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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3469 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 29, 2023

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Not-so-small scale question but this is probably the only place I can get an informed answer on this not constrained by political correctness: what’s your overarching theory of why Western Europe and its descendants are the world’s most influential civilization of the past few centuries?

A small scale answer to a large scale question: being really really good at boats.

My working theory is basically a mirrior of my theory of how Christainity managed to spread so widely. As several users here are fond of pointing out Christianity (and to a lesser extent the other Abrahamic religions) are stupid, irrational, seem to actively harm it's adherents evolutionary prospects, and poorly optimized for memetic spread. By all rights and contemporary social theories Christianity it should never have outlived it's founder, never mind conquer Europe.

The answer I think is in what Christianity as an ideology/memeplex was "optimized for" and that was for fostering cooperation and trust in dangerous low-trust environments. As a result Christian communities held together where others succumbed to crab-bucketing and chronic-backstabbing-disorder, Christian armies stood their ground where others fled. And this tendency can be expanded to the wider "Western World" as until relatively recently "the western world" and the "Christian world" were practically synonymous.

That is a very interesting question, although there is a converse question that might be insightful too, why hasn't China (or civilization X) reached the industrial revolution and/or the scientific/analytical/empirical culture?

I don't remember exactly the name but China had its glory scientific/economic period in a way, I don't remember the name nor the specific reasons exactly but it seems there has been a cultural shift, china entered in an era of opulance (richest country in the middle age) but of stagnation and of obscurantism, it saws a significant scientific decline because of allegedly a change of epistemological culture, IIRC induced in parts by confucianism.

Of course even in that era of decline there was some outliers but this hypothetical epistemological hibernative state china had entered was long lasting and it is an unknown how many centuries/millenias would have been needed for China to reverse from this shift, had they not met the west.

About India I know much less, India had one of the first if not the first civilization on earth, the indus valley,

possibly the first well thought city architecture, and one of the first proto-written language (but maybe not an actual language),

that civilization mysteriously disappeared.

Then much later, they were populated by a mysterious central asian "empire" that has from ethnic origin "europe" and spoke a lost indo-european language, therefore that would make Indians much more ethnically or culturally european than the Chinese but no idea how much it diluted or lasted.

Another interesting question is, would have europe developed the industrial revolution without the technological transfer it received from China and the middle-east?

e.g. has Guttemberg been influenced by Chinese press/paper technologies?

has the import of explosive powder influenced research and conceptions about the sources of energies?

etc

IIRC the excellent book The Epic Quest to Solve the Great Mystery of Earth’s Magnetism shows that China influenced or brought the compass to Europe, which is key for navigation.

I believe those imports of non-western technologies have had a major impact and probably, a necessary impact.

why Western Europe and its descendants are the world’s most influential civilization of the past few centuries?

one could speculate on IQ/racial theories but I doubt that is necessary, it might have given an edge to europeans but even so it's not studied enough today, e.g. chinese people have generally high IQ so we would need another more selective metric of cognitive abilities to diffferentiate an ability to innovate.

Genes that drive a tendency towars anti-conformism, a rejection of authority, and a megalomanism seems key to scientific disruptors.

Let's not forget that access to food also is a big factor.

But the main drive was not racially based but cultural and institutional/organizational.

The rise of early proto-capitalism/access to private funding for research has been a key driver.

IMHO it was not a given that the european would be the firsts since it seems catholicism was actively and potently obscurantist.

another question is about the blockers of past civilizations, for example it is notorious that a Roman centurion implied that Rome was not actively funding the building of engineering machines because he was afraid it would drive a tremendous rise in unemployement..

Of course one should not forget about the economic and energetic multiplier that are slaves.

The Industrial Revolution happened in Britain specifically, and not other parts of Europe, because the precursor technologies were in place to deploy a steam engine at the same time as a real demand for the steam engine(draining coal mines) while a high cost of labor and lack of slavery made conventional means of doing so expensive enough for real demand for a replacement.

The alternate universe where China developed the Industrial Revolution before Britain is one where the cost of labor skyrockets and stays high, while the Chinese invest in researching technologies that precede the steam engine(mostly making better cannon), while switching en masse to the use of coal for fuel.

