by Bruce Wilder
(Ian–this is an elevated comment from my post on Breakout Societal Power. It fills in much of the gap elided to in this phrase “Small groups in competition have the chance, though not the certainty, of fast progress, stuck as they are in a cauldron. It doesn’t always happen…” but does so better than I would have. It’s not just about why some societies in sharp competition don’t make it, however.)
Societies become breakthrough powerful under fairly specific historical conditions.
Competition in a concentrated area.
This covers most breakthrough shifts. Let’s give some examples.
Europe
A large number of kingdoms and republics, in constant competition. If you didn’t advance militarily, culturally (administration and culture matter) and technologically, you were in trouble. As administration improved and military technology changed to favor “despotic kings” like Louis XIV and Henry the VIIth (a very underrated King), decentralized and smaller power, internal (nobles) and external were brought under control. Constant warfare and other forms of competition lead to rapid advancement.
Fail, and you could fall. If the English hadn’t defeated the Spanish armada, well, that would have been the end of an independent England. Many other principalities did fall.
In addition, there was external pressure, from the more advanced, at least initially, Ottomans, whom the Europeans were terrified of. The Ottoman threat was real, and a few key battles and wars could have swung the other way, and Eastern Europe fallen under Ottoman control.
With no central control of the entirety of Europe, people could move easily, and find a place where whatever new thing they wanted to try was allowed.
The end result was a huge increase in technology, administrative control allowing more and more resources to be brought under central control, and swift advancement in the military. Even before the industrial revolution Europeans wound up conquering a vast chunk of the world, one they had industrialized, the world was at their feet, and they wound up in control of about three-quarters of it, with the rest terrified and compliant. (This is the case with China: never actually conquered, but under the thumb, though they did fight as best they could, they were defeated.)
Ancient Greece, then Rome
Greek city states were in ferocious competition with each other. Militarily, culturally and even technologically. The Greeks were far more advanced than the Romans. If you lost, terrible things could happen, like the destruction of your entire city and the enslavement of every survivor.
The Greeks were also under threat by a great neighbouring power: Persia, and the wars against Persia, were, again, close run. They could have gone the other way. By the time of of the Ten Thousand, when Greek mercenaries who had fought for the losing side in a Persian civil were were able to march across much of a hostile Persian empire, crushing all in their way, it was clear to the Greeks that Persia was ripe—their armies were vastly larger, but the Greek way of war was vastly superior.
Greece itself was conquered by Macedonia, which was essentially Greek, but still somewhat Barbarian, then Macedonia, under Alexander, conquered Persia and Egypt. The Persians, even if their leadership hadn’t been cowardly, never stood a chance. Then the Greeks ruled the Eastern Med and the Near East until the Romans. After Alexander, however, they didn’t expand much. The successor states were not dynamic.
Rome was also in savage competition. Against the Greeks, the other Italian tribes, the Celtic tribes and Carthage. They were almost always at war, and they learned well. Eventually they were able to conquer Greece, Span, most of what is now France, and Egypt, though they never had much luck against most of what had been the Persian Empire. Once the Republic fell, Rome didn’t spread much. The occasional Emperor would conquer some land, but they could rarely hold it. The dynamism of the Republic, and the pressure required for advancement no longer existed. Indeed, as time went by the Romans lost a fair bit of their technology, as well. The big single Empire was not dynamic.
The Mongols
Before Temujin the Mongols and the other steppe nomads near China were in constant competition against each other, and were also constantly subject to manipulation and war from China, which sought to keep them down, fearing (quite rightly) that they would invade. Most of Temujin’s life was spent conquering and unifying the steppe nomads, then changing their culture to be more disciplined and usefully warlike. The steppe nomads had always been fearsome, but Temujin changed how they fought: ordering them in groups of 10, 100, 1,000 and 10,000 and enforcing amazing levels of discipline. The Mongols were not just disciplined in battle, strategically they moved faster than any other military of the time and were able to pull off amazing coordination. Columns of troops would meet hundreds of miles away, on the exact day planned.
