World Civilizations

Lecture One: Introduction

I do not know what knowledge any of you may already have of history, either from
reading or from hearsay. But having regard to the title of this history course, “World
Civilizations,” I am bound to proceed as though you knew nothing of the subject and
needed a basic level of instruction, even in its first elements. Inspired by Sigmund
Freud’s lecture style and the problems he faced opening a new field of study, I have
patterned this opening lecture after Freud’s own opening lecture on psychoanalysis. So,
here we go!

One thing, at least, I may pre-suppose that you know – namely, that history is the study of
humanity’s past and the means by which we understand the world around us. The only
living thinking creature on this planet that writes and reflects on its own history is
mankind. However, history is a very imperfect science. I can give you at once an
illustration of the way in which the study of history differs from, and often even reverses,
what is customary in mainstream hard sciences. Usually, when we introduce students to
a science we compartmentalize it into various building blocks and assure the student that
these blocks – this puzzle – will eventually merge in the creation of a rational
understanding of the universe. This is, in my opinion, perfectly justifiable, for a
traditional science. But when we undertake to evaluate historical events we must proceed
otherwise. Were historians more upfront with their students, they would likely tell them
exactly what Freud told his students about the study of psychoanalysis, namely,

We explain to him the difficulties of the method, its long duration, the trails and
sacrifices which will be required of him; and, as to the result, we tell him that we
can make no definite promises, that success depends upon his endeavours [sic],
upon his understanding, his adaptability and his perseverance.1

Just as Freud likely shocked advanced students of medicine with this statement, I believe
that historians would be well advised to apply this principle to their own discipline one
which even Freud acknowledged as an “apparently perverse attitude.“

Now forgive me if I begin by treating you in the same way as I do more advanced
students in history, for I shall positively advise you against coming to hear me a second
time. And with this intention I shall explain to you how of necessity you can obtain from
me only an incomplete knowledge of history and also what difficulties stand in the way
of your forming an independent judgment on the subject. For I shall show you how the
whole trend of your training and your accustomed modes of thought must inevitably have
made you hostile to an accurate understanding of history, and also how much you would
have to overcome in your own minds in order to master this instinctive opposition. I
naturally cannot foretell what degree of understanding of history you may gain from my
lectures, but I can at least assure you that by attending them you will not have learnt how
to conduct an historical investigation, nor how to carry out more complicated forms of
1
Sigmund Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (Garden City, NY: Permabooks, 1956
(1920)), pp. 19-28. All quoted passages in this lecture were drawn from these pages.

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historical analysis. And further, if any one of you should feel dissatisfied with a merely
cursory acquaintance with history and should wish to form a permanent connection with
it, I shall not merely discourage him, but I shall actually warn him against it. For as
things are at the present time, such a person would find himself in a community which
misunderstood his aims and intentions, regarded him with suspicion and possibly
hostility, and let loose upon him all the latent evil impulses harbored within it. Perhaps
you can infer from the present popular discussion about the Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code
now raging what a fickle host the public can prove to be.

However, there are always some people to whom the possibility of a new addition to
knowledge will prove an attraction strong enough to survive all such inconveniences. If
there are any such among you who will appear at my second lecture in spite of my words
of warning they will be welcome. But all of you have the right to know what these
inherent difficulties of history are to which I have alluded.

First of all, there is a problem of the teaching and exposition of the subject. In most
fields of science, you have been accustomed to use your eyes. You can immediately
experience the lecture hall or perhaps recount names or faces of those who arrived before
and after you. Earlier today or this week, you may have driven through town, stopped at
a traffic light, or witnessed an accident. Later you may have recounted these experiences
to others without any doubt about the certainty of your explanation. Consider now the
following event: You witness the lights at a railroad crossing turn on, the bells begin to
ring, and the crossing-gates descend. As you bring your vehicle to a stop, you can see the
train approaching and then hear the train signal its approach to the intersection. It is
almost customary that we scan each car with our eyes to detect the unusual and to address
a certain boredom that comes with waiting for the train to pass. After the train passes, the
gates rise, the bells go silent, and the lights go dark. You can now go on your way
towards your destination. As an historical event, you and your vehicle are both part of
the event and you are one of its actors. There are, of course, numerous factors
determining what you witness, including the side of the tracks determining your view,
your knowledge of railroad technology, and your personal interest – if any – in the actual
event. Thus a teacher of history acts in part as an exponent and guide, leading students as
it were through the actual event, while students gain in this way a direct relationship to
the historical event and believe yourself to have been convinced by your own experience
of the existence of the facts.

Our train scenario represents but one minute example of the role history plays in our
sense of self and our knowledge of the world. Here one could draw a closer analogy to
Freudian psychoanalysis where “nothing happens but an exchange of words between the
patient and the physician.” The central issue here is one of communication between the
patient and the physician, or, as in our case, between the student and the historian. The
historian – like the physician -- attempts to direct the student’s thought-processes and
forces his attention in certain directions, gives him explanations and observes to the
extent possible the reactions of understanding or denial thus evoked. The student’s
unenlightened relatives – people of a kind to be impressed only by something visible and
tangible, preferably by the sort of ‘action’ that may be seen in the movies produced by

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Hollywood. For they are the same people who are always convinced that historians differ
little from neurotics in that their explanations are largely the products of their own
imagination.

