Paul Ziolo

In this paper we will summarise the basic premises that may help us to study the ‘implicate orders’ behind the unfolding of historical events, independently of any specific cultural perspective. We begin by comparing our current historical situation at the threshold of the Third Millennium C.E. with that of a hundred years ago, showing the emergent role of the mental sciences in revealing the subconscious motivations underlying human behaviour. We then present the basic axioms of psychohistory to date, suggesting how they may be incorporated into a general model that integrates both ‘implicate’ and ‘explicate’ orders governing human social organisation in space and time. We briefly discuss the origins and consequences of childhood trauma as well as the dynamics of psychospeciation and the socialisation process, and suggest how the study of memetic archetypes may help to clarify these concepts and give a greater degree of precision to psychological and sociocultural variables used in global modelling. We conclude by reflecting on the roles played by the ‘evolutionary context-free nexus’ in cultural evolution, both in the past and possible in the nearer future.

In establishing a consilient basis between the social and biological sciences, the human brain and the nature of the self continue to present the most formidable obstacle, the greatest challenge, and yet the ultimate key to any final deep understanding of social, political and cultural processes. In this paper we interpret such phenomena as successively complex levels of ‘exfoliation’, growing from a neu- robiological base. Their emergent qualities and interconnections have hitherto constituted separate domains of study within the social sciences. The problem of psychohistory is to seek some way in which degrees of co-dependence between seperately emergent phenomena at successive levels can be visualised, and any invariant properties identified and understood. The topological models of R. Thom and E.C. Zeeman may suggest some possible approaches. Inasmuch as psychic growth itself is an accretion process, the roles of pre- and post-natal trauma in determining the later ramifications of neural development are crucial, yet the consequences remain to a certain extent unavoidable at the present level of human development. Certain theological traditions based on an apophatic approach to human consciousness have recognised this and may offer some insight into how the emotional consequences of early trauma (and the group fantasies they generate later at social, political and cultural levels) may eventually be understood and contained.