From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Oct 14 2002 - 22:32:19 MDT
At 09:00 PM 10/14/02 -0700, Lee wrote:
>But I'd bet we definitely *have* crossed over into
>numerology or something related at this point ;-)
Maybe, but it looks interestingly (to me) like modulations in the 300-year
generational cycle I proposed in THEORY AND ITS DISCONTENTS. That model is
syncretic, part empirical and drawn from other cycle theorists, part
extrapolated from climate periodicities and a guess that these are driven
by solar energy incidence periodicities.
Damien
[here's a grab from that book; apologies for format glitches, and to anyone
here who might have seen this stuff in earlier posts:]
===========================================
Within this double feedback circuit (negative loops ensuring a measure of
stability, while positive feedbacks produce genuine growth and
complexifying change), the four phases of each long cycle enact a two-state
combinatory of order and disorder. In cycle phase 1, preference for order
in the global system is high, but its availability is low; this is the
generation waging global war. In phase 2, preference for order remains
high, and, due to the decisive close of the previous phase, available order
is now high as well, leading to a regime of world order. In phase 3,
preference for order has fallen to low, despite its prevalent and perhaps
oppressively high availability, so a regime of delegitimation sets in for a
generation. Finally, both preference for and availability of order are low,
and deconcentration brings new hegemonic challenge to the boil, preparing
the way for a return to the start of the long cycle. It is arresting to
compare this schema with Wheeler's fourfold categorisation, charted above,
where WARM/DRY matches Modelski's global war phase, and the remainder march
in close agreement.
Of course, the long cycle schema was not developed by synchronic reference
to external biological or even economic pacemakers such as climate, but
after study of the historical narrative at the diachronic level of
competing states, today usually regarded as radically contingent. The major
wars of these five great sequences are given as the Portuguese cycle, with
its ceaseless Italian and Indian Ocean wars of 1494-1516; the Dutch cycle,
with the Spanish-Dutch war of 1580-1609; the first British cycle, with the
wars of Louis XIV, 1688-1713; the second British cycle, with the wars of
the French Revolution and Napoleon, 1792-1815; and the American cycle, or
wars with Germany, 1914-45. Interestingly, Modelski's attempt to forecast
this pattern into the next millennium immediately went awry (along with
almost everyone else's) by assuming that the principal challenger to
American suzerainty in 1973-2030 would be the Soviet Union. Presumably the
slot would be filled now by Japan, or perhaps Unified Europe, or the
Asia-Pacific Tigers [note: written in 1996, ignoring resurgent militant
Islam...DB]. It is a significant mark of this schematism that while its
roster of players is determined by sensitive dependence upon initial
conditions - and hence to some considerable degree remains unpredictable -
the general orbit envelope of the attractor (to borrow the terminology of
chaos theory) is quite predictable. Indeed, it represents rather neatly
what I earlier dubbed a `stochastic emergent schematism'.
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Long cycles in global politics (systemic mode): from Modelski (1987), p. 40.
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[damn, this table won't work in email]
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Generation Gaps: The Ontogenetic Sequence
Perhaps the most striking feature of this century-long process is the role
played by massive conflict, or more exactly its successful conclusion, as a
definitive time-marker. Whether or not the long cycle is calibrated to more
primitive pulses (physiologic, ecological, even solar dynamic), one can set
its clock by the celebrations that mark global armistice. Arnold Toynbee
famously found in this unhappy recurrence a key to alternations between war
and peace: `the survivors of a generation that has been of military age
during a bout of war will be shy, for the rest of their lives, of bringing
a repetition of this tragic experience either upon themselves or their
children' (A Study of History, Vol. IX, 1954, cited Modelski, p. 115).
Perhaps the uniformity of experience shared by those children (in our own
recent history, the `baby boomers') is at least as salient as that of their
warrior parents. As Modelski notes:
if long cycles are processes of social change, then the successive phases
of each cycle might imply the need for different skills, capabilities and
orientations that could be supplied by succeeding generations... In that
sense, the existence of generational differences might be an essential
mechanism for the functioning of such a long-range process of social
change... (p. 116)
For the moment, then, we shall leave in abeyance the question of
`historical phases' and `discontinuities', and turn to the second theme
announced at the start of this chapter. Let us consider the collateral
metaphor drawn upon the course of an individual human's passage (as mapped
by Piaget and other developmental specialists) from infancy to death. Might
this ontogenetic sequence provide insight into cultural patterns of growth
and decay - if indeed there really are any such regularities, the kinds
alleged by Huntington, Wheeler, Dewey, Thompson and Modelski?
