A few days ago, cooper left a comment on my post Why We Study History, in which she said:

… it would seem if we truly used history correctly we would not repeat it so often….

Since then, I’ve been carrying that thought around in my head, considering different ways that I might respond. This is not my response.

She’s absolutely right, of course; it’s impossible to study history over any time period longer than twenty seconds, without noticing cycles in human actions and reactions that seem to generate essentially the same social and cultural conditions. Clothing and hairstyles change, and dialogue and postures shift a little, but the broader results often seem about the same. Keeping my generalist hat on for a moment, let me just leave it at this: history repeating itself is as much a cliche as it is an actual historical condition; and as both of those things, it deserves a healthy dose of skeptical analysis.

And that is actually my main point, about all I could explore in this tiny post. When we talk of history repeating itself, we can’t stop there. We can’t really start there, either…. instead, I think we would need to latch on to some specific element of the cycles we’re trying to unravel, and, starting there, pull all sorts of interdisciplinary tricks to search for common threads and relationships among history, science, art, literature, economics, politics, and technology. It’s these things, along with the philosophical ideas that mold them and drive them forward, that define historical cycles. I can’t think of any theoretical reason why history has to repeat itself, or why history, as cooper stated, has to dictate anything … yet it would seem it has and still does, in cycles that are getting shorter and shorter and shorter….

About a year ago, I purchased the complete Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica from a friend of mine, who found it in old boxes in someone’s cellar while he was at an estate sale. I had no idea then that it was quite a find, historically and intellectually, as this article on Wikipedia states:

“The Encyclopedia Britannica Eleventh Edition (1910–1911) is perhaps the most famous edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the day. The articles are still of value and interest to modern scholars as cultural artifacts of the 19th and early 20th centuries….”

More on the Eleventh another time; I’ve used it often to get a peek at the past, at how something was perceived or described by thinkers of that time. For now, in honor of the day, I’d certainly send a big “thank you” across the centuries and around the world to the men and women who labored then, and labor still today, to guard our intellectual heritage and keep recreating it in even more comprehensive, substantial, and interesting forms.

Here’s the text of the “Labor Day” entry from the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, A Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature and General Information, 1911, Volume XVI, page 6:

LABOR DAY, in the United States, a legal holiday in nearly all of the states and Territories, where the first Monday in September is observed by parades and meetings of labour organizations. In 1882 the Knights of Labor paraded in New York City on this day; in 1884 another parade was held, and it was decided that this day should be set apart for this purpose. In 1887 Colorado made the first Monday in September a legal holiday; and in 1909 Labor Day was observed as a holiday throughout the United States, except in Arizona and North Dakota; in Louisiana it is a holiday only in New Orleans (Orleans parish), and in Maryland, Wyoming and New Mexico it is not established as a holiday by statute, but in each may be proclaimed as such in any year by the governor.

Happy Labor Day!

Update: I hadn’t looked for articles about Labor Day by any other bloggers before posting this entry, but have since come across a few that you might find interesting:

Two Rockwells for Labor Day from History is Elementary

In Honor of Labor Day: The Top Five Myths about Work from History News Network

Labor Day from Legal History Blog

Knights of Labor from Progressive Historians

For my Science and Technology in Western Culture class, I’m reading Society and Technological Change by Rudi Volti. One of the assignments for the current module was to read Volti’s chapter on the development of printing technologies. Volti has a short discussion in this chapter on the psychological effects of printing; that is, on psychological changes that might have occurred as print technology improved and publishing began to flourish.

Volti briefly writes about Marshall McLuhan, and about some of McLuhan’s ideas on the fundamental social changes that occurred in conjunction with the expansion of print publishing and other media. Says Volti:

Some fascinating possibilities … have been suggested by Marshall McLuhan, for whom media such as print and television had consequences that far outweigh the overt messages they carry. Printed books fundamentally changed civilization not because of the information they transmitted; the greatest consequence of printing lay in the different modes of thought and perception that it fostered. In McLuhan’s analysis, each medium engenders a distinctive way of looking at the world; as his famous aphorism has it, “the medium is the message.” The reading of the printed word makes readers think in sequence, just as a sentence is sequentially read from left to right. – pg. 190

I’ve never read McLuhan, so I don’t really know how well this represents his views. But this is perhaps what Tim Lacy is asking about, in his post What is Linear Thinking? from earlier this week. It would seem reasonable that McLuhan – or at least Volti in his interpretation of McLuhan – is highlighting a significant change in the technology of thought that came about in conjunction with the increased availability of the printed word. While I think there’s much to be said for this dramatic change in thought processes, I’m not convinced that linear thinking of this type adequately encompasses what happens in our minds when we read.

