History Has a Tyrannical Bias

Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves, when they take the trouble, though they are usually untidy and dirty. Hammers, axes, swords, daggers, pickaxes, tongs, and also instruments of torture, they make very well, or get other people to make to their design, prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air and light. It is not unlikely that they invented some of the machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices for killing large numbers of people at once, for wheels and engines and explosions always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they could help; but in those days and those wild parts they had not advanced (as it is called) so far. - J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

I'm currently reading an advance copy of Goliath's Curse by Luke Kemp and let me say, it's really a fantastic book. Or at least, the 40% of it that I've read is. Luke will be on the podcast to discuss the book later this year, so get excited about that.

Last time I had Luke on the podcast we talked about the way that history is biased towards conquerors and tyrants. In one respect, this is an actual bias in the historical record. Kings, emperors, and other assorted tyrants often commissioned literature about how great they were. And they were always promulgating edicts, making laws, and keeping detailed tax records of their conquests. So the written record definitely favors tyrants.

Tyrants also loved building really big things out of stone, usually with slave labor, to prove how great and powerful they were. Or maybe just how powerful they were - great can be translated as admirable or exemplary, but it can also just be translated as "big." Sometimes men are called "So and So the Great" because they were simply a pretty big guy, or to differentiate them from their son who would have been, for at least the first 15 years or so of his life, smaller. Even Charlemagne can be translated as Charles the Great or Charles the Big - big not in this case because he was physically large, but because he accomplished big things (ie conquered lots of people). So "great and powerful" might be redundant; Mao, Stalin, and Hitler were definitely all very powerful men. They were, like Ramses the Great, great at building stuff, and also great at murdering and enslaving people. If you're going to study history, it's a lot easier to write about a huge pyramid or Roman column - a monument to mass murder though it may be - than the life of a kind and gentle peasant who made life better for everyone around them. What record do we have of the peasant? No poetry, no edicts, and they certainly didn't build any great walls (the Great Wall of China was pretty shitty as a fortification, but it's definitely great in the sense of big).

But there's more to it than just the fact that it's easier to know about rulers who commanded big monuments built to them. It's simply that, as a general rule, American and European historians are pulling for those rulers. Any given empire is the home team for a historian of "western" "civilization," because they are always on the side of "progress," and by progress they mean movement towards our current societies (which they often call "developed nations." Sorry for all the quotation marks. But it's necessary, because to these historians "civilization" means empire and "savagery" means egalitarian structures. Up is down, etc). Development, as these historians define it, generally needs the subjugation of nature, the adoption of psuedo-democratic institutions, taxation, exploitation, mass burning of fossil fuels, cutting down trees, and winning wars. That's what the historians are looking for - and that's why there are so many more books about Henry VIII and Julius Caesar than there are about Lao Tzu and Hildegard of Bingen. Historians are looking for greatness, not spiritual greatness, but "progress" towards centralized, hierarchical, industrial civilization.

This was made so clear to me in a recent article in The New York Times. I clicked on the headline, actually, because I thought it might be mentioning Luke Kemp's book. The headline was "Worried the World Is Falling Apart? That’s OK. It’s Happened Before." Since Luke's book is about societal collapses, and how those collapses are usually better in the long run for the regular (aka not "great" or "elite") members of society, I just figured that's what the article would talk about

But the article is actually about two recent books, The Once and Future World Order by Amitav Acharya, and The Golden Road by William Dalrymple, which want to tell western readers how great certain non-western civilizations were in the past. The basic gist of the article (I haven't read the books) is that Westerners are likely to recognize and praise the greatness of ancient Athens and Rome, but we've overlooked civilizational greatness in other parts of the world, particularly India. The author of the article, Abhishek Kaicker, actually seems pretty skeptical of their claims, but clearly argues that Acharya and Dalrymple are looking for "greatness" in the Ramses/Charles/Hitler sense. Kaicker writes:

Acharya doesn’t claim that a future world order is necessarily going to be a huge improvement, but he believes that “the decline of Western dominance could alleviate the conflicts and injustice it had caused.” He is rightly critical of the “widespread tendency” to judge progress by the standards of a Western tradition rooted in Greece and Rome alone. He extols the achievements of ancient India, China, Persia, the Mongols, Native America and the Islamic world, many of which he argues were swept away or subsumed without credit after colonial conquest.

Without knowing which societies in the Americas Acharya is talking about I can't speak to that, but the rest of that list is about imperial states. According to Kaicker, Acharya admires their abilities to keep world wars from happening, but for our purposes, we just need to note that Acharya is singing the praises of history's Vladimir Putins and Andrew Jacksons.

Kaicker is more clear on what Dalrymple is up to. Of Dalrymple's praise for India (or rather "the Indosphere," since there was no Indian state matching up with the current post-1948 one), Kaicker writes:

Dalrymple argues that scholars have gone too far in reducing India’s position as a beacon of civilization, while China has wrongly acquired a pre-eminence in Asian history through the “seductively Sinocentric concept of the Silk Road.” But in trying to edge in India as “one of the two great intellectual and philosophical superpowers of ancient Asia,” what he proposes ends up looking quite a lot like the “highly nationalistic and Sinocentric” claims to which he objects.

In other words, when Dalrymple sets out to talk about how great India is, he ends up just reproducing the basic imperial story of greatness. A beacon of civilization, where civilization means winning wars and dominating people. It's a story you can tell about Egypt, India, China, Rome, the Mongols, Athens, France, Russia, England, and the United States. It boils down to: they conquered, and then they built really big monuments to themselves. Also they made great art and came up with wonderful ideas. Often the ideas come in the form of a religion (like Buddhism or Christianity or Taoism) which explicitly condemned imperialism and slavery, but historians of progress tend to sort of muddle the imperial and anti-imperial aspects of these societies together and celebrate them at the same time.

I'm tired of this perspective. Let us now not praise famous men! Let's turn our eyes to everyday greatness, or rather goodness, since everyday goodness is actually the antithesis of greatness. Or, as Kemp writes in Goliath's Curse, distinguishing between civilized societies, which means collaborative, egalitarian, and humane, and Goliaths, which are hierarchical societies of dominance that get praised by historians:

War, inequality, patriarchy, and slavery are probably not what comes to mind when you hear "progress"...Rather than a stepladder of progress, this movement from civilization to Goliath is better described as evolutionary backsliding.

It seems that Acharya and Dalrymple want us to praise India and other non-Western civilizations for their progress towards greatness. But reading history with the anarchist squint practiced by Luke Kemp, James C. Scott, and David Graeber, we can see that what they're actually doing is civilization-washing tyranny. It's time for more historians to adopt the anarchist squint, and admit that their history has a tyrannical bias.