Letters

From the July 2002 issue

(Page 3 of 4)

Carnage and Culture

The title and subtitle of Chris Bray's review of my book Carnage and Culture make the charge that my book "abuses the past" and is "torturing history" ("Torturing History," April). Bray himself characterizes the book -- and me personally -- as "loud," "sloppy," "a wrecking ball," and "ugly." These are serious allegations that deserve a response.

Bray thinks the book's argument is "military freedom." This is false. The theme is the array of advantages that historically accrues to Western militaries because of a variety of cultural practices and values. A single chapter of nine is devoted to freedom. Eight others discuss civic militarism, decisive battle, landed infantry, technology, capitalism, discipline, individualism, and dissent.

Bray calls military freedom "my career argument." This is false. I wrote one previous book, Soul of Battle, that discussed democratic armies. The other nine dealt with a variety of other topics: contemporary farming, classical studies in the university, ancient agriculture, the mechanics of hoplite warfare, and a survey of Greek warfare from Homer to Alexander.

Because he does not understand the book's themes, Bray spends most of his time objecting to a single chapter on the Greeks' freedom at Salamis. He is upset that I call freedom a "Western value" -- and apparently more so by my statement that the West has had a tradition of 2,500 years, one that now has spread to six continents. Yet he adduces no evidence to contradict this point. Bray objects to the book's definition of freedom -- not by citing the actual one provided in the book (on pages 46-55) but by quoting my larger definition of Western culture, as if he thinks the latter is synonymous with freedom.

Bray objects to my notion of constitutional government in late 19th-century England, assuring us that the British in 1879 "were ruled by monarchs" -- as if there were not a consulting parliament and prime minister.

He also makes the weird argument that because free soldiers do not always mouth slogans of freedom in actual battle, I am wrong to argue that they fight well because they reflect a free society in the way they prepare for, think about, and conduct war. He says it's "harder still to believe that the Spanish conquistadors descended with fevered cries of 'One man, one vote!'" I did not actually write that, of course, but rather explained at great length the real differences between Spanish and Aztec approaches to government and culture (see pages 222-232).

Bray cites Sparta, suggesting that I wrongly believed that all Greeks embraced similar ideas of freedom and "the consent of the governed." That is false. I carefully emphasized both the diversity and the inequality present among the various poleis: "Even the most oligarchic states never attempted to establish a theocracy that might control the social, cultural, and economic behavior of its subjects. Generally, Western autocracies that did arise never succeeded to the degree of eastern despots in controlling the lives of their subjects. Still, none of the city-states from the Black Sea to southern Italy extended political equality to women, slaves, and foreigners" (page 50). And: "Within the more than 1,000 city-states not everyone was free. In the fourth-century history of the autonomous polis (700-300 B.C.) there were gradations in which property qualifications were high, moderate, and nonexistent, and office holding was variously open to the few, many, and all" (pages 50-51).

Bray objects to my argument that freedom gave advantages to the Greeks at Salamis and conveniently forgets the context: Unlike the Persians, the Greeks' representatives argued as free men over tactics and strategy, while Xerxes did not tolerate the same degree of free exchange. The Greeks themselves emphasized the key importance of freedom in that victory (pages 48-49).

We simply do not know whether Themistocles' ruse really took place; so one is not "fudging" when expressing doubt about the story. Of course, Themistocles may have given a speech claiming his trick alone was the cause of victory -- but those were his views, not necessarily Herodotus' own.

Bray writes, "Hanson describes 'British redcoats methodically blasting apart Zulu bodies at close range' and tallies as many as 800 Zulu dead -- although only 381 bodies were found." That too is false. That was not my own tally but a reflection of the widely disparate numbers of casualties as noted by different contemporaries: "Reconnaissance parties discovered 351 enemy dead; the number of wounded who crawled away and eventually died may have added another 200 to the fatality total. Later accounts suggest that the total Zulu dead ranged somewhere from 400-800 as bodies were found for miles beyond Rorke's Drift for the next several weeks" (page 298).

Bray objects to my contention that the British success at Rorke's Drift reflected their unique method of training and discipline: "As he does with Salamis, Hanson finds cultural and political motivations in the actions of men who are fighting simply to stay alive." This is banal. Most soldiers fight to "stay alive." It is the historian's task to understand why and how such soldiers do stay alive -- and in different ways and with varying degrees of success that are not merely explicable by the tactical situation at hand but often reflect larger questions of technology, discipline, training, tactics, and, yes, culture.

Bray creates italicized sentences and inserts quotation marks to characterize what I, in fact, did not write. When he cannot find support for his interpretations in the text he distorts with adverbs like purportedly and supposedly. Quotations marked by ellipses are common. Similarly, after producing not a single example of the promised falsity, he resorts to the rhetorical "and so on," "there is no shortage of misstated fact," and "Let one more example stand for the rest."

Carnage and Culture has been assessed favorably in magazines, newspapers, and journals in America, Europe, and Asia by a variety of reviewers -- among them apparently Chris Bray himself, who now confesses that his earlier evaluation of the book was apparently too favorable. Most reviewers do not seek to critique a book twice in order to retract what they wrote the first time around.

Bray -- who is described as a "freelance writer" from Claremont, California -- ends his harangue with a lecture on the proper craft of the historian. But history requires from book reviewers some rudimentary knowledge of facts, intellectual honesty, and reason -- as well as quoting correctly from texts and presenting rather than distorting arguments. If Chris Bray were a historian he would have known that.

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