Obviously, we tend to read sequentially, at least in the sense that we typically read both books and other materials from beginning to end, and, further, we expect some logical relationship between the ideas presented at the beginning and those presented at the end. So the activity of reading does strike me as a linear process. However, reading and learning from what we read are two different things entirely. For sure, I can read something from the first page to the last page, absorbing what I read in the sequential order the author provides – but that isn’t necessarily how I learn from it. If the reading offers me anything at all, then the linear process combines with a variety of other mental process where I make associations, form concepts, increase prior knowledge, absorb and relate details to others I’m already aware of, and (hopefully!) emerge from the reading with either a more solid understanding of something I already know or at least a beginning understanding of something entirely new. Reading – at least reading to learn – is a much more iterative and hierarchical process than it is a sequential process. If this might be described as “non-linear thinking” (and I suppose it might), I would think that non-linear thinking is not the same as illogical thinking – since illogical thinking suggests an inability to build on prior knowledge when attempting to learn something new (or to think about anything else, for that matter).

Continuing the quotation above, Volti goes on to say:

Reading also produces an egocentric view of the world, for the reader’s involvement with the printed word is solitary and private. – pg. 190

This was actually the part that made me suspicious of the “linear thinking” statements about reading. While it is undoubtedly true that reading is a solitary and private activity, I don’t think that adequately describes the personal, cultural, or social significance of reading (or of writing, for that matter). As Benedict Anderson describes so well in Imagined Communities (I swear, I’ll be referring to that book for the rest of my life), one of the true revolutions that occurred through the explosion of printing was a new awareness among human beings of the simultaneous existence of other human beings. At minimum, my reading of a book implies an awareness of one other person – the book’s author – and in all likelihood embraces some sense that other people have read – have experienced – the book in ways similar to mine. If I spun that theory out to one other logical conclusion, I might even say that the reason so many people write, and so many more want to write, is that the sense of existing in a world simultaneously with other people has become an endemic part of the way modern men and women perceive (the significance of?) their existence.

In early 2006, I completed a class on American Intellectual History, where the first book I read was Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities. The course – an independent study course where I worked directly with a mentor to define its content and purpose – was intended to give me a beginning understanding of some of the theory of intellectual history and the different ways it can be approached. Anderson’s book describes the emergence of the idea of a nation as a imagined construct, and his book covers an incredible amount of intellectual territory.

As I was reading the book, I made several notes at the time about blogging as an imagined community, and have since discovered that at least a few others have considered that idea also. One notable essay along these lines is Imagining the Blogosphere: An Introduction to the Imagined Community of Instant Publishing by Graham Lampa – which does a fine job of describing blogging in terms of Anderson’s thesis.

There were a few finer points in Anderson’s book, however, that I found compelling to consider with respect to blogging, and potentially worth exploring from the perspective of intellectual history. Anderson anchors much of his thesis around the impact of the emergence of print publishing, and the spread of newly published material to masses of people as a result of the logic of market capitalism. Anderson goes on to relate this to changes in concepts of time, specifically describing how the conceptual experience of time changed to one where we grasp the idea that there is a distinct past and present, and more importantly that there are people engaging in actions, and events taking place, outside our (approximately) immediate perceptual awareness. Anderson states, as an example:

An American will never meet, or even know the names of [most] of his fellow Americans. He has no idea what they are up to at any one time. But he has complete confidence in their steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity. – pg. 26

Anderson goes on to explain this by describing the experience of reading a newspaper, in which all the news stories are connected first by coincidence of time, and second by their immediate obsolescence:

The obsolescence of the newspaper on the morrow of its printing … creates this extraordinary mass ceremony: the almost precisely simultaneous consumption (”imagining”) of the newspaper-as-fiction. We know that particular morning and evening editions will overwhelmingly be consumed between this hour and that, only on this day, not that…. The significance of this mass ceremony … is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion. Furthermore, this ceremony is incessantly repeated at daily or half-daily intervals throughout the calendar. What more vivid figure for the secular, historically clocked, imagined community can be envisioned? At the same time, the newspaper reader, observing exact replicas of his own paper being consumed by his subway, barbershop, or residential neighbors, is continually reassured that the imagined world is visibly rooted in everyday life. – pg. 35

If you find these ideas difficult – as I did at first – try to imagine not having an awareness of simultaneous activity. That is, try to imagine how differently you would look at the world, if you didn’t have an awareness of a distinct past and present, and of human beings engaged in simultaneous activity. While you won’t really achieve that state of mind, you might begin to grasp what sort of intellectual revolution occurred in human thought for the shift toward this awareness to take hold.

