Pitirim Sorokin on Crisis, Calamity, and Transition
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Sunday 04 February 2024 is the 135th anniversary of the birth of Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin (04 February1889 to 11 February 1968), who was born in the village of Turya in the Russian Empire on this date in 1889.
Despite being born in a village far from the centers of power, Sorokin made his way to St. Petersburg, During the turmoil of the Bolshevik revolution he found himself sentenced to death by both sides in the conflict. Somehow (it’s not clear exactly what happened) he managed to leave Russia in 1922 and come to the US. Given the social disruption Sorokin experienced in Russia we should not be surprised to find that Sorokin was among those who understood contemporary history in terms of crisis; both in The Crisis of Our Age and Man and Society in Calamity; The Effects of War, Revolution, Famine, Pestilence upon Human Mind, Behavior, Social Organization and Cultural Life he discusses contemporary history in terms of crisis.
Previously in my discussion of Barbara Tuchman I noted the idea of crisis and how it is both used and abused a theme in the philosophy of history, and this theme has been pervasive over the past century. As a sociologist, Sorokin seeks to study crisis and calamity in sociological terms, but he expands beyond a strictly scientific scope in the preface to Man and Society in Calamity:
“…the sociology of calamities becomes a general sociology, as well as an inductive philosophy of history. One of its conclusions is that calamities are not an unmixed evil: side by side with their destructive and pernicious functions they play also a constructive and positive role in the history of culture and man’s creative activities. With human beings as they are, catastrophes are great educators of mankind.”
Sorokin says that the crisis of his time — he is writing in 1941, when the Second World War was already underway — is among the greatest of crises in human history:
“It is high time to realize that this is not one of the ordinary crises which happen almost every decade, but one of the greatest transitions in human history from one of its main forms of culture to another. An adequate realization of the immense magnitude of the change now upon us is a necessary condition for determining the adequacy of measures and means to alleviate the magnitude of the pending catastrophe.”
For Sorokin, this crisis cuts across all sectors of society, manifesting itself in every aspect of human life. Thus, as with Husserl, humanity faces a spiritual crisis:
“…the mentality and culture will be stamped by calamities in thousands of ways. Calamities will drive out from the focal points of the public mind most of the other unrelated topics… Besides this impregnation by calamities, the fine arts will be marked by a spreading atmosphere of somberness, dolour, melancholy, and pessimism, sometimes becoming sadistic, macabre, and pathetique. Similar pessimism will invade science, philosophy, and other compartments of culture.”
To his credit, Sorokin gives us some historical basis of comparison for his crisis:
“It is so farreaching that during the last thirty centuries there have been only four crises in the history of Graeco-Roman and Western cultures comparable to the present one. Even these four were on a smaller scale than that with which we are faced. We are living and acting at one of the epoch-making turning points of human history, when one fundamental form of culture and society — sensate — is declining and a different form is emerging. The crisis is also extraordinary in the sense that, like its predecessors, it is marked by an extraordinary explosion of wars, revolutions, anarchy and bloodshed; by social, moral, economic, political and intellectual chaos; by a resurgence of revolting cruelty and animality, and a temporary destruction of the great and small values of mankind; by misery and suffering on the part of millions — a convulsion far in excess of the chaos and disorganization of the ordinary crises. Such transitional periods have always been the veritable dies irae, dies illa — days of wrath and impending doom.”
Sorokin also offers a sociological analysis of these forms of culture that succeed each other one after another in the great transitions of history. As his historical baseline he is taking 3000 year of history, roughly from about 1000 BC to 2000 AD, and finding only four crises comparable to the present, i.e., comparable to the crisis Sorokin was diagnosing in 1941. Sorokin’s crisis is a greater crisis than most because it is, “the substitution of one fundamental form of culture and society for another.” This gives us some basis for understanding the scope of Sorokin’s crisis, but it doesn’t settle every question we might ask, or even the most obvious questions we might ask.
