Learning the Wrong Lessons from History

The View from Oregon – 336: Friday 11 April 2025

Readers of these newsletters will by now recognize my characteristic way of approaching problems, which often involves seeking a complementary formulation of an existing conceptual apparatus that has been already applied to an existing problem, presumably with at least some advantages of these original treatment being evident, so that a parallel treatment of another domain might offer clarification by this exercise. There is more than a little analogical thinking in my method. A correspondent recently made me aware that Elon Musk has urged the importance of thinking from first principles rather than thinking analogically, and I don’t disagree with this, but thinking in terms of first principles and analogical thinking are complementary, and at one time or another we will have need of both. I will allow that thinking in terms of first principles is a much better developed tradition of reasoning, going back to Euclid’s axiomatics, if not before, while analogical thinking has been neglected, at least as far as formal reasoning goes. If one’s aim is to reason rigorously, then you can’t do better than first principles, but if your aim is to discover new ways to synthesize existing knowledge, then you are likely to draw upon analogical reasoning. If we wanted to take this seriously as a problem (which would be a worthwhile cognitive exercise), we could find overlapping regions of axiomatic and analogical reasoning, and how each informs the other.

My newsletter on the aggregation threshold (No. 333) followed in this way, i.e., followed analogically, from the previous newsletter (No. 332) on the dissolution threshold. In my discussion of the aggregation threshold I noted the distinction between early aggregation and later agglomeration of social formations. The failure of civilizations mirrors this distinction in the origins of civilizations, with a distinction between dissolution below the dissolution threshold and collapse above the dissolution threshold. However, now that I’ve seen that collapse is the complementary equivalent of agglomeration—that is to say, collapse is to dissolution as agglomeration is to aggregation (the classic formulation of an analogy)—I would like to find a term other than “collapse,” since I think the concept deserves more than the kind of hand waving often inspired by using a throw-away term like “collapse.” (“Deglomeration” comes to mind, but that’s an unattractive coinage; “disagglomeration” is too long.)

I once wrote (and have subsequently quoted myself many times) that complex systems fail in complex ways. Certainly civilizations (and the civilizational ecosystem of which a given individual civilization is a component) that reach the level of complexity such that they have exceeded the dissolution threshold, fail in complex ways, and this is what makes their complexity not merely interesting, but moreover theoretically interesting. Any collapse of a civilization, even the most gradual dissolution, is interesting from an historiographical perspective, but the collapse of a large, complex, and long-lived civilization is the kind of process the study of which can enrich the study of civilization, even where, or especially where, that study is not taken up specifically for the purposes of studying the collapse of societies.

I introduced the concept of agglomeration in the context of civilization to solve some problems that I was working on. I had come to see that civilizations grow through several processes, not through a single process, and especially I began to appreciate the difference between what we might call synchronic growth and diachronic growth. When Islam rapidly grew in a generation by conquering enormous swathes of territory, it put itself in the position of being an “umbrella” civilization that unified a great many geographically regional civilizations. This is synchronic growth. When Western civilization grew by changing into dramatically different forms in the transition from classical antiquity to the medieval world, and again from the medieval world to the modern world, this is a unification of civilizations over time, and we could call this diachronic growth. I’m not saying that these are the only two kinds of growth that characterize civilization; on the contrary, I’m saying quite explicitly that these are only two among a multiplicity of forms of growth, and I wanted a sufficiently abstract term that could cover all these forms of growth, and so I introduced “agglomeration.” To understand collapse analogously to agglomeration is to understand that civilizations can come apart in many ways, just as they can agglomerate in many ways. As always, the analogy is highly suggestive, but it takes time and patience to tease out what is valuable and what is not valuable in an analogy.

