Confirmation and Disconfirmation in History

12th February 2012

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Confirmation and Disconfirmation in History

I’ve written several posts in which I discuss the idea that particular ideas can be confirmed or disconfirmed by history, and most especially I mean those socioeconomic ideas that are implemented in political ideologies. I haven’t yet produced any definitive formulation of this question, but I find it very interesting and continue to think about it and occasionally to write about it.

The two most obvious examples, and those which I have discussed most frequently, are the argument that communism was “refuted” or somehow disconfirmed by the end of the Cold War and the collapse of Soviet power, and the argument being made today that the recent financial panic has “refuted” free market capitalism, or that the latter was somehow disconfirmed by recent historical events.

These two positions are obviously argued by different sets of persons, with a very small (but not substantial) overlap. Implicit in each position is the idea that, if Soviet communism has been refuted by history, then its alternative (presumably liberal democracy) has triumphed, or that if free market capitalism has been refuted by history, then its alternative (presumably some form of planned, centralized, or communal economics) has triumphed (or will triumph in the near future).

These socioeconomic ideas and their attempted implementations can be brought under the Clausewitzean umbrella by way of invoking the Clausewitzean doctrine that war is the continuation of politics by other means (and Foucault’s inversion of this, that politics is the continuation of war by other means), and when these socioeconomic ideas are brought under the Clausewitzean umbrella, we would do well to remind ourselves what Clausewitz had to say about any decision in a war:

Lastly, even the final decision of a whole war is not always to be regarded as absolute. The conquered state often sees in it only a passing evil, which may be repaired in after times by means of political combinations. How much this also must modify the degree of tension and the vigour of the efforts made is evident in itself. (On War, Bk. 1, Ch. 1, sec. 9)

And so it is with socioeconomic conflict: the final decision cannot be regarded as absolute. Just when you think that an idea is finished and cannot be resurrected again, having become so tainted by its historical record that it is essentially untouchable, that idea will rise again transmogrified, presented to the world as a novelty, reinvented for a new generation.

This is a complicated issue because it touches on both essence and accident. That is to say, there are both intrinsic properties of the ideas that drive this process of being discredited and returning anew, as well as extrinsic accidents of history that contribute to the phenomenon. Moreover, there are intrinsic properties of history itself, aside from the ideologies that are perpetuated throughout history, that also drive the circular process of the waxing and waning influence of an idea.

Elsewhere I have called such ideas that seem to lie beyond historical validation or refutation “perennial ideas.” If I wanted to give them a suitably insulting name, I could call them “zombie ideas” because they seem to come back from the dead. If I wanted to given them a kinder label, I could call them “evergreen ideas.”

In any case, the contemporary debate over what contemporary history has proved or disproved is only the most recent iteration of a long history of existential debates that have drawn in entire communities, who see their identity as being at stake in the ebb and flow of history, and who therefore approach the problem with bias and motive that compromises both objectivity and integrity.

If language and historical record-keeping had been available when homo sapiens left Africa and moved into the Neanderthal inhabited areas of Europe and elsewhere, I have no doubt that the debate over what happened — debated today by archaeologists, anthropologists, and biologists — would also be debated by historians. This may have been the great existential conflict of prehistory, and a crucial turning point in paleolithic life.

Perhaps the greatest existential debate in Western civilization in historical times is that of the dissolution of the Roman Empire and the rise of Christianity. At some point it became obvious that Roman civilization was coming apart at the seams. Many ancient pagans blamed the creeping Christianization of the Roman world for this civilizational decline. Saint Augustine responded vigorously in his City of God that it was not the Christians who were the problem, but the Romans themselves and their gods.

In other words, late antique pagans thought that the decline of the Empire proved that Christianity had been refuted by history, while early Christians viewed their own success and the decline of Rome as proof of their validation by historical events. (Sometimes we call this latter attitude “triumphalism.”)

Given some notable peculiarities of the Western religious tradition — namely, the insistence on the historical truth of mythology, which may well be a result of the rejection of the cyclical conception of history in favor of a linear conception of history — Christians were uniquely placed both to make the argument and to believe the argument that historical events uniquely validated their position in the world.

Ultimately, this early existential debate in western history was a debate over different philosophies of history, much as the debate over collective/cooperativist thought and free market thought in the present day is ultimately an existential debate over different philosophies of history (which is something that I recently tried to show in Gödel’s Lesson for Geopolitics). With this is mind, it is remarkable the Western civilization has been so torn by differences over the philosophy of history. These conflicts, in fact, have been generative of much of the Western tradition, so we cannot regard these existential debates as accidental or incidental.

Entire divisions of macro-history, it seems, have been defined by existential choice. Was Western civilization constituted by conflict over differing philosophies of history, or were these existential conflicts over competing philosophies of history generated by the essential character of Western civilization? Which came first, the chicken or the egg?