Many people do not realize the significance of what happened in Western societies beginning in the 1600s. It was the advent of Reason, as something widely practiced. Reason depends on a conviction that what occurs in the universe is not arbitrary but that there exist principles, even though we do not know what they are. If there are principles underlying events, we have the reasoning capabilities to find out what they are. Beginning in the 1600s, an increasing number of people believed this as opposed to those who accepted “magical thinking”, where God (or gods) exert arbitrary power.
This is not to say that there was not reasoning in earlier times, such as in Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Medieval, or earlier Renaissance societies. But these earlier insights were scattered and dependent on certain individuals, and did not have the same effect on their societies as happened in this later period. Also many of these earlier views were arbitrary and incorrect and affected by dogma. Of course dogma is a feature of human thinking and there is plenty of dogma today; the difference is that beginning at least with Sir Francis Bacon and his exposition of the scientific method, all claims started to be increasingly subject to challenge.
However, I feel that there is an exception to the above. Human society is Protean, always changing in unpredictable ways. I don’t believe that attempts to find “laws” in human society or human history will be successful.
Coyote Vision 