The nature of punctuational crises and the spenglerian model of civilization

Abstract Mankind's essentially untroubled state of mind in the presence of comets during the last two centuries has been fortified by the overall relative brevity of cometary apparitions and the calculated infrequency of cometary encounters with planets. During the course of the Space Age, however, the fact of cometary splitting has also become increasingly secure and there is growing appreciation of the fact that mankind's state of mind can never be altogether relaxed. Indeed a watershed in the modern perception of cometary facts has evidently been reached with the most recent and devastating example of cometary splitting, that of the fragmentation of Comet P/Shoemaker-Levy 9 and its subsequent bombardment of planet Jupiter. Thus there is a recognized tendency now amongst comets, especially those in short-period orbits, due to the occasionally excessive effects of solar irradiation, planetary tides and small body impacts, which gives rise to individual swarms of cometary debris, and it is the resulting repeated penetration of such dispersed swarms by our planet which apparently increases the danger to mankind from time to time. The danger comprises global coolings, atmospheric pollution and super-Tunguska events, the cometary debris being responsible for both high-level dust insertions and low-level multimegaton explosions in the Earth's atmosphere along with a generally enhanced fireball flux. Historically, the presence of such danger was drawn to mankind's attention by the observed bombardments over several decades due to “blazing stars threatening the world with famine, plague and war; to princes death; to kingdoms many curses; to all estates many losses; to herdsmen rot; to ploughmen hapless seasons; to sailors storms; to cities civil treasons.” The sense of cosmic destiny aroused by these bombardments evidently involved degrees of fatalism and public anxiety which were deplored by both ecclesiastical authorities and secular administrations with the result that acknowledged dispensers of prognosis and mitigation who endorsed the adverse implications of ‘blazing stars’ (astrologers, soothsayers etc.) were commonly impugned and censured. Nowadays, of course, we are able to recognise that the Earth's environment is not only one of essentially uniformitarian calm, as formerly assumed, but one that is also interrupted by ‘punctuational crises’, each crisis being the sequence of events which arises due to the fragmentation of an individual comet whose orbit intersects the Earth's. That even modest crises can arouse apprehension is known through the circumstances of the nineteenth century break-up of Comet Biela. Indeed it seems that these crises are rather frequently characterized by relatively violent (paradigm shifting) transmutations of human society such as were originally proposed by Spengler and Toynbee more than sixty years ago on the basis of historical analysis alone. It would appear, then, that the historical fear of comets which has been with us since the foundation of civilization, far from being the reflection of an astrological perception of the cosmos which was deranged and therefore abandoned, has a perfectly rational basis in occasional cometary fragmentation events. Such events recur and evidently have quite serious implications for society and government today. Thus when cosmic danger returns and there is growing awareness of the fact, we find that society is capable of becoming uncontrollably convulsed as ‘enlightenment’ spreads. A revival of millenarian expectations under these circumstances, for example, is not so much an underlying consequence but a deviant manifestation of the violent turmoil into which society falls, often to revolutionary effect.