The Undivided Past

This book sets out to explore and investigate the most resonant forms of human solidarity as they have been invented and created, established and sustained, questioned and denied, fissured and broken across the centuries and around the world, and as they have defined the lives, engaged the emotions, and influenced the fates of countless millions of individuals. It does so by looking at the six most commonplace and compelling
forms of such identities, namely religion, nation, class, gender, race, and civilization. Sometimes regional, sometimes national, and sometimes more global in their compass and in the claims made on their behalf, these groupings have commanded widespread allegiance and commitment, on occasions for good, but often not, since every collective solidarity simultaneously creates an actual or potential antagonist out of the group or groups it excludes. Even if we confine ourselves to the twentieth century, there have been many such confrontations and conflicts variously described as religious wars, or national wars, or class wars, or gender wars, or race wars, or wars for civilization. And whatever the solidarities
specific to our own time, analogous groupings and analogous conflicts have existed across the millennia and around the world, from
Christians versus pagans during the later
Roman Empire to the
white supremacists versus anti-
apartheid campaigners until 1994; and there is no reason to suppose that the twenty-first century will be free of such confrontations. As a consequence, it has come to seem almost axiomatic that the best way to understand past worlds, as well as present circumstances and our future prospects, is in the workings and outcomes of latent or actual conflicts between antagonistic identities, or of how things go in the great game of “us versus them,” exemplified in the words of President
George W. Bush quoted above.
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What is perhaps most remarkable is how well the appeal of “us versus them” works over a range of categories, aggregations, and identities that are scarcely comparable. For much of recorded history the two most prominent have been (initially) religious affiliation and (subsequently) national
allegiance. It is only in relatively recent times that they have been augmented, and in some measure superseded, by the
secular, international trinity of class
consciousness, gender awareness, and racial solidarity. And since the events of
September 11, 2001, the even larger identity and more capacious category of civilization, earlier invoked by historians from
Edward Gibbon to
Arnold Toynbee, has made a comeback, embodied in the writings of
Samuel P. Huntington, which were subsequently invoked by his
neoconservative followers in the United States and by his New Labour admirers in the United Kingdom. But the fact remains that each of these solidarities is constituted around a distinctive axis of interest and awareness: religious cohesion is an expression of faith and belief (or, depending on one’s sympathies, of superstition and irrationality), and can be as much concerned with the next world as with this; national identity relies on a shared narrated memory and sense of
geographical belonging, reinforced by a common language and culture and state power; class consciousness is seen as the outcome of the different relations of people to the modes of production, leading to the hostile solidarities of workers and employers; gender and race identities are partly the result of biology, but also of the meanings and antagonisms constructed and
projected onto anatomical features shared by some human beings but not by others; while civilization is perhaps the most flexible form of human grouping, which can be defined according to any number of criteria.

Yet however disparate and incommensurable, these collective identities have all been defined and reinforced through confrontation, struggle, and conflict—against an alternative religion, an enemy nation, a hostile class, the other gender, a different race, or an alien civilization. The result has been the serial reiteration of the Manichean view that the world is divided into conflicting groups, with a monolithic “good” on one side (those with “us”), and a no less monolithic “evil” on the other (those against “us”). This ultimately apocalyptic perspective has resonated on many terrible occasions throughout history, and it was vigorously and unapologetically reiterated by President
George W. Bush in his final address from the Oval Office: “I have spoken to you often,” he told his fellow Americans, “about good and evil, and this has made some people uncomfortable. But good and evil are present in this world, and between the two there can be no compromise.”
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The trouble is, whether good and evil exist as such, the absolutes they imply have been ascribed with various degrees of literalism to every manner of perceived difference. And so a battle of cosmic significance might be claimed between
Protestant and
Catholic, America and Russia, employee and employer, women and men, black and white, or “the West” and
Islam, confrontations in which each side seeks to galvanize its supporters by exaggerating their solidarity and virtue, and by imputing to the other side a no less exaggerated solidarity and wickedness.
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This impulse thus to sunder all the peoples of the world into belligerent collectivities has existed as long as humanity itself, and in our own day the easy recourse to such polarized thinking by many
political leaders and public figures, and by pundits and commentators, is further exaggerated by an increasingly strident media. It has also been underscored by some historians who have been more concerned to legitimate the claims and urge the merits of one collective identity over and against any (or all) others than to take a broader view of the human past.
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During the last half century or so, the conventional wisdom
that “the history of humanity is based upon the immemorial divisions of its peoples” has been reinforced by a growing academic insistence on the importance of recognizing the “difference” between collective groups.
⁵
According to the anthropologist
Clifford Geertz, “difference is what makes the world go round, especially the
political world”; many of his colleagues as well as literary scholars and cultural critics would agree, and so do those historians who have focused their attention on the creation, perception, working, meaning, and significance of what they varyingly describe as “difference,” or “otherness,” or “alterity,” or “unlikeness,” or “dissimilarity.”
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Beyond doubt, such historical approaches have yielded significant work of enduring value, illuminating dimensions of human experience once unexamined; but as
William H. McNeill, one of the pioneers of global history, has pointed out, the academic preoccupation with the binary simplicities of difference, and with the antagonisms based on them, results in a version of “the past as we want it to be, safely simplified into a contest between good guys and bad guys, ‘us and them,’ ” which disconcertingly resembles the polarized, apocalyptic perspective of President
George W. Bush—or, indeed, of the late Osama
bin Laden.
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