Laws in History and Anthropology: Cornell University 2004

(tendencies_cornell)

(talk at Cornell University, April 2004)

‘A mighty maze but not without a plan’

Introduction

After a lifetime of historical and anthropological research I ask myself once again the questions which from time to time our friends and students ask us. Does all your study teach us anything? Are there any laws to be discovered in these disciplines, any patterns which help us to understand the past, the present and perhaps the future in a systematic way? Is it all a chaos, a confusion, a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing, or are there hidden laws?

The specific spur to think about these things was the decision to try to gather together all I had discovered over the years. I wanted to explain ‘How the World Works’ to my grand-daughter Lily, imagined to be about 18 years old. I wanted to write a series of Letters which would help her to understand what lay behind the surface turbulence of our world.

This was my hope. But I was caught in a logical contradiction or paradox which I had never been able to resolve up to then. We might call it Alexander Pope’s dilemma.

At the start of the first edition of his Essay on Man, he wrote:

‘Expatiate free o’er all this scene of man;
A mighty maze of walks without a plan.’

Perhaps it was pointed out to him that this was verging on heresy. For in the second edition this was changed to:

‘A mighty maze! but not without a plan:’

Which is it?

The paradox was also pointed out to me in conversations and writings by Ernest Gellner. He felt that the great shift from what he called agraria to industria could not have happened by accident. It was too great, complex and organized a shift to have happened by pure chance. Yet it could not have been designed – for who was the designer? Is there some third state which is neither accidental nor designed, both a maze but also a planned maze?

So I sat down to write down my reflections on this problem, as follows.

The philosophical dilemma

Those who study the past or present, historians and comparative analysts, are apparently faced with choosing one of two views, each of which is unacceptable. On the one hand we may try to seek out ‘laws’ similar to those in physics where if A happens, B will always happen. This would allow prediction into the future and give a firmness and purpose to our studies. In the past there have been many famous thinkers who believed they had found such laws. Unfortunately, we cannot now accept their views. Since Darwin, and probably before that, it has become impossible to believe that history is moving towards a particular end, it is not heading in one direction. There is no purpose (God) behind it and there are no absolute laws which govern it. There is no predestined conclusion.

There is no way of avoiding the criticisms by Karl Popper, Isaiah Berlin and many others of what they call historicism or the theory of historical inevitability. There are no laws of the same predictive value as those to be found in the natural sciences (though even those in physics are more probabilistic and conditional than we often think). Hence when we look at the human record, either over the thousand years of the past, or the experience of different cultures today, we cannot expect to find laws similar to the laws of thermodynamics or gravity.

If we reject the idea of immutable and establishable laws, we seem to be forced to conclude that there are no patterns in the past, no lessons to be learnt. History or anthropology looks as if it is the study of unique, one-off, unrepeated events. We can only describe these and not expect to learn any lessons from them about what will happen in the future.

Yet this second position also seems unsatisfactory. We know from everyday experience that while we cannot predict the future, we can make fairly robust and useful predictions which usually turn out to be roughly accurate. If this were not so, all human relations, all traffic systems and all of the existence of humans and other animals on earth would be impossible. It is on the basis of what we have established about human motivation and what we have seen in the pattern of past events that we make endless decisions, big and small. Not only do we in practice have to use the past and our experience of other people to guide our decisions, but on the whole this works. If all events were unique and there were no repeated patterns, life would not be possible.

*

The way out of this dilemma of choosing between two equally unsatisfactory views of history, law-driven or random, is to look again at the objections made to the teleological, historicist, interpretation. The mistake of many of those who are the target of Popper, Berlin or Herbert Butterfield, that is people like Marx, Toynbee or Spengler who were seeking the laws of development is that they were searching for invariant, deterministic, laws, similar to the imagined laws of physics or chemistry. But as many have pointed out, no-one has ever found such invariant laws in history or anthropology. Furthermore, because we cannot know what we shall know in the future, all absolute predictions, as Popper points out, are impossible. But what if we relax the requirement and instead of talking about laws, talk about likelihoods, probabilities, trends or, best of all, tendencies? Here there seems to lie a middle ground which is the one we use in our daily life and gives us both flexibility and some limited predictive power.

