Can We Test the Cultural Complexification Hypothesis?
My Project to Get Quantifiable Data on the Axial Age Revolution and Beyond
Social theorists from philosopher Jürgen Habermas to anthropologist C. R. Hallpike to historians Charles M. Radding and Michael Horace Barnes to sociologists Gunter Dux and Georg W. Oesterdiekhoff to metatheorists Ken Wilber and Hanzi Freinacht (to name just a few) have all posited a deep structural parallel between sociocultural development broadly speaking and the sort of psychological development individual people undergo as described by Jean Piaget (and his tradition). Indeed, Piaget assumed some form of this hypothesis himself (expressed in works like Psychogenesis and the History of Science, for instance).
Fine, you may say. But—is it true?
Well, that’s a hard thing to prove. On the one hand, crude similarities between Piaget’s ontogenetic psychological stages and collective cultural thought easily suggest themselves. At the same time, though, humans are pattern-seeking animals, highly suggestible, and highly susceptible to false comparisons and mappings. How do we know we’re seeing something real and not just imposing our pre-given interpretations onto reality?
That’s where SCIENCE comes in. <flashes of light>
Ideally, if we can move our subjective hunches and intuitions beyond mere suggestion and speculation and into the domain of quantification, measurement, hypothesis-testing, and analysis, we’ll be in a much better position to assess how valid our suppositions about reality really are.
For a long time, people who looked at a map of the world could see that the contours of South America and Africa appeared to line up—almost as though they had once been connected…
Such ideas were, however, roundly ridiculed by academics and pedagogues as mere peruile speculation and hyper-imagination—until, that is, the theory of plate tectonics gained enough evidentiary support to lend this intuition scientific credibility. Today, what was once ridiculed as pattern-seeking fancy is taught as established science in every classroom the world over.
To get there, though, the apparent pattern had to be buttressed by measurable (i.e., quantifiable) evidence and subjected to analytical scrutiny.
So, the big question before us is: Can we do the same with the hypothesis that collective cultural development has made gains along the same continuum as we see individuals accomplishing in psychological development?
Lectica is a non-profit organization that has developed a computerized scoring tool, the Computerized Lectical Assessment System (CLAS), which uses AI calibrated according to a vast dataset to assess the hierarchical complexity of texts. You can read a bit about it HERE. In short, input a text into CLAS and it will tell you, with impressive precision, where it ranks in terms of developmental complexity.
Those familiar with metamodern sociologist Hanzi Freinacht’s use of the Model of Hierarchical Complexity will have a sense of the scale employed, since it’s the same neo-Piagetian developmental thermometer. Using automated technology, CLAS produces scores that agree with human ratings of this hierarchical complexity metric within one-fifth of a complexity order at least 85% of the time! Because it is computerized, though, CLAS offers a powerful tool for scoring large numbers of texts in an economical manner: precisely what you’d want if you wished to test the sort of hypothesis mentioned above using the literary output of millennia’s worth of cultural production.
That is more or less the research program I will be conducting.
If the above-mentioned hypothesis holds, we should expect to see a general uptick in hierarchical complexity from pre-Axial to Axial to post-Axial materials—not merely in some intuitive, subjective way, but in actual numerical scorings. That is, we could actually, for the first time, quantify the apparent trend towards increasing conceptual complexity across broad swathes of cultural history.
A project as expansive as this, however, must unfold in stages. The first phase, then, will test for this this trend in one important and highly influential example of supposed Axial Age development: the Bible.
Now, the Torah/Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible) has long been understood by scholars to be the editorial product of multiple source texts (commonly refered to as J, E, D, and P) which were written over the course of the entire first millennium BCE and only later compiled by a redactor into a single text. Could each source, written across the Axial Age transformation, provide evidence of a trend towards greater complexity?
My first experiment in this research project will be to isolate each strand of the Pentateuch and subject it to a CLAS hierarchical complexity assessment. Will the historical sequence of the sources map to a developmental sequence (e.g., increasing complexity)? That will be the first test for the hypothesis.
This study by itself has wide-ranging implications for biblical studies and source criticism. For us, though, it is only the beginning.
—If, that is, we can fund this research program…
CLAS scoring isn’t cheap. Assessing the hierarchical complexity of just the Pentateuch material will cost a few thousand dollars, all said and done. Eventually, I hope to secure some form of grant funding as the project ramps up. But, for now, it can only get off the ground with support from intellectually curious donors keen to see what the data themselves reveal.
Interested?
I’ve just set up a GoFundMe page to raise the money needed for Phase I of the project. If contributing to the advancement of these ideas is important to you, if helping them move out of mere theoretical speculation and into actual empirical validation is something you’d like to see happen, please consider making a donation to the research fund:
This project is the first major research initiative of Sky Meadow Institute, whose goal is to “bring a complexity lens to the things that matter most.” In this case, that means literally subjecting sacred texts to a complexity analysis! In the broader scheme of things, though, it entails integrating the insights from such studies into a bigger picture appreciation of cultural complexification as part-and-parcel of broader systemic complexification patterns operating in Nature.
I am incredibly excited by this research initiative. Optimistically and ambitiously put, it could entail nothing less than the culmination of Piaget’s grand effort to interpret sociocultural transformations through the lens of genetic epistemology—a project carried forward by the various thinkers mentioned above in numerous ways, yet never into the realm of quantitative analysis—
Until now.
Please, consider donating to the GoFundMe and be a part of this potentially historic initiative.
Cheers
Sounds like a cool project. You may already know about the Seshat project - https://seshatdatabank.info/ - which was started by Peter Turchin, Harvey Whitehouse, and Peter Francois in 2011 to collect a bunch of historical variables to study questions such as the one you pose about the Axial age.
They published an interesting paper that may be of interest on the subject. Mullins, Daniel Austin, Daniel Hoyer, Christina Collins, Thomas Currie, Kevin Feeney, Pieter François, Patrick E. Savage, Harvey Whitehouse, and Peter Turchin. “A Systematic Assessment of ‘Axial Age’ Proposals Using Global Comparative Historical Evidence.” American Sociological Review 83, no. 3 (June 1, 2018): 596–626. - https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0003122418772567