[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] History's Arrow

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (December 24 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


One of the advantages of being a Druid is that you get to open your
holiday presents four days early. Last Sunday's winter solstice was
pleasant, with a scattering of snow on the ground outside and candles
burning indoors as we celebrated the rebirth of the sun. As one hinge of
the year's cycle, the solstice is a good time to ponder the shape of
time: on the small scale, with hopes for the year to come and memories
of the one now passing; the middle scale, as I think back on past
holidays and the uncertain number that still lie ahead; and the large
scale, with which this blog is mostly concerned. In keeping with that
seasonal theme, I want to talk a bit about history on the large scale,
and the ideas our culture uses to frame the idea of history.

One of the things that has interested me most about the reactions to the
ideas about the shape of the future I've presented here on The Archdruid
Report is the extent to which so many of them presuppose one particular
way of thinking about history. Like the character in one of Moliere's
plays who was astonished to find that he had been speaking prose all his
life, a great many people these days have embraced a distinctive
philosophy of history, but seem never quite to have noticed that fact.

This is hardly a new thing. One of the ironies of the history of ideas
is the way that so many cultural themes, surfacing first in avant-garde
intellectual circles, are dismissed out of hand by the grandparents of
those who will one day treat them as obvious facts. Modern nationalism,
to cite one example out of many, began with the romantic visions of a
few European poets, spilled out into the world largely through music and
the arts, and turned into a massive political force that shredded the
political maps of four continents. To some extent, this is the
intellectuals' revenge on an unreflective society: the men of affairs
who treat the arts as amenities and dismiss philosophy as worthless
abstraction spend their workdays unknowingly mouthing the words of dead
philosophers and acting out the poems they never read on the stage of
current events.

The way of thinking about history I have in mind today has followed the
same trajectory. Karl Popper, who devoted much of his career to
critiquing it, called it historicism. This is the belief that history as
a whole moves inevitably in a single direction that can be known in
advance by human beings. Exactly what that single direction is supposed
to be varies from one historicist to another; choose any point along the
spectrum of cultural politics, and you can find a version of historicism
that treats the popular ideals and moral concerns common to that
viewpoint as the linchpin of the historical process. The details differ;
the basic assumption remains the same.

That same assumption has also spread to infect nearly every contemporary
discussion of change over time. After my post "Taking Evolution
Seriously" appeared a few weeks back, for example, one of my longtime
readers forwarded me comments from a discussion on an email list, whose
members took me to task in no uncertain terms for my discussion on the
evolutionary process. When I said that no organism is "more evolved"
than any other and that evolution has no particular direction or goal,
they insisted, I was simply wrong; evolution progresses in the direction
of increased complexity over time, one person claimed, and another
suggested that I would be better informed if I read more of the writings
of the late Stephen Jay Gould.

Now I have no objection to reading more of Gould's work, as I've already
enjoyed many of his books. For that matter, I've read a fair amount of
evolutionary theory, beginning with Darwin and continuing through some
of the most recent theorists, and also took college courses in
evolutionary ecology and several related branches of environmental
science. One thing this taught me is that attempts are always being made
to stuff evolution into a historicist straitjacket. Another thing I
learned is that these attempts are rejected by the great majority of
evolutionary biologists, because the evidence simply doesn't fit.

Some evolutionary lineages have moved from more simple to more complex
forms over time, but others have gone in the other direction, and the
vast majority of living things on Earth today belong to phyla that have
not added any noticeable complexity since the Paleozoic. Nor has the
Earth's biosphere as a whole become more complex; the entire Cenozoic
era - the 65 million years between the last dinosaurs and us - has been
less biologically rich than the Mesozoic era that preceded it, and the
global cooling of the last fifteen million years or so has seen a
decrease in the world's biological complexity, as ecosystems have
adapted to the more rigorous conditions that have spread over much of
the world.

The facts on the ground, then, simply don't support any claim that
evolution moves toward greater complexity. No other version of
historicism fares any better when applied to evolution, either. Yet
ninety-nine times out of a hundred, when you hear people outside of a
university biology department talking about evolution, what they have in
mind is a linear process leading in a particular direction. They are, in
other words, talking historicism.

Trace these ideas back along their own evolutionary lineage and a
fascinating history emerges. The founder of the current of thought that
gave rise to today's historicism was an Italian monk named Joachim of
Flores, who lived from 1145 to 1202 and spent most of the latter half of
his life writing abstruse books on theology. Most Christian theologians
before his time accepted Augustine of Hippo's famous distinction between
the City of God and the City of Man, and assigned all secular history to
the latter category, one more transitory irrelevance to be set aside by
the soul in search of salvation. Joachim's innovation was the claim that
the plan of salvation works through secular history. He argued that all
human history, secular as well as sacred, was divided into three ages,
the age of Law under the Old Testament, the age of Love under the New,
and the age of Liberty that was about to begin.

