God’s Playground: A History of Poland, by Norman Davies
Why Poland matters
God’s Playground is a landmark work. Published in two volumes in 1979, it became a classic, making Davies a household name in Poland. Over 1,000 pages, Davies chronicles the forces which have shaped the country. In the forty years since its publication, no study of Polish history has surpassed it; a review is well worth our time.
We may commend Davies’ panoramic approach whilst questioning his theoretical framework. In the preface, Davies concedes that he does not have a theory. This is problematic – without theory, analysis can become naïve and unstructured – yet remains too common among historians.
Therefore, we might approach God’s Playground through an alternative lens. Social scientists who study history search for exogenous explanations of change. This enables identification of the foundations of stability and change and analysis of causal influences, sometimes with quasi-experimental methods. God’s Playground lends itself to this. As the title indicates, the turbulent and unforeseeable have shaped Polish history to an unusual degree, reflecting the country’s geographic position. In the centre of Europe, flanked by great powers and occupying the landbridge between Russia and Western Europe, it could not have been else.
Skilfully, Davies charts these shocks. Initially, these are associated with dynastic wars. Following the baptism of Mieszko I in 966, a Polish Kingdom tentatively enters European politics.
Soon, we encounter a recurring enemy. Henry II of Germany wars with Bolesław the Brave before the Teutonic Knights, a German chivalric order, install themselves in Prussia in the 13th century. Pursuing the ostensible goal of converting pagans, the order is more interested in plunder and, after overwhelming local heathen, turn their attention to Poland. Polish-Lithuanian forces win a decisive victory at the 1410 Battle of Grunwald, yet the order is a consistently destabilizing force.
Other enemies stir. From the 16th century, the Muscovites become menacing, regularly annexing Polish towns and taking captives. The Poles win their own victories, occupying Moscow from 1610-12, but Russian power grows.
When stability is attained, the results can be splendid. Following the 1569 foundation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, a proto-democratic system emerges, known as the Golden Liberty (Złota Wolność). The nobility (szlachta) is the backbone of this system. Among the class, a spirit of equality prevails, meaning that the King is elected, has limited power and must hold a parliament (sejm) every two years. Fatefully, the liberum veto enables individual land envoys to oppose the decisions of the majority, its exercise nullifying all legislation passed at that parliamentary session. In the long term, hostile powers exploit it.
Religious freedom is equally advanced. Though Catholicism is always prominent and Poland acts as a bulwark against the Ottomans, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth is almost as tolerant as contemporary liberal democracies. There are occasional incidents, yet people are free to practice any religion, the nobility protecting minorities from persecution.
Such tolerance reflects and produces a highly diverse population. Modern Poland is associated with ethnic homogeneity, yet the early modern population contained Uniates, Jews, Orthodox and Muslims, Roman Catholics not constituting more than half the population. To this day, Poland has an indigenous Muslim population: the Lipka Tatars. Famously, Poland had a large Jewish community and Davies tells us about its long contribution and tragic demise.
In Western countries, early cultures of tolerance tend to develop into liberal modern cultures, England and the Netherlands being two prime examples. Alas, the curse of Polish history is that these achievements are snuffed out by the shocks which Davies chronicles.
The late 18th century sees a nadir. After decades of decline, Poland is subject to three partitions which incorporate the country into the Russian, Prussian and Austrian empires and, for well over a century, remove it from the European map. The 1791 constitution, still celebrated on May 3 as Europe’s first liberal-democratic constitution, is the last gasp of the old order.
Though an independent Poland emerges after the First World War, the Second Republic is cursed from birth. In September 1939, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia deliver a brutal coup de grace, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact partitioning the country. Following the Second World War, Poland becomes a Soviet satellite.
Such shocks plunge Poland into disruption. Borders are regularly and dramatically redrawn – the Yalta settlement is particularly radical - meaning that Polishness has a weak link with specific lands. To this day, regional accents are limited; for these to develop, populations must have long-term connections with territories.
Elites are routed. Every generation, upper classes lead uprisings against foreign rule; most fail, leaders being executed or exiled. Infamously, Stalinist Russia identifies nearly 22,000 of the most prominent Poles and executes them in the Katyn Forest. Such loss of elites has few parallels in the West and Davies tells us about it in moving terms. There is a memorable passage on the execution of Romuald Traugutt, leader of the January Uprising.
