When I was in grammer school and high school, I learned about history — as did most of us. Regarding our own nation, I learned about the Revolutionary War, about the Civil War, about WW1 and WW2, about the Founding Fathers, about the adoption of the Constitution, etc. Regarding world history, I was taught about the great empires in China and Rome and the Middle East, about the kings and queens of England, about Alexander the Great, about Genghis Khan and Marco Polo, about the Greeks and the Egyptians with their pyramids, and other sundry events and dates and figures. Unfortunately, I never thought to ask the bigger questions: just why were there kings and nations and wars and trade routes to China? I never stopped to wonder just when and why, in the course of early human history, did people give their consent to being ruled by a king or other kind of government? Just why did they affiliate themselves with a kingdom or a fiefdom or a nation? When did they consent to the idea of war, of putting their lives on the line to bring mayhem and misery to other people who were ultimately like themselves? And when and how did the one or two good things that came from large-scale organization brought on by kings and ruling elders, i.e. trade and shared learning, get going?

Only in my old age did I even think of these things as questions. I have been listening to a CD course from The Teaching Company called “The Wisdom of History” by J. Rufus Fears. I must give Prof. Fears credit for bringing up those questions. In his history of the Middle East, the big professor (Dr. Fears does appear to be a robust man; his “hotness rating” on ratemyprofessors.com is 0) points out that it was in Egypt and Iraq where the first kings and kingdoms occurred. Humans were living there as they were throughout the rest of the world, i.e. in little family-tribes, getting by through a mix of hunting, gathering, and small-scale agriculture.

However, the weather started changing, getting dryer and dryer, and a lot of these little tribes were in trouble. Someone figured out that they could prevent these people from starving by learning how to channel the big rivers and predict their flows, i.e. the Nile and the Tigris / Euphrates system. This would take large-scale organization on the part of those with the right information; and such organization required the ability to boss other people around. Since it was a matter of growing food or starving, a lot of people gave in and pledged their allegiance to the handful of folk with information about the rivers. (Information is the precursor to power.) And so came the birth of kingdom and absolute tyranny. The new kings soon made it clear that they were the boss, not to be questioned. If you don’t like it, go find your own river.

Once we had kingdoms with hundreds and eventually thousands of people willing to do what the king said, it wasn’t hard to take the first steps towards war. Maybe there were still tribal people getting by out beyond the rivers in question; well, why not organize some of the subjects into a fighting group, arm them with sticks and rocks and whatever else could do harm, and go out and conquer those little tribes. It would make the kingdom bigger, give the king more land and people to control, and thus allow more taxes to be levied as to support the material comfort of the king and his family. So, the idea of war and conquering got started. It got especially interesting when one growing kingdom discovered that there were others out there, and that they were becoming interested in the same hills or seas or rivers for future expansion. So, more and more emphasis was placed on training armies and making war. Eventually, war got so popular that it became more than a way to compete with other kingdoms for new turf; if done right, it could conquer another kingdom as a whole, providing a bounty of new lands, slaves, and whatever material comforts the losing kingdom had accumulated.

So, starting with the Middle East but certainly expanding rapidly out from there, the world saw the continual geographic growth of regions where local inhabitants lost their freedom, where they were forced to swear allegiance to a king and give in to his demands (including taxes, service in the army, contribution of free labor for public projects, obedience to general laws of behavior, etc.). There were fewer and fewer places where a small family tribe could just live on the land as they chose. The world was getting organized, but in a rather crude way; there were a handful of big bosses (kings), and thousands then millions of people taking orders from them unquestioningly. (If you did question the king, you were probably a goner).

Still, the geographic growth of all this forced control caused by megalomaniac kings did cause one good thing to happen, something that would eventually give many of the small people the opportunity to gain some level of power and freedom of their own. And that was trade. As kingdoms grew, roads and ships had to be built. Over time, people became more mobile. And people discovered that over those hills or across the bay were other people who had access to local resources that allowed them to make metal plates or pottery or perfume; they might be interested in exchanging some of that stuff for what we have, be it fish or apples or wool or stone tools. Once trade started, many possibilities for individual betterment were unleashed. Numbers and writing were started by kings and their ministers to keep track of taxes; but those techniques eventually got out and were adapted as to help traders. So, with trade was spread the ability to write and understand numbers. Eventually, this spurred the exchange of ideas and techniques. Civilization was on the way.

And thus came about the schizophrenic world that we know: a world of war, a world of power, a world of allegiance demanded by king and country, demands that that too quickly become tyranny. And yet, a world of economic opportunity, intellectual development, and humanistic ideals. The Middle East was the birthplace of our key monotheistic religions, and thus the ethics of individual dignity and rights that eventually stemmed from them. Not far away were the ancient Greeks, who through the leisure and learning allowed to a privileged few (because of trade) were able to develop philosophies and ideals like democracy.

So there it is, the (very rough) story regarding the origins of the best and worst of humankind — if I’m hearing Dr. Fears right. It’s too bad that we are all taught at a young age to take them for granted. If we are going to emphasize our good things and phase out the bad, we need to know where they came from and why they got so popular. History needs to stop being all about dates and people and battles, and start being more about why humankind is the way that it is. You gotta know how you got here in order to get any further.