Chapter 1
DO TOUGH TIMES MAKE FOR TOUGHER PEOPLE?
FOR AS LONG as humans have been writing history, some historians have suggested that hard times somehow create better, tougher people, that overcoming obstaclesâthrough war or privation or some other hardshipâcreates stronger, more resilient, perhaps even more virtuous, human beings.
âHistory is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up,â Voltaire reportedly said. The observation refers to the argument that fortunes of nations or civilizations or societies rise and fall based on the character of their people, and this character is heavily influenced by the material and moral condition of their society. The idea was a staple of history writing from ancient Greece until it began to decline in popularity after the middle of the twentieth century.[1]
Nowadays, the wooden shoesâsilk slippers concept has been largely dismissed by modern historians. There are all sorts of very good reasons for this, starting with the lack of data. It is hard to prove or quantify an amorphous human quality such as toughness or resilience[2] and then justify its inclusion in a fact-driven, and peer-reviewed, academic history book. But that doesnât mean it has no impact at all.
Letâs try a little mental exercise: Imagine that two boxers step into the ring together. They are the same height, weight, and skill level. They have had the same conditioning; they even shared a trainer. All possible variables have been eliminated. What is most likely to be the deciding factor in determining which boxer wins? Is it this hard-to-quantify concept we call âtoughnessâ? Itâs difficult to say one boxer won because he was âtougher.â For a start, why do we tend to assume that tougher is better? Toughness is this vague concept that we all believe exists, and we all use âtoughâ as an adjective, but it is a relative term, and one personâs or cultureâs idea of whatâs tough may be different from anotherâs.[3]
Now instead of individual boxers lining up against each other, imagine the contest on a larger scale, with entire societies facing off. For example, how about if the United States of America of today went to war against another country just like itâthe same geographic size, the same population size, the same economic output, the same military capability, the same weapons and equipment and technology. And this war is going to be brutal, fought to an unconditional surrender, with cities left in ruins on both sides. The only difference between the two countries is that the people we are fighting against, in that mythical mirror country, are our grandparents.
Most of the people born between 1900 and 1930 are gone now, but they were part of an age-group popularly dubbed âthe Greatest Generationâ[4]âbut there have been so many tough eras and generations in history that singling out âthe greatestâ of anything seems a bit silly. Nonetheless, by our standards the members of the Greatest Generation seem very rough and tough indeed. And thereâs a reason for that. Even before they fought the Second World War, these men and women had lived through more than a decade of extreme economic hardshipâthe worst in modern world history.
Andrew Mellon, the secretary of the treasury under President Herbert Hoover when the 1929 stock market crashed, which initiated more than a decade of economic collapse, thought the coming hardship would be a good thing. âIt will purge the rottenness out of the system,â Mellon said, as reported in Hooverâs memoirs. âHigh costs of living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.â
From Mellonâs point of view, maybe he got his wish. The Depression put an end to the Roaring Twenties, a time remembered for high living, speakeasies, jazz, flappers, the Charleston, and the advent of motion pictures. What Mellon might have thought wasteful frivolity was simply fun to others. Things got a lot less fun when money became more scarce.
When the collapse came, it didnât ruin everyone, but about half the population found itself suddenly below the poverty line. It was a decade of hard times. And the accounts from that era are heartbreaking, so much so that itâs hard to imagine any good coming from it. Certainly, few in our modern world would choose to experience an economic disaster like the Great Depression for the potential positive side effects.
By the time the Second World War arrived, an entire generation had been through deprivations. And then they got the worst war in human history right on top of it. The war itself was very bad, entirely different from twenty-first-century conflicts. Today, a first-class power might suffer casualties from a single incident that number in the dozensâperhaps from the mechanical failure of a helicopter, or maybe a blast from an improvised explosive device (IED). Compare this with the hundreds of thousands of casualties the United States experienced in the Second World Warâat Iwo Jima, for example, the thirty-six-day conflict left nearly seven thousand Americans dead, of at least twenty-six thousand total casualties. And thatâs just American numbers; imagine the millions of casualties suffered by the Germans, or the tens of millions suffered by the Chinese and Soviets. Itâs interesting to speculate how we today would react to such mortality.
