Thought Experiment on a Science of Civilization

Sunday

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Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1949. Photograph by John E. Fletcher and Anthony B. Stewart.

Supplement to an Addendum

Recently I posted Technological Civilization: Second Addendum to Part III, in which I employed a thought experiment to explore what I call the Marxian Thesis, which is the idea that the intellectual superstructure of a civilization is determined by its economic infrastructure. That post was an addendum on the series of posts investigating the nature of technological civilization, which is, in turn, a device I am using to take technological civilization as a lens with which to focus on civilization simpliciter. This post is a supplement to that addendum, following up on the thought experiment of the addendum with another thought experiment that leads us in a different direction–but still a thought experiment exploring the idea of civilization, and especially the possibility of a scientific study of civilization.

In my Euclid/Darwin swap thought experiment I thought about the possibility of an ancient Darwin introducing natural selection during classical antiquity, but civilization would have to wait for a Victorian Euclid to introduce higher mathematics and axiomatics into history. How different would the history of western civilization be under these circumstances? Wouldn’t a scientific biology have been a much greater benefit to early agricultural civilizations than advanced mathematics? Another kind of thought experiment in historical counterfactuals could derive from swapping existing figures with non-existent figures. This may sound rather curious, but I will try to explain what I mean by this.

In my previous post I noted that Euclid and Darwin both wrote books that defined a discipline. Euclid wrote The Elements while Darwin wrote his Origin of Species. There are other examples of definitive works, for example, Clausewitz’s On War and Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. In the present context I want to especially focus on Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations, but I suppose I could just as well take Clausewitz as my example: both Smith and Clausewitz represent the application of Enlightenment ideals of scientific knowledge to a particular domain of human experience and activity. For Smith, it was economics; for Clausewitz, it was war.

Adam Smith published his The Wealth of Nations at the high water mark of the Enlightenment. The book was immediately influential, and arguably has only grown in influence since then. Smith’s book effectively created the modern discipline of economics, much as Darwin’s Origins effectively created scientific biology. There were books on economics written before Adam Smith (as there were books about biology written before Darwin), but earlier economics treatises (like earlier biological treatises) did not provide the conceptual framework adequate for the foundation of a discipline on scientific principles. One could say that the financial needs of the industrial revolution meant that someone would inevitably formulate a scientific economics (and this would be evidence for the Marxian Thesis), but we have already seen that this does not always happen. One could equally well claim that the biological needs of agricultural civilization would have inevitably resulted in a scientific biology, but this did not happen.

Suppose that, instead of Adam Smith initiating the development of scientific economics during the Enlightenment, or in addition to this, some other scientific discipline, viz. one not yet in existence today, had its origins during the Enlightenment. So this is my sense of a thought experiment that involves swapping an existing person and text with a non-existent person or text. Suppose we swap Adam Smith and The Wealth of Nations with a non-existent founder of a science of civilization and a definitive book that initiated the development of the scientific study of civilization. In this scenario, some author writes a definitive text on a science of civilization in the late 18^th century or early 19^th century more-or-less single-handedly formulating an adequate conceptual framework for the study of civilization and creating a social science with civilization as its special object of scientific investigation. This text then goes on to be the basis of an ongoing scholarly tradition, so that a science of civilization beginning in the Enlightenment grows into a formal academic discipline with entire departments of universities devoted to its study.

It should be noted that the social sciences during the Enlightenment were far behind the development of the natural sciences, with which latter the scientific revolution began. There was no parallel development of the social sciences (much less a science of civilization) on the order of what was going on in physics, chemistry, biology, and geology at this time. However, this near total absence of an equally well developed social science tradition did not stop Adam Smith from initiating modern economics as a social science discipline. Perhaps economics was the first social science to assume a modern form, and it may be relevant that economics is the most formalized and mathematized of the social sciences today. If we take history to be a social science, then history is certainly far older than economics, but history stagnated from classical antiquity until the modern period, and did not become the basis of a growing social science tradition in the way that economics became something of a template for the social sciences that would follow in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

We can even speculate on how a social science of civilization might have come about during the Enlightenment. There was a time in the late 18^th century and the early 19^th century–the late Enlightenment, when both Adam Smith and Kant were active–when an individual with sufficient resources could have traveled the world almost as extensively as today, if a bit more slowly. This was at the same time when young English noblemen took the “Grand Tour” of Italy (cf. Brian Sewell’s television documentary about the Grand Tour, Brian Sewell’s Grand Tour of Italy), traveling through Europe at a time when European societies were strikingly different from each other. This was also an age of gentlemen amateurs, some of whom became great scientists. Given the resources to travel, and a sufficiently robust constitution that would allow for a bit of discomfort, one would have had, at this time, an historically unique opportunity to travel the world and to see profoundly different civilizations little influenced by each other in comparison to the level of cross-cultural influence today.

With this in mind, we could even construct an imaginary backstory for our counter-factual author of a counter-factual 18^th century treatise on civilization, consisting of the social and cultural equivalent of Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle, subsequently returning home to reflect upon his experiences. Alternatively, a sedentary scholar (like Kant) might seclude himself in his library with the great travelogues being written about the same time (because travel on a planetary scale was now possible)–I am thinking of the likes of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778), James Bruce (1730–1794), Richard Burton (1821-1890), Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913), Charles M. Doughty (1843-1926), and others of the time–and draw from these accounts of nearly pristine civilizations the ideas for a scientific account of civilization.

Some world-traveling gentleman amateur would have had the opportunity to witness regional civilizations uncontaminated by all but immediate neighbors, piquing the curiosity of our traveler, much as Darwin’s curiosity was piqued by his naturalist observations made during his time on the Beagle in its expedition around South America. Returning home to ruminate over all he had seen, he begins collecting more information about every known civilization, and eventually sets pen to paper to record his collected observations and the principles employed to unify his observations. Travel and reading would have made possible the study of civilization in an empirical, scientific manner by visiting regional civilizations, observing them, and perhaps even measuring them by whatever means might have been available to social science metrics of the time (perhaps creating these methods, as Galileo created his own methods of quantitative research of physical phenomena).

We tend to think of the 19^th century conception of civilization as naïve or worse, but in so far as it was, for those who traveled, informed by direct observations of regional civilizations (more isolated from each other than civilizations are today) it was a more sophisticated understanding based on first-hand knowledge, and before the resistance to comparing and contrasting civilizations that we see today (cf. Comparative Concepts in the Study of Civilization). In order to identify the common core of civilization one must be willing and able to analyze civilizations, and analyzing civilizations would mean reducing them to their constituent parts and determining the relationship of the parts to the whole. To do this with civilization requires a certain social environment that is not present today. Civilizations as we see them today have been racked on the Procrustean Bed of universalism and can no longer be seen for what they are because of the strong ideological overlay of scholarship.

If the rudiments of a science of civilization had been initially presented by a definitive text of the Enlightenment, or even of the romantic era, and subsequently refined and formalized as economics and biology have been refined and formalized since their inception as modern scientific disciplines, how might the world have been different? Would the history of western civilization have been altered by the self-understanding made possible by a science of civilization? In On a Science of Civilization and its Associated Technologies I discussed how a science of civilization could lead to technologies of civilization, just as biological science has led to biological technologies. With a science of civilization issuing in technologies of civilization, we would be in possession of the means to actively intervene in the process of civilization in order to attain certain ends. One could see in this ability both profound dangers and great opportunities. Existential risks are always the flip side of existential opportunities.

Even though there was this opportunity for the study of civilization when civilizations are largely isolated from each other, it didn’t happen, and so as I have presented it here in this thought experiment this scenario will forever remain a counter-factual unrealized in our history. We could still today begin the scientific study of civilization, but the evidence of isolated and pristine civilizations is being lost by the day, just as the archaeological and the geological record are degraded by the passage of time and further human activity. The earlier a science appears in history, the more it can take advantage of an historical record that is degraded with the passage of time.

