History

I've been reading a lot of history lately. The Story of China, by Michael Wood, A History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Hourani, a couple of Jared Diamond books, The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan, World War II by Robert Tombs, and other books.

Our view of historical time tends to be fairly compressed. We think the future will be an extrapolation of the past we know personally, our own lifetime and maybe that of our grandparents who told us their stories. This makes larger scale historical events seem an abstraction and not anything that can happen to us. Yes, World War II was in the time frame. My parents remembered it, although they were children. My grandfathers were already too old to fight. But for the U.S. it was not the kind of large scale event I'm talking about, and maybe not so much for the world. For the U.S., it was happening far away. It certainly affected daily life but not really radically. A lot of young men were gone, and a lot of them died, but most came home and got a free education. Globally, it was a horrific convulsion. We do remember the Nazi holocaust and the destruction of European Jewish communities but I think the common attitude people have to it is that nothing like that could happen again. Otherwise the world snapped back quickly to a state very similar to what it was before. In the long run, it wasn't even a catastrophe for the losers. On the contrary, Germany and Japan are at their historical heights of prosperity and political legitimacy. The map of Europe doesn't look a whole lot different than it did in 1939. Political systems were largely restored and went on to evolve gradually.

What I'm talking about is the collapse of empires and polities. The Chinese state collapsed multiple times. While order was eventually restored -- whether by conquest from outside or the emergence of a dominant warlord -- and there was some continuity of form from one dynasty to the next, the times in between were indescribably horrific, not just because of deprivation and death, but the destruction of institutions, and whole communities. 

 

China as a national concept continued to exist, largely in my view because it had a unifying social philosophy, Confucianism, which endured; and a written language and literary heritage that was mutually intelligible among many different spoken languages. Other polities, however, have disappeared entirely, whether by conquest -- Aztec, Inca, the Kingdom of Israel -- by usurpation -- the Roman republic -- or by internal rot.  The dissolution of empires isn't necessarily bad for the people who live under them in the long run, although it is inevitably very painful while it's happening.   

To bring this long-winded reflection to a close, my point is that most Americans today find the idea that the constitutional republic founded in 1789 could end. Such a radical discontinuity is unimaginable, so it must be impossible. It is not.