WINTER'S JOURNEY 1

PART I: INTRODUCTION – TANGENTIALLY SPEAKING

Some may know that my thus-far chosen career path is that of a teacher. A teacher of history. Now, many of us may remember our own high school days, when we asked ourselves a certain question almost daily, occasionally several times a day. And that being, “Why do I have to know this?” It was difficult to answer that question then, but luckily for most of us, it has become irrelevant now. After graduation, we went on to college, to a career, where some of the things that were learned in high school proved useful, but many were shoved aside to reside in some nether region of our minds. Ask me to tell you something about chemistry and physics and all I can probably muster is the general idea of the periodic table of the elements and something about force equaling mass times acceleration. But beyond that is a mystery. Ask me about Calculus and I’ll say differential and integral, ask me to define them and you’ll get a blank stare. Same with French. Same with so many subjects. Well, that’s ok. Maybe it’s how it is supposed to be. But, for me, the above question is not irrelevant. In fact, it is now more relevant than ever, because if I want to teach history to the youth generation, which at the present time is more concerned with the excesses of modernity rather than the wonders of the past, I need to show it that knowing and thinking about our collective history not only develops an appreciation of life, thinking and reasoning skills, and an open-minded cultural awareness, but most importantly it can help us become actually intelligent and more-enlightened beings. For me, the question of why we should study history has been a perpetual source of headache for a long time because I could not formulate a succinct answer. I could not bring together various strands and ideas into a convincing statement of purpose. I could not even convince myself, much less others, that it was a worthwhile endeavor. But having taken a recent trip to Southeast Asia, I believe I have come much closer to that answer and by sharing a little about my adventure, I hope I can provide a good outline of it here…

In thinking about the advance of civilization, by which I mean the evolution and progression of human societies, we have to look back, way back. Where did the first societies arise? What was it that enabled human beings to emerge from caves and interact with each other on more than a purely familial level? How were they able to leave behind a record which has survived into modernity and notifies us of their existence? When we were students, we balked when we were asked to study geography, a seemingly tedious endeavor involving meaningless maps, charts, and statistical information that was of little immediate use. However, with regard to the present issue, it is precisely in the study of geography, or more specifically, of climactic patterns, that a worthwhile idea emerges. After the last Ice Age, which literally imprisoned humanity in those same caves, allowing only brief forays for hunting, the global temperature picture slowly began to take its modern form. Of course, especially nowadays, the highly vocalized global warming movement insists on one or two degree shifts over the course of centuries as a monumental catastrophe to the planet, but whether it is right or not is irrelevant here. What is relevant is that the equator and the areas immediately north and south of it have always had significantly warmer weather than their neighbors closer to the poles. The cradle of human society in Mesopotamia and the rest of the earliest civilizations emerged in areas close to the Equator, right at the transition point between the tropical and the temperate zones along the Tropic of Cancer (23.5 degress N). It was here that human beings first encountered a natural climate that allowed sedentary living and a sustainable growth in population. To avoid making this longer than it has to be, agriculture and irrigation, in tune with the changing of the seasons (in which temperature shifts were not very vast), enabled a large number of people to be fed and live together in one area as opposed to having to constantly move around in pursuit of migrating herds. In due time, various tools and advancements in rudimentary agricultural science allowed fewer people to produce enough food to sustain the entire population, which meant that professions other than hunter or farmer could emerge.

From here, three major developments took place. The first centered around the need for answers to all the baffling questions that Mother Nature threw at early man. Lacking the know-how of modern science, these early societies relied on the priestly class to provide solace to the multitudes that would otherwise be in constant terror over the incomprehensibility of the natural phenomena around them. (How would you interpret a massive lighting storm without knowing that it is simply a discharge of static electricity?) The second concerned the necessity for keeping order, for as more and more people occupied the same space, disagreements and arguments, especially over property, would certainly arise. To prevent the inevitable anarchy (which undoubtedly gripped the earliest of human communes), the idea of authority and a power structure to implement it was born. At first, these two developments were tied together, as is natural, because a priest figure who can unravel an otherwise complete mystery is bound to easily exert control over those lacking such an ability. Eventually, other factors entered into play and power came to be divided between royalty and religion, but I am getting ahead of myself. The third and final development concentrated on the idea of commerce in all of its various manifestations. As soon as a blacksmith and a cloth maker entered the picture, a way needed to be found for each of them to get food from the farmer and for the farmer to benefit from the other two. Again, at first, it was done directly, through barter. Later, it was organized by the local temple, and much later, there emerged a merchant class responsible for overseeing precisely such transactions. With these three developments intermingling, the evolution of human societies is said to have begun.

Thank you, Roman, for the history lesson. But I didn’t come here to read about history, but rather about your trip. Point taken, but do bear with me just a little more. It is important after all. So, as said before, it was right around the Tropic of Cancer that the Sumerians, Babylonians, Assyrians, Phoenicians, Egyptians, the Chinese, and Indians (and many, many others) established the first semi-permanent centers of civilization. At the pinnacle of their individual heydays, if one looks further north or south on the map, one no doubt finds nomadic tribes who, although out of the cave, still had not developed technologically to prevent the climate from influencing their ability to settle down and become complex societies. That’s how it went, thousands of years ago. Of course, back then, no one had the global reach that technology enables today, but nonetheless in answering the question of who were the greatest powers on the planet, one would simply have to look along the Tropic of Cancer. Skip forward to today. Where has this progression ended up? In effect, who are the dominant powers today and where are they located? What is the relationship between them and those glorious civilizations of old or at least the territorial areas they occupied? One can only ask, what the hell happened?

