Riffing on this, I think an interesting and fundamental phenomenon of societies is exactly their frequent inability to imagine their successors, or even the possibility of a successor. Each seeing themselves as a logical peak of the progressive arrow history, especially post-enlightenment (cf. Fukuyama's (in)famous The End of History[0]).
It seems to boil down to the sort of societal consensus definition of "us" that serves as a foundation for the individual definitions of "me" that comprise a society. It's why societies seem to tend to see their peers and predecessors as lesser as well; they are all their own "us"es, in some ways inaccessible to our "us". They may say the same words, but mean different things. They have the same human equipment for reasoning and synthesis, but a different set of priors from which this calculus manipulates and concludes. They seem dumb because they don't come to the same obvious conclusions we do.
And it seems to motivate conservative behavior, by way of fear. At least we can grapple and argue with our contemporaries, and scorn our predecessors. We know what they think, or at least we think we know what they think, filtered through the lens of what we think. But as a societal consensus starts to shift, and we start seeing new priors appearing, things start to get uncomfortable. We see a glimpse of a future we don't understand; we used to be with "it" but "it" changed[1]. We don't know anymore what the next ones will think. What they will be like.
They will still be humans, but they will be a different us, completely inaccessible to our us.
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[0] I know his philosophy is more a bit more nuanced, but it's such a perfect and unfortunate phrasing, accepted so implicitly and literally.
"We were hunters and foragers. The frontier was everywhere. We were bounded only by the earth, and the ocean, and the sky. The open road still softly calls. Our little terraqueous globe as the madhouse of those hundred thousand millions of worlds. We, who cannot even put our own planetary home in order, riven with rivalries and hatreds; are we to venture out into space?
By the time we are ready to settle even the nearest other planetary systems, we will have changed. The simple passage of so many generations will have changed us; necessity will have changed us. We are… an adaptable species. It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us, but with more of our strengths, and fewer of our weaknesses; more confident, farseeing, capable and prudent.
For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness. What new wonders undreamt of in our time, will we have wrought in another generation, and another? How far will our nomadic species have wandered, by the end of the next century, and the next millennium?
Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds through the solar system, and beyond, will be unified, by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by the knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the universe, come from Earth. They will gaze up and strain to find the blue dot in their skies. They will marvel at how vulnerable the repository of all our potential once was, how perilous our infancy, how humble our beginnings, how many rivers we had to cross, before we found our way."
Humans didn’t have such a perspective as they crossed oceans and continents, but these new spaces they explored became new spheres of competition and warfare.
My guess would be that space colonization if and when we reach that point will quickly turn into competition, rivalry, and warfare just like every other frontier in human history.
Even the first extra-terrestrial body humans set foot on was done in the context of the US-Soviet Space Race with the knowledge that the knowledge of rocketry gained in space exploration would also be useful for ICBMs.
Even in the Expanse it was more of a cold war between Earth and Mars, and a class war between the belters and the rest of the solar system. Globalization and the advent of planet-scale weapons have made relative peace and cooperation the more sensible option. The only wildcard is a sovereignty that has nothing to lose, a bitter history, and the power to exact real harm, and the closest we have to that in modern times is Russia. And the best way to avert this harm is to ensure no-one has nothing to lose.
But as I've said before on this forum, The Expanse isn't facts.
Of course it isn’t facts. But it more closely aligns with what we know of human history and nature than the belief that humans will ever be at peace with one another.
Also a fact is that we haven’t seen a hot war directly between two major economic powers since WWII. Quality of life and the global commerce that drives it has been trending upward for some time. Cooperation has simply been recognised as the more fruitful path, but a global scarcity of vital resources could change that equation though.
Not just societies frankly -- people individually believe this as well, psychologists call it the "end-of-history illusion". Quoting Wikipedia:
> The end-of-history illusion is a psychological illusion in which individuals of all ages believe that they have experienced significant personal growth and changes in tastes up to the present moment, but will not substantially grow or mature in the future. Despite recognizing that their perceptions have evolved, individuals predict that their perceptions will remain roughly the same in the future.
I deliberately re-read what I wrote last week, last month, last year, last decade and a quarter century ago, less frequently with each jump, to be sure I'm conscious to what extent my beliefs about the world have changed, what I was wrong about and why and to re-examine past beliefs in light of present knowledge.
