“Hoping for a big tent in which it is understood that disagreement is the price to be paid for exploring important ideas.”
This is conceived as an informal and spontaneous annex to my more extensive blog, Grand Strategy: The View from Oregon.
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Discord Invitation
Self-Transcendence and Developmental Stages of Civilization
In Thinking about Civilization (and further elaborated in Suboptimal Civilizations) I distinguished among what I call orders of civilization, and this included, inter alia, civilization of the first and of the second order, as follows:
Civilization of the First Order is a socioeconomic system of large-scale organization that supplies the matter upon which history works; in other words, this is the synchronic milieu of a given civilization, a snapshot in time.
…and…
Civilization of the Second Order is an entire cycle of civilization, from birth through growth to maturity and senescence unto death, taken whole. (Iterated, civilization of the second order is a series, as described above.)
Civilization of the first order, if it takes the longue durée as a
synchronic whole, may comprise an entire era of civilization, and thus is a “snapshot” only in an unusual sense of that term; arguably,
this is what Marc Bloch, the Annales school historian, does in his book Feudal Society, which treats medieval European civilization in isolation and as a coherent whole. Civilization
of the second order moves beyond this conception of history and
considers how civilizations change and thus exhibit a developmental
sequence of stages.I want to here focus on this second conception in contradistinction to the first.
In What Do Stagnant Supercivilizations Do During Their Million Year Lifespans?
I mentioned in passing, “…the self-transcendence that marks developing civilizations.” This is an important idea for which I have not yet provided any sufficient exposition. The qualitative change of one kind of civilization into another kind of civilization, mediated by an episode of self-transcendence, diverges from the organic norms of biological or evolutionary change.
A civilization may pass through organic stages of development, but the
stages in the history of a civilization may also be of a different kind
altogether, in which one kind of civilization supplants another kind
of civilization, and these two kinds of civilization are not
necessarily related as less advanced to more advanced, or less complex
to more complex, or less mature to more mature.
What is distinctive about social change, which includes changes to
social institutions like civilization (whether or not the sequences of stages that a civilization passes through
in its development is progress, whether or not it is evolution), are precisely those points where
the history of social institutions can diverge from the natural history
of organic, biological, or evolutionary processes. An example of this is
the possibility of originally distinct social institutions growing
together, i..e., concrescence, which is the antithesis of the
evolutionary branching of life that defines biodiversity and the
structure of the biosphere. The self-transcendence of a civilization
that results in the change from one kind of civilization into another –
a metábasis eis állo génos (μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος) – or the preemption of one kind of civilization by another, is another instance of non-organic, non-evolutionary change that marks the development of civilization.
In light of the possibility of self-transcendence that is not organic and which does not define the lifecycle of a civilization, I will reformulate civilization of the second order as follows:
Civilization of the Second Order is a sequence of civilizations of the first order related through descent with modification, representing a continuity of tradition through time, but of different kinds of civilizations, which may or may not exhibit a development from origins through maturity to extinction.
It is an improvement to understand the stages of
development through which a civilization passes as the result of
episodes of self-transcendence as it allows us to set aside (without
entirely abandoning) the idea of a strictly organic conception of the
development of civilization.
The development of a civilization may be organic, and may be a development from less complex to more complex, or less advanced to more advanced, but a change is civilization is not necessarily these things, and so the more generalized conception is preferable as it comprises all these possibilities.
With these qualifications in mind, we can observe that the difference between civilization of the first order and
civilization of the second order is that of the stages of self-transcendence
through which a civilization passes in its developmental sequence in the latter conception.
This ties together the idea of self-transcendence as central to civilization, as well as distinguishing – at the same time as relating relating – a snapshot of a civilization in time and the entire development of a civilization.
