Does history move in repeating cycles? Or in a linear unfolding of progress? Or is history just flotsam and jetsam circulating at random? I have thoughts.
Feel better, and thanks for this effort. For me, trying to divine cycles of history is really trying to use history to predict the future. Better to use it to help think about current events in order to think about and prepare for possible futures
My perspective in discussions like this is always significantly colored by my collegiate training and continuing interest in our biological origins and evolution. It is always useful to remember that the distance between the time we became human (and of course debate about that is hardly completed) and the time the Agricultural Revolution gave us the potential to create what we call ‘civilization' (a term itself fraught with contradictions) is at least a million if not closer to two million. The period of our history then (as compared to our pre-history - that period before the invention of writing - is miniscule. So the hunter/gatherer that emerged from the Paleolithic/Mesolithic had an immense time in which to cement our genetic heritage into place.
We are a complex creature in terms of innate behavior versus learned behavior - our long running Nature versus Nuture controversy. The human brain, that most fascinating creation, has given us the ability to stare at ourselves in a way unknown to any other of our fellow creatures. We have taken that ability and made a vast array of propositions about ourselves - some reasonable, some fantastic, some lunatic. But some traits stand out, and they are reflected in those tendencies which have shown themselves consistently through our individual and collective actions through our history.
What are our longest standing traits? One of them, as I’ve often postulated in posts across the spectrum is our continuing and insatiable determination to separate ourselves into groups of all kinds based on a variety of physical, religious, sexual, political, financial, social, and racial characteristics. Indeed there is almost no difference, real or imagined, however minuscule that has not incited some group or another to separate themselves from some other group or all other groups. The most interesting part of this tendency is that there is really only one difference that has any basis at all in actual biological reality - that we are divided into at least two sexes. And even there the differences are somewhat fluid and in all but one way (the process of procreation) differ only by degree.
Yet over time, we have consistently taken all the other differences, which at most should be subjects of little more than spirited debate to all sorts of lunatic lengths, including the kind of mass violence we call war and the ongoing and increasingly vast expenditures necessary to preparing for the that prospect. Indeed, at the moment a great number of us are actually talking about the unimaginable. large scale warfare between nuclear adversaries which could easily end us all.
So any debate about how the fact that we may have advanced since the dawn of civilization breaks down.
If this is the way you write under Covid, please sneeze in my direction.
Its precisely the job of intellectuals- as opposed to Russian bug experts - to try and help us understand these things. We are currently living through a period of near-universal disappointment that the 2020 election did not banish evil from our political system once and for all, but we're not entitled to be disappointed. We read history to be disabused of such notions, because its humanity itself that will never change, and we can't escape this fact by inventing cycles or other concoctions that don't act as an accurate tool for evaluation, but as an evasion. I for one am very glad that the focus has turned, in this forum and many others, to the universal character of this nervous breakdown on the part of electorates worldwide. Trump will be gone, sooner than we think hopefully, but we should be learning about restoring old and approving new guardrails, because they will always be needed given the fact that it is human beings we are discussing. And to understand, and do that effectively, we need intellectuals.
Enjoyed these reflections and those of commentators. To me the cyclical theories I've read, and most progressives ones as well, aren't very coherent because they usually leave out the singular changes to the planet.
How can history really recur when the physical means of sustaining human life will be (has already been) so drastically altered? Even if we posited a consensus view (in the West) about human goods and harms, how could those goods/harms as measured in the 17th or 19th century ever come back around to something comparable in the 21st or 22nd century? All the good things––productivity of wealth, medical advances, utility from technology, denaturalizing of various kinds of domination––aren't comparably "good" across time if what is deemed good turns out to be neither progressive nor regressive but kind of non-measurable, given the huge uncertainties about what they mean vis a vis the necessary foundation for human life.
Then there is the fact that neither cyclical nor progressive models of history would make much sense to peoples who were killed at a big enough mass scale that they had no real descendants, and the end of history has already come. (The singular "we" of the species might be a dubious construct to think with.)
If that framework does invalidate those models of history, it doesn't make history shapeless or without rhyme or reason; one-directional historical change certainly happens and may very well make all the difference. But it's a lot hard to name that shape. It does suggest to me, though, that "progress" as a Western post 1492 concept might turn out to be the biggest misnomer in human history. Or it might not, which means that core concept is a bad guide for thinking with.