Google and Facebook among others actually provide a means to fetch periodic dumps of my data for this purpose, on sites like HN I use their history mechanism to look back through what I wrote e.g.
> The First Sale doctrine gives people who _buy_ something all rights needed to make use of it.
> It is... disappointing that modern courts have allowed the First Sale doctrine to be watered down so that today there's every chance you will buy something, paying good money, and then be confronted with new "terms" for how you may use the thing you purchased. But it's not in general clear that such an approach is legal.
That's me back in 2017 on a thread about GPL enforcement where people got into software licensing
I think predicting the exact successor societies would be difficult, but there's a lot of SF out there that predicts potential ones. Like the Ousters in the Dan Simmons' Hyperion series or the Drummers in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age or various other flavors of u- or dys-topias.
Or even the Millenia of premillennial dispensationalists, for a religious alternative.
I'd argue some of those are more radical imaginations than much of what actually followed past ages.
I have been thinking lately about that as a defining feature of science fiction, or I guess speculative fiction more broadly; thought experiments into other "us"es. What it's like to be something else. I don't mean to say that as if it's some novel position, just a particular facet that has been resonating.
The eschatology angle is a super interesting one I hadn't considered. If anything though, especially for the millenarian/apocalyptic flavors, it seems like almost the platonic ideal of being unable to imagine a successor; we are the end, and when we end, the world ends, preserving us forever.
And incidentally, there is still resistance there. "Don't immanentize the eschaton!"
> Or even the Millenia of premillennial dispensationalists, for a religious alternative.
> I'd argue some of those are more radical imaginations than much of what actually followed past ages.
This. People throughout history have frequently predicted the end of the civilization they lived in, they just tended to get it wrong, usually because their prediction was some fantasy involving superhuman powers ending the world as we know it, and not just dumb culture wars and succession crises and poor resource allocation and the neighbouring civilization being a bit stronger and more adaptable.
Frankly, even really understanding the moment is impossible, let alone something as distant as the past, or the as yet not-existing future.
That's true for the individual, and the society.
Enlightenment MIGHT come close, but the first thing in traditions that have that as an option/goal is realizing that, well, knowing things objectively/without delusions is basically actually impossible and the concept of 'us' or 'I' is basically one of those delusions. We can have FEWER delusions, and with luck we can be aware of most of them, but we can't really have zero.
So we constrict our information, scope, and framing down to what we consider useful in that moment, and the narratives come from that. Sometimes it's pretty close to 'truth' (as in, matches objectively verifiable facts with a minimal amount of suspension of disbelief, fantasy, or outright delusion), and provides useful information.
sometimes... well, it does not. Often/usually, frankly.
It requires extremely rigorous approaches to get close to anything else, and frankly the forest gets lost for the trees 99.99% of the time.
> Frankly, even really understanding the moment is impossible, let alone something as distant as the past, or the as yet not-existing future.
I thought that too before, but now I'm not so sure.
Human individuals don't differ from each other that much. Sure there's a wide spectrum of physical and mental attributes such as intelligence, perseverance, confidence, etc.
But the basic motivations and behavioural patterns are close to identical, bar really exceptional outliers like Napoleon or von Neumann.
There was a time when I would have believed that too. It’s a probabilistic type view, which in general, on average works out to be mostly correct.
In the physics analogy, I imagine thinking of it like heat.
But, if you pick any individual, just like if you go to an individual atom, you will find that velocity, position, etc. is still impossible to predict except as probabilities on a curve. And unlike atoms, people have strong incentives to lie (to themselves and others), and a rather impressive ability to do so.
And given enough atoms/people or time, you WILL find the truly unpredictable. And you will often find the nonsensical, the self destructive, etc.
The general human motivations (or at least what we perceive them as) are also statistical averages. It doesn’t take much looking to find folks with very, very different ways of acting on them than what we’d consider normal.
Due to this fractal nature of the complexity of reality, it is a delusion thinking anyone can understand the moment. Truly, anyways.
Everything is through a lens, it has to be, or it would be impossible to comprehend at all.
Even someone with a large iron rod rammed through their brain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phineas_Gage) doesn't deviate that much from the median, at least not as much as the aformentioned examples of Napoleon, von Neumann, etc...
So it seems difficult to believe anyone currently alive and capable of walking around can be meaningfully even more different.
