The Historicism of David Deutsch

Elliot Temple
,
1 
    <p>This article is inspired by Brian Moon's article <em>The Poverty of Memes</em> (2025) (read on <a href="https://brianmmoon.medium.com/the-poverty-of-memes-8fece47297d9">Medium</a> or as a <a href="https://perigeantechnologies.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/PovertyofMemes.pdf">PDF</a>). Moon's article criticizes David Deutsch's meme theory (found in <em>The Beginning of Infinity</em> (BoI) (2011)) for being refuted in advance by Karl Popper's critiques in <em>The Poverty of Historicism</em> (PoH) (1944).</p>

Due to Moon's article, I've reviewed PoH and compared it with BoI.

Moon has also criticized Deutsch's meme theory for closely following ideas from Jewish mysticism. That could make Deutsch's claims more mystical or religious and less secular, scientific or rational than Deutsch claimed. It could also make them less original than he presented them as. I don't know enough about Jewish mysticism to evaluate that critique. I thought it was worth mentioning because the same person, Moon, had some good points regarding PoH.

Deutsch's Historicism

BoI 15 (numbers indicate BoI chapters or PoH sections):

I shall call such societies ‘static societies’: societies changing on a timescale unnoticed by the inhabitants.

BoI 1:

But, on the timescale of individual lifetimes, they [our ancestors for most of human history] almost never made any [progress].

BoI 1:

Improvements happened so rarely that most people never experienced one. Ideas were static for long periods.

PoH 33 (my bold):

Contrasting their ‘dynamic’ thinking with the ‘static’ thinking of all previous generations, they [modern historicists] 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.

Deutsch is the type of historicist that Popper criticized. Deutsch talked repeatedly, without citing Popper, about progress being rare enough that it was rare on the timescale of one lifetime, so most people didn't directly experience progress.

The revolution Deutsch thinks we're living in is the "scientific revolution" (BoI introduction, BoI 1) which Deutsch says is "part of a wider intellectual revolution, the Enlightenment" (BoI 1). Deutsch emphasizes that he considers the Enlightenment a revolution: "Thus the Enlightenment was a revolution in how people sought knowledge" (BoI 1).

As to static and dynamic thinking, BoI 15 has "Static Societies" and "Dynamic Societies" as section headings. They're major themes. Deutsch thinks most humans were static thinkers, while he and some other recent thinkers are dynamic thinkers who live in a period of highly accelerated progress due to a revolution.

Deutsch presented these ideas as original. He didn't tell his readers that Popper wrote about static and dynamic societies and about experiencing progress within a single lifetime. I thought those were Deutsch's original ideas and was surprised to find them in PoH (where Popper presents many of the ideas, including the static and dynamic terminology, as restating what historicists have said, not as original). PoH also connects evolution to societies, just as Deutsch's meme theory does.

PoH 22:

Two characteristic representatives of this alliance [between historicism and utopianism] are Plato and Marx. Plato, a pessimist, believed that all change—or almost all change—is decay; this was his law of historical development. Accordingly, his Utopian blueprint aims at arresting all change;[24] it is what would nowadays be called ‘static’. Marx, on the other hand, was an optimist, and possibly (like Spencer) an adherent of a historicist moral theory. Accordingly, his Utopian blueprint was one of a developing or ‘dynamic’ rather than of an arrested society.

Here we see again that Deutsch's static and dynamic society concepts and terminology are unoriginal.

PoH 27:

Professor Toynbee ... expresses ... ‘Civilizations are not static conditions of society but dynamic movements of an evolutionary kind. They not only cannot stand still, but they cannot reverse their direction without breaking down their own law of motion … ‘.[11] Here we have nearly all the elements usually found in statements of position (b) [being able to discern tendencies or directions in evolutionary processes]: the idea of social dynamics (as opposed to social statics); of evolutionary movements of societies (under the influence of social forces);

Here we see talk of static and dynamic conditions of societies and evolution of societies. Keep in mind that whenever Deutsch talks about memes, he's talking about evolution.