In a previous episode we saw that Husserl identified a contemporaneous crisis during the mid-1930s, during what W. H. Auden called a “low dishonest decade.” We could compare the 1930s, as the lead up to the Second World War, to the July Crisis, discussed by Tuchman, as the lead up to the First World War. It would be reasonable to package the lead up to the First World War together with the war itself as one great crisis, and to identify this with Sorokin’s crisis, but is Sorokin’s crisis of 1941, even augmented with the 1930s before it and the Second World War after it, also the same crisis of today? Is this a century-long crisis extending up to the present day? Or, on the other hand, have we overcome the crisis represented by the First World War, enjoyed several decades of peace and prosperity, and now a new crisis is upon us?
Do I need to remind us all of the terrors of the Cold War, when the hands on the doomsday clock neared midnight and we experienced endless proxy wars and the Cuban Missile Crisis? If we are to believe what we hear today we are in yet another historic crisis — a meta-crisis or a poly-crisis. After setting back the hands on the Doomsday clock when the Cold War ended, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved the hands forward putting us closer to midnight than at any other time previously, whether one takes the existential crisis of the present to be the traditional Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse — death, famine, war, and disease — or new horsemen such as climate change, or the threat of unfriendly artificial intelligence.
One problem with the rhetoric of continual crisis is the problem of the boy who cried wolf. When the crisis fails to materialize to the extent predicted, the prophecies of disaster become increasingly shrill and piercing, and as the prophecies become more dire, they are increasingly ignored. Crisis then becomes business as usual. When a crisis lasts for a century, is it still a crisis, or is it business as usual for humanity? It seems that existential risks, like the poor, will always be with us.
And there is another problem. Purporting to find the worst crisis in human history in the present implies a non-Copernican view of history, since we seem to find ourselves at the center of a unique event. This is only possible if our time represents an exception to the rule represented by the remainder of history. As I said in my episode on John Lukacs, Lukacs’ work can be characterized as non-Copernican history. A charitable way to construe Lukacs’ rejection of Copernicanism would be to observe that the present is always at the center of history. There is a sense in which this is true: the present is always sandwiched between the past and the future and in this way it is central to time.
All observers at all times in the past have experienced this same structure of time, and all observers yet to come in the future will experience this same structure of time. Our centrality in time in this respect is not exceptional, but universal. One of the lessons of history is to learn to appreciate the universality of the experience of time among human beings, and to transcend this temporal parochialism; all observers experience the same structure of time, but not all historical ages are the same because the temporal perspective of all observers is the same. We have to learn to distinguish historicity from temporality.
We can’t help but see the terrors of our time more vividly that those we don’t experience ourselves, but we have both a moral and intellectual obligation to place our own experiences in context. In my episode on Simone Weil I suggested that her conception of eternity entails a kind of spiritual Copernicanism, and this is one way to see our experience of time in perspective, though Weil would place our experience in an eternal context defined in terms of a providential philosophy of history. In a naturalistic context, history itself should be the antidote to the sense of exceptionalism we experience due to our centrality in the structure of lived time. When we study the trials and the terrors experienced by others we place our own lives in a larger context, thus seeing ourselves and our life in proper perspective. Historicity, then, is the transcendence of temporality.
