The understanding of teleology since the Enlightenment has been essentially papered over. It is not really that teleology no longer plays a role in our understanding, indeed it is essential, but we have largely forgotten what that is and how it is tied to conceptions of order. It is a great irony that the great doctrine of our age, the defining feature of the present zeitgeist, Progress, is intrinsically teleological. But then, one must consider that if an aspect of understanding is essential, then inasmuch as the arc of history is something we try to make sense of, it follows that a teleological conception is necessarily the only kind. When we examine history, we ask not only where we came from, but how the past's present was ordered in such a way so as to deliver the present; from this, we also ask the same about our own present, asking towards what it is oriented.
We must be wary of committing the conservative mistake with respect to epistemology. So frequently, one notices that conservatives do not contend with the real phenomena which leftists point to in order to support their values. Instead, these conservatives frequently deny that the phenomena takes place at all. This puts the conservative at a disadvantage; if one considers the concept of privilege, it is actually hard to deny that there are certain privileges which accrue to certain groups which aren't due to any demonstrated abilities of the individual in question. The better response is to acknowledge the privilege, and then suggest more rigorous reasons for why that privilege exists besides the standard leftist end-all be-all explanation of sheer irrational racism. If there are demonstrated differences between certain groups, then per Bayesian reasoning this implies you will tend to treat those groups differently under particular circumstances. Gaining knowledge about an individual is not a costless endeavor, and sometimes the costs/risks outweigh the benefits.
It is the contention of Scholastics that whatever is an evil is but a disordered form of the good. This suggests that Progress is not some instance of pure evil, but is merely a disordered form of the good; in this case, that good is one of historical understanding. The concept of Progress clearly informs the structure of understanding, providing a logical conceptual space for performing social-moral evaluations of social phenomena. In other words, ideology. We don't want to say it is wrong simpliciter to have overarching concepts which inform the construction of our ideas. In this case, we must point out that the idea of Progress is not wrong to suggest a direction to history, it is merely wrong about fundamental details. Given the explicit rejection of teleology by modernism, it's not hard to grasp why a plainly teleological concept should be so hard to understand in a clear, articulate way. However, given an explicit understanding of teleology, that should allow us to begin formulating a more ordered form of teleological history.
Most reject the concept of teleology explicitly primarily for a lack of understanding what it is and isn't. If I might define teleology, I would define it as the tendency of beings to behave in order to come to an equilibrium. That is all it is, and nothing more; we mustn't let certain linguistic and philosophical terms of art confuse us on this point, but must structure our language around this understanding. The sense in which we are able to understand how a material body ought to operate given certain conditions of mass, momentum, and proximity to other bodies is just what a teleological understanding is. When we observe the path of Saturn through the sky and notice a perturbation, that is a perturbation relative that world in which another body didn't exist sufficiently nearby to gravitationally affect it. Science is simply impossible without the concept of teleology, since we always understand something to be a perturbation in the case a being exemplifies activity only explained by the postulate of an additional being or event not previously incorporated into our model. We expect a stone to fall to the ground like so; when it doesn't, we do not suggest we were wrong to expect that, but had only failed to previously notice something in the world which would cause it to act otherwise.
Applying this understanding to society, we then come to understand history as the record of civilization's activity. We apply certain models in economics and anthropology which postulate a tendency towards equilibrium, which is just to say they are explicitly teleological, presupposing a form of order by which deviations from the hypothetical order are explained by additional variables. Prices for a good remain above clearing equilibrium? It isn't that the equilibrium model of pricing is wrong per se, but that there is something not covered by the model which explains this apparent lack of equilibrium; of course, in reality it is at an equilibrium, just at an equilibrium relative to conditions not previously perceived or understood.
As society is a being of many magnitudes of complexity beyond the activity of stones, it should be apparent that it will be that much more difficult to articulate in clear terms the trajectory of history. Indeed, given simple cognitive and epistemological limits of the human being, such an understanding of the trajectory of history may be impossible (in an individual…). That does not mean, however, we are wrong to say the history of society demonstrates a tendency towards some equilibrium, whether or not we understand what that equilibrium is. For shorthand, I have referred to this final equilibrium of society as the Omega Point, to cop Teilhard de Chardin and to acknowledge the role expanding consciousness and knowledge appears to play in the unfolding of history.
Teleological history requires a particular metaphysical understanding. Specifically, in order to postulate a telos of civilization, we must understand in what way society is a metaphysically real being. In the way we distinguish between inanimate and animate being on the basis of the kind of activity demonstrated, so we must be able to distinguish between social and non-social being through some kind of activity. This suggests further avenues of research for the neoreactionary paradigm.
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