Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
tension that has not led to outright war since the 1920s mainly because of the mass trans-
fers of population that occurred in that decade, creating two neat, uniethnic states. Peace
reigned, in other words, only after ethnic cleansing that went according to the dictates of
geography. And yet this is ultimately not the line of thinking that Herodotus imparts.
For Herodotus evinces a receptivity to the province of the heart and the attendant sali-
ence of human intrigues. He illustrates how self-interest is calculated within a disfiguring
whirlwind of passion. Atossa, a wife of Persia's King Darius, appeals to her husband's male
vanity in bed while begging him to invade Greece. She does this as a favor to the Greek
doctor who has cured a growth on her breast, and who wants to revisit his homeland. It is
all about geography, until it becomes all about Shakespeare.
Herodotus's
Histories
at its deepest level is about understanding the complexities of
fate:
moira
in Greek, “the dealer-out of portions.” And because heroes are the ones who
overcome fate, they form the superstructure of Herodotus's narrative. It is none other than
Hodgson who notes in his introduction to
The Venture of Islam:
Herodotus wrote his history, he said, to preserve the memory of the great deeds
done by the Greeks and the Persians: unrepeatable deeds that have an enduring
claim to our respect. Those deeds cannot be imitated, though they may be emu-
lated and in some sense perhaps surpassed. But even now we dare call no man
great whose deeds cannot somehow measure up to theirs.
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Hodgson writes this early in his epic to make it clear that men ultimately have control
over their destiny, even as he will often engage for three volumes in the description of
grand historical and environmental trends over which, it might seem, individuals have little
control. Without the admission of individual struggle, there is no humanism in the study of
history, Hodgson says. Thus, he weaves his tapestry of Islam: “a morally, humanly relevant
complex of traditions” that assumes the nature of a global force, but started with the actions
of individuals in Mecca.
So we are back to the battle against fate, and it is well that we are. For we now need
to be especially fortified by the likes of Herodotus, Hodgson, and McNeill, since we are
about to enter exceedingly rough terrain: that of geopolitics and the quasi-determinist the-
ories that emanate from it. The fact is, the broad outlines of history have, indeed, been pre-
dicted, and might still be again. This is, to say the least, unsettling given how individuals
can alter history. But, as we shall see, it is true. The men I am about to introduce should
make liberal humanists profoundly uneasy. These men were hardly philosophers: rather,
they were geographers, historians, and strategists who assumed that the map determined
nearly everything, leaving relatively little room for human agency. Human agency, to the
degree that it did matter to them, mattered mainly in regards to military and commercial
