The Beginning of History

Throughout history, most people have been uninvolved in the storyline. There was history, and there were the nasty, brutish, short lives led by most everybody else.

Athens was the first democracy. But in the 6th Century BCE, at most one-tenth of Athenians participated, even though Athens didn't use property qualifications to limit the franchise. Half its people were slaves, and of course Athens excluded its many foreigners and all women. As noted here earlier (see post "Moving Forward"), 24 centuries after Athens in 1900, only 8% of the people voted in Britain’s parliamentary elections. True democracy is very new indeed.

We must also consider the world’s population, which was less than 900 million during the French Revolution--the first time the masses truly seized and held power anywhere. The world now hosts 6.5 billion people. History before 1789 was about elites in a world with few who could read, small armies, and lots of trees.

Napoleon nearly conquered Europe because he was able to draw on the full resources of France’s population. The 19th Century was about trying to get the French-released genie back in the bottle, using reform to fight revolution. But then came world war. Both world wars were total wars involving entire nations and each war profoundly expanded democracy. It would have been impossible to deny power to people who had themselves sacrificed so much.

And people don’t want war. So there is a close identity between democracy and peace.

Capitalism is the system that decentralizes economic decisionmaking, the same way democracy decentralizes political power. Capitalism empowers the masses to make money on their own. With the rise of China and India in this century, we truly realize what an economic asset each person represents—the more, the better.

Hitler was the horror of the 20th Century. He rose to power within a democracy, and drew his support from a city-dwelling, educated population. His ideology was psudo-science; a warped version of genetic selection. The technologically superior war machine he constructed in Germany helped inspire similarly totalitarian state structures in the U.S.S.R., Japan, China, and elsewhere, and gave us the most destructive war the world has ever seen.

As a population becomes conscious of the power it holds in its hands, things can go wrong. And militant Islam is a bigger threat than nationalism (National Socialism) gone haywire—the militants have a religion, inhabit a large region, draw on a history of humiliation, and are close by two-thirds of the world’s proven oil reserves. We are in the fight of our lives at the dawn of real history, the history of entire engaged populations either clashing or somehow working toward a common purpose.