The Three Sides Of History

I find that there are really three sides to history. In the middle, there is the history with all of it's ideology and high principles as it is portrayed in the history books. To one side of this there is religion, the fact that people are designed to believe in something, and when they do not believe primarily in a religion they tend to put another cause in it's place. The cause or movement gains supporters simply because they require something to believe in.

The third side of history, on the other side of the lofty principles in the middle, is the one that I want to discuss today. It is my belief that history is often idealized and over-simplified in that it is actually driven largely by mundane personal motives.

When a new country gains independence it may be trumpeted as the fulfillment of some lofty ideal, but is more likely to spring from the fact that a majority of people perceive that it will make them better off than previously. U.S. independence in 1776, for one example, was largely brought about because Britain had forbidden further westward expansion of the colonies and a lot of people thought that they were missing out on wealth to be gained. A driving force behind the formation of the Confederacy was simply the unwillingness to give up slave labor (labour).

The idea of communism became so popular because it was based on the gain of the individual, too many of which were economically oppressed by wealthy capitalists. Capitalism had earlier started when a lot of people felt oppressed by rigid class systems and hereditary nobility, and were sure that they could do better in a meritocracy. In times of change, majority opinion often turns out to be wrong and a new system can be an overreaction to the faults of an old one, but the betterment of the individual is what drives such change no matter how much history clothes it in high ideals.

The race to the moon during the 1960s was not so much the great scientific crusade that was portrayed as it was an economic competition between capitalism and communism, between the U.S. and Soviet Union, to be the first to reach the moon. The U.S. put humans on the moon first, but the Soviets took photos of the previously-unseen far side of the moon first.

The Reformation, the breaking away of the new Protestant churches from Catholicism in the Sixteenth Century, was not only about religion. It was also about material betterment. For the Protestants, there was resentment of the flow of wealth from Germany to the Vatican so that the mostly-Italian cardinals could live like royalty. For the Catholics there was reluctance to accommodate the new movement by giving up the profitable sale of indulgences, the forgiveness of sins for a monetary price.

For the first Buddhists and Jains in India, it was almost certainly not only about the new faith but also about escaping the lower castes in the caste system of Hinduism.

For Nazi supporters in the crushing economic depression of the 1930s, it was probably not so much about ideology and promises of a glorious "Thousand-Year Reich" as it was the jobs brought about by the factory orders for military equipment and the virtual elimination of unemployment by the drastic expansion of the armed forces.

What it all comes down to is the question "Will I be better off, or not". Separatist tendencies, the desire of a group of people to break away and form their own country, tend to thrive during economic downturns. It is often not as much about the national identity portrayed in history as simple economic welfare.

In any conflict, a powerful factor in which side people will take is often not the ideology in the history books at all but simply which side looks as if it is going to win. If there is one lesson of history, it is that those on the winning side tend to end up a lot better off than those on the losing side. This forms a spiral in that it then draws still more people who select it as the side likely to win, the ideology and high principles of the history books is secondary.