Now imagine for a moment that you were present at a lecture in history and that the
lecturer was dealing with the life and conquests of Alexander the Great. What reason
would you have to believe what he told you? The situation would appear at first sight
even more unsatisfactory than in the case of psychoanalysis, for the professor of history
had no more part in Alexander’s campaigns than you yourselves. But then we come to
the question of what evidence there is to support the historian. He can refer you to the
accounts of early writers who were either contemporaries or who lived not long after the
events in question, such as Diodorus, Plutarch, Arrian, and others; he can lay before you
reproductions of the preserved coins and statues of the king, and pass round a photograph
of the mosaic at Pompeii representing the battle of Issus. Yet, strictly speaking, all these
documents only prove that the existence of Alexander and the reality of his deeds were
already believed in by former generations of men, and your criticism might begin anew at
this point. And then you would find that not everything reported of Alexander is worthy
of belief or sufficiently authenticated in detail, but I can hardly suppose that you would
leave the lecture-room in doubt altogether as to the reality of Alexander the Great. Your
conclusions would be principally determined by two considerations: first, that the lecturer
could have no conceivable motive for attempting to persuade you of something which he
did not himself believe to be true, and secondly, that all the available authorities agree
more or less in their accounts of the facts. In questioning the accuracy of the early
writers you would apply these tests again, the possible motives of the authors and the
agreement to be found between them. The result of such tests would certainly be
convincing in the case of Alexander, probably less so in regard to figures like Moses and
Nimrod. Nevertheless, there is little to no scientifically defined objective evidence under
consideration.

Now you will have a right to ask the question: If no objective evidence for history exists
and no possibility of demonstrating the process as in our train scenario, how is it possible
to study it at all or to convince oneself of the truth of historical events we have not been
party to ourselves? The study of history is in deed not an easy matter. Similar to the
more recent growth of interest in psychoanalysis, many people have attempted to
confront the challenges of history. Like psychoanalysis, history is learned through an act
of personal reflection. The student must come to understand their own sense of self
created out of a maelstrom of personal experience. Unlike psychoanalysis, history
provides the tools with which we attempt to make sense of our personal experience. As a
consequence, the material for self-analysis is in fact drawn from history. As a method of
analysis, the parallel processes of self-analysis and a growing historical awareness
provide us with the required conviction of our greater reality, and of the truth of its
conceptions, although progress on these lines is not without its limitations. One gets
much further by submitting oneself to a skilled historian, allowing the working of
historical analysis in one’s own person and using the opportunity to observe the finer
details of the technique which the historian employs. Ironically, the method of
psychoanalysis is, according to Freud, only practicable for individuals and cannot be used

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in a class of students. History, in contrast, is practical and necessary for both individuals
and larger groups.

The second difficulty you will find in connection with history is not, on the other hand,
inherent in it, but is in so far as your cultural predisposition to more scientific studies
have influenced you. Your training will have induced in you an attitude of mind very far
removed from the truly historical one. You have been trained to establish the origins and
causes of historical events as though one were investigating a crime. You are likely to
think in terms of means, motive, opportunity, and a rational thread to tie them together.
You may be tempted to ask questions more typical of a psychoanalyst, namely, those
directed to the mental aspects of life. For these reasons a clearly historical attitude of
mind is still foreign to you, and you are accustomed to regard it with suspicion, to deny it
– as was denied psychoanalysis in the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- any “scientific
status, and to leave it to the general public, poets, mystics, and philosophers.” Now this
limitation in you is undoubtedly detrimental to your own personal growth. When
encountering your own inhibitions and the opinions of others, as in most human
relationships, I am afraid you will pay the penalty of having to yield a part of your
alleged free will to which you aspire to a rather subtle cohort of “quacks, mystics, and
faith-healers” unless you have the confidence provided by a more enhanced sense of
history.

I quite acknowledge that there is no excuse for this defect in your previous education. In
contrast to the study of history, Freudian psychoanalysis both departed from the methods
of the originating profession. It also lacked any variety of “speculative” or “descriptive
philosophy.” As far as Freud was concerned, his focus group – medical students – lacked
“anything useful of the relations existing between mind and body, or … a key to
comprehension of a possible disorder of the mental functions.” History and historians do
not have the luxury of any paucity in theory, philosophical or otherwise, or a lack of
significant evidence to explain the failure to inculcate into society a truly historical
consciousness. It is true that historians serve a cacophony of voices. There is a public
demand for a quasi-mythological history elevating their pantheon of heroes into models
of behavior for future generations. The Roman historian Livy could be counted among
them. The public is periodically drawn to those histories that place society and its leaders
under a quite critical microscope. The Florentine historian Niccolo Machiavelli played
such a role during the Italian Renaissance. To these we might add the conservatives, who
see history as a tale of what is to be cherished as well as what is to be avoided, and the
liberals, who aspire to depart from traditional historical paths into a better future.

