Modernism, Postmodernism, and Digitality
A rough draft- Introduction
Introduction
“Anyone who believes in unlimited growth on a physical finite planet is either mad or an economist.” David Attenborough
This book is an attempt to fuse history with a specific kind of mathematics, namely Linear Algebra. The reason for doing this is that Linear Algebra gives insights into a historically grounded way of thinking about the world. This does not mean that that work should be halted or even slowed down, even by a jot, but it does mean that more and more the framework should be a mathematic one. This is somewhat similar to making the move from Aristotelean to Boolean logic: new insights will be gained.
The book introduces the concept of the Cultural System which dominates most thinking and divides thinking about the main issues that divide the people who are within the Logical System. The first thing to stress is that there are many conclusions possible within the Cultural System and which can divide people by their circumstances. So, for example, in the late 1800s, where one is born controls access to capital, ideas, and circumstance. Some people looked at the situation and saw the potential for investing capital in new ideas that would create a network across the US and Western Europe. Others saw a network of social limitations and joined the Marxists or anarchist parties in revolt against the established order. These are both within the Cultural System because both drew from political economy and followed well-established lines in their thinking.
The next point is that Cultural Systems can create Xaos in their playing out, this is because the nature of history is stochastic in nature and the particular people with their particular ideas are truly random, and the system starts out with a stochastic population. But the idea of a Cultural System remains the same even though small differences in initial conditions may mean that events that we assumed would happen as the dead do not work in the mathematics of a logical system. This means that a Cultural System can have differing outputs with the same general inputs.
The first step is to think of actions and thoughts as vectors in a Linear Algebra system. This means that rather than thinking of history as a strict order must view it as a vector system that moves by chaotic means. This then allows us to model and make statements about the past even though the actual events may not have happened in the logical system. The power of this is to peel back the actual events and look at the motivations that were in play. But we can use the markers of actual events to trace the Cultural System and see what events would happen at any given particular point. An example would be the running of the transatlantic cable which allowed a new order to calm into being: wants the event had happened there was a narrowing of the Cultural System which occurred. This means also that we can see which events and logical processes would be important in a particular logical system. An example would be the failure of the revolutions of 1848-49 which ended the Romantic Period and would quickly begin the Neoclassical order which had profound effects on the second half of the 19th century.
What this means is that the method of digging into documents is completely necessary but is also incomplete because the logic is not sufficiently mathematical in nature. Instead, it relies on finding which areas are entrenched in the thoughts and actions of the time based on the Delta points that the actors could see and reveling out into the structure of history. For example, in the 1840s, a set of laws known as the “corn laws” in Britain were the focus of controversy and debate. Now of course, the reason for this debate will be obscure to many people, indicating that it was part of the Cultural System at the time but is now lost and forgotten. This shows how a Cultural System rises and falls with the changing of key aspects.
Because there are many ways to look at logical systems, first this book shall describe how a Cultural System can be constructed and then will make an example of one Cultural System that is of key interest to the time that the book is written knowing full well that at some future point differing constructions will require different Cultural Systems to be explored.
This is because while electrons and butterflies have extremely limited choices the truth about Homo sapiens is the bewildering train of decisions that they can make which requires more detailed mathematics but one which is analogous to the Linear Algebra and differential equations which dominate biology, anthropology, and other fields. The resulting step will be a more mathematicalizable representation of the field of history more in line with its roots in biology. It is this key connection that will drive the cultural systems analysis of history.
In a way, this book is published just as the old order is dying. This is because there is a crisis in climate change which is ignored by the old system but is apparent to anyone who studies the world from the new system. We shall see what the world does when confronted with cold, hard, facts as opposed to unrealities