11&12: for the "End and the Beginning Again", full version

Hidden Forces, Ethnic regeneration as a principle, and factors in Ancient Science.

THESE TWO CHAPTERS MARK THE END OF THIS BOOK.

Chapter Eleven

So, in 10 chapters we have considered all the known phases of ethnogenesis in ethnic history. But we cannot consider our presentation of the issue complete without mentioning one more specific feature of ethnogenesis - the ability of an ethnos to regenerate. The essence of ethnic regeneration is a partial restoration of the ethnic structure that occurs after a period of destruction. What is the nature of regeneration depending on the phase of ethnogenesis? In the ascendant phase, regeneration at the ethnos level is not observed, since passionarity grows steadily, which leads to the complication of the ethnos structure.

In the Acmatic phase there is already something to regenerate, since this phase undermines the political power of the ethnos, its economy, and is even often associated with increased annihilation of one's own fellow citizens when they start fighting each other.

The principle of "be yourself" is a double-edged sword, and if one is by himself and the other by himself, they get in each other's way, and at best they elbow each other, at worst they sword each other, and at still worse they use heavy artillery. And then, at these critical moments, it turns out that, for the sake of self-preservation, the old principle, the principle of the rising phase, "Be what you have to be," must be restored. Then everything is established, comes back to normal. Ethnos creates the sociopolitical and state system under which it exists, and naturally returns to the Acmatic phase, that is, to mutual extermination again, but sometime later, when conditions are more favorable and not so tragic.

A vivid illustration of this kind of regeneration is Russia's recovery from the Time of Troubles. By the beginning of the 17th century, a high level of passionate tension led to an extreme crisis that put the existence of the vast country into question. Only through the efforts of the militia, led by the Nizhny Novgorod merchant Minin and the impoverished Prince Pozharsky, was some order restored and the young Mikhail Romanov, brought to Moscow on a simple sleigh, was proclaimed Tsar.

Already under Alexei Mikhailovich, the frontier lines were restored against the Tatars, Ukraine was annexed, and the process of peasant colonization along the Oka and the Volga was underway. But this did not last long - the growing passionalism reasserted itself with the passions of schism, the blood of Stepan Razin's rebellion, Khovannshchina, the Streltsy revolts and the executions of Peter the Great. Passionary overheating was once again at work, and once again everyone strove to be original.

In the inertial phase, when the ideal is either a Roman Caesar, a gentleman, a saint, or a bogatyr, regeneration is also possible. Perhaps, at a critical moment, there will be some people who will again put their country, as they perceive it, their ethnicity, their tradition, at the center of their concerns, not their own egoistic interest, not their own skin.

Let us examine ourselves

Ottoman Turkey arose as a result of passionate push of the 14th century, which went through Russia and Lithuania, Asia Minor, Egypt to Abyssinia (see chart on pages 492-493, not included). As you can see, both Russians and Turks are relatively young peoples. They lived only 600 years each. Turkey first grew like dough with yeast. The first Turks, who founded the might of the future Turkish Empire, were a bunch of fugitives from Central Asia - Turkmens who fled from the Mongols and, turning to the local Seljuk sultans, asked for a place to settle. The sultan of Iconium permitted them to settle beyond his dominions, near the place of Bursa, on the border with the Nicaea Empire, later Byzantium.

The Turks began, like the Crusaders, a holy war, but for the Muslim faith, and invited all who wished to take part in it. Passionate comrades flocked from all over the Muslim East, who were ready to fight for the faith of Islam until their saber was blunted and they had enough wealth and wives, because in the East this is also considered a very great achievement. 

They were given very small plots of land for farming, called "timar", which was not an estate, but a homestead where the family worked the garden itself, but the timariot-spagi (rider) had to come to the Sultan armed, on his own horse, with his own weapons and serve in the horse army. Riders included Circassians, Kurds, undecayed Arabs, large numbers of Seljuks, Turkmens, Minor Asians, Tatars - anyone. Everyone who uttered the formula of Islam became a Turk, and if he wanted to serve in the army, he became a Spagi, that is, he fought and did not pay taxes in the form of money, because he paid the tax with his blood.

