Noticing Patterns in History and Pretending not to See Them
The View from Oregon — 309: Friday 04 October 2024
I’ve just listened to Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role From the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe. In fact, I listened to it twice, back to back, which I don’t often do. Some years ago I listened to Cahill’s Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus, and when I finished that book I said to myself, “Nietzsche would have hated this book, just really hated it.” That wasn’t my response to his book about the Irish, though I did find plenty of things in it to annoy me, and it wasn’t the book I expected it to be. Given the title, I thought the book would focus on the copying and dissemination of manuscripts from Irish monasteries, and, while it does discuss this, it’s almost an afterthought. The bulk of the book, about the first two-thirds or more, is all prequel to this, setting up the role of the Irish in saving civilization, and it’s not until we get to Chapter 6 that we start to get into role of Irish monks in preserving manuscripts, and even then the treatment was not in the degree of detail I would have liked. If I had written this book I would have reduced the prequel to a chapter or two and spent the bulk of the book on actual Irish efforts to save Western civilization.
Still, for all that, I enjoyed the book enough to listen through it a second time. Cahill certainly makes the Irish sound like an agreeable people, though as I haven’t been to Ireland, and I don’t know any Irish, I have no personal experience of this exotic cultural milieu. But the appealing descriptions of the Irish way of life, and how it fed into the preservation of ancient books, may reflect in part my own proclivities. It is likely that I have some Irish blood somewhere way back in my family tree (more than a thousand years ago), since my people were Vikings, and the Vikings had a habit of raiding Ireland for slaves, some of whom became wives and contributed their genetic signature, and perhaps some of their character, to the race. I imagine that there was more than one Irish captive Viking bride who told the tales of Cú Chulainn to her children, who as a result heard this before they heard anything about Sigurðr the dragon slayer. But all this comes after Cahill’s narrative, which discusses Irish society prior to the Viking raids of the ninth century.
Two interesting patterns appeared in Cahill’s narrative. He didn’t give any particular emphasis to these patterns, but they are evident enough. The first was the resemblance of the Irish heroic age to other heroic ages. It is a commonplace of Greek studies that the events of the Trojan War belonged the heroic age of the Greeks, which occurred during the Greek Dark Ages, and the poetry of Homer is the surviving relic testifying to the deeds of the heroic age. A heroic age would be lost to history were it not followed by a literate age that can preserve an account of heroism, which usually occurs in a dark age. Similarly with Beowulf, which preserves the memory of the heroism of Dark Age Britain into the literate period that followed. The Irish too had a heroic age, and the stories of this heroic age were preserved by literate Irish monks who not only copied the ancient books of the ancient world, but who also recorded the vernacular literature of Ireland. Cahill mentions several charming examples of this, including a poem a monk wrote about his cat Pangur Bán, which is something I had read years ago, but I didn’t at the time know the story about it.
Another pattern that struck me, though Cahill made no historical comparison, was how Ireland was a distant (at the far edge of the civilized world) and somewhat stable society in the sixth and seventh centuries, when the Roman order was falling apart in Western Europe, and as such was the recipient of fleeing scholars who carried books with them to Ireland. These books became increasingly scarce in the rest of Europe, but Ireland was experiencing a period of significant literacy, so these books are gratefully received and copied. This period of literary cultivation within Ireland was then followed by the expansion of Irish monks to the continent, where they founded monastic houses, brought their literacy with them, and re-introduced some of the books of the ancient world into a Europe that had experienced several generations of declining literacy. Something like this happened again almost a thousand years later when Byzantium was shrinking as the Turks advanced and eventually took Constantinople itself. Scholars fled the former capital of the eastern empire, carrying books with them to western Europe, and in so doing re-introduced Greek classics and Greek literature to the West, where Greek had become rare (but which was known and studied in Ireland a thousand years earlier; the Irish hadn’t managed to re-introduce Greek to the continent, though John the Scot translated the works of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite for Charles the Bald in 862).
As I said, Cahill calls no attention to these historical patterns, but they are there and you will notice them if you know the other instances of the pattern. If you have the temerity to notice patterns in history you are likely guilty of speculative philosophy of history (or, if you prefer, substantive philosophy of history, or even material philosophy of history). Given the opprobrium attached to the accusation of speculative philosophy of history, I can easily imagine a philosopher noticing patterns in history and then pretending not to have noticed anything at all so as to avoid falling under the shadow of any association with speculative philosophy of history. Better to remain oblivious. If, on the other hand, you don’t find yourself chagrined to be noticing patterns in history, let’s look a little closer. Of patterns in history I will observe:
- Patterns do not precisely repeat, but they repeat under changed conditions with changed outcomes.
