Civilizations by Laurent Binet
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kill Them All; Let God Sort It Out

Ah, it all could have been so different - if the Caribs had been a bit more organised and eliminated the threat of Christopher Columbus by simply destroying his little ships; if the Vikings of Greenland had been a little more attracted to warm climates; if the rapacious Incas had moved from their mountains to the sea.

Not that the differences in themselves would have mattered according to Laurent Binet’s tale of reverse colonisation in which the New World invades the Old. The same human pomposity, the same greed, the same vectors of new diseases, the same instinctive violence exist in both worlds. And yet the world turns out to be very different indeed.

One way to interpret Binet’s story is in terms of sociology, particularly the sociology of religion. He uses the Lisbon earthquake of 1531 as the equivalent of the Aztec smallpox epidemic in 1520 that eliminated resistance to the Spanish and rapidly led to the destruction of the Mexican Empire. Both events would seriously undermine the fundamental, mostly unconscious, presumptions of the respective cultures.

Perhaps that is the real merit of this kind of alternative history. It reveals the presumptions that we unconsciously maintain about what is normal, moral, valuable, and important. That God (or the gods) speaks in natural catastrophe is a commonplace of religion. But what he (or they) means depends on the happenstance of the human interaction that follows.

The meaning of the world is the real core of something called metaphysics, the study of existential significance, which is a social as much as an academic enterprise. Metaphysics is certainly not a popular topic of conversation; but the expression of metaphysical reality, namely ritual, is. It is our ritual, both religious and their secular derivatives, that institutionalise, as it were, what is beyond language, rationality and analysis into our most intimate personal and communal being.

Ritual isn’t only observable in our religious or political events. Ritual is contained in the clothes we wear (or don’t), the layout of our dwellings, artistic themes and styles, and of course in the myriad of social behaviours we use every day, from how we shop and pay for the items we buy to the physical distance that is considered acceptable between us while we do these things. Language is mostly ritual in the greetings and small talk we engage in. Ritual pervades government and its processes - the three part government of the United States, for example, owes much to the interpretation of the Christian Trinity by a bunch of 18th century deists. Our laws reflect, for ill as well as good, our religious heritage - for example in the primacy of males, belief in retributive justice, and in cour judgments of equity.

So metaphysics is not some hidden, arcane philosophy of being. It is apparent, public, and pervasive. Ultimately it determines what constitutes a fact, that is, reality itself. What prevents us from realising this is an absence of contrast - there is nothing to experience except what is already literally inculturated within us. Until someone like Binet comes along and allows us to see our own metaphysical eye.

What is incalculably creative is the bulk of the book in which Binet places historical figures like Henry ViII, Charles V, Titian, and Cervantes within a new metaphysical context. They are all different in varying degrees from how we perceive them now, suggesting ways, perhaps, that we also might be different than we believe ourselves to be. Civilisations is not, therefore, merely an account of an alternative history; it is also a confrontation with our most profoundly held metaphysical prejudices.

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