The Undivided Past (2 page)

But the fact that humanity
is still here
, that no one has vanquished “us” or “them” on either side of any of these divides, despite such “ultimate” confrontations and conflicts, suggests that there is a case for taking a broader, more ecumenical, and even more optimistic view of human identities and relations—a view that not only accepts difference and conflict based on clashing sectional identities, but also recognizes affinities and discerns conversations
across
these allegedly impermeable boundaries of identity, which embody and express a broader sense of humanity that goes beyond our dis-similarities.
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This alternative perspective is well put by the poet and civil rights activist
Maya Angelou:

In the same vein, if more prosaically, the historian
Timothy Garton Ash has deplored the “Manichean cultural dichotomies” that are peddled by a partisan media, at the expense of the alternative conversation “about what all human beings have in common”; and
Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, has lamented the “brutally over-simplified notions of identity” that “sustain entrenched conflicts,” when in reality, cultures constantly “overlap, borrow from each other and live together” in “a conversation with the whole of humanity.”
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Hence the second epigraph to this introduction, in which President
Clinton urges us to see humanity in less paranoid and more imaginative ways than the exaggerated polarities embraced by his successor in the White House.
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In his recent book, appropriately entitled
The Fear of Barbarians
, the Franco-Bulgarian philosopher
Tzvetan Todorov puts this point emphatically: “the facile dichotomies between Light and Darkness, free world and obscurantism, sweet tolerance and blind violence, tell us more about the overweening pride of their authors than the complexity of the contemporary world.” “No merit,” he goes on, in words that might be an explicit riposte to President
George W. Bush, “lies in preferring good to evil when we ourselves define the meaning of these two words.”
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But most of the academic writing that is skeptical of these Manichean ways of seeing the world, and which urges the broader claims of our common humanity, has been produced by scholars whose interests are philosophical rather than historical, and who are concerned with the present and the recent past rather than with more distant epochs.
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This book, by contrast, seeks to address these issues from a longer-term historical perspective: by examining each of these six collective identities over substantial periods of time; by drawing attention to the excessive and inaccurate claims that have invariably been made for them in terms of their unity, homogeneity, and shared consciousness; and by investigating the conversations and interactions that have gone on across the boundaries of these allegedly impermeable identities, in the sustained and successful pursuit of a more sympathetic vision of a shared humanity. Like Todorov, I argue that the unrelenting insistence on seeing the world in Manichean terms is at best partial
and divisive, at worst reductive and misleading: for these very categories of “us” and “them,” whatever their particular articulation, and though proclaimed to be irreducible and absolute, frequently reveal themselves to be unstable and ambiguous; they often prove to be incoherent even in the thick of their confrontations with the implacable foe; and they are held together not so much by shared self-awareness as by the exhortations of leaders, journalists, activists—and by some historians, too.

This book addresses these issues, by investigating each of those six divisive collective identities with which we seem most preoccupied, even while acknowledging and demonstrating that they are in some ways very different sorts of solidarities. For they are sufficiently similar to one another in their polarizing propensities to merit an urgently needed comparative analysis that is evenhandedly skeptical of each and of all their claims to priority and supremacy. Accordingly, the following chapters examine how theologians and priests, politicians and pundits, commentators and historians have each asserted the incomparable importance of one particular form of collective human identity over any other, and how in so doing they have encouraged among those on one side of any divide a sense of the ultimate righteousness of their cause and collectivity. I go on to describe how, on occasion, people have indeed behaved in accordance with these
Manichean analyses and prescriptions, in terms of religious fervor, national patriotism, class consciousness, gender awareness, racial solidarity, and civilizational identity. And I note how historians frequently contributed to this identity-obsessed way of seeing the world, most fully in the chapter on class. But I also look at the many conversations that have gone on in denial and defiance of these allegedly impermeable boundaries and antagonistic solidarities, which are too often presented, either mistakenly or mischievously, as if they are the only version of the human condition that has any salience or plausibility. For as individuals, we often recognize the common humanity that we lose sight of when called upon to act in groups.

To tackle such a large, important, and controversial subject over such a long-term and broad range is, nevertheless, to run serious risks. For one thing, the collectivities and confrontations based on religion, nation, class, gender, race, and civilization
stir powerful passions on the part of politicians, pundits, and the public—and also of many engaged academics. They want to believe the world is simple in form and easily understood, readily divided between a virtuous “us” and an evil “them,” and in their determined part in helping construct such adversarial identities, they have provided much of the intellectual underpinning for seeing the world in antagonistic, binary ways.
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Another difficulty is the scale and scope of this enterprise. Of each of these chapters it is reasonable to say that a lifetime’s reading and research is insufficient to acquire even a halfway competent understanding of the subject matter involved; and the same may be said of many of the subsections, too. To this charge, I can but reply that the attempt to open up the subject, if only to encourage (or provoke) others to do it better, is worth incurring the accusation of overreach.
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A further objection might be that in this search for common humanity amid the ruins of what has mostly been portrayed as its divided past, more of the examples are taken from European history than from any other part of the world. But there are limits to any author’s knowledge and range, and in any case, many (though not all) of the identities explored here did originate and have been most manifest in Europe, or in the nearby
Middle East.

