Understanding social evolution

Social evolution is a progression of learning, leading into new levels of learning and new levels of understanding (Habermas, 1984, p. 68). Habermas (1984) argues that social evolution emerged with humanity’s capacity to differentiate between the natural, physical environment and the socio-cultural environment. As society’s capacity to differentiate increases, the social reasoning informing a stage is no longer convincing and individuals and groups of people progress to new levels of understanding. However, there are consequences, Habermas contends,

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because “the interpretations of the superseded stage are, no matter what their content, categorically devalued” [italics as in the original] (p. 68). The mythological worldview does not allow for “rational orientations of action”, and ratioanlisation is so influential to the modern scientific outlook (p. 68). Habermas cautions that uncritical devaluation is a one-sided view. It was the view of the modern Enlightenment thinker (p. 62). Habermas suggests that the Enlightenment thinker may have committed a categorical mistake by devaluing mythological-narrative. As a consequence of depreciation, the traditions of entire civilisations fell into dissolution (pp. 62-68). Devaluation changed entire outlooks on life with the result that ‘moral-practical insights’, ‘objectivating thought’ and the ‘aesthetic-expressive capacity’ of everyday life have taken on completely different meanings (p. 68). This is an important point, since it follows that devaluation might have had a ripple effect on the crafts. In early modernity, according to Attiwill (2000), the textile crafts moved into the realm of ‘craft activities’, where,

“in the face of modernist ideals and processes of industrialisation”, craft was considered

“nostalgic and reactionary” (p. 34).

The transformation of mythological-narrative into ‘rational orientations of action’ caused tensions between tradition and modernity. Habermas (1984) uses Horton (cited in Habermas, 1984) to explain the distinction between a traditional and a modern thought system. Horton’s work illuminates also the significance of tradition’s poetry. Horton explains that a traditional society has closed thought systems and is characterised by an absence of awareness that alternatives to established beliefs may exist. It is this absence of alternatives that makes possible the absolute acceptance of established convictions and eliminates any likelihood of questioning.

Moreover, closed societies have rituals informed by the phenomenon of ‘truth’, customs and habits, which regulate all social action. The rituals and the truth is identity-securing knowledge, linking back to the concept of wisdom. Ritual truth is referred to as ‘the sacred’; belief systems hence are sacred, they must not be questioned. This sacredness has an all-pervasive influence.

When sacred belief systems are exposed to threats, opened to question or exposed to ridicule, for example, it provokes anxiety (pp. 64-65). In contrast, Horton notes, a modern society has open thought systems. It is characterised by an “awareness of alternatives, diminished sacredness of beliefs and diminished anxiety about threats to them” (p. 61). Open societies are called ‘open’ because they are open to constant debate, revision and criticism (p. 64). Horton defines the distinctions between traditional and modern attitudes as “protective vs. destructive attitudes” (p. 65). A traditional society has sacred attitudes; therefore it is an institution that is protective of its worldviews. In contrast, a modern society has validity claims that question constantly – and thus destroy – established attitudes. Habermas (1984) opines that there is no need to romanticise the concept of the sacred, but neither should it be devalued uncritically. For

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Habermas, the sacred truth has a certain aesthetic-expressive capacity from which we might learn:

Can’t we who belong to modern societies learn something from understanding alternative, particularly pre-modern forms of life?

Shouldn’t we, beyond all romanticising of superseded stages of development, beyond exotic stimulation from the contents of alien cultures, recall the losses required by our own path to the modern world? (p. 65)

Horton (cited in Habermas, 1984) was a scientist living in traditional Africa. Horton recalls the

‘poetic losses’ that occurred on the path to modernity:

As a scientist it is perhaps inevitable that I should at certain points give the impression that traditional African thought is a poor shackled thing when compared with the thought of the sciences. Yet as a man, here I am living by choice in a still heavily traditional Africa rather than in the scientifically oriented Western subculture I was brought up in. Why? Well, there may be lots of queer, sinister, unacknowledged reasons. But one certain reason is the discovery of things lost at home.

An intensely poetic quality in everyday life and thought, and a vivid enjoyment of the passing moment – both driven out of sophisticated Western life by the quest for purity of motive and the faith in progress. (p. 65)

As noted previously, first theologies were forms of nature worship (Habermas, 1984, p. 47).

Gradually, over a very long period of time, these magical nature/culture relations, ideas and attitudes developed into religious worldviews. Weber (cited in Habermas, 1984) suggests that all paths of religious rationalisation have originated from the same line of thought, that of theodicy (p. 192). For Weber, all great religious worldviews found their origins in certain

“founding figures who were masters of the prophetic word and who lent force to their ideas by an exemplary conduct of life” (p. 192). Thus, the priests of religion were the intellectual interpreters of poetical-mystical narratives. The priests represented the authority of the sacred, bringing their interpretations into new levels of understanding and turning them into a tradition.

Weber puts it this way: the interpretations of “priests, monks and teachers of wisdom was needed to shape these new ideas and modes of life into a dogma and to ‘rationalise’ them into a doctrine capable of being passed on as tradition” (p. 192). Habermas (1984) states that the central concern of the tradition was to find social unity. By way of the authority of the sacred, the rites of tradition served to inculcate consensus-forming belief systems, but tradition’s aesthetic-expressive capacities were equally important. It is due to both: the rite and the myth of a traditional society becomes identity-securing, socially unifying knowledge because of its totalising power and its cultural poetry (p. 47). Habermas suggests that without the poetry of tradition, a society is culturally impoverished. Although worldviews ultimately reflect the

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background knowledge of communities – the invention of supernatural beings accentuated the shortcomings of people’s knowledge and the limits of their powers (p. 47), for example – Weber, according to Habermas, “judges the rationalisation of worldviews by the extent to which magical thinking is overcome” (p. 212).

