An Intimate History of Humanity
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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An Intimate History of Humanity (1994) is a book by Theodore Zeldin which probes the personal preoccupations of people in many different civilisations, both in the past and in the present; it illuminates the way emotions, curiosities, relationships and fears have evolved through the centuries, and how they might have evolved differently.
Excerpt:
- "'Hatred is holy,' said Zola, who fought the enemies of Dreyfus not just from love of justice, ..."
Overview
Next, Zeldin turned to the seemingly insuperable obstacle in the way of human fulfilment, the obstinate survival of fear, hatred and greed, and to the turmoil produced by conflicting emotions. The Intimate History is the book that has won him his widest audience, all over the world, and it continues to be reprinted and discovered afresh by succeeding generations. It is history made directly relevant to contemporary concerns, and at the same time it enriches the meaning of contemporary concerns. By analysing how the expression of emotions changed in different civilisations and centuries, it shows the limits of the idea of an immutable ‘human nature’. Though it points to escape routes out of present-day discontents, it also reminds that escape often leads to unpleasant surprises. Zeldin replaces stability with unpredictability.
Each of the twenty-five chapters shows how a ‘fact of life’ which seems impossible to change becomes far less inflexible when its variations through the centuries are understood. The chapter ‘Why there has been more progress in cooking than in sex’ is an example of how a juxtaposition of apparently disconnected themes can give a new meaning to sexual obsessions. The same juxtaposition is applied in the chapter on loneliness, where the history of research into the immune system is placed alongside suffering in solitude, to produce an unexpected understanding of it. The book presents personal relationships as the crucial element in determining the quality of life, and it seeks answers to such questions as: How has the desire that men feel for women, and for other men, altered through the centuries? Why has it become increasingly difficult to destroy one's enemies? How have people freed themselves from fear by finding new fears? Why has friendship between men and women been so fragile? Why is the crisis in the family only one stage in the evolution of generosity? Each chapter begins with a conversation with a woman discussing what she makes of life, and then introduces evidence from other civilisations, past and present, suggesting that other options might be open to her, if she only situated her problems in a wider time frame. This is a history of the world that takes as its subject the worries and uncertainties that all humans share, irrespective of where and when they have lived, rather than chronicling the rise and fall of disconnected empires and economies. It is also a personal demonstration by the author of how one person can relate with less bewilderment to the whole of humanity's endless floundering through mistakes and elusive hopes.
‘The most exciting and ambitious work of non-fiction I have read in more than a decade’, wrote a reviewer, but with the arrival of the internet it became possible for readers from many countries to record different explanations of the book's significance.
The National Museum of Australia, inspired by the book, translated Zeldin's method into an exhibition of the emotions of the Australians, explaining them by delving into their memories of the past. In support of this rejection of the convention that nations define themselves by recounting their achievements in chronological order, it quoted this passage from Zeldin's preface: ‘You will not find history laid out in these pages as it is in museums, with each empire and each period carefully separated. I am writing about what will not lie still, about the past which is alive in people’s minds today.’
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