My attention to this way of thinking was attracted initially, I think, by Lord Acton’s famous dictum that ‘Power tends to corrupt, absolute power corrupts absolutely’. If Acton had said ‘Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely’, he would patently be wrong. Power does not always corrupt, but usually does. And in this phrase we have the difference between a tendency and a law. Once power is absolute, that is to say there is no counter-veiling force, no other conditions operating on it, we do have a law.’ It is similar to saying ‘Bubonic plague tends to kill people, people dead of bubonic plague do not come alive again’. There is a tendency and a law. In other words we can put forward statements of the kind usually made by economists and others which have the, often unstated, ‘ceteris paribus’ (all other things being equal) clause in them.

The fact that Acton understood this so well made me pay attention to the fact that he seemed to have drawn his inspiration from John Stuart Mill. He quotes Mill’s Inaugural Address as follows. ‘No political conclusions of any value for practice can be arrived at by direct experience. All true political science is, in one sense of the word ‘a priori’, being deduced from the tendencies of things, tendencies known either through our personal experience of human nature, or as a result of an analysis of the course of history, considered as a progressive evolution.’ ( Lord Acton, Modern, 319, Appdx.II, quoting Mill, Address, 51).

Note here Mill and Acton’s belief in the possibility of looking at personal experience and historical events to establish ‘the tendencies of things’. There are tendencies, if not laws. So what are these tendencies and is it helpful to establish what they are? There are several valuable passages in Mill’s The Logic of the Moral Sciences which expanded this idea. Writing about a new science of ethology, Mill suggested:

‘But we must remember that a degree of knowledge far short of the power of actual prediction is often of much practical value. There may be great power of influencing phenomena, with a very imperfect knowledge of the causes by which they are in any given instance determined. It is enough that we know that certain means have a certain tendency (italics in original, AM) to produce a given effect, and that others have a tendency to frustrate it. When the circumstances of an individual or of a nation are in any considerable degree under our control, we may, by our knowledge of tendencies, be enabled to shape those circumstances in a manner much more favourable to the ends we desire than the shape which they would of themselves assume. This is the limit of our power, but within this limit the power is a most important one.’

Mill then goes on to give further precision to the idea of tendencies and to provide some illustrations of what he means.

‘It is however, (as in all cases of complex phenomena,) necessary to the exactness of the propositions that they should be hypothetical only, and affirm tendencies, not facts. They must not assert that something will always or certainly happen, but only that such and such will be the effect of a given cause, so far as it operates uncounteracted. It is a scientific proposition that bodily strength tends to make men courageous; not that it always makes them so; that an interest on one side of a question tends to bias the judgement; not that it invariably does so; that experience tends to give wisdom; not that such is always its effect. These propositions being assertive only of tendencies, are not the less universally true because the tendencies may be frustrated.’ (Mill, Logic, p.55)

Mill then goes on to agree with the philosopher Francis Bacon that these middle level patterns, which lie between universal laws of deep physics and the non-generalizable randomness of events are the most useful of all. The only way to discover them is to make more studies of the past and present of as many societies and peoples around the world as possible, alongside examining our own personal experience as human beings to work out what patterns we can establish.

So Mill and Acton have suggested that there are tendencies which we can establish and although they do not always happen, they can provide guidance for present and future action. They are different from laws, teleological and determining structures which will predestine our future. They lie between absolute free will and absolute predestination, giving room for chance and randomness, but also for the establishment of limited generalizations about patterns.

The contrast between a law and a tendency is excellently illustrated by the work of Thomas Malthus, another source for my realization that this may be the way out of the dilemma. In the first edition of the Principles of Population in 1798, Malthus wrote a very short book in which he tried to establish the laws of population. These laws were inexorable, unchangeable, bound to operate into the future. They are famous. That the biological urge to procreate will inevitably lead to population doubling every generation. That food supplies cannot double at that rate. That populations will rapidly outstrip resources. That they will in due course be cut back by the deaths caused by war, famine and disease.

Further thought and further facts made him aware that there were exceptions to these laws, for example in Norway, Switzerland or England. In other ways the laws did not always operate. So in the revised and greatly expanded edition of 1803 he changed his model to talk of tendencies rather than laws. All else being equal, population would rise very rapidly, but occasionally there were exceptions, for example people might control their fertility by late or selective marriage. The language changes from a deterministic, this or that will happen, this is the law, to one which speaks of ‘normally’, ‘usually’, ‘probably’, there are ‘trends’ and ‘tendencies’.

