Departments
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Week of 8 January 1999 |
Vol. II, No. 18 |
Feature
Article
Brush-up on empires and epochs
Fromkin's concise Way of the World rides waves of historical change
by Hope Green
Even the brightest college students, "like most Americans," laments David Fromkin, are woefully ignorant of history and geography. "I find myself, no matter what I'm teaching, devoting the first lecture to a brief account of the past, so we all know where we're starting from," says the CAS professor of history, law, and international relations.
Troubled by blank stares greeting his every mention of the Magna Carta or Monroe Doctrine, Fromkin was inspired to write The Way of the World: From the Dawn of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-First Century (Knopf), set for publication January 19. His mission: to trace the major patterns of human history in accessible prose, in hopes of shedding light for nonhistorians on why things are as they are.
"I don't want to write History for Dummies; I want to write history for intelligent people," Fromkin says. "I love history, and reading about history for its own sake, but I know that isn't the case for most people. So I set out to solve the problem of how in a very short time, without being untrue to history, you can tell the really big events that people must know before they can think about the future."
In the beginning
In its first chapter, The Way of the World travels back
in time to the Big Bang, before summarizing life's emergence
on the planet and human evolution through the Ice Ages. It
then traces homo sapiens' 6,000 years of political history
up to the present, starting with the Sumerian city-state
Uruk. How this book differs from other historical synopses,
says Fromkin, is not just by its brevity.
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David Fromkin, CAS professor
and author of The Way of the World: From the Dawn
of Civilizations to the Eve of the Twenty-First
Century. Photo by Fred
Sway
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"What I have tried to do instead," Fromkin says, "is bring to readers' attention only the eight big evolutions in history." These waves of change, described in the first eight chapters, include the development among ancient peoples of conscience in philosophy and religion, as well as the ongoing "modernizing revolution" in industry, science, and technology. The last four chapters look at possible future directions for humanity.
Fromkin has been teaching at BU since 1994. He holds a law degree from the University of Chicago and a postgraduate diploma in law from the University of London. In 1972 he was the chief foreign policy advisor to Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey.
Fromkin's previous book In the Time of the Americans: FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Marshall, MacArthur -- The Generation That Changed America's Role in the World (1995), won BU's Kahn Award in 1996. His 1989 best-seller A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914-1922 was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
While The Way of the World is, like Fromkin's earlier works, intended for wide readership, the author hopes it will intrigue fellow historians, too.
"I think this book ought to be an agreeable challenge to them. They might consider how they would write this book, and maybe organize it differently. So I could see an audience that would take it almost as an intellectual game; maybe they would want to write a book like this, but think they could do a better job with it."
To be sure, Fromkin admits, deciding what events to include and leave out was a great challenge. Another was writing about areas unrelated to his academic background, such as technology. (He enlisted experts in a variety of disciplines to review the manuscript's early drafts.)
Clash distinctions
Asked to contrast his worldview with the ideas of other
post-Cold War historians, Fromkin cites Samuel Huntington
and Francis Fukuyama. Huntington, he says, "sees other
civilizations in today's world that will clash with ours,
but I don't. What he calls civilizations I say are not
because they are not acceptable in today's world -- they
cannot produce the life that we have.
"I think that after a long period in which there was a variety of civilizations, we are at a point where there is only one true living civilization: the civilization of science. And there are reactions against it. But to my mind, there are no viable alternatives."
Fromkin refutes Fukuyama's notion that America triumphed in this century by beating all challengers. "I think our competitors lost, rather than that we won, and that the 21st century will be an American century in a different way. We've now won the right to get the world running along lines we advocate. Now we're going to see whether those ideas work or not."
The Way of the World concludes with future scenarios, including threats to the environment and to world stability and the promise of continuing space exploration. Fromkin predicts that as economic borders fade, a clash of ideas will ensue. A "central question in the politics of the 21st century," he writes, "will be the tension between the centripetal pull of a modern global economy that requires regional and planetary organization, and the centrifugal push of atavistic tribalisms. It is a conflict that pits rational interests against irrational emotions."
Decline -- and fail
Also in his book, Fromkin suggests that the United
States will probably continue to dominate global affairs and
influence culture overseas. What could alter that course, he
warns, would be for the country to lose sight of its
ideological heritage, whether through declining educational
standards or eroded moral authority in foreign policy. For
example, he notes the "sorry record" of U.S. support for
dictatorships in Central America and the Caribbean. "The
United States," he writes, "neither deserves to lead, nor is
likely to lead, in the 21st century if it pursues such
policies again."
Rather than innate goodness or evil, Fromkin sees humanity as having a set of contradicting traits. He points to passages in The Way of the World citing primatologist Jane Goodall's research on wild chimpanzees.
"What we can see, not just in our species but in all of the ape family, are some tendencies that at the moment are helpful and others that are not," he says. "There's a tendency to cooperate within groups. There is also a tendency to violent and often homicidal hostility toward members of other groups, and I think that did play a useful role in providing the maximum variety that evolution requires. But as of today, it's an extremely dangerous trait because our weapons are so destructive."
The future will largely be determined, Fromkin says, by the ongoing scientific revolution and how well we anticipate its consequences.
"Civilization has been here only a short time," he says. "There are only 6,000 years of history, and civilization tends to go against some of what look like the requirements of the natural world. It's still not entirely clear that civilization will work."