Ahundred and fifty years ago, James Mill, the father of John Stuart Mill, published an immense history of India, a country he’d never visited and whose languages he did not speak. Mill intended to expose to his readers the ignorance and backwardness of Indian culture; what he exposed instead was the narrowness and arrogance of his own mind. Ironically enough, Mill’s work is still read — not as a sourcebook on India, for on that subject it is and was nearly useless, but as a frightening manifestation of the rigidity of the Utilitarian philosophical tradition from which it sprang.
This fall, Oxford professor Felipe Fernandez-Armesto published to enthusiastic reviews in England a huge new history of the world that is interesting in exactly the same way James Mill’s book was. In just 816 pages, Fernandez-Armesto manages to display virtually every one of the prejudices and vices that have done so much to degrade the teaching of the humanities in our universities. Anyone in search of a solid one-volume summary of the planet’s history would do well to take his Christmas gift copy of Millennium: A History of Our Last Thousand Years (Scribner, $ 35) to a good used-book store and swap it for a copy of William H. McNeill’s Rise of the West or Hugh Thomas’s An Unfinished History of the World. But if you want to see the modern academic mind in all its self-congratulatory self-hatred, no book offers a more complete picture than Millennium.
Fernandez-Armesto’s ambition, frankly confessed, is to write history that hum bles what he regards as the arrogance of the West, history that “rehabilitate[ s] the overlooked, including places often ignored as peripheral, peoples margi nalized as inferior and individuals relegated to bit-parts and footnotes.” Mi llennium consistently dismisses the constitutional, economic, intellectual, a nd moral achievements of Europe and America. It insists instead on the importan ce of developments in Asia and Africa that have been slighted (the author belie ves) until now. In the future, Fernandez-Armesto predicts, “events commonly inv ested with world-shattering importance — such as the English and American Civi l Wars, the European “Wars of Religion,” the French and Russian Revolutions — will look parochial. As the trends of our millennium are reassessed and the picture modified by the chance survivals and suppressions of evidence, encounters at Runnymede and Canossa will be eclipsed by hitherto undervalued happenings in Makassar or Timbuktu.”
One has to wonder whether even Fernandez-Armesto himself can possibly believe that last sentence. The “encounter” at Runnymede — the extraction of the Magna Carta from King John — was the first stumbling step toward limiting power by law: The constitutions that govern modern liberal regimes from Buenos Aires to Tokyo still use phrases that first issued from scribes in the service of the feudal barons of England. The histories of Timbuktu and Makassar may well be fascinating, but it’s hard to imagine that a man who purports in his final chapter to be frightened by the prospect of a revival of fascism in the developed world — as portended by the election of Rudy Giuliani as mayor of New York (I’m not kidding) — can genuinely find them more important than the rude birth of the rule of law.
At first glance, Millennium appears to be quite an old-fashioned history, which recounts the rise and fall of empires and the clash of nations and civilizations. What makes it novel — or at least utterly different from the old “rise of the West” school of historiography — is that Fernandez-Armesto is frankly cheering for the other side. If there is any one lesson that the author wants to teach, it is this: Until the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe was an insignificant and backward corner of the world. Its so-called achievements — the building of cathedrals, the Renaissance, parliamentary government-paled in comparison with those of Africa and Asis. Even Europe’s pre-industrial colonial accomplishments were beggarly affairs, in which luck and the Europeans” local allies should be seen as playing the decisive roles. ” For the Indians of Tlaxcala,” Fernandez-Armesto observes of the conquest of Mexico, “who supplied the vital native levies that enabled Cortes to overawe other potential allies, it was a Tlaxcalan victory over Tenochtitlan, in which some others, including the Spaniards, played an ancillary role.” Anyway, “the achievements of Cortes and Columbus were eclipsed by their Turkish contemporaries.”
True, Fernandez-Armesto concedes, the years 1850 to 1950 were a bit different: In that century, Europe and European settlers did pull ahead of other civilizations to create a world hegemony. But this ascendancy has proven mercifully brief. Already Europe and America are being eclipsed by China and Japan. “Today the supremacy of Western science looks increasingly like a short interval in a long history. . . . The sun has come up again on the other side of the world and the cultural imperialism of the present and the future emanates from the depths of Asia and — increasingly and decisively, I believe — from the shores of the Pacific.”
