Studying the demise of historic civilisations • Hacker News Board

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#71

Post by talonx » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:40 AM UTC

KorematsuFred wrote: post #14

Typical western garbage. Applying vague nation state ideas to civilization. Hindus for example have seen thousands of years as their own unbroken history. Many mantras that I chant today are at least 1500 year old.

I think you are being downvoted for the unneeded name calling.

But the article does not seem to do a great job in terms of accuracy or being able to distinguish between civilizations and empires. E.g. "Mahanjanapadas" should be "Mahajanapadas", and the Magadha empire was part of an existing civilization.

This is apart from the contested dates that the author seems to accept, without citing any sources.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#72

Post by mamon » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:41 AM UTC

yks wrote: post #20

budadre75 wrote: post #13

The US lasted 243 years. Is it the oldest modern nation? I wonder, how will the modern nations different from the ancient ones?

it is not, case in point: Great Britain

Also: Poland, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, pretty much every European nation.

Edit: Seems that GP conflates "nation" and "state". If we're counting continuity of government, they probably only Great Britain is a good example, other countries had undergone many changes, from absolutism, to constitutional monarchy, to non-existence, to democracy, to fascist dictatorships.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#73

Post by riffraff » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:46 AM UTC

discodave wrote: post #48

adrianN wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we're past the age of physical conquering. It's been less than a hundred years since the last World War. That's not particularly long, historically speaking. The pattern seems to be that a new major war starts not long after the eyewitnesses of the last one have all died. If that holds true, the next few decades or so will be interesting.

Remember that the bulk of the worlds population doesn't live in the Anglosphere, or Europe. E.g. if you're from the Middle East, or Africa then you might know a thing or two about revolution, if not war itself. Additionally, the US has now been engaged in Afghanistan longer than they were in Vietnam. There's a whole generation of Americans who know all about war. In the US, the generation who served in Afghanistan an…

also, right at the border of continental Europe we had that "russia just annexed a part of ucraine" a couple years ago.

Have people already forgotten that?

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#74

Post by wallace_f » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:47 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #51

ddxxdd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think a King George Washington would preside over a young America as affluent as President George Washington did. Tyranny has a way of sequestering innovative spirit.

Washington was a slave owner. Tyranny, but only for some people.

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 their ideology with both religion (which was more unquestionable than say, global warming is today) and scientific racism, which did things like measure brain size of different races.

The slave owner like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson was in some ways like an extreme version of the modern liberal -- seeing the person of color as needing an authority to rule over them and provide them with things like welfare, access to education, etc.

This has nothing to do with justifying slavery or ignoring that extreme abuses occured with such institutionalized imbalance of power. What I mean to say is to not throw away the baby with the bathwater. Some of the Founding Fathers created the greatest society to ever grace the earth and they deserve some credit for their heroic bravery and ideas on liberty, even if they lived in a truly fucked up world and had trouble seeing past that.

Edit: downvote away, I guess

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#75

Post by trentmb » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:47 AM UTC

adrianN wrote: post #26

supernova87a wrote: post #21

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…

I don't think we're past the age of physical conquering. It's been less than a hundred years since the last World War. That's not particularly long, historically speaking. The pattern seems to be that a new major war starts not long after the eyewitnesses of the last one have all died. If that holds true, the next few decades or so will be interesting.

Crimea

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#76

Post by agumonkey » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:47 AM UTC

remarkEon wrote: post #42

digitaltrees wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get rid of multi generational transfers of wealth. Make each generation start from scratch. I know it's easier said than done as not all assets are fungible or distributable (social networks, geography etc) but it would make a difference. I read recently that the same families that controlled most the wealth in Florence in the 1600 still control most the wealth now, that's probably not good for scrappy innovation.

>...it would make a difference. It sure would. If I wanted to design a system to throw society into abject chaos, basically permanently, I can’t think of a better way than a rule of “make it impossible to build something for your children”. That idea is anti-family, it’s anti-civil-society, and it’s anti-civilization.

legacy is indeed primordial, that said I get the above idea, maybe make it an indirect asset to unlock after some threshold..

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#77

Post by riffraff » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:48 AM UTC

remarkEon wrote: post #67

guelo wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Civilization has been a long struggle to prevent powerful people from passing on their wealth and power to their children. I mean, most of the history of civilization has indeed functioned the way you describe, but many of the achievements of the past few hundred years has been thanks to the monumental effort to strengthen meritocracy, rule of law and democracy in order to limit the transfer of power hereditarily.

The exact opposite of this is true. Great leaps forward in Civilization have come from things like Empire, explicitly run by hereditary ruling classes, and technological advances. In today’s world the latter now eclipses the former. There’s no reason, in my mind, to think that that ratio will (or should) remain.

and yet the largest improvements in life quality have occurred in the last century, when most of the great empires have fallen.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#78

Post by raverbashing » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:50 AM UTC

ajross wrote: post #62

raverbashing wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several other empires exploited resources and used "free" labor, but only recently they invented industries/mass production, contributed to scientific progress and improved their quality of life with it. Slavery had a very high human cost and it was also something that prevented the evolution of better options. Edit: see below for a better explanation

Do you have an example of a lasting empire that... did not do all of that stuff? I mean, honestly that statement seems kind of laughably wrong.

Compare the evolution of the big empires of the past with the evolution in the last 500 years or even the last 250 years.

The Roman Empire had a water system and concrete to make the Coliseum. Relied on slave labour up until the end. Made a plant that was used as contraception extinct.

Given the time they stood, I'd say their scientific/mathematical progress was nimble.

Egyptian empire: invented geometry, still had slaves pushing stones up to form pyramids.

The Portuguese and the Spanish conquered half the world, but still relied on manual labour and got behind when the English started using machine labour.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#79

Post by LoSboccacc » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:51 AM UTC

Iv wrote: post #65

bilbo0s wrote: post #32

Does it seem to anyone else that they have conflated "civilization" and "political entity" for lack of a better term? Serious question. It just seems that a lot of entries on this list are actually part of the same civilization. In the same way that I would consider the Spanish Empire, the British Empire, and the American Empire to be really all a part of the same Western Civilization. But maybe my thinking is totall…

"In the graphic below, I have compared the lifespan of various civilisations, which I define as a society with agriculture, multiple cities, military dominance in its geographical region and a continuous political structure. Given this definition, all empires are civilisations, but not all civilisations are empires." Under this definition, the British Empire and the USA are totally different civilizations. You are ta…

the roman political structure was stable between the republic and empires.

and if you accept the claim that civil wars or political discontinuity are enough to split a civilization the graph is still fishy because why is the empire not split around the 160something civil war while egypt was split around ruling dynasties?

it's not much consistent, all in all determining the civilization arcs is hard, but you need some form of hard barrier if you want to use the data in such fashion as averaging or deriving any conclusion from it.

Re: Studying the demise of historic civilisations

#80

Post by wallace_f » Tue, Mar 05, 2019, 6:52 AM UTC

bsanr wrote: 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…

Other nations such as China or Russia have comparable or arguably better cheap labor stocks or natural resources. Then Japan has almost zero natural resources and nearly had a shot at taking over the world...