Of course people can claim a limitless degree of difference, but their actual behaviour is what matters, not verbal claims.
Yes I would classify Genghis Khan, Napoleon, etc., as probably even farther from the median adult human then Phineas Gage type oddities.
But this is splitting hairs since the main point is that the maximal case can't possibly be that much more extreme then already well documented cases.
Because only the observable actions of humans in the world is after all what we're capable of perceiving directly. And this is limited to what their body, including vocal chords, is physically capable of doing, no matter how many mental irregularities they have.
Or are you confused about something else?
It's unclear what the meaning of the rest of your comment is.
I’m a bit confused by what your point is, since you seem to be agreeing with me - but taking a static view?
You seem to be saying ‘the current maximal can’t be more than the historical outliers, therefore people are predictable’, while my point is that you can’t actually know that, or fundamentally 100% predict an individual (or a group, really) because those historical outliers obviously occurred and were not obvious until after they had occurred.
Ghenghis Khan existed before he conquered the largest empire in recorded history.
Von Neumann existed before he did what he did.
Einstein existed before he did what he did.
John Wayne Gacy existed before he did what he did.
And there are millions of other examples less extreme, but still important and impactful.
And the next unpredicted maximal person (of whatever stripe) will also exist before you know they are the next maximal person - in whatever direction they happen to be in.
It’s fundamental.
And we’re not even talking about the weird biological stuff - those we had innate immunity to the black plague when it ravaged Europe, or those with innate immunity to HIV being just some very basic examples.
As to your other point I guess - sure, we don’t expect to run across someone that doesn’t need air, and it’s pretty unlikely.
But for example, at some point, before life crawled out of the oceans, it would have been considered impossible to do that. But then something did. It took (depending on the theory or what you attribute causes to) hundreds of millions to billions of years for it to happen (hence my comment on time and/or population), but it did occur.
From the perspective of Groups, History is replete with examples of long tail probabilities occurring and causing major shifts. Not recognizing that they can and will happen, eventually, sets us up for failure, because we refuse to recognize them until too late.
From the perspective of Individuals, near as I can tell it’s impossible to truly even know ourselves, let alone another person. Thinking we have it all figured out is a comfortable delusion. Often it’s functional enough, it works well enough to be ok.
But ask anyone who’s been through a custody dispute and I doubt you’ll get a comforting response on that front.
I’m not saying the X-men are real or ever will be. I’m not saying everyone is a serial killer, or a Napoleon.
Using frequentist thinking when dealing with people is useful the vast majority of the time.
But if you think it’s really true all the time, it isn’t. It’s important to be aware of its limitations.
> You seem to be saying ‘the current maximal can’t be more than the historical outliers, therefore people are predictable’, while my point is that you can’t actually know that, or fundamentally 100% predict an individual (or a group, really) because those historical outliers obviously occurred and were not obvious until after they had occurred.
No, please reread what I said, I never narrowed it down to 'historical outliers' only.
The human genome has been sequenced, brain structure has been analyzed (though we don't precisely know how each piece corresponds to mental phenomena), and so on.
So even ignoring historical outliers, there is still a maximum possible deviation that an adult human brain can physically be capable of.
And the the upper and lower bounds are known. It's not like someone can have a 5x larger brain or a brain with 12 lobes, or a brain with copper interconnections. So there are only outliers within a certain range.
Plus, regardless of how developed or extremely different mental phenomena is, the possible range that others can see is much more finite, bound by signalling constraints and so on. You can only blink your eyes so fast, you can only move your limbs so fast, vocal chords have a speed limit, etc...
For example, a human brain could not function if an iron rod was rammed through the brain stem instead, so if you know this happened to someone, you also can infer there's only one possible mental state they could be in, regardless of any other factors or combination of factors.
There definitely are no outliers in this case.
Another example would be the 24 fps frame rate in film. This was chosen precisely because extensive testing showed this was fast enough to fool the brain into seeing motion without exception.
If someone claims otherwise you can repeat the same testing procedures to determine with certainty, but very likely there are no outliers either in this case.
There probably are a couple hundred hard constraints like this that circumscribes all possible near-future human individual behaviour. Though of course group complexity and more distant scenarios such as cyborgs, etc., would still be unbounded.
Except, as medicine has discovered over and over again, many of those things are not actually true if you get a large enough sample size. And there are plenty of historical examples of behavior that, frankly, no one is going to be able to rationalize today, such as monks meditating themselves to death sealed inside their own tombs.
