The concept of history is hysteresis or path dependence. The concept of economics is ergodicity or the absence of hysteresis. All cultures have histories which feature Sage Kings who introduced a new economic form- e.g. pastoralism, the use of the plough, fishing using boats and nets, etc, etc. There was an element of 'path dependence' which explained why one culture did things one way and another culture did things in a different way. However, there was an awareness that ergodicity too prevailed. Of certain production techniques or habits of lifestyle, it would be said 'this spread from such and such place- none remember how or why' or else 'it is supposed that this practice spread because it was easier or cheaper but no one now remembers how this came about'.
The cretin, Hannah Arendt, didn't understand the concept of history. She wrote
In any consideration of the modern concept of history
which features Structural Causal Models able to distinguish hysteresis from ergodicity
one of the crucial problems is to explain its sudden rise during the last third of the eighteenth century and the concomitant decrease of interest in purely political thinking.
Fuck off! There was plenty of 'purely political thinking' at the time of the American and French Revolutions. Western Historiography, however, had been profoundly changed by transoceanic commerce and accounts of the ancient histories of non-Western civilizations.
(Vico must be said to be a forerunner whose influence was not felt until more than two generations after his death.)
Nobody gave a fuck about Vico. Pretending to have read him didn't get you laid.
Where a genuine interest in political theory still survived it ended in despair, as in Tocqueville, or in the confusion of politics with history, as in Marx.
By 'political theory' she means stupid shite in Plato's Republic or Aristotle's Politics.
For what else but despair could have inspired Tocqueville's assertion that "since the past has ceased to throw its light upon the future the mind of man wanders in obscurity"?
Not the mind of Jules Verne or, in Tocqueville's own time, the sort of technocrats who saw new ways to harness the power of steam or redirect the course of rivers or construct things like the Suez Canal.
This is actually the conclusion of the great work in which he had "delineated the society of the modem world" and in the introduction to which he had proclaimed that "a new science of politics is needed for a new world."
But he was too stupid to deliver any such thing. Still, the Owenites were onto something. Industrial Capitalism could mean higher material standards of living for everybody.
And what else but confusion a merciful confusion for Marx himself and a fatal one for his followers could have led to Marx's identification of action with "the making of history"?
That type of history was already being made by entrepreneurs. The question was whether it could also be made by shitheads whose idea of a good time was to sit on bureaucratic committees raising points of order? The answer was- sure. But it would be a boring or shitty type of history unless, as in Soviet Russia, it was fucking horrible.
Marx's notion of "making history"
which Robert Clive of the East India Company had actually done long before he was born
had an influence far beyond the circle of convinced Marxists or determined revolutionaries.
No. Marx was influenced by ideas which had flourished in England since the Seventeenth century. Plenty of English folk had gotten onto ships and created societies of their own liking. The German pedant was the victim of history.
Although it is closely connected with Vico's idea that history was made by man,
as opposed to fish
as distinguished from "nature," which was made by God,
but it was 'nature' which caused some parts of the world to lack much in the way of civilization. Also, 'nature', meant that places where civilization had developed were more, not less vulnerable to invasion unless their productivity in warfare rose more than proportionally to the tempting nature of the prize they offered.
the difference between them is still decisive. For Vico, as later for Hegel, the importance of the concept of history was primarily theoretical.
No. For Hegel, Napoleon was world history on horseback. Vico, it must be said, being Italian was aware of a type of historically entrenched class conflict in the Cities which Western Europe and America could sidestep or avoid. In particular, in the new manufacturing city where a worker in the foundry might swiftly rise to be an 'iron-master', the notion of class conflict as an unchanging fact of social geography was clearly foolish.
It never occurred to either of them to apply this concept directly by using it as a principle of action.
Fichte did want to be appointed Philosophical Commissar to the Prussian Army. Hegel wasn't that crazy. Still he was a good little beamte, singing the praises of Prussian Crown.
Truth they conceived of as being revealed to the contemplative, backward-directed glance of the historian, who, by being able to see the process as a whole, is in a position to overlook the "narrow aims" of acting men, concentrating instead on the "higher aims" that realize themselves behind their backs (Vico).
