This challenging idea presents a great deal to think about. It strikes me as incomplete. The notion of ideas existing and then being put into action in the world is Platonic. Certainly, there are countless cases in which people have followed an idea into battle or across the seas. But there are just as many in which history has been the source of ideas rather than the other way around.

It is an adage, for example, that believers who go to war come back as atheists and atheists who go to war come back as believers. I have certainly encountered both experiences. In that case, the historical experience of war begets the idea or belief.

Consider that unpleasant Genoese, Christopher Columbus, whose ambitious and greedy character Ham gives a better press than some others. Columbus called the people on the far side of the Atlantic “Indians” because he thought he had arrived in Asia and no experience was going to change the idea that had set like stone in his head.

Conversely, however, the empirical experiences Charles Darwin had as a traveller caused him to think again, almost against his will, about the origin of species. It was, if anything, an inconvenience to him that his personal history brought him new ideas. Ham notes wryly that Darwin would have been mortified to see the way his ideas were exploited both by Marxists and Nazis. This did not make his ideas wrong.

I suspect it would be better, rather than thinking about ideas causing history, to conceive of a circle in which history causes ideas that in turn cause more history and so on. All the creation myths, towards which Ham is hardly the first to raise an arched eyebrow, came about because humankind encountered itself as a mystery requiring explanation. History came first, then ideas about the Garden of Eden and similar places in other cultural traditions and these in turn propelled history, sometimes for centuries, until new historical experiences called for new ideas.

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In a similar way, I suspect that history has many drivers. Technology is one. Science is another. Economics is a third. If these are ideas, then they come about in response to questions raised by living and breathing in time. The main point is that such philosophical ponderings are highly enjoyable. So too is Ham’s lightly worn erudition. It would be an arrogant person who read this book without gratitude for a feast of insight and learning.

The Soul ends with two moments of wonder. The second is a letter to an imaginary grandchild born in 2499. Its message is that we can change the future by changing the furniture in our head. I can’t imagine that a distant society will settle questions “without the need of gods” but I heartily agree that peace and justice are worth existential risks.

The first moment is exquisite. Ham describes coming across a young woman on a sunny day in a church in Paris. There are “tears running down her cheeks”. What follows is a hymn to the mystery of a person at prayer: “No scientist, economist, or philosopher can explain the relationship between a human and her god. No theory or text can interpret her … her mystery confounds those systems. Her silent communion with her god acknowledges the mystery of the sacred.”

Michael McGirr is the author of Ideas to Save Your Life (Text).

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