It might seem that even so `genealogical' a metaphor must offend against
contemporary taste, insinuating a determinism repugnant to our
sensibilities, one especially distasteful to today's heightened awareness
of contingency and the non-linear complexities of chaos. To a generation
of Theorists attuned to Foucauldian strictures on dispersed, bottom-up
`micro-power' vectors in preference to centralising, top-down,
`macro-power', any apparently organicist metaphor must look preposterous.
But as Foucault's translator and commentator Paul Patton has remarked,
`While he does argue that the small-scale relations of micro-power are a
necessary basis for the effects of global hegemony, Foucault does not deny
the efficacy of macrosocial forms of power' (Patton, 1987, p. 236). A toxic
epistemological slide is not inevitable, therefore, if we are careful:
Although Piaget insists that development is continuous, he does allow for
the existence of stages. During any given stage many superficially
different patterns of behaviour can of course be seen to occur. Underlying
them, however, there is held to be some common structures which explains
them and gives the stage its unity. So transition to a new stage means that
some fairly fundamental re-organization is taking place. There is, however,
no sharp break between stages and there are no completely new beginnings....
The main stages follow one another in an order that is held to be the same
for all children. But this is not because they are `pre-programmed' or
wholly determined by maturation.... It is because each stage builds on the
one before it. Thus the earlier construction is necessary for the later
one. (Donaldson, 1978, p. 133)
While this is true of childhood and early maturation, perhaps as far as
adolescence, is there any reason to suppose that the shape of our lives
(let alone our cognitive structures) is segmented beyond, say, the age of
14 or 16? I think there is. The sage Confucius, in the fifth century BCE,
offered a celebrated partitioning that is still resonant:
At 15 I set my heart on learning; at 30 I was firmly established; at 40 I
had no more doubts; at 50 I knew the will of Heaven; at 60 I was ready to
listen to it; at 70 I could follow my heart's desire without transgression.
By way of comparison, let us split up a notional (and, because of the power
inequities of our culture, male) 20th century Western lifetime into
somewhat arbitrary but not absurd sectors of 12.5 years. What is more, I
will code these according to parameters of the Jakobson/Bakhtin schema:
From birth to 12.5, early construction of the social self, peaking at
puberty. [PHATIC (establishing communication channels)... seguing into WE
(addressee as social self/ interpellated subjectivity)]
12.5 to 25, the construction of the subject's individual self, peaking at
the establishment of (his) own early parental role. [I (addresser)]
25 to 37.5, emphasis shifting away from individual subjectivity toward
confident dealings with, especially exploration of, the large-scale `real'
or objective world. [IT (world)]
37.5 to 50, the `writing' of (his) self and activity into the world,
peaking with (his) own children rearing their own first children. [TEXT
(theory)]
50 to 62.5, consolidated mastery of the rules of culture and world alike,
peaking with the shift from specific work competences to supervisory roles
and preparation for retirement. [CODE (meta-level)]
62.5 to 75, mature settling into `elder' role, custodian of the mores of
(his) social order, and preparation for death. [PHATIC/ ALGORITHMIC
(intertext)]
One may readily draw comparisons (perhaps all too easily) between this
schema and developmental stages advanced by developmental psychologists of
various competing schools - Jean Piaget (1962, 1979), Arnold Gesell and his
collaborators (1941, 1971), E. H. Erikson (1968), C. Buhler (1968), Jerome
Kagan (1984) - educators such as Candida Peterson (1989), and
anthropologists such as Colin M. Turnbull (1984) and Michael Young (1988).
Erikson's Freudian scheme runs as follows (I add my own suggested
equivalences):
1. Trust/confidence [PHATIC]
2. Autonomy vs. Shame (`ways of behaving') [WE]
3. Initiative vs. Guilt
4. Industry vs. Inferiority (use of tools and skills)
5. Identity vs. Role Confusion (advent of puberty) [I]
6. Intimacy vs. Isolation (true genitality develops) [IT]
7. Generativity vs. Stagnation [TEXT]
8. Ego Integrity vs. Despair [CODE... PHATIC]
While it is an acknowledged defect of Erikson's system that he fails to
develop a full account of mature life, still, the resemblances with my
account are provocative. Note the closure, perhaps as in `stages' of
historical change, from an unformed phatic/rule-learning beginning in
infancy to a sedimented post-code phatic/rule-governed conclusion in the
elderly.
