Resumo de Future - JOHN J REILLY

With the aid of a simple BASIC program (christened "Dr.
Spengler''s Temporal Analogizer") and some theory taken from Oswald
Spengler''s Decline of the West, Reilly sets off to explore the cycles
of world history. Spengler''s Future is a parallel history of five
civilizations ? Rome (300BC-500AD), Egypt (1800-1000BC), Islam (1200-1900AD), China
(500BC-300AD), and the West (1800-2600AD).

Spengler''s Future is certainly not a serious attempt to predict the
future, but it is hard to know how seriously we are expected to take the
"purely heuristic" historical parallels. It suffers the usual
problems of such schemes ? the too easy selection and interpretation of facts
to fit any pattern and the resulting vulnerability to any kind of neutral
model. Reilly''s approach is also resolutely acausal, operating at the level of
organic civilizations and the intentions of states. To give you the flavor,
here he is writing of the "Early Empire":

A universal polity cannot be established in a day. For some
generations into the imperial period, the Empire has still to determine just
what its constitutional arrangements will be, how large it can become, just
what form of the civilization''s traditional culture is to be promoted and which
suppressed. This first fifth or so of the empire''s history is full of incident,
indeed some of the most colorful things that ever occur in any civilization''s
lifetime. It is, on the whole, a fundamentally prosperous period. The economy
is still vigorously expanding, many technical ideas from the modern era have
yet to be fully exploited, population growth is slowing but continuing.

As he acknowledges in the introduction, this exposes him to all the
criticisms levelled at Spengler or Toynbee. The only defence offered is an
appeal to a change in the philosophy of physics, particularly with the
advent of chaos theory. This is itself debatable, but trying to justify
historical theories by appeal to physics is dubious in any event.

But criticising Spengler''s Future as history is like criticising
Aesop''s Fables on the grounds that animals can''t speak: it is better read as a
morality story, a historical fable, as it were. As such it is really more about
the present than either the past or the future, and despite its detachment it
is revealing of Reilly''s own values. Reilly never descends into earnestness,
however, and leavens his commentary with humour: my strong antipathy to
moralising history was only occasionally aroused. I particularly enjoyed the
introduction, where Reilly (too briefly) summarises the historiographical
background. He writes there that "Dr. Spengler''s Temporal Analogizer
should be kept out of the hands of gullible undergraduates, German revanchists
and recovering Logical Positivists." In this context I''m not sure I don''t
prefer logical positivism.

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