You might be interested in reading my book, From Poverty to Progress: Understanding Humanity’s Greatest Achievement. It includes a chapter on Cultural Evolution and its relationship with modern human material progress.
Do you think institutionalised business and government necessarily leads to decay in subsequent generations? Both mission-orientated government and first generation entrepreneurs can deploy resources in incredibly productive way, with dynamism, flair and innovation. Meanwhile financialised economics and social spending geared bureaucracies seems to be more of a placeholder economics- celebrating at the tiniest incremental result, in the shadow of rusted Goliaths.
To what specifically are your referring to? This sounds like a response to a different article of mine, not this one, which makes me think I am missing something here.
Ah, I see. I tend to occasionally engage in lateral leaping, not explaining intervening steps in my thinking. I was specifically thinking of the way in which at the more complex end of cultural evolution there seems to be an inevitable tendency towards decay. Many blame the fall of Empires on external factors, foreign antagonists, changing ecology, farming exhaustion or even diseases (which may be more true in tropical or sub-tropical zones).
I think this is facile thinking. Most collapses are internal and occur at the cultural layer. I think its because there is inherent tendency towards decay and cultural destabilisation. It might even occur at the ephemeral level, because of the cynicism which arises from an increasing cultural cache of knowledge. For example, we may know that the market is amoral- but does stating the fact openly tilt the culture towards immoral bad acting rather than simple amorality? Wouldn't it be better it introduce the white lie that the market is necessarily morally constrained by competition?
Whether one looks at Rome, the High Period of Islam, the British Empire or America today, all of these falls or impending falls occurred because of internal failures, not because external factors. One factor is undoubtedly overly financialised economics. It was the downfall of the British Empire. Finance crowded out the industrial sector and even by 1890 German industrial output had outstripped the mainland UK by a factor of five- making a future war with Germany all but inevitable. Sure, Thucydides plays a role, but the nexus point which predicts decline is usually hidden in history far further back.
My point would be this- we make these decisions at the level of group dynamically, and we make them memetically through the ideas that become currency between us. Generally, it's not a good idea to debate Libertarians with a fondness for Austrian economics and anarcho-capitalism. It's difficult to get them to accept any of the normal premises about social goods, or even the benefits of utilitarianism. The best one usually do is to get them to concede that Richard Thaler's Libertarian Paternalism is a good idea.
But I did come up with one incredibly strong argument, which floored a guy who had been quite senior with Disney on the programming side. I made the point using network theory, arguing that human distributed networks tended to polarise over time. He asked for examples. History is replete with them. He should have come back to me with the freedom to disassociate, but he didn't.
I think the decay and destabilisation tends to occur at the level of group dynamics, but be caused at the cultural layer. The polarisation tends to happen at the layer of foundational priors. People argue at the surface layer, but don't realise that the real disagreement is occurring deeper, at the contextual layer of the things they take for granted as being true. It mostly happens because although we might come across something which updates our knowledge with corrections, we don't do our due diligence in examining the premises that led up to said belief- and I'm just as guilty of this as everyone else.
At the cultural layer, have you noticed how much more jaded and cynical our Western culture is. I'm not saying that aren't very good reasons for this to be the case- but I think we pay a huge social and economic cost for our cynicism. I used to be quite bleak on climate, it was a cause of intermittent depression and probably contributed to my necessary brush with CBT counselling. What I hadn't done was decent research, going direct to the IPCC to read the summaries direct. Instead, I had trusted media to act as gatekeepers and curators of information- not realising that although climate change is very serious long-term problem it's not anywhere near the existential threat I thought it was.
One of things which seriously changed my mind and had a positive effect on my wellbeing was that I happened to have interests in both climate and engineering the combination led to a number of really good content suggestions. Suddenly I was inundated with all these really amazing and ambitious climate projects. Neom with its solar desalination. The German's North African solar project at the verge of deserts. The Ocean Cleanup Interceptor launch. Chinese reverse desertification projects. There is an endless list. It's easy to sit in the West, see the cars on the road and believe those in power are doing nothing, but a more granular approach which looks at the comparative impacts of things like shipping compared to cars, likely future changes to air freight.
