Philippine Military Academy cadets-- good examples of the workings of cultural transmission. They do not fight in any way resembling that of their prehispanic ancestors-- the line of transmission has been broken and they are heirs to a very different martial culture and tradition
One of the issues in military history is that of continuity and information transmission. When we speak of a “culture of war,” we also have to wonder: how was this culture transmitted? This a crucial question, and one often overlooked. People speak of cultures as if they are somehow naturally and magically transmitted from one generation to the next.
This was something I encountered in my own research. I speak of a “Filipino Way of War” and one of the claims I made was that it had certain common elements that persisted through 3 centuries. What I have now realized is that I need to establish this lineage. Did Filipinos learn it from books, from being taught by previous generations, by observation, or through established institutions?
I don’t much believe in a “racial” or “ethnic” memory (and if you, gentle reader, do, then get the fuck out of here– it’s bad science and history) and idea’s don’t just “float” in the ether, somehow magically transmitted to members of a culture (and just that culture). John Lind, for instance, once noted that he saw how Muslim “terrorist” tactics resembled Arab light cavalry tactics– without saying how a terrorist would know light cavalry tactics from several centuries prior. The worst offender has to be Victor Davis Hanson, who insists on a continuous “Western” military culture without ever making particularly clear how this was transmitted (perhaps it’s somehow in the geography– move to the “West” and poof, you’re all fighting as citizen-soldiers).
The transmission of military ideas also brings up the question of what happens when the ideas are transmitted. The ideas do not remain unchanged– they can drastically change as they move from person to person or from generation to generation.
Take for instance “chivalry” or the martial culture of a group of people we could call “medieval knights.” Chivalry was never firmly institutionalized and while it is certainly a true, coherent, martial culture, it was quite flexible in its bounds and definitions. It had some general rules, especially basic ones, like equipage and fighting style (a knight had a horse and fought on one, e.g.), but much of its other “standards” were completely unstandardized– even the specifics of how these universal weapons were used.
Chivalric training, a highly individualized martial culture.
This was in large part a result of how the ideas of chivalry were transmitted. The most common method of cultural transmission was through highly individualized training, where an older knight would teach a prospective knight, but there were also epics, poems, books, and other such examples of literature. There was no standardization, no manuals, no regulated class, no Chivalry SATs. Because there was no measure of standardization, knights– and their students– had differing ideas on what chivalry exactly was. They had a broad understanding, but within these bounds you had many variations. Chretien du Troyes could write of a highly romantic set of values and we can still call it chivalry, while the Chansons Roland could speak of a very macho, warlike set of values that we can also call chivalry. A Templar could insist that chivalry was highly religious, but a knight who was a Free Company mercenary could legitimately disagree. The result of these varying means of transmission and individualized reception was an inchoate mass of ideas, mores and beliefs that became a culture: chivalry.
The changing of historical circumstances also greatly affects the transmission of ideas. Logic would dictate that as the historical situation changes, then, ideas would either be adapted or discarded. People assign labels like “Western” or “Japanese” onto other societies and then assume that the cultures remain if not static, at least consistent, over time. This is not necessarily wrong, but it’s a stretch to assume that a “culture” is going to be monolithic or even very consistent over the course of time. Just because a samurai lives in the same place as modern Japanese person can we infer that the two people think the same way. They may share intellectual commonalities, having a certain stock of common ideas, philosophies, or physical circumstances, but there will inevitably be differences. This seems self-evident, but popular history and the popular imagination still insists on using terms like “The Western Way of War” or “Asian Mode of Production.” It’s as if ideas somehow magically remain consistent over time and future generations automatically pick up on these ideas and understand them much the same way.
Take Europe, for instance. The shadow cast by the Roman Empire was quite long, and recent historiography has done much to modify the “fall” of the Empire to something more akin to a slow decline. It cannot be denied, however, that from a military history viewpoint, there is a vast gulf between the hastati, principes and triarii of the Roman Republic and the cnights or chevaliers of Medieval Europe. Yet people point to the survival of Roman texts or the rediscovery of Roman and Greek writings to show some kind of Western cultural continuity in military affairs.
This is true as far as it goes: that Europeans did rediscover Classical texts and therefore perpetuated a certain common stock of ideas. But the long gap between Classical and Medieval history affected the transmission. The Medieval and Renaissance readers interpreted the texts very differently from what their Classical authors intended. When Vegetius wrote De Re Militari, he did so with the idea of reviving the Roman army with a strong, centralized government that could reimpose training standards onto what he thought was a declining late Imperial Roman army. Vegetius was therefore working with the ideal of a centralized state with strong coercive powers in the back of his head.
Medieval people found this text and having no such ideal, saw it differently. Instead, they latched onto the ideas in De Re Militari that conformed to what they already understood of war. For instance, Medieval authors noted how Vegetius emphasized that small numbers of trained warriors could overcome large masses, and they thought this confirmed knightly talent and valor. What Vegetius was criticizing was the decline of Roman standards of training and the over-emphasis on poorly trained limitanei. I suspect he would have been horrified if Rome had gone for a solution similar to feudalism, since it would have looked to him like what Rome was already doing: relying on barbarian military elites. Most Medieval readers would have never thought of Vegetius’ desire to strengthen a state government, and would have been disgusted with Vegetius’ goal of military standardization.
A Renaissance copy of De Re Militari. Notice the word "arabica" in caption under the title.
So here’s an important point of the transmission of ideas: quite often, people will take only those ideas which they can either understand or make use of, discarding or modifying the rest. For example, Thomas Aquinas turned Aristotelian philosophy into a philosophy for Christian deism– hardly what Aristotle intended.
Additionally, it is often the case that a Classical text will only be “rediscovered” when the people are in a position to make use of it. Aelianus Tacticus’s works became of use to Europeans only when they had the political mechanisms to make his drill recommendations feasible. His works had been in circulation in Byzantium for much longer– because they had the means to enforce drill.
Perhaps the process of cultural transmission between Medieval and Classical Europe may best be understand if we realize this is more akin to the transmission of ideas from differing cultures. If there are enough differences, then some ideas simply will not translate well from one society to the other. However, and this is a purely subjective observation, I notice that this is quite rare and what is more likely is that the societies will try to understand the ideas of the other culture in ways intelligible to them.
From a military viewpoint, this has a marked influence on how technology is transferred from one society to another. Technologies will be adapted– perhaps even physically– to conform to the needs and paradigm of the receiving society. In this sense, there are many ways to use the same piece of technology the only limitations really being broad physical ones (e.g. can’t use an early musket to snipe, no matter how much your culture wants to).
This is just a very brief treatment of an immensely complex topic. What I hoped to have conveyed was how multi-faceted the idea of “cultural transmission” really is in the field of military history. Tackling this complexity is one of the goals of the New Military History, and is an area where it is particularly good. While trying to avoid excesses of relativism, it shows how difficult it is to make sweeping generalizations on the nature of war across history.