Both were Professors. Marx wasn't.
Marx, on the other hand, combined this notion of history with the teleological political philosophies of the earlier stages of the modem age, so that in his thought the "higher aims" which according to the philosophers of history revealed themselves only to the backward glance of the historian and philosopher could become intended aims of political action.
If the Prussian King had accepted the Crown from the Frankfurt Diet, Marx might have been a Professor in Berlin while Engels would have been a more important man than Lasalle.
The point is that Marx's political philosophy was based not upon an analysis of action and acting men but, on the contrary, on the Hegelian concern with history.
Marx was muttering some mumbo jumbo whose import was 'if you are ambitious, claim to be a champion of the revolting proles. Say 'boo' to the Bourgeoisie every so often. Maybe that way the Aristos will like you and ally with you against their traditional enemy. Also you can never be too anti-Semitic. That way the Cat-licks will like you.
It was the historian and the philosopher of history who were politicalized.
So political philosophy is too useless to even itself be 'politicalized'.
By the same token, the age-old identification of action with making and fabricating was supplemented and perfected, as it were, through identifying the contemplative gaze of the historian with the contemplation of the model (the ?Sos or "shape" from which Plato had derived his "ideas") that guides the craftsmen and precedes all making.
Only if Plato was right. But he wasn't. He was wrong.
And the danger of these combinations did not lie in making immanent what was formerly transcendent,
which is about as dangerous as pretending the pussy cat is a puppy dog.
as is often alleged, as though Marx attempted to establish on earth a paradise formerly located in the hereafter.
Marx didn't even try to abolish death. Why was he such a big meanie?
The danger of transforming the unknown and unknowable "higher aims" into planned and willed intentions was that meaning and meaningfulness were transformed into ends which is what happened when Marx took the Hegelian meaning of all history the progressive unfolding and actualization of the idea of Freedom
as a subject of the Prussian Crown teaching worthless shit at the University of Berlin.
to be an end of human action, and when he furthermore, in accordance with tradition, viewed this ultimate "end" as the end-product of a manufacturing process. But neither freedom nor any other meaning can ever be the product of a human activity in the sense in which the table is clearly the end-product of the carpenter's activity.
Freedom is a collection of Hohfeldian immunities linked to remedies for rights' violations by incentive compatible remedies under a bond of law. This is a matter of mechanism design and 'law & Econ'. It is the product of human activity. It is a different matter that some naturally occurring flat surface can be used as a table or that in certain circumstances, in certain areas or at certain times, freedom is available without any human effort.
The growing meaninglessness of the modern world is perhaps nowhere more clearly foreshadowed than in this identification of meaning and end.
In other words, something which does not exist is nowhere more clearly foreshadowed than in something which does not exist.
Meaning, which can never be the aim of action
Saying 'go fuck yourself' is an action whose aim is its own meaning which is that you should go fuck yourself.
and yet, inevitably, will rise out of human deeds after the action itself has come to an end,
No. Meaning is something intended by an action which aims to communicate it. True, some nutter may say 'the true meaning of your telling me to fuck off is that what you really want to do is to suck me off. The same nutter may say 'the true meaning of your kneeing me in the groin is that you want to suck me off.' However, after you smash in his brain, the meaning of your deed will become clear to everybody. You wanted the cunt to fuck the fuck off. He didn't and so you killed him.
was now pursued with the same machinery of intentions and of organized means
Meaning is not 'pursued' with machinery. It is expressed or intuited or guessed at. It is often sufficient for the intention to be known for the meaning to be 'read in'- e.g. when a Judge reads in various clauses into a contract or sets aside what has been written in favour of something which better meets the original intention.
as were the particular direct aims of concrete action with the result that it was as though meaning itself had departed from the world of men
nope. Meanings were realized and other meanings took their place. An invitation to 'Netflix & chill' means sex. Once sex has occurred, ordering a pizza might be mentioned. Five years down the line the conversation might be about how to get the kid into a good school. This does not mean that the original meaning of 'Netflix & chill' does not continue to operate in the relationship. If it has indeed 'departed from the world of men', it might be because you married a Lesbian.
and men were left with nothing but an unending chain of purposes in whose progress the meaningfulness of all past achievements was constantly canceled out by future goals and intentions.