And itâs not just about weathering the damage; itâs also about inflicting it. Maybe we could take it, but as US general George Patton pointed out, that isnât how you defeat your adversary.[5] Think about the kind of bombing runs the American military had to makeâa thousand planes loaded with tons of bombs heading toward cities where ten or fifteen thousand people might be killed in a single night. Or imagine living through the Blitz in London, when German bombers unleashed their payloads on the city nearly every night for more than eight months. The Greatest Generation knew there was a solid wall of planes above them, and they also ordered the bomb bay doors to be opened.
And then there was the ultimate weapon, nuclear bombs. History shows that our grandparents certainly could, and did, use them.[6] Is there currently a scenario in which the citizens of our societies (as opposed to their governments) would find that an acceptable course of action?
We seem almost too civilized now to do something that seems so barbaric. But then, we havenât lived through what the World War II generation did. Assuming that one could measure a generationâs relative toughness on a scale of one to ten, perhaps the Greatest Generation gets a seven; if we were to imagine ten of these people born between 1900 and 1930 together in a room, maybe seven of them meet our qualifications for âtough.â Generation X has tough people, tooâsome became Navy Seals, a few have crossed Antarctica on footâbut maybe only two out of every ten members of that generation could be said to be tough enough to do such things. So rather than each individual being tougher, perhaps there is simply a higher percentage of tough people in what is considered a resilient generation. That is one way to try to conceptualize how toughness might apply to societies, and yet at the same time it helps highlight how strange it would be to try to quantify such a thing.
In the moralistic histories of the ancients, the âtough times make tougher peopleâ formula worked both ways. Soft times made softer people. To Plutarch and Livy, for example, sloth, cowardice, and lack of virtue were the fruit of too much ease and luxury and money. And a lot of softer people in a society meant a softer overall society. In times and places where the citizenry might have to don armor and use a sword to defend their state in hand-to-hand combat, this could potentially be a national security concern. Perhaps weâre living in a time when toughness in the old sense doesnât matter as much as it used to. If that is the case, then what advantages might a âsofterâ society have over a tougher one?
The great twentieth-century historian Will Durant wrote about the Medes, an ancient people who lived in what is now Iran. At the time Durant wrote,[7] the Medes were thought to have been a relatively poor, pastoral people who had banded together to help throw off the domination of the Assyrian Empire and who had then become a major power in their own right.[8] But soon after, wrote Durant, âthe nation forgot its stern morals and stoic ways. Wealth came too suddenly to be used wisely. The upper classes became slaves to fashion and luxury, the men sporting embroidered trousers and the women cosmetics and jewelry.â
The pants and earrings were not themselves the cause of the Medesâ fall from power, but to Durant and many of his contemporary historians, they were outward signs of how this society had changed and become corrupted, along the way losing the qualities born of harder times that had made them tough enough to win the empire in the first place.[9]
The mid-twentieth-century historian Chester G. Starr wrote about Sparta, an entire society geared toward creating some of the finest fighting men in the ancient world. The soldiers of Sparta propelled this agrarian Peloponnesian Greek city-state to heights it had no right to expect given the size of its population and its relatively modest economic output. But the entire society and culture in Sparta supported and reinforced the army and soldiery. Every male citizen was trained for war and was liable for service until age sixty.
