Currently I'm reading Hume's History of England, I just finished the fourth of his six volumes on the subject. Naturally, one's wisdom can't be measured by how many wise men's words you read, but only by the veracity and sense one displays in one's own words. Therefore, no amount of credentials, authorities, or quotes matter a farthing in a debate, which must be disputed on its own merits and nothing else. However, Hume's careful and thorough canvassing of English, and to a degree, European history, has armed me with a great deal of facts which have led me to at least a minor revision in my opinions.
The principal lesson to be learned from Hume's History of England is how pathetic England's history really was. The fourth volume concludes with Queen Elizabeth's death in 1603 or so. This sounds like an advanced period of European history, having already covered the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Age of Discovery, and many other grand terms we have ornamented our past with. But in fact, the period is still steeped in the most despicable and backward customs, the most impoverished style of living, the most tyrannical of rulers, that one can imagine. Nothing can be imagined to be any better off than the Roman Empire of ages past. In fact, numberless observances could be pointed to that show the Roman Empire off in greater favor -- The existence of standing armies numbering in the hundreds of thousands of well disciplined men, the great engineering feats, the size and scope of their roads, aqueducts, and state buildings, the public baths which kept city folk far cleaner and more presentable, the quality of Rome's greatest authors, playwrights, philosophers, essayists, and poets, its religious tolerance of alien sects, its great attention to written law codes, etc all, still, prove themselves superior to the contemporary scene offered in the Europe of 1600. It is almost doubtless that even with all the heavy cavalry and crude artillery available in the year 1600, not a single European power could have resisted the might of a time traveling Roman Empire arrayed directly against it, so little progress had been made in the art of war.
Just to give you a picture of what was happening at this time in Europe, a great war had broken out between the protestants and the Catholics who wished to extirpate them. I mean this literally. In a world of much lower population than what we hold today, hundreds of thousands of protestants were killed by various means in France, Holland, Belgium, and elsewhere. Some were burnt at the stake, others executed with axes, still others simply rounded up and slaughtered by the regular army and crazed Catholic townsfolk in vicious pogroms. Women were not spared any more than men, and the vilest tortures were used against people for simply denying that Christ's 'real presence' was in the bread and water used for communion. I am speaking of burning to death people so slowly that their legs have fallen off before the fire reaches close enough to stop their heart, tearing their bodies apart on racks, or being pulled four directions by four different horses. It is unfathomable why people who have done so little harm could be hated, or treated so cruelly, by other human beings, while the most degenerate criminals are simply hung for their real crimes during the same era.
The wars of Europe in this time are never ending, and just as fruitless. Eternal war exists between England and France, to the great impoverishment of both countries, but not one line on the map ever shifts because of it. After five hundred fruitless years of war, England has finally been driven out of every last port and province of France. There was never any hope of conquering France or any portion of it, because England was too poor to fund a standing army that could maintain a suitable garrison in peace over the lands they'd managed to storm during the war. Therefore, treaties were made and broken in endless cycles, where the French could take back anything they had stipulated to give over whenever they pleased. The same is true of France's fruitless attempts to conquer Italy, England's attempts at conquering Ireland and Scotland, and every other imperial scheme of the era. The size of the armies of supposedly great kingdoms are breathtakingly small, with major engagements decided with armies of 12,000 men, and still more pathetic, won with the killing of some few hundred before the enemy breaks and flees, and is then overtaken and slaughtered by the thousands. There is so little discipline, so little even attempt to hold a line, that it's hard to even imagine the wars of this era.
The government of England is just one long litany of absurdities and injustices. Since there is no standing army, there is no security for the monarch who presumably heads the country. At any time, a baron or two can form a confederacy and decide to marshal their own forces to unseat the current ruler, and become the new one. So many civil wars are fought on these grounds that not a single monarch escapes being taken down by a domestic insurrection, or putting down several insurrections during their reign. Insurrections were mounted from all corners, by desperate peasants hoping for relief from their poverty, by ambitious nobility hoping to usurp the throne, by religious zealots seeking to impose their idea of Christianity, even by pretenders of long dead princes who were executed long ago by previous unjust and bloodthirsty kings. Commonly, whole wars are fought over which councilor or minister should have the closest approach to the sovereign's ear, and the sovereign must sit by a helpless bystander as the nobility disposes of his government. If anyone is ever brought to trial, usually for 'treason,' he is inevitably found guilty. There is never any need to present evidence, there is no defense which can cross examine the witnesses, there are no appeals to higher courts, in fact, there is no rule of law whatsoever. The trial is simply the end of a long line of endless intrigues and whisper campaigns, like some horrible satanic girl's junior high, that seals the fate of whoever finally lost too much popularity or favor at court. Torture is used to extract confessions, then more torture is used to require them to sign a document claiming torture wasn't used to extract their confession. Threats to their kin and heirs are used to make the intended victims willingly and silently mount the execution blocks. There is little difference between ancient justice and the practices of Stalin's USSR except in the scope of their petty tyrannies. Parliament is powerless to check the power of Kings when they take on six different wives in a row, and are ordered to hypocritically pass contradictory laws within mere months, saying the exact opposite on a matter which they had just said according to the King's previous whim before. Nothing can be more degrading than Parliament's constant appeals to justice and holy righteousness in a law, which they had execrated as satanic and insupportable, just last session, when the previous ruler or minister was in power.