I haven't read his most recent work, but Turchin's prior work "War and Peace and War" I think makes a solid argument about the driving factors behind integration and disintegration of states and empires. Elite production is certainly a part of it, but so are the "frontiers" onto which a state or empire can look to for "outlets" for its populace. I don't think it's an accident that U.S. politics started to disintegrate into their current state when we won the Cold War, removing the last "frontier" before our nation.
Yet another wave theory (this time restricted to economics) is the Kondratiev wave. These wave theories are all very interesting and, in a limited way, they may sometimes work. For example, historically, many art styles went through a development which saw a "heroic" archaic phase--then a full-blown classical phase--then a mannerist phase in which the innovations folded in on themselves--and then a baroque phase of elaborations before "burning out" and being replaced by the next style. We can see this in the development of ancient Greek sculpture, Renaissance paintings, or the films of Fredrico Fellini). But ultimately, I think cyclical theories don't work to explain, or capture the whole of human history and that is because so many factors go into making any period of history what it is, they cannot be replicated exactly entirely in some later period. It is indeed possible that in some varied places and periods elite overproduction caused problems (as Turchin asserts)--but not always and not as an exclusive cause of problems. I would add that the presence of the internet and social media in our current lives--enabling an unprecedented speed and span of contact among disparate people, communication/mobilization/incitement and information management with all sorts of social and ideational implications--is something that would defy any cyclical connectedness to the past.
What I would say is true of the whole of human history (I think I noted this in previous comment to this site) is that human life has been on a trajectory of increasing social complexity (with some variations or temporary setbacks) which involves ever more people, ever more types within a society (even if only of caste/class stratification which sets in after population numbers grow to a certain level), ever more expansion of arenas of interaction (bringing other cultures into one's horizon), ever greater rate of change, ever greater speed of communication, and ever greater awareness of all sorts of things (even if misinformation). Although change can bring helpful innovations, it usually causes disruptions and resistance, and the faster it happens, the harder our institutions have trouble keeping up with it--leading to institutional lag of the sort that plagues us now. Anthropologists have analyzed earlier developments in this complexity trajectory: the move from band organization to more complex tribe organization to yet more complex chieftaincy organization and ultimately to early state organization (known in our discipline as "complex society"). Among the writings on this earlier development of on-going social complexity are The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology by Morton H. Fried (1967), Primitive Social Organization: an Evolutionary Perspective by Elman R. Service (1971) and Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution by Service R. Elman (1975). These, of course, did not touch upon the further development of social complexity once state systems took hold and spread.
Increasing social complexity has its downside, because as I noted, fast change and differences are hard to take. Consider the increase in mass shootings in the US starting in the last third or last quarter of the 20th century. We have always had mentally ill people and always had the Second Amendment allowing personal gun ownership--but only towards the end of the 20th century did mass shootings become a device for expressing frustration or political anger. I suggest the reason is that by the end of the 20th century we had reached a stage of complexity that was great enough to be unmanageable for many people--including those given to mental problems or political anger.
But increasing social complexity is not caused by anyone, cannot be completely controlled, and cannot be stopped (unless we destroy ourselves or are hit by an overwhelming natural disaster). We can only manage increasing social complexity (for a while) before new changes tip any balances or stability that may have been achieved. Our current situation, national or international (some call it a "polycrisis") is probably unprecedented for all that there were multifaceted international crises in the past (such as what many historians dub the "crisis of the seventeenth century"), if only because of the internet and social media--and the looming AI. Historian Yuval Noah Harari has suggested that if, in future, we are governed by AI, AI may generate different "stories" than we are used to, and people will rally around all sorts of issues and ideas and re-shuffle the categories they are in or which exist, in ways we cannot yet imagine and which will require a whole different organization from that we are accustomed to. For the moment, the best we can do is concentrate on what we think would be the best management to our current phase of social complexity, realizing all the while (contrary to what our political parties and ideologues tell us) there cannot be, and will not be, an end-game Utopia.
How is it that some of us crave simplistic and one-solution answers to the complexities of the world while others are intrigued by and delve into the endless possible explanations of our history. Sometimes to abstraction and occasionally to absurdity. One might conclude that human brains, while housed in similar looking skulls, are fundamentally different from one another. This brings to mind a number of existential and possibly brutal questions.