The attack on Polishness is more insidious. Partitioning powers think little of Polish language and culture – Bismarck detests it - undertaking programmes which aim to eradicate the language. Yet assaults tend to be counterproductive, Poles becoming more attached to their language and national identity strengthening in the 19th century. During this time, the rousing national anthem is written (its first line: ‘Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła kiedy my żyjemy’/‘Poland will not die, for as long as we live’). Many die, but enough live.
Though neglecting the statistical methods which enable estimation of the contemporary effects of historic shocks, Davies does explore the implications of these difficult conditions. Aside from disruption associated with the loss of property and personnel, institutions develop in clandestine conditions, entailing high degrees of secrecy and authoritarianism. The contrast with the UK and US is illuminating. Historically, these countries have been spared invasion and occupation, encouraging the development of open institutions which enjoy high trust.
Poland is radically different, low trust underpinning many problems. As the sociologist Jacek Kochanowicz notes, Poles have ‘a relatively high level of trust in the family and in persons with whom one has close, face-to-face relations… [but] a relatively low level of trust in large, formal, and abstract institutions, including the state’. To this day, Poles have comparatively little faith in institutions such as courts, police and parliaments.
Davies concludes his book in the late 1970s. This had been a quiet decade, the Communist Party making certain concessions and maintaining comparative peace. The 1980s could not have been more different. Soon after the completion of God’s Playground, Lech Wałęsa, a Gdańsk electrician, led the Solidarność revolt against the Communist government. Though unsuccessful in the medium term, Solidarność helped bring about the end of Communism, free elections being held on June 4, 1989.
Since then, an odd thing has happened; Poland has been mistress of her own destiny. The transition to democracy had its challenges, yet economic growth was strong, democracy was consolidated and Poland acceded to the European Union (EU) in 2004. Recently, liberal democracy has been strained, the PiS government attacking the independence of the judiciary and media, yet Poland remains an affluent, liberal-democratic EU member state. Some predict that, by 2030, GDP per capita will be higher than the UK.
Will these conditions last? One can make a good case that they will. Beyond arguments for the permanent victory of liberal democracy - and Fukuyama’s thesis has been more successful than many admit - external threats to Poland are modest. For generations, Germany has been a model of pacificism and internationalism. Russia has been more menacing, the invasion of Ukraine stirring old anxieties. But Poland is a member of NATO and the EU, unlike Ukraine. And given Russia’s problems in Ukraine, the threat seems distant.
Yet reading God’s Playground, one suspects that these conditions will not last forever. Many Poles feel this. Every 1st August, thousands gather in Warsaw to commemorate the 1944 uprising, scouts and guides prominent among them. Observing these adolescents, one perceives that they are not merely paying tribute to a past generation, but mobilizing in defence of their country. Should Russian troops enter Poland, who could doubt that they would immediately resist?
Poland will not die, for as long as they live.
[1] A small amount of research tells me that the precise details (of course) depend on the time and place. I am presenting Van Reybrouck’s sanitized version which appears to be basically correct.
[2] Elections became democratic in popular perception with the rise of universal suffrage, which Van Reybrouck regards as a sort of hill-climb to a local but not global maximum.
[3] Was that a sentence an AI would write? Dear Lord, I hope not! For one thing, that’s a terrible usage of “unique” if you’re a real stickler.
[4] I usually find knowledge arguments, considerations of how the same process can be instantiated in multiple different ways/media, reading about others’ mystical experiences, thinking about other non-physical entities like those of mathematics, etc. to together make a convincing against materialism, but I don’t really have time to dive into that here. I’m more interested here in tracing the history of why I might feel this way rather than analyzing the actual arguments.
[5] The Myth of Artificial Intelligence draws on the work of C.S. Peirce, an American pragmat(ic)ist philosopher who thought that the more classic forms of reasoning - induction and deduction - should be joined by a third capacity, one called abduction (probably more commonly referred to as "abductive inference" for really obvious reasons). The concept of abduction was defined ostensibly as something like the capacity to generate a hypothesis that fit the facts, while deduction was reasoning via if-then formal rules and induction a matter of pattern-matching. Yes, I’m over-simplifying, but abductive inference isn’t a concept I fully understand.
