There's a curious predictability in the comments I field in
response to posts here that talk about the likely shape of the future. The
conventional wisdom of our era insists that modern industrial society can’t
possibly undergo the same life cycle of rise and fall as every other
civilization in history; no, no, there’s got to be some unique future awaiting
us—uniquely splendid or uniquely horrible, it doesn’t even seem to matter that
much, so long as it’s unique. Since I reject that conventional wisdom, my
dissent routinely fields pushback from those of my readers who embrace it.
That’s not surprising in the least, of course. What’s
surprising is that the pushback doesn’t surface when the conventional wisdom
seems to be producing accurate predictions, as it does now and then. Rather, it
shows up like clockwork whenever the conventional wisdom fails.
The present situation is as good an example as any. The
basis of my dissident views is the theory of cyclical history—the theory, first
proposed in the early 18th century by the Italian historian Giambattista Vico
and later refined and developed by such scholars as Oswald Spengler and Arnold
Toynbee, that civilizations rise and fall in a predictable life cycle,
regardless of scale or technological level. That theory’s not just a vague
generalization, either; each of the major writers on the subject set out
specific stages that appear in order, showed that these have occurred in all
past civilizations, and made detailed, falsifiable predictions about how those
stages can be expected to occur in our civilization. Have those panned out? So
far, a good deal more often than not.
In the final chapters of his second volume, for example,
Spengler noted that civilizations in the stage ours was about to reach always
end up racked by conflicts that pit established hierarchies against upstart
demagogues who rally the disaffected and transform them into a power base.
Looking at the trends visible in his own time, he sketched out the most likely form
those conflicts would take in the Winter phase of our civilization. Modern
representative democracy, he pointed out, has no effective defenses against
corruption by wealth, and so could be expected to evolve into
corporate-bureaucratic plutocracies that benefit the affluent at the expense of
everyone else. Those left out in the cold by these transformations, in turn,
end up backing what Spengler called Caesarism—the rise of charismatic
demagogues who challenge and eventually overturn the corporate-bureaucratic
order.
These demagogues needn’t come from within the excluded
classes, by the way. Julius Caesar, the obvious example, came from an old
upper-class Roman family and parlayed his family connections into a successful
political career. Watchers of the current political scene may be interested to
know that Caesar during his lifetime wasn’t the imposing figure he became in
retrospect; he had a high shrill voice, his morals were remarkably flexible
even by Roman standards—the scurrilous gossip of his time called him “every
man’s wife and every woman’s husband”—and he spent much of his career piling up
huge debts and then wriggling out from under them. Yet he became the political
standardbearer for the plebeian classes, and his assassination by a conspiracy
of rich Senators launched the era of civil wars that ended the rule of the old
elite once and for all.
Thus those people watching the political scene last year who
knew their way around Spengler, and noticed that a rich guy had suddenly broken
with the corporate-bureaucratic consensus and called for changes that would
benefit the excluded classes at the expense of the affluent, wouldn’t have had
to wonder what was happening, or what the likely outcome would be. It was those
who insisted on linear models of history—for example, the claim that the recent
ascendancy of modern liberalism counted as the onward march of progress, and
therefore was by definition irreversible—who found themselves flailing wildly
as history took a turn they considered unthinkable.
The rise of Caesarism, by the way, has other features I
haven’t mentioned. As Spengler sketches out the process, it also represents the
exhaustion of ideology and its replacement by personality. Those of my readers
who watched the political scene over the last few years may have noticed the
way that the issues have been sidelined by sweeping claims about the supposed
personal qualities of candidates. The practically content-free campaign that
swept Barack Obama into the presidency in 2008—“Hope,” “Change,” and “Yes We
Can” aren’t statements about issues, you know—was typical of this stage, as was
the emergence of competing personality cults around the candidates in the 2016
election. In the ordinary way of things,
we can expect even more of this in elections to come, with messianic hopes
clustering around competing politicians until the point of absurdity is well
past. These will then implode, and the political process collapse into a raw
scramble for power at any cost.
There’s plenty more in Spengler’s characterization of the
politics of the Winter phase, and all of it’s well represented in today’s
headlines, but the rest can be left to those of my readers interested enough to
turn the pages of The Decline of the West for themselves. What I’d like
to discuss here is the nature of the pushback I tend to field when I point out
that yet again, predictions offered by Spengler and other students of cyclic
history turned out to be correct and those who dismissed them turned out to be
smoking their shorts. The responses I field are as predictable as—well, the
arrival of charismatic demagogues at a certain point in the Winter phase, for
example—and they reveal some useful flimpses into the value, or lack of it, of
our society’s thinking about the future in this turn of the wheel.
