Work in Progress: How to Annoy an Historian
Friday 21 April 2023
There are (at least) four questions that are bound to annoy an historian:
- Is history linear or cyclical?
- Is history an art or a science?
- Can history be objective?
- What is the meaning of history?
Now, I’m sure it wouldn’t be too difficult to come up with a few more annoying historiographical questions, but these four in particular have been a thorn in the side of historians, and the thorn has never really been properly removed. That’s the problem. Sometimes the old wound seems like it’s going to push out the thorn that has since grown into the flesh, but it never actually happens. The spot, when prodded, becomes sore, but then, when left alone, the irritation eases a little, and, with a little willful self-deception, the annoyed historian can let bygones be bygones, and forget about it all. Until the sore spot is prodded again.
The fault, of course, is the historian’s own. Historians have, despite 2,500 years to work on the problem, not yet managed to formulate a conceptual framework that would allow a concise formulation of the problem, and its equally sententious dismissal, with axiomatic clarity and precision. One of the rewards of having brought a science to a point of maturity in its development is to be able to point out exactly what the problem is, why it is misconceived and deceptively formulated, and then to show with luminous clarity the correct formulation that dispels all doubt and preemptively quells the possibility of second thoughts. But history clearly can’t do that yet, because it can’t even answer the objection that it might be a literary genre rather than a scientific discipline, as in order to achieve scientific maturity one must first be doing science.
Some years ago when I brought up the problem of linear vs. cyclical history, someone responded to me that even to mention this is unbearably 19th century, implying that I had better get with it and get with the times. My response to this now would be something along the lines of, “If the 19th and 20th centuries couldn’t clarify this, maybe it’s time to work on the problem in the 21st century.” At least, I’m not familiar with any definitive formulation and settling of the problem, and I’ve read a lot of history, historiography, and philosophy of history over the past couple of years. Honestly, it really wouldn’t take that much at this point. We have G. E. Moore’s distinction between numerical and qualitative identity, which, if applied to history, gives us numerically distinct events when taken in their full particularity, but as soon as we pull back and form scientific concepts of any degree of abstraction, we get types of events (births, deaths, wars, coronations, etc.) which are, as such events, qualitatively identical (any two births are qualitatively the same insofar as they are births).
Since Moore’s paper on identity, more than a century ago, there has been a lot more work on identity, and, in particular, some sophisticated work on relative identity, which I take to be related to Moore’s distinction, as an early and tentative proposal is related to a much later and more finely articulated idea. A lot of philosophers straight-up reject relative identity. I am not among their number, but I will admit that there are some serious metaphysical puzzles that need some attention. In any case, it would take a deep dive into metaphysics to dispel the hackneyed old debate between linear and cyclical history, at least by way of the avenue that seems most conceptually natural to me.
The problem of linear vs. cyclical history presented itself to me again recently as I was musing over my recent series of apocalyptic newsletters (no. 227 on contemporary failure conditions, no. 228 on criminal underworlds and overworlds, and no. 229 on civilizational collapse after industrialization). One of the familiar figures of our time (and not only of our time) is the person who is always predicting disaster, regardless of the conditions — Chicken Little proclaiming that the sky is falling. Inevitably, with some individuals always predicting disasters, sometimes they are going to be right. This is the familiar idea that a stopped clock is right twice each day, and known among philosophers as the Gettier paradox, which is in turn understood as the fly in the ointment when one wishes to define truth as justified true belief. Speaking of hackneyed, this idea is so hackneyed that some philosophers will actually say that they define truth as justified true belief plus whatever is required to solve the Gettier paradox — as though naming the problem somehow dissipated it, like a magical incantation. But philosophy isn’t Harry Potter, and logical problems can’t be so easily banished.
Am I Chicken Little? Not numerically, to be sure, but possibly qualitatively. Figures of a given type are repeatedly generated by history; they are born, play their assigned part, and die, and can be found in every age, and in every part of the world. Chicken Little, then, is perennial. That is a quasi-cyclical account of persons and types of persons. But even if we recognize the type of Chicken Little, even if we get wise to the game of history, and start pointing out to our friends the predictable patterns, confidently saying that we know where this is all heading, there remains the problem of the distribution of Chicken Littles in history. If Chicken Little is a recognizable type that recurs, do they all recur with equal frequency throughout history, or do they come in bunches and batches? And, if they do come in bunches and batches, and if these denser clusters of Chicken Littles occur prior to a significant historical discontinuity, then there is something more going on here than Chicken Little exemplifying the Gettier paradox.
Semi-observant normies, with a memory longer than that of a goldfish, who have no particular commitment to cyclical history, and who, if they had it explained to them would probably reject it, have no problem noticing that Chicken Littles have appeared in every generation since the 19th century, noting that these figures are always predicting doom, and they are all eventually proved wrong by history, because history keeps on keeping on. We’re still here, aren’t we?