But the 14th century came when Ertogrul's descendants, Osman and especially Urhan, moved their military operations to Europe. At that time the cavalry alone was no longer sufficient. Infantry was needed. Then they created a new army: the new one was the "yang" and the army was the "charik," which is what we call the "janissaries."

The Turks, upon entering Europe, the Balkan Peninsula, began taking tribute from the conquered Christian peoples, boys between the ages of 7 and 14. The boys were converted to Islam, given very good food, taught theology (the law of Allah), then military training and made into infantry. They lived in barracks, had cauldrons from which they ate very tasty porridge together. Some of them served in the artillery, some in the infantry. It was the best infantry in Europe at that time, not inferior to the Swiss, even superior to it.

The attacks of the knightly European cavalry on the ranks of the Janissaries failed, the Persian kizilbashas also could not break through the Janissaries. Their camaraderie was remarkably close, despite the fact that they were from very different regions, even different ethnicities. Serbs, Bulgarians, Macedonians, Greeks, Albanians, Wallachians (i.e., Romanians) - all could become Janissaries, one only had to be a Christian converted to Islam. Then they got married, had families, but slept in their barracks, went to their wives only on vacations, still ate from the common pot, and were the most reliable and loyal force of the Sultan.

But now that the Turks had reached the Mediterranean Sea, the navy was needed. The navy recruited adventurers, pirates and vagabonds from all over the Mediterranean. There were Italians, Greeks, Berbers, Danes, Norwegians, who were employed in the Turkish fleet, and since they had no ni foi, ni loi, that is, no faith, no law, no honor, no conscience, they willingly converted to the Muslim religion. They had no faith at all and were Christians, so to speak, mechanically.

They formed a corsair-pirate fleet on the Mediterranean Sea, which was so fierce that Spain trembled in terror, France barely held on, the shores of Italy were constantly attacked, and sailing the Mediterranean Sea was a very difficult affair. Until the nineteenth century there were these corsair squadrons based in Tunis, Algeria, Oran and, of course, in the ports of the East.

The most famous were two naval commanders. One bore the name of Barbarossa - red beard, in Muslim his name was Hayreddin, and by birth he was a Greek from the island of Naxos. The other was called Eulj Ali. His ancestry was dark, it seems, of Berber origin. He was renamed from Eulj, meaning marauder, to Klych, meaning sword. He was actually a natural marauder, though an exceptionally talented admiral. The Spanish, Venetian, imperial and papal fleets suffered defeats at the hands of these thugs.

This is how the Ottoman ethnos was created, with the Turkish language at its core - as we can see, out of very different tribal substrata. The unifying factor here was military, state destiny, and political allegiance, with the outward sign of an obligatory belief in the religion of Islam. But no one could verify these people. They said they were Muslims, but they drank wine, they drank vodka, but no one particularly watched them. During their successful campaigns, they recruited a huge number of slave women, made them their wives, and their children from these different slave women joined the ranks of the Turks. Thus, the Turkish state was transformed from a small principality around Bursa into a Mediterranean power, an entirely new power, called Turkey, or, in their language, the High Porta. They didn't call themselves Turks, but Muslims, and Turks were considered the Turkmen population of the inner part of Asia Minor, where there were two or even three Muslim states, conquered by these Ottomans quite late, in the 15th century, after they took Constantinople.

It should be said that the real Turks resisted this conquest with terrible force, and when they were subdued, they were also forced to serve in the army, but as part-time, lightly armed auxiliary soldiers - akinji, who were used for reconnaissance, for robbery, for raids on the rear, for transport maintenance or earthworks, that is, they were exploited and not respected.

The Turks, whom we call "Ottomans" and they call themselves "Muslims," were a very special ethnos. It went through all the phases we have talked about, except the obscuration phase. It reached a phase of inertia when the internal passionarity of the descendants of the Turkmen warriors, the original fighters for the faith, was squandered. All this was diluted by the huge number of European adventurers who entered the service of the Turkish sultans, who also changed their religion (which they did not have at all), who became Turks when the Ottoman economy collapsed from the unsuccessful wars with Russia.

Russia was the only country that beat the Turks, and the Turks beat the Austrians and Italians at will. Turkey lost the Crimea and the Black Sea coast. The wars, which were costly, were unsuccessful. The Ottoman Empire gradually began to decay.

