Maxime Bary emailed me links to copies of three articles by John K. Hord. (Scroll down.) Hord's former colleagues in the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations had advised Maxime to contact the Dickinson College Archives in Pennsylvania. That College then mailed Maxime copies of the articles that are in their possession. These are the articles that are linked here. You might be asked to confirm that you wish to follow the link and it will also be necessary to zoom on the text to make it large enough to be legible.
15 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I'll be glad to read more of what John Hord wrote, considering how much his work mattered to Anderson.
A pub. collection of Hord's essays, appended by Anderson's article "Concerning Future Histories," would be great!
I know Stirling is somewhat dubious about Hord, considering the latter's work to being merely neo-Spenglerian, but they should be worth reading.
Ad astra! Sean
Neo-Toynbean, rather. There are repeating patterns because it's human beings, but basically history is contingent.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I sit corrected, neo-Toynbean! And O agree, patterns can be found in human history, but it's still contingent.
That said, I can still imagine people in the future, like Anderson's Manuel Argos, being inspired by past history. The Founder of the Terran Empire drew on the Principate Augustus founded while also trying to avoid the mistakes made by the Roman. And so on!
Ad astra! Sean
History is contingent, yes, but regularities can be found. One could also say that physics is contingent (objects turning around others, other are falling and so on) but their behavior is gouvernend by "laws" one can approximate quite well.
And another important point, which from my point of view makes John Hords'system interesting and not only Neo-toynbean is that at the end of the 1500-years cycle he describes, there is a period of free-development, only evoked in one article but a bit more detailed in one one Anderson's text ("On future histories"). And Anderson rightfully notes that is such periods, there is contingency. Much contingency. But such periods can come to a halt because of a crisis the society was not able to overcome within 125 years ...
"But such periods can come to a halt because of a crisis the society was not able to overcome within 125 years ..."
That sounds very much like Toynbee's ideas. The pattern he though he saw was a civilization starting, hitting a crisis, if it solves the crisis growing until hitting another crisis etc. If it doesn't solve the crisis (I don't recall a specific time limit), it declines & falls in a very predictable pattern.
Toynbee didn't see any limit to the number of successfully resolved crises, just that the chance of failing to resolve any given crisis is non-zero.
Kaor, MB!
And my fear is that the US is nearing the end of that Hordian grace period during which reform and repair is possible. The harm done by too much folly, bungling, fanaticism, insanity, and corruption is harder and harder to overcome. Will the US enter a period analogous to the Late Roman Republic?
Ad astra! Sean
No. The US is an autarky with an educated population, universal suffrage, and cultural, economic, and technical advantages that have led the developed world to align with the US and the West and their current economic and diplomatic allies to lead the world. The "challengers" (to use the term loosely) are also-rans and poorer in every comparable category.
For example, we live in a world created by the World Wars.
But if you study their causation in detail, it's obvious that WW1 -- or the WW1 we got -- was actually caused by the assassination at Sarajevo. Killing FF did a number of crucial things which removed, temporarily, the barriers between those in Germany and Austria that wanted a war, and getting one. Though not the one they wanted!
And WWII -was- crucially dependent on the personality of Adolf Hitler.
Most people in Germany wanted to overthrow the Versailles settlement and restore full German sovereignty.
But the German military and civil elites were -not- willing to risk another World War, because they were convinced that Germany would probably lose again... and they were right about that.
It took Hitler's peculiar genius (with some help from British and French) leaders to force the issue.
Mind you, Hitler didn't want another World War either, for the same reasons. He wanted a series of short campaigns to clear the decks for an attack on the USSR.
He very nearly got what he wanted too, except that after the fall of France, Churchill refused to do a deal.
Lord Halifax, the only real alternative to Churchill, -did- want to do a deal, and would have if he'd been PM.
So it took the interaction of two very unusual individuals to produce WW2, and keep it going past 1940.
NB: Churchill was in a traffic accident in 1930, and was nearly killed. If he had been, Halifax would have been PM.
