I was driving in the car with my daughter and got to talking about another graduate degree, and she said I should think about history. She said her history professor reminded her of me or vice versa, and she said I would be really good at it, because I was so well read.
I told her I knew a number of people with undergaduate degrees in the liberal arts, like history, who had gone on to earn graduate degrees in a technical field like computer science, for practical reasons, mainly, but I knew of no one who had done it the other way.
But after a while, I started to think it over, and one thought that came to mind was, “why bother with a graduate degree in history?” Why not just write a history?
The answer came that with say a Phd in history, I could then conceivably teach at a university, which might be a nice way to wind down into a second career, different from the first, and maybe an interesting thing in itself.
But the options are not mutually exclusive. So I thought I would consider writing some history myself, just to kick things off. What would I write about?
First off, my touch stone on the subject is a quote from Barbara Tuchman, probably my favorite modern historian: “all history is biography”
History is not about timelines or abstract concepts. It’s about people.
My second principle is perhaps a commonplace, but to me was a personal discovery. In high school, I spent some time in detention, for reasons that don’t matter. There I met a fellow who became my good friend, and we had many engaging conversations. one time he said “it’s interesting how the atom, with a nucleus and electrons, looks so much like the solar system, with the sun and the planets and I said, “and it makes no sense that we study the atom in chemistry class, and maybe we study the solar system in physics class, or whatever, and we study the war which drove so much of the research into the atom maybe in history class, and it’s all really part of the same thing.”
And he said something like “yeah, man.”
And many years later, reading biographies of Einstein and Bohr and Oppenheimer, and those cats, I learned that it’s no accident that the so called “Bohr model” for the atom looks like the solar system, it was quite conscious, and controversial. It’s a simplistic conception that’s helpful only up to a point, and they knew it at the time. And it’s interesting that closer examination seems to very disturbingly indicate that people find whatever they are looking for in the universe, that our will somehow exerts influence over the quantum field, or some crazy stuff like that. Go on and read some of the modern writings in quantum field theory, if you don’t believe me, it will blow your mind.
And that brings me to the history and philosophy of science, or “natural philosophy” as they used to call it, and people like James Burke, who did a couple of TV series and books called “Connections” and also “The Day the Universe Changed”, as well as the work of the philosopher Karl Popper, which has profoundly influenced my view of the world.
And I would love to drill down into how and why these two men were so influential, not just to me, but to so many people, whether they know it or not — one broadly and the other deeply, but I must rush on to list so many other human beings whose contributions are all interconnected in a vast, hyper dimensional web of thought and perception.
So many of our modern western commonplaces of thought, even assumptions about the world, were revolutionary insights derived from Locke, and before him, Hobbes, and arguments against Roman Catholic interpretations of Christianity, itself so deeply fundamental to western thought that it is just given, like air, like gravity. But Christianity is itself based on, or perhaps embedded in another cultural context, Judaism, or more specifically a form and view of Judaism as practiced by Hellenized Jews such as Paul the Apostle, and so we find themes of Greek philosophy and mysticism cropping up in Christian theology, fusing with the Judaic themes in exactly the same way that the colonies of the new world became an amalgamation of various European cultures, translated into a new context. So we can think of these Judaic memes being transplantated from the levant into (or perhaps invading) the fertile soil of the European mind. And to complicate matters further, the rich and complex web of Judaic thought before and since the time of Christ has had a kind of parallel development, profoundly influencing and subtly influenced by the development of Christianity. So nothing ever stands alone in this world, everything is influenced by everything else to one degree or another.
So, for example, I could talk about Spinoza and Newton, or the book of Ecclesiastes and Nietzsche, or for that matter, Christ and Osiris and Buddha. And that bring to mind Frazer’s “The Golden Bough”, and all that, and that’s a whole rabbit hole if ever there was one. And Frazer’s brilliant and original study of comparative folklore, magic and religion brings to mind Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, and Gibbon’s uniquely witty, skeptical and insightful perspective on the development of Christianity based on an objective study of original sources. If you haven’t read these things, you should stop reading these words, right now, and go off and read them, Frazer and Gibbon in their entirety, and I guarantee, you’ll come back a different person, if you come back at all.