The above all belong to a category of broad historical questions to which there are many right, that is, conceivable answers. Herein lies a facet of the beauty of history (no, no not history itself, which is often quite ugly, but of its study). You see, the further we go back in time, the harder it is to distinguish fact from fiction, truth from conjecture, an occurrence from fantasy. Even in today’s world, with all of its instant communication and global media penetration, we still have to go largely on faith, on our belief that what we are being told and what we are seeing is the truth. Go back thirty, forty years and the picture gets more muddled, go back a hundred and the confusion increases, go back a thousand and all we have are bits and pieces of puzzle put together in the imagination of some scholar who tells a convincing story. All this, far from being bleak, is actually very exciting. It means that we can study what are taken to be facts and statistics, as well as existing theories, explanations, and analyses, and apply them to our own theories. We can come up with our own individual understandings of history, and because it is just for us, we will not be under the constraints of academics and the like who have to fit into established guidelines to be taken seriously. This way, we can make history fit our world view, thereby enlarging that world view beyond our simple, daily existence to encompass thousands of years of collective life. But I stray yet again.

So, here’s my on the spot take on what happened. A number of things. As civilizations became empires and populations stretched the limits of the land, expansion became the order of the day. But expand enough and you are bound to run into someone else expanding from the other side. So, there’s the inevitable clash and the technologically superior party becomes the conqueror, absorbing the vanquished in some fashion. Most history of the ancient world concerns precisely such handovers of power. Alexander, later the Romans, both but a few examples of the systemic rise and fall that colors the picture of history. Meanwhile, the locus of power was gradually shifting to the north. Why could it not remain along the Tropic of Cancer? Here’s where I can afford some creative freedom.

Imagine you are rich and idle, not facing the necessity to work and believing yourself to be free to do absolutely anything. Oh, what a dream this is, one that presumably multitudes upon multitudes of people across the entire globe have in common. Whether they admit it or not, it is one of the things that comes to their mind if they are asked to justify their existence. Now imagine the kind of decadence and breakdown of society that ensues were this dream to come true, for who would make all the stuff you would want to buy? A huge catch 22 it all is, because so many slave away under the banner of this dream in one form or another without acknowledging the fact that it is absolutely and systemically impossible to achieve it. The pie is not nearly big enough and the competition for what is available is so intense that only the “hungriest” will break through. And most are not “hungry” enough. Let me stretch it a little and relay this analogy back to the issue at hand. Although there has never been a perfect civilization, the greatest of the ancient ones came close to achieving this dream. Not on an individual level, for any society has those on whose backs it is built, but on a collective one. Laws, procedures, and ways of life were set in place and brought a certain amount of satisfaction to a great enough number of people that innovation, or a desire to improve, slowed down. Again, if you are rich and happy, there’s no impetus for change, for the necessity to change anything in your life to stray from the status quo is simply not present. And so, the status quo hardened into stone and civilizations were left to ride out its momentum.

But, what inevitably happens to someone who is rich? Well, someone else emerges who is richer and can afford three Lear jets as opposed to your measly one. While the denizens of the Tropic of Cancer were basking in their various glories, those of the North had to think longer and harder. Through the rudimentary channels of communication existing then, they borrowed from their southern neighbors but, driven by the coldness of their winters and the marshiness of their swamps, their ability for innovation was not lost, but rather nurtured. They had to think up ways to combat nature, travel the seas, organize, subdue enemies, grow food, etc., etc., that the Cancerians never even dreamt about. And they did, efficiently and profitably. It may have taken a while, but once they came on the scene, the world has not looked the same.

Beginning with the centuries of conquest and exploration some five hundred years ago, the Europeans and later the Americans subdued the old, old world. With the power of innovation on their side, they preyed on decadence and imposed their ways. And the people who had lived in much the same way for hundreds of years were powerless to stop it. Except the West, if you will, also invented the idea of progress, which basically states that innovation must never stop, that man’s never-ending drive to improve must never be allowed to desist. (We can argue here about the merits of so-called innovation, but we won’t). And so, not only did they leave little room for someone else to take their place, there was simply little physical room left, in global terms. The West, which is actually more like the North, became dominant. In the last twenty to thirty years, there has been some resurgence in the old, old world. For example, China, the Middle Kingdom, with a longer continuous history than any other territory on the planet, seems to have allowed innovation back into the system and is poised for a resurgence that would be the first of its kind in history. But, this is developing right now and its consequences will not be known for quite some time yet. What is a fact, however, is that the current picture of the globe is such that moderately young territories wield power and influence over those much older, with a much richer cultural and social tradition. And at the heart of this symbolic overlordship lies one of the greater injustices of the modern age.

Ok. Another pause. Hey, Roman, would you make a point already please? I’m kind of tired of reading about all this stuff because (a) you’re rambling and (b) what’s it all have to do with your trip anyway? Well, here it is. I have lived my life in both the West and the East (but always in the North, for Japan is fully in the “Western” club). I have even lived in that grey area between East and West that for a time approached innovation from a slightly different angle, at the cost of millions of lives and a crippling effect that now leaves it somewhat stranded and confused. But I have never lived in areas of the old, old world. I have visited, but never with the mindset that I had during this trip. And being there, this time around, made me angry, envious, proud, happy, sad, and generally confused. Not all simultaneously, of course, but throughout the trip I saw the ills and the joys of our world and how they play out in a place far removed from my personal experience. And you’ll just have to read on to see if I eventually do make a point.