Change is the defining feature of history. By history, I mean human history; specifically, the history of the human world, which exists over and above–yet never entirely independent from–the physical and biological world.1 As time unfolds the present is influenced by the past; what is, has been conditioned by what once was; the human world of today is a synthesis of the human world of yesterday. Just as any given moment holds the necessary conditions for what is possible in the future, the necessary conditions of the world we inhabit today existed in the past in some way. Today has developed and emerged from new combinations and novel instantiations of a multiplicity of conditions existing in the past. A given moment may be said to comprise a “whole”, out of which emerges a synthesis constituting a larger, more complex, whole. Thus, there is a directedness to the unfolding of history. Like the expansion of the universe or the arrow of time, it would appear history moves in a single direction.2 This phenomenon–in which the totality of circumstances constituted within the human world influences and affects itself over time–I will call historical conditioning.3
Continue reading “Toward a Theory of History”Category: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
The Origins of the Modern Culture of Achievement, Part II
The dawn of the twentieth century witnessed the birth of a unique development in the history of success literature. Ideas and concepts that can be found in both the Transcendentalist and New Thought movements steadily came to be applied to the end-goal of success and wealth creation. This unique synthesis also led to the development of a peculiar science, or what I will refer to as a theology, which was intended to support it.1 In the wider scheme, technological innovations and continuing industrialization led to an expanding scope of economic and sociological change. Among these changes is the growing use of the telephone and electricity, the development of the automobile and airplane, the age of radio and broadcasting, the rise of the motion picture and the film industry of Hollywood.2 The growth of corporations and mass production yielded an ever-expanding set of commodities and consumer goods, in turn leading to the arrival of the professional salesman–a unique sociological type which provided perhaps the first popular audience for the burgeoning industry of success literature.3
Continue reading “The Origins of the Modern Culture of Achievement, Part II”