It's interesting Deutsch used ideas from PoH that Popper was criticizing, not agreeing with. Deutsch didn't explain why he disagrees with Popper or provide a critique of PoH, though.

Laws of History

PoH Introduction:

This approach which I propose first to explain, and only later to criticize, I call ‘historicism’. It is often encountered in discussions on the method of the social sciences; and it is often used without critical reflection, or even taken for granted. What I mean by ‘historicism’ will be explained at length in this study. It will be enough if I say here that I mean by ‘historicism’ an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the ‘rhythms’ or the ‘patterns’, the ‘laws’ or the ‘trends’ that underlie the evolution of history. Since I am convinced that such historicist doctrines of method are at bottom responsible for the unsatisfactory state of the theoretical social sciences (other than economic theory), my presentation of these doctrines is certainly not unbiased. But I have tried hard to make a case in favour of historicism in order to give point to my subsequent criticism.

In basic summary, the main point of PoH is to criticize the idea of laws of history, which would be like laws of physics which history has to follow. Laws of history would control issues like how societies develop and change or stay the same.

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. 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.

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.

Laws of physics say what must happen with no alternative (gravity isn't optional). "Law" is defined as "a statement of fact, deduced from observation, to the effect that a particular natural or scientific phenomenon always occurs if certain conditions are present" (New Oxford American Dictionary). 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.

Context

I helped Deutsch with BoI by discussing the issues with him for years and writing around 200 pages of comments on drafts. I read PoH many years ago. I failed to recognize how much PoH criticized BoI's ideas. I also failed to recognize that some of Deutsch's ideas and terminology, which I thought were original, were actually in PoH (though often being criticized by Popper, not advocated). Deutsch had completed an article on meme theory in 1994, years before I met him, which wasn't published, but I have it and it makes similar claims to BoI. I played no role in Deutsch originally coming up with his meme theory.

For more details, see Moon's article, read PoH to see Popper's criticisms of historicism, and/or read BoI (especially 1, 15, 16, 17) to see what Deutsch said. PoH is 149 pages long, so it's a short, quick read compared to most of Popper's books.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://curi.us/2602-the-historicism-of-david-deutsch
2

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?

1 Like
3

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?

4

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?

5

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.

6

The DIM hypothesis by Peikoff would be historicism, right?

7

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.

1 Like
8

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.

9

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.

10

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.

1 Like
11

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).

12

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.

13

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.

14

what’s the law of history you think Deutsch is making there?

15

e.g. “static societies always have traditions of bringing up children in ways that disable their creativity and critical faculties” and the other claims about there being only two types of societies with various mandatory properties.

16

i think i’m repeating what people have pointed out above, but what makes that a law of history in the popperian sense rather than a universal mechanism claim about what it takes for a society to remain static?

universal claims about social systems aren’t automatically historicist, right?

17

Not sure I can give a short answer that will satisfy you. Have you read PoH? Moon’s article?

18

i skimmed Moon’s article. PoH i’ve read parts of, but not cover to cover.

point me to the sections you think are most relevant and i’ll look again more carefully. for now i just have a simple question:

what criterion separates Deutsch’s claim from an ordinary universal mechanism claim about a social system?

is the historicist part the universal wording, the social-evolution subject matter, or the claim of a necessary historical trajectory?

19

https://claude.ai/share/bc5adea5-1d15-439e-a194-dca6860dc654

If you want more detail I think you should read the full Moon article.

20

i read moon’s article and his twitter discussion with Deutsch. moon sounds confused to me. can we stick with your own argument and understanding? or do you endorse moon’s criterion for what counts as historicism? i see three different ones being used:

  1. moon uses structural similarity
  2. in your article you quote popper’s definition (which includes principal aim is historical prediction) but then apply the dictionary definition of law instead. those give different verdicts on the BoI passage.
  3. your claude link gives a different reasoning again. do you endorse claude’s reasoning for why the Deutsch quote is historicist?

which one are you going with? you said moon’s article inspired you but you only said he had some good points so do you think his criterion is actually correct?