And Adolf Hitler's survival through WW1 was outrageously unlikely, given his dangerous job (battalion and company runner). He was wounded more than once, and was recovering from being gassed in 1918. One bullet a little to one side, and Germany might well have had a conservative dictatorship in the 1930's, but it wouldn't have taken the risk of starting WW2.
Kaor, Anonymous/Dave? and Mr. Stirling!
Anonymous: I disagree. First, the US is not an autarky which can survive with no contact with the rest of the world. Finance, commerce, trade, imports/exports, etc., has made the US inextricably part of the global economy.
And I am not as optimistic as you that self inflicted folly, esp. from the left wing idiots dominating the Democrats won't bring an end to the US as envisioned by its founders in the next century or so.
Mr. Stirling: I agree, history is so contingent, as your comments about Francis Ferdinand, Churchill, and Hitler reminds us. The latter two could so easily have never come to power!
And what might have happened if Hitler had decided to be patient and first, somehow, end the war with the UK before attacking the USSR?
Ad astra! Sean
A free-developement period (grace period) can be bloody as hell. Look the One hundred years War in France, which took place just after the start of the free-developement period Hord has identified.
So how can we determine whether the US - the western civilization in general - are in a crisis ? Let's look at the definition. A crisis consists in the questioning of the core knowledge of a civilization. For the Roman-Latin-medieval civilization, it was the centrality of our universal Church, questioned by the Reform. The Bale council failed to solve it by the conciliar option. So, yes, our modern civilization's core knowledges, Science as a way to know more about the world and to act, is being really questioned. We may be in a crisis.
Now, when did it start ? The Reform crisis, according to Hord, started actually with the Hussite War, a big big event (they resisted to 5 crusades !). I live in France. In France, the key event was the start of the Big Migrations in the 70-80s. The first muslim migrants started to assimilate themselves, but the mollahs from their countries reacted against the occidentalization they were bringing back home. So, islamism (religious fundamentalism, ultra-anti-science), so crazy sociology (racialism, critic racial theory, and so on), so crazy ecologism (we must help the poort guys from those countries affected by climate change, and we hate ouserlves because it is our fault). The issue is not ecology per se not GIEC ecology (which is rational and OK) but the fact that it is becoming quite unscientific crazy among some populations.
So, how much time left for a conversion tyranny to solve the issue ? 60-80 years. 2100 is the limit. In 2100, this crisis must have been solved in at least one country or we will be doomed in a hegemony struggle, principate and so on.
Also, I had two quesions for you guys.
-Stirling :
Some years ago, you wrote in a comment on this blog that :
"Hord's theory falls flat on its face with the Soviet Union, btw.; he classified Leninism as one of his "conversion tyrannies"." -> In which paper did you see he said that ? I am very curious.
-Sean M. Brooks :
Some years ago, you wrote in a comment on this blog :
"In fact, the best summaries I've been able to find of Hord's work is from A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS and the essay "Concerning Future Histories," BULLETIN OF THE SCIENCE FICTION WRITERS OF AMERICA (Fall 1979)" -> Ok, I have read "Concerning Future Histories", but would you have the kindness to send me the extracts from "KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS" where he explicitly talks about the theory ? I have not read it yet ...
Kaor, MB!
Thanks for your comment, even if I disagree with some of them
First, as a Catholic, I disagree with those who think conciliarism was the way to resolve problems within Christianity. Because it would have led to the Popes, the Bishops of Rome, becoming as impotent and powerless as the Patriarch of Constantinople. And I believe that kind of powerlessness is contrary to the will of God.
Meaning no offense to the friends of the US, but it's America which is the hegemon of Western civilization. So the eventual fate of the US probably determines what happens to the rest of Western civilization. I believe the US entered its crisis period as long ago as 1913 and the XVII Amendment to the US Constitution, mandating direct elections of US Senators, beginning a series of changes transforming for the worse the nature of the gov't. If we can still go by Hord's scheme, we don't have much time left before an open breakdown starts a la the civil wars of the Late Roman Republic.
