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BOOKS/IN BRIEF
Built-in bias
THE currents of history run deep and often unseen beneath the everyday flow of events, and it is the historian's pleasurable task to trace the ebb and flow of those forces in the life of humanity. However, there are moments when those currents rise to the surface - with an effect that is often shattering, occasionally moving, but always transforming - to shed an exceptional light on the meaning of history."
The days on which these moments occurred are the subject of this book. The 50 days that the author has chosen cover a period between the development of the Athenian civilisation in the fifth century B.C. and the current crisis after 9/11.
His "choices inevitably reflect the experience of an European author writing in English at the beginning of the twenty-first century. But the fact that history reflects personality does not make it merely subjective, and my fifty days have been chosen because of their undeniable significance and global impact."
This is a pathetic confession. Its premises are false, especially as he admits "we have become increasingly conscious of the inter-relation between the world's continents and the relationship between Asia and Europe, Africa and America". There is nothing "inevitable" about bias.
The book begins with the Battle of Salamis on September 28, 450 B.C., when the Athenian navy destroyed the Persian fleet, and ends with the destruction of the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001. It has a reasonably good index but no bibliography; nor are there any references to the sources under each entry.
This is a great pity. For, the text is well written and substantial. The author's confession does not minimise the seriousness of the lapse, in this day and age, of the book's Western biases. It reflects indifference, perhaps ignorance.
In a book of such sweep as well as brevity, opinions on the selections are bound to differ. Alexander the Great is omitted. The entire continent of Asia is overlooked, except when the West interacted with it or intruded on it.
India figures nowhere. The East India Company's arrival is ignored. China comes in only in the mention of the Boxer Rebellion and Genghis Khan. To the author, evidently, the establishment of the People's Republic of China was of lesser consequence than, say, Martin Luther King. Surely, the focus should have been on the days, the events, that "changed the world" by altering the course of history. And in this context, how can you ignore the independence and partition of India in 1947 or the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979? Or, for that matter, the beginnings of the Cold War in 1946 that raged for 45 years or the Korean War in 1950?
It should be mentioned that the book is not confined to political or military events. The cover itself shows man landing on the moon. But by far the most interesting chapter is the one on how Albert Einstein revolutionised physics, aptly entitled "30 June 1905 E=mc{+2}... The special theory of relativity". In three closely printed pages, the author analyses the theory and sums up Einstein's own remarkable career. Einstein became a committed pacifist during the First World War (1914 - 1918).
"Einstein had made the atomic and hydrogen bomb a possibility. The relativity principle showed that space and time were no longer part of the structure of the world but were inventions which were relative to where the individual happened to be. This was comprehensible enough to be psychologically disturbing to non-scientists."
Like Beethoven, Einstein dug deeply for truth and was touched by a divine spark of creativity. He was a man without any affectations and was by far the most loved scientist of all times. As a public intellectual, he was a powerful voice of dissent. Einstein was a man who, in a profound sense, changed the world.
The author's confession does not minimise the seriousness of the lapse, in this day and age, of the book's Western biases.