One of the essential elements in the development of a civilization is the order in which sciences and technologies appear. We could formulate alternative historical sequences for civilizations in which sciences and technologies appear in a different order than they did in fact in terrestrial history, or alternative historical sequences in which particular sciences or technologies are missing that have been present in human history, or which are present that have been absent in human history. A science of civilization is an example of the latter, so that we can posit a counterfactual civilization in which a science of civilization is robustly present, and whether this science has its origins near the beginning of the history of a civilization (as with higher mathematics) or later in the development of a civilization (as with biology and economics) would also affect the developmental trajectory of a civilization that possessed the knowledge that would be produced by a science of civilization, that the technologies of civilization made possible by that knowledge.

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On a Developmental Conception of the Sciences

Saturday

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The periodic table, color-coded by the source of the element in the solar system. By Jennifer Johnson.

Many years ago, reading a source I cannot now recall (and for which I searched unsuccessfully when I started writing this post), I came upon a passage that has stayed with me. The author was making the argument that no sciences were consistent except those that had been reduced to mere catalogs of facts, like geography and anatomy. I can’t recall the larger context in which this argument appeared, but the observation that sciences might only become fully consistent when they have matured to the point of being exhaustive but static and uninteresting catalogs of facts, implying that the field of research itself had been utterly exhausted, was something I remembered. This idea presents in miniature a developmental conception of the sciences, but I think that it is a developmental conception that is incomplete.

Thinking of this idea of an exhausted field of research, I am reminded of a discussion in Conversations on Mind, Matter, and Mathematics by Jean-Pierre Changeux and Alain Connes, in which mathematician Alain Connes distinguished between fully explored and as yet unexplored parts of mathematics:

“…the list of finite fields is relatively easy to grasp, and it’s a simple matter to prove that the list is complete. It is part of an almost completely explored mathematical reality, where few problems remain. Cultural and social circumstances clearly serve to indicate which directions need to be pursued on the fringe of current research — the conquest of the North Pole, to return again to my comparison, surely obeyed the same type of cultural and social motivations, at least for a certain time. But once exploration is finished, these cultural and social phenomena fade away, and all that’s left is a perfectly stable corpus, perfectly fitted to mathematical reality…”

Jean-Pierre Changeux and Alain Connes, Conversations on Mind, Matter, and Mathematics, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 33-34

To illustrate a developmental conception of mathematics and the formal sciences would introduce additional complexities that follow from the not-yet-fully-understood relationship between the formal sciences and the empirical sciences, so I am going to focus on developmental conceptions of the empirical sciences, but I hope to return to the formal sciences in this connection.

The idea of the development of science as a two-stage process, with discovery followed by a consistent and exhaustive catalog, implies both that most sciences (and, if we decompose the individual special sciences into subdivisions, parts of most or all sciences) remain in the discovery phase, and that once the discovery phase has passed and we are in possession of an exhaustive and complete catalog of the facts discovered by a science, there is nothing more to be done in a given science. However, I can think of several historical examples in which a science seemed to be converging on a complete catalog, but this development was disrupted (one might say) by conceptual change within the field that forced the reorganization of the materials in a new way. My examples will not be perfect, and some additional scientific discovery always seems to have been involved, but I think that these examples will be at least suggestive.

Prior to the great discoveries of cosmology in the early twentieth century, after which astronomy became indissolubly connected to astrophysics, astronomy seemed to be converging slowly upon an exhaustive catalog of all stars, with the limitation on the research being simply the resolving power of the telescopes employed to view the stars. One could imagine a counterfactual world in which technological innovations in instrumentation supplied nothing more than new telescopes able to resolve more stars, and that the task of astronomy was merely to supply an exhaustive catalog of stars, listing their position in the sky, intrinsic brightness, and a few other facts about the points of light in the sky. But the cataloging of stars itself contributed to the revolution that would follow, particularly when the period-luminosity relationship in Cepheid variable stars was discovered by Henrietta Swan Leavitt (discovered in 1908 and published in 1912). The period-luminosity relationship provided a “standard candle” for astronomy, and this standard candle began the process of constructing the cosmological distance ladder, which in turn made it possible to identify Cepheid variables in the Andromeda galaxy and thus to prove that the Andromeda galaxy was two million light years away and not contained within the Milky Way.

Once astronomy became scientifically coupled to astrophysics, and the resources of physics (both relativistic and quantum) could be brought to bear upon understanding stars, a whole new cosmos opened up. Stars, galaxies, and the universe entire were transformed from something static that might be exhaustively cataloged, to a dynamic and changing reality with a natural history as well as a future. Astronomy went from being something that we might call a Platonic science, or even a Linnaean science, to being an historical science, like geology (after Hutton and Lyell), biology (after Darwin and Wallace), and Paleontology. This coupling of the study of the stars with the study of the matter that makes up the stars has since moved in both directions, with physics driving cosmology and cosmology driving physics. One result of this interaction between astronomy and physics is the illustration above (by Jennifer Johnson) of the periodic table of elements, which prominently exhibits the origins of the elements in cosmological processes. The periodic table once seemed, like a catalog of stars, to be something static to be memorized, and divorced from natural history. This conceptualization of matter in terms of its origins puts the periodic table in a dramatically different light.

As the cosmos was once conceived in Platonic terms as fixed and eternal, to be delineated in a Linnaean science of taxonomical classification, so too the Earth was conceived in Platonic terms as fixed and eternal, to be similarly delineated in a Linnaean science of classification. The first major disruption of this conception came with geology since Hutton and Lyell, followed by plate tectonics and geomorphology in the twentieth century. Now this process has been pushed further by the idea of mineral evolution. I have been listening through for the second time to Robert Hazen’s lectures The Origin and Evolution of Earth: From the Big Bang to the Future of Human Existence, which exposition closely follow the content of his book, The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet, in which Hazen wrote:

“The ancient discipline of mineralogy, though absolutely central to everything we know about Earth and its storied past, has been curiously static and detached from the conceptual vagaries of time. For more than two hundred years, measurements of chemical composition, density, hardness, optical properties, and crystal structure have been the meat and potatoes of the mineralogist’s livelihood. Visit any natural history museum, and you’ll see what I mean: gorgeous crustal specimens arrayed in case after glass-fronted case, with labels showing name, chemical formula, crystal system, and locality. These most treasured fragments of Earth are rich in historical context, but you will likely search in vain for any clue as to their birth ages or subsequent geological transformations. The old way all but divorces minerals from their compelling life stories.”

Robert M. Hazen, The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet, Viking Penguin, 2012, Introduction

This illustrates, from the perspective of mineralogy, much of what I said above in relation to star charts and catalogs: mineralogy was once about cataloging minerals, and this may have been a finite undertaking once all minerals had been isolated, identified, and cataloged. Now, however, we can understand mineralogy in the context of cosmological history, and this is as revolutionary for our understanding of Earth as the periodic table understood in terms of cosmological history. It could be argued, in addition, that compiling the “particle zoo” of contemporary particle physics is also a task of cataloging the entities studied by physics, but the cataloging of particles has been attended throughout with a theory of how these particles are generated and how they fit into the larger cosmological story — what Aristotle would have called their coming to be and passing away.

The best contemporary example of a science still in its initial phases of discovery and cataloging is the relatively recent confirmation of exoplanets. On my Tumblr blog I recently posted On the Likely Existence of “Random” Planetary Systems, which tried to place our current Golden Age of Exoplanet Discovery in the context of a developing science. We find the planetary systems that we do in fact find partly as a consequence of observation selection effects, and it belongs to the later stages of the development of a science to attempt to correct for observation selection effects built into the original methods of discovery employed. The planetary science that is emerging from exoplanet discoveries, however, and like contemporary particle physics, is attended by theories of planet formation that take into account cosmological history. However, the discovery phase, in terms of exoplanets, is still underway and still very new, and we have a lot to learn. Moreover, once we learn more about the possibilities of planets in our universe, hopefully also we will learn about the varied possibilities of planetary biospheres, and given the continual interaction between biosphere, lithosphere, atmosphere, and hydrosphere, which is a central motif of Hazen’s mineral evolution, we will be able to place planets and their biospheres into a large cosmological context (perhaps even reconstructing biosphere evolution). But first we must discover them, and then we must catalog them.

