This article is inspired by Brian Moon's article The Poverty of Memes (2025) (read on Medium or as a PDF). Moon's article criticizes David Deutsch's meme theory (found in The Beginning of Infinity (BoI) (2011)) for being refuted in advance by Karl Popper's critiques in The Poverty of Historicism (PoH) (1944).
BoI 15:
For a society to be static, something else must be happening as well. One thing my story did not take into account is that static societies have customs and laws – taboos – that prevent their memes from changing. They enforce the enactment of the existing memes, forbid the enactment of variants, and suppress criticism of the status quo.
Deutsch says all static societies enforce taboos, customs and laws, make members enact memes without variation, and suppress criticism of the status quo.
I agree Deutsch says that.
And Deutsch claims there are only two possible types of society, with static societies being the much more common type in human history, so he’s making claims here about most human societies that have ever existed. This is talking about laws of history that most societies have to follow. It’s historicism.
Here I think I’m missing something. The claim that there are only two possible types of society isn’t a claim about laws of history, is it? Couldn’t there be non-historical reasons for why there are e.g only two possible types of society?
BoI 15 (my bold):
That is why the enforcement of the status quo is only ever a secondary method of preventing change – a mopping-up operation. The primary method is always – and can only be – to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society are never thought of in the first place.
This is another law of history: a grand speculation about what most humans have done throughout history along with claims that history couldn’t happen any other way. Deutsch says “always” and “can only be” – he emphasizes that he’s saying no alternatives are possible.
If we have a theory that something can only for whatever reason happen one way, then doesn’t it make sense to say that in history every time this has happened it’s been that way? Like if knowledge can only be created the way Popper says, doesn’t it make sense to say that all knowledge ever created in history was created that one way, claims of scientists and other philosophers to the contrary notwithstanding?
Deutsch is saying the same things always occur in human societies if certain conditions are present (the conditions are a static society, not a dynamic society). This is an example of what Popper criticized as historicism.
Is a theory about societies different in some way that I don’t understand than a theory about e.g geology?
That humans have free will I would guess. So just because some conditions about a society are met doesn’t mean the historical outcome is predictable like how laws of geology allow you to predict outcomes given some conditions.
I haven’t read PoH.
The DIM hypothesis by Peikoff would be historicism, right?
I read the first chapter of PoH. I’ll say that I do agree with many of the points of anti-naturalistic historicism. I would guess Popper agrees with some of the points too and that he’s just giving a complete representation of the ideas.
I think that the humanities can’t isolate variables and experiment the same way the sciences can. I think it’s correct that predictions about social theories can affect the societies and therefore invalidate the test.
I do believe you can understand the causes and meanings of social events. Like understanding why a war happened or for example why a culture is really polite, safe, trusting and second-handed. Yet this seems to suggest that you could use this knowledge to predict future social events, and then in principle there should be no reason you couldn’t connect them in a domino fashion and predict the whole course of history, something which I think is impossible due to the nature of knowledge. Perhaps the difference is that when we look back the knowledge creation has become a concrete fact, and so we can use the already created knowledge to analyze the social event. Whereas when looking into the future the knowledge that is yet to be created is an unknowable variable which stops us from filling in all the relevant details. I think you could make partial predictions while assuming some variables will stay the same, like you could say that if a society strongly believes in altruism it’s likely to eventually drift towards full socialism. I think there’s something in that kind of analysis, while I also see how for example new, and thus unpredictable, political ideologies could be created that would keep the society more capitalistic.
Thinking about keeping variables the same in science made me think of debugging in programming. You also want keep the variables the same as when the bug happened, i.e., reproduce the state it was in. Then you want to inspect various effects and values of the program, like you do in science experiments. You might also want to change a couple of the variables while keeping the rest the same to see how that effects the system. When you can’t reproduce the state of the program due to outside factors, it’s a lot harder to debug, just like how experiments are hard in humanities.
