Anytime I hear an update about the Ashes, I remember the famous draw in Cardiff back in 2009. Was operating in Helmand with UK Forces at the time and decided if war was like a game, then it must be like cricket. Have to know when to declare and move on.
A comment on Western Civilization: In contrast to other civilizations such as Chinese or Islamic, the configuration of different nations and their cultures not only produce wars but also different directions of thought and inquiry. This brought about the scientific revolution.
Jaques Barzon, a cultural historian, predicted the end of our civilization but had no prediction of its replacement may be. Looks like this is happening sooner rather than later.
Interesting thesis, but it needs tweaking, considering Eastern and particularly East Asian cultures ran ahead of Western ones in terms of scientific innovation for most of civilizational history. Why the West briefly pulled ahead in the 20th century (sans Japan, which more than kept up) with its own scientific revolution—born coextensively with industrial capitalism—is an interesting question on which there is a lot of writing. Probably all the more interesting now that the West has essentially given away its advantage by cannibalizing itself from within, rather than by being conquered from without, as is traditionally the case when the balance of technological and sociopolitical power shifts.
"Probably all the more interesting now that the West has essentially given away its advantage by cannibalizing itself from within"
We turned away from God and are now facing the all-too-predictable results.
The left has been trying to argue that the rise of the west had nothing to do with Christianity for quite some time. Let's use Guns, Germs, and Steel as an entry point. There are many criticisms but at the end of the day, I do think Diamond is correct that the world's dominant power had to come from Eurasia. But he never answered the real question: Why Europe and not China? China had been far ahead of Europe for literally thousands of years. Diamond spends only a few pages on this, and ultimately suggests that Europe's fragment geography lead to increasing competition between nation-states whereas China's flat geography led to a monopoly. So Europe innovated while China stagnated. But this explanation still means that the culture Europe produced was superior to other cultures, so the left was not happy with it.
The next major entry point was Kenneth Pomerantz's book The Great Divergence. If you've read Guns, Germs, and Steel, then you know Diamond's argument is that Europe had the best geography for developing agriculture and the first civilization to develop agriculture would then be well ahead of the rest of the world. Pomerantz makes a similar argument for England versus China. He argues that Chinese technology was comparable to England until around 1800 when the Industrial Revolution began, at which point "the Great Divergence" began. However, following Diamond, he argued that England was blessed with large coal reserves in a convenient location. By contrast, China's reserves were quite remote, meaning coal would be insignificant in China even though China discovered steam power long before the West.
However, there are a million problems with this.
- Gregory Clarck points out in A Farewell to Alms that China had well-integrated markets. In fact, this is key to Pomerantz' argument about Chinese technology and sophistication. So grain prices did not drop very far even after shipping grain long distances in China. If they could ship grain, they could ship coal.
- China had been essentially stagnant for over 2,000 years. It was well ahead of Europe in 1 AD and even in 1000 AD. But by 1800 AD Europe was even with China, which suggests Europe was progressing much faster.
- Europe had true observation-based science (probably developed in the Middle Ages) but China did not have science. They had brilliant inventors, but not true science as we understand it.
- Modern datasets (and there a large and growing number of these) show that England was ahead of China for manufactured products as early as 1500. This makes the whole "they were the same but for steam power" argument collapse.
- China *was* equal to England in agricultural productivity. But that had nothing to do with technology. Quite the contrary. China had highly sophisticated and hardworking peasant farmers who relied on an elaborate division of labor - the so-called "rice path". But even if they had comparable agricultural productivity, China could not further improve without starting to replace human labor with machinery. By contrast, Europe had been using machines to replace human labor since the early Middle Ages. For example, Europe used watermills and windmills. It was easy to substitute steam-powered machines. But despite these being initially invented in China, they were not used in China.
The best explanation for the Rise of the West is found in Joseph Henrich's book The WEIRDest People in the World. Henrich was one of the first social scientists to try to replicate the myriad experiments psychologists perform on college students elsewhere in the world. Psychologists had always assumed they had found the one true human nature, but Henrich's work showed that people respond very differently when in different cultures. Henrich labeled Western culture as WEIRD:
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.