His device was to show that one can establish a powerful predictive pattern, say the ‘law of population’ or the ‘law of diminishing marginal returns’ which he also helped to establish. And then you show that this is what usually happens, all else being equal. But sometimes things are not equal. Since the events are so complex, something may well intervene to break the tendency.

*

I came to believe that this could well provide the basic structure of the book I was trying to write, ‘Letters to Lily’. It could set up a number of tensions or dialectics. Through examination along the lines recommended by Mill (personal experience and a wide survey of past and present civilizations) it might be possible to discover a number of normal tendencies. But they are not laws, for there are always exceptions, cases where individuals and societies and civilizations have avoided the tendency.

Another way of seeing the dialectic is like watching the sea when the tide is coming in fast through rocks, with tendencies swirling against other tendencies, a metaphor I take from Tocqueville. So, much of history is a strife of tides and currents, a struggle betweens tendencies.

The ratio between the number of occasions the tendency fulfils itself, or is counter-balanced, is not fixed and may well alter over time. For example, very strong tendencies which operate in pre-industrial civilizations may weaken with the onset of the industrial process. Some tendencies have almost always occurred in the past, for instance the Malthusian tendency for population to grow rapidly for short periods, while others have only occasionally been allowed to operate. But both are strong tendencies, in the latter case overlain by even stronger ones of a political or social kind.

*

As I thought further, the obvious fact emerged that the more physical, biological and chemical the processes we are considering, the more likely the tendencies are to be fulfilled. At the extreme there are tendencies (like the laws of gravity or Boyle’s law) which are almost uniformly true (that they are not always so is pointed out by Popper and earlier by Heisenberg). Above them come a number of tendencies which tell us about the human body and its relations to the physical world which usually, but not always operate. These are the demographic, ecological and economic tendencies, for instance the law of population or diminishing returns.

Then there are a number of tendencies which are social and political.. But already with these tendencies there are so many complex chains of inter-connected causes that the tendency is fairly unstable, that is to say often deflected, only partially worked out, sometimes completely avoided. And indeed it may be reversed for quite long periods.

The most unstable or complex of the tendencies lie in the areas to do with human mentality and morality. It is here, including the branches of science, that Popper’s objection to predictions becomes most forceful. As knowledge and the tools of knowledge accumulates, the tendencies change. Hence, while we hope to establish some mental and moral tendencies, these are very often only rough patterns of what very often happens, which are only a rough sketch to what may happen.

*

These differences have several other correlations or effects. One is that because the demographic/economic tendencies are more likely to occur and recur, they are easier to detect than the very complex ones at the social and mental end of the continuum. It required an enormous amount of cross-comparative data and very deep reflection to discover these social, political and mental tendencies, since they were so often overlain. They become, so to speak, more and more subterranean. Only by looking at very long sweeps of history and very widely comparatively do they begin to show themselves. On the other hand, it is possible to establish an economic tendency (as Malthus and Ricardo did with the law of diminishing marginal returns) on the basis of quite a limited number of cases and short space of time.

A second related effect is that it is much more difficult to prove that social, political and mental tendencies exist. Few would doubt the laws of thermo-dynamics, or even to a considerable extent Malthus’s principles of population, or some economic and ecological tendencies. The working out of the tendency is so often skewed doubt in the case of political, social, mental and moral tendencies that it will be always much more open to questioning and argument..

Some examples from the Letters.

I have talked at a quite a general level. Let me give a few examples of the kind of tendencies I have in mind.

Starting with biology, we have the disease tendency. This is the tendency for bacteria and viruses to develop faster than larger animals and to increase in number and variety with human wealth and crowding. This leads to the puzzle of how, in the eighteenth century, this tendency was reversed for the first time in history.

Then, in the intersection of biology and economics, we have the famine tendency. That is the normal tendency in history for the incidence and seriousness of famines to increase as human populations grow in numbers and there is a movement towards increasing reliance on particular crops such as potatoes, wheat or rice. Again, how, in the C18 to C20 did much of the world escape from this tendency?

