The Arrow of History: Four Questions
In my discourse, the arrow of history is not a ready-made answer, but a tuple of four questions about history.
- Does history have a direction?
- If it has a direction, where does it lead?
- How can movement in this direction be measured?
- What guarantees this movement: what is the mechanism, what pushes history in this direction?
The short answer is this: history moves toward a state in which humanity becomes braver and smarter.
How To Measure The Movement Of History
We need a measurable parameter. Which one?
A System Of Examinations
The idea is this: the movement of history can be measured through a system of examinations.
Society presents tasks to a person. A person may refuse to enter these tasks at all, may enter and fail, or may enter and succeed. If tasks are ordered by difficulty, then a measurable scale appears.
To come to the examination, intellectual courage is needed. To pass the examination, intellectual power is needed.
If the rank of a society rises, this means that, overall, the intellectual courage and intellectual power of its ruling class rise.
But to build a correct system of examinations, we still need to introduce several more concepts.
For now, therefore, we fix only the principle: history is measured not by dates, not by the names of rulers, and not by the number of events, but by the complexity of the tasks by which the ruling class, the elite, is selected.