It decayed not only from the wars, but also from the mismanagement of the economy. The peasants were being squeezed dry, so they were rapacious, and more and more wasteland was being squeezed out of this "good crescent" that had fed so many nations in ancient times. The peasants fled to the cities, also joining gangs of bandits at sea and on land, because it was more profitable than staying at home, digging in the ground and being constantly insulted and robbed by officials who were foreign to them and who came from nowhere. Though they were called Turks, they came from Poles, Germans, Italians, French - whoever wanted to put a turban around their heads.

It all ended in a terrible catastrophe in the 19th century, when the Turks suddenly realized that they were lacking something. - Money! But where could they get it? So, they took loans at an interest rate from French capitalists to cover their emergency expenses. They had lots of emergency expenses after the victories of Rumyantsev, Suvorov, Kutuzov, Dibich (who had entered Adrianople) - they had huge expenses in general.  In the end it turned out that they could not pay the debt. And then the French government went to the aid of its French bourgeoisie and said, "All right, we will collect this debt for you. It put a fleet into the Aegean Sea and demanded customs in all the ports, the exploitation of salt and other minerals as a concession, the right to collect taxes anywhere until they pay back the debt.

So, the Turkish Empire, a huge country, turned out to be a colossus on clay feet. It began to crumble and fall, and the patriots went to Paris and began to learn about European culture and "civilization. They lived in Paris for a while, then returned as the best Frenchmen and tried to establish a kind of Bonapartist regime, or even a republican one. They were the Young Turks.

The Young Turks led a revolution, deposed Sultan Abdul-Hamid, imprisoned him, joined the German side in the World War, and were defeated and destroyed. There was nothing good about their government, even though they promised freedom to all, it ended up in a terrible massacre of Armenians. About a million Armenians were massacred by the Turks because the Young Turks said that the Armenians were against this regime. And they really were against it because none of the flaws of the old organization were corrected, and the Armenians who lived for 500 years under the oppression of the Turkish sultans, got rich, grew fat and multiplied with terrible force, populating even America; they were killed by these liberals in the cruelest way.

Turkey was about to be occupied by Entente troops. The Anglo-French occupied Constantinople, the Greeks occupied Smyrna and marched deep into Turkey. And then regeneration happened.

The Acmatic phase ended in the 16th century; there was an inertia period from the 17th to the 20th century. It turned out that the Turks who lived near Constantinople, near the Aegean Sea, in the cultural cities, were really useless. They could only drink coffee, smoke pipes, talk about anything - the weather, politics, city gossip - but they couldn't defend themselves.

On the other hand, wild and resentful Turkmens of Asia Minor retained their passionate reserve because they were not taken anywhere and passionate young men stayed at home. They had to graze sheep, quarrel with neighboring Armenians (though it didn't come to massacres), make families and multiply. And when they were taken to war by Kemal Pasha against the invaders, the Anglo-French and the Greeks, they very quickly drove them out of their enclaves and restored Turkey to its present borders.

But here we see a complete process: an example of ethnic regeneration by harnessing the unspent passionarity of the "backward" marginal regions. Passionarity burned out in Istanbul itself, but not in the provinces. The same thing happened in Arabia, but here the dominance was different.   The Arabs were raised against the Turks, and they, not being able to fight with the regular army, paralyzed the Turkish rear, allowed the British to seize Palestine, advance from Basra to the north, to Mesopotamia, and defeat the Turks.  Thus, the momentum of the Arabs was also kept in the early twentieth century, and they achieved independence, because to submit to the Turks; they were very unpleasant.

The Will to Rescue

In the phase of obscuration, regeneration is limited. This is particularly noticeable when it comes to Byzantium. Already in the 11th century. The empire's population of 20 million had grown cold to intellectual problems. Many preferred luxurious life in Constantinople, the richest city in the world at the time, to all other pursuits. Indeed, wonderful buildings which skilled craftsmen decorated with items of wondrous craftsmanship, markets full of grain, furs, maidens from Russia, silks from Baghdad and China, wines from Greece, horses from Hungary and Bulgaria, the schools where, along with Homer and Plato, the poem of the brave Acritus Digenis and the poems of Romanus the Melodist were studied, the lighted temples and the mighty walls transformed the city into a special world, only inscribed in the body of the Byzantine empire.

