Another Year or Two, 2007-2008

We are near the mid-point of the celebration or grieving which takes place about this time every year. Celebration happens among those who feel good. Grieving grips those who don't. We are at the mid-point because different societies use different calendars. Chinese New Year 4706 won't happen until Feb. 7, 2008 (Year of the Rat), while the Japanese celebrate the end of Winter Jan. 1-3. The next Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) 5770 is Oct. 1, 2008. (Or, Rosh Hashanah was last Sept. 29.) Then there are the fiscal new years which take place all the time, most of them happening six months from now. In the United States, New/Old Year celebrations have been going on since Thanksgiving for a variety of reasons, most of them related to money. The American celebration ends when the money runs out, which seems to have happened recently, sometime before Dec. 25, 2007. Calendars based on money run out of glow at different times each year.

The Winter solstice festival has an ancient origin, based on fear of the sun vanishing forever. The sun's recession toward the Equator inspires one of two reactions in many people: fear and trembling or wild celebration. Those who desperately want to go on living are among the fearful, so they do whatever it takes to placate the spirits assumed to control solar brilliance. On the other hand, the imminence of death provokes orgies among those determined to live it up at least once. The orgiastic aspect of solstice is responsible for Mardi Gras, the modern descendant of Roman Saturnalia, which occurs sometime after the depths of Winter and before the visible onset of Spring. The calendrical  time of these festivals wanders because calendars wandered until modern times, mostly due to errors in reckoning the Earthly year, but also by fiat of religious and secular authorities. The Ides of March, for example, occurred at the end of Winter, around the time of the Solar Equinox. The Ides was the Roman taxing date, now changed in America to April 15, because, in both Empires, sufficient time was deemed to have passed for taxpayers to reckon and settle their accounts for the previous calendar year. Tax Day definitely ends any preceding celebratory period everywhere, confirming the close connection between Winter and celebrations. Spring everywhere starts a New Year, so Winter ends it.

For a technical civilization, none of that matters except Tax Day and fiscal years: days of reckoning. Sooner or later, there is always a reckoning. Even those who "got away with it" do not escape accounting for their deeds. Of course, that's not the same thing as Justice being done; it is more like an indictment than a jury's decision.

Coming Events

Most people are interested in resolutions, predictions and prophesies at this time of year, which is probably an outgrowth of the ancient insecurity arising from the sun's minimal appearance. Resolutions are human attempts to propitiate the gods, whereas prophesies are our attempt to discern what the gods will do anyway. Predictions are different: they are a road map of the future. Predictions allow the cognoscenti to avoid dead ends or forestall unpleasant maledictions, and to proceed on the Yellow Brick Road to the great Emerald City.

In the past, I gave my opinions of future happenings. For the most part, I stopped doing that. Nevertheless, I still have a few opinions about the future which I am willing to hazard.

Most of the time, American Presidential election years are good for American stock markets, unless there is going to be a regime change. 2008 is very likely to be a regime change year, which means markets are likely to be volatile and depressive until the outcome is clearer. I think things will settle before next September. After that phase change, markets will definitely head up or down depending on how the financial wizards (who are usually ultra-conservative) evaluate the Administration on offer.

The Presidential elections begin in earnest later this week, Jan. 3, 2008, in Iowa. I don't know how they will turn out, and I make no endorsement of any candidate. To my ears, fmr. Sen. John Edwards sounds most realistic about the condition of the United States, but I doubt he will make it to the goal post. Sen. Hilary Clinton seems most likely to be the next President. I am pretty sure Wall St. prefers Clinton to Huckabee, but not to Giuliani.

Again, I don't know who will get elected. I believe whoever is seated in the Oval Office will probably change little or nothing. John Edwards is right: we need a Teddy or Franklin Roosevelt. Unfortunately, Americans are unlikely to elect such a person, even if a worthy successor were immediately and obviously before us. The Clintons and Giulianis of this world go along to get along, which suits the dominant, conformist Baby Boom mentality. Of course, my views are biased by the conclusions of my previous studies: I think the United States is past the point of no return: its problems cannot be fixed. While I find the products of those studies personally upsetting  I would much prefer a more hopeful statement that justifies activism  it is likely that whoever gets elected will make little or no difference in the eventual outcome. I think the inability of Congressional Democrats to fulfill their election promises or accomplish much else, even when they are the majority,  supports my attitude. For that reason, I have not paid much attention  to American electoral politics since the 2004 election.

Apple Trees

I had a long talk a few days ago, which gravitated to the question whether apples fall far from the tree. This, of course, is the quintessential debate about evolution: whether it is gradual, as Charles Darwin claimed, or punctuated, as Stephen J. Gould insisted. If it is punctuated, as I think it is, how much punctuation is there? Can human being change things around willy-nilly however they may decide?

My view is that, most of the time, apples do not fall far from the tree, but that, occasionally, something happens and things are changed. As I argued in The Graduate Student's Question, culture is highly conservative, changing only slowly. Big cultural changes only come about as a result of revolutions or social collapse. Social collapse changes a culture by ending it, allowing another culture to replace it. Revolutions change cultures by transforming beliefs, habits and rituals; i.e., the way people think and act. These revolutions need not be instant or violent, as happened in France and Russia. They can be subtle, as in the 20th century scientific revolutions. What defines a revolution is an abrupt  change of thought and behavior, not how it is accomplished. Thus, revolutions can be matters of choice, not just events forced on people.

