Dr. Boli really has no intention of burdening you with the whole book on this site, but another sample chapter here or there may be welcome on what the journalists call a slow-news day.

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CHAPTER 2.—THE DEFINITION AND CHARACTER OF CIVILIZATION.

CIVILIZATION IS A disease to which human beings, alone among the terrestrial animals, are chronically prone. Infestations of civilization have been recorded on every inhabited continent, and there are so many clear cases of independent development without contagion that we can only regard the disorder as genetic.

Before we go any further, it may be useful to say exactly what we mean by civilization. The mark of civilization is the city, just as the mark of savagery is the village and the mark of barbarism is the suburb. Life in cities gives civilized peoples the opportunity to specialize, which is to say to set aside a considerable portion of the population to be devoted to useless pursuits. In the village, it is necessary for nearly everyone to be employed in merely assuring the subsistence of the tribe; but in the city, a man who does nothing but design magazine advertisements all day can persuade himself that he is both useful and necessary.

Of all the specialized businesses that civilization fosters, there is none so typical of civilization as the business of government. Philosophers may argue about what the true purpose of government ought to be, but there can be no doubt that the actual purpose of every government known to history has been to foster those conditions under which government can grow and flourish and give birth to more government. It would be very strange if it were not so: a government that was less than enthusiastic about the idea of governing would soon be replaced. Fortunately for the rest of the population, the ambition of a government usually ends at keeping itself in power. The surest guarantee of personal liberty in any civilization is bureaucratic laziness and inefficiency. Our general happiness is in danger only when a government rubs its hands together and decides to get something done for a change. —This is of course a digression, but Dr. Boli has never been one of those who prefer to roar down the interstate from point A to point B without stopping to see any of the sights along the way.

The government of most early civilizations was invested in a divine king, though it seems clear that, from the very outset, these royal personages were more ornamental than useful. The real business of government was carried on by a succession of more or less competent administrators, while the kings married their own sisters and produced more and more degenerate offspring, until at last the royal family was so wispy and diseased that they were practically transparent. But this unhealthy state of the royalty was itself very good for government, since it necessitated a larger and larger class of official functionaries to surround the king and keep him from blowing away in the first stiff breeze.

But keeping the king from drooling on his royal robes, laborious as it may have been, was not in itself sufficient to justify a large and all-pervasive government. Other expedients were necessary to allow the government to grow to truly civilized dimensions.

The creation of public works on a massive scale was one of the expedients that occurred to early governments. Usually some problem could be found whose solution required organizing people into enormous groups of laborers, thus justifying the existence of the government that kept them organized. For example, there was the problem of disposing of dead kings. This problem alone could consume most of the resources of even a fairly advanced civilization. Since kings were divine, they could not simply be tossed in the garbage when they died; and since they were useless, they could not be recycled either. It was necessary to send the departed king off to his apotheosis with sufficient dignity that the other gods would not spend the rest of eternity mocking him. With any luck, the king might pass his entire reign supervising the construction of his own tomb, and then die just as it was completed, leaving his successor to begin an entirely new tomb, and keeping the government in business indefinitely.

If, however, the disposal of the royal carcass did not provide enough business to keep the government going, there was always the perennially reliable expedient of war. A war is a kind of team sport specifically designed to consume as many resources as possible, and thus to require organization on a scale surpassing even what is necessary for the construction of a royal tomb. There is, of course, some risk that the war will get out of hand and destroy the government instead of perpetuating it; but, in general, a well-managed war can go on for years with mutual benefit to the governments on both sides. It does require a certain expenditure of human lives, but civilized governments can easily obtain those by conscripting the men who sit around and write magazine advertisements all day. In general, the slight inconveniences of a war are negligible in comparison to the benefits to be gained by the governments involved, and a government that is not actively waging a war is usually preparing for the next war.

So far we have looked at civilization in terms of general principles. When we come to examine specific early civilizations, we shall find that they present an interesting study in contrasts. For example, the Egyptians had divine kings who married their sisters and built pyramids in Egypt, whereas the Maya had divine kings who married their sisters and built pyramids in Yucatan. Sumerian kings, on the other hand, built ziggurats. So we see that there is an almost infinite variety in these early civilizations.

