Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud by Peter Watson

The book about everything by the man who’s read everything

I had previously read Peter Watson’s book The Modern Mind: An Intellectual History of the 20th Century and liked it very much. His follow-up to that book, Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud is a prequel in the same vein that covers everything before the 20th century. The Modern Mind opened with Sigmund Freud, and Ideas ends with him. In both cases, Watson deliveries sweeping world histories comprised not of wars, monarchs, and governments, but rather of important developments in the arts, sciences, and humanities. Both books are eminently fascinating and enlightening works, but Ideas is even more impressive and captivating than The Modern Mind.

According to Amazon, the print edition of this book is 850 pages. According to my ebook copy, however, it’s 1850 pages, which seems more accurate when one contemplates just how much content is crammed into this volume. Yet crammed it never feels. Watson has to be one of the all-time greatest summarizers in history. Our grandparents had Will Durant to provide them with an overview of the world’s knowledge. We’ve got Watson, and I think we win. When you look at the sources that Watson cites for this book, typically he’s not going back to the original texts written in ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy, or 19th-century Germany. Rather, he is drawing on the most recent scholarship—histories, biographies, critical studies—that have been published by eminent scholars about the people, -isms, and -ologies that he’s discussing. He doesn’t limit himself to Western civilization either, but includes contributions from Islamic, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and Native American thought as well. Watson seems to have read everything, and he miraculously assimilates it all into a coherent whole. He demonstrates an encyclopedic knowledge in a variety of fields: history, science, literature, art, music, sociology, psychology, archaeology, and more. The task of assembling such a synthesis must have been herculean, yet Watson glides seamlessly from one topic to the next, explaining complex concepts in clear and accessible prose. That’s not to say that the text is dumbed down for a popular audience. The intelligent reader walks away from this book having acquired a great deal of knowledge.

What surprised me most about this history of ideas is that, for the most part, it’s also a history of religion. Metaphysical and mythological conjectures on God and the universe are just as much ideas as any scientific theory, and religious thought has dominated mankind’s intellectual development for most of homo sapiens’ existence. (Look at the pre-Enlightenment selections in any art museum or library, for example.) The history of human knowledge, as Watson tells it, is a history of overcoming religious superstition. Watson is not an atheist with an axe to grind like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. He just tells it like it is with a very objective account of how religion has stifled intellectual progress since ancient times. It seems like every major discovery had to go through a centuries-long probationary period during which it was repudiated, prohibited, and persecuted by religious authorities—the punishments of Galileo, for example, or the arduous process of establishing (via fossils) that the real world is older than literal Biblical time. The Catholic popes are famous for this sort of anti-intellectualism, but Watson shows that all faiths to some degree have worked to hold back the progress of learning: ancient polytheists, Buddhists, Muslims, Protestants, and others are all guilty of this crime. Reading this book really makes you wonder what mankind could have accomplished by now if we hadn’t wasted so much time fighting over theology. Of course, as Watson shows, ideas don’t always mean good ideas: White supremacy, social Darwinism, and eugenics are just a few examples of very wrong ideas that have nonetheless proven too influential in human history, and Watson covers such fallacies as well.

Watson is so good at kindling your curiosity, one walks away from his books with an extensive list of topics and readings for further study. Watson himself has written more narrowly focused intellectual histories on The French Mind, The German Genius, and The Great Divide between the cultures of the Old World and the New. Regardless of where and when he might take you, with Watson as your guide you are bound to be fascinated, amazed, enlightened, and entertained.