In history most academics still see be defining work on this as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel.

Guns, Germs and Steel is actually pretty poorly regarded in academia, although it has had a significant influence on popular understanding.

From what I recall of my undergrad days, two main books on the topic were 'The Great Divergence' by Kenneth Pomeranz and 'The European Miracle' by E L James.

Isn't "Guns, Germs and Steel" actually incredibly controversial?

I've never quite agreed with the critiques, and I believe Jared Diamond's book is broadly plausible, but I recall a number of anthropologists and historians criticizing it for going beyond what it could responsibly claim.

I don't remember whose theory it was but someone proposed that the combination of the black death and the discovery of the new world (and the existence of the necessary technological preconditions) caused the industrial revolution.

The black death caused a excess of capital in comparison to the population size in Europe and the new world sustained it by allowing excess population to migrate if conditions weren't favourable enough in Europe. This was particularly true for England.

This caused economic consolidation and a strong desire for investments that didn't hinge on human capital. This in turn led to everything else, from technological inventions to things like fractional reserve banking.

Plate armour and ocean-going ships. Of course, this raises the question why they were developed in Europe and not elsewhere.

IIRC Chinese ships were capable of long range exploration? They would more have been bottlenecked by a lack of investment and especially by a non-colonialist/deshumanizing culture

e.g. Chinese went to sommalia a century before the europeans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_exploration#/media/File:ShenDuGiraffePainting.jpg

The question is, could they have done it much earlier? When exactly did they developed such ships technology?

But there are much more potent historic anachonisms, such as the Indo-greek kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Greek_Kingdom

or the fact greeks went in the Xinjiang, China

What is less known is if those anachronic explorers managed to do knowledge/technology/culture/artefact transfers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_European_exploration_of_Asia

The radhanites seems remarkably interesting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radhanite

The pop-sci explanation is that the Chinese had everything they wanted, while the Europeans lost access to the Asian spice market after the Ottomans took over the Near East. It made sense to send out armoured men on ocean-going ships in all directions to find and/or seize another trade route. And it turned out a few ships of angry European dudes could [roflstomp](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_of_Malacca_(1511)) most resistance.

I never thought about it but the disappearance of past african/asian trade routes with europe and therefore of key assets such as spices would have stimulated europe to rebuild those routes by itself.

The european exploration is often seen as an era of discoveries (new foods and kinds of tools/arts) but in a big part it was in fact a restauration of a previous state of wealth and cultural imports.

As shown the radhanite were the leading group maintaining the previous roman merchant routes from the year 700 to the year 900.

About their disappearance

The causes may have been the fall of Tang China in 908, followed by the collapse of the Khazarian state at the hands of the Rus' some sixty years later (circa 968–969). Trade routes became unstable and unsafe, a situation exacerbated by the rise of expansionist Turco-Persianate states, and the Silk Road largely collapsed for centuries

They were replaced by the Italian city states but the issue with your theory is that it has a gap of 500-600 years, although I have not studied exactly when was the silk road restored, especially for spices.

It seems it was still partly working for some assets such as slaves.

Had the europeans an active desire to restaure the silk road as early as the 900s but couldn't before the 1400-1500s because of technological limitations? (ships technologies?)

edit marco polo is in 1270 but still a 400 years gap

The Mongol expansion throughout the Asian continent from around 1207 to 1360 helped bring political stability and re-established the Silk Road

300 years and not restored by europeans

I am talking about the next disruption: the Ottomans emerged as the biggest power in the Eastern Med that blocked Genoa and Venice from trading along the Silk Road, driving the prices up. Previous disruptions of the Silk Road happened before Europe had the technology to literally go around the problem.

The obvious answer is the industrial revolution.

The more nuanced answer is all the things that led to the Industrial revolution occurring in England and not anywhere else.

It was always going to be between 3 great civilizations. Europe (the west), China & India.

The key years were 1400-1600. Everything after was unsurprising.

