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Studying the demise of historic civilisations

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191–200 of 359 posts

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#191
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is misleading. I think when tossing out the credence of people such as Wadhington or Jefferson with the slavery problem, there is very little context understood about the cultural norms, science and religion those people lived in. The problem was that they did not see other races as people as they saw themselves. They saw their lives and societies and thought of them as savages. They further justified th…

Slaves were not slaves because whites were trying to save them from themselves. They were slaves because they provided cheap labor. Any other argument is just a rationalization, a story for slave owners to tell themselves to make themselves feel better. Both Washington and Jefferson owned plantations that profited from slave labor. Your comparison with the modern liberal should try to take that fact into account.

I'm obviously not rationalizing slavery. That's absurd. My point is to try to show context of what world those people lived in, I clearly said that.

The parent comment suggests some glaring flaw in their conception of liberty. Was it a glaring flaw? Yes. But it's important to understand that in the context of their belief system.

Do you eat animal products? Have you any idea what kind of abuses take place? Do you consume products produced by people whose lives are defined by insecure access to healthcare, safety or even nutrition? Do you contribute to the horrendous destruction of our environment? Work in sv? How many homeless people do you step over on your way to work?

It would be better if people got off their moral high horses and stopped taking for granted the liberty and prosperiry they have available to them here in America.

And politicians and bureaucrats certainly profit from those very schemes.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sometimes, as sad as it is to imagine, I think you need a good war to refresh a country... Please think about this in concrete terms. Not just the abstract concept 'war', but the specific instances of brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief that happen thousands upon thousands of times in any war. What do you hope to gain that would make this worthwhile? Even accepting all of your dubious pr…

> Even accepting all of your dubious premises, is national renewal worth that price? Depends on two things: 1) One's priorities. Some might view the aggregate (the country) as bigger thing than individual people. Under this view, the importance of the lives (or worse, the importance of having comfortable lives) for a present generation can be deemed worth it to the freedom, prosperity, etc. of generations to come (an…

> The question presupposes that avoiding war would avoid "brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief" later. In many cases, that's not the case. Instead, the decline can bring with it violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief -- only without anybody doing anything before to resist those things.

Sure; if you can convince me that any given war will avert more harm than it causes, I'll (intellectually at least) agree that it's justified. But at large temporal and geographical scales, with insanely complicated and only vaguely understood systems at work, you need an extremely strong argument to justify an action that will definitely lead to terrible consequences in the near term.

The comment we're discussing falls far short of such an argument. In fact it doesn't even seem to aim at making one -- and not just in the sense that it's (understandably) very abstract and lacking any kind of detail. As far as I can tell it is motivated by nationalism, and certainly not by any desire to prevent greater suffering. Its idea of failure sounds more like a (relatively) peaceful transition:

> You know I lately think that, ok, we're mostly past the age of empires physically conquering one another, we're in the age of economic ebbs and flows of established countries.

> And in this kind of age, the thing that sinks a country is not aggression by others, but indifference and lethargy as a country "gets old".

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#193

You know I lately think that, ok, we're mostly past the age of empires physically conquering one another, we're in the age of economic ebbs and flows of established countries. And in this kind of age, the thing that sinks a country is not aggression by others, but indifference and lethargy as a country "gets old". "Getting old" means the political desired and inertia of a rich, settled population get to dominate the…

> Sometimes, as sad as it is to imagine, I think you need a good war to refresh a country... Please think about this in concrete terms. Not just the abstract concept 'war', but the specific instances of brutal violence, intense prolonged suffering, anguish and grief that happen thousands upon thousands of times in any war. What do you hope to gain that would make this worthwhile? Even accepting all of your dubious pr…

This. I'm gonna cut to the chase: that line is probably the most fascist thing I'm going to read all day, and excepting you, Hacker News has failed to call it out. This idea that war can somehow mythically rejuvenate the ethos or spirit of a country isn't unique to fascism though. It was also common in the jingoist imperial western european powers, and partly used as justification for aggression against neighbors and abroad.

This is disgusting to see at the top of the comment thread. Anyone who upvoted that comment needs to engage in some serious introspection.

This tactic, of identifying a problem that may have some real validity, but then making logical leaps into absurdity, is typical of postmodern types like Bannon. How exactly does war solve the problem identified? Who are we to watch against?

It's not always about the words that are said. There's a subtext or more than one. The given justification isn't always the real justification, it just has to be plausible enough to get the real message out, seen in that last line. The overton window opens, and those on the sidelines who might have kept similar thoughts to themselves can now be drawn in and engaged. And that last sentence creeps closer to becoming real.

Oppose these ideas and these tactics, HN.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#194
Many of these great "empires" were simply extended looting machines, once they ran out of looting opportunities they collapsed in the same way that a Ponzi collapses when it run out of new "investors". While things were good, it was all golden, glitter and glam, and many tall buildings.

