Can history be quantified?

Can the history of culture be quantified? I believe many historians would answer this question in the negative. The prevailing view seems to be that historical events are unique and unrepeatable, and any attempt to discover laws or recurring patterns in these phenomena is usually met with extreme suspicion. Let us remember as an example the antagonistic reaction provoked by works such as The Decline of the West by the German philosopher and historian Oswald Spengler, or A Study of History by the British historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee, whose conclusions, however, were based on qualitative analysis. It is not surprising, therefore, that to find true quantifiers of history, one must turn to authors who were not professional historians.

Historical quantification of violence

Auchswitz

In a recent conference that I heard, the speaker said that in recent times violence in the world has decreased a lot. She added that many people have the feeling that it is the other way around, that we have now more violence than ever before. Is what she said true, or is what people think true?

Let’s start by defining violence. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines it like this: An act of physical force that causes or is intended to cause harm.

Systems of truth and knowledge

Pitirim Sorokin

Pitirim Sorokin was one of the main sociologists of the 20th century, perhaps the best. One of his masterpieces is titled Social and Cultural Dynamics, where he makes an analysis of the history of civilizations parallel to that carried out independently by the philosopher Oswald Spengler, the historian Arnold J. Toynbee and the anthropologist A.L. Kroeber. In one of the 42 chapters of this work, Sorokin distinguishes seven systems of truth and knowledge, which can be grouped into three large groups:

1.      Ideational systems: they are based on the truth of faith. The principle of truth is God, who provides truth through revelation, divine inspiration, mystical experience, and so forth. In this group, Sorokin classifies three systems of truth and knowledge:

About the social order

In a comment to the Spanish version of a previous article in this blog, JI Gs wrote this:

All societies have an explicit social order, whether they are fundamentally believers or not in the immaterial; even animal societies, let alone insects, have a strict social order and the immaterial has no need to act to generate it or to maintain it.

I have two considerations to make:

Solitary bee (Megachile) and social bee (Apis)

• Comparing human societies with insect societies is a false step. The human social order is based on a set of moral rules that has remained fairly constant over time, except in relation to sexual morality (see the appendix to The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis). The social order of insects is programmed in their genes and their nervous system. While in the human species it is possible, even frequent, that one or more members of society rebel against one or more rules, or even attempt to overthrow the entire social order, the members of insect societies cannot rebel. In other words, man is conscious and free, insects are not. Any comparison between them is out of place, because they are based on totally different structures.

Turgenev and unhappy love

Alfred L. Kroeber

Together with Spengler, Toynbee and Sorokin, the American anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber was one of the four great philosophers of history in the twentieth-century. Father of the famous science fiction writer, Ursula Kroeber Le Guin, A.L. Kroeber hypothesized that cultural configurations begin with a precursor genius, continue with a stage of maximum bloom, and then enter a period of decay, more or less extended in time.

The history of Russia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries provides two perfect examples for Kroeber’s analysis, two astonishingly parallel and simultaneous configurations in two different fields of culture: literature and music.

• In Russian literature we can point to a clear precursor (Pushkin), a time of maximum bloom (Gogol, Lermontov, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chekhov), and a period of slow decline (the Russian authors of the twentieth century).
• In Russian music there was also a precursor (Glinka), a period of maximum flowering (Borodin, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov) and another of slow decay (Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich).

The origin of violence

Pitirim Sorokin

On the question of violence and evil in society there are three fundamental theories:

1. Every human being is a battlefield between good and evil and carries with him strong tendencies towards evil and violence. It is necessary to educate him in moral values, ​​to teach him to control his impulses.
2. Man is good by nature, society makes him bad. Education must try to keep us as much as possible in our original natural state, the good savage. This is the theory of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
3. Man is good by nature, everything bad is a consequence of a poorly focused education. The solution is education in the gender ideology, which is dominant today.

What does science say (in this case, Sociology)?

One of the most important sociologists of the 20th century, the Russian-American Pitirim Sorokin, wrote the following in his book Society, Culture and Personality (Chapter VI, Factors of Solidarity and Antagonism):