History or Biology, Evil or Tragedy ?

 

Due to six million years of living in small kinship groups in a small territory, man’s perspective is normally restricted to the “here and now”. With our today ruling media-cracy, it doesn’t tend to become much longer.

 

Our historians are supposed professionally to take a longer perspective. But they, too, belong to the endangered species; is some schools history has been completely kicked out. And even the historians do not take that very long, biological, perspective that the new Mendelian knowledge is asking for. They may even miss it by a factor of one to a thousand.

 

Let me give you only one example.

 

North of the Rio Grande, border between Texas and Mexico, the best estimates tell us there were 1.6 million Indians and only 330,000 whites and Africans in 1700. A hundred years later, in 1800, there were 5.5 million whites with their African servants, while one third of the Indians had died. Their number remained the same for almost 200 years, around a million.

 

How this happened is the subject of one eminent American historian, Alan Taylor, whose 542 pages long book is reviewed by another one, Gordon W. Wood.[1] Both are telling us about the horrific mutual cruelties which the European invasion in North America caused all the participants involved to indulge in.

 

That is, in itself, a very good illustration to the idea about what normally happens on the “Malthusian margin”. But what I here want to stress is something said almost in the margin by the reviewer.

 

“Of course”, Wood writes, “movements of peoples and violent acquisitions of land…..have been common for millennia everywhere in the world.” Which he then illustrates with “aggressive and often ruthless German tribes” in Rome over 1500 years ago and Jutes, Scandinavian Vikings and Normans - my ancestors – in England a 1000 years ago.

 

While the participants in the colonisation of North America blamed each other and tortured and killed each other, Wood’s conclusion fits perfectly well with mine. The half a million killed Indians, this deep historian writes: “were the victims in a tragedy – a tragedy, however, whose ultimate significance, like the history of the United States in general, transcends the motives and miseries of its participants. The historical process by which entire groups hold power and lose it is always larger than the actions of the individuals who make it up.”[2]

 

Would I rewrite this conclusion of Wood, I would do so on two points.

 

The first one is that I would hardly be content to exemplify the “historical process” with a meagre 1500 years, since the fall of Rome, or even with his “millennia”. My hunch is that what Frederick Jackson Turner famously called the American “frontier concept”, like the German “Drang noch Ostern”, is only a nice variation of that “Malthusian margin” that goes back, in the case of non-chimp human beings, some six million years. That is the same driving force, lacking food or fear of lacking food, which forced us to fill up Africa during the first 99 percent of that period, and the rest of the world during our latest one percent of mankind’s existence. The European take-over of North America is only the latest one hundreds of that latest percent. The process is still the same, but the weapons have become infinitely more murderous.

 

My second change would be a semantic one but, for our understanding of ourselves, a very important semantic change. I would replace “historical” with the word “biological”.

 

“The historical process” which “is always larger than the actions of the individuals who make it up” is, surely, a “historical” process. But not only that, it is, I would suggest, also a “biological” process driving unconscious mankind from tragedy to tragedy for six million years, but lately, as I described in my first bi-monthly “Philosophical Park-meditation”, at least temporarily – also giving the blindly acting, historical-biological winners a fabulous reproductive success, my “three miracles of life”.

 

If we ever are to understand ourselves, and to prevent such tragedies before the final ABC-war, the historians should be the first to help us prolong our perspectives, perhaps even a thousandfold.

 

Because history is not, they should teach us, a sequence of good and evil, deserving reward and punishment in a never-ending circle. It is one blind biological tragedy after the other between inflated Darwinian post-chimpanzees.

 

 Capri June 12^th 2006.

 Gunnar Adler-Karlsson

 www.philosophicalpark.org

 adler.karlsson@capri.it