Futurism, the Next Venture of Islam
The renewed vitality of Islamic civilisation depends on its pragmatic capacity to offer moral and material solutions for the problems of industrial civilisation.
History often happens around us in a way that is hardly noticeable as it passes. Consider the aftermath of the Mongol invasions. The crisis brought on by the initial shock of the Mongol period demanded that Islamic civilisation’s elites rise to the occasion and form new and responsive forms of political legitimacy. The material costs of the sieges and battles may have been extremely dire. But imagine the situation a few years after the deluge: is it possible that daily life did not change significantly for large swaths of the populace?
Imagine you are living in a small town in Central Asia that has been spared the worst during the Mongol invasions. Things trudge along as usual. There may be a new military governor, but the social order revolving around the balance between the military elites and the local notables — what has been called the a‘yan-amir system — is likely much the same, even as the official boundaries of empires ebb and flow. Your community might temporarily fall under the sway of one of the many charismatic messiah-figures of the time, but only until someone with a stronger army (and whose imams had less “innovative” Friday sermons) brings a return to normalcy.
Consider yourself now in the same hypothetical town, not after the Mongol invasions, but during the rise of the European empires. The military governor has again changed, and taxes flow to different hands; like before, your intellectuals and artisans might move (willingly or not) to a new imperial capital. And yet, this new development brings with it a series of increasingly complex technological interventions into everyday life. These may ultimately be salutary, such as improved access to modern medicine or cutting-edge agricultural techniques. But because of their effectiveness, these new techniques demand that the social order bend to their demands: new farming techniques are introduced, familiar waterways are dammed, and pastoral regions are set aside for agriculture to provide cash crops for the world economy. A new, competing class of settlers arrive from the imperial centre, and up-and-coming bureaucrats learn English or Russian to meet the needs of imperial ideologies and to read the newest technical manuals. The imperatives of efficient, technical production might begin to feel a bit more intrusive than previous changes in authority. It is only in hindsight that we know how this era of European hegemony transformed the world through the spread of technicalistic society.
This was one angle of the argument set forth by Marshall Hodgson, a scholar of Islamic civilisation whose three-volume survey of Islamic history, The Venture of Islam (1975), concluded with a discussion of the technically-focused society we all find ourselves in today. A world historian as much as a scholar of Islam, Hodgson contributed throughout his work to several perspectives that we now largely take for granted, such as a rejection of “Golden Age” narratives which saw the decline of Islamic civilisation begin with the fall of the Abbasids, and on the contrary, an appreciation for the Persianate which largely typified high culture in the Middle Periods (i.e. roughly 945-1501 CE). A key issue which caught Hodgson’s attention in the third and final volume of this Venture of Islam is what he called technicalistic society:
…a society in which the dominant elements are on a level of social organisation where in intellectual and practical activity, calculatively rationalised and specialised technical procedures form an interdependent and preponderant pattern.
Technicalistic society is a form of social organisation — and with it, a set of cultural values — which has since become nearly omnipresent in human life. For Hodgson, understanding the logic behind technicalistic society and its impacts on human life would be key to mitigating those negative impacts not just on Islamic civilisation, but on humanity writ large.
Technicalistic Society and the “Great Western Transmutation”
The outcomes of this development – increasingly precise measurements and improved technical procedures – would be so wide-ranging that Hodgson called it the “Great Western Transmutation”: a shift in cultural values which happened to occur in Western Europe but was not predestined to happen there. This new cultural orientation demanded continuous increases in economic productivity, and experimental and continuously innovating scientific methods, with “bourgeois financial power” supplanting the landed aristocracy in social spheres. As the various technical specialities developed interdependently with increasing success in their ability to manipulate the material world, so too did the process of technicalisation come to determine patterns of human life in modernity.
Hodgson saw in technicalistic society not only major developments in scientific discovery or engineering prowess, but (inevitable) psychological aftereffects of this relatively rapid shift in the human experience. The “technicalistic spirit” demanded that efficiency take precedence over any other metric (e.g., aesthetic, or interpersonal) that once might have been given greater credence. This can lead, of course, to considerable progress in the sciences, since the multiplying effect of technical improvements results in almost shocking changes in material conditions in a relatively short period. So too did Hodgson see this mindset as the logic behind legislative government, in which laws are not founded upon permanent (or even divine) bases, but in which they are — by definition — subject to continuous change to conform to lived experience.