The trained citizen militia approach was common to many societies, especially in ancient Greece, but Sparta took it to extremes. There, it was nothing less than a human molding process that started at the very beginning of life: newborns were deemed the raw material of the military, and a Spartan baby was subjected to judgment by a council of Spartan elders who would decide whether the baby was fit enough to live. âAny child that appeared defective was thrown from a cliff of Mt. Taygetus, to die on the jagged rocks below,â wrote Starr.[10]
The infants who were deemed worthy of living were subjected to âthe Spartan habit of inuring their infants to discomfort and exposure.â At seven years old, children were taken from their families and sent to a camp to train. As young adults, Spartans ate in communal military mess halls with their brethren, never knowing the comforts of home. They were deliberately underfed to encourage them to steal food and be resourceful, but then they were harshly punished if caught. These Spartan children grew up to be the best fighting men in Greece precisely because their whole culture worked to create them that way. Supposedly, the Spartans even eschewed money during their heyday,[11] because they thought it corrupted their upstanding morals and martial values.[12]
Then over time, according to the traditional narrative, the Spartans became âluxury-loving and corruptible,â as Starr wrote, and this eroded their toughness and military superiority, eventually leading to their downfall on the battlefield. The Spartans of 380 BCE might not have beaten their very formidable grandfathers of 480 BCE, but the Spartans of 280 BCE would definitely not have beaten their grandfathers.[13] The hated Persians are sometimes credited with deliberately contributing to this. The âGreat Kingsâ of Persia, who could not defeat the Spartans on the battlefield, found that gold was a more effective way to neutralize them. Over time, the premodern sources portray Spartans, especially some Spartan kings, as a good deal more materialistic and money loving than the more âspartanâ Spartans of old. Itâs as if these âsoftâ Persians, as the ancient Greeks often portrayed them, spreading their softness like a virus, equalized the toughness between the two sides.[14]
There are other ways to explain Spartaâs rise and fall than âtoughnessââbetter training and conditioning, for exampleâbut it seems strange to assign no value to it at all.
WAR AND POVERTY are not constants. They may create a heightened resilience on the part of the humans affected by them, but not all people are. Some people get lucky and avoid combat and economic privation. But everyone gets sick.
It may seem strange to suggest that high levels of illness might make human beings tougher, but the effect on a society of relatively regular and lethal epidemics and the mortality they cause certainly might have created a level of resilience that most of us today probably donât possess. A husband and wife who have lost several of their young children to disease and have stoically pushed forward with their lives would probably seem tough and resilient to us. People around the world still do this, and we consider it one of the great tragedies of life to lose even a single offspring. But it has been only relatively recently in human history that this experience has become less than commonplace. Before the modern era, the number of people who lost multiple children to illness was astonishing. One wonders what effects this might have had on individuals and their society as a whole. The historian Edward Gibbon, who wrote The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was one of seven children. All six of his siblings died in infancy. That was a pretty high rate even in the early eighteenth century, but the terrible regularity of losing children before they reached adulthood was common. However, focusing on what disease might do to children is to ignore the wider effects that high levels of illness can have on a society. A really bad epidemic might kill everyone.
When it comes to disease, the world is a vastly different place in the modern era than it was at any previous time in history.[15] Yes, there are parts of the developing world that have been virtually unchanged since the Middle Ages and are still disease ridden, but by and large the technologically advanced societies of the modern world have scant concept of the way human existence was affected by disease from the beginning of humankind until just a generation ago. Itâs startling to think of the many pandemics that have erased large percentages of the global population over the ages. Reading the contemporary accounts is like reading very dark science fiction. If we lost a quarter of the human population to a modern plague, it would seem obscene to suggest there was the positive side effect of making us more resilient.
In some ways, illness makes us tougher, because immunities often develop in those who have been sick. Thatâs hard science. But do people who suffer the regular loss of loved ones to disease become tougher or more resilient individuals? Do societies with large numbers of such people living in them become tougher societies? These questions fall into that gray area of things that we intrinsically feel might be important, but that canât really be measured or proved. Clearly, there were times in our history when only the strong survived, so a person had better be tough. But a case might be made that toughness isnât as important a qualification for survival as it used to be.
Connecting this to the wooden shoesâsilk slippers ladder, one might suggest that timing is important. If tough times call for tough people, what if the times are less tough? In addition, the silk slippers stage can come with some potentially offsetting benefits.
The early-twentieth-century German military historian Hans DelbrĂźck[16] had a theory that everything that characterizes the modern militaryâthe organization, tactics, drill, logistics, and leadershipâis designed to help offset the natural advantage of the toughness that people at a lower level of civilization possess. âCompared to civilized people,â he wrote about the ancient Germans who kept getting beaten by the more refined Romans, âbarbarians had the advantage of having at their disposal the warlike power of the unb...