It has rightly been observed that one of the prime justifications for studying and writing history is to free ourselves from the tyranny of present-day opinion, and these pages seek to contribute to that liberating endeavor by questioning the conventional wisdom of single-identity politics, the alleged uniformity of antagonistic groups, the widespread liking for polarized modes of thought, and the scholarly preoccupations with difference. Most academics are trained to look for divergences and disparities rather than for similarities and affinities, but this relentless urge to draw distinctions often results in important connections and resemblances being overlooked.
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Despite constant urgings to the contrary, humanity has not been, is not now, and should not be best or solely understood in terms of simple, unified homogeneous collectivities locked in perpetual confrontation and conflict across a great chasm of hatred and an unbridgeable gulf of fear. The real world is not binary—except insofar as it is divided into those who insist that it is and those who know that it is not. For it
is in the very range, complexity, and diversity of our multifarious and manifold identities, and in the many connections we make through them and across them, and in the varied conversations we sustain as a result of them, that we each affirm and should all celebrate the common humanity which is the most precious thing we share.
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IN THE TWENTY-FIFTH CHAPTER
of the
Gospel according to Matthew, Christ sets out his vision—and his division—of humanity, proposing two very different and seemingly irreconcilable collective categories: those in this world who are believers in the one true religion and the one true
God, and those who lack such a faith and reject such a single omnipotent deity. And this earthly cleavage in turn anticipates and explains the eternal distinction that will be drawn in the next world, between those who will be saved and comforted, and those who will be lost and damned. On the final day of judgment,
Jesus tells his listeners, when “the son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him,” he will sit upon his throne, and from there he will sort out all humanity, “as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats.” Those he will place on his right hand, the blessed and the elect, will inherit the kingdom of heaven prepared for them since the creation of the world; but those positioned on his left will be condemned to endure the everlasting fire and perpetual punishment
that have been “prepared for the devil and his angels.”
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Here is exemplified what some have seen as the most fateful legacy of Zoroastrian Persia to the Christian religion, namely “a belief in the absolute division of the spiritual world” between good and evil powers, between angels and demons: a permanent schism in the hereafter already prefigured in this life on earth, where hu
manity is split and sundered between the true believers who are destined for heaven, and the unrighteous and the ungodly who are equally certain to be headed for hell.
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The Persian prophet
Zoroaster, from whom Zoroastrianism, an ancient Near Eastern religion, takes its name, is believed to have flourished during the late fifth and the early fourth centuries BCE. He is often credited with having first proclaimed that the universe is divided between the principles of light and of darkness, the cosmic struggle between their respective forces continuing to the end of time, and he believed it was the duty of all human beings to join the angels in the battle against the devil. This prototypical fissure between the righteous and the unrighteous has since proved extraordinarily and continually appealing, finding expression not only in Christianity but in other creeds, too.
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Nearly three-quarters of a millennium after Zoroaster, in the middle of the third century CE, another Persian prophet, named Mani, whose followers were scattered across both the Persian and the Roman empires, and all the way from South Asia to Spain, would once again partition the populated universe, this time between the children of the “Father of Greatness” and those of the “Father of Darkness.” He bolstered his claims with stories and evidence derived from both the
Old and the New Testaments, though this was not enough to keep the early church from dismissing Mani as a heretic. His most enduring legacy is the term “Manichean,” which is often used to describe the views of those of whatever religious conviction who insist on seeing human circumstances in such stark and simplistic terms, with the respective partisans of good and evil slugging it out for supremacy in this world and sometimes in the next as well.
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For at least two millennia, from the time to which the origins of the major religious
belief systems can be traced, there has been division and difference with (literally) a vengeance, as humanity
has often seemed irreconcilably polarized by competing and conflicting faiths—whether pagans versus
Christians,
Islam versus
Christianity, or
Catholics versus
Protestants. The leaders of most of these faiths (all of them, with the exception of paganism, being monotheistic) have claimed exclusive monopolies on both
human wisdom and divine revelation, and at certain stages in their histories they have condemned, scorned, denounced, ridiculed, humiliated, assailed, oppressed, imprisoned, maimed, tortured, and killed their religious opponents and competitors for being, by contrast, the very embodiment of sin, error, wrongdoing, folly, wickedness, depravity, and iniquity. In such ways have religious groupings defined themselves against each other and gone to war, with each faith convinced of the supremacy of its own unique deity and thus of its own unique cosmic superiority. From this perspective, and as the American religious scholar
Martin E. Marty notes, in a book aptly titled
When Faiths Collide
, “the history of religions often appears to be little more than the history of conflict among those who are strange to each other.” Or as his fellow countryman
Walter Lippmann put it more than seventy years earlier, “every church in the heyday of its power proclaims itself to be
catholic and intolerant.” Or as
Jesus Christ himself observed, elsewhere in
Matthew’s Gospel, in fighting words that may also stand proxy for other religious militancies, “he that is not with me is against me.”
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