These observations, I think, have consequences not only for our understanding of the universe in which we find ourselves, but also for our understanding of science. Perhaps, instead of a two-stage process of discovery and taxonomy, science involves a three-stage process of discovery, taxonomy, and natural history, in which latter the objects and facts cataloged by one of the special sciences (earlier in their development) can take their place within cosmological history. If this is the case, then big history is the master category not only of history, but also of science, as big history is the ultimate framework for all knowledge that bears the lowly stamp of its origins. This conception of the task of science, once beyond the initial stages of discovery and classification, to integrate that which was discovered and classified into the framework of big history, suggests a concrete method by which to “cash out” in a meaningful way Wilfrid Sellars’ contention that, “…the specialist must have a sense of how not only his subject matter, but also the methods and principles of his thinking about it, fit into the intellectual landscape.” (cf. Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man) Big history is the intellectual landscape in which the sciences are located.

A developmental conception of science that recognized stages in the development of science beyond classification, taxonomy, and an exhaustive catalog (which is, in effect, the tombstone of what was a living and growing science), has consequences for the practice of science. Discovery may well be the paradigmatic form of scientific activity, but it is not the only form of scientific activity. The painstakingly detailed and disciplined work of cataloging stars or minerals is the kind of challenge that attracts a certain kind of mind with a particular interest, and the kind of individual who is attracted to this task of systematically cataloging entities and facts is distinct from the kind of individual who might be most attracted by scientific discovery, and also distinct from the kind of individual who might be attracted to fitting the discoveries of a special science into the overall story of the universe and its natural history. There may need to be a division of labor within the sciences, and this may entail an educational difference. Dividing sciences by discipline (and, now, by university departments), which involves inter-generational conflicts among sciences and the paradigm shifts that sometimes emerge as a result of these conflicts, may ultimately make less sense than dividing sciences according their stage of development. Perhaps universities, instead of having departments of chemistry, geology, and botany, should have departments of discovery, taxonomy, and epistemic integration.

Speaking from personal experience, I know that (long ago) when I was in school, I absolutely hated the cataloging approach to the sciences, and I was bored to tears by memorizing facts about minerals or stars. But the developmental science of evolution so intrigued me that I read extensively about evolution and anthropology outside and well beyond the school curriculum. If mineral evolution and the Earth sciences in their contemporary form had been known then, I might have had more of an interest in them.

What are the sciences developing into, or what are the sciences becoming? What is the end and aim of science? I previously touched on this question, a bit obliquely, in What is, or what ought to be, the relationship between science and society? though this line of inquiry is more like a thought experiment. It may be too early in the history of the sciences to say what they are becoming or what they will become. Perhaps an emergent complexity will arise out of knowledge itself, something that I first suggested in Scientific Historiography: Past, Present, and Future, in which I wrote in the final paragraph:

We cannot simply assume an unproblematic diachronic extrapolation of scientific knowledge — or, for that matter, historical knowledge — especially as big history places such great emphasis upon emergent complexity. The linear extrapolation of science eventually may trigger a qualitative change in knowledge. In other words, what will be the emergent form of scientific knowledge (the ninth threshold, perhaps?) and how will it shape our conception of scientific historiography as embodied in big history, not to mention the consequences for civilization itself? We may yet see a scientific historiography as different from big history as big history is different from Augustine’s City of God.

It is only a lack of imagination that would limit science to the three stages of development I have outlined above. There may be developments in science beyond those we can currently understand. Perhaps the qualitative emergent from the quantitative expansion of scientific knowledge will be a change in science itself — possibly a fourth stage in the development of science — that will open up to scientific knowledge aspects of experience and regions of nature currently inaccessible to science.

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Addendum on Suboptimal Civilizations

Monday

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What might Byzantine civilization have been like if it had endured for a million years instead of a thousand years?

Carl Sagan often discussed the possibility of very old civilizations in the cosmos, hidden from us by distance or by our ignorance, but which we might someday hope to find by way of SETI initiatives. Here is a passage from Cosmos where he mentions the possibility of a million-year-old civilization:

“What does it mean for a civilization to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilization is a few hundred years old, scientific ideas of a modern cast a few thousand, civilization in general a few tens of thousands of years; human beings evolved on this planet only a few million years ago. At anything like our present rate of technical progress, an advanced civilization millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bush baby or a macaque. Would we even recognize its presence? Would a society a million years in advance of us be interested in colonization or interstellar spaceflight?”

Carl Sagan, Cosmos, Chapter XII, “Encyclopaedia Galactica”

While Sagan focused on the possibility of civilizations that are very old, Kardashev focused on the possibility of civilizations that are very large. Kardashev explicitly argued for the existence of civilizations that he called “supercivilizations” that had quite literally grown to astronomical dimensions. Kardashev wrote:

“The scales of activity of any civilization are restricted only by natural and scientific factors… Civilizations have no inner, inherent limitations on the scales of their activities.”

“On the inevitability and the possible structures of supercivilizations,” Nikolai S. Kardashev, in The Search for Extraterrestrial Life: Recent Developments, edited by M. D. Papagiannis, International Astronomical Union, 1985, pp. 497-504.

These themes occur throughout Kardashev’s writings on supercivilizations, which Kardashev asserted to probably exist and to be detectable by the methods of SETI, if only a SETI project were to focus on supercivilizations:

“Astrophysical research, data from biology and cybernetics, and from other sciences, point to a high probability for the detectability of extraterrestrial civilizations. Currently, what is needed is a fundamental review of our preliminary notions about the possible nature of these civilizations and of the particular method which must be used in the search for them. In my opinion, the only useful concept is the assumption that supercivilizations exist (in particular, also, that our civilization may eventually become a supercivilization).”

“Strategy for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence,” N. S. KARDASHEV, Institute for Space Research, Academy of Sciences, U.S.S.R., Acta Astronautica, Vol. 6, pp. 33-46, Pergamon Press, 1979

Ray Norris raises the stakes in his calculation of the age of detectable extraterrestrial civilizations and argues that any exocivilization we might hope to find would be on the order of a billion years old:

“Conventional models imply that supernovae and gamma-ray-bursters will extinguish life on planets at intervals of about 200 Myr. Since this has not happened on Earth, either these conventional models are wrong, or else life on Earth is probably unique in the Galaxy. The first case predicts a median age of ET as being of the order of 1 billion years. The second case predicts that we will never detect ET. Thus, if we do detect ET, the median age is of order 1 billion years. Note that, in this case, the probability of ET being less than one million years older than us is less than 1 part in 1000.”

“HOW OLD IS ET?” Ray P. Norris, CSIRO Australia Telescope National Facility, Acta Astronautica 47:731, 1999.

For Norris, the idea of a million-year-old supercivilization is a minimum threshold, while the median age for a detectable civilization would be closer to being a billion years old.

The idea of a million- or billion-year-old supercivilization would seem to be the antithesis of a suboptimal civilization, but the consideration of each can help us to refine our conception of the other. If a supercivilization is very old or very large, does this entail that any suboptimal civilization is very young or very small? Given the habitable lifespan of a planet around a stable star, it is possible that even a civilization confined to the surface of a planet (and therefore very small in astronomical terms) could grow very old, perhaps attaining Sagan’s threshold of being a million-year-old civilization. Could we call such a civilization a supercivilization?

