Markable Serial Killer
Riebe, 56, is serving life in Florida’s maximum security Blackwater Prison for the murder of one woman but police believe he is a serial killer and murdered many more.
.Skylar Diggins is a star basketball player, a Nike model and a guest interviewer for ESPN, and now it looks like she's set to become a veritable fashion icon.The 23-year-old South Bend, Indiana native shows off her glamorous side in the April issue of, revealing her super-toned abs and sculpted physique in a red T by Alexander Wang top and matching skirt.And while she's famous for sweating it out in her jersey on the court, Skylar says she has a penchant for looking glamorous when the occasion calls for it. Read more: Skylar Diggins is featured in the April issue of Vogue, which is currently in newsstands'And then one game I got the ball,' she recalled.'
Everybody just drives right, drives right, and I had a wide-open lane on the left, so I laid up and made it.' They passed it to me from that point on,' she said.Now, after earning the title of all-time scoring leader at Notre Dame and being drafted third overall in the 2013 WNBA Draft by the Tulsa Shock, Skylar's rise to stardom has only just begin.Indeed, the point guard revealed that when she was in college, sports agents would tell her that a professional woman basketball player 'simply wasn't marketable', but there's no doubt she's proved them all wrong.' It means the possibilities are endless,' she said.' It means there’s no mold for me.
It means I can blaze my own trail. It means that I can knock down barriers.' It means certain things are possible, and if I work at a certain level, they become probable.'
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATIONBYC. JOADTHE HOW-&-WHY SERIESEDITED BY GERALD BULLBTTA. BLACK, LTD 4, 5 & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.iLondonA. BLACK, LTDMelbourneTHE OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESSBombay Calcutta MadrasMACMILLAN AMD COMPANY LTDPRINTED IN ORRAT BRITAIN CLARr, LTD., IDINBUICHCONTENTSPAGEINTRODUCTION-I. A Talk about the Talk 14CHAP.I. THE GREAT RELIGIOUS TEACHERS 20II.
GREECE AND THE MAKING OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS 30III. FINDING THINGS OUT 47IV. How SCIENCE HAS CHANGED OUR LIVES 57V. THE SPREADING OF KNOWLEDGE 68VI. THE SHARING OF MONEY 76VII. OUR OWN CIVILIZATION 83INTRODUCTIONI. A TALKMyself.
I am trying to write a book on Civilization, and I want to find out what being civilized is. What do you think?Lucy. Oh, I suppose, wearing proper clothes, riding about in buses and cars, having money to buy things and shops to buy them in.Myself.
Yes, but babies wear proper clothes, and Mrs. X1 rides in buses, and buys things in shops. Would you say that babies and Mrs. X were civilized?Lucy. I don't think they are a bit. But, you see, they could be if they liked. There are so many civilized things about now, that anybody can be civilized if he tries.Myself.
What sort of things do you mean?Lucy. Machines, and trains, and wireless, and telephones, and cinemas.Myself. Well, I dare say they have something to do how with civilization; but I don't think that just having them and using them makes you civilized.
After all, being civilized ought to be some credit to you, something you can be proud of, and there is1 Mrs. X is the housekeeper. Lucy thinks her rather savage.7 18 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATIONnothing to be proud of about getting into a train. Let us try and think of some civilized people, and see if that helps us. Tell me anybody you can think of.Lucy. Because he was a great man and wrote plays that people are proud of.Myself.
Now I think we may be getting warmer. But tell me, do you like Shakespeare's plays?Lucy. Not much.Myself. Then why do you say they are great?Lucy. Because, I suppose, I shall like them some day. Anyway, grown-up people make a great fuss about them.Myself.
Yes, and there are other things such as pictures and music that you don't like much yet, but grown-ups make a fuss about. If Shakespeare's plays are a sign of civilization, so are Raphael's pictures and Beethoven's music.Lucy. I suppose so, although I don't know much about them.Myself. Then to produce beautiful things such as plays, pictures and music is being civilized, people like Shakespeare and Raphael and Beet¬hoven are the sort of people who count.Lucy. But all sorts of people I have read about, like the Caliphs and Princes in the Arabian Nights, had splendid things, palaces and silks and satins, and jewels, scents and gorgeous clothes, and wonderful carpets, and lovely things to eat and drink, and slaves to wait on them.
Weren't they civilized?INTRODUCTION 9Myself. I am not sure. You see, they just had what they liked and did what they wanted to.Lucy. Well, why shouldn't they?Myself. Think of something nice, anything you like.Lucy. Treacle toffees.Myself.
Well, suppose you were very rich, had as much money as you could possibly want, and bought thousands and thousands of treacle toffees. Wouldn't you get sick of them?Lucy. I suppose so.Myself. And similarly with catapults.Lucy. What do you mean?Myself.
Well, John likes catapults more than anything else. But suppose he was very rich indeed, and, because he liked catapults best, spent his money on buying catapults, so that he had hundreds of them. He wouldn't be much better off than he was with one or two, would he?Lucy. You mean he could not let off more than one or two at once.Myself. And he would very soon get tired of catapults altogether.Lucy. I expect he would; but what has that got to do with it?Myself.
