceeded to write a new version of it, in which invasions never happened at all, and culture was slowly spread across the globe by collaboration, small-scale settlement, and peaceful imitation. In a world in which three continents had been totally ethnically altered by European and to a lesser extent Chinese settlement, they insisted that ethnic change is never dramatic or cruel at all.
This madness reached its height in the fifties and sixties. It became notorious that English history and archaeology departments tended to specialize in theories that denied that there had ever been a Celtic invasion of Britain, a Celtic invasion of Ireland, any kind of ethnic conquest and/or population replacement at all. For all the dominant theories could see, people had always just stayed where they were. In a world where the whole continents of North America and Australia were inhabited by population groups that had arrived within historical memory, the theorists of the British isles struggled to eliminate the distasteful notion of invasion from the very idea of history.
What this amounts to is not an acknowledgement of the historical evils of conquest, but a sheer escape into fantasy. Any history that actually wants to do justice to the victims of conquest, indeed to the phenomenon of conquest itself, must begin by acknowledging its reality: by having a frank and unflinching look at what actually happened at the interface between two groups, two political systems, two economies, and often but not always two opposing ideologies, when one triumphed and another went under. Instead of which, the generation of the British fifties and sixties simply tried to pretend that no such horrors ever happened. Just as the politicians who were abandoning the ancient colonies liked to pretend that the locals were not the victims of conquest but the willing participants in a Commonwealth of Nations, so historians and archaeologists who were, after all, part of the same educated class, who had studied at the same universities and under the same teachers, and rebelled against the same fathers, pretended that the only significant factors in history are collaboration.
It may be that the climax of this consensus, and the beginning of its breakdown, came with Colin Renfrew's ARCHAEOLOGY AND LANGUAGE, in which this archaeologist, an establishment figure if there is one, tried to prove that the whole picture of the Indo-European expansion (a fundamental fact of prehistory and early history, which resulted in the rise of a couple of dozen cultures from Celtic Ireland to India) had never taken place in the commonly accepted way at all, that the Indo-Europeans had moved not from Central Asia but from Anatolia, that their expansion had begun millennia earlier than commonly thought, and that it had been slow and incremental, based on contacts and exchange rather than conquest. This theory was untenable, and it was based on untenable linguistic arguments and an utter misunderstanding of Georges Dumezil's methods and theories.
I don't know whether this was the clarion call that woke a new generations in the faculties and departments, but the fact is that the consensus has been breaking up swiftly and painfully in the last couple of decades. The English prejudice against migration and conquest is now a common joke, escoriated in Amazon reviews and in mock graduation theses purporting to prove that no Celt ever came from outside Britain at all. Books that, in this day and age, stick to the old views, are apt to receive hostile reviews.
What is the point of this story? It is as follows. Just as the anti-migration prejudice seemed to have been, if not relegated to the mists of history, at least convincingly and broadly challenged, an archaeologist called Francis Pryor produces a TV programme which proposes a particularly extreme version of the theory, claiming that - in despite of a good dozen written sources and contemporary accounts, of the evidence of language and legend, and of everything that can be deduced from succeeding recorded history - there never was a Teutonic invasion of Britain; that the ancestors of the English were settled in Britain before the Romans came; and that on the strength of some dubious interpretations of a number of little-known excavations!
The style he adopts is as significant as the content. The average TV watcher, even if educated, is not likely to have any idea of the ideological battles taking place in the cloistered world of university departments, is at the receiving end of a program that is the last, most extreme, and most obviously unacceptable manifestation of an outdated consensus. But this program presents itself as challenging established ideas and presenting cutting-edge new evidence! And one cannot even exactly say that Pryor is consciously lying. He has grown up in an environment where this sort of thinking was presented as the bright new challenge to established theory. Now he is old and so is his mind-set; but it is still his natural way of thinking, and certainly his natural strategy of argument - to build up an Aunt Sally of supposedly outdated prejudices which he can proceed to knock down. His arguments are outlandish enough to seem strange, and therefore probably cutting-edge, to the average educated person: "hey, I haven't heard this before, so it must be new!" (I am not blaming the average educated persons. I am blaming the programme-makers who in effect misrepresent the state of the question to them.)
And the moral of the fable? It is this: when a historical or cultural theory has become thoroughly outgrown and is no longer at home in research departments and among those who actually know something about it, it crosses over into the realm of pop culture and becomes what is known as popular science. That is what happened to social Darwinism, to the cluster of ideas developped in the mid-nineteenth century around the words "Aryan" and "Semite", to a number of other ideas about history and sociology that are no longer taken seriously and perhaps never were. This one seems about to do the same jump. Look for it next in the DAILY MAIL.