A distinction I failed to make in Suboptimal Civilizations is that between civilizational longevity with and without attaining civilizational maturity. Under conditions of planetary constraint, a sequence of civilizations might arise, come to maturity, and disappear, each in turn fulfilling the essential idea of that particular civilization. This cyclical or sequential vision of civilization is distinct from a million-year-old civilization that is not a supercivilization merely in virtue or remaining “small” (confined to a planetary surface).

Furthermore, a million-year-old civilization might either attain its maturity, establishing itself at a plateau (a high level equilibrium, if you will) at or just past its mature plateau in a state of extended senescence (I can imagine this case being made for Byzantine civilization, so imagine, if you will, a million-year-old Byzantium), or a million-year-old civilization might continue indefinitely in the pursuit of some telos that indefinitely eludes it.

If no catastrophic event brings terrestrial civilization to an end (this does not include predictable change that may well be seen by human beings as catastrophic, but which must be expected over a million year horizon — I am thinking of climate change, inter alia), terrestrial civilization could go on to become a million-year-old civilization (that is not a supercivilization) if it fails to cross the threshold of becoming a demographically significant spacefaring civilization.

If we understand civilization of the third order (see below) to extend from the earliest origins of civilization on Earth to galaxy-spanning Kardashevian supercivilizations, than any civilization we know of occupies a point along this civilizational continuum, and the telos of civilization (and therefore the measure of whether civilization has reached maturity) is a supercivilization. In this sense, any civilization that has not evolved into a supercivilization is a suboptimal civilization.

However, given my definition of civilization of the third order, no individual civilization would thus attain supercivilization status; only the whole structure of intertwined civilizations (going back ten thousand years to the origins of civilization on our planet) could be said to be a supercivilization (and indeed not only in Kardashev’s sense of the term, but also a “supercivilization” in the sense of being a meta-conception of civilization distinct from any particular civilization). In the case of a supercivilziation of the third order, no individual civilization within that continuum of civilization could be judged as a suboptimal civilization in so far as each contributory civilization is part of a third order supercivilization.

If, on the other hand, we require that a supercivilization be a single, continuously extant individual civilization of great antiquity and achievement, then a supercivilization is a concept of civilization of the second order. In this case, even if an individual civilization were incorporated into a network of related civilizations (just as the civilizations of Earth manifest a reticulate organization) that eventually lasted a million years and attained supercivilization status, that individual civilization that itself failed to ultimately develop into a supercivilization could be said to be a suboptimal civilization. Thus a civilization’s attaining maturity could be a function of its development or of its place within the larger structure of civilizations. Distinctions need to be made to avoid confusion.

We could define the maturity of civilization in terms of any of the orders of civilization. In Thinking about Civilization I introduced the idea of orders of civilization as follows:

● Civilization of the Zeroth Order is the order of prehistory and of all human life and activity and comes before civilization in the strict sense. Civilization of the zeroth order may involve socioeconomic communities that do not rise to the threshold of civilization.

● Civilization of the First Order are those socioeconomic systems of large-scale organization that supply the matter upon which history works; in other words, the synchronic milieu of a given civilization, a snapshot in time.

● Civilization of the Second Order is an entire life cycle of civilization, from birth through growth to maturity and senescence unto death, taken whole.

● Civilization of the Third Order is the whole structure of developmental stages of civilization such that any particular civilization passes through, but taken comprehensively and embracing all civilizations within this structure and their interactions with each other as the result of these structures. In other words, civilization of the third order is the life cycle of many civilizations as they overlap and intersect in one grand narrative of civilization.

Based on these orders of civilization, the maturity of each conception of civilization can be distinctly defined:

● Zeroth Order Maturity Mature institutions of hunter-gatherer nomadism.

● First Order Maturity Mature institutions of large-scale socioeconomic organization, without reference to the stage of development of that civilization on the whole.

● Second Order Maturity A civilization that has completed its life cycle, including having passed through a stage of fulfillment of its essential idea.

● Third Order Maturity The maturity of the overall structure of civilization, including diachronic and synchronic relations between distinct civilizations, sufficiently developed that all of the essential features of this conception are present.

It is in this final sense of maturity, the maturity of civilization of the third order, that we can speak of all non-supercivilizations as suboptimal civilizations. However, we may wish to make further distinctions. In cases in which a planetary civilization never passes the threshold to a demographically significant spacefaring civilization, and the entirety of civilization originating on such a planet plays itself out on the same planet, there may be predictable patterns of such planetary civilization of the third order, and patterns distinct from spacefaring civilizations of graduated degrees of gravitational thresholds. Thus we might speak of planetary civilizations of the third order, stellar civilizations of the third order, galactic civilizations of the third order, and so on. This clearly implies all of these distinctions also being made for each order of civilization.

We will also want to formulate the orders of supercivilization:

● Supercivilization of the Zeroth Order I am not yet prepared to say what corresponds to this concept, but I leave it here as a placeholder.

● Supercivilization of the First Order This is essentially Kardashev’s conception of Type II and Type III civilizations from his 1964 paper, which are judged to be supercivilizations on the basis of a single technological capacity, which is a snapshot of their technology in time, divorced from any conception of civilizational development or evolution.

● Supercivilization of the Second Order This is the idea of a single civilization possessing a single developmental arc that leads from primitive origins to supercivilization status, in other words, Sagan’s idea of a million-year-old civilization or Norris’ idea of a billion-year-old civilization. Such a civilization might be the source of detectable civilization understood above as a supercivilization of the first order.

● Supercivilization of the Third Order This is the idea of a network of civilizations that overlap and intersect, with individual civilizations emerging and then disappearing, but with successor civilizations carrying on the tradition and eventually achieving supercivilization status.

Given this sketch of the orders of supercivilization, we would also want to formulate the orders of suboptimal civilizations:

● Suboptimal Civilization of the Zeroth Order Again (as above), I am not yet prepared to say what corresponds to this concept, but I leave it here as a placeholder.

● Suboptimal Civilization of the First Order A civilization the institutions of which fail to fulfill their intended purpose. This could be a civilization at any stage of development or evolution, and indeed it could pass on to a later developmental stage at which it ceases to be a suboptimal civilization. This could be taken as a description of every civilization on our planet today.

● Suboptimal Civilization of the Second Order A civilization that has passed through an entire developmental arc and has apparently completed a life cycle (and is possibly extinct) without however having fulfilled or brought to maturity the essential idea that drove its emergence and development.

● Suboptimal Civilization of the Third Order A network of related civilizations that fails to exhibit full development of individual civilizations within the structure and which fails to exhibit any evolution of the structure of civilization on the whole. In other words, the rise and fall of a series of civilizations that accomplish nothing individually or collectively.

That is a lot to think over, and as many of these ideas are almost as new to me as they may be to the reader (if the reader has not come to them through his or her own reflections on supercivilizations and suboptimal civilizations), as I only arrived at these formulations as I was taking a walk yesterday, it will take time to assimilate this conceptual framework and to see whether or not it is useful for the analysis of civilization. But I might mention that it is a certain satisfaction for me that the idea of orders of civilization lends itself so well to this extrapolation, which implies that this idea is useful in the exposition of other ideas.

If I can continue to develop these ideas in the light of each other, as is suggested by the above exposition, they will prove themselves useful as analytical tools in the study of civilization.

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If a Byzantine civilization had endured for a million years, would it have exhibited a regular cyclical pattern of crises and stable periods, or would it have inscribed a long arc of development? Would it be possible for a million-year-old non-technological civilization to exhibit such a long arc of development?

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Medieval and Industrial Civilization: Developmental Parallels

Saturday

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To compare medieval civilization and industrial civilization may be a bit like comparing apples and oranges, since the two ideas come from two different civilizational periodizations based on different ideas of organizing our thought about civilization. The idea of medieval civilization derives from the familiar Western scheme of periodizing civilization into ancient, medieval and modern, while the idea of industrial civilization derives from the more recent tripartite periodization of human history in hunter-gatherer nomadism, agrarian civilization, and industrial civilization.

