There have been places and periods of history,
when only a congenital optimist
could have had any hope for the future of our species.
Think of the end of Athens' golden age,
the fall of the Roman Empire,
the petering out of the Renaissance,
the end of the Enlightenment,
the rise of fascism.
It's when things look bleak indeed,
that it pays to remember the German 19th century philosopher,
Hegel.
In his lectures on the philosophy of world history,
published in 1830,
Hegel offered us a way of looking
at the darker periods of history,
that neither glosses over their pain
nor, refuses to give up hope
but intellegently helps us to understand
why Human progress cannot be linear,
while encouraging us to trust
that it does occur, nevertheless.
For Hegel, history moves forward
in what he termed a "Dialectical way".
A dialectic is a philosophical term
for an argument made up of three parts.
A thesis, an antithesis and a synthesis.
Both the thesis and the antithesis
countain parts of the truth
but they are also exaggerations and distortions
of the whole.
And so, need to clash and interract until
the best elements find resolution
in a synthesis.
One cannot, in short, get there in one leap.
Hegel thought this pattern constantly observable
in History.
The world makes progress
by lurching from one extreme to another,
as it seeks to overcompensate for previous mistake.
And generally requires three moves
before the right balance on any issue can be found.
So, for example, the ancient Athenians discovered
the idea of individual liberty.
But their regime was blind to the need
for collective discipline and organisation.
The ancient Persians knew all about that
and were thereby able to conquer the Athenians
on the battlefield.
Yet, they were also despotic enemies of free thought
which with time, became its own liability.
It took many centuries for the correct synthesis
between liberty and discipline, to be worked out
in the form of the Roman Empire.
In Hegel's own era, the stifling, unfair,
18th century system of inheritage,
traditionnal monarchy, had been abolished
by the French Revolution.
But, what should've been a peaceful birth
of representative government
ended up in the anarchy and chaos of the Terror.
This, in turn, led to the emergence of Napoleon,
who restaured order, but became a military brute,
trampling on the liberty he had professed to love.
Only after 40 years and much bloodshed,
did the modern balance, Constitution, emerge.
An arrangement which more sensibly balanced up
popular representation, with the rights of minorities.
Or, to take another example, the European Enlightenment
had stressed the importance of reason,
but it had in many parts been sterile and reductive.
The movement known as 'Romanticism'
had then swept in to assert the importance of emotion.
But this had carried excesses of its own.
Only eventually had a correct reconciliation
been worked out between the legitimate,
competing needs of reason
and emotion.
Hegel argument has a highly reassuring feel
at moments when it seems
that one kind of progress has been entirely lost.
He's on hand to reassure us that we're merely seeing
the pendulum swing back for a time.
But also wisely council that this was needed,
because the initial move forward had been blind
to a range of crucial insights.
All sides on a matter will contain important truths,
lodged amidst exaggerations and bombast.
Yet, these truths will eventually be sifted out
through the wisdom of time.
Hegel reminds us that big overreactions are
eminently compatible with events broadly moving
forward, in the right direction.
The dark moments aren't the end.
They are a challenging, but even in some ways
necessary parts of an antithesis,
that will, eventually,
find a wiser point of synthesis.