Though horse archers are always dangerous, it was Genghis Khan’s unification PLUS his changes to society and military organization which turned them into a terror so great that they were not defeated for over a hundred years. In their time, they were just as dominant as the Europeans in the late 19th century.
There are other examples: the Zulus, who had the bad luck to run into the British at the height of their power are one. Warring States China is another. Ancient India around the time of the Buddha is a third. The Sengoku period of Japan is a fourth, and once Tokugawa took power, Japan, in many ways stagnated. (During the Sengoku period, the Japanese had more firearms than anywhere else.)
Concluding
Large empires are stagnant. There may be some advancement, though often there is none or even retrogression, but they don’t make breakthroughs into revolutionary power. At best they inherit it.
Small groups in competition have the chance, though not the certainty, of fast progress, stuck as they are in a cauldron. It doesn’t always happen: the tribes of New Guinea were caught in zero, indeed, often negative sum competition and remained backwards.
But the general rule of breakout power is small states in serious competition, usually with an outside threat.
Larger than I realized:
Now, per capita, it’s actually South Korea, Japan, USA, China and I wouldn’t say that doesn’t matter: it’s why Japan and South Korea stay prosperous (though life in South Korea, I gather, is rather nasty for workers.) Still, the bulk matters more: who’s in the lead.
The common rebuttal is that Chinese patents are low quality. So, let’s say that half of Chinese patents suck. They’d still be slightly in the lead.
It’s also interesting that Japan gets almost as many patents as the US. You don’t hear about Japan much these days (unlike the 80s when everyone was terrified) but they haven’t lost their game.
This chart echoes what I’ve been saying for years: the tech lead moves to where the manufacturing floor is. And that’s in China. Happened when it moved to the US from Britain and the US is not immune to the rule.
TechxManufacturing=Power in the modern world. If the US wants to change this, they have to re-shore industry, not just make half-hearted “friend-shoring” moves.
It’s also interesting how bad Europe does here. Germany+France+Britain=5%, which is half of South Korea. Europe is living off its legacy, and that means its decline is damn near certain if they don’t reverse this. Given the US is now poaching European industry, and Europe is letting it out of fear of Russia, well, the future doesn’t look bright.
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The sad truth of technological progress is that it often leads to worse outcomes, often for long periods of time. The classic example is agriculture, which led to most people living shorter, more unhealthy lives with more dental problems (pain!) and harder births for women. Most of these people also were oppressed by harsh kings, nobles, or big men.
Communications technologies are often heralded, and they have their good sides, but every significant advance in communications from oral memory techniques and writing to the modern internet has been used to increase centralized control and enable closeer control of more and more people. Modern surveillance and immediate communications allow micro-control of individuals which used to require a slave driver right there on the spot. (Hi, Amazon warehouses and delivery drivers!)
Other results have been mixed. For example, gunpowder led to mass conscription armies, and conscription armies have tended to correlate strongly with more democratic and equal societies. (It is VERY robust that those who actually are necessary for fighting get treated well — from Athens and Rome to medieval knights to Swiss Pikemen.)
We’ve moved out of the mass conscription era into a “professional” military period, and this has corresponded with a loss of equality, but we are now moving into an extremely dangerous period: The rise of autonomous fighting machines. Turkey used them in the recent Azerbijan/Armenian war, and almost everyone is working on them.
Warbots mean you only need to keep a small techie class happy, and even they don’t really have a veto on how elites use the warbots. If they want to massacre protestors, there is almost no possibility of refusal.
The narrowing of the base of people necessary, and their removal from the actual fighting puts us in a dangerous place, where .1 percent + a small, well-treated technical group can dominate a society and win wars; they don’t need everyone else beyond the Warbot supply chain.
So what we need is an easy counter. Something like IEDs – a technology any decent techie can create without needing a ton of resources.