Now, I'm a techno-optimist. Don't get me wrong- I still think our leaders are insanely stupid. They pursue both solar and wind (wind is better, topping out at 30%) at levels far beyond their maximum advisable utility as a portion of total energy. They are not making econometric decisions and investing anywhere what they need to in innovation, nuclear, and exploring other options. I also think that Toyota is correct, and hydrogen is the better option for phasing out ICE vehicles.
What helps is knowing that the journalists completely misread the graph for the 2018 interim report. I mean, didn't they wonder why there was a top and bottom estimate in the past! It turns out that the 12 years projection for irrevocable harm was actually scheduled to be around 2053. It also helps to know that the original threshold was set at 2 degrees C, but that the target was changed for political purposes, because 2 degrees C lacked the urgency and impetus to lead to policy changes.
Anyway, my main point with all this is that I think that there is an extent to which a certain cultural narrative can lead to cultural decay, profoundly changing group dynamics at the political and economic layer of civilisations. This was my point about placeholder generations- there are a number of factors, incorrect priors, cynicism, greed, the increasing propensity to cheat- it all adds up to a feedback system which might lead to inevitable decline and collapse.
You write “I think the decay and destabilization tends to occur at the level of group dynamics, but be caused at the cultural layer. The polarisation tends to happen at the layer of foundational priors. People argue at the surface layer, but don't realize that the real disagreement is occurring deeper, at the contextual layer of the things they take for granted as being true.”
This framework is foreign to me. So is a similar framework that talk about the problems of our times as a history of ideas. For me, there is no cultural layer, deeper foundational layer, and more surface group dynamics. For me is it culture all the way down. We humans are not herd animals, we are primates. Put 1000 cows in an enclosed field and they will all peacefully graze. Put 1000 nonhuman primates into a bounded environment and they will rip each other to pieces. Yet 50000 of us pack together in a stadium for a sporting event and we don’t all kill each other. Our species and out domestic animals, by far, consumer more of the primary product of the earth (energy stored chemically via photosynthesis) than any other species of animal, We inhabit all of the terrestrial environment as a single species. We do so by cooperation. The old champions of cooperative living, the social insects have been left in the dust by we humans.
How do we do this. Humans are different because we have culture, an information system parallel to genetics that like the latter evolves and which allows us to do things we shouldn’t be able to do. We have evolved “social scaleup technologies” (e.g. religion, politics, philosophy, morality, military science, capitalism) that has allowed a species very much like chimps (who do not operate at collectives beyond 30 or 40 individuals) to operate at cooperative scales in the millions. We have evolved natural scaleup technologies (e.g. science & technology) that allow us to support immense population densities and to create an immensely complicated and powerful material culture. The layers you speak of are all the same thing, culture of various types, acquired, used, transmitted by collections of culture-using primates.
Sure, but you're discussing something different from me. In this section, I was talking about the Babel problem- the fact that we increasingly lack a common frame. Other civilisation didn't have this problem, because they had centralising tyrannical power structures. Although many were multicultural- Rome, Islam, the Berbers, even the British Empire, etc- they didn't give a shit about what the other cultures in the multicultural consortium thought- the dominant cultural power would just supress any dissent with the application of brutal military force. The main exception was the British- everywhere apart from Africa, where anti-slavery Christian evangelicism was a driving force in early colonial moves, the British quickly learned to leave matters of religion alone, especially in India (although Rome's reaction to Jewish monotheism was initially somewhat similar). In one instance, Queen Victoria even posted guards to protect convalescing Hindu soldiers- from the mass of Christian clergymen intent upon converting them.
My point would be this- democracy is denied the use of military force as a means of preserving internal unitary power. As such, Liberal Democracies, unique amongst historical civilisations, require a common frame. This presents a unique vulnerability and would tend to suggest that multicultural democracies and supranational semi-democracies are inherently more fragile than other types of civilisation.
I don't think "frame" is a useful concept. People do what benefits them or makes sense to them in their particular situation. They don't generally behave in accordance with some frame like an automaton. But how do you know what to do in order to be successful or happy, or at least not a fucking loser?
These are serious problems that people deal with. The collective story of what they do is history. Now the power of evolution is that it aggregates the effects of many individual actions and notes a residual direction. Some phenotypes are becoming more prevalent over time and other less so. We call the former adaptive.