When time permits I'll be glad to quote some relevant from A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS relating to Hord's theories.
Ad astra! Sean
MB: that Hord regarded Lenin's rule as a 'conversion tyranny' was conveyed to me in a private communication by Anderson, who also commented that the 20th century wasn't working out anything like the way Hord had predicted. This was not long before Poul died.
I'm not surprised. Human affairs are predictable only in the sense that human beings act like human beings -- inherently tribalistic, prone to political violence, and so forth.
But the actual course of historical events is violently contingent, the result of endless series of unpredictable accidents.
Hindsight is profoundly distorting.
There are no "laws of history".
What history teaches is that human beings have certain fundamental similarities, but that things like "civilizations" are mere concepts, and that there is no possibility of prediction.
I regard attempts like Marx and Toynbee and Hord as a clutching at straws, attempts at self-reassurance in a chaotic universe.
Because the fact that the future is unpredictable means it's also -uncontrollable-. 'Things are in the saddle and ride mankind.'
We are not rational beings, even -in potentia-, but rationalizing animals. We are not the makers of our world, nor the authors of our selves.
Most human beings find this realization intolerable and wander off down the paths of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning.
Conspiracy theories fulfill the same psychological need -- they posit that -someone- is in control, even if it's the bad guys.
In point of fact, nobody is. Powerful leaders can make consequential decisions, but they can't control the -result- of their decisions any more than you or I.
To return to 1914, the German General Staff wanted a war, basically because they thought that within a few years, by 1917 or so, the Russo-French entente would be impossible to beat.
The assassination of FF gave them a temporary political possibility of bringing on the war they wanted... but the war they -got- wasn't anything like what they anticipated.
This is why Helmut von Molkte (Molkte the Elder) once said that "planning is everything, but the -plan- is nothing".
Success isn't about making a good plan and sticking to it, it's about having -multiple- plans you can mix and match and plug in in different combinations as circumstances alter.
That's why he and Bismark were such a successful combination; they knew that you have to ride the chaos of events and make split-second informed guesses and (also) just hope you're lucky.
On Lenin: he wasn't the only Bolshevik leader. He was, however, the only one who really backed the policy of "revolutionary defeatism" in 1917.
Virtually the whole of the inner circle of the Bolsheviks in that year wanted to launch a "revolutionary Jacobin war" against the German invaders, the way the French revolutionaries had in the 1790's.
Trotsky did, for example.
Lenin forced through the policy of essentially agreeing to whatever the Germans demanded at Brest-Litovsk.
That turned out to be a very successful policy, because the Germans lost on the Western Front.
If the Bolsheviks had tried to launch a revolutionary war against the Germans they'd probably have suffered Kerensky's fate, they'd have lost all their most committed followers, and the SR's would have taken over and the Russian empire fallen apart into its component parts the way other empires crashed in 1918-21.
But the German defeat in the Michael Offensive in the spring of 1918 hung by a hair -- most of the British leadership (including Haig and Milner) thought they were going to win and that the British would be driven off the Continent and the French crushed before American forces could be deployed in strength, and that the war would end with Germany holding the whole of Europe.
Only a couple of crucial decisions by Ludendorff prevented that. Not driving for Amiens, specifically; both Petain and Haig intended to fall back if they did that, with Haig retreating to the Chanel ports and Petain telling the French leadership to ask for an armistice.
So Lenin's decision looks good in retrospect... but it turned on the Germans losing in the west, and his decision made that defeat -much less likely- because Brest-Litovsk permitted an extensive redeployment of German troops to back the Michael offensive.
Life is like that.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
To which all I can say is, WOW!!! That is how much your comments here impressed me. And I have to mostly agree with what you said about Marx, Toynbee, Spengler, Hord, etc. The only caveat I have being that I still think Hord had some useful insights, if we restrict that usefulness to thinking human affairs do tend to recur in very broadly similar patterns.
Ad astra! Sean
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