History and Human Progress and A Book Review I Recommend

The federal government worries about my reintegrating into civil society. I guess I am not doing such a great job of it. I cannot keep from reading things like Daniel Woolf reviewing World of Patterns by Rens Bod, How Do Humans Make Progress? 

How did humans make such progress? That’s the question addressed by one of the fastest growing subfields of history, the “history of knowledge,” which moves beyond traditional “history of ideas” or “intellectual history” to examine how knowledge is acquired, developed, used, and disseminated globally.  Rens Bod is the latest contributor to the genre, a polymathic and prolific Dutch scholar with an early background in the hard sciences. He has already written a well-regarded and synoptic New History of the Humanities (2014) and, with his newest book, (first published in Dutch in 2019), broadens his reach beyond the humanities, while maintaining global coverage. If the earlier book focused on the rise, growth and settling of the modern disciplinary divisions of knowledge, World of Patterns has even bolder aspirations, namely to understand at a higher level how human beings have come to develop something called “knowledge” in the first place, expand and refine it, and develop intellectual instruments for its evaluation. 

I find the idea of patterns fascinating. It fits into something I ran across decades ago when I was doing a large batch of legal research on Indiana's Bill of Rights. How the courts treated equality did not go in a smooth trajectory. We find natural rights as our knowledge expands and our prejudices decrease.

But, Bod insists, patterns are not, in and of themselves, knowledge. Humanity had to take a second crucial step, which he locates during the Bronze Age, of making the patterns explicit and thus communicable, rather than merely implicit and recognized by their immediate makers alone. The key development that made patterns generalizable is the induction from them to the higher stage of principles. As Bod remarks near the book’s end, summing up his argument, “no generalizations over patterns can be made until we first have some patterns. And relationships between patterns and principles cannot be established until we have both patterns and principles.” Principles are generalizations made from patterns, and it is important to note that they are not confined to the natural world; they can be found in such very human situations as early legal codes: consider for instance, the “principle of retaliation” (“eye for an eye”) in the code of Hammurabi, and the fact that it is required in that code to interact with other principles, such as those of “replacement” (an injured party is made whole at least materially) or “satisfaction” (alternatives to punishment are used).  

From prehistory and early antiquity, Bod moves quickly to classical antiquity: 600 BCE to 500 CE, thus including the first few centuries of Christianity in the west but not the arrival of Islam. Apart from the usual Greek figures for whom much of their work has survived (Plato, Aristotle), Bod examines two intellects whose thoughts are known only through the work of later thinkers or in copied texts long postdating their originals. From the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales of Miletus came the first “basic principle for nature—that it is composed entirely of water”; meanwhile in India the early linguist Panini (not the inventor of a popular sandwich) recognized that all language is recursive. Thales’ insight seems weird in the light of modern chemistry, but it was defensible at the time; Panini’s has enjoyed greater longevity, not merely because it has never been disproved, but because, unlike Thales’ principle, it offered a bonus: predictability, the capacity to move from observed pattern through to generalized principle and then to the application of that principle to forecast future events.

This seems to be more of history as I have read it - zigzagging through time with experiments and human fallibility, trying to find a better life for human beings.

Over the course of 300 densely packed pages and subsequent notes Bod deftly juggles his key concepts and their transitions up to recent times, with frequent stops around the world in Asia, Africa and even the South Pacific (see the treatment of Polynesian genealogies). Bod is careful to avoid giving any impression of straightforward, linear, continuous development, pointing out gaps, paths not taken, and threads lost along the way. Hawking’s history-as-stupidity, in the forms of ignorance, prejudice and social distinction, has certainly had an impeding effect, one which Bod acknowledges but also challenges in crediting some of the earliest pattern-recognizers, such as the unknown cave-painters, and in giving notice of contributions (for instance the Tang Chinese legal system) to knowledge that have had little public profile in western-focused standard histories.  Both the global reach and the lack of linearity in Bod’s account makes this a breathtaking tour, sometimes with stops that seem a little too quick, comparisons not fully explored, suggestions left untested, but it also accurately reflects the untidiness, uneven pace, and transcultural quality of intellectual change.  

scn 12/30