Around the capital, on both sides of the Bosphorus, on the sun-scorched hills of Thrace and Bithynia, goats roamed, cicadas rang, and sun-drenched peasants trimmed grapes or picked olives from leased plots, or even from the landlords' fields. Elsewhere, the semi-wild Highlanders of Epirus, Taigetus, and Taurus had their swords and arrows ready to fend off their enemies: Catholics and Muslims. The splendor of the capital was not for them; they got their life's work and war.

Here is the clue to the sudden weakening of Byzantium in the eleventh century, which brought it to the brink of ruin. The capital and the provinces stopped thinking, feeling, and therefore acting accordingly. This had a particularly acute effect on the bureaucracy, which tended to replenish itself at the expense of the executors, for whom the lack of initiative was a prerequisite for prosperity and advancement. A school of jurists arose in Constantinople, the head of which was Michael Psellus, a very educated and dexterous politician. With the help of the Empresses Zoë and Theodora, the lawyers took the government of the country into their own hands, made legality and rationalism their guiding principles, restricted the provincial aristocracy... and, in half a century, brought Byzantium to the brink of ruin.

The living is irrational. A system that is too rigid loses its plasticity and breaks down when it collides with outside layers. And the first victims are the talented generals: here it was George Maniac and Roman Diogenes. During this time the army was reduced and partly replaced by mercenaries from the Varangians: Anglo-Saxons and Russians, the military budget was cut, fortresses were neglected and the country was reduced to a state of anarchy.

Sicilian Normans invaded Italy; Pechenegs invaded the Balkans; the Seljuks crushed the Byzantines at Mancikert and subdued Asia Minor; the pope severed relations with the patriarch; mercenary armies fell out of favor; and the rest of the country was gripped by internal strife, with rivals not shy of calling on enemies for help... The Greek kingdom became a Thracian despo-tate.

It was the provinces that saved it. The rich landowner Alexius Comnenus knew no laws, but knew how to defend himself from his enemies. He put an end to the turmoil in the country and saved its population from the outrages of foreigners: Seljuks, Pechenegs and Sicilian Normans.

Three generations of Comneni: Alexis, John and Manuel - returned to Byzantium most of the lost lands, with the exception of Asia Minor, where the Seljuks settled, who created the Iconic Sultanate. In Europe, after the victory over the Hungarians in 1,167, the Byzantine frontier passed along the Danube and the Drava, including Dalmatia.

The victory of the Comneni was achieved by overstretching, carried out by mobilizing the passionate reserves not yet squandered in the provinces.

The Comnenian regime is a striking example of ethnic regeneration through the use of the passionarity of the provinces. Thus, Byzantium prolonged its glorious existence for a hundred years, but the defeat of the Byzantine army by the Seljuks at Miriocephalus in 1,176 and the huge losses among the best troops were the beginning of the end. In 1,180 Manuel Comnenus died, and his contemporary wrote:

"It seems as if by divine will it had been decided that with the Emperor Manuel Comnenus, all that was healthy in the kingdom of the Romans should die and that with the setting of this sun we should all be plunged into an impenetrable darkness."

He was right!

The final disintegration took place under the Angels and ended with the fall of Constantinople in 1,204. The Crusaders took and sacked with stunning ease a rich, crowded city whose population allowed itself to be pillaged and murdered. But little Nicea and the barren, mountainous Epirus, defeated the best armies of French and Italian knights until they regained the capital and the areas captured by their enemies.

An outbreak of patriotism in the Nicaea Empire revived the shattered country for a while, but the process of ethnic decay continued, and even John Cantacuzenus' courage could not stop it. The Byzantine nation disappeared, dissolved, and deformed long before the Ottomans stormed into a defenseless, or rather, lacking the will to defend Constantinople (May 5, 1,453).

After the End

Even when the ethnos has disintegrated and ceased to exist as a systemic unity, there remain either individual convictions or individuals, the latter leaving a more visible trace in history. Thus, in Constantinople, taken by the Turks, the patriarchy in the Fanar quarter remained. The inhabitants of this section, the Fanariots, long lived in the grace of the Sultans, who respected the Prophet Isa and his mother Maryam. It was only in 1,821, after the revolt of the Greeks of the Sea, of Slavic origin who mercilessly slaughtered the Muslims, that Sultan Mahmud II ordered the hanging of the patriarch and destroyed the last Byzantines, who lived without Byzantium.

