One of my favourite bands of the 80s was Split Enz, out of which Crowded House evolved. And one of their best songs was titled "History never repeats", a sentiment that seems to be fairly widespread. Recently, I started Dawkins' latest book (what is it with established writers on evolution? Gould's brick was immensely in need of editing, and so is The Ancestor's Tale). The first epigram is attributed to Mark Twain:
History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes
Compare this with the somewhat later claim by American philosopher Georges Santayana:
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
The notion of history as a cyclical, or perhaps iterative, process is ancient, of course. I'll resist the temptation to do the historical review (no matter how badly I want to!), but the notion of an eternal recurrence is, well, recurring in western and non-western thinking.
Oddly, the Twain comment doesn't appear to be from Twain, although I can assure you the Santayana comment is authentic. But why does this view of history seem to persist, and does history, in fact, rhyme?
The notion of history that we have is a mishmash of conflicting ideas. The ancient view that things kept recurring, found in Heine and Nietzsche, is based on the commonsense idea that societies have similarities across time. Toynbee, popular in the early years of the 20th century, especially with science fiction writers, repeated the idea that empires have a predetermined path to tread, and as Rome went, so too will modern societies. This would be, in biological terms, an ontogenetic view of history, a term I choose carefully, because August Comte, the founder of positivism, held that societies literally have a life cycle, that moves from the "theological", to the "metaphysical", to the "positive". He was not the first, but the developmental aspect is pretty clear. There is an inner formative force, an entelechy as it came to be known in biology, that drives cultures and societies through these stages.
Of course, Comte was optimistic. The positive stage was supposed to be the maturation of society, and the cycle here was cross-societal. He didn't think each society underwent cycles. As each society matures to the positive stage, it will settle down into long-term stability. In this respect, Marx is a Comtean positivist. Toynbee's view is more pessimistic - it is inevitable that societies will collapse under their own decadence. They age, and die, in effect, and new ones are born.
Recurrence is based on a macrocosm-microcosm view - as below, so above. This view, which comes to us via the alchemical-mystical tradition of the Renaissance and earlier, holds that large things are just like small things, and so history is itself a kind of organism-lineage, with societies as the organisms. There are strong functional reasons why societies must go through the generation-decay cycle, it is thought.
But historical thinking in the west is also informed by another rather distinct tradition - the Christian, and to a lesser extent Jewish and Islamic, eschatological tradition. Eschatology is the theological subdiscipline that studies the "last days" (eschaton), and if you have last days, and a beginning, then you have an arrow of history. Moreover, there is no need for repetition - the hand of Providence, or the Divine Plan, unfolds as it should, and it may even be there is progress (or the inverse) over time. So the unidirectional view of history is also in our conceptual heritage.
There are many attempts to reconcile eternal recurrence and eschatology. Marx and Engel's dialectic view of history, and its precursors, is unidirectional until the proletariat - the last alienated class that is subjugated to class warfare - is liberated and a classless society arrives. Surely this is the Promised Land, the Kingdom of, well not Heaven but a free society. The cycling of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, of ruling class being overthrown by the next class down, and the new order then setting up a new ruling class, is itself a limited cycling in Marxian terms. Eschatology limits Recurrence.
In modern historiography, the two views are secularised. Recurrence becomes functionalism - institutions exist because similar conditions generate similar institutions. Eschatology becomes a narrative view of paricular histories. Each society and each institution has its own, unique, history. How can we reconcile them?
After the first world war, the naive Enlightenment faith in progress began to dissipate. Researchers began to move away from a positivistic account of social evolution, and stress the relativity, and the particularity, of differing societies. Functional accounts of society became the standard ones, but each functional and structural system was its own kind.
What seems not to have been realised outside the biological community, and not even entirely within it, is that Darwin's notion of what later came to be known as "phylogeny" introduced a novel way of viewing history. Of course, it had been implicit in the view of language evolution first proposed as a tree structure by William Jones, and slightly before Darwin by August Schleicher.