Key events:

  • Competitors fall behind due to Mongol/Islamic invaders, but the west doesn't

    • The fall of the last wealthy Hindu empire - Vijayanagara to Mongols (Mughals)

    • The fall of the last wealthy Han empire - Ming dynasty to Mongols (Manchus)

    • Post-crusade stability allowed the space needed for the Renaissance to happen

  • Sea based superiority

    • India and China move to inland capitals (Delhi, Beijing) cutting their focus from the sea

    • Western Europe has access to an ocean that the rest of Europe didn't have

  • First contact

    • First ships from Europe land in India + China. Most importantly, in fringes of the current empire

    • Columbus lands in America

  • Establishment of extractive colonies & economic slack

    • America, Coastal India, Coastal China, Philippines are colonized

    • Britain has the money to think & build

The industrial revolution was by no means guaranteed. But, it is not surprising that it occurred in England. Best colonies, best access to the ocean, best protection from war.

It is possible for the industrial revolution to have never happened. In the case, I can see the ebb & flow of power between the various great civilizations switching hands again. But, the industrial revolution allowed England, and subsequently the west, to overshadow everyone else overnight.

Case to be made that needing coal for fuel and having flood-prone coal mines was why Newcomen developed the steam engine and later why Watt improved it- https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-industrial-revolution/

I'll place a chip on the invention of fractional reserve banking. Every advantage of the west is due mostly to its superior wealth, and the growth of wealth is impossible without an expanding money supply enabled by fractional reserve banks. This growth in wealth enables everything else from scientific research to military conquest, and the forward-looking nature of financial contracts causes the society to adopt a favorable disposition to planning, stability, and economic investment.

For reference: https://twitter.com/incunabula/status/1434803410902167552

I think a couple different things factor into it. The most important aspect is that European languages use an alphabet with discrete letters, which is relatively uncommon compared to languages like Chinese that use glyphs, or Arabic that uses cursive. This means that Europeans have the easiest time using printing presses, which are required for speedy scientific advancement. Human scientific knowledge exploded shortly after the invention of the printing press. In 1450, things weren't vastly more impressive than a lot of things you'd find in like 50 BCE. There were definitely some new inventions, and gun powder weapons changed up warfare a lot, but really things weren't too different considering 1500 years had passed. Then over the next couple hundred years, before you even get to the industrial revolution, you had people like Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Leonardo da Vinci, etc. Hell this [https://kids.britannica.com/students/article/scientists-at-a-glance/627228](list of greatest ever scientists) I looked up to give myself a few more examples has ends "ancient times" at the 1500s; something clearly happened to speed up science and I think it's obviously the printing press. And that scientific advantage let them achieve the industrial revolution and dominate everywhere in the 1800s.

Secondly, for why the West in particular is most influential than say Russia, I think it is just that the West, being the in the west, was able to colonize the Americas more easily. Obviously the Americas will be strongly influenced by the countries that colonized them. Then doubling up on that, Eastern Europe and then China basically crippled itself when it "chose" communism in the 20th century, communism with the benefit of hindsight being just an objectively worse system than capitalism.

HBD stuff may play into it too, but honestly I think some aliens could've dropped into aboriginal Australia in the 1200s and gene edited every human to have 20 extra IQ points and things wouldn't be too vastly different today in terms of geopolitics if they weren't able to have a discrete alphabet and printing press.

I'll answer this by comparing the West to each of the potential alternatives.

The Middle East: I would say the difference here stems from family structure. The Catholic church banned cousin marriage early on and this had the tendency to reduce clannishness and create a high-trust society in which cooperation on a national scale was possible. In the Muslim world on the other hand, the Arab practice of cousin marriage, which developed as a way to keep valuable herd animals within the clan under resource-poor conditions, spread across the Islamic caliphate and had the opposite effect, likely both reducing IQ due to accumulation of deleterious mutations as well as enforcing or creating tribal structures that inhibited large-scale cooperation and altruistic behavior. The Islamic Golden Age was really more of a flowering of Persian culture under the relative peace of the early Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates rather than a peculiarly Muslim phenomenon, and even they seem to have been dragged down afterwards by the burdens of repeated nomadic invasions and the impact of tribalist politics.