Then Henrich began to do a series of natural experiments based on the formation of bishoprics throughout Europe and showed the WEIRD psychology can be traced back to the influence of the Catholic Church on things like monogamous marriage, bans on cousin marriage (which create strong in-group ties but reduce trust with strangers) and neolocal residence. These new Christian social norms promoted trust and cooperation.
Henrich's research answers some puzzles that history buff perhaps already understand.
- Why is Southern Italy and Sicily so low-trust and has such strong extended family ties compared to Northern Italy? The answer is that Sicily was under Muslim rule and Southern Italy was under Eastern Orthodox rule until the Norman conquest of the 11th and 12th centuries. So they got a smaller and shorter dose of Catholic WEIRDness than Northern Italy.
- It also explains why Russia and Eastern Europe remain fairly backwards compared to Western Europe.
- It's worth noting that in modern times, Poland is the shiny star of Eastern Europe (and very soon, all of Europe), but Poland is and always has been Catholic. Catholicism also played a role in Poland rejecting communism back in 1989.
There are criticisms of Henrich too. For on, his thesis is too sweeping. Northern Europe already had many WEIRD social arrangements such as bans on kinship marriage. Perhaps because of dealing with cold climates, Northern Europe had develop cooperative norms before the Catholic Church.
Another problem - which Henrich does address - is that Protestant nations are more WEIRD than Catholic nations. And Henrich uses the Peace of Augsburg (1555) where German Princes were allowed to choose Catholic or Protestant for their principalities, and found that people worked more hours in the Protestant regions, a sign of the Protestant Ethic.
Many of us, of a certain age, were taught that Protestantism and property rights were the US secret sauce.
Protestantism is unusual in that, along with anticorruption, it teaches work for the sake of work, not for God or King. "Idle hands are the Devil's Workshop" was a new concept. Moreover, redemption came from belief in God, no clergy, King or mandatory Church attendance necessary.
Decades ago, schools stop teaching what makes the West unique today. Women and children are not legally protected in the vast majority of the world, even if societies bother to pay lip service to the idea. Also, in a knowledge economy, brain power of the entire population is a great asset. It is one of the few things the Soviets got right.
Other religions teach 'work for the sake of work', too. What makes Protestantism unusual in relation to its close cousins is that it says A.) that the *individual* can and *should* read the holy text--i.e., education and literacy are a good and important thing, as is independent thought, and these are not solely the clergy's to have, but ought to belong to the lay people too, and B.) political power should rest in your own home (the household for the individual, the liberal state for the political collective)--i.e., it ought not be up to some far-off god-emperor in some distant Roman superstate as to how you should organize your community, nor should the state's prefects be the true seat of power--the true seat of power is your household, and those prefects exist to help protect it, not govern it.
Those are two necessary (but probably not sufficient) ingredients to liberal democracy and liberal democratic states, and to capitalist innovation--and without the Protestant Revolution we likely don't ever get a capitalist liberal democratic West, and all its attendant prosperity.
I don’t see how it can be a ‘turn away from God’ that’s the problem when it is by and large the populist right–of which Christian evangelicals are a core component–that is now most engaged in dismantling the systems that upheld Western hegemony in the postwar period and allowed it to conquer Communism. (note that Western hegemony was itself a system largely built by *liberal* Christians) Nonetheless, a problem faced by any thesis that locates the ‘Great Divergence’ in the specificities of Judeo-Christian culture is I.) the fact that not only did Judeo-Christian social conventions predate the Scientific-Industrial Revolution, but it’s not until we get a large-scale loosening of those conventions—most importantly in the Protestant Reformation’s recentering of political sovereignty on localized states rather than the suzerainty of the papacy, and its encouragement of popular literacy by legitimizing the lay people’s right to read scripture—that we get the Revolution proper and,
II.) Japan–which was not Christian at all, and more than kept pace with the Revolution as it unfolded elsewhere.
However, I do think there is something to the ‘Educated’ part of Henrich's WEIRD acronym–IMO it’s undeniable that one common denominator to industrial revolutions is popular literacy, and a tolerance for heterodoxic thinking that challenges certain prevailing orthodoxies. Both of those are aspects of the growth of education, in a broad sense, and a broadly educated public–and I think the argument that Protestantism’s focus on the education of common people, and its jettisoning of the orthodoxy bound up in fealty to the Roman suzerain, played a central role in the rise of the West during the Industrial period, is quite persuasive.