The meaningfulness of lots of 'Netflix & chill' isn't cancelled out by the fact that your kid went to school and then Collidge and is now set to 'Netflix & chill' himself into a position where you become a grandfather.
It is as though men were stricken suddenly blind to fundamental distinctions such as the distinction between meaning and end,
There is no such distinction. The word 'end' has a meaning as does the word meaning. The 'end' to which meaning aspires is the communication of information or affect or a state of mind. But 'end' has no 'end' in itself just as the meaning of meaning is just meaning.
between the general and the particular,
there is no distinction here save of degree. A thing may be said to be truer of the particular than the general but it may not be true of that particular under all circumstances. It is merely generally so.
or, grammatically speaking, the distinction between "for the sake of . . ." and "in order to . . ."
Again there is no big distinction here. One may say 'do this for the sake of your son' or 'in order to secure the interests of your son, do this.'
(as though the carpenter, for in stance, forgot that only his particular acts in making a table are performed in the mode of "in order to," but that his whole life as a carpenter is ruled by something quite different, namely an encompassing notion "for the sake of" which he became a carpenter in the first place).
Rubbish! The carpenter knows he is making a table for the sake of his family whom he wants to see well fed. That is also the real reason he became a carpenter even though, at the time, he just wanted to sleep around for ever and ever.
And the moment such distinctions are forgotten and meanings are degraded into ends,
e.g when 'Netflix & chill' is degraded into sex and then nine months later a bouncing baby comes along and suddenly you discover life is way more meaningful than you ever imagined.
it follows that ends themselves are no longer safe because the distinction between means and ends is no longer understood, so that finally all ends turn and are degraded into means.
Baby grows up, gets married, and has babies. Why is that 'degrading'? How fucking adolescent was Hannah's Aunt?
In this version of deriving politics from history, or rather, political conscience from historical consciousness by no means restricted to Marx in particular, or even to pragmatism in general we can easily detect the age-old attempt to escape from the frustrations and fragility of human action by construing it in the image of making.
Sex should be a pure and spiritual experience. Getting preggers is gross!
What distinguishes Marx's own theory from all others in which the notion of "making history" has found a place is only that he alone realized that if one takes history to be the object of a process of fabrication or making, there must come a moment when this "object" is completed, and that if one imagines that one can "make history," one cannot escape the consequence that there will be an end to history.
Because babies never grow up and have babies of their own. If you get preggers you will have to give up your dream of teaching Socioproctology because you will be changing nappies every moment of every day till you die at the age of eighty. That why I won't have sex even though I long for a deep and spiritual connection with my Professor in the stationary cupboard.
Whenever we hear of grandiose aims in politics, such as establishing a new society in which justice will be guaranteed forever, or fighting a war to end all wars or to make the whole world safe for democracy, we are moving in the realm of this kind of thinking.
Arendt ran very quickly to a place which made those sorts of grandiose claims. I suppose this was because she really liked dollar bills.
In this context, it is important to see that here the process of history, as it shows itself in our calendar's stretching into the infinity of the past and the future, has been abandoned for the sake of an altogether different kind of process,
Nope. It is the same kind of process. The elementary particles which constitute our bodies and our worlds have a history stretching far backward and forward in time. It is a different matter than nothing lasts forever, not the Sun, not the Moon, not even the stupidity of psilosophers.
that of making something which has a beginning as well as an end, whose laws of motion, therefore, can be determined (for instance as dialectical movement)
No they can't because of impredicativity and the fact that intensions don't have well defined extensions in the social realm.
and whose innermost content can be discovered (for instance as class struggle) .
Fuck off! Class cooperation is a reality. Class struggle is merely a stupid slogan. Why not speak instead of the Aryan struggle against International Jewry?
