Excerpt

“Big history” and “metahistory” are grounded in an ancient lamentation over the segmentation of human existence, the alienation from an original sense of oneness. In this chapter I am doing my disciplinary duty by providing a deflating historical counterweight to the desire to overcome those last remaining obstacles on the path to a complete account. For me at least, the difficulties in reaching a complete account in a common language remain; nor am I persuaded that the difficulties are merely technical. The difficulties are deeply engrained not just in modern disciplinary thought but in cognition as such. Indeed, the very goal of a complete account in a common language seems to me to be based on a false view of disciplinary distinctions as well as a false understanding of what we ought to wish for, our real interests.

At the end of his extremely stimulating paper, “The Quest for Patterns in Metahistory,” [1] David Krakauer invokes the shimmering possibility of a “complete account” of historical events that would embrace all frequencies on the “epistemic spectrum.” A 2005 meeting sponsored by the Santa Fe Institute had revealed, as he put it, “the will towards a common language”; it must, he and others felt, be possible to break out of “the tombs of disciplinary scholarship” and come up with a way of speaking that embraces both individuals and types, events and patterns, concrete particulars and universal laws. Sadly, that meeting ended with the recognition that certain “significant technical difficulties” continued to impede progress on this front, and so other meetings were planned in the hope that these could be overcome. The Waikiki Beach setting of the March 2008 SFI conference certainly encouraged a spirit of reconciliation, and the papers were deeply impressive. But for me at least, the difficulties in reaching a complete account in a common language remain; nor am I persuaded that the difficulties are merely technical. In fact, I will argue, the difficulties are deeply engrained not just in modern disciplinary thought but in cognition as such. Indeed, the very goal of a complete account in a common language seems to me to be based on a false view of disciplinary distinctions, as well as a false understanding of what we ought to wish for, our real interests. 

In making this case, I speak from within the disciplinary tomb of the humanities, which are oriented towards the past. This orientation produces, or is produced by, a characteristic mindset, an anti-utopian skepticism. It is historically anomalous that so many humanists today identify themselves as politically left, because for most of the history of humanistic study, the scientists were the radical innovators and modernizers, while the humanists encouraged a spirit of reverential attention to the great names of the tradition; this was in fact the basis for the low value placed on the humanities by C.P. Snow in 1959. Today, of course, the situation is complicated—if not reversed—by the fact that the scientists are all on government funding while the humanists, who have little hope of such support, have become comfortable describing themselves and their work as politically radical. This reorientation may, however, be merely superficial, because humanists still churn out examples from history of how wars, revolutions, utopian projects, and good intentions of all kinds worked out badly; they still throw up cautionary red flags, and introduce a reflective doubt into structures of unquestioned conviction or unexamined enthusiasm. The humanistic disposition has its limits, but the scientific optimism that collective effort will bring us to an ultimate truth is also limited, in its way. When Max Planck, voicing this optimism, identifies the goal of theoretical physics as “nothing less than the unity and completeness of the system . . . not only with respect to all particulars of the system, but also with respect to physicists of all places, all times, all peoples, all cultures . . . not merely for the inhabitants of this earth, but also for the inhabitants of other planets,” I have to wonder what planet he’s living on [2]. In any event, I will in this chapter be doing my disciplinary duty by providing a deflating historical counterweight to Krakauer’s characteristically scientific desire to overcome those last remaining obstacles on the path to a complete account. 

References

[1] Krakauer, D. C. “The Quest for Patterns in Metahistory.” Santa Fe Institute Bulletin (winter 2007), 32-39. 

[2] Planck, M. Ach Vorlesungen über theoretische Physik: Gehalten an der Columbia University in the City of New York im Frühjahr 1909, p.6. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1910; translated in Objectivity, by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, 254. New York: Zone Books, 2007. 

[3] Renan, Ernst. The Future of Science (Boston, 1891), 131; emphasis in the original. Originally published as L’Avenir de la science: Pensées de 1848.

[4] Müller, M. Lectures on the Science of Language, 2 vols. (1864; London, 1994). 

[5] Arvidsson, S. Aryan Idols: The Indo-European Mythology as Science and Ideology. Chicago, 2006. 

[6] Poliakov, L. The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nationalistic Ideas In Europe. 1974; New York, 1996. 

[7] Trautman, Thomas R., ed. The Aryan Debate. Delhi, 2005.

[8] Kennedy, Kenneth A. R. God-Apes and Fossil Men: Paleoanthropology of South Asia, 80-85. Ann Arbor, 2000.

[9] de Gobineau, Joseph Arthur Comte. The Inequality of Human Races (1853-55). New York, 1999.

[10] Nott, Josiah Clark, and George R. Gliddon, Types of Mankind; or, Ethnological Researches, Based upon the Ancient Monuments, Paintings, Sculptures, and Crania of Races, Based on the inedited papers of Samuel George Morton, 8th ed. (1854; Philadelphia, 1857), p. 459.

[11] Renan, Ernest. Till the Time of King David, vol. 1 History of the People of Israel (Boston, 1892), 39, 13. 

[12] Renan, Ernest. Questions contemporaines, vol. 1 of Oeuvres complètes de Ernest Renan, ed. Henriette Psichari (Paris, 1868), 390. My translation. 

[13] Hutton, Christopher M. Linguistics and the Third Reich: Mother-Tongue Fascism, Race, and the Science of Language. London, 1988. 

[14] Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Roots, Races, and the Return to Philology,” Chapter 2 in The Humanities and the Dream of America (Chicago, 2011). 

[15] Hannaford, Ivan. Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Baltimore, 1996.

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