ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the concept of Singularity is related to big history and complexity theory worldviews, which give it universal grounds and help in tracing the palliative global developments in the twenty-first century. Three competing patterns were kept on the agenda in historical discussions throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century’s. One was a Eurocentric, linear, and teleological view of history as a consistent progress “from the worse to the better” aimed at the perfect condition. Another was a descent from the deific past to an atheistic chaos. The third pattern was that there had never been a “human history” but the cycles of ascent, flourishing, and descent of regional civilizations without causal successions or universally valid events. During World War II, the German philosopher and sociologist Norbert Elias, a Jew who had lost his relatives in the Holocaust, demonstrated with figures that the “civilizing process” had been reducing the percentage of violent deaths.