This process, however, is incapable of guaranteeing men any kind of immortality because
people die. Get over it.
its end cancels out and makes unimportant whatever went before: in the classless society the best mankind can do with history is to forget the whole unhappy affair, whose only purpose was to abolish itself.
Henry Ford never knew enough history to forget it. But history is useful. It provides data points and helps us improve our Structural Causal models. It is worth finding out why hysteresis prevails in some areas but ergodicity in others. Does this have to do with uncorrelated asymmetries dictating 'bourgeois strategies'? Perhaps. But this also means we can improve mechanism design by finding more perspicacious public signals which promote better correlated equilibria.
It cannot bestow meaning on particular occurrences either,
Processes don't bestow meaning. Beings with intentionality do.
because it has dissolved ail of the particular into means
Nonsense! People who have sex and make a baby don't get 'dissolved'.
whose meaningfulness ends the moment the end-product is finished:
Mummy and Daddy tend to stick around even after baby has babies. They are plenty meaningful though they can get quite crochety- a wee bit racist- as they get older.
single events and deeds and sufferings have no more meaning here than hammer and nails have with respect to the finished table.
The meaning of hammer remains attached to the hammer so long as the hammer remains. You may say, 'the table is wobbly because such and such nail has come loose'. What Arendt has written is nonsense.
We know the curious ultimate meaninglessness arising from all the strictly utilitarian philosophies that were so common and so characteristic of the earlier industrial phase of the modem age, when men, fascinated by the new possibilities of manufacturing, thought of everything in terms of means and ends, i.e., categories whose validity had its source and justification in the experience of producing use-objects.
We know that what inventors did in the 'earlier industrial phase' was highly meaningful precisely because it was useful. We also know that what Arendt did was stupid and useless. One reason for this was that she could not write a single sentence which didn't literally mean shit.
The trouble lies in the nature of the categorical framework of ends and means,
There is no such framework. Why? Because ends are also means and means are also ends. There are no non-arbitrary extensions to these two 'intensions'. Category theory has no purchase here because there are no sets or network topology.
which changes every attained end immediately into the means to a new end,
That can't be done by a 'categorical framework'. Rather, it is the reason there can be no such thing.
thereby, as it were, destroying meaning wherever it is applied,
Meaning which is meaninglessly applied by a stupid shithead like Arendt does indeed get destroyed. This is because it isn't meaning. It is madness.
until in the midst of the seemingly unending utilitarian questioning, What is the use of , . . ?
which is useful. Finding out what a thing is used for can help us do the thing better or more cheaply.
in the midst of the seemingly unending progress where the aim of today becomes the means of a better tomorrow, the one question arises which no utilitarian thinking can ever answer; "And what is the use of use?"
The use of use is use just as the meaning of meaning is meaning and the sorrow of sorrow is sorrow. It is a different matter that these are epistemic and hence impredicative 'intensions'. This means that asking the question 'what is the use of use' can cause us to think of a higher, better, type of use. I want to use your body for sexual pleasure. What is the use of sexual pleasure? Babies? I suppose that's why sex feels good. Come to think of it, maybe if I use your body for sexual pleasure, love and the greater pleasure of shared parenthood and life partnership, then I will gain more utility from tonight's 'Netflix & Chill'.
as Lessing once succinctly put it. This meaninglessness of all truly utilitarian philosophies
is a function of the uselessness and stupidity of philosophy of every type
could escape Marx's awareness because he thought that after Hegel in his dialectics had discovered the law of all movements, natural and historical, he himself had found the spring and content of this law in the historical realm and thereby the concrete meaning of the story history has to tell.
But for Hegel, Marx may have gone down in history as the person who found the spring and content of the laws regulating the ruminative fart in the historical realm and thereby the concrete meaning of the story history wants us to smell.
Class struggle to Marx this formula seemed to unlock all the secrets of history,
save those concealed by a ruminative fart
just as the law of gravity had appeared to unlock all the secrets of nature.
