Han Jiong: An Inquiry into the Narrative and Historical Laws of Civilization History

Author: Han Jiong

Source: "Historical Theory Research Official Public Account" WeChat public account

The original article was published in Theory of Historical Research, No. 6, 2021

(Source: Douban)

From ancient times to the present, an important purpose of historical research is to investigate the laws of human history and social evolution, and to reveal the universality of them, so as to better guide the real life of human beings. In recent years, the study of historical theories that explore the laws, dynamics, values, subjects, and purposes of history has made a clear return in Western academic circles. This article will take the study of the history of civilization in Western academic circles as the starting point, analyze its performance at the rise of the 18th century, the reasons for its gradual decline after entering the 20th century, and the revival after entering the 21st century. This paper argues that the rise and decline of the study of the history of Western civilization reflects the exploration and reflection of Westerners on the important historical theoretical issue of historical laws. The return of the study of the history of civilization to the vision of Western scholars in recent years reflects the attempt of Western scholars to re-grasp the laws of history and find solutions in order to cope with the current crisis facing Western civilization.

One

In the West, the history of writing regularly has a long history. In the Middle Ages, "with the advent of Christianity, history became the history of truth, and at the same time it was freed from chance and opportunity", and history had "its own laws", but no longer the laws of nature, but "reason, wisdom, providence ... Providence directs and arranges the course of events, allowing them to run towards a goal... For the first time, history is understood as progress." History "is no longer ... The history of countries that have interrelated relations with each other ... Rather, it is typical of universal history". During the Renaissance, the humanist Machiavelli, witnessing the turbulent history of Florence, believed that it was governed by a certain law: "It can be seen that under the law of rise and fall, the regions often go from rule to chaos, and then from chaos to rule. For the nature of human affairs does not allow the regions to go on a flat road; when they reach the utmost perfection they will soon weaken; likewise, when they have become chaotic, in the midst of great despair, and impossible to descend, they must begin to rise again. ”

In the 18th century, philosophically minded historians and historically conscious philosophers combined the Christian conception of historical progress with the rationalism of the Enlightenment era, firmly believing that man, not God or hero, dominated history. The state, the nation, and society, instead of the church and the dynasty, became the main unit of historical research, and a universal history of comprehensive exposition of human history emerged. Universal history sought to inquire into the general laws of the development of human history, and Voltaire was considered a pioneer because he was "the first scholar to observe history as a whole, to link the events of the major cultural centers of the world, and to include all important aspects of human life." During this period, most historians believed that human history was governed by laws, that social phenomena had causal connections, that there was a causal connection between them, that they were concerned with the conditions and motives of social change, that they emphasized necessity and generality, and that they ignored the occasional and the individual. For example, Vico argues that the history of all peoples has generally experienced the "age of gods", "the age of heroes" and the "age of mortals", that man's "common sense" or "common nature" is the ultimate reason for determining the course of social history, and that the task of historians is to explore the connections and laws between complex historical facts. The German Göttingen School proposed that the development of world history can be divided into three stages: ancient, medieval and modern, and the evolution of each stage to the next stage follows a certain causal relationship. The Scottish philosopher Lord Kames, in his Historical Law-Tracts, divided human history into four phases: hunting-gathering, pastoral nomadism, farming, and commercial society, and he firmly believed: "The development of modern industrial and commercial society will make people more free, and freedom will bring elegance and promote human progress." "Cams's concept of civilizational comparison, continuous progress, and the idea that the transformation of property forms constitutes the driving force of social evolution has had an impact on both Adam Smith and Marx.

However, the writing of world history in the Enlightenment era took European civilization as the commanding height and carried a clear sense of racial superiority, which also made it difficult for the development model of the Eastern world to be included in the universal historical laws outlined by enlightenment thinkers. Moreover, the consciousness of European civilization was deliberately highlighted, not only as a category depicting the differences between different peoples, but also as a description of the global order laid down by European expansion. The state of civilization is the inevitable result of the historical process that all societies have experienced or will go through. In this way, history is nothing more than a succession of stages of development: from savage hunter-gatherers, through a few clearly definable intermediate steps, to a civilized, so-called 'polite and business-minded people'. These phases are defined not only by its degree of economic and political development, but also by the unique way in which the people perceive the world. At the same time, capitalism and the Industrial Revolution stimulated the great productive capacity of man, and many historians were convinced that the times in which their peoples lived were or were about to reach the height of the history of civilization. The study of the history of civilization also developed greatly during this period.