- There is more than one pattern to appear in history.
- Patterns intersect in history, and, when they do, the pattern is interrupted, and imprecise repetition gives way to novel events outside the pattern.
That patterns do not repeat precisely was briefly developed in last week’s discussion of cultural evolutionism and cyclical history. Patterns may develop more slowly or more rapidly, they may unfold at a larger or a smaller scale, they may come to a premature end — there are literally an infinitude of ways in which a pattern might be imprecisely embodied in some instance while remaining recognizable as an historical pattern.
That there is more than one pattern seems obvious to me, but reading the critics of cyclical history one would guess that there was one and only pattern in history, it always and inevitably plays out in the same way, and anything other than this is not cyclical history. Cultural evolutionism is often treated as though it were coextensive with determinism and the inevitability of the unfolding of an historical pattern. Again in last week’s discussion I said that there are a lot of obvious things that need to be said about cultural evolutionism and cyclical history, and this is one of those things that need to be said: there are many historical patterns. In the above I have described two patterns: the heroic deeds of a dark age preserved in literary form in a later more civilized age, and fleeing scholars from unstable social conditions who become vectors of idea diffusion, which diffusion then contributes to a cultural flowering that, in its turn, becomes expansive and is responsible for further idea diffusion.
These are not the best known of historical patterns, but they are patterns nonetheless, and to these less obvious patterns we can add the kind of obvious historical patterns discussed last week such as Spengler’s quasi-biological account of civilizations that appear, grow, peak, decline, and then go extinct. So now we have three patterns, and, of course, there are many, many more. There are patterns on the scale of civilization, as with the collapse of literacy in one civilizational milieu, and the displacement of this tradition to another milieu through idea diffusion driven by the push of instability and the pull of an agreeable refuge. There are also patterns that play out on the scale of a city or an institution. Carroll Quigley’s “institutionalization of the instrument” is an institutional pattern that plays out time and again in institutions large and small. There is even more than one form of the cultural evolutionism pattern: Polybius gives us the political pattern of cultural evolution familiar throughout the ancient world, while Marx gives us an economic and technological pattern of cultural evolutionism.
Even if there were only a single pattern in history, it would still give rise to more complex patterns through the intersection of patterns at different stages of development. Take, for example, the stages that a civilization passes through in its development. Not all civilizations arise at the same time, and that means that, at any one time, there are multiple civilizations on the planet at different stages of development. With the arrival of the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas, we saw the collision of one civilization, which had already developed to the point of planetary-scale travel, the production of firearms, and the printing press, with civilizations that were in their stone age, as yet only working gold, without long distance shipping, without the printing press, and so on. Because we have the testimony of the Spanish, many of whom wrote books about their experiences in the New World, we without hesitation identify these New World cultures as civilizations, but if we were to infer backward in time to those societies that were the technological equivalents to the Aztecs, but earlier in the history of the Old World, we wouldn’t know the extent of their social organization and development and some historians were deny that such societies had achieve the status of civilizations. In any case, this clash of early modern civilization and stone age civilization sent Latin America off on a distinct trajectory than would have been the case in a counterfactual history in which the Spanish did not conquer the Aztecs.
Thus the pattern of cultural evolutionism, even if it were consistent across multiple civilizations, by intersecting with another civilizations that were in a different stage of development in their cultural evolution, historical events would transpire as a result of this intersection that were not according to the pattern as it is known it its simplest (and undisturbed) form. But, as I said, history is not limited to the single pattern of cultural evolutionism. There are many patterns in history, and throughout history we find both the intersection of the same pattern at different stages of development, and the intersection of different patterns. Indeed, we find multiple patterns playing out in any one given civilization, and larger patterns playing out among these civilizations as they interact. In practical terms this means that we also see patterns, and fragments of patterns, playing out around us, but despite our ability to recognize historical patterns, we cannot predict the future course of history because of the complexity of the interaction of the patterns. It is entirely likely that patterns are playing out that we have not yet recognized, some of these being at a scale of human beings have not yet had the capacity to grasp. That doesn’t mean it’s hopeless for us to try to understand what’s going on, but it does mean we have to be prepared for a level of complexity that will always blur the hard edges of patterns seen in their simplest instantiations.
