Civilization: The West and the Rest Read Free

‘covering laws’, in Carl Hempel’s sense of general statements about the past that appear to cover most cases (for instance, when a dictator takes power instead of a democratic leader, the chance increases that the country in question will go to war). Or – though the two approaches are not mutually exclusive – the historian can commune with the dead by imaginatively reconstructing their experiences in the way described by the great Oxford philosopher R. G. Collingwood in his 1939
Autobiography
. These two modes of historical inquiry allow us to turn the surviving relics of the past into history, a body of knowledge and interpretation that retrospectively orders and illuminates the human predicament. Any serious predictive statement about the possible futures we may experience is based, implicitly or explicitly, on one or both of these historical procedures. If not, then it belongs in the same category as the horoscope in this morning’s newspaper.
    Collingwood’s ambition, forged in the disillusionment with natural science and psychology that followed the carnage of the First World War, was to take history into the modern age, leaving behind what he dismissed as ‘scissors-and-paste history’, in which writers ‘only repeat,with different arrangements and different styles of decoration, what others [have] said before them’. His thought process is itself worth reconstructing:
a)  ‘The past which an historian studies is not a dead past, but a past which in some sense is still living in the present’ in the form of traces (documents and artefacts) that have survived.
b)  ‘All history is the history of thought’, in the sense that a piece of historical evidence is meaningless if its intended purpose cannot be inferred.
c)  That process of inference requires an imaginative leap through time: ‘Historical knowledge is the re-enactment in the historian’s mind of the thought whose history he is studying.’
d)  But the real meaning of history comes from the juxtaposition of past and present: ‘Historical knowledge is the re-enactment of a past thought incapsulated in a context of present thoughts which, by contradicting it, confine it to a plane different from theirs.’
e)  The historian thus ‘may very well be related to the nonhistorian as the trained woodsman is to the ignorant traveller. “Nothing here but trees and grass,” thinks the traveller, and marches on. “Look,” says the woodsman, “there is a tiger in that grass.” ’ In other words, Collingwood argues, history offers something ‘altogether different from [scientific] rules, namely insight’.
f)  The true function of historical insight is ‘to inform [people] about the present, in so far as the past, its ostensible subject matter, [is] incapsulated in the present and [constitutes] a part of it not at once obvious to the untrained eye’.
g)  As for our choice of subject matter for historical investigation, Collingwood makes it clear that there is nothing wrong with what his Cambridge contemporary Herbert Butterfield condemned as ‘present-mindedness’: ‘True historical problems arise out of practical problems. We study history in order to see more clearly into the situation in which we are called upon to act. Hence the plane on which, ultimately, all problems arise is the plane of “real” life: that to which they are referred for their solution is history.’
     
    A polymath as skilled in archaeology as he was in philosophy, a staunch opponent of appeasement and an early hater of the
Daily Mail
, * Collingwood has been my guide for many years, but never has he been more indispensable than in the writing of this book. For the problem of why civilizations fall is too important to be left to the purveyors of scissors-and-paste history. It is truly a practical problem of our time, and this book is intended to be a woodsman’s guide to it. For there is more than one tiger hidden in this grass.
    In dutifully