These are the tides which historians are striving to guide. It hopes to provide society with
the more dynamic but less certain foundation, to discover the common ground on which a
correlation of individual and societal identities become comprehensible. It is the
intention to give a sense of historical intuition to as many members of society as possible.
History is not reality itself but an attempt to come to grips with reality. To this end it
must willingly interact with every preconception, whether domestic or foreign, social or
political, scientific or religious, but it must also work throughout with a clear conception

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of a purely historical order, and for this very reason I fear that it will appear strange to
you at first.

For the next difficulty I shall not hold you, your training or your mental attitude,
responsible. Returning to Freud, there are two tenets of psychoanalysis which offend the
whole world and excite its resentment; the one conflicts with intellectual, the other with
moral and aesthetic prejudices. In contrast, historians tend to offend everyone at some
level of understanding. Let us not underestimate these prejudices; they are powerful
things, residues of valuable, even necessary, stages in human evolution. They are
maintained by emotional forces, and the fight against them is a hard one.

The first of these displeasing proportions of both history and psychoanalysis is this: that
mental processes are essentially unconscious, and that those which are conscious are
merely isolated acts and parts of the whole. I must ask you to remember that, on the
contrary, we are accustomed to identify the historical with the conscious. Consciousness
appears to us as positively the characteristic that defines the truly historical life, and we
often regard history as the study of the content of that consciousness. This even appears
so evidence that any contradiction of it seems to undermine our belief in the significance
of the historical actors. Marxist, Neo-Marxists, social, and economic historians have
worked diligently to escape the almost religious devotion to the individual for a more all-
encompassing historical theory. Their theories, however, failed to fill the public’s need
for its own sense of historical identity. Something more was demanded. The
psychoanalytical definition of the mind is that it comprises processes of the nature of
feeling, thinking, and wishing, and that there are such things as unconscious thinking and
unconscious wishing. Historical analysis, it would seem, aspires to a comparably
comprehensive understanding of humanity. Freud believed that in doing so
psychoanalysis forfeited at the “outset the sympathy of the sober and scientifically
minded, and incurred the suspicion of being a fantastic cult occupied with dark and
unfathomable mysteries.” Considering only the recent interest in the Da Vinci Code, we
will have no difficult recognizing the popular interest in these “dark” mysteries. Clearly,
there is a difference between the world of professional historians and the more popular
appetite for these historical conspiracies. Even so, the historian must aspire to understand
more than the historical deficiencies in the public’s reading list. It is essential that the
historian seek out the origins and contemporary motives behind the public’s fickle
attention. It is equally important to identify those unique individuals who molded that
historical process. Despite efforts to discredit the place of the individual in history, there
is inevitably one or more individuals consciously pushing the limits of what is perceived
as possible. It might be argued that historical conditions create historical actors.
However, even if these historical conditions served as a social fertilizer, there is no
guarantee that the desired crop of historical actor or actors would appear. Rather, it is the
individual that takes the chance on the unknown and steps out from the crowd.

Freud’s opening lecture now takes a more radical turn: recognizing the significance of
sexual impulses. Historians and other academics have been drawn to psychology and
psychoanalysis as new tools for dissecting their historical prey. These tools suggested
new insights into the minds of figures such as Adolf Hitler and Martin Luther. Freud,

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however, had a more aggressive agenda: “Nay, more, that these sexual impulses have
contributed invaluably to the highest cultural, artistic, and social achievements of the
human mind.” The comprehensiveness and scientific potential of such a methodology
still has its allure.

In my opinion, historians aspire to many of the same goals pursued by Sigmund Freud.
Freud believed he had identified the singular force for change in human history. He
believed that civilization had been

built up, under the pressure of the struggle for existence, by sacrifices in
gratification of the primitive impulses, and that it is to a great forever being re-
created, as each individual, successively joining the community, repeats the
sacrifice of his instinctive pleasures for the common good. The sexual are
amongst the most important of the instinctive forces thus utilized: they are in this
way sublimated, that is to say, their energy is turned aside from its sexual goal
and diverted towards other ends … is insecure, for the sexual impulses are with
difficult controlled; in each individual who takes up his part in the work of
civilization there is a danger that a rebellion of the sexual impulses may occur,
against this diversion of their energy.

Where Freud projected “the liberation of the sexual impulses” as the greatest threat to
culture, historians collectively have identified a number of factors running like currents in
the ocean altering that nebulous clouds of history. Historians struggle balancing the place
of the individual against the general environment or trends. Where there appears to be a
descent into the sexual instincts, historians are inclined to see the antithesis of civilization
and civilized behavior. Where animal instincts begin, history has found its end. History
is not, however, the subjective collection of desirable observations but a reasoned review
of the actions of human beings and their interaction with their environment. Contrary to
the popular reception of Freudian psychoanalysis in the 1920s, the public commonly
finds this observation on history to be agreeable. It is, however, in the nature of the
details and their merger with the big picture that initiates the great schism.

The historian’s intention has been solely to give recognition to the facts as they are found
in the course of painstaking research. These, now, are some of the difficulties which
confront you at the outset when you begin to take an interest in history. It is probably
more than enough for a beginning. If you can overcome their discouraging effect, we
will proceed further.