An exploration of cyclical history. Is it valid? Do cultural cycles exist? Can they be determined?

Anomalies of History by J. O. Quantaman Angular separations between Venus and Mercury follow a recurring pattern over forty years or tentatively 14,600 days. The 40-year cycle covers two distinct phases separated by six-year Transition periods. I have discovered this behavior while doing a statistical analysis of the angular separations between Venus and Mercury. The analysis will be shown in the opening sections of this report. Then I will match historical events that concur with the six-year Transition periods. The events include many examples of cultural reforms in the wake of social upheavals, revolutions, wars and technological breakthroughs. Please do not confuse this report with a deterministic approach to history. Quantum theory has shown that determinism is impossible, for the universe doesn’t have enough storage space to chain-link every effect to its cause. The arrow of time points in one direction only. When a soft-boiled egg rolls off the table and splatters across the floor, there is no easy way to reverse the process and make the egg whole again. Each of us has many choices to deal with whatever circumstances. But life doesn’t work like a digital network. In real-life, you can’t take back a bad chess move. Nor can you take back a serious physical injury as if it was a matter of restoring a corrupted OS to its former state. You must live with your choices and bear the results of your actions. Suppose Time represents more than a linear chronology. Suppose Time has quality components that manifest at regular intervals. If so, there must be a class of events that manifest around such qualities. Let us focus on events that influence or trigger cultural changes. Such events include regional conflicts, pitched battles, changes in political leadership, social upheavals and technological innovations. The history of culture can be viewed as the revaluing of longterm memory. History shows that memory has become depersonalized and reinvested in the public domain. Indeed, everyone retains bone-marrow memory. All of us have the urge to survive: to eat when we’re hungry, to drink when we’re thirsty and to sleep when we’re tired. But life involves more than breathing and slouching before a TV. We must earn the right to shelter and modest happiness. Luckily, humans have been social creatures from the very start. If someone in a hunting & gathering tribe knows how to start a fire, all members of the tribe stay warm overnight. If another is swift of foot and strong of arm, all members of the tribe will have cooked meat to eat for dinner. As the tribe gathers around the glowing embers, a 3rd-person may chant praises of the hunter’s bravery and the firemaker’s skills. So the entire tribe learns of the methods used to slay a stag or coax a fire after torrential downpours. When the heroes grow older or succumb to injuries, younger members of the tribe have the basic know-how to fill these vital roles. In prehistoric times, word of mouth language was all that was needed to spread knowledge from one generation to the next. The earliest agricultural societies set aside a cadre of bards who were charged with keeping the history of the people. In Celtic Europe, druids would wander of village-to-village. During festivals and tribal gatherings, the druids would sing of heroes and villains, wise counselors and fools, glorious victories and tragic defeats. Although Celts didn’t record history, the highlights from scores of generations were preserved in the songs of the bards. Eventually human social interactions grew more complex. Merchants needed reliable grocery lists, inventories of products, customer orders and accounts. They used posters as calendars to mark the dates when debts would be collected or paid off. Bankers issued written receipts for gold or silver they held in trust. The first languages were largely iconic or hieroglyphic with separate glyphs for numbers. Wealthy businesspersons no longer had to remember every facet of their holdings. Instead they called their chief scribes who’d read the particulars from clay tablets or scrolls. The Phoenicians invented an alphabetical script which was soon emulated by the Greeks and Romans. The Egyptians provided durable papyrus sheets that rolled into compact scrolls for easy conveyance. A new class of scribes used ink to scribble vital facts and figures for governing magistrates, high priests or commercial financiers. Popular ballads were written down. These included Gilgamesh, The Iliad and Odyssey. Historians began to record current events as well as myths and popular conceptions of prehistorical eras. A group of scribes on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea gathered myths from Mesopotamia and combined these with Egyptian tales and local folklore. Over many years the edited texts became the present-day versions of the Bible, Torah and Koran. In the last century of the Roman Republic and the 1st-century of the Roman Empire, books existed only in private or municipal libraries. There was no easy way to duplicate a book other than to copy it painstakingly word for word. Most of the folks who lived around the Mediterranean were illiterate. Even fewer were able to write, although many Roman citizens were fluent in Latin, and most Roman aristocrats knew both Latin and Greek. Young men who enlisted in the Roman legions were taught to read and write. This practice was adopted around 100 B.C. by Marius who was also the 1st-general to enlist commoners in the legions. Subsequent generals continued to bring language tutors into winter quarters until about 250 A.D. when legions were supplemented with foreigners and mercenaries, many of whom were captured or conscripted barbarians from outlying tribes. During the Greco-Roman era, rhetoric was far more important than written proclamations. Successful leaders were capable public speakers. Tutors required students to memorize large sections of popular books, such as the Iliad and other fictional histories as well as the texts of playwrights, philosophers, geometers and historians. Students learned by rote. Politicians spoke from memory. Entrepreneurs had the knack for summing figures in their heads. Since it was difficult if not impossible to distribute copies, written laws and edicts were engraved in copper at the governor’s palace. Such bylaws were spread through the district by word of mouth. Recorded texts allowed the bureaucracy to function, but most day-to-day arrangements happened face-to-face with spoken words. Men and women needed keen memories to keep their wits on track. As Roman culture collapsed and human misery grew with the dissolution of the Empire, another cadre of scribes gathered around Christian bishops and abbots. Monks and impoverished scholars helped to preserve a few of the important books during the Dark Ages. Nonetheless, literacy fell to all-time lows. Noteworthy kings had to call on their scribes before they could decipher their wives’ memos. This sorry state of affairs continued until the 13th-century when Mongol hordes conquered huge tracts of Asia and Eastern Europe. They promoted trade throughout their vast empire. A Chinese entrepreneur managed to mass produce playing cards using block type. Card games were very popular among the folks who accompanied caravans hauling trade goods over vast distances: from Damascus to the Beijing, from Baghdad to Delhi or from Hong Kong to Moscow. 