Ultimately, however, the explanation I find fits all the facts better than the others, and is most consonant with what we know of how capitalist economies function, is the persistence of what some theorists call a ‘high-level equilibrium trap’ in East Asia following the Qing dynasty’s consolidation of mainland China, and that dynasty's subsequent isolationist policy regime. Capitalism and capitalist growth is, fundamentally, a *dis*-equilibrium system–its functioning is premised on consistent instability, and the constant pull to rebalance forces of demand and supply that are constantly going out of alignment, through technological innovation. During the time of ‘The Great Divergence’, things were very stable in most of East Asia. There weren’t a lot of resource deficits–the supply and demand for labor and land were very well-aligned–and the Confucian system (and its Eurasian cousins) made for a highly stable polity that valued orthodoxy above everything else. As a result, there was less heterodoxic thinking, and innovation was slower. By contrast, after the Protestant Revolution and the rise of liberalism in the West, heterodoxic thinking was everywhere and generally encouraged in Western societies; on top of that, there were huge resource deficits and capacity constraints that Western societies were battered with and had to create solutions for. Those solutions are ultimately what would produce the great surpluses and technological innovations of the Scientific-Industrial Revolution.
Japan kept up because it faced the same issues–large resource constraints and social-environmental shocks that produced supply and demand disequilibria that required a large degree of technical innovation to overcome. Japanese culture was also somewhat different than continental East Asia, and especially China, in that it had a more competitive, less homogenous socioeconomic structure–each daimyo within the Tokugawa shogunate was essentially its own little city-state competing against the other daimyos, which created greater pressure for innovation.
I'd note that this is why I have always been at loggerheads with hard-line communists I have held discourse with--IMO, you can improve upon competitive markets with certain social support systems and in some cases action to remove corrupt practices that lead to inordinate concentrations of market power. But you're never going to 'overthrow' capitalism and get anything good out of it--you need the creative instability of competitive markets to achieve continued growth in prosperity for everyone. History's pretty clear about that.
I always feel smarter on Saturdays due to TLP. Did not know about the wee hours. At least relative to Sinatra.
Anytime I hear an update about the Ashes, I remember the famous draw in Cardiff back in 2009. Was operating in Helmand with UK Forces at the time and decided if war was like a game, then it must be like cricket. Have to know when to declare and move on.
A comment on Western Civilization: In contrast to other civilizations such as Chinese or Islamic, the configuration of different nations and their cultures not only produce wars but also different directions of thought and inquiry. This brought about the scientific revolution.
Jaques Barzon, a cultural historian, predicted the end of our civilization but had no prediction of its replacement may be. Looks like this is happening sooner rather than later.
Interesting thesis, but it needs tweaking, considering Eastern and particularly East Asian cultures ran ahead of Western ones in terms of scientific innovation for most of civilizational history. Why the West briefly pulled ahead in the 20th century (sans Japan, which more than kept up) with its own scientific revolution—born coextensively with industrial capitalism—is an interesting question on which there is a lot of writing. Probably all the more interesting now that the West has essentially given away its advantage by cannibalizing itself from within, rather than by being conquered from without, as is traditionally the case when the balance of technological and sociopolitical power shifts.
"Probably all the more interesting now that the West has essentially given away its advantage by cannibalizing itself from within"
We turned away from God and are now facing the all-too-predictable results.
The left has been trying to argue that the rise of the west had nothing to do with Christianity for quite some time. Let's use Guns, Germs, and Steel as an entry point. There are many criticisms but at the end of the day, I do think Diamond is correct that the world's dominant power had to come from Eurasia. But he never answered the real question: Why Europe and not China? China had been far ahead of Europe for literally thousands of years. Diamond spends only a few pages on this, and ultimately suggests that Europe's fragment geography lead to increasing competition between nation-states whereas China's flat geography led to a monopoly. So Europe innovated while China stagnated. But this explanation still means that the culture Europe produced was superior to other cultures, so the left was not happy with it.
The next major entry point was Kenneth Pomerantz's book The Great Divergence. If you've read Guns, Germs, and Steel, then you know Diamond's argument is that Europe had the best geography for developing agriculture and the first civilization to develop agriculture would then be well ahead of the rest of the world. Pomerantz makes a similar argument for England versus China. He argues that Chinese technology was comparable to England until around 1800 when the Industrial Revolution began, at which point "the Great Divergence" began. However, following Diamond, he argued that England was blessed with large coal reserves in a convenient location. By contrast, China's reserves were quite remote, meaning coal would be insignificant in China even though China discovered steam power long before the West.