Feel better, and thanks for this effort. For me, trying to divine cycles of history is really trying to use history to predict the future. Better to use it to help think about current events in order to think about and prepare for possible futures
My perspective in discussions like this is always significantly colored by my collegiate training and continuing interest in our biological origins and evolution. It is always useful to remember that the distance between the time we became human (and of course debate about that is hardly completed) and the time the Agricultural Revolution gave us the potential to create what we call ‘civilization' (a term itself fraught with contradictions) is at least a million if not closer to two million. The period of our history then (as compared to our pre-history - that period before the invention of writing - is miniscule. So the hunter/gatherer that emerged from the Paleolithic/Mesolithic had an immense time in which to cement our genetic heritage into place.
We are a complex creature in terms of innate behavior versus learned behavior - our long running Nature versus Nuture controversy. The human brain, that most fascinating creation, has given us the ability to stare at ourselves in a way unknown to any other of our fellow creatures. We have taken that ability and made a vast array of propositions about ourselves - some reasonable, some fantastic, some lunatic. But some traits stand out, and they are reflected in those tendencies which have shown themselves consistently through our individual and collective actions through our history.
What are our longest standing traits? One of them, as I’ve often postulated in posts across the spectrum is our continuing and insatiable determination to separate ourselves into groups of all kinds based on a variety of physical, religious, sexual, political, financial, social, and racial characteristics. Indeed there is almost no difference, real or imagined, however minuscule that has not incited some group or another to separate themselves from some other group or all other groups. The most interesting part of this tendency is that there is really only one difference that has any basis at all in actual biological reality - that we are divided into at least two sexes. And even there the differences are somewhat fluid and in all but one way (the process of procreation) differ only by degree.
Yet over time, we have consistently taken all the other differences, which at most should be subjects of little more than spirited debate to all sorts of lunatic lengths, including the kind of mass violence we call war and the ongoing and increasingly vast expenditures necessary to preparing for the that prospect. Indeed, at the moment a great number of us are actually talking about the unimaginable. large scale warfare between nuclear adversaries which could easily end us all.
So any debate about how the fact that we may have advanced since the dawn of civilization breaks down.
I like that. Thanks
If this is the way you write under Covid, please sneeze in my direction.
Its precisely the job of intellectuals- as opposed to Russian bug experts - to try and help us understand these things. We are currently living through a period of near-universal disappointment that the 2020 election did not banish evil from our political system once and for all, but we're not entitled to be disappointed. We read history to be disabused of such notions, because its humanity itself that will never change, and we can't escape this fact by inventing cycles or other concoctions that don't act as an accurate tool for evaluation, but as an evasion. I for one am very glad that the focus has turned, in this forum and many others, to the universal character of this nervous breakdown on the part of electorates worldwide. Trump will be gone, sooner than we think hopefully, but we should be learning about restoring old and approving new guardrails, because they will always be needed given the fact that it is human beings we are discussing. And to understand, and do that effectively, we need intellectuals.
Speedy recovery.
Get well, Damon.
Ecclesiastes always works for me.
Thanks for the thoughtful, beautifully written essay. Covid hasn’t dampened your intellectual skills at all!
Enjoyed these reflections and those of commentators. To me the cyclical theories I've read, and most progressives ones as well, aren't very coherent because they usually leave out the singular changes to the planet.
How can history really recur when the physical means of sustaining human life will be (has already been) so drastically altered? Even if we posited a consensus view (in the West) about human goods and harms, how could those goods/harms as measured in the 17th or 19th century ever come back around to something comparable in the 21st or 22nd century? All the good things––productivity of wealth, medical advances, utility from technology, denaturalizing of various kinds of domination––aren't comparably "good" across time if what is deemed good turns out to be neither progressive nor regressive but kind of non-measurable, given the huge uncertainties about what they mean vis a vis the necessary foundation for human life.
Then there is the fact that neither cyclical nor progressive models of history would make much sense to peoples who were killed at a big enough mass scale that they had no real descendants, and the end of history has already come. (The singular "we" of the species might be a dubious construct to think with.)
If that framework does invalidate those models of history, it doesn't make history shapeless or without rhyme or reason; one-directional historical change certainly happens and may very well make all the difference. But it's a lot hard to name that shape. It does suggest to me, though, that "progress" as a Western post 1492 concept might turn out to be the biggest misnomer in human history. Or it might not, which means that core concept is a bad guide for thinking with.