Why, this: that the things you read about in the Arabian Nights, the splendid palaces and gorgeous clothes and hundreds of slaves, and all that sort of thing, seem to me to be just grown-up substitutes for treacle toffees and catapults. People get born the sons of kings, and they grow up to inherit power and riches, and then they say to themselves, 'Now, what do I like best?' And10 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATIONhaving found out what it was, they have spent their money in getting as much or as many of what they liked best as they could.Lucy. And then they got tired of it?Myself. Because when you have had a certain amount of doing just what you want and enjoying the sort of things you like, you don't want any more.Lucy.
Like getting tired of the treacle toffees. But you can always stop and begin again.Myself. That is what the Romans did. They used to eat enormous meals, and when they couldn't eat any more, they took something to make them sick. Then, when they were empty, they began to eat again. But I don't call that being civilized.
No, I don't.Myself. After all, pigs do that, although they haven't the sense to be sick afterwards.Lucy. And pigs are not at all civilized.Myself. Well then, let us say that using money and power just to get what you want and do what you like, although it may be very nice for a time, isn't being civilized. In other words, civilization is not just being splendid and grand and living in luxury. And since most of the princes and rulers of the world who have been rich and powerful have used their money and power in this way, they weren't civilized.Lucy.
And isn't it being civilized to own gorge¬ous things like the Caliphs in the Arabian Nights?Myself. No I They must also be beautiful things like the plays and pictures we were talking about.Lucy.
How do you know which are the beauti¬ful things?INTRODUCTION IIMyself. By seeing which are the ones you don't get tired of. Beautiful things live.
That is to say, people go on liking them in all ages. But things which are the grown-up substitutes for treacle toffees last only a short time, because people get tired of them.But let us go back a bit.
Those shops and machines and cars we were talking about, they are not at all beautiful, yet we thought they might have something to do with being civilized.Lucy. Yes, and I know what it is.
They have all been invented, and making inventions is the sort of thing people do when they are civilized. It is because James Watt watched the kettle, and New¬ton saw the apple drop, and things like that, that there are inventions now.Myself. Yes, but it was the inventing and not the inventions that mattered.Lucy. I don't understand.Myself. Well, lots of people had seen kettles boil and apples fall down before Watt and Newton, yet they did not invent anything. Why not?Lucy.
They didn't notice anything special about them, I suppose.Myself. But Newton and Watt did; that was the point.
Falling apples and boiling kettles caused them to think new thoughts, and because they thought new thoughts, men came to under¬stand more about the world and to invent things. Now, although I am not sure about the things we actually invent, I do think that this business of thinking new thoughts, whether they lead to inventions or not, is a sign of being civilized.12 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATIONLucy.
Because, so long as people go on just thinking the same as one another, nothing ever changes.Lucy. You mean that if everybody had always thought the same as their parents we should still be savages?Myself. It's because people think new things that civilization happens. And to think what is new they must also think freely.Lucy. Why shouldn't they?Myself.
Well, they haven't, you know. Most people who have thought for themselves have been told that it was wicked to think differently from other people. Usually there have been priests who have told them that if they thought this or that, the gods would punish them. And people believed the priests and were afraid of the gods, and thought what they were told to think. And even if there hadn't been priests, people always get disliked who think or act differently from their neighbours. Look how beastly you are to new girls at school who are a bit different from the others. And grown¬ups are just the same.
Now, to think freely is very often to think differently, and these things make it very difficult for people to think freely. Yet, as we have seen, without free thinking there can be no civilization.Lucy. But I still don't see why more people don't think freely, if it is as important as you say.Myself. There are a lot of things which are neces¬sary before a person gets the chance. For instance, he must have security; nobody can think aboutINTRODUCTION 13things, if he is afraid of being robbed or murdered at any moment.
Also he must have leisure to think in, and he won't have that if he has to give all his attention to getting food to eat and clothes to wear, if, that is to say, he spends all his time earning his living. And he must have other people to talk to. So that you may say that security, leisure and society, which are all necessary to free thinking, are necessary also to civilization.Lucy. Is that all about civilization?Myself. I think there may be one other thing.Lucy.
What is that?Myself. All this business about being good.Lucy. But what has being good to do with it? Nobody wants to be good really; they are only good because they get into rows if they are not.Myself. And again it is just the same with grown-ups.
If I want to kidnap somebody else's children, or cut his throat, or steal his car, or play with his tennis racquet, I don't do it partly because I should get into such a row if I were found out.Lucy. But what has that got to do with civil¬ization?Myself. That if we all took what we wanted to and ran off with one another's children, and stole one another's racquets, things just couldn't go on. We should all be quarrelling and fighting, for one thing.
And, for another, nobody would be able to invent anything or make beautiful things: life would be too dangerous. So there would be no civilization anyway.14 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATIONLucy. Is that why grown-up people keep the rules and are good?Myself. Perhaps it is not the only reason. I am not sure. But it is certainly one of the main ones. So, you see, this business of being good has some¬thing to do with civilization, and being good means acting justly towards your neighbour, and respect¬ing his property and obeying the laws, and perhaps other things as well.Lucy.