Moving to the area where economics and society overlap, we can just note two. One is the tendency towards industriousness. As civilizations progress they usually move towards an increasing burden on humans, through slavery or domestic pressures. Alternative sources of power, such as wind, water, and particularly animals, are increasingly found to be too ‘expensive’. This is the story of much of the world until the eighteenth century. Again, the puzzle is the exception – the move towards industry, rather than industrialization. How did that occur?

In the same general area there is the move towards inequality and caste, that is birth-based, hierarchies. Normally, as wealth accumulated it tends to increase stratification and hierarchy, as Tocqueville famous observed all over Europe in the five centuries before his birth. Yet, as he also observed, there were exceptions. The English and American experiences took them in another direction. Why?

Then moving towards the intersection of all these with power and politics we can note just two tendencies. The first is towards bureaucracy. As wealth accumulates, numbers of people increase and communication technologies improve, bureaucracies become stronger and larger. Some of the reasons for this were famously outlined by F.Northcote Parkinson some years ago, and we can understand others on the basis of work by Tocqueville, Weber and others. Yet for brief periods this tendency for bureaucracy to expand to fill the space available has been reversed. De-centralization and non-bureaucracy has triumphed. Why?

Another area is in the tendency towards centralized power. As governments become more powerful they destroy all intermediary and semi-autonomous institutions. These, in the form of corporations, had been licensed by the state in the time of its weakness. But once it is strong enough, it takes back their power.

This has been outlined best by F.W.Maitland. He showed how this tendency was reversed in England and the growth towards what we now call civil society occurred against the tendency. Through the development of the ‘trust idea’, the underpinnings of a balanced political and social system were developed upon which Democracy can be based.

Then, on the borderline of these, where they intersect with ideology and religion, we can notice two more examples. The first is the tendency towards predatory warfare. Like bureaucracy, war expands to fill the resources available. It is spurred by many of the combined reasons of greed and fear which Machiavelli outlined. And it often expands outwards because of what I call the ‘reverse domino effect’, which Montesquieu outlined.

This is the tendency for Empires to find that there are always barbarians on their borders who threaten them and who they must try to conquer. Once one domino is down, the next must be knocked down. Montesquieu showed how this effect led to the collapse of Roman civilization. We can see it with the British Empire – India, then Burma, then China etc. We can see it with the American Empire today.

A second tendency is for civilizations to create inner enemies. Over the last 800 years in Europe the roll call of those who have been accused of a conspiracy of hatred against ‘our’ civilization include: Jews, heretics, witches, communists, satanic cult members and now ‘terrorists’. The tendency is for people to fear them, then to decide that the only way to ‘combat’ them is to tear up the normal legal procedures in the ‘emergency’ situation. After the panic is over, it has always been discovered that it was largely the reaction to fear which caused the phenomenon in the first place.

Finally two tendencies on the borderline between technology and thought. A positive tendency is what Gerry Martin, my late co-author, called the idea of the triangle of technological development, which leads to rapid growth. The idea is that, unless something intervenes, there is a movement round three points. The first is the growth of reliable knowledge, ‘science’ or discovery. This is then embedded in new artefacts or technology. This, if useful, is then propagated on a large scale, multiplied through the market. This then feeds back into an increase in scientific knowledge. Our history of glass and its effects is a prime example of this. The tendency, however, is often halted at one point or the other.

The other mental tendency is negative. The technologies of communication, writing, printing, and so on, usually lead to greater thought control, conservatism and suppression of new thought, as in later China or Islam. Occasionally, as in western Europe from the twelfth century, the tendency is overcome. What are the conditions for these exceptions?

These are very brief examples of what I have in mind. Nearly all of them were developed out of a kind of mental triangulation. I have drawn as Mill suggested, on my own life experiences, both as a private individual and as an anthropologist. I have tried to compare civilizations as widely as possible, by reading and by travel through most of the civilizations of Eur-Asia. And I have tried to look both in detail at single individual and communities, and in the widest way at thousands of years of history.

Synthesizing out the tendencies seems to require a huge amount of data. It is somewhat akin to extracting radium from tar. Those I find most helpful in their observation of these tendencies and exceptions are those who were great and wide polymaths, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Malthus, Tocqueville, Maitland, Max Weber and long before them Ibn Khaldun, Montaigne and the Greeks.

