5. The Pattern
Of Universal History
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Deconstructing
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| 5.2.1 Deconstructing Flat History | ||||
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We are getting into something postmodernists frown on, a metanarrative, we will soon discover, of freedom. We can easily accept the critique of such, and yet proceed. The reason is that our system answers to this critique, and reconciles the contradictions: it is directional, and reflects, but does not correspond to its own ‘teleology’, if any. Teleological thinking is a dangerous subject. If we look at ancient Greece we see a bare birth of the idea of freedom amidst a general expansion of slavery. Analysis of such a situation would be misleading, and it really requires a scale of many millennia to assess. So that might still be true of our own present. Only systematic timing and careful accounting of datasets could resolve teleological questions. Directionality is less demanding. The system is interleaved by finite transitions, our turning points, seen in the past. The ‘end’ of the system is not defined: our present action cannot be so determined. Such critiques are often critiques of Hegel. We are doing something different. The whole point is not really teleology, but the ability to change course, reset direction, which could be teleological, but not in the usual sense. What if the goal is to explore diversity rather than pursue a single direction? Our system, we will see, actually does both. Note that a postmodern critique could just as well be about ‘deconstructing flat history’, and the ideology associated with the idea of random evolution. To say that history has no direction, and that the future is determined by economic survival of the fittest, or some variant, is awfully convenient. But let’s take the warning to heart and distinguish directionality from teleology. Problem solved. The enigma is that there really seems to be a high-level operation, a ‘meta’ to the ‘narrative’. It slaps us in the face as we zoom out and look at world history. The Axial Age is completely obvious in this regard. Our gaze over the long range of world history shows us that our postmodern reaction to modernism can backfire, and leave us isolated in a local perspective with no sense of Big History, in that the rise of the modern is clearly a part of a larger pattern, generating the very master narrative we had hoped to avoid. The assumption of ‘flat’ history seems to fail, the facts speaking for themselves. Our turning points show rapid seminal advance, as all other periods tend to lapse into stasis. Thus ‘flat history’ tends not to advance. Nothing could be more obvious, except that Darwinian thinking tends to force us to not see this. We need to be wary of teleology, and a way to distinguish ‘teleologies’ as historical productions of men, and ‘real’ teleology, which is beyond history, as a property of an inferred system in which we are immersed. Directionality, at least, is visible as we move to connect the rise of the modern to a greater system. That is empirical and makes no statement about the future. Note that teleological philosophies are attacked by postmodernists, and rightly so, because they tend to be constructs emerging inside history. And they are unsuitable as ‘meta’ descriptions because they degenerate into ideology. Note how the emergence of teleological history in the Old Testament split into rival versions, claiming the future. Thus postmodern thought quite understandably tries to deconstruct Big History and its metanarratives. The problem is that the direction set by a transition is not the same as the direction set by the overall pattern of turning points. Our ‘metanarrative’ is fairly simple, in any case: a three act play, three scene changes, with the middle mostly dumb show and noise. No ending is given, and the ‘plot’ is quite hard to describe. The Axial spectrum sets five massive ‘directionalities’, and the world religions set two opposing demeanors, historical and anti-historical, as with Buddhism and Augustinian and/or Islamic teleology. The Christian tries to take over the directionality set by the Roman Empire. With extraordinary and unexpected redirection, the small strain of the Ionian Enlightenment is reselected in modern times. The same dilemma arises all over again. The direction set by the rise of the modern is multivalent, history-bound and has no claim on the far future that we know of. Although, and this is significant, the game starts all over again, with the various new ‘teleologies’ of the future of modernism, Hegel’s being one, and the Marxist response to Hegel being another. It is not safe to predict anything in this pattern. And in any case, a new point arises as we begin to assess all of this in a new present of world history, as ‘eonic determination’ switches into ‘free action’. Perhaps for good. It is hard to see how this sequence could continue once we become aware of it. We might be at the end of the ‘eonic sequence’. At any rate, be humble about teleological questions. The great religions are not humble here, and are adventurism pure and simple, schemes of global ecumenization turned into empires of domination with teleological scripts. Thus the very significant critique of metanarratives works both ways. The implied teleology in Darwinist non-teleology, random flat history, is even worse than an explicit metanarrative. It says, with tacit innuendo, that the future belongs to the forces of conflict, and that after great violence the fittest will claim the future. Ethics is superfluous, vestigial religiosity. That is dangerous, and it is not so, as proven by the facts looking toward the past. The Israelites appeared in our second turning point, survived the fittest of them all, the Assyrians, and outlasted them, with no ability to fight back. Many other cases could be found. We can easily bypass the problems of metanarratives if we restrict ourselves to statements about the past, and do not extend our model into the future, in the sense of causal prediction. In the process, our model then generates a strange sort of ‘macro-dramatic’ history, if not ‘metanarrative’, but the narrative stops in the present, where we act by our own choices, not according to some pattern. The question is simple. We see the modern is part of a pattern of three such turning points, and that this series sets a direction with respect to the past (directionality), but not necessarily the far future (teleology). |
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