But history involves not only the history of what we call “The West”, but so much more that is neglected by or even unknown to so many of us, that it is disturbingly sad to the point of shocking. I could talk about the vast tracts of time encompassed by the Chinese empires of the Ming, the Han and the Chin and other dynasties and the Ch’un Ch’iu periods, reminiscent of monarchical western Europe, fertile and innovative and war prone, the era of the great general Sun Tzu, and his classic “The Art of War“. Or the parallels of Feudal Japan to Medieval Europe, or the mysterious millennia encompassed by the Egyptian dynasties of the Upper and Lower Kingdoms, or the vast literature and scripture of what we call India, they themselves call Bharat, and its great tales, comparable to and in some ways exceeding those of Homer or Shakespeare, gathered into the Mahabharata, which includes as only one of its numerous volumes the Bhagavad-Gita. But the “Great Bharata” is itself embedded in a vast and ancient scriptural tradition including the Vedas and the Upanishads, all of which are worlds unto themselves.
But history involves not only the history of thought, but so much of human history involves conflict: and military history is a noble and worthy specialty in its own right. So many innovations were forced by war: so many examples are present in our minds from the modern era, but as just one example from history, consider that Galileo’s telescope was once thought so strategically valuable in the military context that it’s invention was held a state secret. Think about it.
Let us ponder the hundreds or thousands of wars men have wrought upon one another, the countless untold battles of the nations of pre-Columbian America, or the tribes of the central Asian steppes, of the Mongol hordes, of the Celts, the Norse, tales told in the Icelandic sagas, or now forgotton tales of the Germanic peoples of Gaul, of the Aryans in India, each embodying values and world views so very different from one another and our own, that we are shocked to learn how despite their differences in time and place, that all people are the same: we all experience love, and jealosy and pride. Even the Chinese, somehow lived parallel separate histories just the same in their own world (中, the ideogram for China, is a rectangle representing the four corners of the world, with a vertical stroke through its center, indicating the center or axis of the world, that is, “Chin”).
Or consider another path, so to speak, through the history of the traditional martial arts, wushu (武術). For example, the development of Te (手 “open-hand or weaponless martial arts”) in secret on Okinawa while under occupation by Japan.  Open hand, because Okinawans were forbidden from carrying weapons by the occupying Japanese.  According to legend Te was derived from Kung-Fu (功夫 “skill learned through great effort”), itself brought to Okinawa from China by itinerant Buddhist monks. And consider the relationship of Kung-Fu to Buddhism, itself an export from India to China, and transformed as it spread through southeast Asia and Japan to Korea and beyond. And then how the Japanese codified and renamed it Kara Te Do (空手 “the way of the open hand”), as we now know it.    Or comparing and contrasting all the many different schools of martial arts, Tae Kwon Do (태권도 “the way of the fist and foot”), and Ju Do (柔道, “the gentle way”), and Ju Jutsu (柔術 “the flexible way”), and so on, and how they are all rooted in Yoga (control), and how isn’t it interesting that there is no martial art particular to India?
Or again, the rich, manifold, and to most westerners of European descent, the mysterious, almost alien world of Islam, yet in so many ways it’s a reflection, or alternative distillation of influences, and not at all unrelated mixture of Judaic, North African, and Western Asian thought and culture.
And again back to the crossroads of history, culture, philosophy, business and science, and the fascinating story of Leonardo di Pisa, known as Fibonacci, how he brought the Hindu-Arabic counting system from North Africa to Europe. And ask yourself, how profound an influence has zero-based arithmetic had on the development of western science and technology, and how has it changed the world? And consider the transit of the concept of zero from the Ashrams of India through the Madrasahs of Baghdad to the school in Algeria where Leonardo learned of it, and brought it back to Medieval Italy and put it to great practical use in his father’s trade business, and its history from thence throughout Europe.
And maybe you can begin to see what I mean when I say everything is connected.
Or travel back with me to Elea, a Greek colony in Italy, and to the early fifth century before Christ, and contemplate the origins of western philosophy Or consider the origins of the Ottoman Empire in the relics of the Caliphate, and modern Turkey and its unique relationship to Islam, and the peculiar origin of the phrase “Young Turks” and the involvement of the leaders of Young Turk party in the first world war, and the calamitous outcome thereof, and the influences on western Asia and the Arab world of the treaty of Versailles, the reverberations of which we are still dealing with today. That is a topic for an entire book in itself.
Oh, I could go on and on, drilling ever deeper, and roving ever more broadly, but to what end? Is there anybody out there?