Medieval civilization is in some respects more alien to us, and more distant from us, than classical antiquity.

Nevertheless, I think that there is something to be learned from comparison and contrast even across incommensurable paradigms, if not especially across incommensurable paradigms. From a philosophical point of view, there is nothing more interesting that comparing distinct ontologies, which is to say, comparing the different ways that different philosophers divide up one and the same world into ultimate constituents — or, to appeal to two different images used by contemporary philosophers: 1) comparing two different inventories of the ultimate furniture of the universe, or 2) comparing two different ways of carving nature at the joints. Medieval and industrial civilization represent two distinct ways of carving civilization at the joints.

The individual often finds himself alienated from his own role in industrialized civilization, notwithstanding the fact that this civilization has shaped us.

I often appeal to examples and parallels drawn from medieval civilization, because medieval civilization has a special didactic value: with medieval civilization we have an instance of a particular species of civilization that emerged within historical times, flourished, and then vanished, so that the whole of the process was documented and the story of this civilization itself is a completed narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an end.

When we think of our own industrialized civilization as a whole — and while I think of it like this all the time, this is atypical, because most people don’t notice their own civilization any more than the air they breathe — we tend to think of it as a phenomenon at or near its full developmental potential. The persistent apocalypticism and declensionism of our times encourages us in this view, because it suggests that our civilization has reached its peak and has no where to go but down. This is a mistake. Some day we will be able to say of industrial-technological civilization that it had a beginning, a middle, and an end and achieved narrative closure in this way. At present, however, industrialized civilization is a work in progress. We do not yet know what it will look like from a distance, as it were, when we (or others) are able to bear witness not only to its rise and greatness, but also to its decline and fall.

When Satan tempted Christ will all the kingdoms of the world, the devil attempted to show the whole of agrarian civilization from the top of a high mountain.

What I would like to suggest is that we do not yet even know what industrial-technological civilization will look like at its height, much less its maturity, because we are still in the formative stages of our civilization, such as it is. The industrial revolution, beginning a little more than two hundred years ago, has still to transform all the world. It is steadily working toward this transformation, and we can see the signs of this transformation everywhere, but we can also see that this transformation is far from complete.

I have argued in The Industrial-Technological Thesis (and argued the underside of the same in Industrial-Technological Disruption) that the civilization now being constituted is uniquely characterized by the spiraling feedback of science, technology, and engineering. I tried to refine how this escalating cycle of feedback came into existence in The Human Condition Made Rigorous, and I tried to show how this cycle can fail or be interrupted in Industrial-Technological Disruption.

If I am right about our civilization being uniquely characterized by this spiral of advancing science, technology, and engineering, industrialized civilization will always be changing and never reach a point of equilibrium. This would make it problematic to identify any particular point of height or maturity for this civilization, but we can take a different perspective by understanding the consolidation (and therefore, in a sense, the maturity) of industrial-technological civilization to have come about when the world entire exemplifies this form of civilization. I suggested in The Re-Proletarianization of the Workforce that it is only at this point of industrial maturity that Marx’s predictions can be judged to be true or failed.

The crusades were an unprecedented exercise in power projection at a time in history when geographical obstacles were not easily overcome by technology.

To return to the example of medieval civilization, if an individual today is familiar with medieval civilization at all, they are likely to be familiar only with the later stages of medieval civilization, unless they appeal to a semi-mythical Arthurian England (or its equivalents elsewhere in Europe). Except for scholars in medieval history, little is known of early medieval history. If one begins to become aware of medieval history with the crusades, moving on to the construction of the great cathedrals, the formulation of the scholastic intellectual synthesis, the Black Death, and then the gradual unwinding of medieval institutions under the pressure of emerging modernity (really, modernism without industrialism), one is beginning with a civilization already more at less at its height, having reached a point of internal development that it turns to projecting its power outward into the wider world.

Prior to the crusades, medieval civilization had at least five hundred years of development to bring itself to a point of development at which it possessed the resources to engage in the crusades, which not only involved a lot of second sons looking for glory (and loot), but also arms and armor, shipping, foodstuffs, and the maintenance of institutions in the absence of significant military assets. It is, of course, controversial to fix a particular date for the beginning of medievalism, but somewhere between, say, the 400s to the 500s AD, Roman imperial power collapsed in Western Europe and was replaced by local regimes and a local way of life focused on the land, not on trade or industry.

As I said, it is inherently controversial to name a date at which medieval civilization begins, but even if we fix that beginning at any of the later dates that are sometimes used, the medieval world developed for hundreds of years before it reached its maturity, and it is only in its maturity that those of us who are not medieval scholars begin to become aware of medieval history. In other words, the whole of industrial-technological civilization, as it has existed so far, occupies less than half of the time that was needed for medieval civilization to come to maturity.

Although history now proceeds at a blistering pace, the potential scope of a civilization is much larger. Medieval civilization took almost five hundred years to consolidate itself in the Western European peninsula. Despite the rapidity of history in the industrial age, we can see with our own eyes that a little over two hundred years of development have sufficed to bring industrialized civilization to much of the world, but not yet all of the world, and as we make this observation it is intuitively obvious (as much as anything in history can be said to be intuitively obvious) that global consolidation is the inevitable telos of industrialism. Our civilization is more dynamic and faster moving, but it has much more ground to cover before it could be said to have achieved its natural teleology.

In the far future, when our distant progeny can see industrial-technological civilziation synoptically, as a whole, I think it will be clear that, two hundred years into the process of industrialization, that process is still far from complete, and the civilzation that will issue from this process is still far from reaching its mature form and attaining the heights of its development.

In some earlier posts I have already alluded to this. In Social Consensus in Industrialized Society I suggested that industrial society had passed through two paradigms of social organization and was more-or-less groping its way to a third paradigm of social organization. Industrial society may ultimately have to pass through many stages of social paradigmata before it arrives at a form of social organization that is in consonance with the institutions of industrialized society.

In The Next Axial Age I suggested that each macro-historical division of civilization may come to maturity in an axial age, that the Axial Age identified by Karl Jaspers was but the Axial Age of Agrarian civilization, and that industrialized civilization may yet be hundreds of years from its axial moment.

The absence of adequate social institutions and of an axialization period clearly points to industrial-technological civilization being yet in its formative stages.

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The Dialectic of Perspective Taking

Wednesday

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In yesterday’s The Hierarchy of Perspective Taking I suggested that developmental psychology formulated in terms of perspective taking can be iterated throughout life and indeed on macro-historical scales, since the continual extension of human knowledge results in the formulation of ever more comprehensive concepts, and these more comprehensive concepts suggest in turn more comprehensive perspectives that can be attained.

In a future science of civilizations, it may be possible to formulate the developmental path of civilizations. It should be pretty straight-forward to acknowledge that civilizations develop, but this is actually a politically controversial case to make because if civilizations develop that means that different civilizations will be at different stages of development, and that in turn means that different civilizations have achieved different stages of civilizational maturity. This is a controversial claim to make, because in contemporary thought it is considered the height of ill manners to suggest that any one civilization is “higher” or “more advanced” or “more mature” or “superior” to any other civilization. I previously discussed this in The Very Idea of “Higher” Civilization.

Nevertheless, I will stick my neck out and make the unfashionable claim that civilizations do develop, that there are broad patterns of development (thought not anything necessary or categorical), and that the implied corollary — that some civilizations are in a more advanced stage of development than others — is also true. Moreover, I hold that entire civilizations can develop perspective taking, just as individuals can develop perspective taking. The breadth and scope of perspective that a given civilization can subsume constitutes a quantitative measure of its progress to civilizational maturity.

Given, then, that there is the possibility of a developmental psychology (or even a developmental cognitive science) that might do a reasonably good job of outlining the growth of the individual’s knowledge and ability to coordinate multiple perspectives, and given also that a future science of civilizations might formulate a developmental epistemology that would do a reasonably good job of outlining the social growth of knowledge, we obviously here have an ontogenetic development and a phylogenetic development.

