 This is St. Tech, Hawaii. Community matters here. Sources. Well, how do you know about the past? What has the past left us today? How do you know accurately? How do you know in action? It's so easy to be confused. That's right. It's very complicated and you have to be able to interrogate your sources intelligently. You have to be able to ask, is this an honest source? And if it's not, if it's a complete piece of fiction, what does it still teach us? The duties of a citizen. Well, yeah. I think that level of critical thinking is the way where history bleeds into the liberal arts generally and gets you an informed and educated citizenry that's capable of running a democracy. That's it. We're done now. Okay. No, that's it. Stephen Marillo. He's a professor at Wabash College, a history professor there, and we are so delighted to have him here. Jay Fiedel. This is education, let's see, what are we calling this education? Education matters. And we are delighted to have him here to talk about history, to talk about war because he's written about that, to talk about, you know, the development of humanity as a species. You're going to learn about all these things in 28 minutes and 30 seconds. Welcome to the show, Stephen. Thank you for having me on this show, Jay. No pressure. I'm so delightful to be here. No pressure at all. Okay, I wore my best shirt. Let's talk about, you know, the thing at Wabash was, let's see, we want to make our own historians. Yeah, make all our students their own historians. Yeah, what a great idea, what a great notion in the history department anyway, but what is the historian that you want to make? We want to make historians who are critical about sources, critical about the information that has come to us from the past so that when they construct a past, which is what historians do, that we don't uncover something that's just there, we kind of invent the version of the past that we need, based on the sources, so you have to be able to intelligently interrogate sources, ask if they're honest, ask what they're really telling you, who were they written for. And if you do all of that, you'll come up with a reasonable answer to a question about what happened in the past, and now the question of why do you want to learn about the past is kind of implicit in there. Why? Because I think we can learn. Is it a better life? Is it a better life? Or would I be wanting to learn about the past for the benefit of the species? Wow, that's big terms. Yeah, for the benefit of the species. But I think we need to know where we came from, and what the dynamics of world history have been. My specialty is world history at a really big level. And I think that knowing how that has, how the modern world has come about, has benefits in terms of intelligent policy making. So how do you find this generation of history students? You know, I mean, Harvard for your AB in history, and then Oxford for more, for a PhD in history. This makes you different than most mortals, and certainly you see the world differently. Superhistory. If you were in Boston at the time of the explosion, okay, a marathon explosion, and you were standing a couple of blocks away, you'd see that through the prism, the lens of your historical training, and your way of looking at things as an historian. So we know generally, well, you have to tell me how you would react to that, how you would see that, you know, putting it in the context of the entire human species experience, versus somebody who had no history, who didn't have any context, and he saw that same explosion. He would see it differently. Can you tell me the difference between the two perceptions? Well, first let me start by saying that there'd be a considerable overlap. Okay. Historians are still human, and I would see that and be horrified, and have sympathy for the people who are injured and killed, and all that sort of stuff, so the human reaction is always there. I think I might be more inclined to ask questions about why this is happening in terms of global movements of people, political ideologies traveling across the global network, things like that, context. Historians want context. No event stands on its own, and causation is always a complex thing. You want to look at individual motivations, but individual motivations are set in social structures, and economic incentives, and cultural constructs that are all interlinked, and this is what I try and do with history, is make all that complexity more comprehensible by, I do models. That's what's a model for this discussion. A model for this discussion is, I do history in terms of networks, which are global systems of connection, often economic, but also cultural, and the movement of people and so forth, hierarchies, which is what we usually think of as states, empires, the political organizations that people live in that organize their own communities, and that divide them as well. And that divide them. Indeed, networks tend to connect, hierarchies tend to divide, so there's a natural tension between those two sorts of structures that is, I think, one of the central stories of world history, that over the millennia, networks have become relatively much more powerful compared to hierarchies. They've both become more powerful. Modern technology makes any modern state, any post-industrial state, much more powerful able to do things in any pre-industrial state, but relative to each other, networks have become more important. Maybe this is all a simplifying, and I see a network as a horizontal. That is correct. And a hierarchy as a vertical. And