To pick an example - human brain size:
1 in 50 babies have brains that develop noticeably too large for the curve. Digging into it has identified a gene that regulates Brain sizes. There are of course many variations and mutations of that gene.
[https://news.weill.cornell.edu/news/2014/04/single-gene-muta...]
Can someone survive on their own, right now with severe spinal cord trauma? No.
But we can keep their body alive, and they can do basic communication with technical means. They’re locked in, but they aren’t cut off anymore.
Even in the past, people could survive for some time with help with severe and traumatic brain stem damage. I personally know someone who suffered a severe hemorrhagic stroke in her brain stem over a decade ago, was in a coma for months, and recovered. Today the only difference you can see is her fine motor control isn’t as good.
It wasn’t an iron rod, but I doubt it will be much longer before we can help the body recover from something like that too. A century ago, she would definitely have just been dead.
Another example: 24 fps is also not an absolute hard limit or minimum anything.
It’s a picked point where almost everyone can see simulated motion without having to work too hard (on the producer or consumer sides), it’s economical to produce things in (a major problem back in the day when it was all literal film), etc.
It is very noticeably not lifelike to almost everyone. Which is fine for its purpose. People can see motion at far lower frame rates (a flip book being a trivial example), and can see that the motion is artificial at far higher frame rates - picking out that a ‘bad’ frame was stuck into a higher rate feed for instance, or that it’s artificial and not real even in immersive environments (though that is much trickier to create a real test due to technical limitations now, everything we can do is pretty obviously fake to most humans).
This is discoverable with sample sizes of hundreds, at most, and I expect you’ve personally experienced this too.
A friend who hears the sound that no one else can hear in a piece of electronics, for instance.
The further from the median we get, the rarer the deviations get of course. And near as we can tell, the probability of faster than light travel, or as you note a copper brainstem, or mind control is zero. At least unless we have evidence it isn’t. If there was some evolutionary advantage and some path via physics to do it (so, still zero odds on the mind control thing).
But the deviations in people in reality are far, far wider than you are stating or implying.
Even your note on the human genome reinforces this. We did not, and could not, and still can’t, sequence every humans genome in any deterministic way. Even the human genome sequencing we have done has just gone to show that it isn’t really very useful or what we thought it was.
Just to name a few factors - Epigenetics, methylation, and a host of other things have made it really clear that what we thought was ‘the story’ is really not. But it is part of it. And that is without even going into Chimeras, which we’ve found more and more of.
What you’re describing is the ‘all the hard problems in physics are solved’ fallacy.
Life is not that easy, for better or worse.
It can be useful to think it is though when we have something to do though.
You are reading much more expansive claims into my wording then the actual claim. I quite carefully chose the wording.
For example, the 24 fps limit is only regarding fooling the brain into perceiving motion, I never commented on the qualitative perception of said motion. Or whether this motion could be revealed to be fake by inserting interstitial frames, etc.
People ‘see’ motion at 8fps too. It’s just a bit more jarring sometimes. And people can tell it’s artificial even at 60fps.
I wasn’t talking about faking motion by interspersing interstitials, I’m saying some people (but not all) can reliably detect a single ‘bad’ interstitial frames presence at 60+ fps.
The majority of your examples are the same kind of BS you keep trying to sell. Approximations, and generalizations, often trivially disprovable with even a little research and/or independent thinking.
You are again not carefully reading what I wrote. So it's not worth my time to continue providing a substantive response.
Maybe another passing reader will chime in, but I doubt it considering nearly all HN readers would prefer to avoid engaging with low-effort dismissals lacking in credibility.
I think that it is equally hard determining causes. We can clearly see differences between humans in the past and humans as we are today. Because humans are in the past, we easily think they are lesser and more stupid than our technological superior selves. But they didn’t have mass-produced cars and roads everywhere, so they didn’t die of weight-related heart failure. But labor was tougher, so perhaps those same men were getting drunk every night.
Our former selves realized everyone should have a right toward education, but we barely teach the trivium, the education of a free man. Instead we have politicized our education instead of requiring students to read Plato because even our teachers haven’t read him.
It's dangerous to assert that this is a "fundamental" behavior, because it's not always true. Certainly, in USA and the broader West there is an almost total lack of vision right now, from leaders to cultural fabric. We obsess over Nth-derivative Disney films: where is Ursula Le Guin?
