Anglo Saxon Times

I like history, and find that the more I learn about it, the bigger the gaps of the periods and events that I know nothing about seems. I also love audiobooks, because it turns wasted driving time into wonderful learning time, and when downloaded onto an iPod, can be done while exercising or working around the house and yard. It didn't take much to get my interest when David Plotz of Slate mentioned an audiobook on his Gabfest Podcast. He recommended Anglo Saxon Times.

I had purchased a book about the era some years back when I realized that this time during the dark ages was mostly a mystery to me. The book was slow and plodding, and I could never make much headway in it. So the audiobook suggestion was perfect.

This book is actually a Modern Scholar series, college level classes in audiobook form. It was delivered by Professor Michael Drout. He teaches at Wheaton and has degrees from Loyola, the University of Missouri, and Stanford. He has done extensive studies of Beowulf and believe it or not the learned Anglo Saxon scholar J.R.R. Tolkien (The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings trilogy). The best part about the book is that Professor Drout is fluent in Old English (aka Anglo Saxon) and opens each lecture with a reading in Old English of some poetry, history, or saga in Anglo Saxon lore. His Wikipedia entry does not mention this Modern Scholar audiobook.

"Anglo Saxon" covers the gap in time between the fall of Roman control of England (in the 400s) to the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. England had always been a frontier under the Romans with border skirmishes and battles. There were various walls built by the Romans to keep the "barbarians" out. The most famous of these is Hadrian's Wall, but lesser known and farther north was the Antonine Wall. The Romans managed to maintain trade with the Empire on the continent and build a high level of civilization in southern Britain for centuries.

Soon after the Romans left, the invasions began. Areas were repeatedly conquered back and forth between various invaders. What at first was a series of hit and run raids, later became invasion, conquering, and settlement. English lands were considered rich, so many invaders discovered a place worth staying. Even the modern Scots are mainly the settlement of invading Irish, believe it or not. I kept thinking that this explained the eventual development of the British Empire. What else are you going to do when your bloodlines run so thick with the best of the barbarian conquerors of Northern Europe?

The reason little is know of Anglo Saxon times is because little written history survives the era. This is partly because most people didn't read, and partly because most civilized places, including libraries and other repositories of books were constantly being destroyed by invaders. This is not to say that no one read, or that there were no records. There were a couple of great leaders that not only encouraged learning (by then, little remained of Roman era records), but even encouraged translating the bible into Anglo Saxon and conducting church services in the native language. This was not enough for any kind of continuous record to survive, so there are broad gaps in the history of the era. The result is a shadowy and mythical feel to the era, where such stories as King Arthur have a strange stature of semi-believed legend.

One thing I realized when contemplating what it would be like for the people of Anglo Saxon Britain is the irony of their status. The people were "free" of Roman control and taxation, but also free from Roman protection. Sure they had the rule of law and they weren't allowed to do anything they wanted during Roman times, but in exchange, they were not subject to constant predation and invasion by every little tribe seeking booty. It has its parallels in modern times where people are clamoring for less regulation and smaller government. People have always wanted what they perceive to be oppressive authorities off their backs, and it is usually too late when they realize that their government was also covering their backs. I think the ideal balance lies somewhere in between. A good government is one that is heavy enough for you to feel the weight of, but protective enough to allow you room to thrive and grow.

Reasons for War

Human history is thick with wars. Some people say that humans beings are an inherently violent species - that this may in fact be why we survived and became predominant. The cycle of war, while constant throughout human history, has been one which many people wished to escape. Everyone has heard the famous maxim that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. However, as General William Tecumseh Sherman often spoke about after the Civil War, those that have not experienced the horrors of war cannot fully appreciate it as something to be avoided.

The entire prelude to the American Civil War seems to me to be a great suction into the conflict. It's as if war was out there as this irresistible force and men were drawn to it like moths to a flame.

I've often wondered if there is not something latent in men that does desire war. It would explain much, because when you look at history, the majority of wars were fought for entirely stupid reasons. I'm not saying that once some country becomes aggressive that the target nations should not defend themselves. I'm just pointing out that many conflicts, when viewed in retrospect, appear to be events that should have been avoided rather than embraced. Once the idea of war is openly discussed in a country, there seems to be no shortage of people stirring up fear or hatred to support that war. A fever seems to overtake men, subverting their higher reasoning, and making war inevitable.

