3. Idea For A Universal History
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The Economic Interpretation
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3.
Idea For A Universal History |
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| 3.2.4 The Economic Interpretation of History | ||||
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Having produced an economic analogy, we must point out that our cycles are more complex, and quite different from economic phenomena. Look at how the pattern emerges. It has a near monopoly on seminal innovations. But then consider some of the things that don’t correlate with this sequence. They should be of great interest to us, because we don’t control this pattern. What can we call our own? One is easy to find, technical innovation, which often appears relatively at random in history, which is not surprising. For example: zoom target, the discovery of iron. It is not in the eonic mainline. Or three really major ones, printing presses, the compass, and gunpowder. Why is this? It’s the way it should be, fully autonomous self-evolution and self-direction. If we look closely we see that ‘discovery’ is a function of talents and abilities. These can stumble on things. In fact, this is our distinction of ‘free action’. These have undoubtedly long since passed from the realm of macro to micro, they are part of the inherited capabilities of man. And while the discovery of a technical advance is hard, it is far short of directional transition on a scale of centuries. No amount of genius can, as yet, mimic that possibility. Sometimes we see that technical innovations do occur in the main sequence. The thing that is hard is the overall cultural change as this occurs over a long interval. If we note the failures of revolution we can see why. Our pattern seems to do the hard part, large-scale cultural transformations over centuries that men can’t handle. Economies are a function of free agents doing truck and barter, or performing increasingly complex forms of production. But such processes, like technical innovation, are well within the scope of individual ability. They must have been born in the Paleolithic, witness the trade in obsidian, which is very ancient. These forms of interaction have clearly passed into the domain of ‘free action’. Furthermore, economic activity tends to spread out over large regions of space. It is not concentrated, and can advance from anywhere. It creates markets. Unlike the eonic effect, it shows no clear concentration both in time and space. We will call these three technosequence, econosequence, and eonic sequence. These three can overlap and we see a number of hybrid cases, where the econosequence is supercharged by the eonic sequence, with some help from technosequence, a classic example being the Industrial Revolution. Clearly this is not a quite satisfactory situation. It would be nice if everything passed into ‘free action’. It would be nice to be free to direct historical evolution. At least we can say that the ratio of eonic determination to free action is changing over time. Note, however, that capitalism in the modern version shows strong correlation with TP3. We are suspicious. This is an economic and a cultural development. It shows eonic determination. It brings into existence a series of ‘market societies’. And this has led to a fallacy, the economic interpretation of historical causality. One of the great mainlines of historical research revolves around the various economic interpretations of history. The main one was the Marxist, which has been subject to many critiques. Historical materialism as a predictive theory is easy to challenge using our pattern, which doesn’t mean its insights aren’t useful. But we have moved already to distinguish economic history from our eonic history. We can see the reason why. We enter a market society as a result of TP3, not the other way around. We should note how easy it would be to rewrite Marx with this different way of slicing the semantic pie. But the point is that economic history flows on under its own steam, and then grows to dominate social interaction, for better or worse. The point for us is that it doesn’t drive the ‘rich cultural emergents’ that correlate with the eonic sequence. So it is not the driver of history. The reason can be seen, to repeat, from a very simple consideration. An economy is a field of free agents. These agents truck and barter, and often move about to truck and barter some more. Often, like, say, the Phoenicians, they climb in boats and travel very far to do this. And the Phoenicians were quite close to being early capitalists. One of the great economic breakthroughs was the bullock cart, the early truck, a tremendous speed up in economic globalization was its result. Thus an economy is a relatively random field of economic free agents. But we can see already that our pattern spreads in a different way: it is about focalized regions of concentrated advance in short intervals, these producing their own type of diffusion fields. It is something different altogether. The economist Hayek speaks of spontaneous order, but we can see that there is nothing spontaneous about the eonic effect. Our system tends toward spontaneous decline and medievalization, between transitions. Upgrades come on schedule. It may well be true that ‘economies’ (which aren’t localized) show an efficient way toward production and distribution of economic commodities, a spontaneous order of economic activity, but that is not the same as cultural order, which we begin to see is highly concentrated. We can spot the problem immediately as the figure of Adam Smith, an honest economist, is taken as the source of inspiration in all other fields. We just took Adam Smith’s thinking as an eonic emergent in the eonic sequence. Which category does he belong to? You see the problem. The econosequence wouldn’t have produced capitalism, of the modern variety, without the eonic sequence. It is not a question of one economist, but of the cultural context in the transition that makes capitalism possible, e.g. the sudden appearance of abolition at the same time. Marx, theorist or observer? This is a somewhat unfair characterization of Marx. In fact, critiquing Marx’s theories is a very radical thing to do. Stripped of the mesmerizing errors of theory the leftist viewpoint becomes obvious on the level of simple description of the nature of the case with liberal systems. We can generate thimble-sized versions of liberalism and Marxism at the drop of a hat, so critiquing Marx’s theories doesn’t amount to much. He came almost unbelievably close to our type of model, with its discrete series of stages, e.g. feudalism to capitalism. He is actually describing the modern transition, which he thought of in terms of a change of economic civilization. The problem is that ‘capitalism’ is more an outcome, than a prime mover of modernity. The transition from feudalism to capitalism seems to fit the facts, but a close look shows that capitalism was gestating long before. Lest we underrate Karl Marx (speaking of his theories, the question of communism apart), let us consider one point, a truly dangerous one: if our eonic sequence creates an economic society, and not the other way around, i.e. economic evolution is not the mechanism, then, either the result is utopia, or if there is a problem with the output formation, change must either wait for some TP4, if any, or else be taken up by free action without eonic determination, a sort of ‘TP4 Now’ initiative. Lest this be thought absurd, let us note that slavery threatened to endure into the liberal age, and was the object of just such changes in the output formation in the American system. In general our evolving system has parked in a market order, its future over the long term unknown. But there is a clear difference between the evolution of the market order and the eonic evolution of civilization, if only by definition. This issue is one that will not go away in this kind of system, and we shouldn’t be surprised at the monumental confusion of the phenomenon of nineteenth and twentieth century revolution. One thing is clear. A simple revolution cannot mimic one of our transitions. So if you want to see the difference between eonic determination and free action, compare the modern transition with Stalin’s set of five year plans. |
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