Visionaries are rejected (or killed, in the 60s) for rocking the boat, innovation has been gutted by worn as a skin suit by Wall St. We are totally uncurious about our foreign peers, some of whom are outpacing us in substantial ways.
Pop culture is pop culture and only really gets interesting in brief flashes.
> where is Ursula Le Guin?
We've got a whole lot of great speculative fiction these days, but there's no one dominant. It's a curse and benefit of the long tail.
> there is an almost total lack of vision right now
I think the big thing we're missing is some shared set of optimism and an idea of what kinds of things we should want for ourselves. We're divided; we're feeling ennui from being at a bit of a local maximum in a whole lot of ways; looming doom of various kinds (climate, geopolitical, economic) suppresses us.
> innovation has been gutted by worn as a skin suit by Wall St.
That whole financial, administrative, and managerial class has to shrink. Look, finance is a superpower and a key export of the West and it would be a mistake to gut it, but to continue to allow it to grow without bound is an equally big mistake.
Agreed! I'm testing a hypothesis here through the dialectic, not asserting one!
There are definitely visionaries and prophets and doom-seers in each society; when I talk about societal consensus I'm talking about averages.
Though I'd hesitate to agree that vision === imagination of successors. To my mind, there's a difference between improving the extant, and having a new one. Maybe you can get to the latter by way of the former over time, and that way you get into "Gentle Seduction"[0] territory. But that also kind of amounts to a lack of imagination, and a rejection of endings.
> Where is Ursula Le Guin?
Where indeed! Though I haven't given enough of the newer generations of sci fi authors a chance myself, to be fair.
Visionaries continue to be around, but it's so much easier to make noise that you have to really work to sift the wheat from the chaff. It's in Wall Street's best interest to have you thinking that when they stop innovating innovation is dead. But I really think this is what our culture looks like when it's becoming.
> Each seeing themselves as a logical peak of the progressive arrow history, especially post-enlightenment
I'm not actually sure this is the case of pre-modern civilizations. I don't think they really had a conception of history moving in a progressive arrow, they tended to think of time as being cyclical and things would just naturally rise and fall. For any given person their lifestyles were likely to be broadly similar to their grandparents' lifestyles and the pace of change would have been very slow and manageable.
It's really not until the age of sail and discovery of the new world by Europeans that we start to see transformative changes within individual lifespans to the actual fundamentals of peoples' lifestyles and foodways and how economic production works. Before then it's just like, every 100-200 years or so barbarians attack you while you're militarily weak and your empire collapses and everyone gets raped and/or enslaved. So it goes.
Part of it is we can't see the forest for the trees. From where we stand we easily and confidently determine the signing of the Declaration of Independence as a major turning point in history of our country and the world, but I suspect that for many living at the time in America it was just some stuff happening.
> Riffing on this, I think an interesting and fundamental phenomenon of societies is exactly their frequent inability to imagine their successors, or even the possibility of a successor. Each seeing themselves as a logical peak of the progressive arrow history, especially post-enlightenment (cf. Fukuyama's (in)famous The End of History[0]).
"Late stage capitalism" is a good example of this. Although in some ways it's possibly closer to secular End Times rhetoric.
"Late stage capitalism" is the opposite. People just keep saying it claiming history is going to resume soon, and have been saying it since it was invented 110-ish years ago, and yet capitalism continues to not go anywhere.
I don't know. I don't find it difficult to believe capitalism can gradually morph into something else in say 500 or 1000 years, so that you could point at one end (let's say early 20th century) and say "this was capitalism" and at the other end 1000 years from now and say "this isn't capitalism by any reasonable meaning of the word" (I mean, not "future capitalism" but something that supersedes it and has a different shape). And it could also reasonably be believed by future historians that there was an era called "late stage capitalism" just like they now call a period of history the late middle ages.
It's just that in the span of some generations you wouldn't be able to recognize the phenomenon slowly unfolding.
I'm reminded of how the Roman Empire at the time of its big split wasn't acknowledged by its citizens as "Western" or "Eastern", and its slowly unfolding undoing wasn't recognized either. Had you asked a Roman citizen, he/she would have been surprised by the question: there was only one Roman Empire. And they believed it would last forever.