It lifted the veil on secrets far more profound and deeply interfused.
Today, after we have been treated to one such history-construction after another, to one such formula after another, the question for us is no longer whether this or that particular formula is correct.
It is which has better predictive power or permits us to do better mechanism design.
Epilogue- Today the Kantian and Hegelian way of becoming reconciled to reality through understanding the innermost meaning of the entire historical process
Neither offered any such thing. Darwin is a different matter. Evolutionary Game theory has united the Life and Social Sciences. Discoveries in AI are changing the way we understand our own brains.
seems to be quite as much refuted by our experience as the simultaneous attempt of pragmatism and utilitarianism to "make history" and impose upon reality the preconceived meaning and law of man.
No. We stopped respecting non-STEM subject mavens when Scientists started transforming our lives with stuff like smartphones and pills which can help you shed weight.
While trouble throughout the modern age has as a rule started with
nutters- Marxist, Fascist, Islamist, etc.
the natural sciences and has been the consequence of experience gained in the attempt to know the universe, this time the refutation rises simultaneously out of the physical and political fields.
Nukes kept my generation safe. Ukraine's mistake was to give up nukes.
The trouble is that almost every axiom seems to lend itself to consistent deductions and this to such an extent that it is as though men were in a position to prove almost any hypothesis they might choose to adopt, not only in the field of purely mental constructions like the various over-all interpretations of history which are all equally well supported by facts, but in the natural sciences as well.
This is irrelevant. An axiom which is obviously false is one which nobody would bother to use because of 'ex falso quodlibet'- i.e. from what is false any nonsense whatsoever can be logically deduced.
As far as natural science is concerned, this brings us back to the previously quoted statement by Heisenberg (pp. 48-49), whose consequence he once formulated in a different context as the paradox that man, whenever he tries to learn about things which neither are himself nor owe their existence to him, will ultimately encounter nothing but himself, his own constructions, and the patterns of his own actions.
Because intuitionistic mathematics- i.e. one which relies on 'witnesses' or verification- is the work of a 'creating subject'. As Hamming says, a lot stuff which is 'out there' is equally 'in' the math. But this is merely to say there is order in the Universe- at least in so far as objective knowledge of it is concerned.
This is no longer a question of academic objectivity.
Objectively speaking, academics teaching non-STEM subjects are worthless shitheads. Still, they may be entertaining or might impart a touch of gentility to their students.
It cannot be solved by the reflection that man as a question-asking being naturally can receive only answers to match his own questions.
Small children are 'question-asking machines' but beyond a certain point they don't get matching answers. They get a clip around the earhole- at least that's what used to happen when I were a lad.
If nothing more was involved, then we would be satisfied that different questions put "to one and the same physical event" reveal different but objectively equally "true" aspects of the same phenomenon, just as the table around which a number of people have taken their places is seen by each of them in a different aspect, without thereby ceasing to be the object common to all of them.
No. Such is not the case. The guy who is an expert on tables is the one who 'objectively' has the better view of it. The drunken nutter doesn't.
One could even imagine that a theory of theories, like the old mathesis universalis, might eventually be able to determine how many such questions are possible or how many "different types of natural law" can be applied to the same natural universe without contradiction.
i.e. a Grand Unified Theory. Nothing wrong in that at all. We just need better tech so as to be able to decide between currently observationally equivalent theories.
The matter would become somewhat more serious if it turned out that no question exists at all which does not lead to a consistent set of answers
consistent with the evidence? What's wrong with that?
a perplexity we mentioned earlier when we discussed the distinction between pattern and meaning.
Patterns may have a meaning- i.e. an interpretation which expands the information set or has predictive value. Similarly, spotting a pattern may establish the meaning of an expression.
In this instance the very distinction between meaningful and meaningless questions would disappear
for whom? Not for anybody doing useful stuff.
together with absolute truth, and the consistency we would be left with could just as well be the consistency of an asylum for paranoiacs or the consistency of the current demonstrations of the existence of God.