Of course, tree diagrams go back much further than either of these, and the crucial element is time - traditional classifications used a top-down tree structure, while Jones, Schleicher and Darwin introduced differentiation over time instead. What is different about this view of history, is that each branch of the tree is unique, even if there are similarities of function between them. These similarities of function are called "homoplasies", a term coined by E. Ray Lankester, and they obscure rather than elucidate the historical relations between organisms and taxa. But they do, indeed, rhyme.
Darwinian historiography is a late development in the thinking of the west, and it is a hard thing to maintain. Dawkins is trying, despite his tendency to functionalism, to deal with the particular nature of biological history, and the points he makes in Ancestor's Tale are based on this new view, which is best captured, I believe, in the taxonomic philosophy that has come to be known as "cladism". On this view, history is recovered, or at least tested against, patterns of shared derived traits (called synapomorphies in the idosyncratic terminology of the discipline), but you have to eliminate first the convergently derived homoplasies. Once you have a tree, you can work out whether homoplasies have evolved more than once.
Older evolutionist taxonomies would lump together homoplasies on functional (that is adaptationist) grounds. An egregious example was half-seriously suggested by Julian Huxley (grandson of the Bulldog) - Psychozoa (the class of organisms that have reached the "grade of organisation" in which psychological complexity allows cultural evolution). Grade based classifications are fundamentally ahistorical. If meerkats evolved into the grade in twenty million years, they would be members of that grade. Ironically, this is the essay in which the term "clade" (meaning "branch" in Greek) was first coined. Clade based classifications are historical, even though we may not know the exact sequence that generated the clades.
When history rhymes, it is because we have not attended to the differences between particular historical institutions or processes, but the similarities. When we attend to the differences, though, recurrence evaporates. The reason why inferences from someone's or something's being a part of an institution or culture to the shared characters of that culture work is because, basically, they share the ancestry or heritage of that tardition or group. The reason why grade based classifications work is simply because we have pre-specified what it is we want to attend to. In short, the rhymes are in our interests, and the discords or diversity is in the things themselves.
But there'll never be a band as good as Split Enz, again...
Huxley, Julian (1957), "Evolution, cultural and biological", in New bottles for new wine. London: Chatto and Windus, 61-92.
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The concept of rhyming is all about similarities within differences. We don't normally think of a word as rhyming with itself.
Do I take you correctly as saying that differences are more fundamental than similarities? If so, I must disagree. At the very least, the rhymes are in nature's interests as well as our own. This is particularly obvious in biogeography. Convergent evolution on different continents provides examples, but so do biomes. (Southern California has vegetation similar to that of coastal Chile, the Mediterranean, the tip of South Africa, and southwestern Australia.) Human perceptions are involved in this classification, of course, but so is an underlying ecological reality.
Well it does, but that's beside the point. The issue is that there are an indefinitely large (possibly infinite - I stay away from Cantorian sets if I can) number of similarities between any two things, a point made by Locke, among others. You can find a "rhyme" anywhere if you want to. Whether those rhymes are important is, fundamentally, theoretical. And that means that if you shift your theoretical focus, the rhymes will evaporate.
Not exactly. I think that if you want to make inferences between disparate things, the best way to organise them is by gathering them on the basis of dissimilarities. The result will be robust (or more robust; there's no magic method for "natural" classifications) for making inductive inferences. If you know, for instance, that cats are more closely related to each other than any of them is to dogs, and a cat has a certain enzyme that dogs don't, then inductively you can infer that all ormost cats will have that enzyme.
Take the biogeographic case you mention. If the similarities are due to shared derived traits, then the arrangment is inductively robust. Biomes that have a shared "age:area" relationship will have similar flora and fauna, and inductively you can make some generalisations about them. But if they don't, then all you can infer is deductive - you get out of your classification only what (functional or other) similarities you put into them.
But this is the topic of a later post...
> I stay away from Cantorian sets if I can
Arguably, Cantor's theory is an attempt to answer all the wrong questions, and can thus be ignored. I don't say that this view is right! Only that it's an acceptable view, and might give you a good excuse to avoid the maths. :--)
Jason
As you know from recent experience, I share with Darwin an almost pathological fear of actual maths.