But every shift towards technicalism brings follow-on consequences. Hodgson took note of the fact that technicalistic society at its best could lead to great increases in material wealth and surges in knowledge production, with the disruption of existing societal pathways also leading to new personal opportunities and liberties for the individual. That said, this new technical individual might also find themselves “privately isolated,” living in a world with a “tendency towards anonymity and impersonalisation” in place of a more “traditional” sphere which, for all of its faults, provided a person with a defined scope of roles and opportunities.
The impact of the Transmutation upon the Islamic world is seen as particularly destabilising not only because of the rapid introduction of technicalism itself, but that it was imposed through European hegemony. This imposition, in many cases, came in the form of the subordination of non-European lands through either economic manoeuvring or outright colonisation. This is not minimised in the Venture, nor is it taken for granted that there was something about European society that made its hegemony inevitable compared to other human civilisations. I will not rehash here the various responses within Islamic society to the situation — embrace of Westernisation, attempts at renewal of cultural traditions, revolutionary and constitutional movements, outright rejection in forms we might call neo-traditionalist — as these have been well-explored by Hodgson and others.
What deserves additional attention, though, is that for Hodgson, the shortcomings of technicalistic society were a common human obstacle that would require, in turn, a common human response. The solutions that might emerge from the Islamic world, then, could well be key to the worldwide effort to deal with the dislocations of technicalism.
Unification in Dislocation
It is in the epilogue to the third volume of the Venture of Islam that Hodgson turns from history to possibility — the challenges facing Islamic civilisation in modernity, and how this is a common struggle across human society. The global dominance of the technicalistic mindset creates this common struggle as world problems become interconnected and indivisible. The universal human imperative across the now-unified world civilisations is to draw from their distinct traditions to provide solutions to common issues.
For Hodgson, there were two pressing issues. One is the disruption of cultural traditions, the result of an ethos embracing continuous disruptive change as one technique displaces another. Second is pressure on natural resources, as the “possible forms of technical exploitation multiply indefinitely while the physical resources of the planet do not”. Hodgson was concerned not only with the exhaustion of arable land but also that the drive for development would necessarily continue to narrow the space remaining for the rest of the natural world. Large-scale technical society also demands social planning to direct the energies of technique (which “implies the possibility of arbitrary human manipulation”); the need for a lettered mass culture, which brings with it the challenge of implementing mass education to foster technical expertise; and a radical unsettling of moral allegiances, as old norms are felt to be outdated, beliefs are challenged by technical development, and the logic of industrial society places novel burdens upon its participants.
Some of these are on the material plane — conservation, educational reform, mass media — while others are speaking to the moral condition of the human living in technicalistic society. For Hodgson, it was the latter where the heritage of Islamic (or any other) civilisation will have the most to contribute. This is not to say that he was not concerned for the material world, and the “development gap” — in which the uneven adoption of technical methods necessarily means that certain regions will be forced to “catch up” to earlier adopters — is an issue that Hodgson felt confronted all of humanity. But while he believed that developments in automation, energy production, or other scientific advancements might make it ever faster and cheaper to bring material parity across human society, the internal, spiritual dislocations of modernity would remain.
Accordingly, solutions may be found in the intellectual and religious heritage of the major world traditions, whose thinkers were frequently concerned not only with material progress but with internal human states. Traditions can provide the individual with new opportunities for “creative possibilities.” It is exactly the “historical, traditional mode of human involvement” in which the individual would not be considered fungible, as in the technicalistic drive for specialised and depersonalised functioning. As such, it may be the “older traditions of vision” which can aid in seeking a higher purpose than technicalistic goals.
As Hodgson saw it, the balance to be struck would be between the particularity of a specific heritage and the universalism inherent in technicalistic society:
On the level of basic spiritual insight, an interpretation of community and law will be increasingly inadequate to actual experience until it can confront creatively the presence of contrasting spiritual traditions of equal status in a single world-wide society. This must take place on at least two planes: the community as such must overcome its exclusivity without sacrificing its formative discipline, and the heritage it carries must be in dialogue with contemporary culture common to all communities, yet without sacrificing its integrity.
There is, in other words, a “standing tension between universalism and communalism” in reaching into Islamic heritage to find answers to the problems of the modern age. Hodgson’s recommendation for overcoming this limitation was a “grand dialogue among the heritages” — not merely “distill[ing] abstractions from the several pre-Modern heritages,” but encouraging the various civilisational-religious traditions to “enlarge [the] range of dialogue,” and collaboratively devise solutions to the atomisation which has characterised life in the technicalistic age.