'What things? I should like to know what being good is.Myself. So should I; so would lots of people.
Anyway, we have discovered some of the things that count as being civilized, making beautiful things, thinking freely and thinking new things, and keeping the rules, without which people couldn't get on together. Grown-ups call the first of these things art, the second science and philosophy, and the third political justice and ethics.
Now these things may not be all that civilization is, but any¬way they will do to go on with.1II. A TALK ABOUT THE TALKI have given this talk that I had with Lucy be¬cause it explains, as well as I can explain it, some¬thing of what I mean by civilization, and it explains too why I have left out of this book the story of many great kings and empires which you might think ought to have gone into it. The empires you read about in the Bible, such as Assyria and Baby-1 Young readers may now, if they like, akip to page 20, where the storyof civilization really begins. They should return to this chapter when theyhave reached the end of the book ED.INTRODUCTION 15Ion, and the famous cities of the East like Samar¬kand and Baghdad, were no doubt very splendid and luxurious, but they were in the main ' treacle toffee ' civilizations. This is not altogether true of Egypt, and even in ancient Babylon, no doubt, some men lived civilized lives, made good laws and produced beautiful things. And among the rulers of these old countries there must have been some who were wise and enlightened.
But in the main the princes and the princesses, the Caliphs, whom you meet in the Arabian Nights, and the rich and powerful people of all countries, were content, as most people have always been content, to get what they liked and to enjoy it. At bottom most of these old kings and rulers were just treacle toffee eaters. So the Empires and the Caliphs and the kings and princes don't for the most part come into this book.And there are two other points.The first is this: to have power is a good thing, provided you use it properly.
But most of the rulers that one hears about in history, when they got tired of ' treacle toffees ' and wanted to show off their power, did so by bossing and bullying other people. For example, most of the world's great Empires have been built up on slavery. Slaves are people whom you own, just as you own furniture or clothes or toys; and just as you can do exactly what you like with your toys (and why not, since after all they are only things and not alive?) so you could do exactly what you liked with your slaves. And what most people have seemed to like to do most was to order them about, to make them work very hard, pay them very little money, give them very littlel6 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATIONto eat, and to kill them and torture them when they felt inclined. To-day we have machines to do the work of slaves, or some of it.1Nor is it only slaves that have been bullied and ordered about. As a matter of fact, great kings with supreme power have as often as not behaved in this way to everybody. Great kings and rulers are people who have the power to treat everybody as owners treat slaves, and usually do.
They can make people do whatever they want, and if anyone refuses, off goes his head. We call this using power tyrannically, and the ruler who behaves like this a tyrant. Tyranny has nothing to do with civiliza¬tion, so I have left out all princes and rulers called great only because they had immense power.And the other point is this. Most of the people who appear most often and most gloriously in the history books are great conquerors and generals and soldiers, whereas the people who really helped civilization forward are often never mentioned at all.
We do not know who first set a broken leg, or launched a seaworthy boat, or calculated the length of the year, or manured a field; but we know all about the killers and destroyers. People think a great deal of them, so much so that on all the highest pillars in the great cities of the world you will find the figure of a conqueror or a general or a soldier.
And I think most people believe that the greatest countries are those that have beaten in battle the greatest number of other countries and ruled over them as conquerors. It is just possible they are, but they are not the most civilized.» See Chap. VII.INTRODUCTION 1JAnimals fight; so do savages; hence to be good at fighting is to be good in the way in which an animal or a savage is good, but it is not to be civilized. Even being good at getting other people to fight for you and telling them how to do it most efficiently- this, after all, is what conquerors and generals have done-is not being civilized. People fight to settle quarrels.
Fighting means killing, and civilized peoples ought to be able to find some way of sett¬ling their disputes other than by seeing which side can kill off the greater number of the other side, and then saying that that side which has killed most has won. And not only has won, but, because it has won, has been in the right. For that is what going to war means; it means saying that might is right. Now being a great soldier or conqueror may be quite good fun, but it is not being civilized. And so I have left out people like Caesar and Napoleon and Alexander from my story of civilization. For what were they after all but men who were specially successful in getting multitudes of other men killed?
Now all through history people have wanted money and power and quarrelled with their neighbours; they have used money to buy 'treacle toffees' and nothing but 'treacle toffees', they have used power to bully other people, and, when they have quarrelled with their neighbours, they have tried to kill them. That is what the story of mankind ha3 on the whole been like. Even our own age has just fought the greatest war in history, in which over ten million men were killed and over twenty million mutilated. And while to-day it is true that people do not fight and kill each other in the streets, while,l8 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATIONthat is to say, we have got to the stage of keeping the rules and behaving properly to each other in daily life, nations and countries have not learnt to do this yet, and still behave like savages. And although we do not keep slaves and a man is free to work or not as he likes, most of the population is still very poor indeed, and, if a man does not do what his employer tells him, as likely as not he will starve.So you see that with most of history this book will have nothing to do. There has been very little civilization in the world and very few civilized peoples. Indeed, if I were only to include the peoples who never behaved like savages, never made them¬selves sick with treacle toffees, never killed and never bullied, it would never be written at all; for there would be nobody to put in it.But we must not expect too much.
