HISTORY
The Soul: A History of the Human Mind
Paul Ham
Penguin, $49.99
This is a vastly ambitious book. It is also wonderfully entertaining. I have not read all Paul Ham’s impressive catalogue of history, but I can’t recall him ever letting his prose off the leash as boldly as he does in this book. He creates a broad survey of the entire intellectual and spiritual history of the world with an inviting measure of wit and caution. Ham has never been easily impressed and that is truer than ever in this account of five millennia of human meaning-making.
Archduke Ferdinand and his wife, Sofie, in Sarajevo shortly before their assassination in June 1914. But did their violent deaths really start World War I?Credit: Alamy Stock Photo
The Soul, as a title, does not quite explain what this book is trying to achieve. Even the subtitle, “a history of the human mind”, doesn’t capture for me the author’s purpose. Ham favours a materialistic account of human existence, seeing the mind as a product of the brain and the words “mind” and “soul” as very nearly interchangeable.
But there is little neuroscience in this book and not many of the quirks and quiddities of medicine found at the cutting edge of mind and matter that pepper the works of, say, Oliver Sacks. Ham is deeply suspicious of any kind of spirituality that might originate in a place outside history or outside material existence. At the same time, his account of historical figures such as Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Jesus and Mohammad, and countless others, is never scornful or dismissive. It is often sympathetic.
Ham’s purpose is different from that of most people who have tried to put an experience that is beyond words into language, but no less fascinating. Over 800 packed pages, he returns constantly to a question about the driving force of history. He asks why historical events take place, not in the sense of a simple cause of chain and effect. A gunshot from a teenager in Sarajevo may have triggered the carnage of World War I, but it was hardly the real cause.
Ham passionately advocates a thesis that history is powered by ideas. Major historical events are occasioned by the stuff people carry around in their heads. Beliefs are the fuel of history. They lead to all the strange and perplexing happenings that keep historians in business.
Nearing the end of a bloody chapter dealing with the medieval crusades, for example, Ham writes: “we won’t wade deeply into the details of the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Crusades, because they simply repeat our theme of belief as the engine room of history.” In speaking of the views of Augustine of Hippo regarding “pagans and the nature of the Christian soul”, he writes “they speak to our theme of belief as the engine room of history”.
He uses the phrase “the engine room of history” on so many occasions that it comes to define what he means by “the soul” or “the mind”.
This challenging idea presents a great deal to think about. It strikes me as incomplete. The notion of ideas existing and then being put into action in the world is Platonic. Certainly, there are countless cases in which people have followed an idea into battle or across the seas. But there are just as many in which history has been the source of ideas rather than the other way around.
It is an adage, for example, that believers who go to war come back as atheists and atheists who go to war come back as believers. I have certainly encountered both experiences. In that case, the historical experience of war begets the idea or belief.
Paul Ham says Charles Darwin would have been mortified to see the way his ideas were exploited both by Marxists and Nazis.Credit: Alamy Stock Photo
Consider that unpleasant Genoese, Christopher Columbus, whose ambitious and greedy character Ham gives a better press than some others. Columbus called the people on the far side of the Atlantic “Indians” because he thought he had arrived in Asia and no experience was going to change the idea that had set like stone in his head.
Conversely, however, the empirical experiences Charles Darwin had as a traveller caused him to think again, almost against his will, about the origin of species. It was, if anything, an inconvenience to him that his personal history brought him new ideas. Ham notes wryly that Darwin would have been mortified to see the way his ideas were exploited both by Marxists and Nazis. This did not make his ideas wrong.
I suspect it would be better, rather than thinking about ideas causing history, to conceive of a circle in which history causes ideas that in turn cause more history and so on. All the creation myths, towards which Ham is hardly the first to raise an arched eyebrow, came about because humankind encountered itself as a mystery requiring explanation. History came first, then ideas about the Garden of Eden and similar places in other cultural traditions and these in turn propelled history, sometimes for centuries, until new historical experiences called for new ideas.
In a similar way, I suspect that history has many drivers. Technology is one. Science is another. Economics is a third. If these are ideas, then they come about in response to questions raised by living and breathing in time. The main point is that such philosophical ponderings are highly enjoyable. So too is Ham’s lightly worn erudition. It would be an arrogant person who read this book without gratitude for a feast of insight and learning.
The Soul ends with two moments of wonder. The second is a letter to an imaginary grandchild born in 2499. Its message is that we can change the future by changing the furniture in our head. I can’t imagine that a distant society will settle questions “without the need of gods” but I heartily agree that peace and justice are worth existential risks.
The first moment is exquisite. Ham describes coming across a young woman on a sunny day in a church in Paris. There are “tears running down her cheeks”. What follows is a hymn to the mystery of a person at prayer: “No scientist, economist, or philosopher can explain the relationship between a human and her god. No theory or text can interpret her … her mystery confounds those systems. Her silent communion with her god acknowledges the mystery of the sacred.”
Michael McGirr is the author of Ideas to Save Your Life (Text).
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