kelley » Wed Dec 02, 2020 5:46 pm wrote:The man named Peter Turchin, who's featured in this piece, has an interesting hypothesis:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... re/616993/"The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around, declining living standards among the general population, and a government that can’t cover its financial positions . . . Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily 'elite overproduction'—the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill."
There's something to be noted which is lacking in the piece. It's about elite conduct in a general social sense. When ethics are monetized and codes of behavior are commodified, as is the norm in coporate America, a contradiction is created between the individual's disdain for the merely transactional and the collective desire to earn profits. This is a bigger problem than the widespread failure of leadership which characterizes our common plight. What it eventually shows is that, in the long term, contradictions such as these are unsustainable. If there's a fundamental issue to be addressed in the US today, it would revolve around the recognition of the paradoxes this willful blindness creates.
My hope is this may resolve itself generationally, over a limited amount of time in which such solutions may be found.
Fascinating read, thanks. And you make an excellent additional point.
In that vein, I can't help but wonder how much of that ten thousand years of historical data is bad data or vice versa? Not just in terms of what happened or how it happened, but also the basic assumptions of the modeller, as you point out.
What effect would that have on a model?
What effect does the existence of a bad model have on the world?
What effect does the existence of a good model have on the world?
What if better data comes along?
On this last point, I'm thinking of how availability of new archaeological data is altering the last forty thousand years of history, almost by the day. For example, the platinum layer and impact products found almost everywhere at the Younger Dryas boundary, approximately 12,800 years ago, indicate cometary or asteroidal impact(s) and which as Graham Hancock has argued, could provide a cause
other than human predation for the ensuing mega-fauna extinctions.
Perhaps hunter-gatherers don't tend to destroy their ability to live on the land after all? Although we do.
* This is but one example where precise data would make a vast difference to the western narrative of history and to any subsequent model of historical processes.
What if, in some sense, history is a self reinforcing narrative? If so, could a narrative substantially more accurate than
Western Exceptionalism actually change all of future history by itself alone? For example, what if Hancock's long term project of proving the existence of a 'precursor civilisation' is indeed proven? The implications would certainly shatter history as
we tell it.
Finally, what if
human nature eventually turns out to be human
culture, and in turn, culture turns out to be a result of all the stories we tell?
* Some wilder speculation on the subject of hunter-gatherers: in all times they must have lived fully conscious of the greater whole of which they are but part, knowing that survival is intimately bound through interrelationship with all other species. Cave and rock art made by these hunter-gatherers is certainly suggestive of negotiation with spirit beings. Could these spirits represent a sort of gestalt mind of the tribe and of other tribes and species, with the shaman(s) as representative or focus of the will of the tribe?
Which leads to an intriguing thought, and an application of my own world view... The idea that, among other things, religion may eventually be seen as a record of inter-species communication stretching across tens of thousands of years and of conscious accommodations reached: don't hunt this animal in a particular season but in return you will never go hungry OR use this plant with that plant to heal a certain malady but in return don't pick the plants in a particular place or at a particular time etc. God as living nature, as responsive and purposive organism, observable at larger scales and at the species level, though much harder to see at the scale of a human lifetime.
Perhaps chimeric figures and therianthropes from all human myths could represent a literal inter-species bridge - where each may dream together and be understood by each, and at this elevated level, collaborate. From here we might consider that the bee and the flower wilfully conspire to fulfil each others need.