After all, the race of men has only just started. From the point of view of evolution, human beings are very young children indeed, babies, in fact, of a few months old. Scientists reckon that there has been life of some sort on the earth in the form of jelly-fish and that kind of creature for about twelve hundred million years; but there have been men for only one million years, and there have been civilized men for about eight thousand years at the outside. These figures are difficult to grasp; so let us scale them down. Suppose that we reckon the whole past of living creatures on the earth as one hundred years; then the whole past of man works out at about one month, and during that month there have been civilizations for between seven and eight hours. So you see there has been little time to learnINTRODUCTION igin, but there will be oceans of time in which to learn better. Taking man's civilized past at about seven or eight hours, we may estimate his future, that is to say, the whole period between now and when the sun grows too cold to maintain life any longer on the earth, at about one hundred thousand years.1 Thus mankind is only at the beginning of its civil¬ized life, and, as I say, we must not expect too much.
The past of man has been on the whole a pretty beastly business, a business of fighting and bullying and gorging and grabbing and hurting. We must not expect even civilized peoples not to have done these things. All we can ask is that they will sometimes have done something else. If they have they will get a mention.But what else? For, as somebody has just very properly remarked, I have made a great pother over what civilization is not, but I haven't said what civilization is. But, you see, I am still not quite sure myself, and I have written this book partly to find out.
Perhaps we shall both of us know better when I have said a little about the few civilizations that there have been in the world. So let us talk about it again at the end.1 This works out at about twelve hundred thousand million years (twelve and eleven noughts) in real time.CHAPTER ITHE GREAT RELIGIOUS TEACHERSTHE earliest civilizations of which I shall write are those of India and China which existed some 2500 years ago. But I shall not describe them at any length, and this for two reasons. First, we know very little about them, so that in any event there is not much to say; secondly, they are chiefly famous for their religions. The Indians and the Chinese deserve a mention, not so much because they thought freely, or made beautiful things (although the Chinese in particular did both), as because they had new ideas about what I have called the busi¬ness of being good, and tried to put them into practice.Early Religious Ideas.-In order to show the religious advance made by these civilizations, I must first say something about the religious ideas which prevailed before they began. Early religious ideas might be described as a mixture of fear and cupboard love.
Primitive man found himself at the mercy of all kinds of material forces which he did not understand and could not control; thunder and lightning and earthquakes and floods. He could not imagine these things happening without20GREAT RELIGIOUS TEACHERS 21something to make them happen, and, according to his ideas, something meant somebody. There must be, he thought, some kind of person behind these thunderstorms and earthquakes, and in this notion of a somebody who caused dreadful things to happen we have the beginning of the idea of god. But primitive man did not think of one god who was responsible for everything that took place, but of a number of gods, each of them ruling over a particular department of the world. For instance in Egypt, where there was already some kind of civil¬ization, one of the earliest known, some four thousand years ago, there was a great multiplicity of these gods, a god for the moon, a god for the sun, a god of darkness, a god even of learning. Many of these gods were animals; there was a cow goddess (Isis), a frog goddess (Hekt), and so on.
The gods loved and hated and struggled and had favourites just like human beings, and practically everything that happened in the world was thought to be due to them. And people had to be very care¬ful to keep them in a good temper, for the gods were liable to get angry and sulk, with terrible re¬sults for human beings. All through the early his¬tory of man runs the idea that it is only by praying to the gods and flattering them that man can sur¬vive the many perils of his life. For example, the Egyptians believed that the morning would only come if Re', the sun god, was fetched up from the underworld every twenty-four hours by the prayers of the high-priest, who had to humble himself and beg Re' to appear.The Power of Priests.-Beliefs of this sort gave22 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATIONvery great power to the priests. The priests were the 'go betweens' between men and gods; they alone knew the will of the gods, and they told men what it was. Thus the priests managed to get the people to do whatever they wanted them to do by simply saying that it was the will of the gods, and must therefore be done, or some terrible disaster would befall. By this means the priests became very powerful.This power of the priests, which was founded on fear of the gods, led to many cruel practices, among them human sacrifice.
For the priests were apt to say that unless living victims were sacrificed to please the gods, the gods would show their dis¬pleasure by causing the tribe to be defeated in battle, by spoiling the crops, or in some other unpleasant way. To take the case of Egypt again, the prosperity of the country depends very largely on the river Nile. The Egyptian soil is very dry and would bear no crops unless it were watered by the Nile. Every year the Nile overflows its banks and floods the country for miles all round, and as a result of this flooding the land is fertilized and bears crops. Now the river Nile, of course, had its special god, or rather goddess, and the priests said that unless the proper sacrifices and burnt offerings were made to the goddess of the Nile, the river would refuse to overflow its banks and people would starve.
