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An anonymous substacker has written up a good piece on the Rise of the West. Essentially, he comes to the conclusion that the divergence began in the 1000-1500 A.D. period and that subsequent colonisation efforts by Europe of the rest of the world was simply an outgrowth of those earlier advantages.
This of course upends the familiar trope of "the West got rich by the backs of the Third World" so popular with leftists in the West and in countries like India, across the political spectrum. I bring this up because if the poor countries of the world today have any hope of catching up, they should first re-examine honestly why they fell behind in the first place. Yet I see precious little of that, except mostly moral grandstanding about the evils of the exploitative West.
This also has domestic political implications because a lot of white guilt-driven narratives are sprung from the narrative that the West got rich by exploitation and thus the logical corollary is that evil white people should repent (preferably through monetary reparations). The narrative that colonisation was simply a natural outgrowth of European pre-existing advantages that grew over time naturally undermines it. One could also note that the Barbary slave trade, or the slave auctions in the Ottoman Empire, shows that the Third World was far from innocent. But of course these historical facts don't have high political payoffs in the contemporary era, so they are ignored or underplayed.
I don't fully agree that these narratives are sprung from the theory that whites got rich from exploitation.
The founding cause is the notion that we are all equal. It logically follows that if one group got 'ahead' of another, that they did so at the expense of someone else. How else could you explain the fact that one group has so much whilst another has so little? And it seems to be an unfortunate case of basic human intuition to suspect foul play whenever two sides get widely divergent results, especially if they are supposed to be equal.
When you get into the weeds of debunking theories that arise from being logically necessitated you are just slamming your head into a concrete wall. A logically necessitated theory can't ultimately be untrue. It can't be false. It's logically derived from a greater truth. It's necessitated. It has to be true in some way.
So long as you don't engage with that greater truth you will never get anywhere. In fact, people are more likely to hate you for casting aspersions on their theory since any theory you have, that doesn't align with what is logically necessitated, has to be, in some way, untrue. A lie, a play on words, a twist on reason. And what kind of a person would do such a thing?
The larger problem is that the greater truth isn't always derived at via the same way. So you might have a person who believes because their teacher said all human beings are equal. And from there the Grand Theory of Evil Whitey intuitively followed. Or you have a person who was exposed to Civil Rights propaganda as a child and started seeing black people as inherently more virtuous than white people. Or a person who simply adopts and believes in the dominant opinion of their environment for no other reason than it being that. What science man says must be true.
I think these sort of articles act as a cross between two worlds. The activist HBD types, that frame themselves as challenging a hegemony of environmentalism or whatever. And the 'I'm just doing research' types, who make contradictory theories to the 'hegemony' but don't make explicit 'the hegemony is wrong' arguments.
There is a tendency to excuse the 'just doing research' types in 'rationalist circles' for being more 'pure of heart', along with the general appeal of stats and graphs. But I think ultimately the instincts of those who decry both types of HBD enjoyers as nazis are more correct than not. You can't entertain these ideas without abandoning the idea that everyone is equal. And regardless of your motives or intent, abandoning the idea of equality will inevitably lead to the same kind of logically necessitated truths that we find in those who embrace the notion of universal human equality.
Agree with everything you said but I think the meaning is unclear on this last sentence. Embrace should be reject. Or maybe those who embrace the rejection of equality.
Or do you mean that they're like mirror images of eachother? 'Favorable image of whites' camp vs the 'favorable image of blacks' posse?
I mean the latter. Not to make the 'debate' out to be too contrived or anything. There's still an objective truth out there. But people undeniably behave in this way.
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