The idea that ancient societies were better able to use force to impose some frame on the wide population is hard to believe. Use of force is horrendously expensive and leads to early collapse. That went out in the Iron Age.
The new strategy was cooperative. The Romans maintained a vast empire by co-opting local elites, demonstrating that they would be personally better off joining the Roman club than remaining on their own. The Romans were tolerant, you were free to be you, keep your religious beliefs, just add Augustus and the current emperor to the roster of gods that are worshipped in your land.
As an imperial province, you are spared the problem of defense against powerful enemies (who's gonna fuck with Rome?). The sort of tax monies you levied and spent on defense you now send to Rome. Any extra is yours to disburse as makes sense. In 212 AD emperor Caracalla made all free men in the Empire Roman citizens, it had become a commonwealth. The Romans were as skilled as you Brits in statecraft, we Americans are unfortunately not.
Yes, the Romans did violently suppress people wanted to change these easy terms. All they asked was payment of reasonable taxes and placement of emperor-gods as a symbol of patriotism. Only the Flag Burners in Judean objected. Herod* ran a tight ship and did not tolerate any shit (the Gospel of Mathew contains an urban legend illustrating his street cred). His son, trying and failing to be seen like his dad was removed by the Romans and replaced by a Roman procurator. Matthew implies one of this son's cock-ups (this wasn't an urban legend, it really happened) as the reason why Mary and Joseph went to Nazareth from Egypt instead of returning home to Bethlehem). The Roman's did not like having to send Romans to run shit-heap provinces because the locals can't but what do you do? It worked for 60 years and then went tits up. Things went tits up a lot quicker when we Americans sent a fucking *proconsul* to Iraq. (I'm still angry about that).
Well now I've gotten sidetracked. My point is there is no frame. There are people muddling through life trying to manage as best as they can with the situation, they are in. Most of the time they keep things together, other times, as the poet said, "Things fall apart, the center does not hold."
I am a fan of the center. I want it to hold, even if it doesn't really deserve to.
*Herod was a real sob, as Augustus noted when he quipped, I'd rather be Herod's pig than his son
OK. Frame is an imprecise word. How about unifying social propaganda? I don't think many realise just how paradigm shifting mass media was. The downside was that it led to society-wide self-deception. The upside was that it was a social cohesion building force. Propaganda in the 1930s was a minor hobby of mine- I wanted to understand mass cultural insanity. The truth was there had always been antisemitism in Germany- the Nazis simply sought to greatly amplify it.
Many commentators incorrectly equate our current zeitgeist with the 30s. This is a mistake. I know it's not an original thought, and certainly not of my authoring- but I think that a better historical equivalence is to be found in the innovation of the printing press and the religious wars and cultural instability that followed. Most people think the Bible was the most popular printed book- instead pamphlets on how to spot a witch were more popular. The current changes are technological in nature, but with a profoundly culturally destabilising effect.
This is why most politically correct authoritarians are young women. Imagine being subjected to the most horrendous bullying and harassment from your broader peer group. Your every word expressed and written down subject to the least generous interpretation and mockery. Wouldn't you be conditioned to think that extreme self-censorship was natural and that even the most mildly objectionable comment is a moral outrage? Teenage boys get off lightly with social media, they are partially insulated by gaming and tend to favour physical approaches to aggression rather than reputation damage. Life is hell by comparison for teenage girls.
You write “I think its because there is inherent tendency towards decay and cultural destabilization.”
This seems similar to Ibn Khaldun’s concept of asabiyya, or social cohesion, which Turchin uses to explain how durable civilizations like the Romans hold together through multiple secular cycles. It is generated by the evolutionary pressure exerted by the threat of nearby fearsome enemies. For example, Rome’s asabiyya was forged by the threat posed by the Etruscans and then the Gauls, which then lasted through four secular cycles, the Kingdom, the early Republic, the late Republic, and the Principate, before running out in the Crisis of the Third Century. The empire was restore by a new line of Illyrian emperors, who gained control of the the old empire and began a new one, the Byzantine. This empire considered itself as a continuation of the Roman empire and kept that name. But its core strength came from what would become Yugoslavia, whose asabiyya was forged by the Gothic threat much as the Gauls had forged that of the Rome.
