Implications of History

Implications of Cosmopolitan History for Intellectuals and Others

By John Taylor; 2007 January 05

I am going into Kant's Cosmopolitan History in such depth because I think it is that important.

We have backed into our globalizing post-internationalist world. We are utterly unprepared even to look ahead, much less plan our next step. It is true that I have spent much time in this blog blaming corruption of the political process for this environmental mess, but there is no doubt that most if not all of the blame lies squarely on the backs of intellectuals. They are the ones who have kept our heads resolutely turned backwards from where we are going.

Kant wrote this pamphlet over two centuries ago. In it he called for other scholars to take their courage between their hands and write a "cosmopolitan history" of the entire human race. He was well aware that it would have been impossible to write such a history at that time. The world had been barely explored. But he could not ignore the issue and he wrote an outline, just as he later outlined a world constitution, his Sketch of a Perpetual Peace.

Yet even after the passage of two centuries nobody has taken up his challenge. The closest to a comprehensive history of human beings as agents and stewards of planet Earth is Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel." This book and its lessons on what it takes to survive as a race are far from being taught in every elementary school in the world as they should. The knowledge is there in bulk, but the resolve to refine it is lacking. No cosmopolitan history has been attempted by any historian, much less a body of historians, as the project would demand.

Is it any wonder that we are in such deep doodoo? Meantime, what are historians writing? You tell me. We need a world constitution and what are political scientists studying? You tell me. We need a world language, and what are linguists and literary lights doing? You tell me.

We need a world history, desperately. History teaches how to sacrifice short term profits for long term benefits. It gives us the vision to see beyond what is right before our noses, because we can see how such vision and faith worked out over decades and centuries in the past. So, difficult as such a huge enterprise would surely be, a cosmopolitan history must be undertaken as soon as possible and taught to every pupil in the world.

It is so maddening. Whenever there is lack of resolve, you do not have to scratch hard to find the reason why. Ignorance, especially ignorance of history. Yet the world's historians are inert, mere lazy lumps of fluff. The only ones worse are scientists.

Science magazines focus our attention on trivial gadgets, ephemeral product proposals beloved of their paying sponsors, and in the meantime blithely ignore what really matters. We sit back and think about superficial inventions and allow our water supply to degrade, the north pole to melt, and on and on. There is a beam firmly lodged in our eyes. Let me tell you the most important item in science news last year. It was a study reported a couple of weeks ago in Science News. Somebody did a detailed, eyes open study of the sewer system. What is so important about sewage treatment you ask? Well, if you have to ask, that is what I am talking about, total ignorance of history. It is like those bleary eyed charity campaigns for breast cancer when rectal cancer kills far more people, but what self-inflating ego is going to stand up for rectal cancer? Or sit down? Or whatever? Same thing with the sewer system. The water table is slowly degrading but this is still not something we want to talk about.

What they found was that if you separate out urine from solid sewage it cuts down the processing time from almost two weeks to a couple of days. They even invented toilets with two holes designed to enable this separation, one hole takes urine and the other the rest. These new toilets are available to buy, even though virtually everywhere the sewage disposal system is not designed to accommodate this separation. That is, the urine is separated out by Toilet 2.0 and then later on it is recombined with the solids. End result, no advantage. That is always the result without what Bucky called Comprehensive Design Science.

But the ironic thing that the study found out is that urine is valuable. It turns out that urine is high energy stuff, which is exactly why it slows down the processing of sewage. That is a good thing. Urine has many industrial uses. Even back in Roman times urine was valuable, used in washing and processing of textiles. As the ruins at Pompeii have shown, citizens walking by textile factories were encouraged to stop and take a piss. Take a walk through any modern city and try to find a place to do that. And when you do, it is wasted, sent to a processing facility where it screws up the works and makes it all much more expensive to deal with. Let us not forget that the Roman Empire lasted almost a thousand years; our Adolph Nobody world disorder has barely lasted two centuries.

Oh, did I say the scientists are the worst? No, the worst are those apparatchiks of capitalism, businesspersons. These nomenclatura of nihilism go on and on about quality, initiative and profit potential but when it comes to opportunities like this to make a profit while helping the environment all you hear is deafening silence. I can hear Scrooge saying to Marley, "But you were a good man of business." And Marley replying, "My business was mankind." Sit down for the environment, or stand up, it does not matter, because mankind is Adolph Nobody's business.

If we had planning, order would be possible. Both science and religion, ideally, are nothing but planned faith and knowledge. If we are going to plan well be must understand where we have been. We need all need to learn a common cosmological history in early childhood to know what it means to be a human being. This will be impossible as long as no common history has been written, much less made available as the heritage of all. Until this history is researched and written all that we will have to educate us about our common humanity will be corrupt propaganda, perverse ideologies, and competing nullities, prejudices and superstitions.