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| 2007 publication: intro to Turchin for the non-academic |
It is important not to overestimate our understanding even of simple agrarian societies. Applying history’s lessons to the present day presents even more difficulties because we live in a different world from the one of the Assyrians, the Romans, and the Mongols. Abundant food and energy, rapidly developing technology and science, mass media, the World Wide Web, and the mobile phone make any direct comparisons between historical agrarian empires and the modern industrial states problematic. On the other hand, modernity did not remake human nature.
In the battle of man versus nature, nature always wins.
As the late, renowned American psychologist Charles R. Snyder summarized, even on a personal basis, “high-hope persons consistently fare better than their low-hope counterparts in the arenas of academics, athletics, physical health, psychological adjustment, and psychotherapy.”
What undermined Kant’s greatest discovery, the distinction between knowledge, which uses thinking as a means to an end, and thinking itself as it arises out of “the very nature of our reason” and is done for its own sake, was that he constantly compared the two with each other. Only if truth (in Kant, intuition), and not meaning, is the ultimate criterion of man’s mental activities does it make sense in this context to speak of deception and illusion at all.
Of course a danger is a potentiality, not an actuality. Of course some of these developments may not happen. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but the road to heaven may be paved with bad intentions that have not matured into acts. That is our saving grace, our hope. But we must recognize that the source of the new and enormous danger is not outside but inside this world, inside the minds of men, including scientists and those who support and cheer them on.
From the ecological perspective, elevating the individual over the community makes no sense, intellectually or practically. Individuals should have civil rights, but civic duties and responsibilities must have at least equal weight if we wish to preserve the integrity of the system over the long term.
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