h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

What got you interested in History & what sustained your interest in it? During your teaching career were you a "passionate historian" that taught, or a "passionate teacher" that taught history ... or something in between. Apologies for the questions - I am developing an interest in history.

Hi Stone Aart

I'll take those one at a time.

(A) "What got you interested in History?"

Two part answer really (a) As the great Historian J.R. Green wrote back in the 1870s if you walk around in Oxford you can not help but be struck by the way that the city and its surroundings has grown out of the Past and is deeply rooted there...I think that this has been one of the sources of the fascination of the Morse and spin-off stories that are set in Oxford, not to mention things like "The Lord of the Rings" and the "Tales of Nania" plus so many other attempts to place the Present within the context of a great sweeping tide.

(b) Being born in Oxford in 1944 in the midst of arguably the greatest historical event in the History of the Earth (if one agrees that History is the study of Human actions and their consequences)my early life was not only overshadowed by words like Auschwitz and Hiroshima but also be on going tragedies in a world awash with refugees, displaced peoples. But it was possible still to believe that really humankind had finally "got it". My parents I now realize were trying to make good in this Brave New World and very early on I was swept up into their life within the Oxford Labour Party, which, as part of the 'new order' was charged with uniting "Town" and "Gown", bridging the class divide to create a "One Nation" progressive ideal. But then Aneurin Bevan in a controversial speech referred to either Tories or middle class people as "vermin", suggesting a "Final Solution" attitude and on my seventh birthday, 22 April 1951, the Bevan-Wilson Revolt at the Labour Party Conference split the party, and condemned the Attlee Government. Organized Labour was happier with "the class war", protest defensive politics and industrial action rather than progressive One Nation politics. But the divisions that were threatening the world with a Third World War, made ever-present by the Nuclear Tests on places like the Bikini Atoll, were very obviously rooted in the Past, and Oxford University was so obviously a great repository of all kinds of information and expertise about what had gone on all over the world, that, presented with the 11+ selection process in 1955 which would determine whether I was suitable for academic studies or not, I grasped the fact that 'passing the 11+' meant access to university study and I resolved to 'pass' and to use the opportunity to get study History at university level.


(B) What sustained your interest in it? I think that taking the same path as J.R. Green (though I had not yet read the copy of his "Short History of the English People" that my Mother had brought for me from the Oxfam Shop in Broad Street, where she did voluntary work on Wednesdays) was probably crucial. In Green's day you studied at Oxford in order to enter the Church and he left Oxford to work amongst poverty and desperation as well as success and achievement in London's East End...Though I had had the chance to study at Oxford, by that time I was suspicious of the residual "them" and "us" Class war that saw rich and privileged people like Mr Wedgwood Benn happy to 'take up the cause of the poor' and encourage genuine 'working class radicals' to take the lead roles. And even at my first choice university Bristol I felt very much that my lecturers were products of the system and had very little grasp of what life was actually like for the common people, and the real potential of those common people to change everything from the grass-roots up, rather than by top down imposition.

So, having found myself with life choices that none of my family had ever had, much like a contemporary at Cardiff in my training year, Neil Kinnock, I decided to go into teaching in order to empower children with a knowledge of history as I had been empowered, and moreover, when the crunch came, to go to the Inner City, as Green had done, because that was where I would find pupils and parents with the same sense of being blown around like flotsam and jetsam in a wild world that I had known. Over 37 years the variety of Historical topics I needed to cover teaching classes 11 to 18, plus to children from all over the world with backgrounds in almost every imaginable culture really kept challenging my grasp of world history.


(C)During your teaching career were you a "passionate historian" that taught, or a "passionate teacher" that taught history

Perhaps it is not for me to say and I am tempted to just quote two pupils from just over ten years ago who befriended me on Facebook a week or so ago.. The first I believe would have said that I was both a passionate historian and a passionate teacher, She wrote that she values the way that our school taught her to think for herself, and though she then went on to study fashion her stand-out piece of work was an Historical study of the Leather Jacket.. The other one said that she became a History teacher largely because of me, though she is now taking a year off to tour Latin America before she is 30.. Sounds good to me.

Thanks for asking.

Cass

PS.. I am just off to France for a few weeks and may not be online much over there, so apologies if I am slow to respond.

So maybe you were a product of your environment? I can imagine wandering around Oxford must have exposed one to a sense of a continuing past and tradition, plus a time of reflection regarding issues surrounding WWII, plus having a role model in the form of JR Green. I suppose you could have also become a politician, a sociologist, or maybe even a clergyman given that environment.

