And so will be our way out

When looking at history to understand its lessons and discern where we are coming from, there are, broadly speaking, two competing schools of thought: one sees history as the product of mind, that is, what people thought and were up to. This is called idealism, and it is decisively out of fashion.

The other sees history as the result of material pressures, such as economic developments or natural and other external conditions. It is called materialism, and it is what we are all conditioned to believe in these days.

To claim that material conditions play no role in human affairs — and therefore history — would be absurd, obviously. But ever since sociology, Marx, and the so-called “social sciences” came on the scene in the 19th century, we have forgotten that at the end of the day, humans do stuff because, well, they think about doing it first; they find reasons to do so based on their world views, priorities, and ways of thinking.

You might argue that sometimes, people have no choice: before they starve due to famine, for example, or when threatened with death-by-flood, they will inevitably migrate. But these are limit cases, and claiming that this means history just churns along on autopilot, and that human behavior is simply caused by external circumstances, would be to commit what I have called the limit case fallacy: taking an extreme case where complexity collapses into a single dimension, abstracting some law from it, and then slapping the law back on the 99% of other cases that are not limit cases. This is left brain hemisphere nonsense on steroids.

Besides, humans arguably always have a choice. People have been known to override even their sense of survival and accept certain death in the name of a higher ideal. If someone strongly believes that cannibalism is worse than death, he will rather die than eat his fellow men. And if he believes that leaving his land would be a sin against his soul, he might take his chances with flood and famine rather than migrating.

Most cases are not that extreme, though. It’s easy to claim, for instance, that the industrialization drew peasants to the cities because of better wages. But the fact is, not all did that. And to understand why those who did decided to do so, we need to know about their thinking, their reasons: what did they value? Why did they have those values, and how did they develop them? Why didn’t they see a future living on the land anymore? What were they looking for? What happened to their culture before then? Who were the movers and shakers of the zeitgeist at the time, and what were their motivations?

While we are at it: who decided that industrialization was a good idea to begin with? You can’t separate it from the radical shift away from traditional religious ideas and towards worship of science and technology in the 18th and 19th centuries, to name just one aspect. And you can’t separate that from earlier developments in the history of ideas, such as the Enlightenment emphasis on reason and knowledge. And even that is not straight-forward: reason and knowledge could have ushered in a flourishing of non-materialist cosmologies and studies that go beyond both religious and empiricist dogma, which indeed was a huge driving force during Enlightenment times, as I’ve talked about before. But alas, it went differently. That the industrialization happened, and happened the way it did, is dependent on a whole slew of developments in people’s outlook, what R.G. Collingwood called absolute presuppositions (see my essay about it here).

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