There was an ancient Greek called Thucydides who wrote a famous history of the Greek Civil War between Sparta and Athens. This was 420BC, almost 2500 years ago. He describes the events leading to war and at one point touches on the motives that drive a state into War. He said they were fear, honor, and interests. Usually a combination of these interests will convince a group of people that they need to wag a war against another group. Fear of what the other group will do if they are not stopped is the first element of building up a war frenzy. If we don't stop them, they will surely hurt us. Honor is the form of pride that requires a group defend themselves or respond to a slight or offense. Interests are the greed that motivate men to think that there are gains to be had to going to war. Sometimes this interest is simply plunder, the other guys have a lot of nice things that we can simply take from them in a war. Many wars in history end with the victors enslaving the vanquished. Often, troops would simply take whatever they wanted after a victory. Often, the defeated land was absorbed or exploited for its resources or geographically advantageous position. In ancient times, going into battle for spoils was a more open motivation. The Romans would often seek out wars so that the soldiers could be properly compensated and would not be tempted to revolt against their leaders or the state. In modern conflicts, this may be a motive, but the aggressors usually deny it, and it is impossible to prove. Recently, many Iraq War opponents stated that the U.S. went to war for oil. Who can determine how much this played into the conscious or subconscious motivations for the war. Many people reject the premise offhand, because they tell themselves that it would be a dishonorable thing to do. On its face, it is an entirely stupid reason to fight, because war disrupts oil production and distribution.

However, history has often shown people to be overly optimistic about their chances in a conflict. History is thick with examples of people stating how quick and easy a war will be, partly as a preventative to those reluctant to start the war, and partly because people often believe the war will be quick and decisive. General Sherman was judged to be insane early in the Civil War when he said it would take 60,000 men to drive the rebels from Kentucky and 200,000 to win the war. These numbers ended up being very low, but were so far in excess of the estimates at the time that no one believed them. Consider the Iraq War again. This was a war we were supposed to be able to win very quickly, and it was supposed to pay for itself with oil revenue. Instead, it dragged on for 6 years and cost a fortune. The Iraq War is not unique in this respect, the only thing that would ever be unique about a war is if people were honest about it or came up with accurate estimates of the cost in time, money, and manpower at the onset of war.

No one ever expects what the eventual truth about a war will be when the war is just beginning. Before the Greek Civil War, the Spartans did not believe the war would be fought the way the Athenians said they would fight it. The Athenians were no match for the Spartans on an even battle field, foot soldiers against foot soldiers. They had an impressive navy, and had never developed large land forces that were strong and skilled. Their plan when they elected to go to war, put forth by Pericles, was to stay in their walled city, let the Spartans do what they wanted to the countryside, and outlast them with their wealth and huge navy. Neither the Spartans or the Athenians believed the war would be costly or long. Athens, goaded by honor and no longer persuaded by Pericles, abandoned their strategy later in the war, insuring that it would be a long drawn out affair which left both sides so weakened that they would eventually be ripe for takeover by other forces.

So, despite the lessons of history, people seem to forget that war often leaves them weakened and fails to achieve the goals they strive for at the beginning of the conflict. This does not mean that sanity should prevail and war will end any time soon, it just means that the voice of reason is often drowned out during the march to war.

Greek Heritage

I always got confused by Greek and Roman history.

You learn about these great and amazing civilizations that were powerful and predominant thousands of years ago, but you don't think about the timeline. I started thinking about the timing of the civilizations and wondering what order things happened.

The cultures overlapped, as it turns out.

Greeks were not exactly conquered and subjugated by Romans all at once. The Greeks weakened themselves through Civil War and continuous internal squabbling, which allowed the Romans to take them over. Greeks were not usually a single unified entity, except briefly under Alexander. Years after he was gone, the Greek world was a series of separately ruled areas, always in revolt internally, and competing between the regions.

Rather than being completely defeated and overrun, then killed and enslaved, they suffered a different fate than many areas subjugated by the Romans. They ended up with a deal where their surrender allowed them to have some autonomy. The Romans admired Greek culture and learning, and since is was part of Roman scholarly culture, they did not want to wipe it out entirely. While the Romans understood that the Greeks were completely subjugated, just allowed more freedom, the Greeks continued for a while as if they actually had these freedoms. By the time they figured out that they were not really free, the Roman Republic was huge, controlling most of the known world. Their special status as a relatively free province came to an end under Sulla, and the Greeks were reorganized into the Province of Achaea.

Throughout their long ancient history, the Greeks were amazing historians and scientists. They figured out a great deal of the basic sciences simply by reasoning it out. They were meticulous at record keeping, and preserved much of their accumulated knowledge in writing.

So the Greeks, while not as successfully savage as the Romans, in some ways persisted longer than the Romans. Their ideas and ways of thinking continued to predominate long after they were just a part of the Roman Empire.

I never really thought about "Greek Society" as it is applies to modern college students. We have fraternities and sororities, and I never understood the actual connection to the Greeks. I just knew that they used Greek letters for their names. I think that using Greek culture as a template for modern university groups is an acknowledgement to the fact that the Greeks were true lovers of knowledge. Any person going to college is expected to embrace learning for learning's sake, as the ancient Greeks did.

Later, they still valued pure scholarship at a time when the Romans had set up a system of education that guaranteed that most Romans would disdain learning. As a result, the Greeks were often brought in to run the day to day administration of the Roman Empire. There were many more qualified literate Greeks than Romans. In a way, the Greeks were in charge of the Romans rather than completely subjugated. Their control of the Roman bureaucracy was almost complete, and while they were nominally the servants, there is no doubt that they had considerable influence in the way the Roman Empire was run on a day to day basis.

