Social and Cultural Dynamics by Pitirim Sorokin

Author:Pitirim Sorokin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sociology, psychology, history

580 B.C.—a.d. 100

678

212

100-540

239

557

540-1500

73

519

1500-1920

1302

1339

Total

2292

2627

Again it is worthy of mention that in spite of a long course of time

— 2 500 years — and in spite of the fact that the indices are made regardless of their possible quantitative balance, this balance is there, and all in all is rather surprisingly close. For each short period, or even for the longer periods given in the above figures, there is a considerable quantitative difference in the strength of the rival currents; but for the total period, or even for the period of the last 420 years, they fairly closely balance each other. In the light of this, the “ ever-recurrent ” foolish assurances that one of the currents would disappear forever becomes particularly childish as a scientific statement.

So far as the highs and lows of each of the currents in Figure 15 are concerned, the most conspicuous periods in these respects are as follows.

The period from 540 to 380 b.c. is that of the domination of a kind of Mixed form represented by a belief in Destiny, God, Fatum, Moipa, and eifxap fxepri, the Pythagorean belief in the mystic, quantitative relationship between phenomena, etc. In a sense, it is a kind of determinism, but a determinism very different from the purely mechanical determinism of the later period. No less can it be styled indeterminism, because the determination here is near to “ God’s will,” or logos, inde-terministic in its nature. The period is a mixture of both, so typical of the Idealistic culture. A similar situation was met before in the systems of Truth and of Idealism-Materialism. The real blossoming of determinism in Greece and Rome is the period beginning with the second half of the fourth century B.C. and ending with the first century a.d., with its climaxes in the fourth century B.C. and the first century a.d. Since the second century a.d. it has rapidly declined and after the sixth century it becomes “unnoticeable.”

Now comes the turn of the domination of indeterminism. It becomes monopolistic from the sixth to the thirteenth century. In the thirteenth century (note again, the century of the Idealistic culture), determinism reappears and rapidly grows, reaching a climax in the sixteenth century; then it recedes slightly in the seventeenth and resumes its rise in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

During the last four centuries both streams have been almost equal in their strength.

The next point to be mentioned is that when the Graeco-Roman culture split into the Pagan and the Christian streams — approximately from a.d. 100 to the sixth century when the Christian stream absorbed the Pagan — the Pagan as well as the Christian philosophical thought had in this (as well as in other respects considered above) practically the same course of direction. We find the Pagan as well as Christian thinkers split between these two currents; in both groups, after the second century, appeared almost simultaneously the trend of reinforcement of indeterminism, and after the third century a rapid weakening of determinism. Thus, the “turn

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