War And Peace

You might have thought that modern history, having rejected the ancients’ belief in man’s subjection to a Deity, and the direction of peoples towards predetermined ends, would have turned away from the outward manifestations of power to look for the causes that lie behind it. But modern history has not done that. It has rejected the views of the ancients in theory, while continuing to follow them in practice.

In place of men imbued with divine authority and directly controlled by the will of God, modern history has created either heroes endowed with extraordinary, superhuman powers, or simply men of widely differing qualities, from monarchs to journalists, who have become leaders of the masses. Modern history has replaced the ‘divinely ordained’ aims of various peoples – the Jews, the Greeks, the Romans – which ancient historians saw as the progressive aims of humanity as a whole, by new aims of its own – the well-being of the French people, the German or the English, or, in the most abstract terms, the single, noble aim of civilizing all of humanity, by which is usually meant the inhabitants of a small north-western corner of a large continent.

Modern history has rejected the ancient creeds without putting any new ideas in their place, and the logic of their position has forced the very historians who claim to have rejected the old beliefs in a divine right of kings or fate to come back by a devious route to the point where they started, and to two basic premises: (1) that nations are directed by individuals, and (2) that there is such a thing as a goal towards which nations and humanity in general are proceeding.

In everything written by modern historians from Gibbon to Buckle,¹ for all the ostensible differences between them and their ostensibly original approaches, everything is underpinned by these two ancient and inescapable premises.

In relation to the first of these, the historian describes the activities of certain individuals who in his opinion are leaders of humanity (one of them will limit this accolade to monarchs, military generals and ministers of state; the next will bestow it on monarchs and orators, but also on cultivated reformers, philosophers and poets). In relation to the second one, historians always know the goals towards which humanity is being conducted. For one of them this goal is the aggrandizement of Rome, Spain or France; for the next it will be freedom, equality or the imposition of some sort of civilization on that little corner of the world known as Europe.

It is 1789 and Paris is in ferment. The ferment grows, spreads and manifests itself in a movement of people from west to east. This eastward movement repeats itself several times, clashing with a counter-movement coming from east to west. In the year 1812 it reaches its furthest point, Moscow, and then, with incredible symmetry, the east-west counter-movement gets under way, drawing along behind it all the people in the middle, just as its predecessor had done in the other direction. The counter-movement returns to the starting point of the first movement, Paris, and then subsides.

Throughout this twenty-year period a vast number of fields go unploughed, houses are burnt down, trade flows in different directions, millions of men grow poor, get rich or migrate, and millions of good Christian folk who claim to love their neighbour go about murdering each other.

What does it all mean? Why did it happen? What can have induced these people to burn houses down and murder their fellow creatures? What were the causes of these events? What force impelled men to act in this fashion? These are the simple and honest questions that leap to mind when humanity comes across memorials and traditions stemming from that bygone age of turmoil.

Commonsensical humanity turns for answers to the science of history, the object of which is the bringing of nations and of humanity to self-knowledge.

If history had clung on to the ancient creeds it would have said that the Deity, wishing to reward or punish His people, gave power to Napoleon and directed his will for the attainment of His own divine ends. A clear and complete answer. You could believe in Napoleon’s divine significance or not, but for a believer the entire history of that period would have been comprehensible and beyond contradiction.

But modern history can no longer respond like that. Science now repudiates the old idea of a Deity intervening in human affairs, so other answers must be found.

In answer to these questions modern history says, ‘Do you really want to know the meaning of this movement, where it came from, and what force produced these events? Listen to this.