Making this explicit, then, ontogenetic epistemic development is the growth of knowledge of the individual, while phylogenetic epistemic development is the growth of knowledge of social wholes. Each is dependent upon the other in a escalation of knowledge. (As we shall see below, there is nothing necessary or inevitable about the escalation of knowledge.)

The individual who achieves a new level of perspective taking can pass this knowledge along socially so that others can learn it without having to independently make the breakthrough on their own. Societies incorporate perspective taking into socially constituted bodies of knowledge and passes this along to individual members of a society. Thus there is an interplay, a dialectic, between the individual’s development and the development of the society of which the individual is a member. Each can spur the other to attain to a perspective that either in isolation would not achieve.

Since the emergence of settled civilization, epistemic escalation has been the rule, but it has been a rule with many exceptions. Even given the dialectical interplay between individual and society, the intrinsic tension of which implies a creative resolution, there are times when knowledge stagnates and societies experience retrograde development.

Stagnation and retrograde development is almost as controversial as maintaining that civilizations experience development. Also, historians have come to distance themselves from “loaded” evaluative terms like “dark ages,” and rightly point out that things are usually more complex than a distinction between “progress” and “dark ages.” This is much like my observation yesterday that Erik Erikson’s developmental stages are overly simplistic. The critique that I gave of Erikson yesterday could be applied equally to individuals and civilizations.

Progress and stagnation are probably too simplistic, but sometimes they are apt. However, there is another way to conceive the situation that might present novel possibilities of cognizing civilizational development, and this comes from further analogizing between individuals and civilizations (or, if you like, between the microcosm and macrocosm of knowledge). When an individual experiences stagnation or retrograde development, this is usually the result of mental illness. Now, there is still a certain evaluative disapproval that attaches to mental illness, but this is becoming less acute, and most people today see mental illness as less a moral issue and more of a medical issue. (This perspective, of course, has problems of its own, which I discussed in Banishing Despair.)

If we come to understand civilizational decline, then, not as a moral issue, not as a result of decadence, but as a pathology of civilization, as the sickness of civilization, we might formulate an understanding of stagnation and retrograde development that has eluded us in our earlier use of moral concepts to explain decline.

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The Origins of Time

Wednesday

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The Construction of Ecological Temporality

A Genetic Account of the Origins of the World

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The ontogeny of time

The emergence and development of temporal consciousness — that is to say, the origins of individual time, the ontogeny of time — begins in the individual, but the early experience of the individual is that of an individual embedded in a temporal context. The individual’s internal time consciousness is constructed in a temporal context that I will call the reflexive experience of time.

Children — at least those children allowed a childhood, which is not always the case — live most in the world of meso-temporality, mostly because they have not yet learned not to trust, and so they feel free to express the spontaneity of their inner time consciousness as though by reflex. Reflexive experience of time, in which there are few if any barriers between the micro-temporality of the individual and the meso-temporality of the immediate social context of the individual, embodies an absolute innocence.

In a condition of innocence, everything that occurs is new, so that time is densely populated with unprecedented events. Every hour and every day brings novelty. As we age, every hour and every day brings more of the same — the same old same old, as we say today — and so it is little surprise that we don’t notice the passing of this undifferentiated sameness. For the young, time flies by unnoticed, and because the passage of time is unnoticed it has the quality of timelessness.

As we age, time flies by all the faster.

Later, in our maturity, we have the ability to appreciate episodes of innocence that we could not have appreciated in our younger years — thus following the well-worn idea that youth is wasted upon the young — there is another sense in which youthful experience makes the fullest use of time and yields a density of experience that we cannot experience in later life.

G. B. Shaw was the one who first said, “Youth is wasted on the young.”

The time consciousness of youth, driven by the stream of novelty that is the result of innocence, sharpens and enlarges the smallest events, and thus we see young children sobbing over a ice cream cone that has dropped to the ground, which leaves us, as adults, largely unmoved. We shrug our shoulders and move on. Would that we could experience life with such intensity that an ice cream cone were worth a flood of tears.

There is a sense in which it is counter-intuitive to speak of the intensity of experience of children, since the halcyon days of youth are usually not thought to consist of intensity but rather of carefree indolence, but in the sense outlined above, the innocent lead lives of greater intensity than the jaded.

Innocence wrings every last drop from the passing of time, so that in a condition of innocence there is no moment that is wasted. In maturity, the greater part of time is wasted, until, as Shakespeare noted, having wasted time, time wastes us.

Developmental temporality: the role of play

Developmental psychologists have had much to say about the child’s initial encounters with a recalcitrant world that does not answer to its whims. This initial phase of socialization is also the first loss of innocence, and the first compromise of reflexive temporality. As the consciousness of temporality progresses in the individual, the individual comes to understand that they can cultivate a Cartesian privacy in which fantasies will not be interrupted by the recalcitrant world. Thus reflexive temporality gradually gives way to imaginative temporality, and the spontaneity of the child is displaced from the immediate expression of inner promptings to the inner expression of these promptings by way of imagination. Thus play emerges, and the imaginative temporality of play allows the individual to further develop the inner time consciousness of Cartesian privacy.

Erik Erikson's stages of psycho-social development is one well-known developmental theory.

Play, however, also makes possible a re-discover of reflexive temporality when the childred discovers other children and begins to play with them. The shared, social temporality of play, especially when adults are not present to puncture the illusions generated by imaginative time consciousness, can again converge onto a purely reflexive time consciousness when the child feels free to express their spontaneity among peers who share the form of time consciousness common to this stage in the development of childhood.

Pieter Bruegel, detail from Children's Games, 1560, Oil on oak panel, 118 x 161 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Vienna

Play, too, is eventually compromised, as conflicts inevitably emerge from games played with peers, so that the life of the child exhibits a dialectic of shifting between reflexive time consciousness and imaginative time consciousness, which is a shift of the focus of spontaneity from outer life to inner life and back again to outer life. It is the dialectical process that contributes to the further development and reinforcement of an inner time consciousness of Cartesian privacy, which becomes a haven for the individual, wounded by encounters with an unsympathetic world.

Games among children often result in conflicts, and these conflicts teach us early in life that the world is usually not responsive to our will.

All throughout the dialectic of early time consciousness, however, the experience of the child is still marked by innocence, and it is the process of the degradation of innocence that brings about a fully mature time consciousness (if, in fact, this does develop, and its development is not arrested by trauma).

The degradation of innocence and the emergence of mature time consciousness

The degradation of innocence comes about from cumulative experience. Cumulative experience can only be experienced as cumulative with the development of memory, so that the emergence of robust memories is central to the emergence of fully mature time consciousness. However, it is the same process of the emergence of memory that degrades innocence. Memory demonstrates to us the non-novelty of our spontaneity, and as the spontaneity of our internal promptings loses its novelty, it also begins to lose its interest.

As we age, and the depth and breadth of our experience grows, preserved in an improving memory, and our opportunities for experiences of innocence decline proportionately until our capacity approaches zero and we no longer expect or even hope to directly experience innocence again. In the lives of many adults it is their relationships with children that yield whatever vicarious experiences of innocence for which they still retain hope, and so they take pleasure in seeing the world anew through the eyes of another, but there is a melancholy to this because one knows in one’s heart of hearts (as subtle as the distinction may seem to be) that there is a difference between immediate and vicarious experiences of innocence.

And yet (and despite), when we are surprised by an authentic experience of innocence later in life, beyond the bounds of youth, we now experience it from a perspective of maturity, and both its rarity and our capacity to appreciate it make the experience all the more precious. When we are young, everything is new to us, and experiences of innocence are common; experience narrows the scope of innocence until any such experience appears as something completely unexpected, but when it does occur we have the maturity to appreciate the experience that we did not possess in youth.

