The Invention of Yesterday

Introduction

This book was born some years ago when I happened to be reading three seemingly unrelated works of history at the same time. One was about the First Emperor of China, who put a million peasants to work building that Great Wall. Another was about Central Asian nomadic life in the centuries before the Mongol conquests. The third one was about barbarian warriors such as Attila the Hun attacking Rome in its later days.

Because I was reading all three books concurrently, I noticed something that probably would not have occurred to me otherwise. The Great Wall of China going up had something to do with the Roman Empire coming down. A provocative thought. China and Rome were two entirely different worlds and knew almost nothing of each other back then, but between them stretched the Central Asian grasslands of the nomads whence the Huns came riding out. When something big happened in China—like the construction of a wall that blocked invading nomads—it sent ripple effects through the nomadic world, which eventually reached Rome. And, of course, big events in Rome sent ripple effects the other way.

What intrigued me was not the Rome-China connection per se but interconnectedness itself as an aspect of human history. I went looking for other examples, and they weren’t hard to find. The religious practices prescribed by the Prophet Muhammad, it turned out, had something to do with Europeans acquiring the magnetic compass. The twelfth-century conquest of Jerusalem by the Seljuk Turks had subtle roots going back to crop failures in Scandinavia centuries earlier. The policies of the Ming dynasty in China contributed to the American Revolution. The nineteenth-century invention of the cotton gin in the United States devastated family life in sub-Saharan Africa—the list goes on endlessly.

Even tens of thousands of years ago, it seems, when we were isolated bands of hunter-gatherers ignorant of the many other bands of humans roaming Earth, we were, somehow, some single far-flung network of interconnected peoples. The globalized tangle that we are today is only the latest chapter of a story that goes back at least forty thousand years and perhaps as many as sixty thousand.

This book takes interconnectedness as one of the through lines of world history but acknowledges another side to the story. Even as we grow ever more intertwined, we stay ever more resolutely distinct from one another as groups. We live on the same planet but in many different worlds. What any of us humans see as the whole world is just the world as we see it, whoever “we” might be. What we know as the history of the world is actually a socially constructed somebody-centric world historical narrative. There’s a Euro-centric one, an Islamo-centric one, a Sino-centric one, and many more. How many more depends on how many collections of people on Earth think of themselves as a “we” distinct from “others.” Any two world historical narratives might have the same events and yet be different stories because the shape of the narrative depends on the teller of the tale. To say that one of the many possible somebody-centric world histories is the real history of the world is like saying that one of these maps depicts the world as it really is.

The shape of the narrative is what it all comes down to in the end. History deals in facts, of course, but in history, those facts fundamentally serve a narrative. When we construct our story, we are inventing ourselves. That’s what we were doing in those caves, long ago, gathered around the fire, passing on to our children what we remembered about our grandparents and reminiscing about life-changing adventures we’d shared and arguing about which of us really killed the bear and drawing conclusions about the meaning of life from the stars we saw above—for when ancient folks looked up at the night sky, they didn’t just see stars, they saw constellations. They said, “There’s a bear,” and they said, “Hey look, a mighty hunter,” and their companions nodded, and as long as everybody in the group saw the bear and the mighty hunter, there they were.

It’s all too easy for us modern folks to say the constellations weren’t really there. Yes, it’s true that those constellations existed only in the minds of the people looking, but then, everything we see and know as human beings is in some sense a constellation: it’s there because we see it. We exist as constellations of people. We’re immersed in constellations of ideas. We live in a universe of constellations, which are themselves made up of constellations. In the social universe, constellations are as real as it gets.

Social constellations form intentions and set the agendas of history: countries, families, empires, nations, clans, corporations, tribes, clubs, political parties, societies, neighborhood groups, social movements, mobs, civilizations, high school cliques—they’re all constellations. They do not exist outside culture. The mighty hunter dissolves upon closer examination into random individual stars. The same is true of social constellations. Clan, country, movement, mob—get up close to any of these and all you see are individual human beings and their ideas.

Culture is a world we invented and keep inventing, a world that would disappear without us. Social constellations are not like rivers or rocks, they do not exist in the physical universe, and yet they have an existence as real as floods or landslides. They must, for they do things in the physical world: build bridges, make wars, invent cars, send rockets to the moon. Any individual human who is part of such a constellation can drop out without the constellation winking out of existence. All the individuals in a social whole can be replaced by other persons without the constellation losing its identity and continuity. Every American who existed one hundred fifty years ago is dead and gone, yet America still exerts clout. Every Muslim alive in 1900 is dead now, but a palpable Islamic entity still influences real events. When we talk about history, we’re talking about events that happened only in the cultural universe, and in that universe, social constellations enact the drama; they’re the characters strutting the stage.