Probably the most common response I get can best be
characterized as simple incantation: that is to say, the repetition of some
brief summary of the conventional wisdom, usually without a shred of evidence
or argument backing it up, as though the mere utterance is enough to disprove
all other ideas. It’s a rare week when
I don’t get at least one comment along these lines, and they divide up roughly
evenly between those that insist that progress will inevitably triumph over all
its obstacles, on the one hand, and those that insist that modern industrial
civilization will inevitably crash to ruin in a sudden cataclysmic downfall on
the other. I tend to think of this as a sort of futurological fundamentalism
along the lines of “pop culture said it, I believe it, that settles it,” and
it’s no more useful, or for that matter interesting, than fundamentalism of any
other sort.
A little less common and a little more interesting are a
second class of arguments, which insist that I can’t dismiss the possibility
that something might pop up out of the blue to make things different this time
around. As I pointed out very
early on in the history of this blog, these are examples of the
classic logical fallacy of argumentum ad ignorantiam, the argument from
ignorance. They bring in some factor whose existence and relevance is unknown,
and use that claim to insist that since the conventional wisdom can’t be disproved,
it must be true.
Arguments from ignorance are astonishingly common these
days. My readers may have noticed, for example, that every few years some new
version of nuclear power gets trotted out as the answer to our species’ energy
needs. From thorium fission plants to Bussard fusion reactors to helium-3 from
the Moon, they all have one thing in common: nobody’s actually built a working
example, and so it’s possible for their proponents to insist that their pet
technology will lack the galaxy of technical and economic problems that have
made every existing form of nuclear power uneconomical without gargantuan
government subsidies. That’s an argument from ignorance: since we haven’t built
one yet, it’s impossible to be absolutely certain that they’ll have the usual
cascading cost overruns and the rest of it, and therefore their proponents can
insist that those won’t happen this time. Prove them wrong!
More generally, it’s impressive how many people can look at
the landscape of dysfunctional technology and failed promises that surrounds us
today and still insist that the future won’t be like that. Most of us have
learned already that upgrades on average have fewer benefits and more bugs than
the programs they replace, and that products labeled “new and improved” may be
new but they’re rarely improved; it’s starting to sink in that most new
technologies are simply more complicated and less satisfactory ways of doing
things that older technologies did at least as well at a lower cost. Try suggesting this as a general principle,
though, and I promise you that plenty of people will twist themselves mentally
into pretzel shapes trying to avoid the implication that progress has passed
its pull date.
Even so, there’s a very simple answer to all such arguments,
though in the nature of such things it’s an answer that only speaks to those
who aren’t too obsessively wedded to the conventional wisdom. None of the
arguments from ignorance I’ve mentioned are new; all of them have been tested
repeatedly by events, and they’ve failed. I’ve lost track of the number of
times I’ve been told, for example, that the economic crisis du jour could lead
to the sudden collapse of the global economy, or that the fashionable energy
technology du jour could lead to a new era of abundant energy. No doubt they
could, at least in theory, but the fact remains that they don’t.
It so happens that there are good reasons why they don’t,
varying from case to case, but that’s actually beside the point I want to make
here. This particular version of the argument from ignorance is also an example
of the fallacy the old logicians called petitio principii, better known
as “begging the question.” Imagine, by way of counterexample, that someone were
to post a comment saying, “Nobody knows what the future will be like, so the
future you’ve predicted is as likely as any other.” That would be open to
debate, since there’s some reason to think we can in fact predict some things
about the future, but at least it would follow logically from the premise. Still, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone
make that claim. Nor have I ever seen anybody claim that since nobody knows
what the future will be like, say, we can’t assume that progress is going to
continue.
In practice, rather, the argument from ignorance is applied
to discussions of the future in a distinctly one-sided manner. Predictions
based on any point of view other than the conventional wisdom of modern popular
culture are dismissed with claims that it might possibly be different this
time, while predictions based on the conventional wisdom of modern popular
culture are spared that treatment. That’s begging the question: covertly
assuming that one side of an argument must be true unless it’s disproved, and
that the other side can’t be true unless it’s proved.
Now in fact, a case can be made that we can in fact know
quite a bit about the shape of the future, at least in its broad outlines. The
heart of that case, as already noted, is the fact that certain theories about
the future do in fact make accurate predictions, while others don’t. This in
itself shows that history isn’t random—that there’s some structure to the flow
of historical events that can be figured out by learning from the past, and
that similar causes at work in similar situations will have similar outcomes.
Apply that reasoning to any other set of phenomena, and you’ve got the
ordinary, uncontroversial basis for the sciences. It’s only when it’s applied
to the future that people balk, because it doesn’t promise them the kind of
future they want.
The argument by incantation and the argument from ignorance
make up most of the pushback I get. I’m pleased to say, though, that every so
often I get an argument that’s considerably more original than these. One of
those came in last week—tip of the archdruidical hat to DoubtingThomas—and it’s
interesting enough that it deserves a detailed discussion.
