Epistemes and the Long Term Future
Sohail Inayatullah
Forecasts of the future often
assume that the larger epistemological context for events and trends are
stable. However, taking a macrohistorical perspective - drawn from Johan
Galtung’s and Sohail Inayatullah's, Macrohistory and Macrohistorians
and Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things - forecasts themselves
are understood by the episteme that shapes them. For example, the
likelihood of a particular technological development has a greater or
lessor likelihood of occurrence depending on the nature of the episteme
– the knowledge boundaries – that is current.
Epistemes are the larger and
deeper paradigms of knowledge – reality – that contextualize the
boundaries of what can be known. They interact with social, economic,
technological and intellectual developments. At the most simple,
epistemic history is seen in three stages: ancient (Greek or Roman),
medieval (Christian middle ages) and modern (rise of the West), with the
postmodern (the collapse of grand narratives) being the next likely
stage. In the Indian context, this is read as ancient (Hindu), medieval
(Muslim) and modern (British/nationalism).
Economy and technology
Alternatively, more focused on
economy as pivotal, grand thinkers argue for an agricultural, industrial
and postindustrial schema, with these categories created by the means of
production and the types of work done in each historical stage. This
division allows theorists to argue for future stages such as a services
age or even an artistic age. Likewise, Comte and Spencer, whose
categories of history and future are those that we live today, gave us
primitive, modern and scientific (positivism) as historical stages, with
the latter for all practical purposes being the final stage when truth
is known, and all that is left to is to implement social and scientific
laws. It is this latter assumption of a unified historical and future
framework, an unbroken grand narrative of social evolution, that guides
many forecasts – probable, plausible, possible. They do not take into
account the possibility of the entire framework of what is we consider
nature and truth changing, of the emergence of new nominations of
significance, of fundamental discontinuity. Believing that the future
will be data-led – focused only on current dominant drivers (economy or
technology), we get logical scenarios based on short-run current
understandings.
Alas, if only history and future
were so simple. A macrohistorical view shows us quite the opposite, that
all attempts to postulate the end of history, or the unending
continuation of a particular social formation – whether capitalism or
liberalism or modernism or communism or the religious vision of “heaven
on earth” – are doomed to fail.
This is partly because the
mechanisms of civilizational change are not only exogenous (planet
change, asteroids) and endogenous (creativity, drive to dominate,
dialectics) but interactive and mysterious, that is, unknown,
epistemologically discontinuous. Seen from this perspective the shape
of the future of knowledge comes out quite differently.
Cyclical history and futures
The Indian philosopher P. R.
Sarkar is perhaps most instructive. He finds evidence for four stages:
worker, warrior, intellectual (priest) and merchant. Each social stage
defines what is truth, the natural and the beautiful, more so each stage
defines what is of significance. After the merchant stage, the cycle
starts over. Thus to forecasts which assert that economic globalization
will continue unabated, Sarkar points out that historically all systems
exaggerate a particular type of power. Thinking forward 1000 years, we
can well imagine the cycle going through many stages, with the current
globalization of capital eventually leading to a globalization of labor,
which will possibly lead to a more disciplined unified martial society
(which will likely expand to outerspace, as martial civilizations tend
to do, expand outward, that is). This stage of World Empire will then
lead to another era where ideas about God and truth will flourish.
Overtime, there will be a decline since intellectual ideals will not be
able to deal with other factors of reality, leading to yet another focus
on economics and wealth creation.
Sorokin also finds evidence of
non-linearity in history. He posits that historical change follows the
pattern of the pendulum. Civilizations move backward and forward between
ideational societies focused only on the nature of truth to sensate
civilizations focused on pleasure and capital accumulation. Each one
swings too far, with integrative stages appearing on occasion. Thus, we
should expect to see in the next hundred or so years, a swing away from
the sensate to the ideational. In a 1000 years, there will be additional
swings, a few hundreds year of each.
Emergence and evolution
The main point is that all
systems are to some extent patterned and change is intrinsic in them.