Yeah, I was thinking something similar. Also, the article doesn’t show Deutsch is historicist in the Popper sense because it didn’t show Deutsch’s primary aim is historic prediction/ prophecy. Deutsch constantly writes about the future being unknowable because of the unpredictability of knowledge growth.
If you have a critique of my article, say it directly and explain/argue it, instead of briefly directing negativity towards me (without enough details to properly counter-argue) in passing in response to someone else.
Also, if Marx’s primary aim was something other than historicism, e.g. to make claims about economic theory, then he couldn’t be a historicist? I don’t know where you’re getting your interpretation of Popper and you didn’t give quotes or details, unlike my article or Moon’s.
I thought about tagging you or directly addressing you in my post, but decided against it. I don’t remember exactly why.. I think because I didn’t want to come across as pressuring you to respond. I’m still learning forum etiquette. If a few of us forum members met up in person and stood in a circle, me criticizing your article to the other members and not addressing you directly would be rude. But, the forum is a different dynamic. I wasn’t sure whether to tag you r not. I disagree with you framing my criticism as directed negativity though.
Yeah, scratch that. That wasn’t what I meant, but my choice of wording was poor. Understandable criticism.
When I read The Poverty of Historicism and The Open Society and Its Enemies, the vibe I got from Popper was, Marx was a historicist because he was doing prophecy (at least that was one of the main reasons he was a historicist). He would see patterns in history and then claim to know the inevitable future based off of those patterns (laws of history).
Deutsch made some bold claims about static societies (though that could be good if it opens the claims up to criticism), but he doesn’t treat history as governed by a predictable, necessary trajectory. In fact, Deutsch constantly speaks against doing prophecy.
But as I quote BoI in the article (bold added):
That is why the enforcement of the status quo is only ever a secondary method of preventing change – a mopping-up operation. The primary method is always – and can only be – to disable the source of new ideas, namely human creativity. So static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties. That ensures that most of the new ideas that would have been capable of changing the society are never thought of in the first place.
This looks to me like claims about laws of history or laws of the evolution of societies or something along those lines. He’s making claims about the necessary trajectories of societies. I think it’s prophecy in a relevant sense to Popper’s critiques.
Also, Deutsch presents himself and his books as Popperian. So he ought to have written something about this instead of ignoring some of Popper’s arguments (while also using others, on this very topic, without citations).
This is a strong claim, but he could be right? I don’t see anything inherently wrong with making this kind of conjecture about society. Maybe he couldn’t think of an example of a static society that enables human creativity. I tried brain storming some examples, including an open, rational society that gets stranded on an island with little resources or gets hit by a meteor, but none refuted Deutsch’s claim. If this is Historicism, I guess I don’t see a problem with historicism then?..
Thinking about your article where you use Astrology as an example of gauging how humble one should be on a topic. I’ve read some Marx but I’m not sure how far he’d go in trying to make predictions about the future. But, I trust Popper did his due diligence, and Popper paints him as a doing historicism. I’m conflicted…
In recent interviews, it seems like any time people ask Deutsch to do prophesy, he is completely against it. I feel like if you asked Deutsch to predict the future of a static society, he wouldn’t because of the unpredictability of knowledge growth. And I think there’s am important difference between that answer and someone trying to predict the future of a society based on laws of history.
Popper published a book arguing against this, which Deutsch read and (as best I know) liked, and then Deutsch presented himself and his book as Popperian. If Deutsch thinks Popper is wrong about a major theme of one of Popper’s books, I think he ought to say something instead of contradicting and ignoring Popper (without explanation or acknowledgment of what he’s doing) in one part of his book while praising and building on Popper in other parts. An argument Popper is wrong about historicism would actually have value and be worth publishing (though I’m not convinced Deutsch actually thought of one).
I think a lot of Deutsch’s readers would be rightly surprised to find out the actual situation. I think that’s bad and Deutsch shouldn’t have misled them.
I haven’t read a significant amount of Marx. Reisman also wrote negatively about Marx. Marx doesn’t seem very promising to me but I’m less confident about that than I used to be.