The French empirical philosopher Comte saw civilization as a system, arguing that the history of civilization is a dynamic structure that develops regularly. He divided the history of human spirituality or human civilization in general into three stages, namely, the theological stage, the metaphysical stage, and the final empirical stage. The positivist stage is characterized by the fact that "the human spirit abandons the futile search for absolute ideas, the origin and destiny of the universe, and the causes of phenomena, and concentrates on the laws of phenomena—that is, their constant and unchanging succession and similar relations." Like Comte, Hegel embraced this abstract, linearly developing view of the history of civilization and pushed it to its peak. For Hegel, the course of world history is the process of civilization, the world's historic nation is the "civilized nation", and the driving force for the development of civilization lies in the "objective spirit" or absolute spirit. Hegel went on to point out that the "Germanic spirit" is the spirit of the new world, and the Germanic civilization will therefore become the highest paradigm of civilization and the final destination of the development of world civilization.

In the second half of the 19th century, the rise of national consciousness and the in-depth understanding of civilizations outside Europe led some Western scholars to reflect on the universality of civilization. The German scholar Heinrich Rückert, in his Lehrbuch der Weltgeschichte in Organischer Darstellung (Lessons in World History), published in 1857, denied the existence of a "single, unified cultural type," the possibility of a universal civilization, and denied that historical development would lead toward a unified end. Carl Lamprecht's study of cultural forms of self-consciousness in specific social communities, as well as Burckhardt's concept of cultural history, takes the study of regional civilizations to new heights and places greater emphasis on disruption in the evolution of civilizations. In 1861, the British historian Henry Thomas Buckle published a history of British culture, emphasizing that European and non-European civilizations followed different types of laws: "In Europe, nature is dominated by man, and outside of Europe, it is nature that dominates man." The British philosopher Herbert Spencer distinguished between civilized and uncivilized peoples, pointing out that the complete development cycle of civilization includes three stages of progress, stability and decline, which provides theoretical support for the study of the discontinuous evolution of civilization.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, there was a crisis in rationalism, and nietzsche's criticism of Western civilization led to reflection on the definition of civilization and the development of civilization. Spengler and Toynbee challenged Hegel's view of the history of civilization and no longer saw Western civilization as the end of human history. In Spengler's view, both the history of the West and the history of other regions are conceived in their own unique cultures and civilizations, and they also go through cyclical processes of origin, growth, maturity and decay. Therefore, the West does not have the privilege of being above other civilizations, and the "decline of the West" also reflects the inevitability of history. Similar to Spengler, Toynbee also examines human history from the perspective of civilization. Toynbee emphasized that each civilization is parallel and equivalent, there is no difference between superiority and inferiority, and the development of human history will follow the logic of multiple lines rather than a single line. Influenced by them, Western scholars not only abandoned the universalist study of civilization, but also weakened the grand narrative inquiry into the laws of history.

After the mid-20th century, the German philosopher Jaspers's "The Origin and Purpose of History" (Vom Urspung und Ziel der Geschichte, published in German in 1949 and english in 1953) attempted to continue the holistic and universal approach to civilization research and reflect on the cultural foundations of different political and social systems, but it was difficult to save the grand narrative from declining. The reason is that under the cold war confrontation pattern, people temporarily shelved the ultimate issues of historical development trends and futures, and instead focused on cultural and political issues that were closer to reality, advocating reformist "fragmentary social engineering", coupled with the postmodernist deconstruction of grand narratives that emerged in the 1970s, led to the decline of the discussion of historical laws through the history of civilization. Only a few studies of the history of civilizations still retain a macroscopic perspective, promoting the study of regional and transnational histories. For example, Braudel pointed out in 1963 that "civilization can only be studied over a long period of time in order to grasp a thread that emerges gradually—something that is observed by a group of people", and that "any history closely related to the theory of universality needs to be restored to its true face".

