It stands to reason that there may be in human brain chemistry, outside what is in our minds and in our identified social psychology, cycles of behavior for individuals (if we can even at a certain point persist with an absolute concept of discrete, entirely separate members of our species) and for social groups, including nations.
The word “nation” is interesting in this context. We accept Dunbar’s Number as a reasonable limit for maintained social relationships, but what assumptions is it based on? People often imagine they have relationships with others they have not met, and also imagine the relationships they are actively engaged in are something they are not.
No matter how we try to define the context, the limits of relationship numbers seem to be more political than scientific. Us/Them thinking can encompass vast numbers based on specious identifiers of commonality and difference.
The reason I begin this thinking today is because having reviewed the way history is taught and studied, and how it has been revised in light of new findings across other disciplines including forensic archeology and anthropology, it is obvious that there are recurring cycles of social reorganization which simply occur. With what science has begun to reveal about brain chemistry and what we already knew about stages of mental development, a revision of how we understand historical events seems inevitable.
Other species we observe to have macro-behavioral patterns in their lifecycles. We identify those more readily than we see parallels in our own kind for obvious reasons. Let’s take a stab at this and pose the question again. Outside of all the pronouncements about rhyming and doomed repeat, which make for glibly clever statements in the agora or ale house, what if humans go through similar cycles of impulses and actions generationally, because of underlying brain chemistry?
Short of absolute determinism, there do seem to be broad recurring trends in the history of human social organizations, with the same perennial conflicts and questions in different places at nearly the same times in a cycle.
It is the identifiable similarities at a high level, things an alien anthropologist would easily spot, that have led me to this line of inquiry. Whether it will go much further or prove a mule, however stubborn in my thoughts, but failing to gain interest and offspring, is largely out of my hands now.
How human are these, the very words, our ways of expressing ourselves! At least we have that still, something at last to retain for ourselves heroically, outside of what history and science may eventually reveal to us.
To be continued?
I Dwell In Possibility 