Houses still lacked chimneys, the smoke of their cooking fires was just wafted out the windows, and buildings were mainly of mud and straw. Eating utensils were made out of wood. Sheep were more valuable than peasants -- most of the masses were utterly shiftless, praying and begging as monks, idle servants of their lords for the sake of showiness, unsuccessful farmers of tiny, unimproved plots of land, or common vagabonds constantly hung by the thousands every year. No one, as far as I can tell, ever bathed at all.
Naturally, health was so precarious in this age, that aside from the misery of life for the common folk, two misfortunes befell the state itself: Queens could do nothing but have 10, 15 children in a row in the hopes of two heirs surviving, and Kings would constantly die before their heirs reached maturity. This meant that between every ruler would be a sort of 'interregnum' period where all the usurpers and rival claimants to the throne could try their luck, and civil war would break out until the prince, finally, could reach a tolerable age to assume the headship of state. If length of life were the same as today, much could be said in favor of the security and order a nation could gain from a lifelong rule and a hereditary succession. But sadly, no such benefits can be seen in history, since a lifelong reign never amounted to much time anyway, and the succession was never secure because no living heir had ever reached age 25 by the time the parent dies. Instead, the constant turmoil of elections every two years seems a welcome relief from the civil disturbances found in all English history under the monarchy and nobility. It is almost unimaginable for an elected government to go around executing conspirators for treason, and just as unheard of for a successful treasonous coup to occur.
Even though, by this time, several great individuals had already lived and died, they in no wise represent the state of the whole. Rather, they can be seen as lone exceptions, no different from Maimonides or Augustine, during their eras. Michelangelo, Dante, and Petrarch can in no way redeem the remainder of their contemporaries, who continued to live by the most cruel and ignorant tenets. Few people if any had any access to the works of these great poets or painters. The same is true of the vast conquests made in the New World. Even though a 100 years had passed since Columbus and Vasco da Gama had opened up the outside world, no sizable or important colonies or conquests had been made anywhere. The state of navigation, the poverty of the citizenry incapable of affording the capital for any bold enterprise, the weakness of their nation's armies, could barely handle the naked savages they met upon landing. The vast slaughters of Indians the Spanish managed in South America did secure a large supply of gold and silver, but this was used not for the improving of commerce, manufacturing, industry, science, or any other long term investment, but simply to fund ambitious prince's wars with all their neighbors and the slaughter of protestant dissenters, making one infamy only the enabler of another.
Passing over the brief golden age of Greece and Rome, it is entirely possible to consign to oblivion all history before the modern age. Just as nothing good really happened, or existed, in Europe prior to 1600, it's probably just to say that nothing good happened or existed after 1600 either. We have to wait until the Enlightenment and the Industrial revolution to find the first stirrings of true civilization and the world we see today. Since nothing good happened or existed until this period, we can trace everything good that exists today to something that occurred after this period. Therefore, there is no use in knowing anything before this period! The constant advice for us to learn from our past becomes inoperative when our past is wholly imbecilic and iniquitous. Even then, can European history ever take pride in itself, or take as a good precedent, any era before slavery was abolished? Before the serfs were at least freed from their thralldom to the nobility? Before criminals had a day in court to defend themselves, and jails were not full of political criminals and criminals of conscience instead of genuine malefactors? Before everyone had the right to whatever religion they thought best, or no religion at all? Now we are up to the year 1870! Russia can't be said to have had any veneer of civilization until 1960 or so -- it learned the first principles of humanity and justice around the same time it learned how to split the atom and go into space, so disjointed was their moral progress from their intellectual!
Our predecessors were moral and politcal dwarfs compared to the practices of the modern day. We can learn nothing from them and there is nothing positive to emulate about them. So few people lived in these times, that just the last few hundred years of living souls is equal to the last few thousand years anyway. When we discuss the great doings of France and England, we should really be substituting in their places small towns like Nashville or Springfield, since their populations were no higher and their wealth far lower. That's all their grandeur can amount to -- giving them the same name as the great nations that exist today completely inflates our imagination of their influence and majesty. In 1600, it is estimated that somewhere from 1 million to 2 million people lived in the entire United Kingdom. For reference, this is smaller than Houston, Texas contains today! We should be as excited and avid in reading the exploits of the mayor of Houston as we are in reading the King of England.
Everything important in history has happened extremely recently. History is continuing to accelerate. Soon even what we consider important now will be meaningless to the people of the future. What we consider great breaks with the past will look to the future like meaningless nitpicking compared to the differences their societies will have in comparison to the present. One could even go so far as to say that we share little resemblance as a life form to our own ancestors. We live twice as long as they do, our women are treated as well as our men, our infants actually survive to adulthood, barely anyone dies due to violence, everyone has clean water, plentiful food, even air conditioning, we are all literate, and our intelligence far exceeds theirs. The Flynn effect has shown that. Only the most superficial resemblances between our lives and theirs remain.
Hopefully in the final two volumes of Hume's history, we will reach a date that is recognizable as a part of true human history, as a piece of modern history, that has some bearing on the world of today. If not, at least we can thank ourselves that Hume lived a hundred years after the closing of his narrative, and that he, at least, as one of the most preeminent philosophers of all time, is still a portion of the modern, human era, with much to learn from and emulate to this day.
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