200 years later, Gutenberg invented the printing press. Yet, superstition had become so embedded that it took several centuries before printed books made significant impact. If anything, printed books helped westerners recover their long-lost heritage via translations of Arabic texts. Major innovations came more often from ocean explorers who found new continents and brought back wild tales and hoards of gold. While Luther was handing out pamphlets that questioned the supremacy of the Catholic church, school kids in China were reading finely bound textbooks of botany, astronomy and philosophy. The Mongol-inspired expansion of international trade helped dig Europeans out from the dismal Dark Ages. New knowledge, fine silks and spices also brought fleas and the Black Death, which spread plague and overfilled graveyards from Manchuria to Iceland and from Thailand to Morocco. City folk suffered the most. Thus, populous China lost more than half its citizens in a few short years. Western Europe observed wretched sanitary practices, which offered a bonanza for flea-infested rats. Europeans lost nearly a third of their fellows. Gutenberg’s printing press helped to bring on 300 years of insane religious wars (also abetted by ethnic rivalries and plain-old personal vendettas). It took longer for printed books to make positive impacts. The most important was the innovation of public schools, although parents had to be members of the upper classes before their kids would be included. Tutors were suddenly faced with ballooning class sizes. They had to devise new methods to test and grade their charges. The learning process was still largely by rote, but the amount of source material increased by a hundredfold. A few misguided crackpots had the nerve to teach students how to think. But their modest results raised such a ruckus that the crackpots were soon given one-way tickets to the Americas or Australia. Pamphlets were the biggest beneficiaries of the printing press. Pamphlets appeared on every street corner. Folks couldn’t walk their dogs without getting handed two or three. In those days, folks hadn’t learned the downsides of junk mail. Many took the pamphlets home. Some even managed to read them. Others who couldn’t read treasured them as if they could. The pamphlets contained everything from fantastic recipes for cheese-stuffed dumplings to Elmo’s famous hair restorative. Pamphlets also contained diatribes on almost every topic, including incitements to revolution. Soon the police were out in force, questioning every pamphleteer. The police arrested dozens, but the left the most flagrant junk dealers alone. Pamphleteers evolved into newspaper conglomerates that printed dailies, weeklies and monthlies. Some of the monthlies included purloined booklets for the ladies. Newspapers had scores of adverts on every other page. The news sections contained valuable information, such as weather predictions, special events, train schedules and the visits of ships to local ports. Folks began to see things beyond the sightlines of their neighborhoods. They began to see themselves as members of a city, or some cases, citizens of a nation. Knowledge of simple everyday events became more widely known. For instance, readers of newspapers would learn about freak fires at apple orchards, so they’d run down to the store and stock up on apples before the prices went through the roof. Information became a convenient advantage, though folks soon forgot about yesterday’s news when tomorrow’s news promised another bag of goodies. Let us jump to the present. The public media is pervasive. We are deluged with radio waves, television images, billboards on transit buses and advert banners on almost every website. We have millions of options and appeals at our fingertips. We have musical accompaniment in elevators, shopping malls and grocery stores. We can play games with others or ourselves online. We’re linked to dozens of friends and retailers. 99.9% of what we hear and see is irrelevant. It goes in one ear and out the other. Yet the info never stops, not for a minute, not for a second. Without written and/or electronic records, we would be lost as polar bears on tropical islands. Without proper credentials, we couldn’t even get to 1st-base, let alone close the deal on a new car or a new house. To arrive where we are today, we’ve had to relinquish our personal memories and bequeath them to the public domain. We’ve thrown our two-cents worth in with everyone else’s, and somehow everyone benefits. Never in history have folks enjoyed so many conveniences, so many options and freedoms. If we look back at recent history, we see that innovations have driven changes in the social fabric. Even so, upstart technologies don’t take root until folks are ready to embrace them. Wars and social conflicts create powerful incentives to adopt new gadgets, especially when the gadgets promise to turn defeats into victories. I will show how violent conflicts occur more often during the six-year Transition periods. The evidence for this is presented in the later sections of this report. Technological innovations will furnish the impetus for both conflicts and stalemates. And don’t forget... The development of nuclear weapons has postponed the advent of World War III. The great powers haven’t dared to risk civilization-ending chaos. The most lethal weapons known to man have idled in their silos for more than 60 years. I’ve studied many proposals for cyclical history. All of these have been way up in the clouds or focused too narrowly to encompass the sweep of culture. None of the proposals, to my knowledge, has been put to a rigorous statistical analysis. The 40-year cycle may prove no better than the others. It won’t predict the weather ten years from now. It won’t help you get rich in the stock market. It won’t predict with certitude the occurrence of future wars. If anything, the 40-year cycle will let you appreciate the tidal flows of history. Regard the six-year Transition Periods as anomalies from a commonly accepted norm. The rest of this report is contained in the PDF and available for download. Also visit my website: http://www.psignologic.net/history.html