China: The standard answer is Jared Diamond's geographic hypothesis, where the lack of physical barriers in eastern China as compared to Europe promoted political unification, reducing interstate competition and removing incentives for the development of (mostly military) technology to get the edge on rival nations. I don't really buy into the more determinist version of this argument, but the consequences of political unity vs division, whatever their provenance, on technological development seem quite clear. During the Opium Wars Qing Dynasty soldiers were digging up centuries old cannons to use against the British because they were more advanced than anything they had produced recently. Some argue that the Chinese writing system being too difficult to learn is also a contributory factor, as mass literacy is quite important in industrial development, but the success of Japan would seem to contradict that.

India: Here, the caste system concentrated literacy and intelligence among a very small fraction of the population and had more or less the same effect as Arab tribalism in the Middle East. While the Brahmin class is clearly quite intelligent and has produced some of humanity's greatest literary works, as well as thriving on an individual basis in modern developed nations, the segregation and lack of inter-caste cooperation within India itself has created a low-trust society and retarded its development in recent times relative to China.

Eastern Orthodox Europe: Geography may be a factor here as well. Russia was devastated by the Mongol invasions and subsequent centuries long occupation, and since then has tended to centralization, forever paranoid of its flat open borders without any natural barriers. Like in China, the stability of a large autocratic state tends to discourage experimentation and technological advancement. I'll also note that civilization and settled societies came to this area relatively late compared to the lands to its west and south.

Native American Civilizations: These simply did not have enough time to develop, the region having been settled later, and the societies in Mesoamerica and the Andes were just reaching the cultural level of the early Bronze Age on the eve of colonization. There was also minimal communication between the two major civilizations, as large stretches of ocean and tropical jungles lay between them, so each had to evolve in almost complete isolation.

Everywhere Else: I'll go with the cold winters hypothesis here. The descendants of people who migrated north during the ice ages (i.e. Europeans, Middle Easterners (and by extension the Indo-Aryans of South Asia), East Asians, and Native Americans) were under substantial selective pressure for intelligence, long-term planning, and resourcefulness to survive the harsh conditions.

Re the Muslim world, the refusal to adopt the printing press for centuries certainly must have been a factor.

some argue the Chinese writing system being too difficult to learn... but the success of Japan would seem to contradict that.

Isn't Japanese writing quite a bit easier to learn than Chinese, although still more difficult than the Latin Alphabet?

I mean, to be literate in Japanese one must master two phonetic systems (Hiragana and Katakana) in addition to thousands of Kanji characters, with each of those Kanji having potentially multiple readings, not all of which are monosyllabic as they would be in Chinese. If Japan went through the same process as South Korea and phased out the use of characters for most written purposes that would simplify things, but that is definitely not the case at present and the average educated Japanese has memorized as about as many characters as his Chinese counterpart.

I have no proof for this, and believe that it is fundamentally un-provable, but I believe that for whatever reason, Western Europe has developed a culture that is the most highly optimized in existence for embracing and taking full advantage of a long series of compounding technological advancements. I don't have a full list of exactly what this entails, but I believe it includes:

  • Belief in individual liberty - others can do as they please as long as it doesn't harm you

  • Low role of honor/shame/guilt - if you screw up, you can fix it, try again, start over with something new, etc

  • Low dedication to any particular elite - anyone who comes up with a new idea good enough to put them on top can go ahead and take that slot

  • Openness to criticizing yourself and your culture and embracing new ways of doing things

Obviously not every single individual member of this overall culture believes all of these about everything all the time, but I think it's still essentially the dominant core values of the culture. Other cultures succeed or fail in the modern world to the extent that they embrace these values.

Many other cultures have attempted to catch up by embracing the current top level of technology, but if they don't adopt all of the values along with it, they will eventually fall behind when the next advancement comes along. I think of Japan and China, which have at various stages done a pretty good job of adopting the current top level of technological advancement, but seem to inevitably fall behind when the top level moves ahead. Russia could probably be described about the same.

How many of those traits were incorporated back in 1400?

The Spanish and Portuguese colonizations happened before the Enlightenment, before the Reformation. Catholicism was the only game in town. Monarchies were not particularly limited by a sense of forgiveness or openness-to-criticism. Neither were the Greek and Roman influences which shaped the Renaissance.

I don’t think you’re wrong that liberal, secular humanist cultures have an advantage…I just don’t think it’s been around long enough to explain European success.