Another improvement that civilization brought to humanity was writing. Every truly civilized society had writing of some sort. It was not necessary to have a system of writing that could express every spoken idea, as ours can, but it was absolutely essential to be able to tally up how many cities your king had destroyed and how many thousands of people he had slaughtered in the process. Thus, for example, the Aztecs developed a pictorial historiography that was admirably suited to documenting slaughter on an industrial scale; similarly, the Incas had their quipus, intricately knotted fringes with which it was possible to keep an accurate count of how many heads had rolled. On the other hand, the Egyptians developed a system of writing that was also capable of expressing more complex ideas, such as panegyrics on the king to whom a particularly successful mass murder was attributed. The Maya also had a complex hieroglyphic script that baffled every attempt to decipher it until quite recently. As long as the Maya writing remained undeciphered, anthropologists were free to fantasize that the Maya were a nation of peaceful astronomers; but, now that the key to Maya writing has been discovered, we know that they were simply celebrating their successful slaughters in the usual fashion.

The development of writing is of paramount significance to the present work, since it marks the beginning of history, which we may define as the written record of the slaughters inflicted on one civilized group by another.

At various times, important ancient civilizations have grown up in the Nile valley in Egypt, in the Indus valley in Pakistan and India, in the Yellow River valley in China, on the plains of Mesopotamia, in Nigeria, in Zimbabwe, in various parts of Mexico, and in Peru. Most of these civilizations have left us some form of written record, and the story is always the same: this king killed that king and slaughtered all his followers. The notable exception is the Indus Valley civilization: the writing left by these mysterious ancient Indians has not yet been deciphered, and anthropologists therefore believe that they were most probably a nation of peaceful astronomers.

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Next:

Chapter 3.—The Ancient Egyptians, Furnishing and Decorating the Afterlife Since 3150 B.C.

IN REFERENCE TO Dr. Boli’s Complete History of the World, “Mary” writes:

Sir Walter Raleigh was working on a history of the world while in the Tower of London. Except one day he saw some workers quarrel outside the tower, and one was killed. Despite actually seeing it, and the most diligent queries, he could never find out it was about.

Whereupon he gave up his history and burned what he had done.

This is such a charming story that it seems almost petty to correct any of the details. Indeed, it requires only two small corrections: for “gave up,” read “continued,” and for “burned,” read “published.” Sir Walter’s history was a very popular standard work for a century after he wrote it, and can be found in more than one edition on Google Books, which is now perhaps the most comprehensive library on the planet outside Dr. Boli’s own library.

Sir Walter’s own preface to the History is worth reading, and we can find an abridgment of the work here. Abridgment, as any author knows, is the sincerest form of flattery; it implies that one’s work is considered so essential that even the impatient and subliterate deserve a crack at it.

There is, however, one form of flattery that may be even more sincere than abridgment, and that is legend. Stories true and false circulate about people like Sir Walter because they simply deserve to have good stories told about them. A legend is posterity’s only way of conveying the magnitude of a personality that has made an indelible impression on the imagination of his contemporaries. The stories tell us, not what Sir Walter actually did, but what kind of man his friends knew him to be. In that way, our legends of Sir Walter Raleigh may be said to be not false, but actually truer than the mere facts of the case will allow.

Dr. Boli, finding other histories inadequate, has long contemplated writing his own history of the world from the beginning to the present day. Whether such a project could ever be worth the effort it would require, however, is a question he has so far been unable to answer. If the publication of this first chapter attracts enough interest, perhaps the project will be worth continuing.

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CHAPTER 1.—FROM THE CREATION OF THE UNIVERSE TO THE DAWN OF CIVILIZATION.

IN THE BEGINNING, according to science, there was the One, and from it all things were created. This account differs so little from that given in the first chapter of John’s Gospel that we may consider the two versions fundamentally interchangeable, allowing for some poetic license on both sides.

At a certain point in time—in fact, at the very first certain point of time in the history of time—this primordial unity gave birth to multiplicity with a tremendous racket. There is some disagreement as to why this event occurred: theologians believe it happened because God willed it; scientists believe it happened for no reason at all; and Dr. Boli, whose opinion must be allowed to count for something in his own book, believes it was the result of deliberate sabotage. The matter thus set loose in the previously tidy universe busily set about forming itself into galaxies, stars, planets, and other detritus, so that today there is little hope of ever getting the place cleaned up. This should be a valuable lesson for us all on the tragic consequences of slovenly habits.

Very roughly ten billion years after the moment of creation, our own solar system was constructed in the suburbs of one of the middle-sized galaxies, the Sioux Falls or Omaha of the universe, and our own planet was set aside to provide a small area of mixed-income housing.