The sacrifices were usually animals, oxen and so forth, but sometimes they were human beings. Most primitive people have had beliefs of this sort.
The Aztecs, who lived in Mexico, believed that men were created to be the food of the sunGREAT RELIGIOUS TEACHERS 23and were required to fight and slay one another, so that it should not want for nourishment. Hence they thought that unless they offered the sun human flesh from time to time, its light would grow dim.Cupboard Love for the Gods.-Not only were the rites and practices of early peoples cruel, not only did they give great power to the priests, but they meant that people had a very low idea of religion. Early religions, as I said above, are a mixture of fear and cupboard love. You are afraid of the evil things the gods will do to you unless you keep them in a good temper, and you have hopes of the good things they will do for you if you like them or pretend to like them well enough. In other words, you worship them for what you think you can get out of them.
And so you flatter them and pray to them and tell them how powerful and how good they are, and bribe them with sacrifices and by making presents to the priests for the temple. The worse-tempered the gods were, the more presents you had to make; and it is not to be wondered at that the priests, who benefited by the presents, made out that the gods were very bad tempered indeed.One God instead of Many.-The chief merit of the civilizations about which I am first going to write is that they rose above these very primitive ideas about the gods.
In the Old Testament of the Bible, which was written by the Jews, and the Indian sacred writings called the Upanishads, we find it being taught that there is only one God. This substitution of one God for many was un¬doubtedly a great advance; for one thing it put an2+ THE STORY OF CIVILIZATIONend, although only by degrees, to the practice of human sacrifice. But it must be admitted that the Jehovah of the Old Testament is not a very agree¬able person. He is a terribly jealous God who will not admit any rivals, and he is always getting cross, so that, although the belief in him may have caused the Jews to act righteously, they did so chiefly in order to avoid incurring his wrath. Fear, in fact, was still the mainspring of religion.But in the sixth century before Christ there arose in India and China three great teachers who tried to make men understand that it was important to do what was right for its own sake, quite apart from whether there was a God or not.Buddha.-Of these the most important was Gautama Buddha (568-488 B.C.).
Buddha was a rich young Indian, born of a noble family. At the age of nineteen he married a beautiful cousin, and until he was twenty-nine lived the ordinary life of an Indian nobleman of his times, the kind of life which I have called a 'treacle toffee' life. Then he suddenly became discontented; this life that he had been living was not, he felt, the real life, but a sort of holiday. He wanted to find out the meaning and purpose of being alive, and with this object he joined for a time the ascetics.There have been ascetics at all times and in all countries, but they have always been particularly numerous in India. They are people who believe that power and holiness may be obtained by making one's body uncomfortable, as for example by not eating or sleeping, and by beating oneself.
But after a time Buddha turned from these ideas. HavingGREAT RELIGIOUS TEACHERS 25come to see that the way to discover truth is not to have a weak or diseased body, he horrified his companions by demanding food. Accordingly they cast him out as a failure, and for a time he wandered quite alone. We know nothing of his wanderings, but presently we find him sitting under an enorm¬ous fig tree, called the Bo tree.
Here he had a kind of vision. And his vision resulted in the first great teaching about good and right which was given to mankind.Buddha taught that all man's unhappiness comes from wanting the wrong sort of things, the pleas¬ures that money can buy, power over other men, and, most important of all, to go on living forever after one is dead. The desire for these things makes people selfish, he said, so that they come to think only of themselves, to want things only for them¬selves, and not to mind overmuch what happens to other people. And since they do not get all their wishes, they are restless and discontented. The only way to avoid this restlessness is to get rid of the desires that cause it. This is very difficult, but when a man achieves it, he reaches a state of mind or soul which is called Nirvana, which is a state of perfect quiet and calm. Some Buddhists have supposed that people live a number of different lives, and that what happens to them in each life depends upon the way in which they have behaved in their former lives.
For instance, if you have been very wicked in a previous life, you get born a slave or even one of the lower animals as a sort of punishment. And you go on living life after life until you reach the stage of having got rid of26 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATIONyour desires, and entering Nirvana.
This does not, however, seem to have been the teaching of Buddha himself.Lao-Tse and Confucius.-About the same time as Buddha, two great religious teachers arose in China. Lao-Tse's teaching (about 600-510 B.C.) was very like that of Buddha. Confucius (550- 478 B.C.) paid more attention to men's relations to their fellow-men. His view was that a man could not achieve goodness all by himself, since it was natural for him to live in society together with other men. And, since the society which he knew, the China of his day, was as full of strife and suffer¬ing as most societies have been, he taught that the way for a man to become good was by helping to make society better.
'It is impossible,' he said, 'to withdraw from the world, and associate with birds and beasts that have nothing in common with me. With whom, then, should I associate but with suffering men? The disorder that prevails is what requires my efforts.' And so he laid down a code of rules for conduct in daily life.