Looking at history it seem asabiyya tends to run out after 3-5 cycles, except for that “Energizer Bunny” of civilizations, China, which is one cycle 9 or 10, IIRC. But they have had a constant threat of steppe barbarians, Huns, Mongol, Manchurians that served to recharge them. Looking at Britian, I would argue their civilization begins with the Norman Conquest, which ended Saxon England, which had one secular cycle over 870-1070 and possibly a couple of cycles before that. The British civilization went through the Plantagenet (1070-1485), Tudor-Stuart (1485-1690), Mercantile (1690-1870) and Republican (1870-1960) as which point the British Empire had dissolved and the civilization had fallen. As for America, our asabiyya was forged through conflict with American Indians, which created the colonial militia, which fought and won the War of Independence against the British. By 1810, the Indian threat was largely gone and we have gone through two cycles 1780-1870 and 1870-1942 (unlike for Britain, WW II was an empowering process so it is part or the rising phase of a new cycle, whereas the two world wars greatly degraded British power and were in the falling phase of the previous cycle). The US could have another cycle after this one.
Thanks for the reference! And sure, I largely agree with you. My only quibble would be over the Saxon England question. Although, William the Conqueror was initially quite brutal and replaced many existing nobles with his own people, he did eventually accept that if he wanted to fully benefit from the wealth and tax revenue he had gained, without wiping out a productive populace, he would at least partially have to concede to Saxon culture. Perhaps the most important tradition was English Common Law. It's a mistake to think this began with Magna Carta. The Sovereign was both subject to law and its protector long before Magna Carta. Magna Carta only reified existing tradition. The foundation for these common law rights was the Fyrd, the requirement for freedmen to muster and serve in the sovereign's army in times of war. It's still found in America today, in the requirement to register for the draft.
On your earlier reply, I largely agree with you on the matter of the overemphasis on ideas, with one all-important exception. I think that when a culture becomes internally weak, demoralised and beset by division, it naturally becomes vulnerable to memetic viruses, terribly bad ideas which can occasionally become fatal. Some cultures actually have these pathological entities supersede their natural culture, albeit for relatively brief periods in the historical span. Examples would be the Soviet Union (Lenin and Stalin periods), Nazi Germany, Revolutionary France during the Terror, and China during the Cultural Revolution.
Historians are aware of Robespierre's informants and the denouncements, but far less attention is paid to the extent to which the Nazi Regime relied upon neighbours informing upon each other for its all-pervading power over the citizenry. Years ago there was a great documentary on the subject which shed light on a rarely glimpsed subject matter. Historians managed to find a single archive of police records from the period which survived the destruction of documents. It paints a grim picture.
Not sure whether the link gives you the full playlist, or just the first video. Irritatingly, it's broken down into 10 minute chunks. It's the Chaos and Consent videos- if you're interested. The Amazon listing describes the series as 'arguably one of the most important documentary series ever made'. It had a profound effect on me. Although I was quite popular in my youth, I was also a bit of a freak, because of my intellect and weird was of looking at things. Watching it, I couldn't help but feel that I would be one of those reported upon.
My broader point was if one looks at culture at a social meta-organism, then memetic viruses are like a flu which can infect a vulnerable host- sometimes it's just a fever which runs its course and breaks, occasionally it can kill.
You are right about the Saxons. My take is based on elites, and the 1086 Domesday survey shows that just about all the manors were held by Norman nobles, whereas before 1066 they would have been held by Saxons.
But as for the bulk of the population, these people were assets, literally, and so not wiped out. And though the new English elites continued to speak French by the late 14th century, English had become the language of the court. Considering that William I's great-great-great-grandfather was Norse and presumable spoke a Germanic language. more similar to English than French, it is curious that by William's time they saw themselves as so Gallo-Roman (French) that they continued to use this language for 10 generations after WIlliam.
Interesting article.
You might be interested in reading my book, From Poverty to Progress: Understanding Humanity’s Greatest Achievement. It includes a chapter on Cultural Evolution and its relationship with modern human material progress.
https://frompovertytoprogress.com/from-poverty-to-progress-book-page/
My birthday is coming up and my wife is going to want to know what to get me. I think I'll add this to my list.
