Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 18

If you’re not thrilled with the tapestry analogy, how about the notion of six degrees of separation, also known as “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” when applied to entertainment figures. The idea is that anybody on Earth can be linked to anybody else in six or fewer interactions. Depending on which interpretation of this idea you like, the interaction could be as simple as a shared acquaintance or a handshake. Some people call it an urban legend, but a few researchers have tried to test the notion, with mixed results.

The game calls for making the connection in six steps or less. Let’s see whether I can do that with Alexander the Great, who died in ancient Babylon, and the Iraq War that started in 2003.

1 Alexander’s conquests spread Greek influence around the Mediterranean Sea.

2 Romans embraced aspects of Greek religion and philosophy.

3 The Roman Empire eventually adopted Christianity.

4 The Roman Catholic Church preserved ancient writings containing classical (Greek and Roman) ideas through the Middle Ages.

5 Christian scholars rediscovered Greek philosophy, sparking the Renaissance.

Oops. Darn. I’m not there yet.

So historical connections aren’t as easy to make as movie-actor connections, but I was on my way. See, the Renaissance led to the Enlightenment, when ideas such as government by consent of the governed took hold. That period led to the American Revolution and modern democracies — the style of government that George W. Bush said he would establish in the Middle East after getting rid of Saddam Hussein by invading Iraq, which helped make room in Iraq and Syria for the rise of ISIS. That’s more than six steps, but not bad.

If you fill in enough steps and make enough connections, you’ll begin to see the interconnectedness of virtually everything people do on Earth. Maybe once upon a time, a band of hunter-gatherers in what would later be Yemen or Thailand could live for 1,000 years in ignorance of the rest of the world, and no other band of hunter-gatherers anywhere would have known that those prehistoric Yemeni or Thai people existed. But that moment is long gone. Delve into any bit of humankind’s story now, and you’re on a path that reaches far beyond whatever city or village you started in. Each path branches into countless others that together reach around the world and stretch through time to what came before. Everything that ever happened, somebody once said, is still happening. History is now.