Nor is the West merely being overtaken. It is being colonized from within, as Asians populate Australia, New Zealand, and western Canada. California, too, Fernandez-hrmesto speculates, may likely soon split off from the rest of the United States to join some Chinese-dominated Pacific Commonwealth. As for the rest of the U. S., it is “becoming the most conspicuous arena of counter- colonization at the start of the new millennium, owing in part to the mental revolution that has extended a frontier of African awareness across the hemisphere, and in part by the demographic revolution represented by the Hispanic diaspora. This is a movement of counter-colonization in the fullest sense: a repeopling of territories wrested by aggressors pursuing their ” manifest destiny,” a reversal profoundly similar to the peaceful counter4nvasion of European countries by their empires’ victim-peoples.”
That term “victim-peoples” is potentially misleading. Fernandez-Armesto is no t one to weep for the losers of history: His book contains just two glancing re ferences to the Holocaust of European Jewry, and the first of them is written i n such a way as to suggest that it was a crime committed by the French. The sin gle reference to the victims of the Gulag is even vaguer and more cryptic. The evil of the trans-Atlantic slave trade naturally moves him much more, but one d etects a certain “can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs” spirit even the re. For despite Fernandez-Armesto’s formulaic genuflections at the altar of Thi rd World martyrdom, it isn’t really victimization that he cares about, but powe r. Like the English Stalinists diagnosed by George Orwell, Fernandez-Armesto is a power-worshipper. It is because he believes that power is ebbing from his own civilization that he disparages it, and it is because he imagines that power is accumulating in the East that he celebrates the cultures of Asia. In the long r un, he concludes, our millennium will be seen as “continuous with the last and the next: characterized, say, by brief challenges from Islam and the West to an otherwise almost continuous history of Chinese preponderance.”
The evidence for this last claim is odd, including as it does “the modification of scales of values under Buddhist and Hindu influences and under the impact of increasingly popular martial disciplines and sports from the East. Oriental taste, long established in the West in the context of the decorative arts, is increasingly flavoring the food and selectively shaping the major arts in most western countries.”
The prediction that China will soon wake to dominate the world is a familiar one. Conceivably, the prediction might actually someday prove true. Rather than itemizing the reasons for the unlikelihood that this will happen anytime soon, however, let’s take a lesson from the professor himself. “The course of history,” he says in his introduction, “is influenced less by events as they happen than by the constructions-often fanciful, often false — which people put on them. . . . I have tried consistently to ask myself not, “Why did this or that change happen?” but “Why did people convince themselves of the reality of this or that alleged change?'” So let’s join him. Let’s try to understand why Fernandez-Armesto believes what he does and writes as he has.
Jorge Luis Borges could put together a short story out of the pivotal people and things startlingly scanted by Fernandez-Armesto’s history. Virtually none of the great champions of human liberty engages his attention. John Locke is omitted, as are Immanuel Kant and James Madison. Science and technology, or at least Western science and technology, scarcely get a mention. James Watt, Louis Pasteur, Alexander Graham Bell, Otto Benz, the Wright brothers, antibiotics and anesthetics, the American landing on the moon: All omitted.
Religion gets slightly more attention, but even so, you’ll look in vain for the names of John Calvin, St. Bernard, Maimonides. Although Millennium is lavishly illustrated, Fernandez-Armesto himself confesses that he could find no room in his story for “the achievement of Goethe, say, or — rather more to my regret — of Mozart or Michelangelo.” (Elvis Presley, however, merits two pages and a photograph.) Fernandez-Armesto makes no room for the development of the parliamentary institutions exported by the English to the rest of the world: the English Civil War, the Revolution of 1688, the emergence of traditions of freedom of religion, speech, and the press, or the great Reform Bills that created a working liberal democracy. Even the American Revolution — a diffcult thing to overlook — is disparaged.
Freedom, democracy, mass prosperity, scientific discoveries — the things that have made this millennium the most remarkable in all of our history as a species, and that have made the past three or four centuries the most remarkable of all — impress Fernandez-Armesto not a bit. What matters is mass. Conquerors count; scientists don’t.
No wonder, then, that the future seems to Fernandez-Armesto to belong to the Orient. Others might notice that postimperial Asia and Africa are more completely shaped by Western ideas and ideals than ever before; that they participate in a world economic and diplomatic system defined by Western rules and ultimately backed by Western power; that Western languages dominate international communication; that even those non-Westerners most intent on rejecting the West (the mullahs of Iran, the communists in Beijing) are helplessly trapped within Western intellectual paradigms. But Fernandez- Armesto cannot notice these things. To do so would require him to weigh such imponderables as principles and rules and words as in some sense equivalent to the teeming bodies of Jakarta and Shanghai. Nor would he want to notice them: for they would spoil the cackling pleasure he feels in the perceived displacement of his civilization by more ruthless antagonists.
Millennium, in short, could not more perfectly reflect the assumptions and convictions of our contemporary intellectual life. In the most depressing sense, it is truly a book for our time.
By David Frum