Do you think institutionalised business and government necessarily leads to decay in subsequent generations? Both mission-orientated government and first generation entrepreneurs can deploy resources in incredibly productive way, with dynamism, flair and innovation. Meanwhile financialised economics and social spending geared bureaucracies seems to be more of a placeholder economics- celebrating at the tiniest incremental result, in the shadow of rusted Goliaths.
To what specifically are your referring to? This sounds like a response to a different article of mine, not this one, which makes me think I am missing something here.
Ah, I see. I tend to occasionally engage in lateral leaping, not explaining intervening steps in my thinking. I was specifically thinking of the way in which at the more complex end of cultural evolution there seems to be an inevitable tendency towards decay. Many blame the fall of Empires on external factors, foreign antagonists, changing ecology, farming exhaustion or even diseases (which may be more true in tropical or sub-tropical zones).
I think this is facile thinking. Most collapses are internal and occur at the cultural layer. I think its because there is inherent tendency towards decay and cultural destabilisation. It might even occur at the ephemeral level, because of the cynicism which arises from an increasing cultural cache of knowledge. For example, we may know that the market is amoral- but does stating the fact openly tilt the culture towards immoral bad acting rather than simple amorality? Wouldn't it be better it introduce the white lie that the market is necessarily morally constrained by competition?
Whether one looks at Rome, the High Period of Islam, the British Empire or America today, all of these falls or impending falls occurred because of internal failures, not because external factors. One factor is undoubtedly overly financialised economics. It was the downfall of the British Empire. Finance crowded out the industrial sector and even by 1890 German industrial output had outstripped the mainland UK by a factor of five- making a future war with Germany all but inevitable. Sure, Thucydides plays a role, but the nexus point which predicts decline is usually hidden in history far further back.
My point would be this- we make these decisions at the level of group dynamically, and we make them memetically through the ideas that become currency between us. Generally, it's not a good idea to debate Libertarians with a fondness for Austrian economics and anarcho-capitalism. It's difficult to get them to accept any of the normal premises about social goods, or even the benefits of utilitarianism. The best one usually do is to get them to concede that Richard Thaler's Libertarian Paternalism is a good idea.
But I did come up with one incredibly strong argument, which floored a guy who had been quite senior with Disney on the programming side. I made the point using network theory, arguing that human distributed networks tended to polarise over time. He asked for examples. History is replete with them. He should have come back to me with the freedom to disassociate, but he didn't.
I think the decay and destabilisation tends to occur at the level of group dynamics, but be caused at the cultural layer. The polarisation tends to happen at the layer of foundational priors. People argue at the surface layer, but don't realise that the real disagreement is occurring deeper, at the contextual layer of the things they take for granted as being true. It mostly happens because although we might come across something which updates our knowledge with corrections, we don't do our due diligence in examining the premises that led up to said belief- and I'm just as guilty of this as everyone else.
At the cultural layer, have you noticed how much more jaded and cynical our Western culture is. I'm not saying that aren't very good reasons for this to be the case- but I think we pay a huge social and economic cost for our cynicism. I used to be quite bleak on climate, it was a cause of intermittent depression and probably contributed to my necessary brush with CBT counselling. What I hadn't done was decent research, going direct to the IPCC to read the summaries direct. Instead, I had trusted media to act as gatekeepers and curators of information- not realising that although climate change is very serious long-term problem it's not anywhere near the existential threat I thought it was.
One of things which seriously changed my mind and had a positive effect on my wellbeing was that I happened to have interests in both climate and engineering the combination led to a number of really good content suggestions. Suddenly I was inundated with all these really amazing and ambitious climate projects. Neom with its solar desalination. The German's North African solar project at the verge of deserts. The Ocean Cleanup Interceptor launch. Chinese reverse desertification projects. There is an endless list. It's easy to sit in the West, see the cars on the road and believe those in power are doing nothing, but a more granular approach which looks at the comparative impacts of things like shipping compared to cars, likely future changes to air freight.