Some of his theories were formally condemned by church councils, but his
core theory proved unstoppable. Every generation of church reformers
from the thirteenth century to the eighteenth seized on his ideas and
claimed that their own arrival marked the coming of the age of Liberty;
every generation of church conservatives stood Joachim on his head,
insisted that the three ages marked the progressive loss of divine
guidance, and portrayed the arrival of the latest crop of reformers as
Satan's final offensive. As secular thought elbowed theology aside, in
turn, Joachim's notion of history as the working out of a divine plan
got reworked into secular theories of humanity's grand destiny.

Notable among these was the theory argued by the Marquis de Condorcet in
Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Spirit in
1794. A rich historical irony surrounds this work; Condorcet had been a
strong supporter of the French Revolution, and hoped that the end of the
monarchy would usher in a republic of reason; instead, he was condemned
to death by the new government and wrote his Sketch while he was on the
run from the guillotine. He nonetheless described human history as an
inevitable rise from barbarism to a future of reason and progress in
which all of human life would undergo endless improvement.

Condorcet's faith in perpetual progress found many listeners, but a more
influential voice was already waiting in the wings: Georg Wilhelm
Friedrich Hegel, who managed the rare feat of becoming both the most
influential and the most unreadable philosopher of modern times. In his
Philosophy of History, which was published shortly after his death in
1831, he argued that history was the process by which human freedom
(which, for him, was not quite the freedom of the individual; he
idolized Napoleon and the government of Prussia) was maximized in time.
In Hegel's mind, Joachim's threefold rhythm of history was reworked into
the three phases of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, by which every
opposition was resolved into a higher unity.

Hegel's view of history became enormously influential, less through his
own work - I challenge any of my readers to plow through the Philosophy
of History and come out the other side with anything but a headache -
than through the writings of those influenced by him. Political radicals
at both ends of the spectrum jumped on Hegel's ideas; on the left, Karl
Marx used Hegelian ideas as the foundation for his philosophy of class
warfare and Communist revolution; on the right, Giovanni Gentile, the
pet philosopher of Mussolini's Fascist regime, was a rigorous Hegelian.
For that matter, Francis Fukuyama, who played a role much like Gentile's
for the neoconservative movement, drew his theory of an end to history
from Hegel.

Still, the spread of Hegel's ideas isn't limited to the radical fringes,
or even to those who know who Hegel was. I think most people who have
been following the issue of peak oil for more than a few months have
noticed, when the subject comes up for discussion in public, one of the
most common responses is "Oh, they'll think of something". Ask the
person who says this to explain, and odds are you'll be told that every
time the world runs out of some resource, "they" find something new, and
the result is more progress. This is Hegel reframed in terms of
economics; shortage is the thesis, ingenuity the antithesis, and
progress the synthesis; the insistence that the process is inevitable
puts the icing on the Hegelian cake. More generally, the logic of
historicism governs the entire narrative: history's arrow points in the
direction of progress, and so whatever happens, the result will be more
progress.

Examples could be added by the page, but I hope the point has been made.
Still, it's crucial to realize just how deeply historicism has become
entrenched in all modern thinking. If, dear reader, you think yourself
untouched by it, I encourage you to try a thought experiment. The
average species, paleontologists tell us, lasts around ten million
years. Imagine that by some means - a visit from a time machine, say,
that leaves you holding a history of humanity written by an intelligent
species descended from chipmunks - you find out that this is how long we
have. We won't achieve godhood, or reach the stars, or destroy the
planet, or enter Utopia; instead, the nine million years we've got left
will be like recorded history so far. Civilizations will rise and fall;
our species will create great art and literature, interpret the universe
in various ways, explore many modes of living on the Earth; finally,
millions of years from now, it will slowly lose the struggle for
survival, dwindle to small populations in isolated areas, and go extinct.

If that turns out to be humanity's future, would you be satisfied with
it? Or would you feel that some goal has been missed, some destiny
betrayed? If the latter, what makes you think that?

Now of course it may be a waste of breath to contend with ideas as
pervasive and deeply rooted as historicism, but the effort has to be
made, if only because historicism has a dismally bad track record as a
basis for prophecy. Name a historicist belief system that's been around
more than a few years, right back to Joachim of Flores himself, and
you'll find a trail of failed predictions of the imminent arrival of the
goal of history. (Joachim himself apparently believed that the age of
Liberty would arrive in 1260; no such luck.) If we are to have any
useful sense of the future ahead of us, historicist belief systems are
among the worst sources of guidance available to us.

Fortunately there are other choices. In next week's post, I plan on
talking about some of those. In the meantime, best holiday wishes to all
my readers - whatever holidays you celebrate at this time of year.
_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He
lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/12/historys-arrow.html


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