I started with a parody of some of the cruder religious conceptions of history because it contains in their original forms many of the errors that supposedly secular theorists of history develop – the same theorists who are often so smugly certain of their enlightenment but whose anti-clericalism and scorn of religious obscurantism often only highlights their own fetishes.
Perhaps the most common of these is that human history is the result of some immutable and inflexible human nature. If you think that this is only a common-sense crudeness, you have not read much 'evolutionary psychology'. What is rather embarrassingly called 'science' has proven that it is not necessary to have recourse to anything 'God-given': we can declare eternal and unchanging anything we please, so long as it exists today. It need not even exist among humans, the closest primate will do.
A common-sense understanding of violence for example is that it just stems from human nature. No essential difference is understood between the occasional violence among bands of hunter-gatherer's and the systemic wars of capitalism in the imperialist stage. According to this theory people today are neither more nor less rapine than we have ever been, only the technologies of violence have gotten more effective1. This perspective fails to see today's wars – in Afghanistan for example – in their particularity, it fails to see how the needs of American capital (and therefore the needs of American capitalists) have necessitated the war in Afghanistan and instead blame humanity's intrinsic evils.
The error is one of the 'level of generality' – in this case, information supposedly gleaned at the most general level of in investigation (eternal human truths) are applied – miss-applied – to very concrete circumstances. The opposite error is also common: rather than human nature, Bush's particular eccentricity, stupidity, racism or corruption are blamed – of course since according to this theory such eccentrics always crop up, this error resolves into the first. This brings us to another error which it is necessary to guard against.
Capitalism is radically historicising. Every generation expects to live differently from the previous one, in fact, things change so quickly that I can expect my lifestyle today to be vastly different from what it might be ten years from now; I am also just old enough to remember when I had never heard of the Internet, something my younger sister would find as incomprehensible as living without a telephone. My father can remember at least four economic crises and his father could remember two wars. History, more than ever, can seem not like the story of human nature bungling its way through time, but simply as chaos where change follows on change without reason or pattern. As Marx put it, “All that is solid melts into air.”
But if history is to be the study of both continuity and change in human society, it is surely necessary to be able to make differentiations on a sound basis. It is necessary to recognise that there are fundamental similarities between hunter gatherer societies and (for example) capitalist societies. At the very least, they are both examples of human society. And of course, there are considerable differences as well between the two. Put simplistically, they are both societies and share in common all things which must be true of any society; but any society A will have characteristics specific to the kind of society it is which it will not necessarily share with any society B. Similarly, societies A1 and A2 will have in common all those characteristics which must be true of any society A but may still have important differences between them. In order to be able to make comparisons of this order, it is necessary to create nesting levels of generality.
1And just to prove that calling yourself a Marxist doesn't protect one from the errors of capitalist ideology, this is almost a direct quote from Terry Eagleton's Holy Terror. Somewhat ironically, Eagleton wrote another book, Ideology: An Introduction which is possibly among the most valuable contributions to the debates on this issue.
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