This is far more complex then the lay view that the decline follows the
rise (although certainly there is historical truth to this) since there
is novelty, emergence. As Vico wrote hundreds of years ago, the laws of
social change are soft, the past never repeats in the same way.
Certainly then there is a role
for individuals, for new technologies, for grand social movements, for
bifurcation as Ilya Prigogine and other modern scientists have argued.
However, is as well, argues Arnold Toynbee, imitation and thus eventual
decline. But with all generational decline, a new era can be ushered in
by a creative minority. However, there are not endless possibilities to
social structure, to the shape of the new era. There are only a few
possible evolutionary structures (at this stage, at least): local,
self-reliant culture systems; a new world church (ideational); a new
world empire; or the “Wallersteinian” mixture of local polities and a
world economy – the capitalist world economy we have today. There are
not an endless array of social choices, just as for humans, biology and
genetics "determine" the shape of what we are.
As with modern/postmodern
thinkers, for grand cyclical historians, novelty too is part of the
macroscope of time. For Sarkar and Sorokin, the pattern of history can
change through directed leadership, directed social evolution. The cycle
of history can be transformed to the spiral, the progressive movement of
social evolution toward a more ideal society. However, the basic
evolutionary pattern of the cycle – in Sarkar’s theory of
worker/martial/intellectual/merchant – cannot change since these are
evolutionary, historically developed. Exploitation and human misery,
war and domination can be ended but history does not end, there are
always new challenges.
For Sorokin, there are only five
ways to answer the question of what is real, what is true. Either the
ideational world is truth; the sensate world is truth; both are true;
the question is not important; or one can never know. Of the latter two
categories, no civilization can be created. From the former three, we
get the ideational, sensate and integrated epochs. Johan Galtung has
added the notion of contraction and expansion arguing that civilizations
are often in different phases to each other. For example, the West and
Islam are in counter-cyclical phases, taking turns being in contraction
and expansion modes. Chinese philosopher Ssu-Ma Chi'en, in contrast,
saw history and future less in the context of bifurcation, of
transformation, and more in terms of a harmony cycle. When the leader
follows the tao, that which is essentially natural, then civilization
flourishes, virtue reigns, however, overtime leaders degenerate and move
away from learning. Virtue degenerates and harmony disappears.
Eventually, however, a new leader appears, a sage-king, and equilibrium
is restored. The future then for Ssu-ma Chi'en can best be understand by
examining how closely leadership is virtuous.
There are thus structural
limitations as to what is possible, there are historical evolutionary
patterns. But what is crucial of this discussion is that it is not just
new technologies or human creativity that will create the future, but
that these stages are the larger epistemes which define what is the
true, the good and the beautiful, that frames how we think about the
future. Epistemes do change – great humans create new discourses that
change the nature of what it is to be; new technologies transform the
nature of reality; and grand natural events as well change reality.
Thus, while macrohistorians give us patterns which will structure the
future of society, these structures evolve interactively with the new
(and many times the "new" is merely ephemeral, an old form that looks
different because the epistemic basis of intelligibility, of recognition
have changed).
Contextualizing factors
Often, however, we investigate
the latter, and not the former, creating realities, that while
interesting, do not give us insight into the mechanisms of past and
future, since they do not account for the grant structures in history –
the patterns of social and civilizational change. The factors analysed
are done so from a short term data-heavy perspective, forgetting the
overall episteme that shapes what constitutes data. Instead of breaking
new ground into the long-term factors impacting the future, forecasts
merely restate the current politics of reality. While they assume that
there will be fantastic new technologies or events they hold stable the
foundational nature of reality, not contesting the epistemological and
civilizational basis of political, economics and society.
However, by focusing on episteme
we can gain a sense of what will be the overall paradigm of what it
means to be human. The future nature of epistemes thus becomes a factor
that interacts with forecasts of new technologies (external
nature-domination or internal self-domination, for example), new
movements, and new societies.
The best tack then is to develop
a complex knowledge base of the future that is data, value and episteme
oriented, that is thus inclusive of structure and agency, at individual,
national, civilizational and planetary levels.