But as long as they existed, they remembered their past greatness and splendor! Even if it did not matter to history, the ethnographer must note the fact of the presence of a fragment of the past, and the ethnologist must interpret it. But some people, some eminent persons, had particular fates, depending on the place where they were received. In Florence they taught the Humanists the Greek language and Eloquence, in Spain El Greco painted the portraits of the grands, in Moscow Maxim the Greek taught and acted, and so on. This inertia did not last long, but the baton of the cultural tradition was passed on.

Such was Sidonius Apollinarius, already a Christian bishop of Clermont in 471. He was very well off under the barbarian kings, but in his letters, he poured out an incredible sadness which stemmed from a lack of cultural interaction. No one who spoke to him appreciated his knowledge of Latin philology. The bearded Burgundians around him were either occupied with war or drunk.

The most abundant material on this phase, which may be called "memorial", is found in the folklore and remnant rites of the so-called "backward tribes". Remarkable works of oral art are available from the Altai, Kyrgyz and probably from the Amazons and Australian Aborigines, although language difficulties prevent a detailed understanding of the latter cases. But that is not a problem. The main point is that these ethnic groups are not "backward", but overly advanced, i.e., they have reached an advanced age. In fact, their memory is the monument, just as vulnerable to the ravages of time as their outfits, once beautifully sewn and decorated, their wooden houses called "mansions", their bronze weapons, oxidized and crumbling to the touch. But this is not the end, for memory is also power.

The people of the memorial phase described here still have some passion, tormented by a sense of hopelessness. Their immediate environment is incapable even of despair. They do not want anything, except satiation, and warmth from the hearth. Their ideals, that is, their predictions, have been replaced by reflexes. They cannot and, worse still, do not want to fight for life, so the duration of this phase is very short. Since the environment changes all the time, and the environment is always changing, Homo sapiens would depopulate if it could. But since this is not the case, we must conclude that passionate shocks are more frequent than the final phases of ethnogenesis.

A new passionary burst, a mutation, or a non-gentropic impulse, initiates another process of ethnogenesis before the inertia of the previous one has time to dry up. This is why humanity still inhabits planet Earth, which is not a paradise for people, nor is it a hell, but an arena for accomplishments both great and small. So, it was in the past, will be in the future, in all regions of the earth's surface. If soon it is so, and it is really so, then it is possible to reduce all the phases of ethnogenesis, taking into account time and place (epoch and region) on one table, which we did for the northern hemisphere of the Old World.

Phases of ethnogenesis

(I won’t reproduce this chart, all in Russian and lots of small unreadable details.) Phases of ethnogenesis at the super-ethnic level

If enough information were available, one could interpret the ethnogenesis of America, South Africa, and Australia in the same way, but this is a matter for the future.

Chapter Twelve Word of Science In ancient times.

When Science was in its infancy, people viewed the world as a collection of immobile objects: stars, mountains, and seas, and if they observed motion - the change of day and night, the growth of grasses, or the aging of their loved ones - they regarded these forms of motion as cyclical. It would be unfair to condemn them for this: it is just as commonplace in the twentieth century. However, already Hesiod caught the linear flow of world formation: ✓the epoch of Uranus - space without time and energy; ✓the epoch of Chronos - addition of time with the Brownian motion of miracles; ✓the epoch of Zeus - addition of energies (lightning bolts). This was a primitive doctrine of evolution, progress and linear time. Nowadays it is preserved in geology - the doctrine of the change of eras: Paleozoic, Mesozoic, Cenozoic.

The great Heraclitus formulated the doctrine of perpetual mutability: "Everything flows, everything changes, no one can enter the same stream twice and no one touches the mortal essence twice!" and Zeno proved that there is no movement, for Achilles cannot catch up with the skull.

Both speculative conclusions render Science meaningless; the Heraclitian because it is impossible to describe phenomena that are vanishing and inimitable, and the Zenonian because without motion, the objects of study cannot even be approached to examine them. That is why scientific cognition was replaced by sophistry and Gorgias had the right to formulate his three theses: 1) "Nothing exists!"; 2) "If anything existed, it would be unknowable!"; 3) "If cognition existed, it would be impossible to transmit it...!" Dead end!