if you think of the sort of people who live in a horizontal construct versus the sort of people who live in a vertical construct, they've got different outlooks on the world. They've got different sort of cultural assumptions about how you deal with people. We're moving to horizontal, aren't we? Tell me we are. Well, because of the increasing power of networks, yes, I think the globe has become more horizontal than vertical, especially compared to 200 years ago and before. Before industrialization. I mean, this is why modern democracy is a phenomenon of the modern industrial world. That the ethos of equality and of dealing with each other on that level rather than a sort of confusion or pick your traditional ethic where you're subservient to your superiors, bow to them, and your superiors command and you obey, and you owe each other respect, maybe. Not always. Sometimes you're in the lion's pit. Yeah, that's right. I'm not sure what kind of gladiator would respect the Roman emperors, but they'd be obeying whether they wanted to or not. So I take it from what you say. I mean, I would add my thought that being in a horizontal world is a better place. It's actually a better state of humanity, do you think? I think so. I think egalitarianism is an important value. I think it makes it more possible to treat everybody equally, to think about being able to treat everybody equally, equal opportunity economically, equal value as a human being. That's not even traditional ethical systems that respected people, respected them in terms of some people who are better than others, more powerful. That's baggage we don't really need. I agree with you. But a horizontal condition, a horizontal character configuration of humanity, it's not a guarantee, is it? I mean, we got there only through a lot of trouble and toil and fits and starts and trial and error, and if we can hold on to it, it's great. It's like Franklin. Ben Franklin is coming out of Independence Hall in Philadelphia, my old thing. There's a woman waiting for him, it's his big secret. She says, Dr. Franklin, Dr. Franklin, what kind of government are we going to have? And he says, Madam, we're going to have a republic if you can keep it. Yeah, that's right. You know, you will have the kind of government that you deserve. So it's the same thing with horizontal. You've got to work to keep it, no? That's right. That's right. It's a product of individuals doing things that benefit themselves within structures that encourage that. It's not automatic. It's still a very strong tendency towards hierarchy, towards exclusiveness. This is one of the great battles of modern politics. Yeah, well, when you say modern politics, I mean the Trump administration. I mean, the Trump administration and other right-wing ethnic nationalist administrations in Europe, they want to divide themselves off, and that's often, I don't want to attribute that to the people as a whole because it's often a matter of demagogic leaders who are taking advantage of conflicts that arise to enhance their own power. But that, again, emphasizes that sort of verticality in that we have leaders who will make us safe, that only I can fix it, is a very hierarchy kind of non-egalitarian claim. And history has shown that doesn't work. History has shown that that doesn't work, although history also shows that in pre-industrial conditions when communications are slow and there's not a lot of wealth, that it's the only sort of government that works effectively. It's a modern democracy is a product of our being rich and our being having modern communication systems. I mean, imagine trying to run a popular vote in the Roman Empire. You just can't do it. By the time you decide something, the crisis has passed. The Persians are at the gates and whatever. One lesson for that in terms of our current situation is global climate change. If we screw things up enough, pardon my language there, as to seriously reduce our wealth creation capacity and mess up global communications, you're undermining the conditions on which egalitarianism, democracy, and all our modern values are built. And you're undermining the species in general, because if we have those natural disasters or extreme weather, we've just seen so much of it even recently. And next year is El Nino, it's going to be worse. People are going to die possibly by the carload because of this. In direct ways and in indirect ways, when I flew here from the mainland, I was stunned when I looked down at San Francisco where we were taking off that that's not cloud cover, that's smoke down there. And inhaling smoke is not good for you. And there's vast areas of the country that are being affected by the haze of monstrous forest fires. So you mentioned in the context of two people, one an historian, one not an historian, observing the same scenario. And part of the difference for the historian is that he looks back, he sees causation. He understands the continuum, maybe all the way back. I mean, I suppose the perfect answer, the perfect perception would be all the way back to the very beginning of life in the cave. And he sees all of that sweeping up right there to Boston and the bomb in Boston. And he puts all that together in the nanosecond and he understands. But you said causation and it really fascinates me. Because if you can understand causation from way back when till now, then your student of causation is what you are. And you can see this event, this explosion in Boston at the marathon. You can see that as causation for other things. That's right. There's a piece of a much