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The Wall Street Journal, May 20,
2013
First as Tragedy,
Then as Cant
Is the great historian Edward Gibbon really more
responsible for dividing the world by creed than the crusading Pope Urban II?
The Undivided Past
By David Cannadine
(Knopf, 340 pages, $26.95)
(Knopf, 340 pages, $26.95)
The introduction
to David Cannadine's "The Undivided Past" brandishes dueling
epigraphs from Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
"When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world . . . " proclaims the
quotation from Mr. Bush. "It was 'us versus them.' " Mr. Clinton's
words, by contrast, decry the compulsion to "believe our differences are
more important than our common humanity." Mr. Cannadine clearly shuns Dubya
in favor of Bubba, yet the aim of the British-bred, Cambridge-educated
Princeton professor isn't to praise the culture wars but to bury them. For him,
"the unrelenting insistence on seeing the world in Manichean terms,"
through the stark and erroneous "categories of 'us' and 'them,' "
warps our view of both contemporary politics and the grand sweep of human
history. The message of Mr. Cannadine's deeply humane yet ultimately
frustrating book is that "the real world is not binary—except insofar as
it is divided into those who insist that it is and those who know that it is
not." A Manichaean view of history blinds us to the "range,
complexity, and diversity of our multifarious and manifold identities."
Mr. Cannadine offers chapters on six us-versus-them definitions of
identity that he finds especially pernicious: religion, nation, class, gender,
race and civilization. Each chapter begins with contrasting epigraphs and then
discusses one or two ur-texts that fixed a given dichotomy in the Western mind.
The argument for the primacy of religious divisions in human history stems, for
Mr. Cannadine, from the Gospel of Matthew, which divides humanity between the
saved and the damned, and from Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of
the Roman Empire" (1776-89), which highlights conflict between Paganism
and Christianity. A more recent view—that it is secular nation-states rather
than religions that sort the world into camps—finds its clearest expression in
the memoirs of Charles de Gaulle. The idea that class trumps all other
identities, unsurprisingly, begins with Marx and Engels's "Communist
Manifesto" (1848) and Engels's "The Condition of the Working Class in
England" (1845).
Less predictably, "Appeal of One-Half of the Human Race"
(1825), a proto-feminist tract by Irish polemicist William Thompson, takes the
blame for dividing humanity by gender. Thompson's contemporaries, Scottish
doctor Robert Knox and French demographer Comte Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, do
the same for skin color in their respective books "The Races of Men"
(1850) and "Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races" (1853-1855).
Finally, 18th-century British philosopher David Hartley's "Observations on
Man" (1749), along with Gibbon's "Decline and Fall" again,
plants seeds for the "clash of civilizations" model embraced by
Samuel P. Huntington and George W. Bush.
Each chapter shows great learning and a remarkable talent for
summarizing vast literatures. Each correctly insists that human beings resist
intellectuals' efforts to sort them into simplistic categories. Five of the six
chapters do grant that the original thinkers and their successors had a point;
horrendous crimes have been committed in the name of the supremacy of religion
or race, or the struggle between civilization and barbarism. Only in the
section on class does Mr. Cannadine seem curiously unwilling to admit the
possibility that Marx and Engels may have been on to something. Indeed, it is
difficult to figure out whether Karl Marx or George W. Bush is the bigger
villain in Mr. Cannadine's Manichaean hall of shame.
It is, however,
precisely the lack of flesh-and-blood historical villains that makes "The
Undivided Past" frustrating. Mr. Cannadine tells us that he wants to
"investigate the most resonant forms of human solidarity as they have been
invented and created, established and sustained, questioned and denied,
fissured and broken across the centuries and around the world, and as they have
defined the lives, engaged the emotions, and influenced the fates of countless
millions of individuals." That long sentence, like many others in the
book, begins in the passive voice. It assigns no human being clear
responsibility for inventing those "forms of solidarity," and in fact
turns the abstract solidarities themselves into the active force that
"influenced the fates of countless individuals."
Throughout this book, words rather than deeds, high-flown ideas rather
than gritty historical events, take center stage. Books often seem more
important than bombs in chapters that barely mention politics, economics and
power relationships among human beings. Is Edward Gibbon really more
responsible for dividing the world by creed than the crusading Pope Urban II?
Is Robert Knox more responsible for racism than the slave owners whose
oppression his book justified? For that matter, is Samuel P. Huntington more
responsible for the Iraq war than the second President Bush? And are a
president's words about a world divided between us-and-them more important than
his deeds in taking his nation to war?
Mr. Cannadine is certainly correct that the authors about whom he writes
oversimplified the divisions they described. But the divisions those authors
described were often real nonetheless. And the divisions were made real not so
much by those who described them as by those who wielded the power to make them
real. Mr. Cannadine admits that "categories of 'us' and 'them' . . . are
held together not so much by shared self-awareness as by the exhortations of
leaders, journalists, activists—and by some historians, too." Yet exhortations
produce different results when pronounced by the powerful rather than the
powerless; the color line that Robert Knox drew may have been the same one that
W.E.B. DuBois evoked, but the two authors did so for very different purposes.
Mr. Cannadine has performed a service in reminding us that history is
more complicated than white versus black, men versus women, or capitalists
versus workers, and in insisting on "our shared humanity beyond our
differences." To move beyond those differences, however, his readers may
need to remember that the deeds of the powerful, as well as the ideas of the
bookish, are what cleave humanity into us and them.
Mr. Richter
teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania.
A version of
this article appeared May 21, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall
Street Journal, with the headline: First as Tragedy, Then as Cant.
20/05/2013 