After the 1990s, there were many magnificent, unique and influential works on the history of global civilization. These works emphasize "human communication, exchange and migration", and most of the content is classified according to the research theme or thematic order, focusing on outlining how world civilizations have moved from isolation to connection through trade, technology, migration, species spread, etc., but there is a lack of consistent explanation of the existence of human beings, their historical positioning and future prospects, so it is difficult to meet the reader's pursuit of overall history and laws. In this case, one scholar has pointed out: "They do not help to alleviate our strong need for simple compilations that go beyond interesting insights, and we are eager to finally be able to identify the general picture of global historical developments." Although the "final conclusion of history" and the "clash of civilizations" have brought about a brief return of civilization research, such "the focus of civilization discourse is not on interconnection and interaction, but on exclusivity and emphasis on cultural particularity."

In short, the study of the history of civilization, which was pioneered in the Era of the Western Enlightenment with the aim of revealing universal historical laws, was not enough to cover the particularity of regional civilizations, including the non-Western world, and was questioned by scholars who tried to challenge the centrism of Western civilization. In addition, the reality of the decline of Western civilization after World War II and the deconstruction of grand narratives by postmodernism, the study of the history of civilization and even the exploration of historical laws are gradually declining. As a global general history, the narrative of civilization history overemphasizes cross-cultural interaction, and ignores the internal inheritance of civilizations and the law of the overall evolution of human civilization, which cannot but be said to be a pity.

Two

Since the beginning of the 21st century, under the influence of historical practices such as the resurgence of long-term research and the return of universal history, historians have rekindled their interest in the historical laws in the narrative of civilization. Some scholars have re-evaluated the Axial Age or Axial Civilizations, providing a new theoretical platform for the discussion of historical laws. For the concept of the "Axial Age" proposed by Jaspers and its characteristics, researchers have proposed some new titles, trying to highlight the important value of this concept in the study of the history of civilization. For example, Karen Armstrong called it "the Great Transformation," Habermas called it "a revolution in worldviews," and John Tolpe called it the "Moral Axial Age."

When Jaspers proposed the "Axial Age" theory, he mainly wanted to show that the development of world history or civilization could achieve breakthroughs in many different places, not just in the West. Moreover, unlike the study of regional civilizations in the 19th century, Jaspers emphasized that the internal connections between different civilizations can form a unique "civilization complex". Unlike Jaspers's speculative conception of Axial civilization as a philosophy of history, new research advocates empirical sociological interpretation of history. For example, Ian Morris's comparative study of the economic aggregates of Eastern and Western civilizations, Habermas's genealogical study of faith and knowledge in the context of religious revival, Robert Bella's study of religion and ethics in the Axial Age, Jan Asman's study of cultural memory and mythology, Peter Turchin's study of historical cycles and cultural shifts, and so on. The above research has its own focus, or attempts to summarize some common characteristics of multiple civilizational entities, or to explore the evolutionary patterns embodied in the multiple transformations of individual civilizations, or to emphasize the internal motivations of the overall change of multiple civilizations. Recently, some scholars have even proposed the use of global comparative historical evidence to systematically evaluate the "Axial Age" theory.

The exploration of the fundamental dynamics and laws of historical development is reflected in the debate around the criterion of "breakthrough" civilization in the axial era. As early as 2001, scholars such as Eisenstadt, John Anachen, and Bjorn Wittlock noted that "there is an ontological distinction between high culture and low culture in the real world, and there is a regular subordinate relationship between low and high." Their basic consensus is that the "breakthrough" in the concept of civilization stems from the emergence of people's specific abilities, rather than the inevitable result of species evolution in general. "At the most basic level, cognitive transformation is related to the interpretation of the most fundamental aspects of human existence, specifically to reflexivity, historicity, and agentiality." "These faculties manifest themselves in the ability of man to reflect on the world, and to give expression to different scenes of the world, that is, the ability to imagine the worldscape observed here and now as another situation." Robert Bella argues in Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age that the religion and ethics of the Axial Age were the main drivers of the evolution of humanity as a whole. Eisenstadt, on the other hand, integrates the breakthrough of civilization with the social division of labor, the rules of value behavior, social order, and institutional stereotypes, and analyzes cross-regional social transformations, thus avoiding equating modernization with Westernization, secularization, and cultural homogenization. Pluralistic modernity has become the most influential "civilization discourse" in academia.