I doubt it’ll take that long. Capitalism depends on being able to make a profit.
It’s possible quite soon that everything will be commoditized (designed, built, and recycled by machines ultra-cheaply) and nothing will be profitable.
The Bronze age collapse is one of my favorite topics in History. And I see a lot of parallels between the centralized palace economies that produced much brittleness then and the 'everything is controlled by networked digital computers and defined in software' Ruby Goldberg machine of a civilization we have now.
Covid saw a lot of supply chain problems, and suddenly shorter, directer, more local supply chains were preferable to highly optimised international ones. If I'm not mistaken, the bronze age collapse also came from collapsing international supply chains, so maybe that's a lesson for us: depend less on stuff produced on the other side of the world, and more on local products. The international stuff is fine for luxuries, but not for essentials. I guess this is why the US and EU are trying to get more tech manufactured locally again, instead of depending on Taiwan that might be invaded by China.
How much was it the advent of better technology that didn't require those supply chains? Iron. In which case the lesson is: have more and more complex supply chains, tie us all together, don't allow us to be independent because civilisation _is_ that interdependence.
It's part of the causal chain. Whether it's sea peoples, a pandemic, or escalating international tension, if it disrupts trade of essential items, it will disrupt prosperity, the way of life, and a whole host of other things.
And what if that bleeding is from numerous sources internal and external, from a long succession of rough situations? You might not even die from blood loss, you might just have such anemia that mustering your strength to gather the resources needed to survive becomes harder and harder until you perish from exhaustion and lack of sustenance.
I find that often the end of things comes down not just to a single definable cause, but when a few events that might have been weathered successfully in isolation happen in an overlapping manner, and may cause additional problems otherwise.
"The system failed" is not much in the way of explanation. All systems over a huge area failed at the same time. Explaining why and how requires more then "multiple things went wrong".
Climate and technological changes seem to be a strong candidate.
I found Robert Drews' explanation the most coherent, although it hasn't caught on so there must have been some problem with it.
His explanation was military-technological: infantry weaponry and tactics advanced to the point that infantry > chariotry. At that point, masses of common people with relatively cheaply made weapons (still bronze at this point) could beat the military of the established civilizations, and all those cities were ripe for the looting. Only Egypt and Assyria were able to adapt their militaries to the new realities and survive.
This also explains why, when civilization reestablished itself in the Iron Age, it was in a much different form.
My point is that it may be hard to tease out how much of that is survivorship bias (survivorship of records of failed states, that is). If it often takes multiple things failing at once to actually have the societies fail, then when you look back that's what you'll see, because other societies that fails will exhibit that to a high degree as the times when things don't happen to coincide are cases where the societies were able to pull through.
I don't see how survivorship bias applies to analyzing societal collapse when you don't take into account societies that didn't fail... Non failing societies is precisely what you should leave out in this case
Any conclusion drawn that excludes a bunch of similar situations because the ultimate outcome ended up being different seems likely to be flawed, IMO.
It's easy to point at climate change and say that's a deciding factor, but if there's ten times as many societies that faces similar climate change situations and didn't fail, then it's either not climate change, or it's climate change in combination with some other aspect of their society which made the problem something they couldn't deal with, whether that be cultural, socioeconomic, or another problem that happened at the same time.
Back to the original point, I think sometimes "multiple things went wrong" totally can be a reason, and if there's an inability to accept that, I think that itself should be questioned. If a society is attacked, and there's a famine because of climate change, and the king dies from an illness unexpectedly and the succession is messy and there's not strong leadership, perhaps any one of those things is a hurdle that can be overcome, but if they all happen in a short period of time, that's definitely going to be a much larger stressor for a society.
That doesn't mean they don't need to be identified, and we should accept "eh, multiple things happened" as the only answer, but any inability to accept the there might have been a confluence of events that combined to cause an outcome would be a failure on the part of historians, IMO.
> Any conclusion drawn that excludes a bunch of similar situations because the ultimate outcome ended up being different seems likely to be flawed, IMO.
In principle yes but in this case we're looking at why all civilizations collapsed at the same time. There is no control group. The ones that didn't also went through large scale hardship and change. The point is not collapse vs survival, is why the large scale hardship with multiple concurrent collapses happened. The phenomenon being studied is not 'this civilization collapsed at this time', it's the multiple synchronized collapses and widespread hardship and change.
