Sustained Integrated Historical Cognition
[The following is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of the forthcoming book, the History of Tomorrow. It is presented here for the purpose of revealing the theoretical underpinnings of the theory of present-centrism — a mode of historical inquiry used to create the compendium of world history that is the History of Now. My hope is that this pre-publication release will help readers to better understand that book and the History of Tomorrow, which is the sequel to it. Of course, I also hope that it will also encourage those of you who haven’t read them to do so.]
The idea that a process of historical inquiry needs to be understood and pursued as a process of abstraction is entirely unrecognized in modern historiography. Such a process is necessary, however, in order to maintain the present-centricity of one’s cognition as one extends and intensifies one’s knowledge of the past. It is crucial, therefore, that we trace the development of the structure that we have established so far in the History of Now and the first four chapters of the present volume in order to understand the kind of process involved.
It will only be through an awareness of both that structure and the theory that makes it possible that you will be able to ensure that your own understanding of what we have explored so far is present-centric, and that you will be able to continue your studies present-centrically.
Your success in this regard will revolve around your ability to achieve, validate, and extend your own knowledge in the form of constructs.
— —
In modern parlance the word “construct” loosely signifies some sort of mental object. The Oxford English Dictionary offers a set of related definitions for the term from linguistics, psychology, and mathematics, with the broadest definition given as “anything constructed, esp. by the mind, hence spec., a concept specially designed to be a part of a theory.”
Notice that no effort is made in this definition to distinguish between concepts and constructs.
Both are types of abstractions, but they are not equivalent, and while a large swath of the history of philosophy has been absorbed with examining the nature and validity of concepts (sometimes called “universals”), almost no theoretical attention has been devoted to the study of constructs (i.e. abstract particulars).
However, since historical periods are constructs, not concepts, and the identification of periods, i.e. the process of periodization, is an example of a process that can be termed “construct formation,” it is indispensable for anyone who wants to study history systematically to be appraised of the nature and purpose of constructs.
Let us work with a recognizable example that will further our inquiry — and precisely the kind that people are normally inclined to take for granted: the American Revolution (1765–1789).
Up to this point in our present-centric telling of history the Declaration of Independence of ⚓︎1776 has acted as one of two placeholders for this period — the other (tandem) anchor fact serving this purpose being the forging of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights in ⚓︎1787/9. If one wishes to reach a fully integrated awareness of these events and their role in American history, however, one must periodize them.
Here is a simple version of the sequence of events that unfolded:
Starting in 1765, with the passing of an act of the British Parliament commonly known to Americans as the “Stamp Act,” British colonists in the American colonies began to agitate against the imposition of new taxation measures upon them by their mother country. “No taxation without representation” was a rallying cry that drove the protests, which mounted as the British government attempted to assert unqualified sovereignty over the colonies despite long-established precedents of self-governance within them. When the Boston Tea Party protest of 1773 resulted in the destruction of a valuable cargo of tea (upon which a new tax had been imposed) the British government took direct control of the city of Boston, and the colonists convened the First Continental Congress to organize a collective response. Their grievances were ignored, and soon an outright rebellion was sparked by a confrontation between British troops and colonial militiamen at the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775. The rebellion became a revolution with the issuance by the Second Continental Congress of the ⚓︎Declaration of Independence. The Continental Army created by that congress then fought the Revolutionary War for independence under the command of George Washington until the decisive battle of Yorktown of 1781, where, with French help, Washington defeated the British commander Lord Cornwallis, leading to the recognition of the United States by Britain via the Treaty of Paris of 1783. Not seeing a way to sustain independence as a loose confederation of new states, the colonial leaders known henceforth as the “founding fathers” then crafted the U.S. Constitution in ⚓︎1787, which was ratified by the states over the next few years and served as the basis of a new federal government for their now truly United States of America, whose social contract of natural rights was cemented by the passing of the Bill of Rights in ⚓︎1789.
These — and, of course, many more — events, are what constitute the American Revolution, by which is properly meant: a period in history from 1765 to 1789 in which the British colonists of the thirteen American colonies rebelled against their mother country and formed a constitutional republic in the name of individual rights, which exists to this day in significantly modified form as the United States of America.
What goes unnoticed by those who make use of periodization on an informal basis when trying to organize their awareness of the past is just what is involved in the process, what the cognitive outcome actually is when that process is undertaken correctly, and what purpose it properly serves.
The first thing to notice is how periodization augments the cognitive value-significance of the facts subsumed by a period. Simply put: periodization increases the value of knowing the facts involved.
Consider, for instance, the value of knowing that there was a Stamp Act crisis in 1765 as an isolated fact.
