Niall Ferguson and
"The War of the World".

Earlier this week the revisionist historian Niall
Ferguson concluded his TV series on Channel 4
in the UK. His contention is that the conflicts of
the 20th Century were not ideological in nature
but fundamentally ethnic. Human ability to
treat other people as "alien" enables them to
indulge in "ethnic cleansing" without the empathy
of fellow feeling. How are we able to treat each
other as if we have come from another planet?
I often wonder if at heart all evil is actually a lack
of empathy - the inability to put oneself in someone
else's shoes.

I have to say that Ferguson's thesis seems to me
to be a re-hash of Samuel Huntington's "The Clash
of Civilizations" rather than anything desperately
original as the TV promo promised. [I've looked at
Huntington's ideas in a blog back in March '06 if
you're sufficiently interested!]

Having concluded that the world's conflicts often
defy simple explanation Ferguson goes on to attempt
a simple explanation = 'too many young men needing
economic prospects'. This is rather too simplistic in
my view, I think (for what it's worth) that young, poor
men are not so much the cause of conflict as the
unwitting foot soldiers of events outside of their
control. But then why should a historian have any
particular insight into the future?

Ferguson's final remarks which made an appeal to our
common humanity were belied by the lack of common-
ality his programmes highlighted. As a Christian I
can understand his attempt to appeal to some higher
concept which will enable us to treat each other as fully
human, but such a concept -it seems to me- cannot be
centred in humanity - we must look beyond ourselves
to truly understand ourselves. Indeed Ferguson's
appeal rests on the ability to empathise - yet to build
a philosophy on ourselves, as all Humanists do, is
actually a subtle denial of the need for empathy. How
often have you heard someones crime described as
"inhuman"? Or have you called someone "inhuman"?
The truth is what we pointlessly call "inhuman" is in
reality all too human. By calling it "inhuman" we are
making a vain attempt to distance ourselves from it
by "alienising" it [what I call "otherising" it!] I am a
Christian because the Gospel of Jesus helps me see
the world as it actually is, and Jesus does not seek to
comfort me with silly notions of my own innate
goodness but confronts me -and us all- with our
alienation from the One who is the source of all love.

"If only there were evil people some where insidiously
commiting evil deeds and it were necessary only to
separate them from the rest of us and destroy them.
But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the
heart of every human being." Alexander Solzhenitsyn
in 'The Gulag Archipelago'.