Cosmological Constraints on History

The View from Oregon – 312: Friday 25 October 2024

Ruth Benedict attributed to Edward Carpenter the image of modern man “endlessly catching its trains.” Even in the Automobile Age, this remains a compelling evocation of the pointless busyness of modern life. I haven’t been able to find the quote in Carpenter, but here’s some context for Benedict’s use of the phrase:

“It is quite as convincing to characterize our cultural type as thoroughly extrovert, running about in endless mundane activity, inventing, governing, and as Edward Carpenter says, ‘endlessly catching its trains,’ as it is to characterize it as Faustian, with a longing for the infinite.”

Carpenter was a utopian socialist, and the kind of English eccentric that was once produced with some regularity on the sceptered isle, so it is not difficult to imagine him having said or written this, which is as much an indictment of technological modernity as it is of Spengler’s Faustian man. I doubt that pointless busyness is unique to modern era, but it is perhaps more prevalent, and the trains themselves (not to mention automobiles and aircraft) have accelerated the process of being pointlessly busy.

It is often asserted that history has speeded up in the modern period, but I am of two minds about this. I can think of examples that seem to illustrate this, but I can also see it as a perennial feature of the human condition. Technology has certainly made it possible for us to move faster, and to accomplish many things much faster than was ever previously possible, but even having recognized this obvious fact, we still have to make the distinction between how much of this acceleration is merely the endless catching of trains, and how much of it is an actual acceleration of the historical process. It would be nice to be able to quantify the rate of the historical process, and if we could do so that would be a paradigmatic exercise in speculative philosophy of history, but at the same time it would be an achievement of scientific thought, which seeks to quantify its qualitative observations. Ultimately, this is a metaphysical question of the appearance and reality of the rate of change in the historical process, so even if we could quantify the idea of the historical process, this quasi-scientific quantification would take its place within a metaphysical context.  

On the side of the actual acceleration of the historical process we can cite the busyness of the modern period—roughly, the past five hundred years—which is certainly packed with events, many of them unprecedented events, and many unprecedented events following one upon the other with startling rapidity. Ancient institutions—states, empires, civilizations—formerly endured for hundreds and even thousands of years, whereas modern institutions seem to be outdated as soon as they are given the formal structure of an institution. On the side of pointless busyness lending the appearance of an acceleration to the historical process we can cite the fact that there is very little discernible difference between the different iterations of institutions that come and go as quickly as they do. The institutions “churn” like employment in an industry with a high turnover rate, but little is accomplished in the churning. I have no doubt that ancient Rome during its heyday was filled with individuals who made a show of their busyness as a way to demonstrate their importance. In an urban society, it’s kind of like busyness is seem as a marker of prestige: if you’re busy, you must have a lot of irons in the fire.

I don’t have a way to quantify the historical process; I don’t even know where to start, but, now that I have explicitly framed the question, I will be thinking about it. What forms of evidence could be brought to bear to quantify the rate of change of the historical process? What kind of observations could we make of rates of change? How could we identify rates of change across distinct historical milieux, so that another civilization with no trains to catch could be compared straight across to our civilization, in which trains are the default mode of transportation in some geographical regions, while being virtually irrelevant in other geographical regions?  

A corollary inquiry, or perhaps even a place to start on the question of the rate of historical change, would be the question of natural constraints on the historical process. This is something that I have thought about for many years, but which I haven’t tried to make explicit. It’s difficult even to give a clear idea of what I mean by natural constraints on the historical process, and calling them “constraints” might be misleading anyway, as we could with as much justification call the natural processes that contribute to and occur in parallel with the processes of human history the facilitators of historical process.

Let me begin with the obvious claim that some units of time are natural rather than being arbitrary or artificial. A day and a year are natural divisions of time. We could even call them cosmological units of time because they are artifacts of the Earth’s rotation on its axis and its orbit around the sun. The further perturbations of Earth’s rotation and orbit give us the seasons, which become more sharply delineated as we move from the equator toward the poles. On the other hand, divisions of time like minutes, hours, and days of the week are conventional and established by human beings, not by cosmological processes. Of course, the argument can be made that the month is an artifact of the phases of the moon, and even today, in the twenty-first century, Lunar calendars persist alongside solar calendars. Given the Lunar cycle and its relation to the number of days it takes for the phases of the moon, one could argue that this time is going to be structured in some way, and that one of the obvious ways is to structure it in terms of four weeks, and this makes weeks and days of the week less arbitrary that I implied above. This may well be the case. No doubt there are scholars who have spent their lives making such connections.