Godel believed in 'Absolute Proofs' and gave a mathematical proof for the existence of God. Computer checking revealed the inconsistency in it. But even the error was illuminating.
However, what is really undermining the whole modern notion that meaning is contained in the process as a whole,
There is no such notion. Perhaps, what Arendt means is that meaning can be holophrastic- i.e. refer to a process as a whole like when you shout 'Bullshit!' and storms out of the intervention your friends have set up for you.
from which the particular occurrence derives its intelligibility, is that not only can we prove this, in the sense of consistent deduction, but we can take almost any hypothesis and act upon it, with a sequence of results in reality which not only make sense but work.
In other words, anybody can do stupid shite while claiming to be acting consistently and from the highest possible motives.
This means quite literally that everything is possible not only in the realm of ideas but in the field of reality itself.
No. It just means that stupid shitheads have shit for brains.
In my studies of totalitarianism I tried to show that the totalitarian phenomenon, with its striking anti-utilitarian traits and its strange disregard for factuality, is based in the last analysis on the conviction that everything is possible and not just permitted, morally or otherwise, as was the case with early nihilism.
One could say the same thing of Liberal Democracy. Did you know that dissidents who seek to subvert Neo-Liberalism by raping children are pitilessly incarcerated? Some are even treated as 'mentally ill'! It is obvious that denying babies the right to full genital intercourse with disgusting perverts is part and parcel of a Patriarchal plot to perpetuate Bourgeois morality.
The totalitarian systems tend to demonstrate that action can be based on any hypothesis and that, in the course of consistently guided action, the particular hypothesis will become true, will become actual, factual reality.
Nonsense! A totalitarian system which is based on the hypothesis that making miaow miaow noises will lead to the liquidation of the kulaks will fail utterly. This is the reason Chairman Miaow was not able to become the first Communist cat to rule over India.
The assumption which underlies consistent action can be as mad as it pleases; it will always end in producing facts which are then "objectively" true.
No it wont. Mao had to kill people or get his acolytes to beat the fuck out of them. Saying miaow miaow would have cut no ice.
What was originally nothing but a hypothesis, to be proved or disproved by actual facts, will in the course of consistent action always turn into a fact, never to be disproved.
Rubbish! Even if we beat to death any Army officer who reports that our troops have been driven back by the enemy, our claims to be winning the war will be disproved when the invader enters our Capital city and takes us prisoner and strings us up from the nearest lamp-post.
In other words, the axiom from which the deduction is started does not need to be, as traditional metaphysics and logic supposed, a self-evident truth;
because crazy people are under no obligation to be logical or show a concern with truth or plausibility
it does not have to tally at all with the facts as given in the objective world at the moment the action starts; the process of action, if it is consistent, will proceed to create a world in which the assumption becomes axiomatic and self-evident.
No it won't. Don't be silly. All that can be achieved is people pretending that your propaganda is the truth. But, you can also get them to pretend to be cats by beating them if they say anything except miaow miaow.
The frightening arbitrariness with which we are confronted whenever we decide to embark upon this type of action, which is the exact counterpart of consistent logical processes, is even more obvious in the political than in the natural realm.
Arendt would sometimes decide to embark on a course of action involving becoming a Totalitarian dictator.
But it is more difficult to convince people that this holds true for past history.
No. We don't care about 'past history'. If you tell me Robin Hood was a disabled Nigerian Lesbian, I nod my head. But if you say the same about Narendra Modi, I will contradict you sharply. It is Amit Shah you are thinking of.
The historian, by gazing backward into the historical process, has been so accustomed to discovering an "objective" meaning, independent of the aims and awareness of the actors, that he is liable to overlook what actually happened in his attempt to discern some objective trend.
Nothing wrong in that if the dude is an economic historian or concerned with demographics or other such 'objective' matters.
He will, for example, overlook the particular characteristics of Stalin's totalitarian dictatorship in favor of the industrialization of the Soviet empire or of the nationalistic aims of traditional Russian foreign policy.
