Quotes from the Tragedy and Hope A History of the World in Our Time

Executive Summary

• The excellent book Tragedy and Hope was so good, it was necessary to record some quotes.

Introduction

This is a breakthrough book on history.

When Technologies Are Imported to a New Society

When white men first came to North America, material ele-ments from Western Civilization spread rapidly among the different Indian tribes. The Plains Indi-ans, for example, were weak and impoverished before 1543, but in that year the horse began to diffusenorthward from the Spaniards in Mexico. Within a century the Plains Indians were raised to a muchhigher standard of living (because of ability to hunt buffalo from horseback) and were immenselystrengthened in their ability to resist Americans coming westward across the continent. In the mean-time, the trans-Appalachian Indians who had been very powerful in the sixteenth and early seven-teenth centuries began to receive firearms, steel traps, measles, and eventually whiskey from theFrench and later the English by way of the St. Lawrence. These greatly weakened the woods Indiansof the trans-Appalachian area and ultimately weakened the Plains Indians of the trans-Mississippi area, because measles and whiskey were devastating and demoralizing and because the use of trapsand guns by certain tribes made them dependent on whites for supplies at the same time that they al-lowed them to put great physical pressure on the more remote tribes which had not yet received gunsor traps. Any united front of reds against whites was impossible, and the Indians were disrupted,demoralized, and destroyed. In general, importation of an element of material culture from one soci-ety to another is helpful to the importing society in the long run only if it is (a) productive, (b) can bemade within the society itself, and (c) can be fitted into the nonmaterial culture of the importing soci-ety without demoralizing it. The destructive impact of Western Civilization upon so many other soci-eties rests on its ability to demoralize their ideological and spiritual culture as much as its ability todestroy them in a material sense with firearms.

How Democracy Was Based Upon Equivalence of Arms

On the military level in Western Civilization in the twentieth century the chief development has been a steady increase in the complexity and the cost of weapons. When weapons are cheap to get and so easy to use that almost anyone can use them after a short period of training, armies are generally made up of large masses of amateur soldiers. Such weapons we call “amateur weapons,” and such armies we might call “mass armies of citizen-soldiers.” The Age of Pericles in Classical Greece and the nineteenth century in Western Civilization were periods of amateur weapons and citizen-soldiers. But the nineteenth century was preceded (as was the Age of Pericles also) by a period in which weapons were expensive and required long training in their use. Such weapons we call “specialist” weapons. Periods of specialist weapons are generally periods of small armies of professional soldiers (usually mercenaries). In a period of specialist weapons the minority who have such weapons can usually force the majority who lack them to obey; thus a period of specialist weapons tends to give
rise to a period of minority rule and authoritarian government. But a period of amateur weapons is a  period in which all men are roughly equal in military power, a majority can compel a minority to
yield, and majority rule or even democratic government tends to rise. The medieval period in which  the best weapon was usually a mounted knight on horseback (clearly a specialist weapon) was a period of minority rule and authoritarian government. Even when the medieval knight was made obsolete (along with his stone castle) by the invention of gunpowder and the appearance of firearms, these new weapons were so expensive and so difficult to use (until 1800) that minority rule and authoritarian government continued even though that government sought to enforce its rule by shifting from mounted knights to professional pikemen and musketeers. But after 1800, guns became cheap- er to obtain and easier to use. By 1840 a Colt revolver sold for $27 and a Springfield musket for not much more, and these were about as good weapons as anyone could get at that time. Thus, mass armies of citizens, equipped with these cheap and easily used weapons, began to replace armies of professional soldiers, beginning about 1800 in Europe and even earlier in America. At the same time, democratic government began to replace authoritarian governments (but chiefly in those areas where the cheap new weapons were available and local standards of living were high enough to allow people to obtain them).