These rules are very detailed; they lay down what one should eat, what wear, what visits one should pavj how con¬duct oneself in public, and so on, and they have governed the behaviour of the Chinese ever since.The teachings of Buddha, Lao-Tse and Con¬fucius are known by the Chinese as the Three Teach¬ings. The Chinese and the Indians are very num¬erous, and although very few Indians remain Buddhists to-day, these three teachings, which are in many important respects the same teaching, have determined what most living human beings haveGREAT RELIGIOUS TEACHERS%'thought and believed with regard to matters of good and evil and right and wrong. And not only most human beings but most civilized human beings.
For, although the history of China has been very stormy and the state of China to-day is un¬settled and confused, the Chinese have been civil¬ized for a longer period and more continuously than any other people. In spite of the troubled times through which China has passed, and the many different peoples who have invaded it, Chinese civilization has never died out, and it is quite possible that, as it came before any of the other civilizations, so it may last longer than any. Importance of Asoka.-That Buddhism became so important in the world is largely due to a great king who ruled in India in the third century B.C.
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He is the only king I shall mention in this book, and his name is Asoka (264-227 B.C.). Like most famous kings in history, Asoka was a conqueror.
His father, Chandragupta, had transformed India from a number of little warring states into a more or less unified country, and Asoka pushed his father's conquests right down to the southern end of India. Unlike the other great conquerors in history, how¬ever, he seems to have realized the suffering that war involved. He was a devout Buddhist and wanted to make other people Buddhists too. But it could not, he thought, be right to spread what you believed by violent means; and so he gave up war, while still victorious, and decided to devote himself to spreading Buddhism not by fighting but by preach¬ing. He kept his empire at peace and ruled it wisely. In particular, he did much to make India.28 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATIONmore prosperous by digging wells, planting trees, founding hospitals, and educating his people.
He even tried to educate women, which was an un¬heard-of thing in those days. And he sent out missionaries all over Asia and into Europe to spread the teachings of Buddha.While doing these things he met with the op¬position of the priests. For Buddhism, unlike most other religions, does not require priests and clergy¬men to teach men how to be good, to pray to the gods on their behalf, and to persuade the gods to favour them.
It teaches that men can become good by themselves without the aid of priests, and ought to try to do so apart altogether from the question of pleasing the gods.What the Great Religions teach.-But although these new religions were addressed to individual men and women, they all of them tried to show that happiness lay in somehow forgetting that you were an individual man or woman, and in losingyourself in something greater than yourself. In this they were saying precisely what Jesus Christ was to say nearly 600 years later. Most people in the western world think Jesus was the greatest of the religious teachers, and regard the religion of Christianity which he founded as the most important of all the religions. Christianity to-day is the chief religion of western Europe and America. It is, however, im¬portant to remember that what Europeans and Americans think about Christ is not what the' majority of men have thought about him or think even now. But, although men differ about who Christ was, most people believe that he was a veryGREAT RELIGIOUS TEACHERS 29great teacher indeed, and that what he taught about the way in which men ought to live is both noble and true.We cannot doubt that if men lived the kind of life which these four great religious teachers urged them to live, the world would be much better and happier, and at the same time a more civilized place than it is or ever has been.
Unfortunately their teachings, especially that of Jesus (who said that we should be kind even to our enemies), have usually been found to be too difficult for people to follow, though that is no reason why they shouldn't try to follow them.All the great religious teachers of mankind have insisted on this: that men ought not to live for themselves alone. We ought not, they have said, to spend all our time and energy in getting just what we want for ourselves, power and money and im¬portance in the world: we ought to serve something greater than ourselves, whether a god or a cause or our fellow-men. It is by serving this something greater that men will forget themselves and so achieve happiness. This or something like it is what the great religions have taught, and it is one of the most important of the things that civil¬ization means.
It is also the hardest to learn and practise; in fact most people have found it much too hard.CHAPTER IIGREECE AND THE MAKING OF BEAUTIFUL THINGSThe Surprising Greeks.-And now I come to what many people consider to have been the greatest civilization that the world has seen, the civiliza¬tion of the Greeks some five hundred years before Christ. This civilization, which lasted for about two hundred years, came to its height in the city of Athens, during the one hundred and fifty years from about 480-330 B.C. The Greeks were re¬markable in all sorts of surprising ways, so many that, if I were to try to tell of even a few of them, this book would be about nobody else.Most of the peoples that there have been in the world have added nothing to civilization; they have behaved exactly like their fathers and their fathers before them, preserved their traditional ways and customs and passed away. And history has nothing to say about them either for good or for ill. But every now and then comes a people which makes a break with the past and starts afresh on its own.From time to time in the history of the world a small section of the human race has suddenly gone30MAKING OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS 31up like a rocket, and, breaking out in a shower of sparks, lit up everybody and everything around it. Of all these soarings of the human spirit the uprising of the fifth-century (B.C.) Greeks was the most startling.
They went up in a perfect blaze of splendour, and Athens was the most splendid rocket of them all. Let us try to imagine for a moment what an Athenian's days was like.An Athenian's Day.-He woke up under a cloudless sky, probably on some terrace overlook¬ing the sea. He breakfasted on a sort of verandah, and then went out as soon as he could to the streets and the market-place, for except to eat and sleep the Athenian is hardly ever at home; his life is passed out-of-doors. The streets and the market¬place are full of his friends and acquaintances, and he spends a good deal of his time talking and argu¬ing with them, especially arguing.
