For some years now a theatrical troupe called the Reduced Shakespeare Company has made its living performing all 37 of Shakespeare's plays in just over an hour and a half. It's a highbrow joke. In Civilization, Roger Osborne speeds through more than 40,000 years of Western history in just under 500 pages, minus bibli-
ography and index. This is definitely not a joke, although it comes close to being a stunt, an intellectual high-wire act that the author pulls off with deceptive ease.
Is anything missing? Apparently not. Socrates rates a long, considered look, but Osborne finds room for the lesser-known Cleisthenes. All the major rulers line up in good order, right down to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and US President George W. Bush. Battles and wars, scientists and inventors, artists and tycoons, all get their turn in a smoothly rolling narrative that embraces Michelangelo and Fats Domino, Galileo and Dolly the sheep, the steam engine and the McDonald's hamburger.
Civilization is not a recitation of greatest hits, or a checklist of events and dates. Osborne, with great skill, ties his disparate topics together into a coherent narrative, as absorbing as any novel, with felicitous turns of phrase, and tidy summations, on virtually every page. Theoretically it should be impossible to describe the life, thought and influence of Thomas Aquinas in less than two pages, but Osborne does it, showing no signs of strain. It would be hard to imagine a more readable general history of the West that covers so much ground so incisively.
But Osborne has profound doubts about his subject. His title might well have been followed by a question mark. At every point along the familiar trail of artistic achievement, scientific breakthrough and economic transformation, he stops to probe, often painfully, and to ask awkward questions. Greek philosophy, he suggests, may have planted the seeds of later disasters by equating abstraction — "teasing out the universals, the constants, the invariables from among the clamor and noise of the real world" — with clarity of thought.
Even the appearance of printed books carried unintended, sometimes undesirable consequences. "There had always been divisions in society," Osborne writes, "but in medieval times the divide between nobility, clergy and peasantry had still allowed access to spiritual wisdom and salvation to the lowest in society; the revival of a civilization of the written word placed most of the population outside its borders."
Even the Renaissance — "not so much a period of history as the repository of the myths we have created about western civilization" — undergoes a skeptical cross-examination. It was in 15th-century Florence that craftsmen proclaimed themselves artists, turning away from the mass audience that generations of their predecessors had spoken to and creating a permanent, pernicious division between low and high art.
Osborne moves in for the kill in his discussion of colonialism. His vague sense of unease with reason and progress as uncontested virtues culminates when he takes up the near-extermination of the native peoples of the Americas, a calamity that, for him, raises a disturbing thought. "We are drawn to wonder," he writes, "whether the western way of thinking and of organizing human affairs makes us incapable of gazing on, and perhaps even learning from, another culture without needing to dominate and destroy it and make it part of the western system."
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