Most modern techies spend their entire lives working on questionable techs–how to serve more ads to convince people to buy shit they don’t need — tech that does no good in the world.
If you’re an inventor type, and you want to do good, here’s your chance: Figure out a counter to warbots that ordinary people can use.
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When is a society prosperous? The general understanding seems to be it’s when everyone has an abundance of goods. But is this a useful definition? Are you prosperous if you have an abundance of goods, but no time to enjoy them? Are you prosperous if you have an abundance of goods, but you’re sick? Are you prosperous if you have an abundance of goods, but you live in an oppressive society? Are you prosperous if you have an abundance of goods but are desperately unhappy and feel you’ve wasted your life?
You can argue to keep it simple: Prosperity means everyone has access to a lot of goods and services. But I think this falls flat; we can all understand that more goods don’t necessarily make us better off, nor more services. More foods that make us sick aren’t better. More health care doesn’t mean we’re healthier, it often means we’re sicker. More prisons mean our society is producing more criminals and more crime.
Just increasing economic activity doesn’t make people better off, doesn’t increase prosperity.
The prototypical example of this is the move to agriculture. It would seem self-evident that learning how to grow more food has made us better off. More food is better, right? In fact, however, the move from hunting and gathering to agriculture led to lives which were worse, for the vast majority of the population. People were shorter in most agricultural societies, which indicates worse nutrition. There was far more disease and far more chronic health conditions. People also generally had less free time and they lived fewer years than the hunter-gatherers who preceded them.
Nor was this a short term decline, it lasted for thousands of years. Height is a good measure of nutrition, and we are still not as tall as our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Pelvic depth, which measures how easily women give birth has also never recovered. Median lifespan was not higher for around 6,000 years. And it declined for hundreds of years during that period in certain areas of the world. Members of the Hellenic world, from 300 BC to 120 AD, had longer lives than westerners before the 20th century.(1) Our lives can get worse, and stay worse, for hundreds or thousands of years, despite having more ability to create goods.
Are societies with more food and goods better if the people are sicker, live shorter lives, and have more difficulty reproducing? If that’s prosperity, do we want it?
Instead of more goods, more “stuff,” we should want the right goods and/or the right stuff. Stuff that makes us healthier, happier, smarter, more able to do great works, and to live well. Instead of more work, we should want right work, enough work to make the right stuff, but not so much work we have no time for our loved ones, friends, and doing the activities we love, whatever those might be. And, as much as possible we should want health instead of medicine and low crime rather than prisons.
All other things being equal, yes, more productive capacity is better. The more stuff we can make, in theory, the better off we’ll be. But in practice, it doesn’t always work that way.
Again, part of this is about the right stuff, or the wrong stuff. In our own society we are seeing an epidemic of obesity and diabetes due to our diet, for example. Part of that problem lay with modern hierarchies and inequality. Inequality is undeniably bad for us, as a whole. The more unequal your society is, the lower the median lifespan. The more unequal the society, the sicker, in general. More heart attacks, much more stress. The more unequal, the more crime. These links are robust.
The links run two ways. On the one hand, humans find inequality stressful. The human body, if subject to long term stress, becomes unhealthy and far more likely to be sick. People who feel unequal act less capable than those who feel equal. This is true for the rich and powerful in unequal societies and the poor. Everyone suffers. Though the poor and weak do suffer more, even the rich and powerful would be healthier and live longer in equal societies, most likely simply due to the stress effect.(2)
The second part is distribution, or rather, the question of who gets to control distribution. The more unequal a society, the less stuff the poor and middle class have, comparatively. Some technologies tend to lead to more inequality, some tend to lead to more equality. In most hunter-gatherer societies, there isn’t enough surplus to support a class of rich, powerful people and their servitors–in particular their servitors who enforce the status quo through ideology or violence. With little surplus, there is equality. This doesn’t mean hunter-gatherers live badly, most of them seem to have spent a lot less time producing what they needed than we do, they certainly didn’t work 40 hour weeks, or 60 hour weeks, closer to 20. (3) The rest of the time they could dance, create art, make love, socialize, make music, or whatever else they enjoyed.