The streets and the market-place of Athens were, like the clubs of to-day, places where people met for the fun of the thing, to talk about affairs and enjoy one another's company. But, as in the case of most modern clubs, there are no women about, or very few. Where, then, are the women? They are indoors. On the whole, the Greeks thought that men ought to spend their lives outdoors and women indoors, from which you will see that the men did not have much to do with the women.After greeting his friends in the streets our Athenian may go and do a little work.
But work does not mean for him as it does for most of us, sitting about indoors doing the same thing over and over again. He is, let us say, a potter making32 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATIONclay vases, or a mason engaged in putting up one of the splendid public buildings on the Acropolis (the sacred hill of Athens). In his workshop there are two or three apprentices, and, say, half a dozen slaves. Although he is the master and gives the orders, he works with them on equal terms. On the whole, he treats his slaves well and pays them for the work they do as much as he pays free men. Presently they will have saved enough to buy their freedom, if they want it; for Greek slaves are con¬tinually becoming freed men either by purchasing their freedom, or by having worked long enough to have earned it.
Altogether the workshop is more like the studio of an artist than a modern factory, and our Athenian has the habits of an artist rather than of a modern workman; he works only when he feels inclined, and his working will not inter¬fere with his performance of his various duties as a citizen of the State.The workshop itself is mostly out-of-doors in a sort of portico or verandah; the court is flooded with sunlight and the workers sing as they work. And what happens if it rains? It practically never does rain.In the afternoon our Athenian will probably go to the assembly and take a turn at doing the State's business. The assembly is the governing body of Athens; all men citizens belong to it and have a right to speak.
Moreover, they vote, and by their voting decide what the city shall do, what de¬cisions shall be made about war and peace, what taxes levied, and so on. Usually our Athenian will think having to go to the assembly rather a bore,MAKING OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS 33and so after a time he gets paid money to attend. If he doesn't go to the assembly, he may put in an appearance at the law courts as a juryman and decide disputes between his fellow-citizens. And wherever he goes he will meet people he knows to talk to, and, should he meet a stranger to the city in the streets, he will welcome him and ask him his business.In the evening he will probably go to dine at the house of a friend. There may be half a dozen or a dozen other guests at dinner, which they will take lying on couches, the food and wine being brought round by slaves. Probably there will be no women present, and after dinner, or even while it is still going on, the men will begin to talk.
Often they will go on talking all the evening without leaving the dining-room.What they talked about.-What did they talk about? Anything and everything, science, philo¬sophy, history, politics, religion, love, foreign lands, where the human race came from, where men go to when they die. There were hundreds of things to talk about, for the Greeks were interested in everything.
They were thinking things out for themselves for the first time. For this is the first and perhaps the most important thing that I want to say about the Greek civilization; it was a civil¬ization of men whose minds had at last got free, free to think and to talk as they liked. This, of course, only applies to some Greeks, perhaps only to a few; and the freedom and fearlessness of the few some¬times got them into trouble with the rest. You can¬not after all expect everybody to be wonderful at834 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATIONonce, even when they are Greeks. But the few were the people who mattered.
Afraid neither of gods nor of men, they regarded no subjects as sacred and none as wicked, and, being the most inquisitive people on the earth, they talked about and inquired into everything. It is only when I come to tell the story of later civilizations that you will see how unusual were this freedom and fearlessness of mind.And talking and wondering and finding out, they laid the foundations of all the things that civil¬ized people care for to-day, of science and philo¬sophy and art and politics. Thus the Greeks prac¬tically began everything, and that was why they found life so exciting.The First Doctors and Historians.-For example, the first doctor was a Greek, Hippocrates1 (460 to about 370 B.C.), who lived on the island of Cos. Most of the things that Hippocrates found out about the body are now known to be not quite true, but he laid the foundations upon which others built- he and another Greek called Galen (A.D.
130-200), who lived at Rome five hundred years later. But, although we have found out much more than Hip¬pocrates ever knew, doctors still try to observe the rules of medical conduct which he laid down, to help one's patients to the best of one's power, never to use magic or charms, never to supply poison, never to give away secrets, and always to try and help everybody in the house you are visiting.1 I say that Hippocrates lived, but it is quite possible that there never was any such person, any more than there was a St. George in the story of St. George and the Dragon.
Markable Serial Killer Season
Hippocrates and his sayings may, in other words, be just a legend, but, if so, it is a legend which shows what sort of people the early Greek doctors were.MAKING OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS 35The Greeks, again, were the first historians, the first people, that is to say, to record the sayings and doings of other men, and to try to make a connected story of what had happened in the world. Herod¬otus (484-425 B.C.) travelled into far lands and brought back strange tales, and wrote the history of the wars of the Greeks and the Persians.