Forty thousand years ago, such social constellations were imagined into existence by small groups of people who knew each other personally and what they saw together was who they were together. We’re not fifty people in a cave anymore; we’re eight billion people spread all over the world. None of us can have the perspective of all eight billion. Each of us is part of some smaller social world and bound to the perspective of our own world. We don’t see the same stars, and even if we did, we wouldn’t see the same constellations: what we see up there reflects who we are down here, and down here we’re not all one group. History keeps happening because of that fact: we’re not all one group.

When I was in high school, I ran across the word defenestration. I had to consult a dictionary to learn that this odd word meant “throwing someone out of a window,” and it puzzled me that such a word even existed. After all, there is no term for throwing someone off a balcony or through a doorway or out of a moving car, so why defenestration?

The answer (I discovered) goes back to something that happened in Central Europe four centuries ago. In 1618, one fine day, a group of Catholic lords came to the city of Prague, where most of the people were Lutherans. The Catholic lords had come to deliver a message from the Holy Roman Emperor: Lutherans, the emperor said, must stop building churches on royal land. The Lutherans listened, and then hauled two of those Catholic lords to the window and threw them out. The meeting room was on the third story of the building, so the drop from there to the ground was seventy feet. This was the famous Defenestration of Prague.

Amazingly enough, both lords survived. The stage was then set for interpretation. What did their survival mean? Well, it depended on who you were. Catholics saw the event as a miracle, proof that God was on their side. Lutherans focused on the reason why the lords survived: they landed in a deep heap of dung. The Catholics and Lutherans were both Christians, but when they met, they didn’t see fellow Christians or fellow Germans or fellow anything. When they looked at the same event, they didn’t see the same event. Even sitting in the same room, they were living in different worlds, and those worlds existed only in culture.

It wasn’t just Catholics and Lutherans. Back then Europe was teeming with diverse groups of Christians who saw themselves as “us” and other European Christian groups as “them.” Lutherans and Calvinists were both Protestants, but Protestants themselves consisted of many mutually exclusive groups, each with its own worldview. In the tinderbox of us and them that was seventeenth-century Europe, the Defenestration of Prague kicked off the Thirty Years’ War, a horrific struggle in which some eight million people were killed or died of starvation, many of them noncombatants. But the contenders weren’t individual people, ultimately; they were social constellations.

Could groups involved in such savagery ever reconcile? Could their descendants ever look upon one another as anything but the other? It must have seemed unthinkable four hundred years ago. And yet today, a Lutheran family descended from Germans might live next door to a Presbyterian family descended from Scots, in some small town in Minnesota, without either of them necessarily even knowing what kind of Christian their neighbors are, much less caring. A Catholic and a Protestant might join the same book club without worrying about defenestration and have lively conversations in which religion never comes up.

It’s not that differences between these groups have evaporated. Their doctrines remain as different as ever. It’s just that somehow, over time, they’ve become different parts of the same culture, some single, amorphous, larger, shared us. Examples like this abound in every civilization. Small worlds sometimes do merge into larger worlds; or small worlds intermesh to become distinct parts of single larger wholes, and how this happens is a riddle that can be unraveled only in the cultural universe. Maybe someday two families who live on the same street and send their children to the same kindergarten won’t know or care whether their neighbors are Lutheran Christians or Wahhabi Muslims.

Or maybe not, because even though, yes, we’re getting ever more interconnected, let’s not overlook the way we’re doing it: by coalescing relentlessly as social clusters, clumps, and constellations. Ideas and information don’t just ripple through the human sea; they travel from culture to culture, and when they cross such borders, some things change. And some things don’t. And sometimes borders blur and a bigger cultural something comes into existence, in which parts of both cultures are included, and in which the ghosts of earlier, smaller cultural constellations still live and breathe.

Consider one small example. Chess is played all over the world today, but in the sixth century, it was played only in India, where it was invented. Back then, according to legend, there was a king who fervently believed in free will. Dice games irked him; he wanted a game in which players controlled their own destiny. A savant named Sissa rose to the challenge by inventing a game that depended entirely on strategic thinking, the kind of thinking that makes for success in war. The king was so delighted he offered the inventor gold, but humble Sissa only wanted wheat as his reward: one grain for the first square on his game board, two for the next, four for the next, and so on. The game was played on a board divided into sixty-four squares, and when the king tried to comply with Sissa’s request, he discovered that doubling the amount of wheat for each of the sixty-four squares added up to more wheat than the kingdom produced in a year—as Sissa well knew, for he was a mathematician, and mathematics was one of the glories of Indian culture at that time.

