YUVAL NOAH HARARI, SERGUÉI LAVROV AND KARL POPPER ("THE MISERY OF HISTORICISM" (II))

#YUVALNOAHHARARI AND #KARLPOPPER ("THE #MISERYOFHISTORICISM" (I)) https://t.co/SraR6ONOlw

Has Yuval Noah Harari refuted Popper?

If "nobody can predict the future course of human history", how can anybody pretend to decide the course and direction of human history? pic.twitter.com/mRJUSREVDh

— Guillermo Ruiz Zapatero (@ruiz_zapatero) September 24, 2024

Attempt to defeat #Russia #a ‘#suicidalescapade’, #Lavrov warns #Ukraine and the #West https://t.co/jQY5HTmcPo

Hope of defeating Russia on the battlefield is senseless given that Moscow holds nuclear weapons and any effort by the NATO to keep aiding Kyiv will prove to be

— Guillermo Ruiz Zapatero (@ruiz_zapatero) September 29, 2024

 

 

CONCLUSION. THE EMOTIONAL APPEAL OF HISTORICISM

Every version of historicism expresses the feeling of being swept into the future by 

irresistible forces. 

Modern historicists, however, seem to be unaware of the antiquity of their doctrine. 

They believe — and what else could their deification of modernism permit? — that their

own brand of historicism is the latest and boldest achievement of the human mind, an 
achievement so staggeringly novel that only a few people are sufficiently advanced to grasp it.

They believe, indeed, that it is they who have discovered the problem of change — one of the 

oldest problems of speculative metaphysics. Contrasting their ‘dynamic’ thinking with the 

‘static’ thinking of all previous generations, they believe that their own advance has been 

made possible by the fact that we are now ‘living in a revolution’ which has so much accelerated the speed of 

our development that social change can be now directly experienced within a single lifetime. 

This story is, of course, sheer mythology. Important revolutions have occurred before our time,

and since the days of Heraclitus change has been discovered over and over again.* 

To present so venerable an idea as bold and revolutionary is, I think, to betray an 

unconscious conservatism; and we who contemplate this great enthusiasm for change may

well wonder whether it is not only one side of an ambivalent attitude, and whether there was 
not some inner resistance, equally great, to be overcome. If so, this would explain 

the religious fervour, with which this antique and tottering philosophy is proclaimed the 

latest and thus the greatest revelation of science. May it not, after all, be the historicists who 
are afraid of change? And is it not, perhaps, this fear of change which makes them so 

utterly incapable of reacting rationally to criticism, and which makes others so responsive

to their teaching? It almost looks as if historicists were trying to compensate themselves 

for the loss of an unchanging world by clinging to the faith that change can be foreseen 

because it is ruled by an unchanging law.