Collingwood’s constitution of scientific history was fourfold: that it asked relevant and exact questions; that it asks these of “determinate men at determinate times”; that it maintains a “criteriological” rationality in its recourse to evidence; that its point is to enlarge humankind’s knowledge of itself by telling it what it has done.
This is how their [Englightenment philosophes] notion of self-expansion – through unlimited growth of production, and the expansion of productive forces – steadily replaced all other ideas of the human good in the eighteenth century; it became the central objective of existence, with corresponding attitudes, norms, values, and a quantitative notion of reality defined by what counts and what does not count.
In this schema, now wholly internalized, the human being used the tools of theoretical and practical reason to expand his capacities; and all his reference points and norms were defined by the imperative of expansion. Progress for him denoted the endless growth of a society whose individuals are free but responsible, egocentric but enlightened.
The high stimulus society in which we live is represented through advertising as full of vibrancy and vitality, but, as advertisers know only too well, its condition is one of boredom, and the response to boredom. Since the rise of capitalism in the eighteenth century, when according to Patricia Spacks boredom as such began, an ‘appetite for the new and the different, for fresh experience and novel excitements’ has lain at the heart of successful bourgeois society, with its need above all to be getting and spending money.
Many resort to diseased methods of coping, not only physical addiction to drugs, alcohol, and tobacco but also psychological addiction to eating, entertainment, gambling, pornography, sex, shopping, and sports.
In sum, this would be systems-style leverage: avoid direct conflict, use the forces already at play, manipulate so quietly as to be unnoticed, know that no effort truly ends. Treat Middle East peace not as something to be hammered together but — to use Hayek’s idea for economies — as a garden to be tended.
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