larger painting on the wall that you're just seeing a little bit of. And as you study the painting, you become part of it. This is the world. If world history is this great sort of mural, you can't help but become part of what you're looking at. And then you're looking at yourself. Okay, that's point two on the final exam. The first part, we all have to become historians to be good citizens. There will be a quiz. Short answer. And the other is, you're part of it. You're part of it. You can't escape. That's right. That's right. Even asking questions of the past, it doesn't change the past but it changes our view of the past and that can be politically important. Now I will say, so I was not to claim too much credit just for history, that it's the sort of questions that any good liberally educated person who's studied the humanities and the social sciences and sciences should be able to ask. It's just that history has this particular focus on events in the time stream. And how, yes, obviously any one event then becomes, is not just effect but cause for future. Is there any limitation in categories of events that you would consider as a historian? For example, I mean government. Government moves, leadership, government initiatives. That would definitely be part of it. I suppose social changes, literature would be part of it. Gee whiz, technological changes. That would be part of it. Yep. But is there a limit on that? No. Or is it everything? Oh it's everything. The question is, how do you divide it up? How do you make it comprehensible? And my model has not just networks and hierarchies but also what I call cultural screens where people project images about themselves and that's how they identify themselves and so forth. The cultural frames within which those images are projected and that's one of the things that differentiates different societies is what are their screen images but even more what are their frame values? Yeah. What do they think is the natural way to view the world and there's no natural way to view the world. Is their rationality the same as my rationality? And often it isn't. This is one of the things you learn studying military history is that even in something that seems as straightforward in terms of rationality while we want to beat the other side, what's the best way to do that? Thinking of who's the other side, what does beating mean, all that sort of thing. And even then there'll be multiple choices. Oh yeah that's right. It's all subject to cultural construction. Before we go to military, we go to military right after the break. Okay. I really want to ask you about that. The final question I have for you at least in this part of the show is this. So you have these students and you're teaching them because you really enjoy teaching them? Telling them about this continuum and this complex world all around us and putting them as a part of it. Making them part of global history. Right. Okay. Are they taking the message? Because we need them to, am I right, we need them to understand that to be the next generation of leaders of good citizens, the next generation of people who are going to save the planet environmentally for example, are they getting it? I think so. I'd be a failure as a teacher if I thought they totally weren't. You're biased. Yeah I am biased. Of course I'm succeeding. But I get evidence of this at least at the end of each school year when I've taught in the fall semester history 101 which goes to 1500 and history 102 which goes to the present and at least in history 102 they've looked at the last 500 years of history and I divide them into groups and have them do a sort of project and they get to pick a current world event or issue and analyze it from the perspective of the model and I think they do a pretty good job of seeing the dynamics of these things and how they fit together and analyze them critically and I've had plenty of students say that this is affected how they read the news and what they see in the world today. I didn't tell you this before Stephen but I monitored an American history so I know exactly what you're saying. Yeah except American history, current events. For a medievalist like myself. Okay we're going back to medieval right after this break we're going to talk about war you like war don't you we're going to study war right after this break. This is Think Tech Hawaii raising public awareness. You can be the greatest, you can be the best, you can be the king conveying now your chest, you can be the world, you can be the war, you can talk to God, go banging on his door. Islands and how it not only affects the way we live but other aspects of our life not only here in Hawaii but internationally as well so join us for human humane architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. That is the cover of volume one so it's a gorgeous photograph I found of the restoration of various statues I thought gave a sense of the classical world but we got a couple of modern Asian workers working among it. I like the picture you can interpret the way you want I kind of like it as here's modern workers working on history and we're making history. So was it 800, 900 pages one? Gosh I can't tell you know it's not that long both volumes put together are about between 400 and 500 so it's 250 pages per volume. So I mean just for our listening audience could you summarize both volumes in 50 words? No. I'll try though. So volume one is the spread of the human species and they're building up of various structures like states and empires and the increasing contact among