DoubtingThomas began with the standard argument from
ignorance, claiming that it’s always possible that something might possibly
happen to disrupt the cyclic patterns of history in any given case, and
therefore the cyclic theory should be dismissed no matter how many accurate
predictions it scored. As we’ve already seen, this is handwaving, but let’s
move on. He went on from there to argue
that much of the shape of history is defined by the actions of unique
individuals such as Isaac Newton, whose work sends the world careening along
entirely new and unpredicted paths. Such individuals have appeared over and
over again in history, he pointed out, and was kind enough to suggest that my
activities here on The Archdruid Report were, in a small way, another
example of the influence of an individual on history. Given that reality, he
insisted, a theory of history that didn’t take the actions of unique individuals
into account was invalid.
Fair enough; let’s consider that argument. Does the cyclic
theory of history fail to take the actions of unique individuals into account?
Here again, Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West is
the go-to source, because he’s dealt with the sciences and arts to a much
greater extent than other researchers into historical cycles. What he shows,
with a wealth of examples drawn from the rise and fall of many different
civilizations, is that the phenomenon DoubtingThomas describes is a
predictable part of the cycles of history. In every generation, in effect,
a certain number of geniuses will be born, but their upbringing, the problems
that confront them, and the resources they will have available to solve those
problems, are not theirs to choose. All these things are produced by the labors
of other creative minds of the past and present, and are profoundly influenced
by the cycles of history.
Let’s take Isaac Newton as an example. He happened to be
born just as the scientific revolution was beginning to hit its stride, but
before it had found its paradigm, the set of accomplishments on which all
future scientific efforts would be directly or indirectly modeled. His
impressive mathematical and scientific gifts thus fastened onto the biggest
unsolved problem of the time—the relationship between the physics of moving
bodies sketched out by Galileo and the laws of planetary motion discovered by
Kepler—and resulted in the Principia Mathematica, which became the
paradigm for the next three hundred years or so of scientific endeavor.
Had he been born a hundred years earlier, none of those
preparations would have been in place, and the Principia Mathematica wouldn’t
have been possible. Given the different cultural attitudes of the century
before Newton’s time, in fact, he would almost certainly become a theologian
rather than a mathematician and physicist—as it was, he spent much of his
career engaged in theology, a detail usually left out by the more
hagiographical of his biographers—and he would be remembered today only by
students of theological history. Had he been born a century later, equally,
some other great scientific achievement would have provided the paradigm for
emerging science—my guess is that it would have been Edmund Halley’s successful
prediction of the return of the comet that bears his name—and Newton would have
had the same sort of reputation that Karl Friedrich Gauss has today: famous in
his field, sure, but a household name? Not a chance.
What makes the point even more precise is that every other
civilization from which adequate records survive had its own paradigmatic
thinker, the figure whose achievements provided a model for the dawning age of
reason and for whatever form of rational thought became that age’s principal
cultural expression. In the classical world, for example, it was Pythagoras,
who invented the word “philosophy” and whose mathematical discoveries gave classical rationalism its central
theme, the idea of an ideal mathematical order to which the hurly-burly of the
world of appearances must somehow be reduced. (Like Newton, by the way,
Pythagoras was more than half a theologian; it’s a common feature of figures
who fill that role.)
To take the same argument to a far more modest level, what about
DoubtingThomas’ claim that The Archdruid Report represents the act of a
unique individual influencing the course of history? Here again, a glance at
history shows otherwise. I’m a figure of an easily recognizable type, which
shows up reliably as each civilization’s Age of Reason wanes and it begins
moving toward what Spengler called the Second Religiosity, the resurgence of
religion that inevitably happens in the wake of rationalism’s failure to
deliver on its promises. At such times you get intellectuals who can
communicate fluently on both sides of the chasm between rationalism and
religion, and who put together syntheses of various kinds that reframe the
legacies of the Age of Reason so that they can be taken up by emergent
religious movements and preserved for the future.
In the classical world, for example, you got Iamblichus of
Chalcis, who stepped into the gap between Greek philosophical rationalism and
the burgeoning Second Religiosity of late classical times, and figured out how
to make philosophy, logic, and mathematics appealing to the increasingly
religious temper of his time. He was one of many such figures, and it was
largely because of their efforts that the religious traditions that ended up
taking over the classical world—Christianity to the north of the Mediterranean,
and Islam to the south—got over their early anti-intellectual streak so readily
and ended up preserving so much of the intellectual heritage of the past.
That sort of thing is a worthwhile task, and if I can
contribute to it I’ll consider this life well spent. That said, there’s nothing
unique about it. What’s more, it’s only possible and meaningful because I
happen to be perched on this particular arc of the wheel of time, when our
civilization’s Age of Reason is visibly crumbling and the Second Religiosity is
only beginning to build up a head of steam. A century earlier or a century
later, I’d have faced some different tasks.
All of this presupposes a relationship between the
individual and human society that fits very poorly with the unthinking
prejudices of our time. That’s something that Spengler grappled with in his
book, too; it’s going to take a long
sojourn in some very unfamiliar realms of thought to make sense of what he had
to say, but that can’t be helped.