> It's easy to point at climate change and say that's a deciding factor, but if there's ten times as many societies that faces similar climate change situations and didn't fail
Climate studies in History show how massive, widespread collapse or large scale change happened in times of marked shifts in world climate, not the other way around
> but any inability to accept the there might have been a confluence of events that combined to cause an outcome would be a failure on the part of historians, IMO.
I wholly agree, and I never encountered this problem in academic History
I don't think we're actually in disagreement at all. I wasn't trying to be very specific even in my original comment when I replied to "Sure once you start bleeding you die from blood loss but if you're knifed can you really say you died from anemia?", but just note that we should be careful about assuming the blood loss was from being knifed, or being knifed once. Just that societal level changes can be complex as we should leery of accepting a narrative that neatly provides a cause. That doesn't mean it's wrong, it just means we should fight against our own instinctual urge to accept and believe simple answers.
> Climate studies in History show how massive, widespread collapse or large scale change happened in times of marked shifts in world climate, not the other way around
I'm not trying to argue it's the other way around, I'm more making an case that if climate change contributes 1/10th of the stressors causing a civilization collapse, and the rest is a bunch of other stuff added together, some individual items that might be more than 1/10th the cause, we'll still probably look at it and say ah, climate change caused it, because it's what happened and a bunch of other civilizations collapsed at the same time.
Sort of similar to losing your job in a recession. It's most often attributed to the recession, but in reality there's likely a lot of things that contributed, and the recession contributed enough to be the the straw that broke the camels back. Were one of those other things not present, the job may not have been lost.
What this means is that we likely attribute the variable that the most distinct entities as the cause, as opposed to the variable that contributes to the cause the most. Calling this out as I'm doing is mostly a matter of semantics, I'm fully aware, but I think it might be important to consider when formulating thoughts on this.
If climate change at a specific point causes every civilization to collapse, it's obviously the cause. If it causes an increase in the rate of collapse by 50%, it's very likely the cause. If it causes 20% more, now we're getting into a territory where it's contributing, but very possibly not the largest contributor.
I understand that with a population of civilizations as small as we have at any specific time in history that a statistical increase large enough to notice from climate change probably means it was indeed climate change, so I'm not trying to convince you it isn't, as much as call forth a way we put narratives to events. We definitely do often say someone lost their job because of the recession, when the relative change overall to the population can be quite small.
People understand the world through narratives, and those those narratives match reality to greater or lesser degrees sometimes.
Well you couldn't have had a 'bronze' age without without long and complex supply chains. Tin had to be imported from Western Europe and/or Central Asia. Same applies even more so the modern economy. Countries that rely on global trade will simply outcompete any autarkic ones before any apocalyptic event even occurs.
> depending on Taiwan that might be invaded by China
The more the west is reliant on Taiwan the less likely is China to invade. So maybe that's a good thing.
I don't like historicism. History is not supposed to be generalized, it's quite the opposite. It's about cataloguing and remembering the things we've been through. History is not a science, it's an art form.
For a longer-form treatment, Patrick Wyman's podcast, Tides of History, has been going through an extended series about prehistory, including the bronze age collapse. It's a lot, and mostly through a particular thinker's lens, but still worthy I think.
I really enjoyed youtube channel History Time's take on identifying the so-called 'sea peoples': "The Sea Peoples & The Late Bronze Age Collapse // Ancient History Documentary (1200-1150 BC)".
It gave me a lot of perspective on how much activity was happening all over the Mediterranean and beyond at that time. This and related channels have a lot of long form content on Ancient History, which I really appreciate.
I decided to watch the episode on the Bronze Age Collapse there and... I can't say I enjoy the "Grand Narrative" style of presentation all that much. With regards to that one episode in particular, the final segment on the effects of the H3 eruption of Hekla struggles with the chronology just not working correctly. The presenter gives the eruption a date of around 1100 BC, which seems to already be on the early side of dates (mid-late 1000s BC looks more reasonable), but if you're paying attention to the chronology, it's well after the Sea Peoples start showing up and the Bronze Age Collapse has occurred (~1200-1150BC), so its putative role in inducing the Sea Peoples to start their raiding would require a time machine of some sort.
The margin of errors when dating events three millennia in the past are quite wide. Besides, the large scale collapse of multiple civilizations can't be lined up in a row of neatly separated events. Why does this particular eruption need to be before the evidence of large scale raiding of sea borne forces?