Ironically, all three of these philosophical approaches to Science survived into the twentieth century, changing forms, but not so much that they could not be recognized.

The philosophical constructs turned out to be wrong. Sure, the river and the mortal body are mutable, but within legitimate limits; hence, a second "touch" on them is possible. Zeno's aporia, which asserted that motion is only our perception, since it is inconceivable, was refuted by the emergence of differential-calculus: it turned out that motion, which is indeed the basis of the universe, is not only observable but conceivable and even inconsistent.

Yes, phenomena and objects can be called stable if they change slowly, but even so, one must keep in mind that the nature of change is determined not so much by the appearance of things as by dialectical laws: the transition of quantity into quality, the unity and struggle of opposites, and the negation of negation. These laws prompt scientists to consider a third kind of motion, the oscillatory motion, which, as we shall see, underlies many phenomena, including ethnogenesis.

The fact of ethnic change within a system is determined either by the accumulation or by dissipation of biospheric (biochemical) energy, while the stability of a heterogeneous system is determined by the law of the unity and struggle of opposites. The discreteness of ethnogenesis and ethnic history, or, similarly, the existence of "beginnings" and "endings," is a direct manifestation of the law of negation of negation, according to which the birth and death of any system are inextricably linked. Dialectics, and only dialectics, will allow us to solve our problem.

Thesis

Let us pose the following question: to which science - natural or humanistic - does everything that has been said above about the dynamics of ethnos belong? To answer this question, we first need to clarify the very notion of the humanities and the natural sciences. It is commonly thought that the humanities are those that study man and his deeds, while the natural sciences study nature - living, dead and dormant, that is, that which has never been alive.

This division is unconstructive and full of contradictions that make it meaningless. Medicine, physiology and anthropology study human beings, but they are not humanities. Ancient canals and ruins of cities turned into hills - anthropogenic metamorphosed relief - are in the sphere of geomorphology, a natural science. Conversely, geography before the 16th century, based on the legendary, often fantastic stories of travelers handed down through the tenth hands, was a human science, just as geology was based on stories of the Flood and Atlantis. Even astronomy before Copernicus was a humanistic science, based on the study of texts by Aristotle, Ptolemy, and even Cosmas the Indykoplo.

People preferred to live on a flat Earth surrounded by the Ocean rather than on a ball hanging in infinite space, the Abyss. These views still prevail today, despite universal secondary education. Hence, the distinction between the humanistic and natural sciences is not principled, but rather staggered. As Vernadsky remarked back in 1902, "In the 18th century, the work of the naturalist in geology and physical geography resembled the methods and techniques that reigned as recently as in ethnography and folklore. This is inevitable in this phase of the development of science".

On the basis of this, it is easy to conclude that dividing ways of thinking, and thus the sciences, by the subject of study is inappropriate. It is much more convenient to divide them according to the method of primary information acquisition. Two approaches are possible: reading books and listening to communities (legends, myths, etc.) or observation, sometimes with an experiment.

The first approach corresponds to the humanities, of which philology is the queen. The second corresponds to the natural sciences, which are to be subdivided into mathematical and expository sciences. The mathematical ones, work with symbols; the descriptive ones with phenomena. The latter include geography and biology. 

The reason for this strange separation of the sciences is profound, but it has also been described by Vernadsky, who called it "unconscious scientific dualism”. He explained the thesis as follows: "By the name of a dualistic scientific outlook, I mean that peculiar dualism.... When the scientist-researcher puts himself as the observer, in opposition, consciously or unconsciously, to the world under study”.... What emerges is the fantasy of the scholar-researcher's rigorous observation of the processes of nature as a whole, outside of himself. Thus, the philologist is inevitably outside the text he is studying. Otherwise, he cannot work. The scientific dualism so harmful to the natural sciences is, then, a legacy of the humanities, transferred to a field foreign to their own.

There is a fundamental difference here. What the humanist sees from the outside, the naturalist must try to see from within, since he himself is in the biosphere, in the flux of constant change. In this flow, he sees more than the humanist, who sees only ripples on the surface, but whose complicity with planetary life ends with its inevitable demise as a living organism. This is the dialectic of nature.

