When I look at the middle ages, I see myself reflected back. This is the justification I most often give when asked why I have chosen to focus, as a historian, on the time period stretching roughly from fifth century to the fifteenth. It is, as Morris Bishop put it, a period of continuation and transition. There is a continuation from the Roman and Germanic precedents, and a transition in social organizations that continues to the present.
When I ponder the study of history as a whole, I tend to think of fossils, representing the ancestry of the present. In more concrete terms, I think of hominid fossils, and it is during this period that the fossils begin to resemble the present. It is something akin to holding the skull of Homo sapiens at the moment he emerged from Africa and thinking: this is us.
The practice of history requires more than knowledge of dates and names. It is the study of cultures as much as events. Questions of who and when and when are important, but answering them is not sufficient to practice the historian’s craft; one must endeavor to understand the why, even though the why is seldom fully understood. This is perhaps the greatest misconception of history among the wider public, that everything in history is cut and dried. Each historian brings to the practice his own diagnostic tools with which he approaches the evidence, and these tools influence the final result. Among the lenses through which I view history is Darwinian evolution, for the value it has in the consideration of culture. All too often, culture is treated as something completely chosen. But Darwin tells us something different, and we need to consider this as well when we study anything people do.
Darwin realized that when he applied his theory of evolution by natural selection to humans, this would open all facets of human existence to examination by the light of biology. He argued that through selection, humans had acquired an ability to imitate, to pay attention, to imagine and to reason. Yet his fundamental insight, and one we must consider, is that humans are, at bottom, no different from other animals. That, though we have the vocal capacity to claim our superiority and the technological ability to enforce it, we are subject to the same drives and risks, ultimately, as every other organism. Indeed, it is nature that has brought us to this point. The marvel of this is overlooked; it is as seminal to an honest view of ourselves as Galileo’s joining of the heavens and the Earth by one set of rules was to an honest view of the universe.
Culture, then, must be seen as an outgrowth of biology as well and as subject to the same selection pressures as biology. The most important reason that humans do the things they do is because those things have, in the past, contributed to greater reproductive success than doing other things. So, as a historian looks at the human past, it would serve him well when he sees some strange cultural artifact, to remember that at some point it was adaptive. This must include the origins of religion.
Darwin understood man not to have been “aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in an omnipotent God” and thus sought to place the origins of religion in the struggle for existence.[1] In the pages that followed, Darwin proposed that there was a belief in “unseen spiritual agencies” that was common among the less civilized peoples of the world and, though to the skeptic this may appear to be a distinction without a difference, posited that such could “easily pass into the belief in the existence of one or more gods.”[2]
There can be little doubt that religion is ultimately a social phenomenon, whether one believes it an adaptation to social living or a gift from the deity to guide a certain group. Darwin saw morality as an adaptation to social living, since “[n]o tribe could hold together if murder, robbery, treachery, & c., were common; consequently such crimes within the tribe are ‘branded with everlasting infamy.’” [3] He made this statement in the context of an argument about sympathy, which he believed allowed people to be social, and suggested that the lack of morality evinced among uncivilized tribes was due to their lack of sympathy for those outside the tribal group. As forward-thinking as Darwin was, he was still at times hobbled by ingrained prejudices. Cultural mechanisms such as religion, it has been argued, are necessary to regulate behavior in groups that are too large for each member to know each other member. Religion, then, must arise as one of those regulators of relations within tribal groups, and its prescriptions and proscriptions must be viewed in this light.
Historians tend to treat religion and culture as something entirely man-made or, if they are theistically-minded, as artifacts handed down from the heavens. Darwin, by contrast, requires us to look to our biology for at least a partial answer to the deeper “why” questions we pursue. Thinking in this way allows the historian to view historical phenomena in a different light. We can see culture rising by selection, performing a selective function and fading when it is no longer adaptive.
This, then, is the perspective that Darwinian thought offers to the historian. It is a further tool to investigate the why questions that are left over once who, when and where have been answered. If we, as historians, begin with the notion that people are, to some extent, driven by their biology, then we can see the things people do as answers to the question of how best to survive long enough to pass our genes to our offspring. We can understand that, at some point in the distant past, our individual chances of survival were enhanced by banding together and sharing resources and responsibility. The dark side of this is that our survival was also enhanced by treating members of other groups, attempting to do the same thing we were, as somehow fundamentally different and applying different rules to them, removing the protections we give to members of our own group. This can be used in considering broad issues such as heresy and orthodoxy, or in particular religious ideas, such as the prohibition on usury in the Abrahamic faiths.
Such a view also helps us understand why certain cultural appendages continue long after their usefulness has passed. At some point in the past, each piece of the culture we inherited from our parents provided, if not a distinct advantage in the struggle for existence, at least no detriment. This is a strong incentive to continue practices that might seem logically outmoded or even detrimental to ourselves and others. As long as a certain beliefs or modes of living are not an obstacle to reproductive success, they will likely endure and be passed on to offspring, not through genetics, but through imitation and instruction.
But it also provides no excuse. When we can see, in the light of selection, that a practice once beneficial has become detrimental, then by all rights we should alter it. We should recognize the reasons we persist in it and, using the autonomy selection has granted us, break free. And in this sense, a view of history that takes this into account could potentially be prescriptive. If history is to speak to us, after all, it is because the story it tells is our story, the lessons learned bear upon our present and our future. Why bother with it, with anything, otherwise?
[1] Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man in E.O. Wilson, ed., From so Simple a Beginning: The Four Great Books of Charles Darwin (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006), 814.
[2] Ibid., 815.
[3] Ibid., 830.
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