Sissa’s creation reflected his cultural context in many ways, big and small. It was a game for four players, each of whom had eight pieces. One represented the king and one his top general. The rest of the pieces stood for the four divisions typical of Indian armies at that time: chariots, cavalry, elephants, and, of course, foot soldiers. The game was called chaturanga, which means “four branches or limbs.” In politically fragmented India, a simultaneous war among four combatants struck a chord.

From India, however, the game moved to Persia, a monolithic society locked into an epic struggle with an equally monolithic Rome. Persia was permeated by a worldview that saw polarity as the fundamental principle of reality: light versus dark, night versus day, good versus evil, life versus death—that’s what the world was all about, said the Persians, and the world they were thinking about existed only in culture, that socially constructed realm.

Sure enough, there in Persia, chaturanga turned into a game for just two players, each of whom had sixteen pieces. The board was redesigned to feature alternating squares of light and dark. And the game picked up numerous bits of local color. The very name chaturanga changed into the similar-sounding Persian word satranj, “a hundred worries.” The general became the vizier, a chief political adviser—every Persian monarch had one of those. Chariots were no longer used in war, so the chariot of the Indian game became a rukh, a gigantic, ferocious bird of Persian folklore.

By medieval times, the game had found its way through Spain into Western Europe. And look what happened there. The vizier became the queen. The cavalry turned into knights. The elephants became bishops. Europe had no folkloric bird like the Persian rukh, but rukh sounded like roq, which was French for stone, so the pieces formerly known as rukhs now became stone castles.

Yet even as surface features were changing, the internal structure of the game endured: the order among its parts, the template, you might say. The number of pieces remained constant, and they moved the same way. Elephants were bishops now, but there were still two of them, and they could only move diagonally. Chariots became castles, but chariots moved, and therefore so did castles. The king remained the most precious piece on the board, and the whole game was still about protecting one dude who hardly did anything. Check was still check, and checkmate, checkmate. The pawns remained pawns because, apparently, every society has lots of those. And the strategies that worked in India worked just as well in Persia and in Europe. Sissa is long gone (beheaded, perhaps, after trying to claim the kingdom’s entire annual output of wheat), but the mathematical ideas of sixth-century India remain solid planks in the edifice of human knowledge today.

What happened to chess happens to pretty much everything in human culture. We’re all one humanity, but we never stop creating whirlpools of exclusion. As we interact, ripple effects pass from one human whirlpool to another, and in the process some things change, some things don’t, and sometimes, something new comes into being—in general, something bigger.

Forty thousand years ago, we existed only as countless small autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers, widely distributed throughout the wilderness, roaming a world almost entirely unaltered by our existence. Hardly anyone ever met anyone they didn’t already know, except at birth—and yet somehow, even then, with no awareness of the fact that we were all interconnected. Today, every habitable inch of the planet is inhabited by humans; no place on the planet remains unaltered by our activity, no life can unfold in isolation from the general flux and flow of human activity, any human action anywhere can have consequences for any other human anywhere—yet somehow, interconnected though we be, we’re still grouped into many different socially constructed microcosms that stand in for the unknowable totality of the world itself.

From the bird’s-eye perspective, we might consider human history as the story generated by the expansion of these microcosms in the cultural realm and the interactions that occur when they intersect or overlap—interactions that produce everything from psychological confusion, social chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs. Most significantly, however, even amidst the conquests and enslavements, the rapes and murders, ideas mingle and interleaf until new and more comprehensive conceptual frameworks emerge. We see this in social and economic developments, in warfare, in technology and invention, in religion, art, philosophy, and science. We see it in the course of empires and the spread of ideas. We see it in the occasional overthrow of one global paradigm by another.

The human web has been thickening for tens of thousands of years and will surely go on doing so. In one year, ten years, a hundred years, if we are still around, our lives will not have become less intertwined but more so. More so is the trend, the relentless trend. There does seem to be some single human enterprise going on, but it’s too big to see. Or at least, we cannot see it yet, any more than the ancient Chinese could see how they were affecting ancient Rome or vice versa. We all want to be part of something bigger than ourselves, but the something bigger has never yet been humanity as a whole. The trajectory looks like it’s moving from many to one, but trajectory alone cannot tell us if that’s really where this story is headed, especially since we certainly aren’t one big happy family yet—or one big anything for that matter.

To get any inkling of the road ahead, we have to look at the road that stretches behind us. How did we get from where we were to where we are? If ever-increasing interconnectedness is the through line, what is the shape of the narrative so far? What are its themes and turning points? What have been its chapters and stages and key events? In short, if history is a story that we’re telling one another, what is its plot?

That’s the story I went looking for all those years ago when it first occurred to me that the rise of China had something to do with the fall of Rome. And this book is the story that I found.