There are, in any case, degrees of arbitrariness in our divisions of time. Days and years have a very low degree of arbitrariness, while months and weeks have a higher degree of arbitrariness. One could make the argument that the imperfect alignment of days vis-à-vis years, and the Lunar calendar vis-à-vis the Solar calendar, proved a challenge to human attempts at time keeping and calendrics, and therefore was a spur to scientific discovery. Here we can speculate on the degree of misalignment of various cosmological time divisions as prompting scientific inquiry: what degree of misalignment suggests something that ought to be aligned, and what degree of misalignment merely suggests two distinct phenomena that are to be separately tallied?

We could imagine different configurations of planetary systems that would give to local observers a wide range of phenomena that might simply puzzle these observers or provide a spur to scientific inquiry and explanation. Planetary systems with a very different structure from our Solar system would present a different set of cosmological phenomena to be explained, and as such they may receive rather different mythological explanations during the early cognitive development of a local intelligence, and therefore a different pathway from mythological explanation to scientific explanation. These different pathways from mythology to science would then enter into the history of the local intelligence, making the large-scale structure of the history of that intelligence rather different from the large-scale structure of human history, which has had its distinctive forms of transition from mythological to scientific explanation.

Another spur to scientific explanation beyond the attempt to reconcile distinct cosmological phenomena is the attempt to precisely measure cosmological phenomena. While days and years are clear cut temporal divisions, measuring them with precision has been the occasion for more precise observations and more precise instruments to assist in more precise observations. Because of the view of the heavens afforded by our location on Earth and its transparent atmosphere, we have had a front seat for viewing phenomena on a cosmological scale, and this has made it possible for us to observe puzzling movements like the precession of Mercury and the speed of light, and latter we are forced to take account of in the observation of other worlds in our Solar system, which move relative to us at distances that make the speed of light measurable even by relatively rudimentary clocks.

There is a sense in which a year is an arbitrary unit of time, and a sense in which it is not. Now that we can measure the orbits of planets around other stars, we know that there are planetary systems with different structures than our planetary system. Given that stars have different degrees of brightness (which correlates with temperature), the habitable zone for a planet of a red dwarf will be quite close in, like the distance from our sun to the planet Mercury or less, while the habitable zone for a planet of an F star would be further out than our habitable zone, making the orbit much longer. But as we conduct the search for peer life, we focus on the closest analogues to Earth that we can find, which means similar orbital distances and similar years. Planets of red dwarf stars might be so close in that they are tidally locked, and red dwarf stars have a lot of flares that could be damaging to any life on the planet of such a star. Planets of hotter stars would have much less time to evolve complex life, since the hotter the star, the less time it spends on the main sequence. Thus we find ourselves converging on Earth-sized planets around G type stars orbiting in the habitable zone where there can be liquid water on the surface. This is a constraint on the length of a year that could be observed by an intelligent observer anywhere in the universe. There remains a significant range of possible orbits, and therefore possible years, but there is still a constraint that probably describes a bell curve of optimal year length for a planet that evolves complex life.

Similar considerations hold for the length of day. We can’t rule out the possibility of intelligent life on a rapidly spinning planet or a very slowly spinning planet, or even a tidally locked planet, but the slow basting of Earth in the light of the sun probably played a significant role in the origins of life on Earth, allowing for regular cycles—not only cycles of light and dark, which are also cycles of high and low UV radiation, but also cycles like the tides and the winds, all of which play a role in the planetary-scale process of the origins of life. As with the length of a year, the length of a day in relation to the possibility of evolving an intelligent observer probably describes a bell curve with Earth’s rotation being close to optimal. We don’t know the exact bell curves for length of year and length of day, and we don’t know the optimal values for the evolution of intelligent life, but we can postulate them, and this can furnish us with another of those cosmological spurs to scientific discovery culminating in scientific research programs seeking explanations. On the condition of the ongoing progress of science and technology, several hundred years in the future we may be able to furnish the quantitative data to define these bell curves and their optimal values.  

---