Now, I'm a techno-optimist. Don't get me wrong- I still think our leaders are insanely stupid. They pursue both solar and wind (wind is better, topping out at 30%) at levels far beyond their maximum advisable utility as a portion of total energy. They are not making econometric decisions and investing anywhere what they need to in innovation, nuclear, and exploring other options. I also think that Toyota is correct, and hydrogen is the better option for phasing out ICE vehicles.
What helps is knowing that the journalists completely misread the graph for the 2018 interim report. I mean, didn't they wonder why there was a top and bottom estimate in the past! It turns out that the 12 years projection for irrevocable harm was actually scheduled to be around 2053. It also helps to know that the original threshold was set at 2 degrees C, but that the target was changed for political purposes, because 2 degrees C lacked the urgency and impetus to lead to policy changes.
Anyway, my main point with all this is that I think that there is an extent to which a certain cultural narrative can lead to cultural decay, profoundly changing group dynamics at the political and economic layer of civilisations. This was my point about placeholder generations- there are a number of factors, incorrect priors, cynicism, greed, the increasing propensity to cheat- it all adds up to a feedback system which might lead to inevitable decline and collapse.
You write “I think the decay and destabilization tends to occur at the level of group dynamics, but be caused at the cultural layer. The polarisation tends to happen at the layer of foundational priors. People argue at the surface layer, but don't realize that the real disagreement is occurring deeper, at the contextual layer of the things they take for granted as being true.”
This framework is foreign to me. So is a similar framework that talk about the problems of our times as a history of ideas. For me, there is no cultural layer, deeper foundational layer, and more surface group dynamics. For me is it culture all the way down. We humans are not herd animals, we are primates. Put 1000 cows in an enclosed field and they will all peacefully graze. Put 1000 nonhuman primates into a bounded environment and they will rip each other to pieces. Yet 50000 of us pack together in a stadium for a sporting event and we don’t all kill each other. Our species and out domestic animals, by far, consumer more of the primary product of the earth (energy stored chemically via photosynthesis) than any other species of animal, We inhabit all of the terrestrial environment as a single species. We do so by cooperation. The old champions of cooperative living, the social insects have been left in the dust by we humans.
How do we do this. Humans are different because we have culture, an information system parallel to genetics that like the latter evolves and which allows us to do things we shouldn’t be able to do. We have evolved “social scaleup technologies” (e.g. religion, politics, philosophy, morality, military science, capitalism) that has allowed a species very much like chimps (who do not operate at collectives beyond 30 or 40 individuals) to operate at cooperative scales in the millions. We have evolved natural scaleup technologies (e.g. science & technology) that allow us to support immense population densities and to create an immensely complicated and powerful material culture. The layers you speak of are all the same thing, culture of various types, acquired, used, transmitted by collections of culture-using primates.
Sure, but you're discussing something different from me. In this section, I was talking about the Babel problem- the fact that we increasingly lack a common frame. Other civilisation didn't have this problem, because they had centralising tyrannical power structures. Although many were multicultural- Rome, Islam, the Berbers, even the British Empire, etc- they didn't give a shit about what the other cultures in the multicultural consortium thought- the dominant cultural power would just supress any dissent with the application of brutal military force. The main exception was the British- everywhere apart from Africa, where anti-slavery Christian evangelicism was a driving force in early colonial moves, the British quickly learned to leave matters of religion alone, especially in India (although Rome's reaction to Jewish monotheism was initially somewhat similar). In one instance, Queen Victoria even posted guards to protect convalescing Hindu soldiers- from the mass of Christian clergymen intent upon converting them.
My point would be this- democracy is denied the use of military force as a means of preserving internal unitary power. As such, Liberal Democracies, unique amongst historical civilisations, require a common frame. This presents a unique vulnerability and would tend to suggest that multicultural democracies and supranational semi-democracies are inherently more fragile than other types of civilisation.
I don't think "frame" is a useful concept. People do what benefits them or makes sense to them in their particular situation. They don't generally behave in accordance with some frame like an automaton. But how do you know what to do in order to be successful or happy, or at least not a fucking loser?
These are serious problems that people deal with. The collective story of what they do is history. Now the power of evolution is that it aggregates the effects of many individual actions and notes a residual direction. Some phenotypes are becoming more prevalent over time and other less so. We call the former adaptive.