By itself, it means next to nothing anymore. School children have struggled for generations to retain such facts in memory long enough to answer the multiple choice tests imposed on them, and which they rightly perceive as useless otherwise. No significant aspect of the world we live in stems from the Stamp Act itself, nor from the protests that ensued.
Nor does anything about life today revolve around the discrete fact that a bunch of unruly American colonists boarded a ship in Boston harbor in 1773 and dumped the tea overboard.
But the United States of America — the most important country in the history of the world — came into being via the American Revolution!
An entirely different order of significance — cognitive value-significance, to be precise — pertains to the American Revolution as a period than to its constituent events viewed separately.
(The only exception to this point is the ⚓︎Declaration of Independence, which, as we saw in the History of Now, is one of the cardinal anchor facts of all human history. The unusual significance of that one fact, however, in no way invalidates the point concerning the others facts that constitute the period, which derive their proper significance only in relation to the ⚓︎Declaration and — especially — to the period that it anchors.)
The kind of cognitive benefit that accrues through periodization is the kind that always accrues by a proper process of abstraction, regardless of the context. For example, when one upgrades one’s mathematical reasoning from repeated addition to multiplication, or, in a more complex scenario, as one generalizes one’s thinking from arithmetic to algebra, and eventually graduates to calculus, the types of calculations one can perform, and thus the range of phenomena one can model, expand radically, as do the advantages of doing so. Try to imagine Isaac Newton arriving at his theory of gravitation if he had only been able to model the motion of objects by addition and subtraction!
If we fail to engage in the necessary forms of historical abstraction when studying the past, we restrict ourselves to the kind of lower order thinking Newton would have been stuck with had he not invented calculus. In order to upgrade our historical cognition of facts to a truly empowering — i.e. integral — level, however, we need to know how to enact the steps required and validate the outcome.
To form a period of historical knowledge one begins by focussing on events that are correlated in place and time within a wider domain. Although the periodization of events in disparate cultures, centuries or even millennia apart, is possible, it always requires a context of prior (periodized) knowledge. By contrast, to see that an event in Boston in 1773 is connected to subsequent events in nearby Lexington and Concord (also in Massachusetts) in 1775 is much more straightforward.
But the identification of a period requires a specific act of selective focus beyond an awareness of correlation. It involves grasping that a sequence of two or more events are essentially connected, which means that they exhibit distinctive historical affinity.
Affinity is to construct formation what similarity is to concept formation.
When we form a concept like “table,” we focus on how various tables we’ve encountered are similar, and by omitting the slight differences between them (in the context of the wider field of differences between tables and other objects such as chairs and bookcases) we are able to grasp that — allowing for differences in specific measurements — all tables are “ man-made objects consisting of a flat, level surface and support(s), intended to support other, smaller objects.” (This specific example, including the definition, is drawn from Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology by philosopher Ayn Rand, whose solution to the “problem of universals” is far and away the best available in the history of philosophy. For a full explanation of concept formation, the reader is referred to that work.)
When we form a construct like the American Revolution, by contrast, we don’t focus on how related events are similar; we focus on how they are affinitive — affinity being the relationship between two or more elements that participate in the same whole, but in a different way (or ways).
When periodizing, in particular, we must learn to see events not merely as facts, but as components of some meaningful sequence. Thus the Stamp Act Crisis of 1765 is viewed as the inciting event of the period. The Boston Tea Party of 1773 is seen as an escalation of the phase of the revolution in which the colonists were still focussed on protesting unjust taxation. The battles of Lexington and Concord of 1775 are seen as the initial military confrontation of the rebellion, which, along with other early battles, and in the context of the granting of a leadership role by the separate colonies to the Second Continental Congress, form part of the basis for the eventual ⚓︎Declaration of Independence, a technically illegal act that necessitated a fuller commitment to war, the long prosecution of which culminated in the Battle of Yorktown of 1781, and finally the acquiescence of Britain to independence in 1783 — which itself cannot be treated as the end of the Revolution, when viewed in its full historical context, because the colonies had yet to consummate their efforts until they united once and for all under the Constitution of ⚓︎1787 and assured the long-range protection of rights in their new country by the passing of the Bill of Rights in ⚓︎1789.
It is only when the role of each event within such a progression (or sometimes merely a succession) is understood as a component contributing to the meaning of the period — whose full cognitive significance derives from the whole — that the periodization is complete.
A period is a mental integration of two or more events exhibiting distinctive historical affinity, with their combined cognitive value-significance specified.
— —
Starting from this awareness, it is critical for you as a reader to understand all the key elements of the thesis of the History of Now and the History of Tomorrow as constructs.
They are many and various, and not all are periods.
The first construct at the heart of the thesis is the construct of the World We Live In, as presented in the first three chapters of the History of Now.
The components of that construct are the major cultures of the world, viewed as “cultural blocks,” among which five are designated as cardinal cultures, and among which the United States has primacy.