Agriculture didn’t lead immediately to inequality, the original agricultural societies appear to have been quite equal, probably even more so than the late hunter-gatherer societies that preceded them. But increasing surpluses and the need for coordination which arose, especially in hydraulic civiliations (civilizations based around irrigation which is labor intensive and requires specialists) led to the rise of inequality. The pharoahs created great monuments, but their subjects did not live nearly as well as hunter-gatherers.
The organization of violence, and the technology behind it, is also a factor. It is not an accident that classical Greece had democracy in many cities, nor that it extended only to males who could fight and not women or non-fighting males. It is not an accident that Rome had citizenship classes based on what equipment soldiers could afford: the Equestrian class was named that because they could take a horse to war. It is not accident that the Swiss Cantons, where men fought in pike formation, were democratic for their time. Nor is it an accident that universal sufferage arose in the age of mass conscription and that women gained the vote as societies moved to mass mobilization.
When Rome moved away from citizen conscription to a professional army it soon lost its liberty. As we move away from mass armies it is notable that, while we haven’t lost the vote formally, the vote seems to matter less and less as politicians increasingly just do what they want, no matter what the electorate might have indicated.
Power matters for prosperity. The more evenly power is spread, the more likely a society is to be prosperous, for no small factions can engage in policies which are helpful to them, but broadly harmful to everyone else. Likewise, widespread demand, absent supply bottlenecks, leads to widespread prosperity as well.
In the current era, we have seen a massive increase in CEO and executive pay. This is due to the fact that they have taken power over the primary productive organizations in our society: Corporations. The owners of most corporations, if they are not also the managers, are largely powerless against the management. It is not that management is more competent than it was 40 years ago, at least at their ostensible job of enriching shareholders, it is that they are more powerful than they were 40 years ago, compared to shareholders and compared to government.
Because increases in the amount we can create do not automatically translate into either creating what is good for us, or into relatively even distribution of what we create, increases in the amount we can create do not always lead to prosperity. Likewise, it certainly does not naturally lead to widespread affluence. Productivity in America rose 80.4 percent from 1973 to 2011, but median real wages rose only 10.2 percent and median male wages rose 0.1 percent. (4) This was not the case from 1948 to 1973, when wages rose as fast as productivity did.
Increases in productivity, in our ability to make more stuff, only lead to prosperity and affluence if we are making the right stuff, and we are actually distributing that stuff widely. If a small group of individuals are able to skim off most of the surplus, prosperity does not result and if a society which is prosperous allows an oligarchy, nobility, or aristocracy to form, even if such an aristocracy (like our own) pretends it does not exist, society will find its prosperity fading.
Creating goods that hurt people is not prosperity either. Currently, about 40 percent of all deaths are caused by pollution or malnutrition.(5) If someone you love has died, there is a good chance they died because we make stuff in ways that pollute the environment, or because the stuff we make, like most of our food, is very bad for us. Being fat is not healthy, and we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic. Even when we do not immediately die, we suffer from chronic diseases at a rate that would astonish our ancestors. As of the year 2000, for example, approximately 45 percent of the US population suffered from a chronic disease. 21 percent had multiple conditions.(6) Some of this is just due to living longer, but much of it is due to the food we eat, the stress our jobs inflict upon us, and the pollution we spew into the air, land, and water.
We should always remember this. Increases in productive capacity and technological advancement do not always lead to welfare and when they do, they do not automatically do so immediately. The industrial revolution certainly did lead to increased human welfare, but if you were of the generations thrown off the land and made to work in the early factories, often 6 1/2 days a week, in horrible conditions, you would not have thought so. You were, in virtually every way, worse off than you were before by being thrown off the land, and so were your children. A few industrialists and the people around them certainly did very well, but that is not prosperity, nor is it affluence.
