The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, September 8, 2025

Notebook: William H. McNeill was one of those great historians who, like Herodotus, like Vico, like Voltaire, saw in the mingling of civilizations not the “clash” that Samuel Huntington saw, but the only way to a more enlightened future. He also believed in world history as a discipline at a time–the 1980s and since–when specialization has so atomized the field as to make it unintelligible to the lay reader, with some rosewater exceptions of the David McCullough kind. My late and second father turned me on to him in 1986 on the eve of my exile from New York for Chapel Hill, where I was to do my graduate work in history and discover that my professors had only contempt for a student intent on journalism. Mythistory and Other Essays was the small McNeill bible I carried. I started rereading it the other day. It was like opening a 40-year-old bottle of Veuve-Clicquot and still hearing the champagne sparkle. Then I came across these lines: “Future historians are unlikely to leave out Blacks and women from any future mythistory of the United States, and we are unlikely to exclude Asians, Africans, and Amerindians from any future mythistory of the world. One hundred years ago this was not so. The scope and range of historiography has widened, and that change looks as irreversible to me as the widening of physics that occurred when Einstein’s equations proved capable of explaining phenomena that Newton’s could not.” McNeill died in July 2016. He was 98. Assuming he still had his faculties, he probably thought Clinton was about to get elected, and his prediction would hold true. He was professionally mistaken in one regard: he believed in progress. (I don’t know how anyone familiar with the history of Christianity and its thousand-year reign of willful, studied, scholastic ignorance, can still believe in progress.) He could not have imagined the hands of Trump, DeSantis, Renner and Ruffo on the history syllabus. But what have they been doing that the Catholic church did not do for fifteen hundred years? 

—P.T.

In its assault on the past Christianity had help from others with a similar lack of interest in high classical civilization: Huns, Goths, Visigoths and others – the ‘barbarians’ – whose migrations and invasions into the ever-weakening Roman Empire hastened its collapse.* The shrinking of mental and cultural life was both a cause and an effect of diminishing education; fewer books were written and published, prohibitions were imposed on what could be read and discussed, and the predictable consequences of such circumstances followed in the form of increasing ignorance and narrowness. Christianity congratulates itself on the fact that the preservation of fragments of classical literature which managed to scrape through this period of appalling destruction was the achievement of monks, in later centuries, copying some of the manuscripts that survived; and although this was a merely partial, belated and inadequate response to the wanton zealotry of the earlier faithful, one must be grateful even for that.

–From A.C. Grayling’s The History of Philosophy (2019).

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