Loot of course takes many forms, gold, silvers, the work of serfs, the work of slaves, monopolies on trade routes, monopolies on trades itself and of course looting of weak environments itself.

The aftermath is what is sustainable, but this difference between the glitter and the sustainable is very boring and what the historians call a dark age or dark period because its not newsworthy even thought it is actually the origin of the next age of expansion.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#195
post #27

Let me throw a wrench into things with a provocative statement (which I have no intention of citing support for): The affluence of Western Europe and the US was not built on hard work and ingenuity so much as the exploitation of cheap labor and the sudden access to deep veins of basic resources or economic/industrial efficiencies which were either already extant but inaccessible without a critical mass of capital, or…

I think the causality goes the other way around. If the Aztecs could have conquered the world, they would have. It's not as if they were a particularly nice people.

Anyway, this is an argument people will still be having 200 years in the future.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#196
post #163
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> Does it seem to anyone else that they have conflated "civilization" and "political entity" for lack of a better term? They even got that wrong. The Roman Republic, the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire are the same political entity. Arguably the Ottoman Empire was as well, since the Ottomans basically left the Byzantine bureaucracy intact. The Sultan even used the title Caesar and declared himself protector o…

They share their origin in the same political entity, but have clearly different cultures and developed in different directions. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire had a massive impact on Western Europe. There's also the medieval Holy Roman Empire which was officially a continuation of the Western Roman Empire, and at odds with the Byzantine Empire because they considered themselves the only legitimate Roman Em…

This reminds me of a conversation I had yesterday with one of my daughters about species, specifically Homo Sapiens, but generally as well.

She was asking who the first Homo Sapiens was. I suggested that if there was such a person, if an anthropologist had been there they wouldn’t have seen anything special happening. The way they would have categorised hominid species would depend on the populations they saw at that time.

It’s the same with civilisations. How we categorise them is temporally dependent and is in fact an artefact of language. Reality doesn’t care if our linguistic categorizations make sense, or how they are limited.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#197
post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is misleading. I think when tossing out the credence of people such as Wadhington or Jefferson with the slavery problem, there is very little context understood about the cultural norms, science and religion those people lived in. The problem was that they did not see other races as people as they saw themselves. They saw their lives and societies and thought of them as savages. They further justified th…

> The problem was that they did not see other races as people as they saw themselves. They saw their lives and societies and thought of them as savages. Yes > religion (which was more unquestionable No - America was founded as a country on freedom of religion, which is why it ended up with thousands of little groups from a state of polyamorists to some guys who really liked making furniture. > than say, global warmin…

Yes, Jefferson wrote into the original draft of the constitution outlawed slavery, but the southern states refused to sign on to that. Historical facts and context like that do not invalidate all the good done by the Founding Fathers. That is my point.

I'm not aware you are rebelling against our government for the atrocities which exist in the world today.

The rest of your post is dismissive of not asinine, and even against HN guidelines.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

putting the EU in that list is fishy and a reminder that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, especially for evaluating contemporary information.

I'm sure everyone will be shocked to hear such things of an article that begins with a highlighted "The neutrality of this article is disputed.".

people are literally linking it as source but ok.

https://xkcd.com/978/

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sure, evolution and ideas take time, but it seems it took much less time once the right mindset was in place. Right. But come to think of it, that mindset is, too, a technology. It took a while to develop, and its evolution seems to be intertwined with the inventions humans made over time, and the shape societies took.

mindset is, too, a technology Hrm... Would you consider that independent of technical or causal (scientific) knowledge? Is it values, or more than just that?

I don't think it's just values. Knowledge and technology plays into this too.

I don't have a fully fleshed out model in my head just yet, but I imagine it like this: humans seem to have a pretty fixed emotional and cognitive makeup. What changes is the landscape in which we operate - what technologies are available, what customs exist in our times, what are the core "cultural memes". Kind of like water flowing downhill - a simple process in itself, but where it goes and what shape it takes depends on the landscape it's flowing through, and the flow itself shapes that landscape over time.

Another way of viewing this: we humans are like somewhat fixed neurons, but it's the connections we make with each other that change. Connections both to our contemporaries through complex social structures, as well as to the past, through knowledge accumulated in books and traditions, and other artifacts of past cultures.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"and got behind when the English started using machine labour" What do you mean by machine labour here? If you're referring to steam engines I think you're drawing a causal link that isn't justified. The dates at best line up to early steam engines. They were massively inefficient and used for pumping out mines, they weren't exactly transformative to the nation.

What were those mines producing?

Tin and copper in Cornish mines, was the main driver early on.

That isn't really the point, yes it was the 'age of steam' but in reality it made a few marginal mines profitable. There were no steam trains, no steam ships, no wide spread mechanisation.

Britain wasn't some backwater that was propelled ahead of spain due to accidentally discovering steam power. It was already a power in it own right, with trading networks and markets for these raw materials, that was the impetus for the development of steam.

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