In light of the above, then, we can see that we have drawn the wrong lessons from the multiplicity of accounts and explanations that have been given for the collapse of the western Roman Empire, which set the stage for the Dark Ages to follow, and that was the unlikely foundation for the rise of Christendom as a civilizational unit. It’s not a failure to understand, but a failure to reckon with multiple modalities of failure. A complex process like the failure of the western Roman Empire, in which an agglomerated civilizations falls apart, could well—would almost certainly—unravel in different ways in different geographical regions, as indeed when these regions were added to the Roman Empire they were added according to their distinctive circumstances. Roman Britain is an especially good example of this, because we have a date on which Roman forces were withdrawn: AD 410. Events unfolded rapidly for Britain after 410 in the wake of Roman withdrawal. For example, other peoples of northern Europe began migrating to Britain in large numbers. Nothing like this firm date holds for the European continent. Even though Italy is separated from the rest of Europe by the Alps, there remained far more robust commerce across the Alps with Italy, where some dwindling Roman power remained, as compared to the commerce by ship to Britain. It’s not that commerce stopped, but rather than it shifted from Roman commerce to the commerce of the peoples migrating into the British Isles after the Roman withdrawal.

Since I’ve mentioned drawing the wrong lessons from history, I will take this opportunity to point out how much drawing the wrong conclusion from the past is a part of human experience. If one listens to children talking among themselves when they are trying to understand adult dilemmas, you can identify without too much difficulty why their understanding and explanation comes up short in the absence of adult experience. They are missing crucial information about adult motivations and so must come up with explanations based on their experiences, which are driven by different motivations, different valuations, and a distinct (but overlapping) conceptual framework. This same dilemma is played out among adults between those who have a less comprehensive understanding of events and those with a more comprehensive understanding of events. Limited individuals will formulate limited explanations on the basis of their limited knowledge and limited understanding.

Drawing the wrong lesson from experience is a vivid reminder of our fallibility, and I’m sure everyone experiences this sooner or later. Even as I look back on what I now know to have been a case of my drawing the wrong lesson from an experience, I have to wonder if, in my present understanding, I am once again drawing the wrong lessons that I may someday see to be wrong. Of course, a lot of instances of taking the wrong lesson away from the study of a problem follow from deception, and especially from self-deception. There are a great many people who need to believe a given explanation, or a given way of understanding things, and they will not entertain any explanation that calls their foundational belief into question. Indeed, within the conceptual framework of a given belief structure, it can be nearly impossible to even formulate an explanation that departs from that framework.

Thus we get to the next stage of the process: identifying that there is a problem, but not being able to understand the mechanism of the problem. There is another step beyond this, when the mechanism of the problem is understood, after a fashion, but the conceptual framework employed to describe the mechanism is so nearly disjoint from the concepts necessary to explain the problem in the most direct way, that the understanding is little more than deceiving oneself that one’s existing belief structure is adequate. As the “mechanism” so described becomes a grotesque funhouse mirror projection of a problem, there is a real question of whether we have understood anything at all. We could call this “propagandized” understanding, since it is as much more or more about plugging the holes in the failing conceptual framework as it is about understanding the world.

Many get stuck at the threshold of identifying a problem but not being able to explain the mechanism of a problem, and at least as many get stuck at the stage of explaining the mechanism in a palatable way that doesn’t call into question established beliefs. You can stay stuck here, or you can engage in the troubling business of dismantling your beliefs and testing reformulations of your conceptual framework to see if they offer a better understanding of the problem than your previous propagandized understanding of the problem. Nietzsche once wrote that what is needed is not the courage of one’s convictions, but rather the courage for an attack on one’s convictions. That’s what I’m talking about here. As it is painful and distressing to call one’s foundational beliefs into question, not many make it to this stage.

This discussion of analogical reasoning was going to lead to another analogy. My newsletter of last week (No. 335) on the lower bound of civilization suggests the need to think about the upper bound of civilization—upper and lower bounds are obviously complementary concepts—but I’ve written enough for this week, so I will leave the problem of the upper bound of civilization for another time, noting that it strikes me as a problem of great intrinsic interest, certainly no less interesting that the problem of the lower bound of civilization.

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