However, there are a million problems with this.
- Gregory Clarck points out in A Farewell to Alms that China had well-integrated markets. In fact, this is key to Pomerantz' argument about Chinese technology and sophistication. So grain prices did not drop very far even after shipping grain long distances in China. If they could ship grain, they could ship coal.
- China had been essentially stagnant for over 2,000 years. It was well ahead of Europe in 1 AD and even in 1000 AD. But by 1800 AD Europe was even with China, which suggests Europe was progressing much faster.
- Europe had true observation-based science (probably developed in the Middle Ages) but China did not have science. They had brilliant inventors, but not true science as we understand it.
- Modern datasets (and there a large and growing number of these) show that England was ahead of China for manufactured products as early as 1500. This makes the whole "they were the same but for steam power" argument collapse.
- China *was* equal to England in agricultural productivity. But that had nothing to do with technology. Quite the contrary. China had highly sophisticated and hardworking peasant farmers who relied on an elaborate division of labor - the so-called "rice path". But even if they had comparable agricultural productivity, China could not further improve without starting to replace human labor with machinery. By contrast, Europe had been using machines to replace human labor since the early Middle Ages. For example, Europe used watermills and windmills. It was easy to substitute steam-powered machines. But despite these being initially invented in China, they were not used in China.
The best explanation for the Rise of the West is found in Joseph Henrich's book The WEIRDest People in the World. Henrich was one of the first social scientists to try to replicate the myriad experiments psychologists perform on college students elsewhere in the world. Psychologists had always assumed they had found the one true human nature, but Henrich's work showed that people respond very differently when in different cultures. Henrich labeled Western culture as WEIRD:
Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic.
Then Henrich began to do a series of natural experiments based on the formation of bishoprics throughout Europe and showed the WEIRD psychology can be traced back to the influence of the Catholic Church on things like monogamous marriage, bans on cousin marriage (which create strong in-group ties but reduce trust with strangers) and neolocal residence. These new Christian social norms promoted trust and cooperation.
Henrich's research answers some puzzles that history buff perhaps already understand.
- Why is Southern Italy and Sicily so low-trust and has such strong extended family ties compared to Northern Italy? The answer is that Sicily was under Muslim rule and Southern Italy was under Eastern Orthodox rule until the Norman conquest of the 11th and 12th centuries. So they got a smaller and shorter dose of Catholic WEIRDness than Northern Italy.
- It also explains why Russia and Eastern Europe remain fairly backwards compared to Western Europe.
- It's worth noting that in modern times, Poland is the shiny star of Eastern Europe (and very soon, all of Europe), but Poland is and always has been Catholic. Catholicism also played a role in Poland rejecting communism back in 1989.
There are criticisms of Henrich too. For on, his thesis is too sweeping. Northern Europe already had many WEIRD social arrangements such as bans on kinship marriage. Perhaps because of dealing with cold climates, Northern Europe had develop cooperative norms before the Catholic Church.
Another problem - which Henrich does address - is that Protestant nations are more WEIRD than Catholic nations. And Henrich uses the Peace of Augsburg (1555) where German Princes were allowed to choose Catholic or Protestant for their principalities, and found that people worked more hours in the Protestant regions, a sign of the Protestant Ethic.
Many of us, of a certain age, were taught that Protestantism and property rights were the US secret sauce.
Protestantism is unusual in that, along with anticorruption, it teaches work for the sake of work, not for God or King. "Idle hands are the Devil's Workshop" was a new concept. Moreover, redemption came from belief in God, no clergy, King or mandatory Church attendance necessary.
Decades ago, schools stop teaching what makes the West unique today. Women and children are not legally protected in the vast majority of the world, even if societies bother to pay lip service to the idea. Also, in a knowledge economy, brain power of the entire population is a great asset. It is one of the few things the Soviets got right.