If the breakthrough of civilization in the axial period is regarded as a norm or rule, then it is necessary to explain why some ancient civilizations failed to achieve breakthroughs. This is about the applicability of the law and the issue of "exceptions". Jan Assmann argues that ancient Egyptian civilization failed to survive because it failed to distill the core of its culture or construct a memory model that maintained the core of this culture, despite the many breakthroughs that characterized the Axial civilizations of ancient Egypt. In addition, how to deal with the problem of world history staging with the concept of the Axial Age as the core is related to the continuity and turning nature of the stage of historical development. A general trend is that the Age of Axial Civilizations is thought to have existed in multiple transformations in the development of global civilizations, rather than in the transitions originally thought to be between 800 and 200 BC. The "second axial mutation" may refer to the emergence of Islam or Christianity, but also to the emergence of Buddhism by Eisenstadt, and by Rémi Brague to describe the transformation of modern European society. John Tolpe believes that there are three axial ages in the development of human history, namely, the Axial Age of Morality, the Axial Age of Matter, and the Axial Age of The Spirit.

On the basis of studying the history of the development of civilization in the axial period and then looking for universal historical laws, some scholars are also thinking about whether the probabilistic laws are more in line with the reality of historical research. In order to "find general principles that explain the operation and dynamics of historical society", the American ecologist and historian Peter Turchin tried to integrate theoretical models and large-scale long-term data analysis, using the tools of complex science and cultural evolution to reconstruct a statistical law, that is, the law of probability. In 2009, Turchin founded the journal "Historical Dynamics" and gradually established an information database containing more than 450 historical society materials, trying to analyze and compare human society in time and space to predict possible political turmoil. In 2017, he teamed up with historians, physicists, and semioticians to form a group to predict the future of humanity, hoping to help people identify structural crises affecting social stability and take timely action to mitigate them. Turchin stressed that the search for the laws of history is not to "defeat history," but to make historiography more vigorous. What makes himself superior to great historians such as Yuval Harari lies in the fact that he offers a test of the hypothesis, that is, to "transform the hypothesis into a dynamic model, extract quantitative predictions from it, and then test it with historical data." It is not difficult to see that statistical probabilities or probabilistic laws are just a reproduction of the so-called covering-law model.

Three

In recent years, the renewed attention paid by Western scholars to the study of historical laws is mainly to solve the current crises and dilemmas facing Western civilization, and then try to propose a new interpretation of the development laws of Western civilization. Specifically, there are currently three main crises in Western civilization.

First, the development of Western civilization has not created a fair, open, prosperous and free world, but has accumulated deep shortcomings, and even accumulated heavy burdens. The fundamental crisis of Western civilization comes from the crisis of capitalism, from the polarization of rich and poor within Western civilization. Jorgen Randers, professor emeritus at the Norwegian Business School and author of "2052: China and the World in the Next Forty Years," argues that "by 2050, American and British societies will be divided into two classes, with a few elites living well, but the living standards of the majority will decline and social equality will disappear," at which point "the so-called democratic, liberal societies of the West will fail, and countries with stronger governments like China will be the winners." This situation has spurred more socially responsible scholars to pay attention to deep-seated inequalities in Western civilization. For example, the American economic historian Fogel explores the nearly four hundred years of humanity's solution to the problems of hunger and health. French scholar Piketty studied the long-term evolutionary trend of inequality in capitalist society based on various systematic historical data such as national accounts, income, property and tax payments in Many European and American countries. Walter Scheidel, a professor of Roman history at Stanford University, examines the economic inequalities facing humanity from the Stone Age to the 21st century, arguing that the corrective effects of wars, revolutions, plagues, and the collapse of predatory states on domestic inequalities are short-term.

Unfortunately, it is difficult for these scholars to face up to the fundamental shortcomings of the capitalist system. As mentioned earlier, Peter Turchin used his political pressure index to test and successfully predict the political turmoil in the United States in 2020, but he only intuitively selected three variables to analyze, namely, the interest rate to measure the country's ability to repay the debt, the real wage to measure the country's ability to mobilize the masses, and the number of Senate obstruction bills to measure the degree of elite competition. Even if some scholars have fully realized that the new "global disorder" has exacerbated the original vicious circle and highlighted the political and civilizational crisis in Europe and the United States, it will not be able to give a better solution. "Today, there is no real alternative to capitalism. In the face of capitalism and its panic, the only thing Europeans want is security and well-being within imagination. What are the limits of its imagination? It is the market and identity commonality itself. In this way, Western civilization has almost lost the ability to rationally envisage future changes in the global order.