Romans Always Won

I was listening to a podcast about ancient Roman history when I heard an interesting phrase. He said that the Romans always won in battle because they always handled their logistics correctly. They did everything the same, each time they moved off to war. They carried or collected enough supplies and had their transportation lines open and secure. Sometimes the warriors and the strengths of the armies were not so different, but the preparations and standardization of how to fight made the difference. So Rome dominated because they had a plan and a method.

The Roman Empire had a nice two episode spread in National Geographic a while back. It showed how their achitecture and engineering and their language, laws, and culture persisted after all this time. The history of ancient Rome podcast I have been listening to has concentrated on their wars and political development.

Roman influence has survived a long time, yet one of the things people also focus on about the Romans is that their empire eventually failed. When I was young, The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire was a very popular book. Many people have simplistic explanations as to how they fell from lack of morals and opposition to Christianity to outsourcing their military. Many people have drawn parallels between the America and the Roman Empire. If you consider Rome having a reign of around 800 to 1000 years, there is no comparison to America, we are simply too young. If you want to point out influence, wealth, power, and technology, you may have something there. I was going to say that one difference is that we don't go out conquering other countries, but you could argue that we do that economically.

What is interesting is the way a winner or leader is copied and emulated, as well as opposed and plotted against. Just by virture of their wealth and dominance, Rome was always at odds with the barbarian tribes around it. Their success made them a target. It is clear that they slowly stopped being what they were as far as the transformation that made them fall from grace. They lost much of their ideas and drive.

It doesn't matter that Rome itself fell if you consider that it's ideals and ideas infected the world and survived without the actual empire in existence anymore. The same would be true of America if we were to be surpassed as a world leader. Our organization and methods have already infected the world. Look at what some consider to be our biggest rival - China. They embraced capitalism and market economies in order to get where they are today. They may still call themselves communist, but who is kidding whom here? They are communist in name only. One little factor I keep hearing in the news is how many engineers and scientist each country has or is producing. The idea is that whoever the technological leader is will also be the world leader. That's based on the American model as well as the Roman model.

Just like sports teams can't win forever, one country or one group cannot dominate forever either. Countries may rise or fall, but what endures is the ideas that came out of the countries through their literature or works.

Temporal Binocular vision

My wife was telling me about something that she read in the book Reading Lolita in Tehran. The assertion was that Middle-easterners are focused on history and Americans are focused on the future. My wife believes \that history should play a part in the decisions we make, and that those decisions are for what will happen in the future.

I thought about what she said about history and future, east and west, Muslim and Christian. I believe that Science Fiction has always appealed to me because it is a way of hoping for a better future (and sometimes showing a worse future to avoid). I think in some ways, it is my theology.

The problem is that either option, a person that only looks to the past, or a person that only looks to the future is like someone with only one eye. Using both eyes, you have binocular vision and you can focus on something and take in it's depth (actually, you have depth perception with binocular vision, so the analogy comes close).

New technology is a double edged sword. If you charge toward the future with a new innovation you have to keep in mind the effects. If you do not have a good idea of what happened up to now, or what usually happens when someone makes a similar change, you can have unintended consequences. Ignoring the past can cause problems, either with the technology itself or with society's resistance to change.

Only through being grounded in the past can you learn from it and move confidently into the future. This isn't just introducing technology, but in politics and diplomacy, too. Look at Iraq for instance. If we paid the slightest attention to Viet Nam, we would have known that it was not going to be easy, but instead, we just looked at securing oil for now. Sometimes politics are short sighted.

The problem with many people that are focusing on the future is that they are focusing on the future of next month or next year, and not 5, 10, 50, or 100 years from now. In a way, it's not even fair to say that they are looking toward the future, they are looking toward their immediate short term needs. This country used to do things like buy the Louisiana purchase because they knew there would be a time when it would make sense to control all the land between the seas, this during a time when a trip of 100 miles could be a week long ordeal, and there wasn't even a way to get across the country yet. That's foresight and vision. What we do now that passes for thinking about the future is the equivalent of wondering what's for lunch.

We're getting a little better with science in analyzing long term impacts of current decisions. Climate change science is helping to focus scientific thinking in this respect. Evolution, Geology, and Astrophysics all teach us to think about things in the long term. In science, it's easier to predict things. Certain principles can be studied and replicated, most fields of study have similar patterns that can be expected.

This vein of thought when focused on politics is not very satisfying. Politicians are not rewarded for looking at the long view. The current news cycle is the predominant focus, and the 2 year election cycle prevents anyone from thinking beyond the immediate future. True leaders had a sense of the length of history and their place in it. Many people do not realize that Abraham Lincoln was horribly unpopular in his time, but his steadfast focus on mending the Union saw him through some terrible times and kept him working through all the setbacks until he succeeded. Now he is considered the best President we have ever had. John Kennedy put us on the moon, in a time scale that was beyond what he could have hoped to still be President, if he had lived and been re-elected. We need this kind of leadership today when we look at the way we will use energy and what we will do with our nation's debt in the future. Because one thing is for sure about the future, stick around long enough, and it will come to pass.