Philosophy of History and The Next World Order

The next world order will at least be one that can maintain a high level of defense spending for all of the participants and their respective military-industrial complexes. A philosophy of history shouldn’t be analyzed with evolution as a paradigmatic factor; instead it should be made with the Universe’s tendency or vector to grow in complexity.

History isn’t evolving. Rather it could be said to be growing in complexity. Philosophically that is interesting. All of the elements of the Universe were made through stellar synthesis- except for those created by human or other sentient intelligence on a small scale. Humanity has made a few artificial elements.

Life is that next stage of complex structures arising from combination and recombination of elements. That has occurred in human history as well; especially noticeable from the bronze age to the present. Civilization creates more complex structures comparable to the way molecules form into larger and more complex units rising to become biological units. Evolution is far too crass and undervalues the fundamental change that is complexity. If the social world doesn’t destroy itself soon- hopefully not before the N.B.A. trading deadline- it too will continue to grow in complexity.

There have been numerous philosophies of history developed over the centuries. Aristotle probably should be credited with inventing the first as his The Politics described cycles of forms of governance. G.W.F. Hegel invented an evolutionary dialectic of the world-spirit rising into self-awareness. Karl Marx famously used that dialectic as a technical way to discover the metaphysics of political change (or evolution). He believed various forms of governments collided, or various social classes collided to create a synthetic new form. Marx was as wrong as Hegel in oversimplifying with reductionist logic what history actually is as a living process. Arnold Toynbee invented a challenge-response theory of  civilization. I like that one myself, believing that civilizations have faced challenges and responses that were cyclical and found to occur in more than one civilization. I believe as well that the mechanics are also over-simplistic regarding actual human societies.

Rather than a mechanics, history is better compared to the formation of a complex work of art built from the ground up with myriad different construction components going into it all over the sphere of existence. The present is the flat top of the mountain of history. The elements made in the past don’t always support new additions upon them and collapse or form sinkholes of civilizations. Formerly there was a planetary scale unified effort of building- one sees the technology and governance gap of forms of pre-Columbian eastern and western hemispheric populations for example.

The interacting social forms are more comparable to chess board squares that change location on the board and have Venn diagram mechanics for sharing similar political and economic interests on adjacent and distant locations- sometimes forming allied chess squares through treaties and informal , or even simply with the overflow of pollution all across the board.

Mixing a metaphor of a chess board with Venn Diagram powers and a mountain rising it height ib the present, built upon the past (one is free to invert the mountain and have an inverted pyramid is beginning with human social living scales from isolated families to global civilization today) present interesting visualizations- and that is a working philosophy of history.

The next world order is presently in the formative process beginning with the Clinton concession of Russian Ukraine to the west, followed by the build up of the European Union and N.A.T.O. with expansion and political self-awareness as a new world power greater than Europe had ever known before, inevitably generated conflict over Ukraine with a post-Cold war Russia that wanted its pre-communist revolutionary property returned. Neither did Russia want N.A.T.O. to expand after the Cold War and become a greater danger than it was before the collapse of the Soviet Union to its strategic security.

Russia had the obvious opportunity to resume a neo-socialist alliance with China. China, having benefited tremendously by the Nixon era turn toward free enterprise and foreign trade had grown to become the largest economy on Earth. The world order was changing to a multi-polar formation with major blocks of China-Russia and BRICS, Europe and the United States. Most of the world would affiliate with some or all of these blocks, and the United States would defend itself from encroachment by the EU military power in Greenland. Various intramural levels of alliance and trade would exist among the three major blocks with Europe attempting to alienate America from Russian relations while it expanded Eastward.

In nature the Universe has combined particles into atoms and elements in large scale structures and the next level of complexity seems to have been life. One might say that creating life was the purpose of the Universe, and to sustain and increase its sentience and level of intellect. One may believe that God made and managed the order of complexity generating sentience and intelligence or not. 

People today still have various micro-theories about how society functions best and how political forms arise. None, I think, have much of a chance for being accurate or functionally correct since they cannot fit as abstractions upon the real complex, variegated, discrete structures comprising human society in a material planetary environment and ecosphere.