It is the same innocence that is behind the very different time consciousness of youth compared to maturity. Everyone knows that as you age, time seems to pass ever more quickly, until it flies by and the years scarcely make any impression in their passing. This stands in stark contrast to feelings of endless summers from our childhood that seemed to go on forever, as well as anticipating and waiting for holidays that seemed to take forever to arrive.

The time consciousness we associate will full cognitive modernity is a product of cognitive maturity.

Keeping secrets and Cartesian privacy

Another aspect of the child’s encounter with a recalcitrant world not obedient to his or her wishes is the discovery of the power of secrets. The youngest children, immersed as they are in meso-temporality and observing few if any boundaries between internal spontaneity and external expression, cannot keep a secret. Even if they make an experiment of it, and older children try to let them in on a secret, they will usually blurt it out, and as a consequence are considered untrustworthy. …

The shared confidences of older children, however, especially confidences that exclude adults and their alien forms of time consciousness, become an object of envy for the younger child, who wants to become “grown up” in order to share in these confidences. Thus the younger child makes a conscious effort of will to cultivate inhibitions on his or her spontaneity. Older children will continue to test the younger children for the trustworthiness in keeping secrets, at the behest of the pleading of younger children, initially with small secrets and eventually with larger secrets. When these secrets are successfully kept, the child passes the test, and in passing the tests passes another threshold of maturing time consciousness.

The experimenting and testing of secret-keeping trains the child in the development of his or her Cartesian privacy, which becomes a faculty consciously developed by the individual as an exclusively private reserve from which the world entire. The child discovers that not only may adults be excluded, but that other children can also be excluded from this realm of Cartesian privacy. In this perfectly private space of conscious, purely interior micro-temporal consciousness takes root and begins to grow, and as it grows it contributes progessively more to constitution of individual consciousness.

Shared time, social time, and the world as we find it

One of the most mysterious aspects of personal chemistry between individuals, and that which is perhaps the conditio sine qua non of friendship (whether Platonic or romantic), is the simple fact of shared time. Friendship has its origins in childhood play, but its possibilities are deepened by mature time consciousness. We are able to be friends with those with whom the common passage of time is enjoyable. Play is the first expression of joy in shared time. In adolescence, the shared time begins to take on a more intellectual form as shared time becomes primarily shared conversation. In contemporary colloquial English, this is called “hanging out” or simply “hanging.”

I suspect that everyone, or almost everyone, has experienced among their interaction with acquaintances the fact that, with some combinations of individuals, the two or more parties in question mutually enjoy the passage of time together, while among other combinations of individuals, the two or more parties find the common passing of time together to be irritating, unpleasant, or otherwise unfulfilling. The former is a welcome kind of chemistry, while the latter is an unwelcome (but also inevitable) kind of chemistry.

There are also obvious cases of asymmetry, when one party to the shared passage of time finds the experience rewarding, while another party to the same shared temporal frame of reference finds the experience unrewarding or even odious. Here the temporal frame of reference is identical, but the subjective experience of that shared time is sharply distinct. Such are what Shakespeare called the pangs of despised love.

In my post ecological temporality, in which I developed Urie Bronfenbrenner’s bio-ecological model, specifically expanding and extending the ecological treatment of time, I distinguished levels of temporality parallel to Bronfenbrenner’s distinction between levels of bio-ecology. Thus what Husserl called internal time consciousness I called micro-temporality, and the interaction of micro-temporalities begets meso-temporality.

Meso-temporality is social time, and another way to refer to social time would be to call it shared time. An isolated individual experiences the micro-temporality of internal time consciousness, and simply by being present in an environment experiences a rudimentary level of meso-temporality from the necessary interaction of an organism with its environment (the minimal form of rudimentary meso-temporality involves interaction with an inert environment, as, for example, knocking on a door).

Shared time is facilitated by secret-keeping. The young child who cannot yet keep a secret says things openly that impair social relationships. As children learn more above the social environment in which they find themselves, they learn, under penalty of social exclusion, what must be confined to Cartesian privacy, and what may be openly and freely shared. To blurt out socially inappropriate assertions with no concern for boundaries of privacy — both one’s own privacy as well as the privacy of The Other — is to commit a social faux pas and to risk social exclusion. Being envious of social inclusion, children make an effort to train themselves in the boundaries of polite expression, and in so doing they are forced to cultivate a consciousness of the Cartesian privacy of The Other, which is another important threshold on the way to mature time consciousness. The recognize the Cartesian privacy of the other is to recognize the internal time consciousness of The Other. Thus one’s own emerging micro-temporality is placed in the context of the other’s inferred micro-temporality, which together and jointly constitute social time.

The social time or meso-temporality that emerges from a common temporal frame of reference for two or more individuals possessing internal time consciousness is perhaps distinct from that meso-temporality emergent from the micro-temporality of internal time consciousness in the context of an inert, non-conscious environment. Thus meso-temporality may take a variety of forms. Meso-temporality simpliciter may be taken as the interaction of a micro-temporal agent with its environment. When that environment includes other micro-temporal agents and agents join in common action (or common inaction, for that matter), this is social time or share time. Thus social time is a subdivision of meso-temporality.

The minimum condition for social time is two conscious individuals. Two micro-temporalities functioning in a common frame of temporal reference constitutes the first and simplest level of shared time, though shared time can be augmented with the addition of more conscious individuals and can grow until, for spatio-geographical reasons, a common frame of temporal reference is not longer possible. This meso-temporality that exceeds a common frame of temporality is meso-temporality of a higher order of magnitude, and thus constitutes exo-temporality. The interaction of meso-temporalities yields exo-temporality, which is the usually setting for “history” as this is usually understood. Herodotus and Thucydides write on the level of exo-temporality: the interaction and intersection of particular communities over space (a given geographical region) and time (a given period of history).

Returning to the interaction of micro- and meso-temporalities, we can see from the very different responses that individuals have to shared social time that this “functionality” in a shared temporal frame of reference can function in different ways for different individuals. Even when the shared temporal frame of reference is identical, the micro-temporality of consciousness usually remains clearly distinct from the shared time. That is to say, consciousness usually enjoys Cartesian privacy. This is the point of departure of Husserlian internal time consciousness.

The exceptions to Cartesian privacy occur when an individual agent, even having previously cultivated a sense of Cartesian privacy in the childhood dialectic of reflexive time and imaginative time (which perhaps only becomes possible in the context of fully mature historical consciousness), becomes so fully embedded in a meso-temporal frame of reference that they experience no boundaries between themselves and the other agents present. In shared social time one may be so comfortable in the presence of others that one is as spontaneous in interacting with them as one may be spontaneous with one’s own thoughts in private. This constitutes a (temporary) recovery of the reflexive time consciousness of early childhood.

One way to express this is that a particular subdivision of shared social time is when individuals participating in a common meso-temporal frame of reference experience in common what psychologists call “flow states”, such that the individuals in question can no longer distinguish between their internal time consciousness and the meso-temporality of shared time: the barriers of the self come down, and the individual is lost in the shared world. This would be a particularly intimate form of social time, and is possibly the necessary condition of love. Possibly.

The lost paradise of reflexive time

Why do we seek ideal love? We seek ideal love because it is the temporary recovery of the lost paradise of the purely reflexive temporality — unmindful of boundaries, unmindful of a distinction between self and world, unmindful of any barrier to absolute spontaneity and freedom of expression, unmindful of any social constraint risking social exclusion. Love is the reminder of what we have lost in coming to mature time consciousness, even while knowing what we having gained in terms of cultivated micro-temporality, memory linked both to immediate micro-temporality and enduring self-identity, and an awareness of history and our personal place within history.