The key to such a construct is the ability to view countries and cultural blocks (which are both constructs) as components of an integrated whole. It is intellectually unproductive to view the interconnected world we live in as just a collection of two hundred countries, because countries viewed merely as countries are simply too numerous, and the vast majority of them contribute no significant thrust to history. An organized and hierarchical construct is needed for the purpose of integrated historical cognition.
Identifying which countries impart the most significant impulse to history as countries is the first step in arriving at an integrated awareness of the system of the world. From there, it is necessary to group certain countries together, because the affinity exhibited by those countries as components of larger cultural blocks allows us to factor in their contribution to human events on the scale necessary to incorporate them into a manageable and coherent whole. A cultural block is a country or group of countries that imparts a cognitively significant impulse to history at any particular time.
Once that foundational awareness is available to us, it becomes possible to build the next construct that is necessary for the present-centric study of the history of the world: the cardinal anchor fact framework.
In that construct the historical facts identified are not merely facts about the past, as students of history are accustomed to thinking of them, but rather the most fundamental components of an integrated awareness of the historical identity of the cardinal cultures of today as an integrated set. The Declaration of Independence of ⚓︎1776, for instance, is not an isolated fragment of circumstance; it is an anchor point marking the origin of the cardinal cultural block of the United States, while at the same time establishing its fundamental linkage to European civilization. Similarly, the Fall of Rome in ⚓︎476 AD is not some atomic datum of truth; it is an anchor point marking at the same time the origin of Europe as a cardinal cultural block and its relationship to its precursor, Greco-Roman civilization.
Combining such anchor points into the visualization or “map” of history that is the cardinal anchor fact framework allows us to readily summon the full context of history for higher level abstraction when studying any detailed aspect of it.
The World We Live In, its component cultural blocks, and the cardinal anchor fact framework, are all constructs. Like periods, each such construct is formed by grasping that its constituents are not merely separate things, but components of a greater whole, and by cementing one’s awareness of that whole by identifying and articulating the type(s) of connection(s) that bind the elements into an entity of a different order.
A construct is “a mental integration of two or more components exhibiting distinctive affinity, with their form(s) of coordination specified.”
— —
Within the context established by the foregoing, and specifically within the domain established by the cardinal anchor fact framework, one then is in a position to grasp the crucial truth that the identity of every single culture, viewed as a historical entity, has changed from its inception to its present incarnation, and one is able to pursue the periodization of that changed historical identity.
America, for example, originally a culture of Political Separation⚓︎, is now the self-appointed World Police Power⚓︎. The initial periodization of that transformation arises in the context of an awareness of the anchor facts of ⚓︎1776 and ⚓︎1823, which anchor our grasp of America’s persistent initial cultural identity in terms of foreign policy, as well as World War I (⚓︎1914–19), World War II (⚓︎1939–45), the Truman Doctrine of ⚓︎1947, and the War on Terror (⚓︎2001-), which represent America’s modern political interconnection with the world.
On the basis of this fundamental periodization scheme — and in the full context consisting of the periodized history of all five cardinal cultures presented in the History of Now — one then is in position to engage in the more abstract process of the periodization from periodizations of its cultures, as we have done in the present volume with regard to American culture.
At this higher level of abstraction, the complexity rises significantly, but grasping the primacy of the United States in world affairs helps us to maintain our focus where it belongs.
A concomitant process, which we have already initiated, involves the juxtaposition of the history of different aspects of a culture, such as that of American foreign policy and the American social contract, in which each aspect is viewed as a component of a more complex whole: American culture as such.
The combination of these elements is what ultimately permits us to identify not only that American Culture⚓︎ has evolved into Americanistic Culture⚓︎, but to see with ever greater clarity that the latter is increasingly a thing of the past. The tool we need for that purpose is sub-periodization, a fundamental type of which is the identification of transitional periods in history.
The identification of the transitional periods of Democratization⚓︎ and political Interconnection⚓︎ is what has allowed us to see the processes whereby America’s cultural identity changed, and to anticipate how it will evolve into the future.
Many people claim to understand why history unfolds the way it does, without knowing how, in fact, it does unfold. With the method of periodization at our disposal, we can finally dispense with the kind of metaphysical presumption and arrested empiricism that typifies these hypotheses and instead: actually begin to know.
And to viably predict.
And even — eventually — to take the kinds of action that will change the course of history as we actually intend.
That is the ultimate purpose of my work: to change the level of abstraction of history in order to transform it into the tool it could and should be for those who earn the right to wield it.
Although the work has barely begun, it has begun.
Let us proceed.
[The History of Now is available via amazon.com. For more information about the forthcoming book The History of Tomorrow and related courses, please contact me at scott@presentcentric.com.]