The idea that ancient societies were better able to use force to impose some frame on the wide population is hard to believe. Use of force is horrendously expensive and leads to early collapse. That went out in the Iron Age.
The new strategy was cooperative. The Romans maintained a vast empire by co-opting local elites, demonstrating that they would be personally better off joining the Roman club than remaining on their own. The Romans were tolerant, you were free to be you, keep your religious beliefs, just add Augustus and the current emperor to the roster of gods that are worshipped in your land.
As an imperial province, you are spared the problem of defense against powerful enemies (who's gonna fuck with Rome?). The sort of tax monies you levied and spent on defense you now send to Rome. Any extra is yours to disburse as makes sense. In 212 AD emperor Caracalla made all free men in the Empire Roman citizens, it had become a commonwealth. The Romans were as skilled as you Brits in statecraft, we Americans are unfortunately not.
Yes, the Romans did violently suppress people wanted to change these easy terms. All they asked was payment of reasonable taxes and placement of emperor-gods as a symbol of patriotism. Only the Flag Burners in Judean objected. Herod* ran a tight ship and did not tolerate any shit (the Gospel of Mathew contains an urban legend illustrating his street cred). His son, trying and failing to be seen like his dad was removed by the Romans and replaced by a Roman procurator. Matthew implies one of this son's cock-ups (this wasn't an urban legend, it really happened) as the reason why Mary and Joseph went to Nazareth from Egypt instead of returning home to Bethlehem). The Roman's did not like having to send Romans to run shit-heap provinces because the locals can't but what do you do? It worked for 60 years and then went tits up. Things went tits up a lot quicker when we Americans sent a fucking *proconsul* to Iraq. (I'm still angry about that).
Well now I've gotten sidetracked. My point is there is no frame. There are people muddling through life trying to manage as best as they can with the situation, they are in. Most of the time they keep things together, other times, as the poet said, "Things fall apart, the center does not hold."
I am a fan of the center. I want it to hold, even if it doesn't really deserve to.
*Herod was a real sob, as Augustus noted when he quipped, I'd rather be Herod's pig than his son
OK. Frame is an imprecise word. How about unifying social propaganda? I don't think many realise just how paradigm shifting mass media was. The downside was that it led to society-wide self-deception. The upside was that it was a social cohesion building force. Propaganda in the 1930s was a minor hobby of mine- I wanted to understand mass cultural insanity. The truth was there had always been antisemitism in Germany- the Nazis simply sought to greatly amplify it.
Many commentators incorrectly equate our current zeitgeist with the 30s. This is a mistake. I know it's not an original thought, and certainly not of my authoring- but I think that a better historical equivalence is to be found in the innovation of the printing press and the religious wars and cultural instability that followed. Most people think the Bible was the most popular printed book- instead pamphlets on how to spot a witch were more popular. The current changes are technological in nature, but with a profoundly culturally destabilising effect.
This is why most politically correct authoritarians are young women. Imagine being subjected to the most horrendous bullying and harassment from your broader peer group. Your every word expressed and written down subject to the least generous interpretation and mockery. Wouldn't you be conditioned to think that extreme self-censorship was natural and that even the most mildly objectionable comment is a moral outrage? Teenage boys get off lightly with social media, they are partially insulated by gaming and tend to favour physical approaches to aggression rather than reputation damage. Life is hell by comparison for teenage girls.
You write “I think its because there is inherent tendency towards decay and cultural destabilization.”
This seems similar to Ibn Khaldun’s concept of asabiyya, or social cohesion, which Turchin uses to explain how durable civilizations like the Romans hold together through multiple secular cycles. It is generated by the evolutionary pressure exerted by the threat of nearby fearsome enemies. For example, Rome’s asabiyya was forged by the threat posed by the Etruscans and then the Gauls, which then lasted through four secular cycles, the Kingdom, the early Republic, the late Republic, and the Principate, before running out in the Crisis of the Third Century. The empire was restore by a new line of Illyrian emperors, who gained control of the the old empire and began a new one, the Byzantine. This empire considered itself as a continuation of the Roman empire and kept that name. But its core strength came from what would become Yugoslavia, whose asabiyya was forged by the Gothic threat much as the Gauls had forged that of the Rome.