them down to 1500 when up to that point states and hierarchies kind of have the upper hand and then around 1500, 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the global network gets bigger, gets more powerful, everybody's communicating with each other more, there's more... Out of their silos. Yeah, they're out of their silos, there's more cultural interaction, exchange conflict unfortunately and the story then is the world coming more together. You can read this in linguistic terms that down to about 1500 the number of languages in the world was increasing pretty steadily because you take any group of people and put them in a big enough place, parts of them will start speaking different languages since 1500 the number of languages is declining. Interesting, that is really interesting. So I'm just talking about that period of time and the break off between the old world if you will and the new world at 1500 there's a kind of dispute in the schools today about that. Can you describe that? Sure, the people who administer the AP tests, the advanced placement tests that give college credit to high school students for what they study have been worried about the world history AP test which attempted to cover the entire, you know, from the cooling of the earth to the warming of the earth that someone once put it in one course and the students didn't like it, it was too much, the teacher didn't like it, they didn't know how to teach it, ETS didn't like it, but their solution was to say that the AP test will run from about 1450 to the present and the entire professional historical world that does world history hates that, thinks it's a terrible idea and it is a terrible idea because starting at 1450 you lose too much of the vital background for one of the things that world history is good for is showing you the evolution of cultural differences and the many, many ways that people can organize their lives and their cultures and where, again, if you're looking in the past for how did we get here today, you're not going to find the answer. And it feeds in from previous eras. That's right, that's right and you know you've got what, four grandparents, eight great grandparents and so on and so forth and you say what's the history of me, I'm just going to go back to my four grandparents, you're not going to get the full story and I think the problem is that there is so much to teach at the conventional level that world history has taught that it's like you've got an entire story on the wall and you've got a picture frame that can only take in part of it at a time, so this is the part of it that we're going to take. My solution is to draw the camera back, wider angle lens, raise the level of abstraction. One of the things my model allows me to do in the textbook is to say, well world history isn't about all the details, it's about these patterns of networks, hierarchies and culture and how they have changed over time and what the big picture dynamics are. I think you could actually do all of world history in one semester. I know people who do it using my book. Well this is going to build students, I mean after this point, it's going to build students who are better citizens, it's going to build students who have a better perception of where we are on the continuum and therefore use better critical thinking in order to examine what is happening and what should happen and try to change it. I hope so, that's the idea, again not just of history but of a good liberal arts education, it's making you a critical thinker and a more engaged citizen. And not just history, the science has a crucial role to play there, the humanities have a crucial role to play there, it's across the board but at least for the historical piece of it, yes this is designed to teach students why is the world the way it is today, what are the really fundamental features and where is it going and what can you do to be a productive part of it. And I don't mean productive in economic terms, I mean in citizenship terms. Right, because ultimately it's the citizens who determine how the government works. That's right. Or it should anyway. So I guess I'm interested in knowing whether it is or should be a required course. When I went to school it was required and I told you I minored in American history, although that's only current events. American history is fascinating history. But should it be required and how much of it should be required? That's a really good question and I come at it from a slightly odd position. Wabash is a very small liberal arts college. It only has 900 students, they're all male. We're one of the three remaining all male colleges in the US. And world history is not required. No history course is required in the Wabash curriculum. History, philosophy and religion are part of a group where you have to take at least one or two courses from that grouping. And history is fairly popular. Major and popular is a distribution requirement. So it kind of comes out in the wash for us that it's not required but enough people take it. Should it be a required course? That's a complicated question. I know because the trend in education is not to require a lot of things. That's right and part of that is the flexibility. And part of that is student flexibility, student choice to construct their own curriculum. And it's also true, unfortunately, just psychologically, you require a course, people hate it. Academic freedom. Academic freedom if you say, oh, I'm in here because I want to, you get more engaged in the course. And I always have the luxury of dealing