[6] The usual comparison in these circles seems to be a shoggoth (perhaps wearing a smiley-face mask). Given my dualist leanings, I instead picture something more like a deep hole, an internal emptiness similar to a Chinese room or (spoiler for a book that’s been out for years) one of Peter Watts’ scrambler aliens from Blindsight. That’s creepier than a Lovecraftian amoeboid IMO.
[7] I've spoken with modern Jews who espouse similar levels of vagueness or even flat-out disbelief in an afterlife, but I've never been 100% clear on how "official" a lack of belief in the afterlife is in contemporary Judaism.
[8] “Christianity is Platonism for the masses” - Friedrich Nietzsche, and so many people after him.
[9] Spoiler Alert: No, not entirely. I still find LLMs creepy, though also perhaps less impressive than some believe, and absolutely resent the fact that a small minority of human beings are busy forcing all of us to deal with them.
[10] And Cary doesn't consider that a wholly positive thing, believing Augustinian inwardness has had nasty effects on Christian spirituality through the centuries, but that's less relevant to me here. Anyway, on balance, I'm probably more convinced by Cary's charitable reconstruction of Augustine in the end than I am by Cary's attempt to problematize/debunk aspects of Augustine's thought, both in this book and its companions Inner Grace and Outward Signs.
[11] My general impression of Augustine as a youth is that he was a bit of a jackass - not only in his teenage dalliance with heresy, but in his personal life. His lack of self-control of his own sexuality is proverbial. His mother Monica is the one who really deserves her sainthood for keeping him in line as much as she did and preventing him from ruining his life.
[12] Many philosophers (such as the Stoics) also felt similarly, believing that the human soul was composed of an element, common options being fire or quintessence.
[13] Augustine is thought to have been fluent only in Latin rather than Latin and Greek both, so it’s likely most of his exposure came through translations and what we might term “secondary sources.” We non-Classics majors should empathize.
[14] The Holy Spirit seems like a more natural fit here, if only because the name resembles “World Soul” more, but oh well.
[15] Cary’s biggest objection to Augustine is (my words here) that Augustine has a tendency to maybe over-intellectualize (?) To Cary, the most important things about Christianity are things like the flesh of Christ in communion, being with others to partake, etc. Tangible, corporeal, even carnal things. Augustine, however, was much more averse to those more fleshly matters, at least in his post-conversion thinking.
[16] This seems like an early example (though by no means the earliest) of the association of study and knowledge with ethics and morality, specifically with being more ethical or moral. Specific examples of cases in Western culture where the more educated are considered morally better than others are likely to be culture-war bait, so I leave it to the readers to supply their own.
[17] This is another point where Cary is bothered by Augustine. To Cary, this comparison seems to lock us off even further from one another. It implies that we don’t really know someone by trusting them and their words, but can only know someone by seeing into them. Which means that in this life we don’t know anyone, not truly. And it’s another example of Augustine walling off meaning on one side and the external, bodily world on the other.
[18] This is an area where Cary goes into more detail in Outward Signs, part of the trilogy that Invention starts. He discusses Augustine’s expressionist semiotics. Basically, if you didn’t already understand the meaning of a word or a sign, the word or sign itself would not communicate it to you because if it did that would violate the causal hierarchy. This means the meaning has to be in the mind rather than in the word/sign/world.
[19] A man inside a room receives strings written in Chinese characters, a language he does not speak. Following voluminous instructions he finds in filing cabinets, he produces further strings of Chinese characters that he sends out of the room. A hypothetical conversation in Chinese could be happening, but the man in the room understands absolutely none of it. If the instructions involve mathematical weights and log probabilities, then the analogy with GPT should be obvious. Objections that no human being wrote the program miss the point. Of course there are instructions, else the GPUs could not execute them. They’re just instructions produced by a previous iteration of the room.
[20] In other words, your “mind’s eye” isn’t rolling end for end.
[21] Though Socratic/Platonic recollection of previously known facts from a world of Forms was distinct and obviously influential, also.