Thucy-dides (about 470-400 B.C), one of the world's most famous writers of history, told the story of the great war which the Greeks waged among them¬selves, the war of the Athenians against the Spar¬tans. Thucydides is remarkable because he was the first man who tried to tell the true story of a quarrel without favouring either side.The First Scientists and Philosophers.-Again, the Greeks began the study of geometry. Probably many of my readers have heard of Euclid (450- 374 B.C); if you haven't yet, you will.
You will probably find him rather difficult and come to think of him only as the author of a boring and inky school-book about triangles and right-angles. It is a pity that you should have to think about Euclid like this, because he was a very great man who, with the aid of a little sand let into the floor, discovered the laws of geometry.
Euclid wrote a book which survived long after the world which Euclid had known had been swept away, and the Greeks had been conquered by the Romans, and the Romans conquered in their turn by the barbarians, and the barbarians by the aid of that very book were at long last educated and turned into civilized peoples, among whom we number ourselves.Euclid is not much studied in schools to-day,36 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATIONbut I had to learn him at school, which is, when you come to think of it, a very remarkable thing. For geometry is a sort of science, and in nothing is early knowledge so quickly left behind as it is in science. Yet here was I, twenty years ago, being made to read Euclid who wrote two thousand four hundred years ago.There was nothing which our Athenian talked so much about at his dinner, nothing which in¬terested him so much as philosophy.
Philosophy is a sort of discussion about everything, about the difference between right and wrong, whether there are gods and what they are like, what the world is made of, how it began, how men ought to live together in society, whether they ought to own slaves, whether eating 'treacle toffees' is the most important thing in life, and hundreds of other things. The Greeks began this discussion some two thousand four hundred years ago, and it has gone on practically ever since. And they had all sorts of exciting ideas about the subjects they dis¬cussed.There was Socrates, for instance (about 471- 399 B.C.). He used to go into the market-place and ask people inconvenient questions, the sort that children sometimes ask grown-up people, and which always annoy grown-up people when they find that they don't know the answers, although they thought they did.
Socrates annoyed the Athenians so much that they accused him of doing harm to young men's minds and had him poisoned. This was one of the worst things the Athenians did.Then there was Plato (427-347 B.C). He was aMAKING OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS 37disciple of Socrates and wrote down most of his teaching in what are called Dialogues, which are talks carried on by a number of people who come together and discuss things in general. Socrates usually begins the Dialogues by asking his incon¬venient questions, and then, when nobody can answer them, sets to work to try to answer them himself. These Dialogues of Plato are among the most famous and the wisest books in the world, and people who care about knowledge still read them eagerly to-day as they have done in all ages.
Samuel Little
After Plato came Aristotle (384-322 B.C.). He was one of the most inquisitive men who ever lived, and tried to find out about everything, about the stars, about what things were made of, about how the mind worked, about the different kinds of animals, and about what one ought to aim at in life. I cannot even begin to speak of the answers which the Greeks suggested to all the questions they discussed.
Indeed in a queer sort of way their greatness lay in the fact that they didn't answer them. Most of the people who came after the Greeks have tried to answer them and have thought that they had succeeded; but their answers have usually been wrong. In spite of this, however, they have insisted that they were right, and have made things very uncomfortable for those who did not answer them in the same way as themselves. The Greeks alone kept open minds, saw that there were all sorts of answers and let people choose their own.
On the whole, perhaps, their main general idea, and that about which most of them were agreed, was that one ought to try38 THE STORY OF CIVILIZATIONsomething of everything, but not have too much of anything. This is called the doctrine of 'the mean', and it is a very good doctrine too.And it must be remembered that, although the Greeks did not settle the things they talked about, they had enlightened ideas about them. Indeed they had the first enlightened ideas in the Western world. Thus we hear them in their discussions con¬demning slavery, trying to get rid of superstition, claiming for women the same rights as men, look¬ing forward to the day when all mankind will be one brotherhood and there will be no more divi¬sions and wars. And they are the first Western people (for we must not forget Buddha) ever to suggest that these things are possible.There are two things about which I ought to say something more before I leave the Greeks; the first is their government and the second their art.The Idea of Democracy.-Most of the govern¬ments of the world, as I said in the Introduction, have been cruel, oppressive and unjust. Their object has been not to do good to the people whom they were governing, but only to benefit those who were governing them. Usually the government has been in the hands of some absolute prince or ruler possessing supreme power, who did precisely what he liked with and to his subjects.
In such cases he would be assisted by a few people belonging to highly placed families, who were treated like favourites in a school, and helped the ruler to keep the great mass of the people in subjection. Some¬times the families would govern by themselves without any one person as prince or supreme ruler.MAKING OF BEAUTIFUL THINGS 39The Greeks called the first kind of government a tyranny and the ruler a tyrant, and the second kind an aristocracy or oligarchy and the ruling families aristocrats or oligarchs. Tyrannies and aristo¬cracies had been the rule in the world for centuries before the Greeks, and they were the rule again for centuries after them, which makes it all the more remarkable that some of the Greek cities, notably Athens, invented a new system of government called democracy, which is the kind of govern¬ment which prevails in most civilized countries to-day.The idea of a democracy is that the people shall do their governing for themselves.