Looking at history it seem asabiyya tends to run out after 3-5 cycles, except for that “Energizer Bunny” of civilizations, China, which is one cycle 9 or 10, IIRC. But they have had a constant threat of steppe barbarians, Huns, Mongol, Manchurians that served to recharge them. Looking at Britian, I would argue their civilization begins with the Norman Conquest, which ended Saxon England, which had one secular cycle over 870-1070 and possibly a couple of cycles before that. The British civilization went through the Plantagenet (1070-1485), Tudor-Stuart (1485-1690), Mercantile (1690-1870) and Republican (1870-1960) as which point the British Empire had dissolved and the civilization had fallen. As for America, our asabiyya was forged through conflict with American Indians, which created the colonial militia, which fought and won the War of Independence against the British. By 1810, the Indian threat was largely gone and we have gone through two cycles 1780-1870 and 1870-1942 (unlike for Britain, WW II was an empowering process so it is part or the rising phase of a new cycle, whereas the two world wars greatly degraded British power and were in the falling phase of the previous cycle). The US could have another cycle after this one.
Thanks for the reference! And sure, I largely agree with you. My only quibble would be over the Saxon England question. Although, William the Conqueror was initially quite brutal and replaced many existing nobles with his own people, he did eventually accept that if he wanted to fully benefit from the wealth and tax revenue he had gained, without wiping out a productive populace, he would at least partially have to concede to Saxon culture. Perhaps the most important tradition was English Common Law. It's a mistake to think this began with Magna Carta. The Sovereign was both subject to law and its protector long before Magna Carta. Magna Carta only reified existing tradition. The foundation for these common law rights was the Fyrd, the requirement for freedmen to muster and serve in the sovereign's army in times of war. It's still found in America today, in the requirement to register for the draft.
On your earlier reply, I largely agree with you on the matter of the overemphasis on ideas, with one all-important exception. I think that when a culture becomes internally weak, demoralised and beset by division, it naturally becomes vulnerable to memetic viruses, terribly bad ideas which can occasionally become fatal. Some cultures actually have these pathological entities supersede their natural culture, albeit for relatively brief periods in the historical span. Examples would be the Soviet Union (Lenin and Stalin periods), Nazi Germany, Revolutionary France during the Terror, and China during the Cultural Revolution.
Historians are aware of Robespierre's informants and the denouncements, but far less attention is paid to the extent to which the Nazi Regime relied upon neighbours informing upon each other for its all-pervading power over the citizenry. Years ago there was a great documentary on the subject which shed light on a rarely glimpsed subject matter. Historians managed to find a single archive of police records from the period which survived the destruction of documents. It paints a grim picture.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0074knp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQjhuGj-PuY&list=PL65A40740BC82013C
Not sure whether the link gives you the full playlist, or just the first video. Irritatingly, it's broken down into 10 minute chunks. It's the Chaos and Consent videos- if you're interested. The Amazon listing describes the series as 'arguably one of the most important documentary series ever made'. It had a profound effect on me. Although I was quite popular in my youth, I was also a bit of a freak, because of my intellect and weird was of looking at things. Watching it, I couldn't help but feel that I would be one of those reported upon.
My broader point was if one looks at culture at a social meta-organism, then memetic viruses are like a flu which can infect a vulnerable host- sometimes it's just a fever which runs its course and breaks, occasionally it can kill.
As for mimetic viruses, did you read this post of mine?
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/cycles-of-radicalization
You are right about the Saxons. My take is based on elites, and the 1086 Domesday survey shows that just about all the manors were held by Norman nobles, whereas before 1066 they would have been held by Saxons.
But as for the bulk of the population, these people were assets, literally, and so not wiped out. And though the new English elites continued to speak French by the late 14th century, English had become the language of the court. Considering that William I's great-great-great-grandfather was Norse and presumable spoke a Germanic language. more similar to English than French, it is curious that by William's time they saw themselves as so Gallo-Roman (French) that they continued to use this language for 10 generations after WIlliam.
I wrote a couple of posts on global warming.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-global-warming-became-scientific
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/a-simple-math-model-for-global-warming