I haven't read his most recent work, but Turchin's prior work "War and Peace and War" I think makes a solid argument about the driving factors behind integration and disintegration of states and empires. Elite production is certainly a part of it, but so are the "frontiers" onto which a state or empire can look to for "outlets" for its populace. I don't think it's an accident that U.S. politics started to disintegrate into their current state when we won the Cold War, removing the last "frontier" before our nation.
Yet another wave theory (this time restricted to economics) is the Kondratiev wave. These wave theories are all very interesting and, in a limited way, they may sometimes work. For example, historically, many art styles went through a development which saw a "heroic" archaic phase--then a full-blown classical phase--then a mannerist phase in which the innovations folded in on themselves--and then a baroque phase of elaborations before "burning out" and being replaced by the next style. We can see this in the development of ancient Greek sculpture, Renaissance paintings, or the films of Fredrico Fellini). But ultimately, I think cyclical theories don't work to explain, or capture the whole of human history and that is because so many factors go into making any period of history what it is, they cannot be replicated exactly entirely in some later period. It is indeed possible that in some varied places and periods elite overproduction caused problems (as Turchin asserts)--but not always and not as an exclusive cause of problems. I would add that the presence of the internet and social media in our current lives--enabling an unprecedented speed and span of contact among disparate people, communication/mobilization/incitement and information management with all sorts of social and ideational implications--is something that would defy any cyclical connectedness to the past.
What I would say is true of the whole of human history (I think I noted this in previous comment to this site) is that human life has been on a trajectory of increasing social complexity (with some variations or temporary setbacks) which involves ever more people, ever more types within a society (even if only of caste/class stratification which sets in after population numbers grow to a certain level), ever more expansion of arenas of interaction (bringing other cultures into one's horizon), ever greater rate of change, ever greater speed of communication, and ever greater awareness of all sorts of things (even if misinformation). Although change can bring helpful innovations, it usually causes disruptions and resistance, and the faster it happens, the harder our institutions have trouble keeping up with it--leading to institutional lag of the sort that plagues us now. Anthropologists have analyzed earlier developments in this complexity trajectory: the move from band organization to more complex tribe organization to yet more complex chieftaincy organization and ultimately to early state organization (known in our discipline as "complex society"). Among the writings on this earlier development of on-going social complexity are The Evolution of Political Society: An Essay in Political Anthropology by Morton H. Fried (1967), Primitive Social Organization: an Evolutionary Perspective by Elman R. Service (1971) and Origins of the State and Civilization: The Process of Cultural Evolution by Service R. Elman (1975). These, of course, did not touch upon the further development of social complexity once state systems took hold and spread.
Increasing social complexity has its downside, because as I noted, fast change and differences are hard to take. Consider the increase in mass shootings in the US starting in the last third or last quarter of the 20th century. We have always had mentally ill people and always had the Second Amendment allowing personal gun ownership--but only towards the end of the 20th century did mass shootings become a device for expressing frustration or political anger. I suggest the reason is that by the end of the 20th century we had reached a stage of complexity that was great enough to be unmanageable for many people--including those given to mental problems or political anger.
But increasing social complexity is not caused by anyone, cannot be completely controlled, and cannot be stopped (unless we destroy ourselves or are hit by an overwhelming natural disaster). We can only manage increasing social complexity (for a while) before new changes tip any balances or stability that may have been achieved. Our current situation, national or international (some call it a "polycrisis") is probably unprecedented for all that there were multifaceted international crises in the past (such as what many historians dub the "crisis of the seventeenth century"), if only because of the internet and social media--and the looming AI. Historian Yuval Noah Harari has suggested that if, in future, we are governed by AI, AI may generate different "stories" than we are used to, and people will rally around all sorts of issues and ideas and re-shuffle the categories they are in or which exist, in ways we cannot yet imagine and which will require a whole different organization from that we are accustomed to. For the moment, the best we can do is concentrate on what we think would be the best management to our current phase of social complexity, realizing all the while (contrary to what our political parties and ideologues tell us) there cannot be, and will not be, an end-game Utopia.
How is it that some of us crave simplistic and one-solution answers to the complexities of the world while others are intrigued by and delve into the endless possible explanations of our history. Sometimes to abstraction and occasionally to absurdity. One might conclude that human brains, while housed in similar looking skulls, are fundamentally different from one another. This brings to mind a number of existential and possibly brutal questions.