Sorokin’s crisis can evade some of these problems of continual crisis and parochial temporal perspective, but I don’t think it can do so entirely satisfactorily. Sorokin offers us a big picture of history in which crises take their proper place since he places crises within the panorama of civilization in transition. Not surprisingly, given this civilizational context, Sorokin, like Voegelin, was an admirer of Toynbee:
“Regardless of the subsequent criticism, Arnold J. Toynbee’s A Study of History is one of the most significant works of our time in the field of historical synthesis. Although several volumes of it are yet to come, six published volumes display a rare combination of the thoughtfulness of a philosopher with the technical competence of a meticulous empiricist. The combination insures against the sterile scholarship of a thoughtless “fact-finder,” as well as against a fantastic flight of an incompetent dilettante. Hence its significance for historians, philosophers of history, sociologists, political scientists, and for anyone who is interested in the how and why of emergence, growth, decline, and dissolution of civilizations.” (“Toynbee’s Philosophy of History,” in The Pattern of the Past by Pieter Geyl, p. 95)
Again I have to point out the use of “dilettante.” Voegelin criticized Toynbee as a dilettante in philosophy and religion, while historians typically criticize Toynbee’s approach to history as that of a dilettante. Sorokin in this passage is saying that the scope and scale of Toynbee’s project, with its meticulous technical competence, insulates Toynbee against the charge of dilettantism. This claim has not held up very well, but Sorokin’s Toynbee is not everyone’s Toynbee. Sorokin explains how he reinterprets Toynbee in terms of his own sociological categories:
“…most of the traits which Toynbee ascribes to the civilizations in their period of growth and partly in that of ‘petrification’ are accurate for the phase of civilization dominated by what I call the ‘Ideational supersystem of culture’ (not the total given culture in which it appears). Many of the characteristics of Toynbee’s ‘disintegrating’ period are typical for a phase of civilization dominated by what I call the ‘Sensate supersystem’ (not the whole total culture or civihzation). Many of the characteristics of Toynbee’s stage of acute disorganization are but the characteristics of the period when a given culture passes from the domination of Ideational to Idealistic or Sensate supersystems, and vice versa. Such periods of shift happen several times in the history of this or that ‘total culture’ or ‘civilization.’ They are, however, neither a death nor ‘petrification’ nor ‘arrest’ but merely a great transition from one supersystem to another. Put into this scheme, and reinterpreted, many pages and chapters of Toynbee’s work become illuminating, penetrating, and scientifically valid. In such a setting his conception of the creative character of human history acquires still deeper meaning. Likewise, his hesitant diagnosis of the present state of the Western civilization becomes more definite and specific: as the status of the civilization entering not the path of death but the painful road of a great transition from the overripe Sensate phase to a more ‘etherialized’ or spiritualized Ideational or Idealistic phase. Translated into more accurate terms of the real sociocultural systems and of the great rhythm of Sensate-Idealistic-Ideational supersystems of culture, A Study of History is a most stimulating and illuminating work of a distinguished thinker and scholar.”
An uncharitable interpretation of this is that Toynbee’s work is not illuminating, penetrating, or scientifically valid without translating it into Sorokin’s terms, but we can leave that aside. Sorokin is concerned to show not only that Toynbee’s thought can be supplemented and improved with Sorokin’s framework of sociocultural systems, but also that what Toynbee describes as the rise and fall of many civilizations, when suitably modified by Sorokin’s approach, instead describes a difficult and painful transition from one social system to another.
While Sorokin argued against the kind of naturalistic life cycles of civilization he finds in Toynbee, Sorokin’s own work easy bears interpretation in cyclical terms. In Man and Society in Calamity (p. 13) Sorokin writes:
“The life history of any society is an incessant fluctuation between periods of comparative well-being and those of calamity. For a given period the society enjoys peace, order, prosperity, and freedom from notable catastrophes. Again, its life is darkened by calamities which, singly or en masse, assail it and destroy its previous well-being. Sooner or later this catastrophic phase is succeeded by a new stretch of well-being, which is replaced, in turn, by a further period of calamity. And so this alternation goes on, throughout the entire duration of the society in question.”
Sorokin could argue that the epochal transitions from one social paradigm to another is not the natural history of a single civilization from birth to death, but he doesn’t escape cyclicality quite so easily. If we stand back from the panorama Sorokin describes, we could see a cycle on a larger scale as the sensate paradigm gives way to the idealistic, the idealistic gives way to the ideational, and the ideational in turn gives way once again to the sensate. If something is retained and built upon in the great crises of transition, history haltingly moves forward. But if the slate is wiped clean in a great crisis, and society must start over from scratch, then we are back to an endless cycle.
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