Theories of HistoryI. How much we know about history?

Theories of History
   Good morning, class. Today’s lecture is mainly concerned with some theories of history.
   How much of man’s history do we know? We really know very little, Written records exist for only a fraction of what we suppose to have been man’s time as a unique species. Furthermore, the accuracy of these records is often suspected, and the scope and selection of significant detail in them often needs improvement.
   It is worse when we try to reconstruct man’s history before the development of writing, and this is unfortunate because the history of the greatest discoveries, such as fire, the wheel and the sail, as well as the history of the early development of human society are lost to us. The most that we can do is to use traces, deduction, speculation and the knowledge we have of the habits of those animals which have elementary social order to help us make a partial reconstruction. This is hardly a satisfactory substitute for precise information.
   With our knowledge of human history, which is only fragmentary at best, it is therefore nearly impossible to reconstruct the beginning and to deduce the end of the story of man. Thus, there have developed many schools of thought on the subject, each of which attempts to give coherence to the human past by fitting it into the framework of a theory of history.
   Now, let’s take a look at one of these theories, it is assumed that man continually progress. He has evolved from a lower to a higher form of being, and he continues to evolve. This evolution takes place both in terms of his potentials and his abilities to actualize these potentials. If one holds this theory, one feels that modern man must be more intelligent and civilized today than his ancestors, as well as physically and morally superior to them. One further assumes that this progress will continue into an ever more glorious future. Here deduction often ends and dreams of Utopia begin, for it seems that most of us find it hard to think of the human race developing into a race of angels. All in all, as theory of history, the above view has had many eminent supporters.
   It might be well to mention here a variation on this theory that used to be popular, namely the idea that man rose from a low condition to a Golden Age at some time in the remote past, and that things have gone straight downhill ever since. Many eminent men have found a sort of gloomy comfort in this idea, but science has now opened up possibilities for the future which make this theory less defendable. Perhaps for this reason the theory has little modern support.
   A second theory of history is held by those men who see man’s history as something quite different from a simple progression from a lower to a higher state. They see it as a cycle of stages of development, which are predictable in their broad outlines and main features. As surely as a civilization rises and comes into being, so also must it decline and fall. The chief pattern one sees in history is the rise and fall of civilization. Man, according to this theory, is warlike in one stage of his history and humane in another. This is not due to individual human beings or to general progress, but rather to determining socioeconomic patterns that are not, as yet, understood. To holders of this theory, modern man is not looked upon as the most superior social being yet produced. He is simply the typical product of the current stage in the cycle of our civilization. In fact, he may actually be inferior to members of past civilizations. It all depends upon what stage of civilization we happen to be living in. Indeed, it has been said that the average modern literate city dweller is comparatively more ignorant of his era’s fund of knowledge than other literate city dwellers of the past. While the staggering fund of knowledge in our technologically advanced world is undoubtedly greater than that of any past civilization, it is probably true that the average modern man, relying on such repetitive forms of entertainment as television and working in a narrowly specialized job, knows a great deal less sheer information about his world than did earlier people.
   In a third theory of history, the two above theories are to some degree reconciled. According to this theory, which is often termed the spiral view of history, human societies do repeat a cycle of stages, but overall progress is observable in the long historical perspective. Civilizations do rise and fall, as the advocates of the second theory maintain, but the new civilization which replaces the first, usually by conquest, contains superior qualities which enable it to rise to a higher stage of development until it declines and is replaced by yet a third civilization.
   The above theories interpret history in term of the overall progress of mankind in general without respect to differentiation within the social order. It is also possible to view human history in terms of the interaction of socioeconomic groups. Human history, according to this theory, is most clearly interpreted as the disappearance of class struggle. Most people who hold this theory assume a resolution of the struggle through the disappearance of class differences, although it would be just as correct to assume that the struggle could continue unresolved. Those who assume that the struggle can eventually be resolved hold that history has a goal and that progress can be measured in terms of how quickly mankind is reaching that goal.