Culture is a Natural Product

One ought to be blind not to see that the cultural achievements of Stone Age man have been preserved to the peoples until the present day…hammers, chisel, saw, awl and needle, cloth and pottery, bow and arrow, and daggers and sword, all that lives today as in those days and awaits being replaced by better ones. … But it is not only the technical achievements of the prehistoric man which persist in all cultures, it is also the spiritual and ethical sentiments, provided that we can assume them in the earliest

times. The age-old custom of human sacrifice is retained in all cultures, but in an always more spiritualized form. (Exner, 1923, p. 141)

Although material tools played an important role, throughout From Chaos to the Present Exner – in contrast to Mach’s thought experiment (Sect. 3.9.) – put main emphasis on spiritual content, on the scientific and cultural ideas, and on the social and ethical development. They reveal a continuous – but not deterministic – progress while the life of the individual cultural organisms is full of ruptures and discontinuities. This difference resembled the distinction between the microcosmic level where discontinuous and random changes occur like molecular collisions in a gas and the macrocosmic level where certain weak regularities emerge and admit reasonable predictions. Also for Exner historical predictions were possible.

By the same necessity [as the quality of a semen determines the fruit] our present state results from all previous events, and who is ignorant of this connection or even denies it, is at loss when confronting the future; for only one who has recognized how something has come into existence can justly foresee the further development. (Ibid., p. 277)

But all historical predictions yield only average values and tendencies to equilibrium which, in stark contrast to Spengler’s fatalist determinism, admit manifold exceptions.

Yet, to apply his indeterminist theory and to compare cultural units with microparticles, Exner needed a further hypothesis to exclude any historical teleology that could counteract, positively or negatively, the tendency to equilibrium. Here physicalism came in.

Only where very catastrophic events – be they of physical or political kind – occur, what has been achieved already long before could go to ruins, as has, for instance, been caused to the old cultures of Central America by the brutal invasion of the Spaniards. But this is a highly singular case that can be explained by all kinds of circumstances; usually even the greatest political events, such as the marches of Alexander the Great, may well create or destroy empires but not cultures. In the cultural life of a people, political circumstances generally play a minor role; culture is a natural product with its own laws of growth which are not affected by political deeds to any considerable extent. What brings about culture is in first place the spiritual inducement [geistige Veranlassung] of the people and no less the external physical influences, the properties of the soil, the conditions of rain and irrigation in the country. (Ibid., p. 397)

Combining physicalism and indeterminism, Exner was able to maintain simultaneously the idea of cultural and scientific progress of mankind and a theory of the single culture’s life that in some of its consequences was not all too different from Spengler’s. This can be seen from a drawing in the Conclusion of From Chaos to the Present (figure 4). Exner emphasized that the “heights which are to illustrate the respective state of the cultures are entirely arbitrary; for who could numerically compare the heights of different cultures… . One immediately realizes that the four older cultures have undergone a much slower development than all subsequent ones, a fact which, of course, was caused by the relative secludedness of these countries in earlier times.” (Ibid., p. 434) This observation provides the clue to two very general weak regularities that can be discerned in Exner’s manuscript and that are often called

“laws”.

Fig. 4. The succession of different cultures. The letters denote Babylonian (B), Egyptian (Ae), Chinese (Ch), Indian (I), Greek (G), Assyrian (A), old Persian (P), Roman (R), East Roman

(Ro), Arab (Ar), and European (Eu) culture.

First, the life of a single culture is the shorter the higher its cultural level has become.

“It is comprehensible that in the course of progress random external influences attain more and more weight and bring a more rapid pace into the development. The very same we had seen with respect to the geological epochs, to wit, the higher organisms stand, the quicker are they subjected to changes into more purposive [zweckmäßigere]

forms, and the same may well hold true for cultural evolution too.” (Ibid., p. 119) As Exner identified the more purposive states in biological evolution with the more probable ones, this meant that the higher a culture had become the more rapidly external influences changed the most probable state.

Second, an increase of interactions between various sectors of a single culture and, in particular, between different cultures accelerates the evolution in the same sense as an increase in molecular collision rate, that is, a higher temperature, leads to the equilibrium state more rapidly. Exner’s unswerving physicalism makes it tempting to compare (morphologically) the above figure to a probabilistic distribution function familiar from statistical mechanics, for instance, the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution for the velocity of molecules in a gas (figure 5). Perhaps figure 4 then could be seen to measure the new scientific and cultural ideas contributed by the culture at a certain stage of its development. Within such a setting the cultural world might be viewed as a permanent interaction of different national cultures, and these in turn as the interaction of certain sub-cultures within them, such as science, arts, or economy, all of which are represented by a distribution function whose multiplication yields the overall distribution function. Perhaps these remarks exaggerate what for Exner – who had explicitly denied the measurability of culture – only represented an analogy. Yet they provide an interesting illustration of how his theory of culture perfectly availed itself of the micro-macro distinction of statistical mechanics.

