A new take on an old issue
Glass half-full or glass half-empty?
For the past 20 years, we’ve heard from academics, some politicians and various commentators that America is a deeply racist society. In response, some colleges, the federal government and certain corporations require employees and students take instruction in DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion.
Aware of the destructive power contained in charges of racism, some Americans paint their political opponents as racial bigots with no evidence whatsoever.
But is America a cauldron of racial hatred? Or are those who believe so willfully mistaken, or just as likely, ignorant of the past?
In “A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism” (Encounter Books, 2024, 176 pages), Professor John M. Ellis is having none of this pessimistic glass half-empty attitude of race today. To the contrary, he contends that for the first time in history humankind has long been moving, by fits and by starts, toward what he calls gens una sumus, Latin for “we are all one people.”
Ellis begins his history by taking us back to 1500, when “cultures didn’t admire one another, but on the contrary were suspicious and hostile, always fearing conflict. People saw safety in the protection afforded by people like themselves, and they saw only danger in contact with people beyond their own tribe.” By tribe, Ellis means ethnic groups based on a common language and culture, ranging from groups like the Cherokee in North America to the Anglo-Saxon English of Britain. In 1500 and earlier, the idea of gens una sumus was non-existent.
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Over the next five centuries, three major forces came into play that are ending this tribalism in most of the world. The first was the Age of Discovery, in which exploration, led mostly by Europeans, brought into “close and sustained contact peoples who had hitherto known nothing of one another’s existence.” This outward expansion from countries like Spain, the Netherlands, and in particular, Great Britain, led to colonization, which eventually created multi-racial societies and nations.
Second on Ellis’s list is the printing press. With that invention, the publication of books, newspapers, pamphlets and magazines brought about wider literacy. These two trends fed off of each other, creating a literate public. This development meant that people could experience other peoples and cultures vicariously through print. As Ellis then points out, “that, in turn, meant that ideas concerning the rights and wrongs of human behavior could become a more powerful force in human affairs.”
At about the same time, the Protestant Reformation saw Northern Europe, including Great Britain, break from the South and the Catholic Church. “It was these northern European states,” Ellis rightly notes, “that would be most prominent in the development of modern science and technology, and more generally of modernity itself.”
Combined with the European excursions and settlements around the globe, knowledge and use of this technology would soon spread and become an international phenomenon.
Further into his history, Ellis adds a fourth factor in lifting peoples above tribalism, the development of democratic ideas, particularly those in Britain. This transformation of government and politics gradually helped give birth to the idea, as witnessed in Britain’s eventually fierce opposition to slavery, of gens una sumus.
By means of numerous historical examples, Ellis builds his case that the last 500 years have brought about this profound transformation in how we view others. He recognizes that in many places in the world, parts of Africa, for instance, or the Middle East, the bonds and loyalties of tribalism still dominate, so much so that they result in bloody and horrific violence. Some nations, such as Japan, remain xenophobic, or like China, racist, but even in those places the widespread idea of gens una sumus has blunted these attitudes.
In the last chapter of “A Short History,” Ellis turns his attention to “the most hotly disputed issues of our time,” like racism, cultural appropriation and colonialism. By ignoring the past, indeed by applying today’s “we are all one people” idea to that past as if it was then a standard of behavior and conduct, many of the commentators about race in our day have gone off-track. Rather than celebrating the progress made by human beings in moving away from tribalistic inclinations and ethnic prejudices, they have instead judged the past by a standard that didn’t even exist in that earlier time and have condemned today’s newly created pluralistic, multi-cultural societies as being racist. Ellis writes, “They think that modernity is riddled with racism; the truth is that modernity has rescued us from racism.”
Ellis concludes, “A look at the sweep of history from 1500 to the present ought to make us optimistic and confident. We have made enormous strides. The truth is that we’ve long since overcome the widespread fear and loathing of other cultures characteristic of 1500. We’ve progressed especially in the last seventy-five years, during which we have become a multi-racial society in which all kinds of people work well together and have valuable friendships.”
“A Short History of the Relations Between Peoples” offers a fresh perspective on race and culture in our time, one that should leave readers with hope for the future.
(Jeff Minick reviews books and has written four of his own: two novels, “Amanda Bell” and “Dust On Their Wings,” and two works of nonfiction, “Learning As I Go” and “Movies Make the Man.” This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