That is a useful thing to do. The fact is, Russian industrialization could have been done even faster and at a much lower cost of human suffering. It should also be recognized that the Great Depression was Stalin's lucky break. It meant he could get in American Corporations to kickstart the process. Had the Americans not fucked up their monetary policy, there could have been a virtuous circle of higher marginal efficiency of Capital gaining economies of scope and scale and expanded internal markets. Why go off to Moscow if you can make lots of money in Manhattan?
Within the natural sciences things are not essentially different, but they appear more convincing because they are so far removed from the competence of the layman and his healthy, stubborn common sense, which refuses to see what it cannot understand.
The layman doesn't give a fuck about how the science works. He just likes cool, shiny, tech- preferably with NFC. I don't know what NFC is, but I know my phone doesn't have it. Or maybe it does. Perhaps I'm thinking of LLM. Also, I want one of those filters so you look like a bear or a panda when you are on Zoom.
Here too, thinking in terms of processes, on the one hand, and the conviction, on the other, that I know only what I have myself made, has led to the complete meaninglessness inevitably resulting from the insight that I can choose to do whatever I want and some kind of ''meaning" will always be the consequence.
For pragmatism, meaning is utility. For one purpose, what is meaningful is one thing; for another purpose, it is entirely different. Looking at Stalin's economic policies, we can separate out that which was purely economic or ergodic and stuff he thought he needed to do to keep his hold on power (which had to do with hysteresis) . But this sort of 'factorization' is second nature for most of us.
In both instances the perplexity is that the particular incident, the observable fact or single occurrence of nature, or the reported deed and event of history, have ceased to make sense without a universal process in which they are supposedly embedded; yet the moment man approaches this process in order to escape the haphazard character of the particular, in order to find meaning order and necessity his effort is rebutted by the answer from all sides: Any order, any necessity, any meaning you wish to impose will do.
Nope. You 'factorize' information. To test your Structural Causal Model against available data, you may need to find proxies for things like 'Tech transfer possibilities' (which increase when the domestic market for the advanced country is in the doldrums) and 'Stalin's paranoia' (which prompted him to kill off a lot of the people who had worked best with American capitalists on turn-key projects.
This is the clearest possible demonstration that under these conditions there is neither necessity nor meaning.
Not for a smart person who is working on something useful. True, a particular epoch in a particular place may bee wholly chaotic. Nothing much can be said about it save that stupid shit went down and then yet stupider shit went down. Chances are this was because it wasn't in the material interest of any smart and powerful agent to intervene there because the place lacked resources or strategic value.
It is as though the "melancholy haphazardness" of the particular
Arendt wrote 'What matters in history, whose haphazard, contingent melancholy [Kant] never forgot, are not the stories, not the historical individuals, nothing that men did of good or evil, but the secret ruse of nature that caused the species to progress and develop all of its potentialities in the succession of generations.' This was because she was as stupid as fuck. The 'secret ruse of nature' is to get people of opposite sex to bump uglies so babies get born. But it is a secret nobody, much above the age of 14, does not know. Incidentally, the only reason Arendt and other such fuckwits got paid a bit of money was because some adolescents need child-minders who will distract them from masturbating incessantly by gassing on about 'melancholy haphazardness' and other such shite which is only of interest to very special little snowflakes who deserve very special education in same spaces which charge Mummy and Daddy an arm and a leg.
The truth, however, is that history is a data set which we often find it useful to factorize into the ergodic and the hysteresis ridden. We then see what opportunities were missed and thus how we can improve upon our own Tardean mimetic processes for 'catch up' growth.
had now caught up with us and were pursuing us into the very region where the generations before us had fled in order to escape it.
They died. We too will die.
The decisive factor in this experience, both in nature and in history, is not the patterns with which we tried to "explain," and which in the social and historical sciences cancel each other out more quickly, because they can all be consistently proved,
Social and historical processes tend to have too many degrees of freedom for 'consistent proofs' to be available. There is bound to be 'overfitting'. Anyway, all you can hope for is correlation or Granger causality, not the thing itself. Still, with big enough, accurate enough, data sets, the law of large numbers comes into its own. Noise cancels itself out. You get good enough correlations. The trouble is they may breakdown the moment they are instrumentalized.
than they do in the natural sciences, where matters are more complex
less so. Why? Because 'intensions' better correspond to well defined 'extensions' and so Liebniz's law of identity applies.
and for this technical reason less open to the irrelevant arbitrariness of irresponsible opinions.