And a gain of affluence which lasts less than two centuries and ends in ecological disaster which kills billions, well, our descendents may not call that a success, or nor may they think it was worth it.
Prosperity, in the end, is as much about power and politics as it is about technology and productive ability. The ability to make more things does not ensure we are making the right things, or that the people who need them, get them. Productive capacity which is not shared is not prosperity.
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It’s time to talk technology, and the catastrophic futures it makes possible—and how to avoid them. This isn’t just about climate change, which, if it goes really wrong, could wipe out humanity (if, for example, the oxygen cycle gets screwed up: entirely possible.) It is about a wild variety of technologies, from ubiquitous surveillance to genetic engineering, to nanotechnology. It is not hard to forsee the possibility of creating a totalitarian state in which revolt is impossible. The new neuroscience, which is becoming more and more reliable at telling when people are lying and seeing decision points before we are consciously aware of them, combined with implants and surveillance, makes it possible to envision a society in which revolt not only couldn’t succeed, it couldn’t even be thought about, or not for long enough to do anything about it.
(Kicked back to the top as it’s important and timely given the work that I will be doing over the next few months.)
Likewise, the Galts may one day decide, with improved methods of production, that 99% of humanity is superfluous to requirements, and get rid of the useless eaters.
We can also imagine a world of tailored humans: through genetic engineering, nanotech, cybertech and so on, in which some people are really are so superior to the rest of humanity that the mass are ants. We forget that in much of history it was so. The old Punch comics, with the small, twisted, deformed poor people were not caricature, that’s what people who worked hard and had inadequate nutrition all their lives looked like. They were weaker, stupider and uglier than the nobility. This wasn’t innate, but it was real. The nobility saw themselves as better than their inferiors because they were.
That superiority was environmental, but if we decide to ration transhuman technologies based on who can pay, well, it will be more than environmental, especially after multiple generation of artificial selection.
All of these technologies are vastly dangerous, and all of them suggest the possibility of the creation of catastrophic end states: the complete end of humanity, the creation of totalitarian states, the creation of a new untouchable aristocracy; surveillance societies in which the very possibility of even mental privacy does not exist.
We could turn away from them; we could reject them. Those who say that is impossible are wrong. A world state could probably pull it off, in the same way that the Tokugawa Shogunate was able to control key technologies for centuries; a system which ended only because it was upset from the outside. Absent the possibility of an outside shock, a world state could run for a very long time.
But these technologies also offer the ability to create radically better ways of living: truly affluent societies with what amount to replicators; humans who suffer far less from pain, disease and mental infirmity; an end to aging; and wondrous possibilities for creation of artifacts and life forms we can’t even imagine today. There are those who feel that anything “unnatural” is to be avoided: I say that the historical and pre-historical record is one of mass rape, mass murder and mass extinctions, of violence and cruelty and want. I am not willing to put aside transhuman technologies from fear, because the human condition is suffering and fear, and I want that to end.
So we come to points of failure. While we all live on Earth, to these technologies, we are one society, no matter what our apparent divisions. We are going to move towards something much closer to world government in the next century, not because we want to, but because without it we are not going to be able to mitigate and reverse climate change, and if we don’t do that, well, we could have an extinction event. No individual country can manage the earth’s ecosphere, there will be international organizations capable of using force to ensure compliance, or we will lose billions of people.
Earth is a bad place to experiment. Changes spread too easily, too uncontrollably. Nanotech in the wild, genetic changes on a mass scale, neuro-monitoring technology, and so on, cannot be contained to one society, one geographic region, not least because if one group does obtain a decisive advantage they WILL use it to subjugate others.
This is why I support, and have long supported, getting off the rock: spaceflight, and colonization. Get out into space, into the Oort cloud: learn how to live not just on other planets but in space itself, and we can experiment to our heart’s content, separated from each other by the vast gulfs of vacuum. If one society goes bad, it doesn’t have to take everyone else down with it. Add (ideally) a caveat that societies can run themselves as they want, but can’t prevent emigration (they can prevent immigration) and you have a model which no longer has a single point of failure, has a frontier for the discontents to go to, and allows us to experiment with radical changes to who and what we are.