For me when I was a child I never really had a strong sense of history, for me it was exploring and trying to understand nature and the cosmos - so I went into the physical sciences. I realise now that in some respects it was a fairly asocial view and attitude.

Best wishes

Morning Stone Aart

Well the "environment" as far as Oxford is concerned is the whole Cosmos.

The University which occupies so much of the heart of the town and is its major "industry" was created as a major think-tank and training centre for the brains, heart and soul of Medieval Christendom, the "Catholic" or 'universal' Church that tried to grasp the kind of knowledge and qualities associated with God...

Thus its very fabric spoke of all life on Earth with Botanical Gardens that brought plants from the whole world and museums like the Pitt Rivers Museum that had human artefacts and archaeological remains from all over the world...

Our daughter did go to study at Oxford, in her case Physics, and it seems very "Oxford" that her good friend who was the top physicist of her year and who went on post-grad and into academia, has devoted himself to making a map of the universe. It has taken him to Australia and away from Oxford's "Mists and mellow fruitfulness" because stargazing is easier there...


But Ancient knowledge of the kind that is also preserved in Oxford knew that, in the terms of Mesopotamia (the real one not the Oxford one) "Anu" the God of the Heavens lives in a majesty and a scale far removed from life on Earth..

At Ur they paid more attention to the Moon Goddess who was connected to the movements of the waters and the daily tides which had such an impact on "the tides in the affairs of Man"....

The Civilization that I was born into held out the promise that Humankind was achieving a mastery over Nature, and I suppose what intrigued me was whether we could truly could use the powers that had created the monstrosity of the Second World War in order to enhance Life on Earth rather than destroy it..

As for Science being 'asocial'-- I believe that modern Western Science and the famous "scientific method" was very heavily based upon the "post-mortem" concept in which things animate and inanimate are taken out of their environment and context and placed in artificial Laboratory conditions in order that they may be studied under "controlled conditions", which is much the same as monks withdrawing from "the world" in order to achieve a higher understanding of it...

But then much the same was true for the parallel development of what I have called "book culture"...

Where I feel that History has lost its way is that it became so intimately connected with withdrawal from Life and into dusty documents in monastic libraries.. Too many Historians seem to have come from studying books at academic schools then carrying on at university, either staying on a university essentially writing the books that serve the purposes of universities or trying to write for a wider public, when they have little knowledge of ordinary life and nothing really empowering to say to ordinary people..

I know all about the attraction of books and that feeling of finding access to like minds often among those are dead but whose ideas can live on, so you spend your time living with the dead and neglecting the living...It was one of the things that took me away from Oxford and academia and into teaching: and perhaps I have 'paid a price' during the last ten years when I have read and written so much in part because Life has allowed me since it is only now that I am Seventy that I am about to become a grandfather and my universe and my life are about to gain a new centre, meaning and purpose.

Hi just a non-sequitor question: someone has posted the following elsewhere

"99% of all wars/conflicts throughout history, have been caused by religions and individuals interpretations of "scriptures"."

Would you go along with that statement?

Well "What is causation?" .. Famously T.R. Malthus said that wars, famine and disease are the "Natural checks" on population increase because even humanity has a greater capacity to reproduce itself than its capacity to increase its food supply...So the whole Moses story, for example, is directly connected with the population increase in ancient Egypt that was particularly high amongst the Israelites' Hence the order that all new born baby boys should be killed, and quite probably the "Plagues of Egypt" that persuaded the Pharoah to allow Moses to take 'his people' out towards the Promised Land...And more recently most analysis of the outbreak of war in 1914 have ignored the Malthusian pressures on the people of Great Britain that made it inevitable that they would probably be fighting someone or other very soon.. It was a choice between Civil War, disintegration and chaos, or fighting Germany for the international rule of law and peaceful security. One could say that Ireland chose the former.

So in so far as it is possible to generalise

"99% of all wars/conflicts throughout history", have been shaped by people who offered what appeared to be credible solutions to current problems and persuade others both to enlist in their cause and others against them. Can it be a 'war' when only one side uses violent aggression? It takes two, and given the difficulty of being totally original and also of getting people to embrace something totally original existing "power concepts" are almost invariably evoked.. Just look at pop culture and pop songs that use ideas like Angels and Heaven and Devils-- especially advertising.

Throughout human history migration (colonisation) has also been a response to overpopulation - of course this can lead to problems if the area is already populated by humans (especially with a different culture). The idea of killing infant boys as an ancient means to control population is a new one for me, but interesting. It is said that today some poverty stricken areas in India etc kill infant girls because they are deemed a future drain on the family economics.