Actually, you can be way more 'irresponsible'- e.g. saying the Earth goes around the Sun, humans are descended from apes or even that the Universe is a hologram. What matters is whether your predictions are better. But this is also true in politics and economics. Nobody gives a shit what Jason Stanley thinks of Trump. We did pay attention to Alan Lichtman. Sadly, he thought Harris would win. Now his name is mud. Still, I suppose, he thought he was being 'responsible' by pretending there were objective reasons why a proven Nazi werewolf who has been sentenced to jail on multiple counts of genocide, cannibalism, and saying mean things about fat women, could never be re-elected POTUS.
These opinions, to be sure, have an altogether different source, but are liable to becloud the very relevant issue of contingency, with which we are everywhere confronted today.
Life is contingent. It is something we get over soon enough.
What is decisive is that our technology, which nobody can accuse of not functioning, is based on these principles, and that our social techniques, whose real field of experimentation lies in the totalitarian countries,
Nope. They don't bother with 'mechanism design' which is concerned only with what can be non-coercively achieved.
have only to overcome a certain time-lag to be able to do for the world of human relations and human affairs as much as has already been done for the world of human artifacts.
Nothing much has changed in 'the world of human relations' though some 'human artifacts' have changed beyond recognition in my lifetime. Perhaps I'd feel differently if I were an 'influencer'. But, few of us are.
The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself.
Neil Armstrong met beefy American tourists on the moon.
All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as man-made or as potentially man-made.
None have. It really isn't true that a fart of some potential me set off the Big Bang. On the other hand Arendt definitely did make Uranus.
These processes, after having devoured, as it were, the solid objectivity of the given,
coz Uranus turned out to be made by Hannah's Aunt
ended by rendering meaningless the one over-all process which originally was conceived in order to give meaning to them,
that 'over-all process' was and is our struggle to live more secure, more opulent, more pleasant lives and die with some degree of confidence that our posterity will flourish and enjoy a felicity we currently can't conceive.
and to act, so to speak, as the eternal time-space into which they could all flow and thus be rid of their mutual conflicts and exclusiveness.
Arendt appears to have confused Newtonian 'eternal' and absolute Time and Space with relativistic space-time. But nothing 'flows into it'. It is merely the hypokeimenon, or undergirding, of reality in which events occur.
This is what happened to our concept of history, as it happened to our concept of nature.
Hers were shit because she was stupid and studied useless shite.
In the situation of radical world-alienation, neither history nor nature is at all conceivable.
Because your brains have turned to mush.
This twofold loss of the world the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice in the widest sense, which would include all history has left behind it a society of men who, without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass.
In other words, Arendt- because she studied and taught stupid shite and ended up with a brain which had turned to mush- imagined that a similar fate might overtake everybody else.
For a mass-society is nothing more than that kind of organized living which automatically establishes itself among human beings who are still related to one another but have lost the world once common to all of them.
No. Mass-society is just a stupid shibboleth that was cooked up by stupid shitheads a few generations previously. It was connected to such phenomena as pre-sliced bread (surely an abomination sent by Satan) and packets of breakfast cereal and milk delivered in cartons rather than from the bucket of a dairy-man. Clearly, our good decent yeomen and mechanics will become weak and deracinated and Americanized. The world we once had in common- one where the proles knew their place and wore wooden clogs, not patent leather shoes- has been lost. Human beings no longer relate to each other in a natural organic way. If you try to bugger a Bishop instead of threatening you with excommunication, he is all like 'I'm terribly sorry, but I simply don't feel that way about you, Sir Keir. Have you tried the Chief Rabbi? Bit of a size queen- but who isn't these days? Personally, I blame COVID.'