I couldn't say about 1400 specifically. I'd say I basically think that many aspects of these traits were at least present in sort of a prototype form at least as far back as that. As in, not necessarily openly embraced by the notional leaders of nations, but often present in the mid to upper layers of the societal elite. Stuff like the Enlightenment and Reformation didn't magically appear out of nowhere. I'd note that Columbus was able to secure funding for his voyage despite being completely wrong in his calculations about the size of the Earth. Did anything like that happen in China? I expect they had the resources to do such things, but if they have, I've never heard of it.

Climate seems to have an impact. When you have long winters, you need to plan ahead and develope large ag or industrial capacity.

If you can just pick fruit off a tree all year. No need.

It’s pretty hard to find any warm

Climate country that produces cars. Though I imagine there’s local South American brands I don’t know if perhaps.

If you can just pick fruit off a tree all year. No need.

Is that the case, though? Any tree whose fruits can "just be picked" at any time would be stripped bare pretty quickly, and Malthus would rear his head soon. Hunter-gatherers and horticultors in tropical jungles have to work really hard for their food, water, and toolmaking resources. Even in the lushest jungle the vast majority of biomass is useless to humans. Besides, warm weather does not necessarily lead to lush jungles -- monsoon or savanna climates with long dry seasons often result, and harsh deserts as well. Is life significantly easier for the San or the Yanomamo than for the Inuit?

Mexico and the US south both have pretty large industrial capacities. India and Vietnam do too.

Where climate has a truly large impact seems to be on the development of long distance trade to obtain luxuries that cannot abide cold winters, like sugar or pepper.

But that wasn’t really true until 100+ years after industrialization. The Civil War would have looked pretty different if the South developed industry as fast as the North.

Still, I think any explanation has to start way before the 1800s, so maybe trade is the key.

I think any explanation has to start way before the 1800s

Why not the fact that slavery is a lot more economically feasible when your crops spoil very quickly when picked, have relatively constant harvest times, and don't lend themselves very well to even rudimentary mechanization (ox + plow + wheel and axle will not help you generate more tree fruits to anywhere near the same extent those things will help you get more grain per harvest)?

When labor is cheap, and you inherently need lots of it due to the properties of one's crops, how can you justify spending the money to mechanize for only marginal benefit? The only other real option is defense/arms races, and the American civilizations really had no concept of what kind of destruction the Sea Peoples were going to visit on them when they arrived. No need for selection pressure there, just sit back and relax, we're the only people in the world.

But spoilage was not a problem for the crops that slaves in the New World were imported to work on: cotton and tobacco in the US; sugar in Brazil and the Caribbean. And of course cotton did lend itself to mechanization, in the form of the cotton gin.

I’m talking tropical. The south generally still has winter where ag doesn’t work. Mexicos industrialization is a function of the US industry rather than home grown. Plus Mexico has significant European stock. The indigenous Mexicans are a different story.

My theory has always been that, putting aside motivation, the primary factor in Europe's success was being the first adopters of firearms, as firearms are what decisively gave more sophisticated, urbanized civilizations the edge over simpler, nomadic ones. Up until firearms, it didn't matter how awesome your empire was, it could still get ransacked by nomads with much more limited technologies.

When the Portuguese went after India; they had a decisive military advantage. The Muslim trading ships were, at the time, unarmed(!) and Pedro Alves Cabral was able to seize a ship and loot it. When there were riots in Calicut in response and a bunch of missionaries and other Portuguese were killed he bombarded the city into ruins, apparently without reprisal. When Ethiopia was at risk of falling to Muslim invaders, they famously beseeched the Portuguese for aid and convinced them to send a small force of riflemen, who turned the tide of the war.

Rifles and Cannons were game-changing.

Europe's success was being the first adopters of firearms

Except they weren't the first.

It was the Chinese who invented gunpowder, and the first time firearms see wide-spread use as practical battlefield weapons is in the Middle East during the Byzantine–Ottoman wars of the 14th century.

HBD was always going to give Europe an edge in economic growth coming out of the Black Death, but a combination of state ideology and family norms with geography resulted in that higher GDP being leveraged to expand. Other parts of the world had individual ingredients(Asian HBD or the Islamic world’s missionary ideology), but only Europe had all of them.

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