With regard to religion I find many here and elsewhere have an exceptionally naïve view as to exactly what it is and then draw conclusions from this naïve view.

In ancient times ... if my history is correct ... when one tribe conquered another tribe, the adult men where systematically slaughtered, while the useable women and the children were collected as part of the spoils - would that be on the whole correct? I have heard that the Ottomans used to take the young boys from conquered Christian lands and train them up into a Muslim fighting force.

I suppose the Ottoman practice is more or less an extension or continuation of the practice of Empires demanding tribute that included fighting men of lands in their Empire. I believe this practice was also common in England and elsewhere, as part of the "feudal" system.

Hi Stone Aart

Well the killing of all Israelite boys born in Egypt is explained in Genesis,, and was the reason why Moses was put in a basket on the Nile...This practice was actually quite common in parts of India- the Ganges and the sea off Orissa where (as you say) the killing of females was seen as key: and female infanticide as well as the practice of suttee were all part of population control...The spreading of English/British values has tended towards the great increase in global population...Slavery, the slave trade and the slaughter of slaves when there was no work for them to do (to justify their existence) all seem to have been all part of population control...And I suspect that Chinese "foot-binding" was only the visible part of the attempts to control breeding in China, where female infanticide (and even cannibalism) was common- and was again under Mao Tse Tung during great famines.

Certainly that "model" of slaughtering the men and taking the women and children seems to be one that historians have tended to generalise-- My suspicion, however, is that such "scientific" history was the product of the Nineteenth Century when sub-Saharan Africa was seen as a "Dark Continent" lost in time and something that showed us all of the previous prehistoric socio-economic ways of life 'alive and kicking' that helped to make sense of archaeology...This of course favoured racism because having taken African models in order to understand prehistoric times, people tended then to look at Africans as "prehistoric" and "backward" people like the ones in the books....The truth was probably more complex. Men were probably kept alive when the victors were short of Labour and women and children when there was some point in increasing population, and possibly not under other conditions.. Of course one reason for keeping slaves alive was that when "the Gods" demanded sacrifice you could start with the slaves and work up to such a bad state of affairs that "The King must die"....

And you are right about the Turkish Ottoman Empire took boy children from the conquered and trained them to be an elite squad called "The Janisseries".

Thanks, with regard to the Bible Moses description - I will have to go away and do a bit of thinking. I know that the infant Moses and the basket in the stream description is similar to a description of Sargon of Akkad given as a neo-Assyrian legend ... perhaps suggesting a geographical widespread practice or something else. Then there is also the description of King Herod killing boys somewhere in the new testament (Matthew). ... Then there is also the description of the Angel of Death killing first born sons (or maybe it was first born children) in Egypt (Exodus).

"With regard to religion I find many here and elsewhere have an exceptionally naïve view as to exactly what it is and then draw conclusions from this naïve view."

I agree entirely.. Obviously any 'established' religion starts to introduce even babies into the faith and has ideas and images that are not necessary "wrong" but which can only be seen and appreciated with the magic and wonder of children and the miracle of new life.

Our daughter is expecting our first grandchild imminently and, discussing two days ago the process that will very soon bring her face to face with a totally new and as yet unknown human being, as someone with a Masters Degree in Physics, she nevertheless said of the 'mechanics' that join her life with her babies that it is "magical"...

But those not touched by such things can not see them in this blessed way.

But, of course, there are other ways and other conditions in which these things can be seen: and, for example, people who attack Christianity usually pick on 'Childish' images that most Christian thinkers have not used for ages..Somewhere On my bookshelves I still have my copy of the controversial Sixties book written by the Bishop of London" "Honest to God", and a pamphlet in answer written by the Archbishop of Canterbury "Image Old and New"...

But all of these things are really only secondary- the only thing that is really-real is the energy of this moment that we are living through, energy that we can harness for what we consider good and positive uses or the reverse. And generally I believe that the religious impulse has been more towards trying to do good and to live positively than the reverse..

Re the Egyptians and population control..

This may have something to do with Pharoahs apparently marrying their sisters.

And the prevalence of marrying cousins within some populations, like the British Muslim one based originally on British India, may have had a biological as well as a socio-economic cause.

The rate of natural abortions is much higher in pregnancies that violate "the laws" of 'consanginuity', so though some terribly deformed children may be born from time to time, the population will not breed at the same rate as when the couple are not related in any way.