David Cannadine - The Undivided Past: Humanity Beyond Our Differences

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2013 by David Cannadine
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
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Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

eBook ISBN: 978-0-307-95737-5
Hardcover ISBN: 978-0-307-26907-2

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material: Doubleday and Cambridge University Press: Excerpt from We and They from Debits and Credits by Rudyard Kipling, copyright 1926 by Rudyard Kipling, copyright renewed 1953 by Elise Bambridge and from The Cambridge Edition of the Poems of Rudyard Kipling, edited by Thomas Pinney. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., on behalf of U.S. print rights and by permission of Cambridge University Press, on behalf of Canadian print rights and World electronic rights.

Random House, Inc.: Excerpt from Human Family from I Shall Not Be Moved by Maya Angelou. Copyright 1990 by Maya Angelou. Used by permission of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cannadine, David, [date]
The undivided past : humanity beyond our differences / by David Cannadine. 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN: 978-0-307-26907-2
1. World history. I. Title.
D 20.c197 2013
128dc23 2012029278

Cover image: Commerce Brings Peoples Together (Eastern Merchants on a Western Shore) by Theodore Chasseriau. Louvre, Paris, France RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, New York

Cover design by Jason Booher

Manufactured in the United States of America

v3.1

For Nomi and Rick

When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who them [sic] was. Today, were not so sure who they are, but we know theyre there.

President George W. Bush,
quoted in the New York Times, April 16, 2006

The world is awash in divisions rooted in the human compulsion to believe our differences are more important than our common humanity.[But] our common humanity is more important than our interesting and inevitable differences.

President Bill Clinton,
Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World

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

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 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 conflictagainst 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

During the last half century or so, the conventional wisdom

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 relationsa 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.Maya Angelou:

I note the obvious differences

Between each sort and type,

But we are more alike, my friends,

Than we are unalike.

In his recent book, appropriately entitled 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, activistsand 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.