Both the prophets of doom and the critics of claims of cyclical history are both wrong, though each in his own way. Macrohistorical events like the failure of a civilization occur over the longue durée, so that the successive prophets of doom over perhaps hundreds of years are all seeing the same disaster, though each thought he was seeing a doom particular to his own time, that would be realized (the prophecy would come to fulfillment) in his own time. They are correct in foretelling disaster, but their human, all-too-human biases mean that they attribute a human scale to history that does not play out on a human scale. Generations can come and go all the while a civilization is failing. The prophets of doom are wrong about the scale of the disaster in time, and often wrong in assuming that the mechanism of failure they have identified is the one unique mechanism of failure that will bring down civilization. But civilizations are large and resilient — they are complex adaptive systems, among other things — so they are not usually brought low by a single mechanism.
The critics of cyclical history, who use the cyclicality of their own times as a means of ridicule (by pointing out the qualitative reemergence of the Chicken Little type), are correct in their belief that each individual prophet of doom predicting the doom of his own time (based on the failings of his own time) was wrong in the narrowest sense of error, but the critic of cyclical history is himself wrong about the bigger picture — and wrong about the smaller picture too. They are wrong about the bigger picture because they cannot see that they many prophets of doom are all predicting the same disaster that is unfolding too slowly to be noticed in a single human lifetime. They are wrong about the little picture because (lacking any genuine sense of self-reflection) they are incapable of seeing that the cyclicality that they ridicule is a microhistorical form of cyclical history.
No sane person denies the cyclicality of days, weeks, and months, the phases of the moon, the seasons, and the years, and with these naturally occurring cycles are the naturally occurring cycles of human beings who populate this iterative world — at least for a time. We recognize microhistorical forms of cyclicality in our own lives every day, and pay them little mind. We usually fail to recognize macrohistorical cyclicality because we can no more see it than we can watch the grass grow.
I suggest that the many prophets of the doom of civilization that have appeared since about the middle of the 19th century are all witnessing and proclaiming the same slowly unfolding process of civilizational failure. This requires caveats, conditions, and qualifications. And some of these qualifications require qualifications. What I am claiming is that we have a batch of doomsayers since the 19th century, and that implies that the distribution of doomsayers becomes thinner prior to that. This, then, is a major qualification: I am making a distinction between prophets of doom of the newly emergent industrialized civilization from perennial prophets of doom, most of whom are inspired by religious prophecy, and most of whom see the mechanism of civilizational failure as sin.
If you deny this distinction between modern (secular) and perennial (religious) prophets of doom, then my argument collapses. There have always been religious prophets of doom, and they probably have been reasonably equally spaced through history. Even here, though, we can argue for bunches and batches. Karl Jaspers’ positing of an Axial Age in which the world’s major religious and philosophical traditions appeared, could be characterized as a bunching of prophets. Insofar as these prophets predicted catastrophe if repentance was insufficient, they could be called prophets of doom. So that is one qualification of a qualification.
Another qualification of a qualification is that the distinction I made between modern (secular) and perennial (religious) prophets of doom is illegitimate not because the prophets are wrong, but because they are right. Again, the scale of the disaster is crucial. We can understand religious prophets of doom as foretelling doom on a cosmological scale, but since human beings are what they are, this cosmological prophecy is made personal, i.e., relevant to the individual, when it isn’t really relevant at all — like the generations who come and go like so many mayflies while a civilization is slowing failing and falling. The religious prophets of doom, on this account, are right at the same scale as contemporary cosmologists who predict the death of the Earth at one scale of time, the death of the sun at a longer scale of time, and the heat death of the universe at an even longer scale of time. It’s not a choice of fire or ice: we get both.
What is all important here is getting the scale right, and that is an historical problem. The prophet wandering the desert, and the cosmologist seated behind his desk, are working at the same time scale. The secular prophets of doom that have emerged since the industrial revolution think they are all working at the same time scale. They are both right and wrong, and all at the same time. They are all working at the same time scale of a civilization very slowly disintegrating, but they are all wrong in thinking that they are working at the time scale of the immediate.
It remains to speculate that a conceptual framework adequate to resolve any one of the four problems with which I began would also be adequate to solve the others. We do not know this to be true. We can hope, but science suggests otherwise. Relativistic physics solved problems that classical physics could not solve, but it didn’t solve all the problems, and some of these problems hang on tenaciously in our conceptual framework for physics. I suspect the same would be true for history: a really rigorous treatment of any one problem would bring a temporary sense of both relief and triumph, but it would slowly become apparent to later generations that loose ends remain.
