this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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To be fair, the single iron atoms are surrounded by a lot of carbony goodness. There's a few metals that have minor biological uses in humans like that, and even sodium and potassium are metals in pure form.
It's hella weird to me how we suddenly developed democracy and industrialisation after thousands of years of kind of the same thing. I have yet to hear a convincing explanation; right now I'm playing with Lanchester's laws as a theory.
How would Lanchester's law apply? I admittedly never heard of it before, but I don't see equivalents for army size and damage ratio here...
Anyway, the answer to your question is probably just population growth. We needed a critical mass of "useless" people not preoccupied with subsistence for science-y stuff to gain enough traction and spread.
There were democracies before industrialisation by the way, e.g. in ancient Greece.
Yeah, they called it that, but most of the population was literal slaves and like 1% of the population was actually rich and male enough to participate in the political process in any way. Same story with the Republic of Venice and all the other pre-modern republics, it was basically monarchy by council. Power actually derived from the masses is new within the last couple centuries or so. I don't think people realise this enough.
The British Empire started the same way, but suffrage fairly continuously expanded over the decades, whereas Athens had a tendency to slip back into a dictatorship for spells.
That's probably part of it - science started creeping along with the invention of agriculture, although it was too slow for contemporary people to notice - but don't forget Europe wasn't the most happening place to start with and had just dealt with the black death. If it was population the Enlightenment should have long since happened in China or India. Actually, I think Roman Europe might have been more populous than early modern Europe, but I'm not sure.
Same story for wealth, and most cultural explanations.
It's not obviously connected, but it shifted at about the right moment in history and military matters flipping on their head could have had enough of a political impact to completely change everything like that. My working theory is something like, non-linear attrition for smaller groups favours the side that has more mass support. Before projectile weapons were dominant the French Revolution might have been crushed like every other peasant rebellion, basically.
When the US was founded it excluded about 94% of the people from within its borders from participating. Slavery existed on a mass scale throughout the world's early, liberal (so-called) democracies, or often their economy was subsidized by slave labor abroad in their colonies. So if slavery didn't exist within their immediate borders, it existed for the people their political & economic system subjugated. The idea that industrialization or "democracy" (not even sure how you are defining it, really) came into existence suddenly isn't accurate, although there are revolutionary periods where social change came suddenly or breakthroughs in technology that occurred that reshaped social production. Those didn't ever occur in a vacuum, and those discoveries were only able to affect the social system in so far as the social system was developed in such a way that they could be utilized.. Often those big revolutionary changes in the social system were due to contradictions (compounding antagonistic relationships) within the social system itself becoming untenable. Trying to shoe-horn a somewhat obscure military "law" isn't really going to explain how those changes occurred in a realistic way, because human society is much more complicated than that. You seem to want to reinvent the wheel here, you should try reading Marx, you might find it quite satisfying.
On your last point, the French Revolution was crushed ultimately, although the new social order retained changes that were beneficial to its new ruling class. But weapons themselves aren't necessarily going to singularly shape the way in which social conflict resolves. Military technology is important to these developments, but ultimately a part of the larger social system that is always changing to either maintain itself or undergoing revolutionary change.
Yup. And by today's definition, I don't think that's a democracy.
I'd define it as one end of a continuum of incentives for leadership. In a modern democracy, pissing off the voting public is a guaranteed lose condition. In North Korea all that matters is keeping the the people just below you loyal and the people just above you happy (yes, I see your domain, no, I don't want to hear your conspiracy theories right now, I'm having another conversation). Kim Jong Un doesn't need to care if his people are starving as long as his generals keep their soldiers in check for him, who will in turn keep the civilians in check. Maybe he does, I think some dictators do, but he doesn't have to.
Agreed, it didn't happen suddenly at all. It took centuries of both reform and revolution and counter-revolution. But, it did happen unexpectedly after a lot of the same, and I fear it going away again if I don't know why it's here.
Also, I'm not sure if industrialisation is connected to the growth of ideologies, although I suspect it based on timing and certain shared ideas.
Agreed. That's the only variable I can find from the last 2 centuries that didn't exist anywhere in the preceding 50 centuries or so, though, at least to date. My next best guess is that the awareness of progress itself fueled it.
My understanding is that it required four parts. Metallurgy, precision engineering, scientific method, the history of us trying all the wrong ways before.
Like, the Roman's had the steam engine they just couldn't make reliable high quality parts. Further they didn't know a rational economy was something they should have or could have wanted.
Well, the classical steam engine also wasn't very powerful. It spun... but that's it. They would have needed to add a proper turbine and closed ducts around it if they wanted to get a useful power output the same way. To be fair, I'm sure they could have figured it out or moved to a piston design, but as you point out they didn't know economics and technological advancement were a thing. As far as they knew things were the same as they ever were and science was a hobby for the idle rich.
It's a lot easier to talk about the industrial component than the (arguably more important) ideological one because it is so concrete. The Roman empire showed signs of early economic automation, like mechanical harvesting machines, which all vanished as it collapsed. The Chinese were using blast furnaces already in the same period, and you can see mass production of things like pottery vary far back in the archeological record indeed. For some reason, it didn't take.
I personally suspect feudal lords just stifle innovation. Industrialisation showed up at the same time as the ideological enlightenment, and we see similar patterns in modern developing countries. But, I could be wrong. Are you drawing your four-part theory from a book I could read?
No, that is just a listing of all the diffrent explanations I have heard. I suspect they all play a role to a greater or lesser degree. My personal idea is that slavery was the thing. It would never be profitable to spend the money to invent a labor saving device when there was effectively infinite cheap labor. They didn't have the metallurgy to create high quality machine parts and the industrial design and manufacture ideas were invented for a long time yet. Their mechanical engineering was better than ours till like the 1900s. So it was all bespoke work. All expensive and kidna delicate. So you wouldn't want to pay the expense of a labor saving device when you could just buy a few gauls for the money.
In the way of capitlaism stifling blue sky innovation feudal lords had to be even worse.
Exactly. Under feudalism, there's no "disrupting" established lords regardless of the pitch or your personal connections; even if one wanted to be your patron the others would probably gang up on them. This is basically why Russia is still using 99.9% old Soviet technology. They haven't given themselves titles yet but oligarchs are basically feudal lords, Kamil Galeev has gone into more detail about that specific case.
To be fair, most the soviet stuff was well made in ways lots of modern stuff just isn't. Like up untill the very recent period we didn't have any space flight capacity but the old soviet stuff was still going strong.
It's true. They set out to be hyper-progressive science people, and in some ways succeeded. Their engineers were always decent, and when a factory could source the stuff they needed good stuff was built.