In the beginning our planet was a frankly unattractive place, with no landscaping to speak of and very few of the amenities living beings usually look for in a neighborhood. It took some time to attract any residents at all, and we must candidly admit that the first inhabitants were not beings of the highest class. They were a hardy lot, however, and made up in ambition what they lacked in refinement. Soon they and their descendants had covered the earth, in the process shaping it to their liking (whether with the permission of the landlord or in defiance of him it is no longer possible to determine) and adding some color to the place.

As yet these primitive Earthlings still maintained a firm hold on their cellular independence. At some point, however, a kind of communist revolution took place, and creatures appeared made up of individual cells organized into a cooperative whole. It is important to remember that these cellular communes even now are in the minority, and that most creatures on earth have clung tenaciously to their unicellular liberty. Single-celled organisms, however, or even more primitive beings, write no histories, so we shall have little more to do with this silent majority until its members erupt into our multicellular affairs in the forms of various diseases.

At first most of these multicellular organisms inhabited the water, but eventually some of them were induced by competition—a force that did not sit well with their communist ideals—to colonize the land as well. These colonial enterprises came about in stages, as plants, insects, vertebrates, and other creatures discovered one by one the advantages of life in the open air. One suspects that there may have been a fair amount of marketing involved, since more than one kind of creature, after spending enough time on the land to form a fair opinion of the place, has decided to retreat to the water again. If we could speak the language of whales, we might find that they believed they had been duped, and still harbored some resentment against the salesman who had persuaded them to abandon the aquatic life for so many years before they finally came to their senses.

On land, as in the water, food was the first requirement for any creature. The industrious plants devoted their lives to manufacturing their own food from sunlight and a few unclaimed minerals they found lying about. Most other forms of life resorted to the simpler expedient of theft, so that today the entire economy of life on earth rests upon the ability, and more important the willingness, of the plants to produce much more than they need for themselves. It would take only a single vegetable demagogue with a talent for persuasion to upset the whole balance of our existence.

Most of the rest of the history of life on earth is a dreary and repetitive tale of one creature eating another and then being eaten by a third; there are only so many times one can hear the story without beginning to find it a bit familiar, even if the names of the principal characters in the drama have been changed. To be sure, there were highlights. For quite some time, the earth was producing dinosaurs; and any planet that can produce a lizard the size of an apartment complex can reasonably claim to have accomplished something. There are also butterflies, for which no apology is needed. There was also a definite trend toward the development of greater and greater intelligence in the creatures that inhabited the earth, but it cannot be said that the uses to which that intelligence was put were morally commendable. In general, the less said about the long period from the colonization of the land to the appearance of the first primates, the better. Indeed, it could easily be argued that it would be best to skip over the period from the first primates to the present as well; but then the rest of the pages in this book would be blank, which would doubtless prove a disappointment to purchasers who had expected to find words on them. The historian must keep the realities of the market in view.

The early primates differed from the animals around them mostly in that their descendants were destined to be later primates. As for the later primates, they began to show some traits that we recognize as typically human, such as random outbursts of violence and the ability to sit for hours picking specks off themselves. Clearly it was only a matter of time before such advanced creatures dominated the earth.

These later primates made several failed attempts at producing a human being until they finally got it right. There were, for example, various species of Australopithecus, which failed because they were in the wrong genus. There was Homo erectus, which got the genus right and succeeded in the upright-posture department, but apparently exhausted itself in the process. There was Neanderthal man, Homo neanderthalis, which possessed a large brain, a keen intelligence, and a peaceful disposition, and was disqualified by these obvious flaws. Not until the appearance of Homo sapiens did the primates produce a species with the exact traits needed to fit it for an advanced civilization: that peculiar combination of an ability to reason adequately with a willingness to abandon reason most of the time that makes civilization possible.

Civilization was not a thing that happened all at once. Older historians divided human development into three distinct stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. Modern scholars reject that division as unnecessarily complex. We now understand that barbarism and civilization are merely savagery on a larger and larger scale.

Although it puts him out of step with current thought, however, Dr. Boli still finds the old threefold division useful, as giving shape to a narrative that would otherwise be confusingly formless.

In the first stage, therefore, which we shall persist in calling savagery, human beings gathered in small groups for the purpose of killing each other two or three at a time. In the second stage, the barbaric stage, we gathered in large tribes for the purpose of killing each other by the dozens or hundreds. In the last stage, civilization, we gather in large nations and empires for the purpose of killing each other by the thousands or hundreds of thousands.

History properly begins at the civilization stage, and it is therefore with our first groping toward civilization that we shall begin the next chapter.