BQ 9: What drives the engine of history?

The big questions of history

People live and breathe and move and do what people do. This requires energy. The energy originates in the sun and is captured by plants, which are eaten by humans and by animals that are eaten by humans. Thus the sun drives the engine of each human life.

History is the sum of human lives observed over time. Yet not simply the sum but the product, for the lives intersect and interact, creating societies and civilizations. What provides the motive force for these? What drives the engine of history?

Solar energy, to be sure, as it powers all those humans. And stored solar energy, after humans learned to use fire, fueled by wood from trees. Some societies eventually got a leg up on other societies by burning coal and later oil. In time the pursuit of these long-sequestered forms of carbon drove the expansion of empires.

Competition had been underway long before then. Bands of hunters fought other bands for access to the best hunting grounds — that is, for access to the richest sources of solar energy the humans’ prey embodied. Bands became tribes and tribes became nations, and the fighting continued. From the steppes of Eurasia to the savannah of Africa and the plains of America, the hunters struggled against each other to claim the largest share of solar energy on the hoof.

Some societies learned to live lower on the food chain. Farmers ate mostly plants rather than animals that ate the plants. This gave them access to additional calories and allowed their populations to outstrip those of the hunters. The farmers pushed the hunters to the margins, even as they fought among themselves for the best farming grounds.

The farmers who organized most effectively — creating governments and cities and armies — dominated their foes. They were still struggling to capture the energy of the sun, but at several removes. The sun was driving the engine of history, but history’s participants rarely thought of their struggles in those terms.

They cast the struggles in other language. Religion was a powerful organizing principle. It bound the faithful together, and it allowed their leaders to speak with the authority of the divine. A secular gospel, focused on self-determination and natural rights, served the same purpose in societies where the individuals couldn’t agree on a single god. Wars of religion could be brutal, but no more brutal than wars fought under the banner of nationalism.

Successful societies were successful in part because they recruited talented leaders. In early days martial talents were the most valuable, and the greatest warriors became chieftains and kings. As societies specialized and stratified, other talents came to the fore. Kings looked to ministers adept in playing potential rivals one against the other. Where elected presidents and prime ministers supplanted monarchs, candidates honed their skills of persuasion. Some appealed to the angels within voters, some to voters’ devils. Some conveyed vision, others grievance. Many draped personal interest in the garb of collective welfare.

In all of this, competition remained the driving force. Sometimes individuals cooperated and occasionally nations. For a few years, even a few decades, cooperation could prevail.

But cooperation was no more than a truce, a balancing of rivals. The competitive instinct was primordial. It ran backward through farming societies competing for farmland to hunters fighting for hunting grounds and finally to the first plants struggling against their neighbors upward toward the sunlight.

No more than individuals can societies escape their inheritance. We carry the competitive impulse in our DNA, and we’ve imprinted it in our social genes.

We need not be prisoners of our inheritance. Species and societies change. The question for historians, as historians, is how much and how fast the change among humans and their societies has occurred and under what circumstances.

The question for historians as citizens is whether those circumstances can be tailored to current need. If so, the challenges facing humans at large might be overcome. If not, the eons-long struggle will continue.