Essentially, social transformation is marked by changes in systems of basic concepts and understandings. Through the various eras of human development, societies have moved from mythological-narrative ways of thinking to the theological views of the creation, through the Greek contemplation of the metaphysical, ‘the whole of what exists’, to our modern more

‘rational’ understanding of the world (Habermas, 1984, p. 214). It is an evolutionary process in which the insights and knowledge of ancient wisdoms are supplanted with the rational, evidence-based knowledge of modern science. Weber (cited in Habermas, 1984) describes the process as follows: with each transition to a new level of understanding a new idea is born. The first idea emerged when members of a society no longer considered “the forces that mysteriously confronted them in the unmastered environment as powers immanent in the thing themselves, but represented them as beings lying behind the things” (p. 196). The next idea was born when men began to personify natural phenomena and the idea of heroes, monsters and deities crystallised. Then, the monotheistic concept of a transcendent God emerged. In the West, this was a key idea and once accepted, it gave rise to another new idea: that of a rewarding and a punishing God. This in turn gave rise to the idea that the destiny of men depended – more or less – on adhering to ethical commitments. With the rise of Judaism, another idea developed;

men began to understand themselves as “God’s instruments working in the world” (p. 196).

Another worldview was born when Protestantism was added to the concept of ‘predestination’

(p. 196). For Weber, the transition towards rationalisation is a process of disenchantment and was initiated by the following sequential developments:

· Radical repudiation of magical measures and all sacraments as means in the quest for salvation – the definitive disenchantment of religion.

· Relentless isolation of the individual believer in a world where the dangers of creature idolatry threaten, and in the midst of a soteriological⁸

· The idea of a calling or vocation, based to begin with on the teachings of Luther, according to which the believer proves himself to be an obedient instrument of God in the world through the worldly fulfilment of the duties of his vocation.

community that denies any visible identification of the elect.

· The transformation of the Judaeo-Christian rejection of the world into an innerworldly asceticism of restless labour in one’s calling;

8 Pertaining to salvation ("Oxford English Dictionary," 2009)

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outward success does not, it is true, represent the real basis of the individual redemptory fate, but it does represent a basis for knowing it.

· Finally, the methodical rigor of a principled, self, controlled autonomous conduct of life, which penetrates every domain of life because it stands under the idea of assuring oneself of salvation.

(p. 165)

Habermas (1984) notes that no matter how different the ideas, they all point to the same line of development: “that of a disenchanted understanding of the world, purified of magical ideas” (p.

196). However, the attainment of these new levels of understanding has not resulted in the desired outcome. The ultimate aim of the project of Enlightenment, Lash (cited in Beck, 1994) writes, was to free people from the social constraints of tradition, to open up a world founded on ideas such as the freedom of choice, individualism, liberal democracy and rational thought.

However, post-modern studies have shown that modernity has introduced new constraints in the form of ecological threats, social uncertainty and personal insecurities (p. 2). Habermas (1984) concurs; for him, demythologisation has resulted in decentered and sometimes utopian forms of interpretation: “A complementary error of modernity is the utopianism which thinks it possible to derive the ‘ideal of a completely rational form of life’ directly from the concepts of a decentered world understanding” (p. 73). Habermas (1987) posits that the utopian content of Enlightenment thought gave rise not to an ideal but to a deception. Importantly, as he interprets it, the uncontrolled dynamic of economic growth is associated with this deceptive perspective (p. 329). Adorno and Horkheimer (1944) are of the same mind. For them, differentiation and demythologisation was a relapse into magical thinking, making possible the rise of capitalistic enterprises: “the dissolution of the last remnants of pre-capitalism, together with technological and social differentiation or specialisation” has led to the emergence of the culture industry and the subsequent “deception of the masses” (1944). These points and their relationship to the crafts will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 4. Essentially, Habermas argues that capitalist modernisation has destroyed traditional life-forms or re-interpreted them as something that had never existed, overlooking in the process the need to replace certain qualities with something more meaningful (p. 329). Against the backdrop of capitalism, traditional forms of life – including the life of craftsmen and cottage industry workers – “retained the melancholy charm of irretrievable pasts and the radiance of nostalgic remembrance of what once had been sacrificed to modernisation” (p. 329).

Differentiation is the key evolutionary mechanism that has largely resulted in specialisation, expertism in all areas of life, the dissolution of tradition, the increasing dissociation from nature and humanity’s subsequent mastery of nature (Habermas, 1987, p. 283). Habermas (1984) ascertains that understandings of the world no longer ascribe to the world as a whole, especially

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not “in the sense of a totalising knowledge” (p. 1). What society has in its place is an increasing division of proficiency and knowledge. Understandings about history, science, nature, society, art and even craft have all become separate fields of enquiry. Moreover, within each of these fields further divisions of expertism and knowledge occur. Ultimately, Habermas (1987) understands social evolution as a process in which lifeworld action and systemic influences become increasingly complex and evermore separate from one another. He argues that as the complexity of systemic differentiation increases, the rationality of the lifeworld grows (p. 153).

Thus, remaining traditional concepts are at further risk, suggesting perhaps that understandings of traditional textile hand production are at risk too.

3.10 The interconnections between tradition and early