with a student body that is there voluntarily. We only have a couple of minutes left. Sure. Stephen and I, I want to get to the promised point that is war. Okay. War, is it an essential part? This is an anthropological question, I suppose. Right. Is it an essential part of the species? Do we have to make war? We have to be, they say that humans are the only species that actually kill other humans. I mean, here's my answer to that. And it comes straight out of deep, long-standing anthropological debates. Within the discipline of anthropology. No, I don't think it is. I think it's a, it has in large part been a product of the invention of agriculture and sedentary societies. I think before about 12,000 BC, there was conflict. There was interpersonal violence. There was certainly the potential for groups organizing and attacking each other and defending against each other. But it was not endemic. It was not a constant part of human politics. I think it's a product of hierarchical societies and the same conditions that produced agriculture. Well, this goes to the predictability issue now. We know there have been wars on a regular basis throughout. Oh, ever since then it's been endemic. Yeah, you can't escape it. At any given moment in time, in this moment included, and maybe even special this moment, we seem to have a lot of strife and violence around the world. Sometimes really senseless, with nobody winning, everybody losing. But I guess the question I put to you is, as an historian, if you study it from way back when to the cave, you can figure out, can't you, when it is more likely to happen and when it is less likely to happen? Theoretically, you can do that. The problem is like any human phenomenon, war is so complicated and there's so many exceptions and conditions under which it can happen. Reasons for it to happen that include politics, but that's our particular sort of modern view of why wars happen. It also happens because of cultural reasons, because of economic reasons. That it's really hard to predict exactly. Now, in big picture terms, again, I'll come back to a couple of big pieces of the model. Network activity, that horizontal exchange and economic engagement with each other. Trade. Trade reduces war. Tariffs. Tariffs increase war. Increase the possibility. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So networks do not produce war as much as hierarchies do. So the stronger networks, global networks, become theoretically the less conflict you should see. Now, the problem is the leaders of individual hierarchies might see that and put in tariffs. They trump up, so to speak, trade wars that would raise the possibility of conflict again. And I'll come back to, again, to the sort of climate change problem that if there's a sudden decrease in our ability to produce resources, scarcity, then conflict will almost inevitably go up. And democracy will go down, frankly. So if I'm a strong personality as he is and others in our last hundred years have been, do you think I could go out of my way and actually create a war all by myself? Oh, yeah. That's just far too easy to do. You can create the conditions in which wars will happen. I mean, there are institutions for doing that, unfortunately. So it is a possibility. And it's one that I think in a functioning democracy we should be very alert to and on guard against. We talked about Barbara Tuckman and the guns of August, all the factors and events and planning that led up to World War I with the notion this will be the third question on the exam. If you plan a war and spend all your time planning a war, what happens? You have a war. Yeah, if all your contingencies are, well, we'll fight the war this way. You're going to fight the war one way or another. That's unfortunately true. And World War I is a great example. And before World War II, that we're in Disha that Hither and Jan, it was a networking thing, but it was also hierarchical. And you could see that there were in Disha leading to the winds of war. And so now, and I would say World War II, the in Disha were a little more personal. I mean, you had Hitler. That was one major indication that war was going to come. World War I was senseless. The major combatants in World War I did not need to fight each other. They did themselves tremendous damage by fighting each other. And they undermined their position in a larger world by fighting each other. It was stupid. No benefit. No benefit. So taking everything we've talked about, Steven, everything for the beginning. Sending his eyes it off. OK, and putting it in the final basket of the final question here. Where are we in terms of the in Disha of war on the continuum of the species right now under this administration with the events happening globally? I would say we are at a very sensitive moment where almost anything could happen. Again, climate change is one of the crucial things there. We may already have missed the best chance to reduce the seriousness of its impact. We're at a moment where the ethnic nationalist reaction against global network activity is at its height. Which way that goes, even without the conditions of climate change, is in the balance. And I think we all have a role to play in trying to make sure that it follows the peaceful path, the path of everybody respecting each other and thinking of human rights as central to the modern world. And that's not part of the exam, but you better remember that. Yes. Thank you, Steven. You're quite welcome. Great to have you on the show. Thank you for having me on the show, Jay. It's been fun. Same.