The separation between the humanities and the natural sciences does not give us the right to prefer one to the other. After all, it is the humanities that have enriched modern mankind with information about other cultures, both modern to the era of European Enlightenment and the dead ones. It is for this that the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, replete with atrocities and crimes, now are called the Renaissance. And while the humanities had accustomed readers, hungry for knowledge, to faith in sources, historical criticism, coupled with natural science, allowed faith to be limited with doubt, with the result that the science of history became the possessor of a vast array of facts, that is, elements of every complex construct. The trouble was that, with one exception - socio-economic history - there was no skeleton of science, the principle of classification. In any generalizing work, the facts are presented simply in chronological order, with the consequence that they are poorly remembered.

Physical chemistry, astronomy, and cosmography have overcome similar difficulties by using mathematics, but zoology, physical geography, and historical ethnography do not allow mathematical symbolism to be applied to them. We cannot "think that all phenomena accessible to scientific explanation will be subject to mathematical modeling formulae.... On these phenomena, like waves against a rock, the mathematical shells, the ideal creation of our mind, will break."

It would seem that the competence of natural science extends only to those facts that exist today, but not to those that have gone into the past. However, paleontology and historical geology study precisely the past, guided by the principle of actualism, according to which the laws of nature observed now were just as valid in the past. However, this applies to mass phenomena, but not to single facts of interest to the historian.

As you know, all natural laws are probabilistic and therefore subject to the law of large numbers. So, the higher the order, the greater the influence of the law on the object; and the lower the order, the greater the role of chance, and thus the increased degrees of freedom. 

Therefore, in natural science a single observation is perceived critically. It can be accidental, incomplete, distorted by the circumstances of the observer and even by his or her own feelings.  Errors are also possible in experience. Experiences may not be pure: data may be artificially fitted (artifact) or not taking into account all the extraneous components. But all these shortcomings are compensated by a large number of observations, where the inevitable error is within the margin of error. In other words, it is so small that it not only can, but it should be ignored.

This is how an empirical generalization emerges - an inconsistent body of information equal in certainty to the observed fact. And if a historian or paleo-ethnographer takes this path, he gets as brilliant prospects as biologists, geologists and geographers already have. Let the initial element of historical research be an excess. If one gathers many of them, they will lend themselves to classification, and later to systematization, and thereby provide verifiable material for empirical generalizations. This is how 19th century socio-economic history found its roots in historical materialism, which is not based on anecdotal evidence but on objective reality with its inherent consistencies.

Historical geography and ethnography of the 19th century did not know how to answer this question because there was no way to do it. It was the systems approach of L. von Bertalanffy and Vernadsky's biochemical energy of the biosphere.  These two discoveries made it possible to make an empirical generalization of all previously established facts and thus provide a descriptive definition of the category "ethnos," establishing the nature of the movement of matter in ethnogenesis.  Thus, humanitarian historical geography and paleoethnography became a new natural science - ethnology.

And what about history, the information of which we have used so abundantly?

Like the two-faced Janus, it has remained humanitarian where the subject of study is the creations of human hands and minds, that is, where buildings and factories, ancient books and records of folklore, feudal institutions and Greek polities, philosophical systems and mystiheresies, pots, axes, and painted vases or paintings, in short, sources that are essentially static and cannot be otherwise.

Man creates these things with his own labor, while removing their material from the cycle of biocoenosis conversion. He stabilizes the natural process, so these things can only be destroyed, not reconstituted. But man is a member not only of society (Gesellschaft), but also of ethnos (Gemeinwessen). Together with his ethnic group he is a member of the biosphere. Forever changing, dying and being born, like all life on our planet, it leaves its mark through the accomplishment of events that constitute the skeleton of ethnic history - the function of ethnogenesis. In this aspect, history is a natural science and falls within the purview of dialectical rather than historical realism.

Peculiarities of historical time

As is well known, geography studies the formation of the Earth's surface, which includes four shells: lithosphere, hydrosphere, atmosphere and biosphere. Their combination is the result of a multitude of natural and anthropogenic processes that have created and are constantly changing the face of the Earth. It is this combination that creates the specificity that distinguishes geography not as an accidental body of information, but as an independent science of geographic diversity.