One asset Hodgson thought Islamic civilisation (now heritage) could provide to this project would be its “frank sense of history” — that is, the tradition inherent in the Islamic discourse of reconciling a religious tradition which was formed-in-time with the fact that this same religious tradition asserts values which transcend historical contingencies. This is not limited to Islam, naturally, though (by focusing on Islamic civilisation in his work) Hodgson expressed a hope that contemporary Islamic discourse would build from the tensions within its own tradition, “go a great deal further,” and “provide a basis for creativity” by which those of us still struggling with the challenges of technicalistic society might “overcome [our] cultural dislocations.”
The nature of universalised technicalistic society also means that this venture of Islamic society has ramifications for all of humanity (and the conclusions of other traditions, upon Islamic civilisation). For Hodgson, in our current condition, “the ultimate spiritual commitments of any sector of mankind must be taken account of by every other sector in evaluating its own ultimate commitments.” The success of one group, then, is the success of all — and vice versa.
Reservations and Opportunities
One might question whether Hodgson’s recommendations are satisfying for Islamic civilisation per se, and whether his framework is an actual critique of technicalistic society, or only an adaptation within it. Hodgson believed that the world religions provide a means by which those of us living in technicalistic society might start to address its unsettling and disruptive effects, including the increasing material pressures on world-society. This is a reasonable point to take from the perspective of the world as a single civilisational unit, but one might ask whether this is particularly Islamic. For someone who is committed to the success of Islamic society and who wants to meet the challenge of Islam in their personal orientation, it may not be particularly convincing to direct these goals to a universalistic perspective.
This is a frequent challenge for those who see commonalities across religious traditions as a human endeavor, or wish to perceive behind them a common spiritual or esoteric thrust: does this approach flatten religious practice into a meta-narrative, in which the particular religious traditions — each with their own, sometimes conflicting, claims about human purpose, salvation, the divine — are welcomed only to the extent they embrace this same universalising meta-narrative? Are visions of Islam, or any other religious tradition which views itself in more exclusive terms excluded from participating in this project of tackling the shortcomings of technicalistic society? This is not to criticise those approaches which are more perennialist in nature, but only to note the tension inherent in this path.
On that note, one might ask if Hodgson’s prescription matches his diagnosis of the disruptions that technicalistic society has wrought on human tradition and sources of meaning. Islam may well be a source of wisdom for those who are confronting, for example, atomisation and the accompanying loss of meaning, but does drawing from these sources on a personal level confront the prime cause — the very prioritisation of technicalism as the prime goal of human functioning? Or does this ethical-moralistic approach only provide palliative relief to the individual in the face of a technicalistic ideology which, by definition, cannot but continue to innovate, dislocate, and disrupt? If the solution to dealing with the ongoing system is still taking for it granted, it may not provide a sufficient alternative for those who are unconvinced with technicalistic society in the first place.
Then again, consider the points being raised in Hodgson’s concern about how to respond to technicalism. There is the issue of how to retain a connection to our religious and cultural traditions in a period when it seems like the old order has ceased to command the respect it once could. The cosmopolitan nature of our interconnected world-society — only made more rapid in the Internet age — calls for finding a balance between what we owe our local, tangible connections and what we owe the broader human community. The individual believer (and not only in an Islamic context) may see a dominant world paradigm which does not quite seem to fit with their own deeply-held beliefs, while realising that they must still find a way to work within it.
Hodgson would likely be the first to note that when looking at the long course of Islamic intellectual heritage, these are hardly new questions — though they may, just as in previous moments of upheaval, require new answers.
Author: Zach Winters is a writer and historian based in Chicago, Illinois. His doctoral work at the University of Chicago focused on messianism and the esoteric sciences in the Timurid era. He also writes about religion, culture, and history at his Substack page.
Artist: All art has been custom-drawn for Kasurian by Ahmet Faruk Yilmaz. You can find him on Instagram and Twitter/X at @afaruk_yilmaz.
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Further Reading
Hodgson and World History:
Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (3 vols)
John Nef, The Conquest of the Material World
Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West
Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History
William McNeill, The Rise of the West
“Technicalistic” Society:
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media
Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy
Is this just a summary of the book