#iscsc

I have returned from a couple of weeks in Korea, and am in the process of getting my sea legs back. We traveled by plane, train, bus, automobile and subway. We didn’t have one bad meal. The people we dealt with were friendly, helpful and just lovely. (Le Mutt didn’t come with us us on this trip because he heard of a conference in Chicago going on at the same time that he thought would be more to…

My new Frontiers Column is now available in the Fall 2023 EMERGENCE newsletter from the IBHA. Here is the text:

Frontiers – Fall 2023   

Last month I traveled to Poland to attend a conference of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (ISCSC)—the theme of the conference was Civilizational Security: Clashes of Civilizations, Clashes within Civilizations, and Stable Global Futures—in part to make the case for the role of big history in studying civilization, and, by implication, the role of civilization studies in big history. Since big history aspires to be a form of scientific history this poses immediate problems, as civilizations primarily have been studied by the methods of traditional history and the social sciences, whereas big history, while not neglecting the social sciences, has been primarily oriented around the natural sciences.

I tailored my remarks to the theme of the conference by arguing that civilizational security—a concept introduced by conference organizer Grzegorz Lewicki—demands that we avoid old misunderstandings and familiar cognitive biases by clearing the ground and starting over from first principles. The failures of civilizational understanding that lead to instability and conflict, I argued, ultimately flow from the foundations of our understanding (or misunderstanding). To overcome these failures, and thus to overcome the misunderstandings that have led time and again to catastrophe, may require a novel effort to understand what history and civilization are at the most basic level.

Big history and the study of civilization share, or could share, many core concepts in a newly founded scientific discipline that approached both history and civilization in the scientific spirit, each drawing equally from a scientific method reformulated to be relevant to human experience in time. A newly founded historical discipline in which history and civilization were unified in core concepts might be a distinct kind of history from traditional humanistic history in which the critical study of documents is central, and also distinct from the kind of scientific history in which the empirical evidence of genomics, physical anthropology, palynology, and archaeology are central.

One could argue that traditional humanistic approaches to history are as different from contemporary scientific history as humanistic psychology is from psychodynamic psychology. We have grown accustomed to there being many different schools of thought in psychology—Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian, behavioristic, cognitive, and humanistic, inter alia—each with their own distinctive methods, but it strikes us as a bit strange to entertain the same idea in regard to history. To be sure, it is widely recognized that most historians have an implicit philosophy of history, and we can divide historians into schools of thought based on their philosophical presuppositions, but we rarely go so far as to recognize distinct methods of historical inquiry, except insofar as they are the distinct methods of the auxiliary historical disciplines such as Sigillography (the study of seals), palaeography (the study of handwriting), epigraphy (the study of inscriptions), numismatics (the study of coins), and so on.

Nevertheless, we have, at least de facto, humanistic history and scientific history existing side-by-side almost as schools of thought in psychology exist side-by-side, with each learning from the other, but neither fully reducible to the other. Perhaps it is time to acknowledge methodologically distinct forms of historical inquiry that complement each other in this way, but which remain distinct even as they develop in concert. Fundamental conceptual differences do not necessarily hinder the progress of science. Physics cannot (yet) unify quantum theory and gravitation, and light can be described as a wave or a particle depending upon the kind of measurements taken, but physics continues nonetheless.

We all know that many historical accounts of the past disagree. Historians argue endlessly with each other to try to sort out these disagreements, whether by demonstrating the truth of one’s preferred account, or by accepting part of one’s rival’s account and revising one’s own views accordingly. Such disagreements are most familiar in relation to matters of historical fact, although they also intrude as differences of philosophical presuppositions, and, as such, are more recalcitrant to resolution. What I want to suggest here is that there may be different ways of reconstructing the past (and preconstructing the future), distinct from factual and philosophical differences, which different accounts suggest different insights as well as different explanations that complement each other, deepening our understanding, even as they remain distinct disciplines.