The Six Ages of (hu)Man
Let us assume provisionally that this developmental history reflects a
(somewhat flexible) genetic/cultural clock regulating individual
development with some robustness across many cultures. Clearly, this is
likely to have altered in an unprecedented degree during the 20th century,
when its later phases became stretched out by our own high-tech medical
culture, with delayed or extended child-rearing, healthy maturity, and
senescence. Still, it is feasible that such a grand template might be
assimilated and rehearsed in broad cultural shifts of Jakobsonian Dominant
(within, of course, the limits of each bounded culture or civilisation).
But again we are brought up short. Can science, the realm of
non-intentional objects, be expected to say anything central about the
human condition of subjects? Climatic phases might be recurrent, but aren't
we humans set free of biology, children of self-reflexive, infinitely
mutable culture? While a naturalist such as E. O. Wilson might hope to draw
broad sociobiological lessons from animal behaviour and the processes of
genetic adaptation, these days it is generally regarded as an illicit move
within the humane specialties. The fashion in human studies is `thick
description', empathetic immersion in local ways. Global grand theories of
social structure and change, especially the strongly reductionistic sort
first made popular several decades ago by Desmond Morris, Edward Wilson and
Richard Dawkins, are automatically rejected as misguided and simplistic.
The case is not, however, so simply dismissed. To cite Ernest Gellner once
more:
Most pre-scientific societies... build up a tolerably coherent
world-picture, in which background world-story, social organization, and
natural fact are all congruent. The time-ordering sub-system will tend to
dovetail in with the personal hierarchy sub-system: the big periodic
festival, marking the seasonal rhythm, also underwrites the hieratic
rankings. (Gellner, 1988, p. 60)
Given this traditional interlock, it would not be surprising if the
palpably biological stages of the individual's developmental unfolding were
incorporated into the grander seasons of a society's ebbs and flows. Of
course, each year brings new births and deaths, so one might wonder how a
universal ontogenetic cycle begun anew with each child might be registered
(prior to the epoch of long cycles and their great punctuating global wars)
against the continuum of history.
Hunter-gatherer orders will indeed tend to blend time into timelessness,
disrupted chiefly by random natural catastrophes or rich years, time-bonded
by the round of annual liturgies. Once civil society has precipitated,
however, the clock tends to be set by the accession of chiefs, kings, or
perhaps high priests or prophets and external conquerors. Although somewhat
discontinuous, these events in turn will tend to follow the generational
unfolding of a healthy human family (since kings and priests live well, if
spared in battle). And, as we have seen, it is possible that ecology itself
provides a calibration mechanism, chiefly through modulations or ripples in
the prevalence of game or agricultural produce, perhaps via biological
adaptation to such roughly boom-and-bust dietary cycles.
Cultural Stages
The surmise that the historical variety of human cultures might comprise a
taxonomy is by no means exploded. Ernest Gellner, for example, sees history
as passing through three great phases: hunting/gathering, agrarian, and
industrial (Gellner, 1988, p. 16ff). `These three kinds of society differ
from each other so radically as to constitute fundamentally different
species, notwithstanding the very great and important diversity which also
prevails within each of these categories' (ibid.) Anthropologist Marvin
Harris (1979), a cultural materialist, lists a larger variety of social
orders - which I construe as sub-divisions of Gellner's - comprising a kind
of evolutionary trajectory. That is not necessarily to say a predictable
one, but certainly one that makes sense, step by step, in hindsight, in the
way that a cladistic diagram makes sense of branching evolutionary
histories. Nor, I hope, is it absurd to map this sequence against the
emergence of certain privileged domains of subjectivity. The speculative
attributions to Harris's classifications shown in brackets are mine:
Hunter-Gatherer bands (phatic/algorithmic);
Pre-State Villages (we);
Chiefdoms (I/charismatic authority);
Low Energy Centralised States (world/it);
Industrial States (theory);
Post-Industrial States (code... phatic/algorithmic).
I cannot stress too strongly that this arrangement does not imply any
`immaturity' in members of extant pre-industrial cultures, or any `savage
mind' more primal or concrete than our own blessed state.
[etc etc blah]
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