The modern period, starting with the Enlightenment and ending recently with the advent of in post-modernism, was the most revolutionary and violent period of History. Despite our fascination with ancient struggles, such as the Peloponnesian Wars, modern wars far exceeded ancient ones in scale and scope, as well as principles at stake. The endless modern religious or ideological wars, including the Cold War, were about social forms and culture. What was at stake was what each person would believe and do. No civilization until the modern ones had the power to enforce a totalitarian grip on everyone. Of course, those wars are not entirely over: there is the revanchist Islamic threat commonly called "terrorism." But I am confident people will abandon the Jihadists and others of that ilk in the long run, just as little by little the ancient hatreds in Ireland and the Balkans are being set aside. We can have a peaceful world, if only we are sufficiently persistent and consistent about it. (We cannot arrive at peace through more war.)

So, I look upon modernity and its aftermath as an example of cultural revolution, a case where the apple did, in fact, fall far from the tree. But the apple fell farther as a successive line of new trees, each growing faster than before, not by one leap and bound from the parent of them all. This generational change was possible because culture is acquired; i.e., cultural evolution is Lamarckian, not Darwinian.

History

 I hold that History, which is the recorded part of Universal history, is chaotic. That term does not mean History is random and without order. Chaotic systems are orderly (patterned) for varying periods, but subject to sudden shifts; i.e., they are metastable. Also, "orderly" does not mean predictable in the old, Newtonian sense of cause and effect. "Orderly" means there is a pattern to systemic behavior (e.g., we can observe cycles), but chaotic systems are unpredictable with respect to the particular orbit they will follow. At best, we can only make a statistical estimate of the path to be followed.

Because History is chaotic, it is impossible to predict the future exactly, even if we perceive a pattern of activity. This sort of situation confronts the weatherman every day. Local weather patterns are reasonably predictable, based on knowledge of air flow, temperature, pressure and other factors. Nonetheless, local weather is the result of the chaotic behavior of the climate system. Chaotic systems can exhibit local order (seeming cause and effect) in the midst of global disorder.

For my money, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs & Steel is still the most compelling explanation of how the modern world arrived. Despite a myriad of contenders, no other work captures so well what happened before the Industrial Revolution. The Europeans came to dominate the world because they took full advantage of several accidents of nature. In addition, their dominance encouraged belief in themselves as the master race which, in turn, justified their willingness to enslave and murder others. Adolph Hitler was only the latest in a long line of white supremacists that emerged after the Renaissance.

Please note: the European conquest of this planet was substantially complete before the Industrial Revolution. The most important event in modern History was the "discovery" of the Americas. Europeans found in the New World a source of wealth and huge lands available for colonization. European confinement to a peninsula of the Eurasian continent ended with Columbus' voyage, regardless of who "owned" the new settlements. It took more than two centuries after Columbus to establish the human outlines of the modern Americas. It required the imposition of slavery on imported Africans and serfdom on native American Indians to tame the land, European style. The wealth and space of the New World gave impetus to the population explosion that started in the 17th century.

The Renaissance and Reformation broke the spirit of Medieval Europe just as the New World was opened in the 16th century. I think newly found wealth and territories inspired the notion that every man could be a King, thus breaking the great Chain of Being. For the adventurous, things did not have to be as they had always been. That sort of thinking was everywhere at that time. The break with the past was only partly self-conscious: Europeans thought they were seeking the wisdom of the ancients, but actually created their own accounts of the world. At the same time, Europeans were encumbered with ancient preoccupations; e.g., Newton was an alchemist. Thus, the modern world did not spring full grown, an Athena from the brain of Zeus, but went through many fetal transformations before its birth. First we were a fish, then a frog, and only later a monkey, before landing naked and bawling on this planet. Even then, our chameleon existence was not ended, as we tried many more suits before assuming our present shapes and colors.

The Industrial Revolution started in the 18th century, probably a result of the scientific philosophies invented by the likes of Descartes, Leibniz and Newton. The most important idea of the time was the machine: the automaton that did our work for us. That was indeed a revolutionary idea, as it threw out the ancient Biblical injunction about having to work to eat. For some reason, that adoption of machinery which we call the Industrial Revolution did not take hold until the 18th century, even though people had used machines since ancient times. But, once the Industrial Revolution started, there was no stopping it. The principles and early models of almost all modern machinery were developed before the Victorian era. For example, an early version of automated equipment was the Jacquard Loom developed in Napoleonic France. Another invention of Napoleonic France was the tin can, which made modern warfare and grocery stores possible. The British developed the steam engine and railroad, but those inventions only came of age during the Victorian era in the United States and continental Europe (particularly Russia), where long distances and few roads separated trading centers.

There is something different about modernity not accounted in British culture, contrary to the claims of  Prof. Gregory Clark (Farewell to Alms). Modern Empires are not solely about toleration, as identified by Amy Chua (Day of Empire). There has been a burst of ingenuity unprecedented in History which has enabled more and more human beings to live in security and comfort. The practice of scientific method to discover knowledge systematically, and the rapid, widespread application of that knowledge in tested engineering techniques, is unique to our species. There's a downside to this ability: the catastrophic wars in the 20th century. The upside is the human ability to control its destiny. That is, we became capable of social choice.

Now it remains to choose wisely.

Posted 01/02/2008 09:35:19 AM                Last update: 01/02/2008

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