The Folly of Writing History without a Cognitive Dimension

Abstract

Oesterdiekhoff believes that there is a largely neglected root cause in the transition to modernity: the rise of science and its causal role has elevated some 30 to 50 per cent of adults in advanced societies to Level B of formal operations. This level refers to Piaget's terminology. It involves breaking free of the concrete world of things and moving into a world of ideas, symbols, abstractions, the hypothetical, and using logic and evidence to systematize these, as a general strategy rather than as something limited to a particular area (perhaps required by the tasks of a modern job).It is only when this root cause is articulated that we can make sense of the dynamics of five developments in the modern world.This rise of science, particularly as applied to physics and chemistry, promoted the industrial revolution, and I would add all of its attendant effects, such as more cognitively demanding work roles, mass education, smaller families, modern parenting, and more cognitively demanding leisure. It also engendered the enlightenment in which a secular view of the world banished witches and the demonization of heretics. It also led to respect for the rights of the individual, which underlie democracy and humanism, or the notion that all humanity should enter the circle of moral concern, something that made the elevation of some to aristocratic privilege and the dehumanization of others through slavery untenable. In other words, cognitive progress was accompanied by political and moral progress, so that the rule of law and diminished violence became the foundations of modern society, the documentation of which Oesterdiekhoffrightly attributes to Stephen Pinker (2011).I see no serious defect in this framework of analysis. Those familiar with my work know that it had a single objective: to use cognitive progress to illuminate the history of modernized peoples in the 20th century. They will also know that I stumbled on this mission by trying to interpret the so-called Flynn effect, that is, the dramatic increase in IQ performance in developed states ever since IQ tests were invented. I have hitherto emphasized industrialization as the ultimate cause of IQ gains over time, its spinoffs such as mass education as the intermediate causes, and the altered minds of the people taking the tests as the proximate cause.I have followed Oesterdiekhoffby singling out altered minds as the neglected key concept. The crux of the cognitive history of the 20th century was the moment when we freed our minds from the concrete world with its utilitarian spectacles and donned scientific spectacles. We began to classify the world using abstractions, take the hypothetical seriously as a realm of logical analysis, see relationships between symbols that transcend the literal identity of the symbols, and generalize moral principles rather than treating them as given objects. This last is a recent development, that is, only recently have I analyzed cognitive progress and moral progress as mutually reinforcing tendencies in the 20th century - see Flynn, Intelligence and human progress: The story of what was hidden in our genes (2013). Roughly Oesterdiekhoff's five developments fall into primarily conceptual developments (science and industrial invention) or moral developments (democracy and humanism) with the enlightenment (secularization) as a bridge.His analysis can be summed up in a phrase: modernity has produced a man. No totalitarian regime created a man, but without fanfare impersonal social forces have begun the task. The new man of our day has a mind and character radically different from the mass of men in 1900. My contribution has been to show that the evolution of the mind and ethics of the new man was by no means complete in 1900. This despite the fact that Britain had enjoyed a century of progress, marked by the retirement of James Watt in 1800 (the year during which his steam engine began to revolutionize production), with Continental Europe following suit soon after, and America industrializing in earnest after the Civil War. …