Moreover, ideal love in the context of mature time consciousness can exceed or surpass the lost paradise of early childhood’s reflexive temporality, because ideal love can accommodate an authentic awareness of the beloved as other, as possessing its own Cartesian privacy and its own micro-temporality. To love the other in full awareness of their otherness is a more profound species of shared social temporality, and with this profundity comes depth of feeling that did not exist and could not exist in childhood. It has been said that a woman’s heart is a ocean of secrets, and perhaps we need not even superadd a qualification of gender to this poetic truth. Shared secrets, withheld from the rest of the world, can be among the most powerful form of shared social temporality, and it is the power of these experiences that moves us (i.e., we experience the sublime) and thus generates profound awareness of the other and depth of feeling in one’s relationship to The Other.

However, love disappoints more often than it satisfies, so that our tentative reaching out to the world in search of love becomes an experiment that is disconfirmed more often than it is confirmed. And even when love satisfies, it rarely endures. Some retreat within themselves, when the pangs of despised love are too powerful, while others, unable to forget the ideal of the lost paradise, continue to seek, and are in rare moments rewarded for their efforts.

The phylogeny of time

The origin of non-human time, of objective time, is the proper concern of the phylogeny of time. Of course, ontogeny and phylogeny are intimately interconnected, and we may even speculate on a temporal recapitulation in which temporal ontogeny recapitulates temporal phylogeny, but I will not pursue this further in the present context.

In terms of the origins of time, or, rather the origins of human time consciousness, interaction with other agents within an environment — i.e., meso-temporality — almost certainly preceded the emergence of self-aware micro-temporality, just as meso-temporal interaction almost certainly preceded those larger temporal formations such as exo-temporality and macro-temporality.

Macro-temporality emerges even later, in terms of specifically human macro-temorality. Before humanity knew itself as a whole (on which cf. the quote from George Friedman that I cited in Humanity as One) we did not know ourselves as a whole either in space or time. It is only with the emergence of human self-knowledge of our species as a whole in time that macro-temporality emerges, and this cannot happen until a fully naturalistic account of human origins emerges with Darwin.

The internal time consciousness of Cartesian privacy emerges from cognitive modernity, much as does historical consciousness. There is a sense in which internal time consciousness is historical consciousness of the self, while historical consciousness is the internal time consciousness of history. Both represent temporal consciousness of a greater order of magnitude than the interactions of meso-temporality. This is another interesting idea that I will not pursue further at present, but which deserves independent exposition.

Cosmological and relativistic time

Objective conceptions of time rooted in mathematics, physics, cosmology, and the natural sciences can be formulated without reference to human time, much less to the structures of micro- and meso-temporality that constitute the greater part of the ordinary business of life. However, science, as a human undertaking, retains its relevance to the human agents who are responsible for the constitute of objective, natural time.

In fact, we run into difficulties when we attempt to formulate a doctrine of time too far removed from human experience, precisely because human experience has been responsible for science, and the truths of science must ultimately be redeemed in human experience.

One is immediately put in mind, in this context, of Newton’s famous formulation from his Principia:

“Absolute, true, and mathematical time, of itself, and from its own nature, flows equably without relation to anything external, and by another name is called duration: relative, apparent, and common time, is some sensible and external (whether accurate or unequable) measure of duration by the means of motion, which is commonly used instead of true time; such as an hour, a day, a month, a year.”

Newton implies that human measures of time such as “an hour, a day, a month, a year,” are untrue, because only mathematical time is true time, but Newton’s categories of “relative, apparent, and common time,” are in fact quantitative measures of time in natural history which can be studied and defined with the utmost precision by natural science. Time measurements of a day, a month, and a year are rooted in astronomical events that constitute some of humanity’s first and earliest scientific knowledge. Had Newton gone in the other direction in the litany of apparent time, listing instead “an hour, a minute, a second, …” he would have approached the punctiform present and therefore the ideal limit of micro-temporality.

Despite the relativity of simultaneity that isolates us from the temporality of other dynamic systems independent of our own, there is a sense in which human temporal categories seem to me to retain their relevance throughout the cosmos today — at very least, just because human beings are an interested party in the universe at present — in a way that I do not feel human temporal categories to be relevant to very early cosmological history or to the far flung future of cosmological history.

One way to formulate this would be to put it in the context of the divisions of cosmological history propounded in The Five Ages of the Universe. We live today in the Stelliferous Era, i.e., the Age of Stars. Before the Stelliferous Era came the Primordial Era, which includes the Big Bang, expansion, inflation, and consists in large part of subatomic particles that have not yet congealed into familiar elements and structures. After the Stelliferous Era come the Degenerate Era, the Black Hole Era, and the Dark Era, after the stars have burned themselves out and the cosmos goes dark again. This is a classic scenario of cosmological eschatology based on heat death due to entropy.

Human measures of time seem meaningless at the quantum and subatomic scale of the early universe, and these same measures seem equally meaningless at the vast time scales of the universe as it steadily runs down in entropic heat death. Yet, at the present, anthropocentric time scales seem relevant to the universe entire as we know it today (relevant, though not by any means necessary or even privileged), although most of the universe is beyond any meaningful relation to specifically human time, and will remain so.

One justification for the feeling (which I readily admit is my own prejudiced intuition, and I claim no validity for it beyond that) that anthropocentric temporal categories apply throughout the Stelliferous Era is that life as we know it is possible throughout the Stelliferous Era, while life as we know it is not possible during the Primordial Era or during the Degenerate Era or after.

The possibility of life as we know it throughout the Stelliferous Era means the possibility of other species emergent from other solar systems, other planets, other biospheres, and other sentient species emergent from a parallel biological context, functioning according to the same natural laws that govern our world, our bodies, and our minds, means that an approximately anthropocentric (although technically xenocentric) time consciousness exists elsewhere in the Stelliferous Era, and is perhaps pervasive throughout it.

Objective micro-temporality

Although the categories of human time seem irrelevant to either the earliest stages of the universe immediately following the big bang, and perhaps also to the largest structures of space andtime, the “cosmic soup” of the early universe is recognizably a form of micro-temporality, even if it is not microtemporality at the same level of human micro-temporality. Moreover, the micro-temporality of pre- and sub-atomic particles prior to the precipitation of universe from the coalescence of ordinary elements is another paradigmatic instance of meso-temporality: the particles interact, and they can only come together and coalesce into the world we know and love by coming together.

The temporality of the early universe thus closely parallels the temporality of the ontogeny of time in the individual, in so far as the individual’s micro-temporality is always constituted jointly by the meso-temporality of the shared milieu in which the individual finds himself or herself. The micro-temporality of the individual particles of the early cosmic soup is crucially dependent upon the milieu of interacting particles, which is a meso-temporal milieu.

Larger structures of cosmological time — objective exo-temporality, objective macro-temporality, and objective metaphysical temporality — only come above in the fullness of time — lots of time — as the universe matures and new spatio-temporal structures emerge. As novel physical structures emerge, there necessarily emerges an interaction of these larger structures with smaller structures and with other larger structures, and these interactions of ever-increasing size produce the higher levels of objective ecological temporality.

Closing speculation

As ever-larger temporal structures emerge from a universe consolidating its structure, and ever-larger temporal structures emerge from the maturation of human consciousness, these objective and human forms of ecological temporality converge. It would be very difficult to demonstrate a close parallelism between the micro-temporality of consciousness and the micro-temporality of fundamental particles, but in the increasingly more comprehensive temporal categories of ecological temporality the chasm between the two becomes less marked.

At the level of macro-temporality, it is not difficult to see the convergence of human time and objective time, since human life and human civilizations are shaped by macroscopic forces such as geography, and geography is a local expression of cosmology. A human civilization that emerges from its planet-bound condition and asserts itself on a cosmological scale would constitute human beings living on a macro-historical level, and to do so would demand the emergence and cultivation of macro-temporal consciousness.

It may be only at the level of metaphysical temporality (which I also call metaphysical history) that there can be a full convergence of human time and objective time, so that that two ultimately become indistinguishable and therefore one. This may be the ultimate telos of civilization: to establish an identity with the universe at large.

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I have had a little more to say on the above in Addendum on the Origins of Time.

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