I think I posted before that history is characterized by discontinuity and revolutionary change. Histories only appear continuous through the prism of whatever narrative structure is imposed upon them. Historical narratives usually reveal modernity as a pinnacle, with the bulk of history serving only to elevate modernity above the rest. Narratives which don't focus on modernity often elevate one particular time and place to which all other times and places ascend and after decline. You can trace the image of the light on the hill right back to Western culture's Anatolian dawn.
From ancient times people believed that phenomena arose from the interior structures of stuff. Aristotle taught that objects affected the world around them. Feathers fall more slowly through the air than lead, he supposed, because heavy objects fall fast, and light object fall slowly. A rolling ball slows and stops because rest is “natural and preferred, whereas motion requires a motive force keeping it moving", he said.
Galileo's heresy of gravity and Newton's equations of force revealed natural powers acting upon all objects equally. In the centuries since, people observed other natural symmetries, discovering electromagnetic and atomic forces, and irrevocably changing the way we live.
History is littered with examples of its end. More, Hegel, Marx and Fukuyama each signaled the end of humankind's sociocultural evolution and the final form of human government. Modern science has its roots in a similar series of attempts to circumscribe the boundaries of scientific inquiry by anchoring its pinnacle on one particular set of certainties or another.
The latest scientific pinnacle is exemplified in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), an experimental machine so large it sprawls across national borders.
The LHC was created to test physics Standard Model, a conjecture that explains the existence of symmetrical natural forces, gravity, for instance. Symmetrical forces are theorized, in the Standard Model, as a consequence of interactions between physical and immaterial particles, the most important of which is the Higgs, or God particle, an immaterial particle that gives physical particles mass. Since physical particles can't exist unless they have mass, the immaterial Higgs particle became known as the God Particle.
Next week, on March 30, the Large Hadron Collider will have operated for 12 months, and has another 36 months to go before the current series of experiments ends. So far there has been no sighting of the God Particle, or any other phenomena associated with the fundamentals of physics' Standard Model that the LHC was expected to produce. Maybe it is not so much the end of history as it is the end of that particular grand narrative of it. Big news either way.
Human thought is obsessed with dichotomies - we assume if physical exists there must be immaterial forces. But having said this, I really like the idea of a God particle, does that mean if they don't find it, that will also disprove the existence of God. Ha!
ReplyDeleteThe thing with the Higgs Boson is not that they expected to find it, but that the current model predicts it. What this means is that if it is found, that is conclusive proof for the standard model as it stands, nad if it isn't found, then the question is still open. If something else is found, then another theory, possibly one of the many alternatives already proposed, will be needed to explain it. It has nothing to do with any 'grand narrative of history'.
ReplyDeleteAlso, only Fukuyama actually proposed a final form of government with his 'end of history' nonsense. Hegel did something similar, but didn't go as far (the common anti-Hegel nonsense that he worshipped the Prussian state to the contrary), and Marx, on the contrary, pointed out that we can understand capitalism, and from this we can draw on some expectations of what the transition to communism will be like, but we cannot know exactly what communism will be like, nor can we even imagine what communism itself will transition to until we get there. This point is something that Engels criticized Hegel on, pointing out that Hegel saw liberalism as the culmination of history, that is, as the end of the historical process, which goes against the very dialectical method he used.
Heh agreed was generalising a little mischievously there (and poor F Fukuyama, is perhaps a stationary target) to make a gentle point that defining historical moments are perhaps more elusive than they appear.
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