Graeber did a top notch job with Debt: The First 5000 thousand years. But I think Anthropologists taking on big history is a bit of a stretch. Harari's books, for example are very superficial, trying to touch on everything from biology to politics and end up with very little real insight. I never felt Dawn of Everything would be worth the time and money...
edit: for the record, answering in edits is weird and I'm against it... authors slinging mud is hardly a case for their own competence, besides recommending a book about the whole of history to someone who wanted documentary recommendations on a very specific topic in History is also a bit of a hack
The parallels are definitely there. Two issues happening are imo primary causes, corporate consolidation and the move towards "Demand-driven Supply Chain".
'[As to what you wrote]: "There are informers [... to the king] and coming to his presence; if it is acceptable to the king, let me write and send my messages to the king on Aram[aic] parchment sheets" — why would you not write and send me messages in Akkadian? Really, the message which you write in it must be drawn up in this very manner — this is a fixed regulation!'
Ironically, the reason we know about this message from the King of Assyria about how hell no he won't upgrade to parchment is because it was a message baked into GOOD OLD CLAY...
"Clay. It's the future of the past." -- Assyrian Clay Council Marketing Blurb
This was amazing and I loved it, on so many levels.
The only thing I found ironic: "If you're going to record a historical occurrence, you can't beat a good stelae. ... What could possibly erode stone? Nothing that I can think of" -
Yeah that's pretty much on point. We are still reading some of them so..
Definitely more durable than a hard drive, trust me!
I wonder if a key difference between the Bronze Age and our age is that we have perfected the art of “collapse”, to the point where we are collapsing all over the place all the time - and we call it change.
One could look at countries like the US or UK, and compare their coal-based economy of 1800 with their oil-based economy of two hundred years later, and conclude that these are two radically different societies - but it was a gradual transition, not a collapse of one order and its replacement by another.
In the article, there is supreme overconfidence that the then-current ways of doing things would remain the same forever. But I don’t see this viewpoint as a prevailing force in our current society. We positively fetishize new tech and change.
Everyone wants copper ingots. Everyone. I’ve traveled pretty extensively in this world, and everywhere I go, everyone wants the same thing: copper ingots. Our grandfathers wanted copper ingots. Our great-great-grandfathers wanted copper ingots. If I know anything about anything, our great-grandchildren are going to want copper ingots, too.
> "Everyone wants copper ingots. Everyone. I’ve traveled pretty extensively in this world, and everywhere I go, everyone wants the same thing: copper ingots."
It's worth noting that, when iron first appeared, it was not superior to bronze on just about any metric other than cost. But you need to use iron at scale to figure out steel...
The question is, what will this essay look like if written today? Are some of our own ideas and technologies going to change as drastically? Are there frameworks (e.g. Hegel's concept of Geist) to help us think about what we're moving towards?
These are the names of the “sea peoples” a general term for the roving bands that helped cause or were a symptom of the Bronze Age Collapse. Note these weren’t likely what they called themselves, but the names the Egyptians referred to them as.
Incredible! Made my day; thank you for sharing. I used to be bored by history until I read somewhere that it is really the study of change (I think Harari wrote it?)
It seems to boil down to the sort of societal consensus definition of "us" that serves as a foundation for the individual definitions of "me" that comprise a society. It's why societies seem to tend to see their peers and predecessors as lesser as well; they are all their own "us"es, in some ways inaccessible to our "us". They may say the same words, but mean different things. They have the same human equipment for reasoning and synthesis, but a different set of priors from which this calculus manipulates and concludes. They seem dumb because they don't come to the same obvious conclusions we do.
And it seems to motivate conservative behavior, by way of fear. At least we can grapple and argue with our contemporaries, and scorn our predecessors. We know what they think, or at least we think we know what they think, filtered through the lens of what we think. But as a societal consensus starts to shift, and we start seeing new priors appearing, things start to get uncomfortable. We see a glimpse of a future we don't understand; we used to be with "it" but "it" changed[1]. We don't know anymore what the next ones will think. What they will be like.
They will still be humans, but they will be a different us, completely inaccessible to our us.
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[0] I know his philosophy is more a bit more nuanced, but it's such a perfect and unfortunate phrasing, accepted so implicitly and literally.
[1] To quote Grampa Simpson