Processes in the geographical environment take place within the framework of spatio-temporal laws. Since time is an indispensable parameter here, any specification of chronology in the geographical sciences is helpful. Thus, historical geology shows changes in the extra-biological shells of the Earth, but the dates of changes in the relief, chemical composition of the atmosphere and hydrosphere, are very approximate and measured by geological periods. In the study of the biosphere - in paleozoology and paleobotany - the tolerance is smaller: mastodons and mahiroduns became extinct in the Cenozoic. Only the study of the anthroposphere, not even in the Holocene, but in the historical period, provides an absolute chronology (accurate to a year). On this basis, anthropogeography shows the sequence of changes that took place over the last five thousand years. In such an aspect, biospheric processes should be considered as Mesocosm, lying between the levels of Macrocosm (Cosmos) and Microcosm (atomic and molecular phenomena). But how should planetary time be considered in relation to biospheric structures, taking into account the changeability of species and ethnic groups?

Linear time without beginning and end is very convenient for abstract constructions, but it can't reflect the multifariousness of systems arising in the biosphere. Here we stumble upon a phenomenon that was previously unaccounted for and not properly understood. The laws of nature in their general forms are the same for different levels of structural organization of matter, although they manifest themselves through diversity. This basic principle of dialectical monism has been brilliantly confirmed in synergetics and ethnology. Therefore, chronological levels (as a characteristic of development) are relevant at multiple levels, from the atomic and molecular (for Prigozhin) to the population level (for the author).

The importance of the general systems theory for geography is also related to the latter circumstance. The outburst of energy (negative entropy) observed in natural processes and its subsequent dissipation is a universal mechanism of interaction between the system and the environment. This universality proved by I. С.  For micro-objects Prigozhin describes this universality in geography as movement at the population level. In other words, on the biospheric level, development does not evolve, but occurs in discrete transitions - from equilibrium to disequilibrium and back. The new structure always behaves differently than the previous one, which has already lost its initial impulse and is close to the equilibrium with the environment.  So, momentum is the beginning of the dissipation process leading the system to its inevitable collapse.

In this regard, the Eastern chronosophy suggests the idea of cyclic process, similar to the change of seasons or phases of the moon. In the first century B.C. Sima Qian formulated, as already noted, the thesis of historical development: "The end and the beginning again". However, the situation is more complicated: there is no cyclicity in biospheric processes (speciation) in ethnogenesis.

There is no cyclical biospheric process (speciation) in ethnogenesis. The type of interaction under discussion corresponds not to rhythm (repetition) but to the inertia of excess, in which the change in potential is described by a complex curve of ups, downs, and zigzags. This curve of a burning fire, a withering leaf, the explosion of a powder cellar. The only difference here is the duration of the process, and ethnogenesis lasts from 1,100 to 1,500 years, if they are not disturbed by exogenous influences, such as genocide by a foreign invasion or epidemic.

But besides the rejected forms of time motion (translational and rotational) there is also vibrational - the fading sound of a string after a pluck and a pendulum after a jolt. Waste of momentum energy from the resistance of the host medium and its dissipation is the dissipation that we observe in the Earth's biosphere. Biocenoses, and even ethnic groups, emerge externally, form ecosystems, and slowly dissipate the biochemical energy of living matter described by Vernadsky. In this aspect, ethnic history (unlike social history, which is spontaneous) is part of the biosphere.

In ancient times there were ethnic groups that created anthropogenic landscapes, for the ruins of the cities of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Yucatan, and the mounds of the Great Steppe are traces of former dissipations, just as deserts and salt marshes in their time completed the attempts of ancient people to fight their foremother, the biosphere.

Victory was unattainable in principle, because the limit of dissipation is the equilibrium state of the ethnic system with the environment (homeostasis), that is, the loss of resistance, for which no energy resources remain. This is why most of the ethnoses that lived and created during the historical period no longer exist. Ethnosystems collapsed into pieces, into wreckage and into dust, that is, individuals who then integrated into new systems in renewed landscapes with new traditions. In fact, Prigozhin's discovery is the justification of the principle of environmental protection, for friendship with nature is optimal, and not the victory over it.

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