had some important function in primitive societies or in the age of early state formation but they could see no justification for it in the modern age. The idea that war, and other forms of violence, were a throwback to a past age now thinly papered over with ‘civilization’ was urged by the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud when he reflected on the reasons for the prolonged and deadly fighting in the First World War: ‘the primitive, savage and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any individual, but continue their existence, although in a repressed state’. Freud thought war rapidly exposed the savage persona inside and later argued that the more ‘civilized’ a people became, the more likely it was that the dam of repression would burst and uncontrollable violence result.
Whether this really is the mechanism that releases violence, Freud proved all too right in his prediction. In the late 19th century it was still just possible to imagine that the barbarities of earlier history, when cities were sacked, their populations put to the sword, fine buildings burned, was a thing of the past (though this did not prevent European troops on a punitive expedition from destroying the stunning Summer Palace in Beijing in 1860, an act of wanton vandalism that witnesses compared with the sack of Rome by the Goths). But the 20th century has been the bloodiest in all of human history, witness to somewhere between 85 and 100 million violent deaths, and millions more wounded, maimed, tortured, raped and dispossessed. It includes the deliberate murder of the European Jews which must rank with anything else in scale and horror from the past 6,000 years. It will be difficult for historians in a few hundred years’ time to see what separates the Mongol sack of Samarkand in 1220, which left only a few of the inhabitants alive, from the Allies’ destruction of Hamburg in 1943, which burnt the city to the ground and killed 40,000 people in hideous ways in just two days. The second was, of course, quicker and more efficient, but the moral defence usually mounted, that war is war, is a maxim as comprehensible in the ancient world as it would have been to Genghis Khan or Napoleon. So-called civilization displays precisely Freud’s divided self—capable of self-restraint and social progress, but capable of sudden lapses into barbarism.
The impact of famine, disease and war on human history was famously illustrated by the English 18th-century clergyman, Thomas Malthus, who argued in his Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, that throughout history the dangers of overpopulation were always checked by the operation of these three elements. It is tempting to turn this argument on its head and wonder how it is that the human species survived at all under the multiple assault of violence, hunger and epidemic but it took another English biologist, Charles Darwin, with the publication of The Origin of Species in 1859, to explain that species survived through natural selection. The survival of Homo sapiens was thus biologically explicable; the stronger survived, the weaker perished. In a crude sense that was true, and for decades thereafter it was assumed that harsh though the realities of history had been, they had been necessary hardships to produce a biologically and intellectually progressive species. Both writers have in the end been confounded by a further paradox of the modern age: population has risen to levels often predicted as insupportable, but growth has scarcely been dented by the incidence of disease or violence or hunger, while natural selection has been overturned by modern medicine and welfare policies. The most violent and deadly century has at the same time been the century with the highest survival rates.
Grim though the past has often been, history has not been an unmediated story of suffering borne by an uncomprehending and victimized humanity. From the very earliest times human societies needed to make sense of the chaos and dangers around them, or to justify the hardships they faced, or the reality of unpredictable or premature death or to find some wider moral universe which sanctioned acceptable forms of behaviour and penalized others. Religion was able to satisfy all these needs and religious beliefs, like warfare, have been a constant for at least six millennia. Consideration of religion raises awkward questions about the nature of ‘world history’ because for most human societies through most of time, the material world described by modern historians has only been one part of the universe of human experience. Religious communities are connected to other unseen states and unknowable sites which have been, and for many still are, as profound a part of reality as the political structures and economic systems of the visible world. Belief in a world of spirits or an afterlife, or in unseen and divine guardians, or in a sublime universal ‘other’ has made historical experience multi-dimensional, natural as well as supernatural. For medieval Christians the world was one link in a complex chain between heaven and hell, which included the nether world of purgatory where souls were left to wait entry to paradise. For ancient Egyptians the other world was so real that kings talked and walked with the gods, and when they died took with them their household, animals, and furnishings. So widespread was the belief that the dead, or at least the kings, nobles and priests, needed to take possessions with them beyond the grave that modern knowledge of past cultures has been enormously expanded by the votive offerings and funerary furnishings found in excavated graves.
Belief in the supernatural, the divine, a world of the spirit, the reality of a soul that could live on beyond the decay of the earthly body, magic, superstition and witchcraft created for the inhabitants of all but the most recent communities a sphere of experience that was always larger than the material world around them. Belief was used to explain the apparently inexplicable, to ward off evil, to promote well-being, induce harmony of being and to prepare the mortal body for the world or worlds to come. The link with a world beyond mere physical observation has proved remarkably enduring, even in the secular, liberal West. In southern Italy images of saints and the Madonna are still carried through villages to offer protection against floods or volcanic eruptions or to encourage rainfall. The concept of ‘the Limbo of the Infants’, introduced as a term by the Catholic Church around 1300 to describe a haven for the souls of babies who died before there was time for baptism, in which they enjoyed a natural happiness, but were denied access to heaven, was all but set aside in 2007 when the Church announced that unbaptized infants should be entrusted to the possible mercy of God. Protests from parents anxious that their dead children should have a sure destination forced the Church to admit that Limbo was still a possibility. All attempts to provide a secular alternative to traditional Islam have foundered on the continuing vitality of the values and practices of the faith which is bound to a world beyond this one. Suicide bombers are recruited on the promise that they will be welcomed at once by the souls of the faithful when they cross the threshold of death.
Religions of every kind have exerted an extraordinary psychological power. This has been served in a number of ways. For thousands of years the finest buildings and monuments have been dedicated to religious purposes; in tribal societies the sacred—totems, ancestral graveyards—have exerted powerful fears and provoked an instinctive reverence. The numerous cathedrals, mosques and temples built in Christian, Islamic and Buddhist communities from medieval times onwards as gateways to the divine are among the richest architecture in the world, constructed in societies where for the poor the monumental buildings were awe-inspiring expressions of the spiritual. Religions were also the source of sanctioned behaviour. The rules laid down for social practice, custom, family life, or sexual conduct, are almost all religious in origin. A great many religions have been vehicles for constructing a male-centred society in which women were compelled to accept an ascribed and restricted gender role or risk severe forms of punishment or social discrimination. Many moral codes or legal systems were constructed by lay authorities—for example, Justinian’s Codex, or the Code Napoleon—but they relied on a conception of acceptable behaviour that was derived from the core moral teaching of the Church. In traditional Islam there should ideally be no distinction between religious precept and state law. In early Chinese history the emperors were accorded divine status, making the law, but making it as gods. In Japanese society, where the emperors also enjoyed quasi-divine status, to die willingly for the emperor was a moral obligation that overrode all others.
Religious belief was always difficult to challenge because the threat that unbelief or heresy posed was a threat to an entire way of viewing the world. For a great many communities governed by animist or polytheistic systems of belief there were no reasons, and usually no means, for questioning the ground in which such belief was rooted. There was no question of earning salvation, but simply obeying the customary rites and endorsing