Other religions teach 'work for the sake of work', too. What makes Protestantism unusual in relation to its close cousins is that it says A.) that the *individual* can and *should* read the holy text--i.e., education and literacy are a good and important thing, as is independent thought, and these are not solely the clergy's to have, but ought to belong to the lay people too, and B.) political power should rest in your own home (the household for the individual, the liberal state for the political collective)--i.e., it ought not be up to some far-off god-emperor in some distant Roman superstate as to how you should organize your community, nor should the state's prefects be the true seat of power--the true seat of power is your household, and those prefects exist to help protect it, not govern it.
Those are two necessary (but probably not sufficient) ingredients to liberal democracy and liberal democratic states, and to capitalist innovation--and without the Protestant Revolution we likely don't ever get a capitalist liberal democratic West, and all its attendant prosperity.
I don’t see how it can be a ‘turn away from God’ that’s the problem when it is by and large the populist right–of which Christian evangelicals are a core component–that is now most engaged in dismantling the systems that upheld Western hegemony in the postwar period and allowed it to conquer Communism. (note that Western hegemony was itself a system largely built by *liberal* Christians) Nonetheless, a problem faced by any thesis that locates the ‘Great Divergence’ in the specificities of Judeo-Christian culture is I.) the fact that not only did Judeo-Christian social conventions predate the Scientific-Industrial Revolution, but it’s not until we get a large-scale loosening of those conventions—most importantly in the Protestant Reformation’s recentering of political sovereignty on localized states rather than the suzerainty of the papacy, and its encouragement of popular literacy by legitimizing the lay people’s right to read scripture—that we get the Revolution proper and,
II.) Japan–which was not Christian at all, and more than kept pace with the Revolution as it unfolded elsewhere.
However, I do think there is something to the ‘Educated’ part of Henrich's WEIRD acronym–IMO it’s undeniable that one common denominator to industrial revolutions is popular literacy, and a tolerance for heterodoxic thinking that challenges certain prevailing orthodoxies. Both of those are aspects of the growth of education, in a broad sense, and a broadly educated public–and I think the argument that Protestantism’s focus on the education of common people, and its jettisoning of the orthodoxy bound up in fealty to the Roman suzerain, played a central role in the rise of the West during the Industrial period, is quite persuasive.
Ultimately, however, the explanation I find fits all the facts better than the others, and is most consonant with what we know of how capitalist economies function, is the persistence of what some theorists call a ‘high-level equilibrium trap’ in East Asia following the Qing dynasty’s consolidation of mainland China, and that dynasty's subsequent isolationist policy regime. Capitalism and capitalist growth is, fundamentally, a *dis*-equilibrium system–its functioning is premised on consistent instability, and the constant pull to rebalance forces of demand and supply that are constantly going out of alignment, through technological innovation. During the time of ‘The Great Divergence’, things were very stable in most of East Asia. There weren’t a lot of resource deficits–the supply and demand for labor and land were very well-aligned–and the Confucian system (and its Eurasian cousins) made for a highly stable polity that valued orthodoxy above everything else. As a result, there was less heterodoxic thinking, and innovation was slower. By contrast, after the Protestant Revolution and the rise of liberalism in the West, heterodoxic thinking was everywhere and generally encouraged in Western societies; on top of that, there were huge resource deficits and capacity constraints that Western societies were battered with and had to create solutions for. Those solutions are ultimately what would produce the great surpluses and technological innovations of the Scientific-Industrial Revolution.
Japan kept up because it faced the same issues–large resource constraints and social-environmental shocks that produced supply and demand disequilibria that required a large degree of technical innovation to overcome. Japanese culture was also somewhat different than continental East Asia, and especially China, in that it had a more competitive, less homogenous socioeconomic structure–each daimyo within the Tokugawa shogunate was essentially its own little city-state competing against the other daimyos, which created greater pressure for innovation.
I'd note that this is why I have always been at loggerheads with hard-line communists I have held discourse with--IMO, you can improve upon competitive markets with certain social support systems and in some cases action to remove corrupt practices that lead to inordinate concentrations of market power. But you're never going to 'overthrow' capitalism and get anything good out of it--you need the creative instability of competitive markets to achieve continued growth in prosperity for everyone. History's pretty clear about that.
"note that Western hegemony was itself a system largely built by *liberal* Christians"
If by "liberal" you mean classical liberal, then sure. But classical liberalism was itself a Christian creation. Good post overall btw.