[22] That is definitely not the last time an “information technology” informed our conception of the mind and how reasoning worked. Besides the obvious usage of computers and computation in recent attempts to explain mental phenomena, clockwork and other technologies have featured in the past. For the general case of how information technology affected thinking (not necessarily conceptions of the mind, but thinking and reckoning in general) in the Roman world, Mosaics of Knowledge by Andrew M. Riggsby is proving a fascinating book, though I still have a lot of it to go.
[23] What’s the quote from Chamber of Secrets? “Don’t trust it if you can’t see where it keeps its brain!” maybe.
[24] Or a Greek- or Chinese-speaking proto-whatever-else-you-got. Though who the heck knows. Maybe some random dude in the Parthian Empire solved the alignment problem and it’s just waiting in an Arabic translation on a piece of papyrus in the Egyptian desert somewhere. Stranger things are technically possible.
[25] In contemporary philosophy of mind the idea of intentionality, the way in which a thought or statement could be "about" some object or state of affairs within the world, is inspired by older medieval notions.
[26] https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=7064)
[27] I literally do not understand why he feels this way. I gather his experience of high school was much more alienating than mine, which was merely boring. Though I am certain he is significantly smarter than me, I also suspect he attended a school with a much greater proportion of intelligent and gifted students than my own public high school in the rural South, so I really am a bit confused that he found it so bad.
[28] https://acoup.blog/2023/02/17/collections-on-chatgpt/
[29] https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-2
[30] This is something like a personal Neal Stephenson-style “amistics” maybe. As an aside, my exchange with ChatGPT on amistics in Seveneves was one of the more surreal I’ve had so far. It flat out didn’t know what it was, explaining it as a portmanteau combination of various scientific fields related to genetic engineering. It didn’t even know the “Amish” etymology, let alone that it was a field for humans to consider which technologies they wanted or did not want in their culture.
[31] Pressing it on Christian theology has led to some very odd shifts such as the one where it gradually confuses Lutheran and Calvinist doctrines seemingly without “realizing it.” While asking it to contrast Lutheran single predestination and Calvinist double predestination, it gradually lost track of which was which and identified the single variant as the distinctive Calvinist doctrine.
[32] Beth Schwartzapfel, "A Primer on the Nationwide Prisoners' Strike," The Marshall Project, last modified September 27, 2016, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2016/09/27/a-primer-on-the-nationwide-prisoners-strike.
[33] "Demands Increased by Rioting Convicts." 1971.The Hartford Courant
[34] New York Times, Melville, Attica Radical, Dead; Recently Wrote of Jail Terror
[35] Fred Ferreti "LIKE A WAR ZONE': AIR AND GROUND ATTACK FOLLOWS REFUSAL OF CONVICTS TO YIELD 9 HOSTAGES AND 28 PRISONERS DIE AS 1,000 STORM ATTICA." Sep 14, 1971.
[36] Robert T. Chase. Review of History as Witness: Writing Atrocity, Rethinking Rebellion, and Documenting State Violence, by Heather Ann Thompson. Journal of Civil and Human Rights 3, no. 1 (2017): 87–94
[37] Chase, Journal of Civil and Human Rights 3, no. 1 (2017): 87–94
[38]Putnam wrote Bowling Alone before the rise of social media and video games, and so his analysis of the effects of passive entertainment focuses mostly on television. I believe these other media have basically the same cultural and psychological impacts; however, I will focus on television in this section to keep closer to the source material and avoid constant awkward language.
[39] Today, if you include video games and social media, that number has increased to seven hours a day.
[40] Millennials and Zoomers are not addressed due to the publication date.
[41] Summarized in a graph drily titled “Greed trumps community among college students”
[42] An interesting corollary of this is that the sense of loss and isolation experienced by returning vets today may be more an indictment of our lack of cohesion than anything else. One need not go to war to find brotherhood.
[43] As is typical for a piece whose title begins with “Towards an Agenda for…” none of his suggestions have even come close to happening.
[44] To be sure, social media and video games are interactive in some sense, but this is different from being engaging. Though social media provides the option to contribute, it encourages passive scrolling. And top-selling video games are thrill rides designed to provide constant dopamine with no investment other than time.
[45] Amusingly, Google used to encourage this with their famed “20% time” policy. This seems to have been killed in 2013.