If one fails to maintain the distinction between law and tendency, it is possible to end up in the monstrous delusions of Marx, Spengler and others. On the other hand, if we stray too far in the other direction, as in the work of some post-modernists, or earlier writers such as AJP Taylor, then we end up in the position of Simon Schema who writes at the start of his History of England, that the only thing which an academic is a story-teller.

Many are reduced to the pessimistic view that we can learn nothing from any of the social sciences. The world is indeed a might maze without a plan. We can only describe, never proscribe or predict. We are on a darkling plan where confused armies fight by night. We can teach our grand-children nothing and give them no guidance or cheer.

One other advantage of this tendency approach is that it protects us against the fact that almost every generalization we make can be refuted by an exception. As Popper notes, science proceeds not by providing things true, but having in place theories which have not yet been shown to be untrue. That is fine for science.

But if we apply this method to social science, it leaves us with almost no statement approaching a generalization. There is always someone in the audience ready to remind us that this or that law is not true among the XY peoples. We seem to be reduced to pure description of individual, non-generalizable, cases, a point made some years ago in a famous article by Evans-Pritchard.

Yet with the idea of tendencies, we can make a partial generalization. ‘All power tends to corrupt’, ‘bureaucracies tend to grow’, ‘inequalities tend to grow greater’ and so on. The exceptions to these are not refutations, but interesting qualifications which help us to understand the conditions which lie behind the tendencies and to refine our models. When does power not corrupt, or bureaucracy not expand?

Conclusions

I have only skimmed over a few of the tendencies I try to explain in the Letters. Nor have I had time to explain how the tendencies were occasionally avoided. The exceptions and the reasons for the exceptions are in many ways even more interesting than the tendencies. But I hope I have shown a possible way out of the dilemma I drew attention to at the start.

Most people in the past, and many in the present, believe that the way in which things develop through time is laid down by God or the gods. God is a master craftsman, artist or mechanic, who designs an elaborate system. People argue that all this present complexity cannot be the result of a pure accident. There must be a purpose behind it. If you believe this, it will solve many puzzles and make it easier to accept apparent chaos.

Personally I cannot see evidence for a human-like force behind creation, though I do accept that there is an extraordinary degree of orderliness. It seems to me likely that this is the result of basic biological and physical laws, operating over millions of years. These lead to constant small variations. Those that work, that improve the chances for the survival of plants and animals (including human animals) are retained. Add to this the nature of human beings, with their conscious experimentation, their cultural memory and desire to improve their world (and their ability to make a hash in their attempts) and it is possible to account for how our world could have reached this point.

In all of this the many ‘accidents’, such as the shape of Cleopatra’s nose, the wind that destroyed Kubla Khan’s fleet off Japan, or the birth of Napoleon, have changed the world. On the other hand there are deep forces and laws, the laws of population, economics and politics which I have told you about, which also operate alongside these one-off accidents. So we can see a mixture of chance, of unintended consequences and comprehensible and more general laws.

*

So I do believe that there are deeper tides below the surface of history. Beneath the daily events there are a number of continuing structures and strong tendencies. To change the metaphor, there are paths along which civilizations move and though there is room for straying, they are under some compulsion to stick to the path.

These tendencies and paths are determined by physical, biological, economic, political and social forces. They constrain our lives in the same way that language constrains, but does not absolutely determine, what we can think and say. The best way to harness their power is to understand what they are. In knowledge is freedom. When the fly realizes it is trapped in the fly-bottle, it has established some freedom. It may even find the exit from the jar.

*

So although every methodology has its costs, I do find the idea of a middle level between laws and randomness attractive. By approaching history and anthropology in this way we escape the criticisms of historicism, teleology, historical inevitability. Equally, we escape the despair (and patent nonsense from our own experience) of a view of events as totally random and without discernible pattern or meaning. As in our everyday lives, we look for patterns in the past and present, but not ones that operate uniformly and without variation. The approach we are taking sets up models of what we might expect to find and thus directs our attention to exceptions. That seems a good logic for the study of history and anthropology, combining an attempt to learn something from the past both from the norms and from the exceptions.


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