Certainly there are repetitions in history, because certain situations occur fairly regularly. Each of the following points represents recent and not-so-recent bits of "history". People always have many options for dealing with the troubles of their time, but it's really helpful to know what worked for the last guy who faced this problem.
Volcanos are damn rich soil, so people *will* go to farm and live on and around them. Ditto for tidal basins, for different reasons. Never mind "safe", people have to make a living....
A prince brought up with excessive privilege (and maybe a bit of inbreeding), might not make the best king as an adult.
At any given time, there are liable to be a few nutcases conspiring against the government. Occasionally one will actually do something.
Once a dictator realizes he can have anyone he dislikes killed, he eventually comes to notice that he really doesn't like all that many people.
There are some people who are willing to treat law and loyalty as negotiable. Some of them will also have power.
I'm looking at a similar subject over on my blog, although from a different angle. (Please note, my quip about reading philosophy being similar to medieval torture did not refer to anyone around here... I always find reading your philosophical views a pleasure, John.)
My mom is a history teacher, so I grew up hearing that if I failed history, I'd be doomed to repeat it. (Oh how that phrase makes me smirk, now.) But seriously... if all of nature arises from a common source, increasing in diversity over time, just as the universe increases in entropy from a common source, then wouldn't the differences be just as fundamental as the similarities?
Any situation we encounter is based on the results of the last situation, but usually in a unique arrangement. We have to assume things will be similar to the way they were, even if we can't be certain of how, or how much. Learning from a past mistake offers a small advantage when a new situation arises--a slight enough advantage that we've acquired many specializations in learning.
Also, John, as much as I love my fractals and geometry, math scares the crap out of me, too.
I preferred A. Whitney Brown's take on it. History doesn't repeat itself: historians repeat each other. Its not some great cosmic design or coincidence. It's merely a bad case of plagiarism.
Seriously, I see a few trends in this worth noting. The difference seems to be do they look at the similarities or the differences when looking at things.
Scholars with an eye for prediction in a regular, scientific way, tend to look for patterns (and thus, often see them...most of the time, its because they're there).
The religiously driven, particularly those with an eye for the end-times, seem to look solely at the differences.
So where a historian sees patterns in societal development and progress, the other only looks at the differences and asserts that his society is nothing like "that" (often because the other feels that they're part of the "chosen" ones blessed to a different fate of everybody else).
Where the biologist sees patterns of evolution and ecological progress (predator-prey relationships, predator trends like forward-facing eyes and strong sense of smell), the creationist only sees "each according to its kind" - differences are significant and proof of a varied designer, ecological niches proof that the creator loves those creatures to give them what they need.
> As you know from recent experience, I share with Darwin an
> almost pathological fear of actual maths.
Einstein was also unfond of maths. I wonder whether that's a coincidence, or whether avoiding maths helps to concentrate one's mind on the overall structure of a theory.
(Disclaimer: I'm not saying that Einstein was BAD at maths. On the contrary, seems to me he was very good at maths. I'm just saying he was much less fond of it than a lot of his peers were.)
So, lessee.. Einstein was unfond of maths. I am much more unfond of maths than Einstein. THEREFORE I am smarter than Eistein. Right? Did I get it right?
Joe, I'm pretty sure that those who think specific cases in history are their own thing are not being "creationists", necessarily. They are attending to the contingencies and unique causes of those cases. It is often the case that "creationist" thinking applies far more to those who strive to find functional similarities, although I have to say I think there is nothing wrong with a measured functionalism either.
Gradism is one kind of scientific enterprise. Without it we'd not have Mendele'ev's table of elements. But elements remain the same in all times and places, while historical objects don't. So similarities in history - the ones that matter, anyway, are down to historical influence, a kind of social inheritance (AKA the diffusionist model). And this is genealogical thinking, of which Cladism is an instance.
Not only Rhyme, but also Rhythym. Alas, no Rheason ;)