Holism and Human History

This paper uses a systems-theoretic model to structure an account of human history. According to the model, a process, after its beginning and early development, often reaches a critical stage where it encounters some limitation. If the limitation is overcome, development does not face a comparable challenge until a second critical juncture is reached, where obstacles to further advance are more severe. At the first juncture, continued development requires some complexity-managing innovation; at the second, it needs some event of systemic integration in which the old organizing principle of the process is replaced by a new principle. Overcoming the first blockage sometimes occurs via a secondary process that augments and blends with the primary process, and is subject in turn to its own developmental difficulties. Applied to history the model joins together the materialism of Marx and the cultural emphasis of Toynbee and Jaspers. It describes human history as a triad of developmental processes which encounter points of difficulty. The ‘primary’ process began with the emergence of the human species, continued with the development of agriculture, and reached its first critical juncture after the rise of the great urban civilizations. Crises of disorder and complexity faced by these civilizations were eased by the religions and philosophies that emerged in the Axial period. These Axial traditions became the cultural cores of major world civilizations, their development constituting a ‘secondary’ process that merged with and enriched the first. This secondary process also eventually stalled, but in the West, the impasse was overcome by a ‘tertiary’ process: the emergence of humanism and secularism and – quintessentially – the development of science and technology. This third process blended with the first two in societal and religious change that ushered in what we call ‘modernity.’ Today, this third current of development falters, and inter-civilizational tension also afflicts the secondary stream. Much more seriously, the primary process has reached its second and critically hazardous juncture – the current global environmental-ecological crisis. System integration via a new organizing principle is needed on a planetary scale. Holism & Human History (Zwick) 7/12/2009 2