There are two tasks for the next cycle, the next ideological and technological age. The first is to stabilize the earth, and provide a good living to everyone without destroying the ecosphere. The second is to create workable space colonization so that humanity is no longer vulnerable to having a single point of failure, and can experiment to find the full possibilities of our new sciences and technologies, fully knowing that many of those societies will go bad, in horrible ways, but hoping that some of them will create radically better ways of living and of being human.
Perhaps we could do all this on Earth, but if we blow it the consequences are too high. And anyone who has read or lived history knows that eventually we WILL blow it. Run Earth, the storehouse of virtually all life, conservatively, let the experimentation take place of off-world.
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There is an underlying dynamic of solidarity and surplus that seldom gets the attention it deserves.
Ancient Greece at the end of the of the Bronze Age participated in the famous but mysterious collapse and entered a Dark Age of significantly diminished population, political organization and culture. They emerged beginning around 800 BCE, apparently with a new set of technologies, politics and agriculture and trade that generated surplus. People were healthy and well-fed (comparatively). Greece experienced a population boom, increasing in numbers roughly ten times over 400 years and a critical part of the competition among city-states was to found colonies. It wasn’t just Greece, Phoenicia and the Etruscans and others were involved.
Technological innovation is not a merely moral phenomenon; it is a matters of surplus and numbers. There must be a surplus to feed an artisan class and trade and a differentiation of labor.
The surplus that fed the urban civilization that Rome engineered diminished with soil erosion. The extraction of the tradeable surplus from a slave class on the great latifundia was inefficient and self-defeating on many levels, undermining the economic foundation of an urban civilization. People at the bottom of the system were unhealthy. Famines and plagues ensued. Trade declined with falling division of labor in a dimishing artisanal class, compounding the effects of declining agricultural surplus.
The rise of China followed on the creation of enormous agricultural surplus to feed vast armies and an urban civilization with a huge artisanal population, with trade driving deep division of labor and technological inventiveness. The surplus originated in vast hydraulic projects and the elaboration three-crop rice production.
There would be no social barrier in China to ever more labor intensive agriculture: more and more hands in the fields until the extraction of surplus was choked off by congestion losses. By 1500, Chinese peasants could barely feed themselves. Ordinary people were physically weak. The cities were huge, but represented only single-digit percentages of total population.
Europe recovering from the Dark Ages that followed the collapse of Rome saw a revival of surplus, especially after iron plows turned the heavy but fertile soils of Northern Europe and dug deeper in the south. But, the congestion losses of too many hands in the fields showed quickly too and the flowering of the High Middle Ages ended in overpopulation and the Black Death, which was driven as much by imminent famine as rats and fleas.
The contrasting aftermaths of the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death — two, long series of bubonic plagues sweeping thru Europe is worth contemplating. One destroyed a civilization and the other seemed to spark a new civilization.
Agricultural surplus feeding a growth of artisanal production and merchant trade, but being choked off by congestion and extractive oppression is a recurrent dynamic. It underlies the peculiar history of rivalry between England and France. France, with the greatest agricultural potential in western Europe, occupying an extensive well-watered plain, had a vastly greater population than England thruout the Middle Ages and well into the 19th century. But, France became overpopulated. Famine and hunger drove the French Revolution when bad weather triggered bad harvests that threatened the surplus that fed Paris.
England’s ability to feed its industrializing cities was a near-run thing in the 18th and 19th centuries. The additional surplus generated by the British Agricultural Revolution was a paltry thing and Ireland was kept on the edge of famine by overpopulation until pushed over the edge.
The productive often desperate competition that Ian draws attention to has a multi-path causal relation to the generation and/or extraction of surplus. That surplus may originate in accidents, be managed or neglected by elites and be extinguished without intention.