Second, the centrality of Western civilization is weakening, leading to the reshaping and transformation of the global order. There was originally no distinction between high and low civilizations, but in a period of history, there were relative differences between the speed of development and the advanced and backward, and in fact formed the central position of a certain civilization. Since entering the modern era, a small number of Western countries have regarded "civilization" as an ideological discourse tool for maintaining their dominant position and promoting and expanding the capitalist colonial system from the very beginning, "after the great geographical discovery, political economy, sociology, anthropology, the history of European civilization, international law, etc., all of which have participated in the shaping of the hierarchy of civilization to varying degrees." However, when the global status of Western countries changes or even gradually loses its central position, the global order will inevitably be readjusted. Since entering the 21st century, the West is facing the possibility of being overtaken or overtaken by non-Western emerging powers, and the situation of "the East is subordinate to the West" formed in modern times is quietly changing. More Western scholars pointed out that the NEW CROWN epidemic will only accelerate the shift from US-centered globalization to more China-centered globalization. Unfortunately, entrenched Western civilizational centrism and cultural elite consciousness obscure their true direction in exploring the causes of global disorder. As mentioned earlier, the history of global civilization, while choosing a non-nation-state paradigm and a non-Eurocentric perspective, overemphasizes the "important role" of "interaction, interconnection, and cross-social structures", "cedes causal explanatory power to them", and abandons endogenous interpretation. Most of these works fail to comprehensively examine what factors in their own civilization inhibit or inspire the vast majority of workers to improve their production and living conditions and develop their productive capacity.

Third, Western civilization is facing a series of increasingly severe challenges, such as global public security, climate crisis and ecological disasters, and global governance problems, which force Western scholars to think about the future development of Western civilization and the existence of human beings. Taking the concept of the "Anthropocene" as an example, this concept has gradually been accepted by scientists and the general public, which means that it is necessary to place human beings in the context of the evolution of the earth and even the universe, and to investigate the relationship between civilizations and nature, and the relationship between different civilizations. This kind of civilization history, which integrates the history of man and the history of the environment, requires historians to pay attention to the overall and long-term development and evolution of the law, reflecting a deep concern and social responsibility for "how human society has changed" and "why modern society has changed so fast". The history of mankind is essentially a history of how human beings regulate nature, society and their own development and change through their own production and life activities. Relying on the creative activities of production and life over the years, the depth and breadth of human regulation of nature, society and itself have become more and more prominent. Whenever people's practical and cognitive activities touch a new "tipping point", human beings reflect more deeply on their creative and destructive consequences, which inevitably requires the establishment of a grander view of history in space and time. For example, the planetary space beyond "humanity" and the historical time beyond the "Anthropocene", that is, the typical "post-human" concept of civilization history.

In addition, many cutting-edge research results in the field of natural sciences, such as gravitational wave effects and synthetic biotechnology, are also constantly impacting the inherent understanding of "human beings" and "human civilization". In the face of an unprecedented crisis of civilization, it is difficult to explain the evolution of civilization and social change with traditional theories of human nature, cultural essentialism or scientific and technological determinism. Many countries advocate strengthening cooperation between natural sciences and social sciences, and adopting a comprehensive perspective and interdisciplinary analysis methods to analyze human civilization and its development laws. For example, the first article in the academic journal "Evolutionary Research in Imaginary Culture", which was launched in the United States in 2017, is "Interdisciplinary Investigation on Human Nature, Culture and Scientific Beliefs".

By reflecting on the shortcomings and crises of Western civilization, Western scholars try to reconstruct the study and exploration of historical laws, and then find the certainty in historical development for Westerners who have undergone rapid changes and lack social security. Nevertheless, Western scholars' discussion of historical laws in the narrative of civilization history still needs to focus on the following two problems. First, how to bridge the debate between the humanistic and scientist view of history in the integration of human history and environmental history. Second, how to avoid single-factor determinism without falling into the trap of omnipotent and omnipotent explanations brought about by multiple compromises. If the inquiry into the laws of the development of the history of Western civilization is to be well developed, it is necessary to innovate in the understanding and interpretation of the "ultimate cause" or "fundamental driving force". More than 170 years ago, the materialist view of history launched a historical ontological revolution in the process of founding, and the theory of historical laws and their realizations revealed by it still has guiding significance.

The author is Han Jiong, a lecturer at the School of Marxism at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics

Comments from omitted, the full version please refer to the original text.

Editor: Xiang Yu

Proofreader: Water Life

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