Fig. 5. The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution

Still, the main problem of the probabilistic approach remained to define a measure of order and disorder. Thus in the concrete applications of Exner’s probabilistic laws the specter of tautology is lurking; in particular, when we reach our own cultural sphere, traditional value judgments step in as an allegedly physicalist measure.

The effect of this law [that the higher development yields the faster progress] was substantially supported by the favorable situation and arrangement of the Mediterranean area, a circumstance which in the history of the world was never offered to mankind. In a most favorable climatic position, equally far from the frosty pole and the overly hot equator the adjacent peoples bore in themselves the germs of cultural development, and the extended coastline and the numerous large and small islands in-between offered the most favorable opportunity for navigation and thus for trade, for the intimate contact among the peoples, and for the foundation of colonies in remote countries. (1923, p. 217)

Exner’s introduction to the first millennium BC comes rather close to arguments familiar from natural teleology. The boundary conditions are so suitably arranged that interaction and progress follow with bare necessity and without any statistical fluctuations. Here Exner’s interaction law simply degenerates into an idle tautology.

Yet this caveat against the nomological value of the interaction principle shall not lessen its importance as an antidote against Spengler’s segregation of the independent cultural organisms. Moreover, Exner’s detailed comparison of the interacting Mediterranean cultures with the isolated cultures of India and China is quite suggestive.

Taken in this weaker form as an empirical fact, interaction was a necessary condition for Exner’s main thesis about continuous progress in cultural history because it enables other peoples to take over and adopt the intellectual and scientific achievements of decaying peoples and extinct tribes. For instance, the most important deed of Alexander the Great was the planned dissemination of Greek culture in Asia, an impact that lasted much longer than Greek statehood. European culture stands at the end of the tendency of increased interaction among cultures because owing to its technological superiority it is about to become a global culture. Once again, we see that indeterminism and physicalism do not safeguard against writing justificationist history.

The emergence of the objective worldview was intimately linked with the circumstance that religion develops into ethics, which accordingly constitutes the common root of religion, art, and science. “What is basic to all of them, what constitutes their root is the ethos. With its awakening also culture begins, and this can

ethical principles.” (Ibid., p. 159) Philosophical ethos emerges from religion in various ways. “One will expect each religion to originate from the belief in a deity [as a primitive explanation of natural phenomena], but in Buddhism the old Gods of the Brahman religion have been dethroned and replaced by the principle of causality which solely rules the world.” (Ibid., p. 292) But this important intellectual achievement of India was short-lived. Buddhist philosophical ethics was too complex, so that the Indian people soon returned to the old Gods. But this relapse was less harmful than it appears. “[T]he cultural effect of the religions does not lie in their How, but in the first established ethical principles for life, and according to nature these are quite the same in all religions.” (Ibid., p. 380) Despite their progressive ethical content, all religions are in danger of ossifying into mere dogmatism.

Exner’s distinction between macrocosm and microcosm and the two laws also found their expression in biological terms. “The most general law of nature which is valid for all vegetable and animal life … reads: Nature does nothing for the individual, but everything for the genus. The individuals do not enjoy the protection of Nature, as long as the genus only is preserved.” (Ibid., p. 157) In cultivated nations this law of primitive society might seem suspended, but in reality it constitutes precisely the basis of their instability. “If higher culture truly has originated in the esteem for the intellectual characteristics of individuals, if thus a people brings the individual in a certain opposition to the genus, then it acts against the general law of the organic and accelerates its decline.” (Ibid., p. 158) In the struggle for existence between cultivated and uncultivated peoples as well as between educated and uneducated men, the latter

“will always have the advantage, his acts are solely determined by the goal to be reached, not by the means leading to it, the educated one will find on his way everywhere inhibitions of ethical nature which prevent him to seize the most effective means.” (Ibid., p. 206) Thus, uncultivated tribes without individual differentiation – a highly improbable state, as Exner had remarked back in 1908 – can be united under a common goal while the distribution of individual characteristics represent a stable equilibrium state that cannot be changed so easily.⁹⁶

After all, culture appears to be identical with the possession of ideas, in the single human as well as in the people; after them man aspires when philosophizing about religion, in artistic work, or finally when seeking the truth in science. In this sense one can say: ideals are the only thing that truly exists.

(Ibid., p. 159)

Agreeing mainly with Spengler that all fine arts, except for music, have reached the stage of exhaustion and degenerate into decorative or formalistic exercises, Exner emphatically exempted science from the overall decline. The age of science was not over at all but full of steady progress.

Although for most of the arts these days [of growth] seem to be already over, this is certainly not so for the sciences, and even less so because the highly developed technology equips the scientist with ever new means. The experiences of the past two centuries show that each science generates other sciences in its wake, and before our eyes the fields extend almost to infinity out of which always new ones sprout and which for interminable times promises rewarding work for the searching mind. (Ibid., p. 431)

96 Needless to say, a decade after Exner’s death some of the most cultivated nations of Europe had been united under a fascist leader’s will with devastating consequences for their interactions.