As Anderson also describes, this intellectual revolution occurred within a historical context where existing social and political power structures began to crumble. Blogging is often described as democratizing, in the sense that it moves some control over information from traditional institutions to anybody who has enough interest, and takes enough time, to post their thoughts on a web site. While there are certainly questions to be raised about the efficacy or value of the information on a typical blog site, the fact that blogs even exist – and that they are written and managed by individuals usually working on their own – has implications for human intellectual development that, I think, have yet to be considered. Their potential influence is dramatic; the potential of that influence to effect political, cultural, and social change is also dramatic. And if Anderson’s thesis is true, or even mostly true, then they even have the potential – at least partly because of their immediacy and the speed with which information now travels – to permanently alter some elements of the way human beings think.

I’ve been puzzling for about a week now about what first entry I would write for this blog. I acquired the domain name afewgoodpens.com well over a year ago, just after finishing an introductory web design class I took through Empire State College – and feeling all giddy about the possibility of designing and maintaining my own site. The giddiness faded after a while, when I realized there was no way I’d be able to create and keep up with a full-fledged site. I kept the domain name anyway (because I liked it and it meant something to me), cranked up this WordPress site, and just recently got around to playing with it some. I still have a lot of work still to do to customize these pages the way I want (the banner pic’s pretty nice, eh?), but more on that in another post.

What cranked me up to write this entry tonight was this e-mail message I received from the Humanities and Social Sciences Network’s Intellectual History list (http://www.h-net.org/~ideas/). I subscribe to about a dozen H-net lists, but read only occasionally and seldom respond – simply because work and my classes leave me very little time to write the kind of thoughtful responses with attentive follow-up that lists of that caliber deserve.

Nevertheless, this message from Tim Lacy decrying the decline of intellectual history as a distinct and independent discipline got my attention, and I’ve read it several times. He has published the full text of the e-mail on his blog, here:

U.S. Intellectual History: A Call To Action

And he has a related post here:

Follow-Up On The “Call To Action”

As brief background, let me just say that I returned to school about five years ago, as an adult student who already had a full-time career, to pursue a bachelor’s degree in historical studies. I have nine classes to go – including one called Science and Technology in Western Culture that starts in two days – at which point I intend to continue in a master’s program. Over the past year, my classes have started becoming more advanced; my last three were intellectual history classes: one on American intellectual history, one on American modernism, and one on historiography. I read about twenty books for the three classes, and the classes exposed me for the first time in my life to Benedict Anderson, David Noble, George Mosse, Matthew Frye Jacobsen, and Jackson Lears. Along with the historiography class, reading these amazing writers has given me at least some beginning grasp of the intellectual issues historians face when trying to make sense of the interactions between history, society, culture, politics, economics, and philosophy. The ability of these writers to cross disciplines and integrate them into a coherent narrative kept me up late many nights, wide-eyed no matter how tired I was, marveling at their skills.

It is in that sense that Tim’s posts caught my eye. I wondered – especially while taking the historiography class – what was the current state of intellectual history. Taking a look at that was way beyond the scope of an undergraduate class, so I didn’t really pursue it – other than to “back-pocket” my thoughts for another time. The narrative that the classes provided me with, however, suggested that intellectual history was probably in something of a deconstruction period – where it was breaking down to a lower level of detail, disintegrating somewhat, presumably (at least in the theories buzzing around in my head) to be reformed and reintegrated in a higher, more abstract form over the next generation or so.

Tim’s posts seem to confirm the deconstruction phase; though, of course, that’s only one source. And without further study it’s impossible to determine if that deconstruction is temporary (as I optimistically want to believe it is), or a more general reflection of American anti-intellectualism that Tim concerns himself with in the linked posts and several other posts on his blog. Intellectual trends take place and change over such long periods of time, it may not be possible to even get a good fix on the current state. We’re right in the middle of it; yet being right in the middle of things – and feeling a certain discontent over what we see around us – is often what we need to spur us into action.