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Awesome video! Turns out @rufuspollock and I have read a lot of the same books, and draw quite similar conclusions from many of those books. Brendan Graham Dempsey raises a question at the 1:03, and I’d like to post a few thoughts in response to that below.
In the context of a much larger discussion about cultural evolution, Brendan pushes back at 1:03 against geography, technology, institutions, etc. as causal factors in cultural emergence. He would appear to favor a more pure form of self-authoring idealism. My meta observation about all that is that nothing says “Western” or “modern” quite so much as self-authoring idealism! People who think like that belong to a time and a place. Everything “metamodern”, ‘integral”, “liminal”, “Second Renaissance”, etc. likewise belongs to a time and a place. Brendan is concerned that architects of the future of civilization not somehow be bound by such pragmatic circumstances. Here we differ. To me, architecting an alternative future for civilization 1) is ultra pragmatic, 2) occurs plausible in current historical circumstances for specific reasons, 3) is thoroughly influenced by geography, technology, institutions, etc., and 4) allows for - indeed demands - personal commitment and a transvaluation of values. To me, there are some pretty obvious systemic flywheels between culture, personality, institutions, material productions, and spiritual symbols. Terms like “civilization” are common proxies for holistic pattern recognition of such interlocking systems, but if we had to decompose them all analytically and tokenize them for the consumption of LLMs, I have no doubt we could. That systemic sensibility of mine - that also spawns from a time and a place. This time, and this place.
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This came up on Substack yesterday. It’s helpful for expressing how I see the world:
That’s why I don’t have a lot of interest in what @rufuspollock in the videos calls “primacies”. Culture, technology, geography, means of production, selfhood (pick your favorite causal factors) strike me simply as particularized frequencies of much more comprehensive resonances. The music is in the flow of fingers up and down the keyboard, not in any given finger banging away on any given key. That said, I’d also like to not fixate too much on “pattern language” as such, because seeing patterns - or embodying them in performance or plastic arts - strikes me as more resonant than talk in general.
Great points @RobertBunge
IMO we need “ecological explanations” that weave together the big 4 in any given context:
- Environment / Geography
- Technology
- Structures (including the economy)
- Culture (and ontology/consciousness) including worldviews etc
In any given situation e.g. “explain the end of slavery”, or the “rise of mega-empires c 1000BCE onwards” or “the rise of the west” there are factors from all 4 dimensions.
At the same time, in terms of paradigmatic change, and more generally in terms of large scale socio-political change, I would hold to the “primacy of being” thesis, where the 4th factor has primacy (i.e. a kind of priority in some sense).
This is a much bigger thread …
Here’s quick starter for 10 of applying these ideas …
| Geography primacy (e.g. Guns, Germs, Steel) | Techno-primacy | Structural primacy | Cultural primacy (Henrich, WEIRDest people) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Eurasia is east-west so easier for people, plants and tech to flow around. Also western europe has lots of small kingdoms (lots of mountains/seas etc) so lots of competition => rapid innovation. | (some geo) lots of coal deposits enabling the industrial revolution. Or luck of invention: printing press / gunpowder etc happened to happen in Europe … | Runymede and magna carta (by chance) leading to long-run democratising etc. (??) | Chance policies of catholic church lead to end of kinship networks leading to weird cultural attitudes that are individualistic, egalitarian, pro-capitalism/markets etc. |
Generally, all that works fine for me. The “Geography” column is basically a restatement of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, which is good as far as it goes. A lot of other authors in the empirical meta-history space (e.g. Morris, Turchin, Kemp) are to various extents supplementing or refining Diamond’s argument. But it’s pretty clear from all of these, that ancient agriculture arose first in what Morris calls the “hilly flanks” of Mesopotamia for reasons that were mostly about geography, available species, and climate. It’s not like Mesopotamians were uniquely intelligent - Chinese, Mesoamericans, Africans, and Indus Valley people independently repeated the process a few centuries later. It’s just that the Near East was favored by location and speciation. Beyond Diamond’s basic East-West insight, Turchin and Kemp in particular analyze the cultural and institutional mechanisms of human complexity radiation in great detail. Competition essentially pushes the latest and greatest technologies of exploitation and conquest from the cores to the frontiers, until the frontier peoples form their own imperial cores. That’s why the “West” started out in Anatolia and migrated by-the-by to London and New York.
The problem with a purely geographic explanation of Western emergence in the Renaissance is, why did it not happen centuries sooner? Turchin especially (inspired by Ibn Khaldun) shows why edge barbarians always come to power over the previous core. Russia, Islam, the Aztecs, the Mongols, the Manchus all came to power that way. The Franks and the Saxons in Western Europe were just another version of that edge barbarian story. Moreover, medieval Europeans were schooled in everything that mattered by the greatest civilization of the era - Islam - which in turn sourced wealth and innovation from across the full Eurasian span. Once South American silver entered the scene, Europe was really orchestrating everything from everywhere all at once. Of the geographic advantages enjoyed by Renaissance Europe, distance from Central Asia was arguably the best. Wave after wave of Central Asian horse warriors wrecked all the other ancient civilizations time and again. Europe figured out how to fight by cavalry - and then by gunpowder - without getting fully overrun. (China, arguably more sophisticated than Europe, was not so geographically favored).
All of Europe’s many peninsulas, islands, mountains, and microclimates would have availed it nothing, however, without an institutional matrix that favored competition and innovation and precluded something like a Ming Dynasty to force cultural centralization. That’s where Henrich’s argument speaks most convincingly. It’s easiest to set Jesus aside for a moment and just consider the medieval Church as the multinational corporation that it arguably was. Why was the Church so against extended families based on cousin marriage? (FYI - you won’t find anything about that topic in the Sermon on the Mount!) Real simple. The Church needed 1) bequests and 2) vocations. It needed free agents who could write their own wills and make their own personal commitments. Also, if it could roil family alliances that held together the German nobility, so much the better. So the Church used canon law to screw over the Teutonic barony, in a nutshell. The upshot of this was eventually monastic orders, guilds, free cities, and the preconditions of arrangements like the Magna Carta. No need to follow the Gospel when you can just follow the money! However, Jesus was in fact somewhat involved. Like any Axial Age teacher, he detailed a program of personal salvation and ethical action. Buddha, Confucius, and Socrates were not dissimilar in this regard. It turns out in the wreckage of fallen empires, personal meaning-making rises to the fore. The really interesting question is why did the Western version of this evolve into a scientific revolution, because parallel Asian developments were in some ways very similar in focus and in some dimensions perhaps even more advanced.
On that final point, I’d simply like to add that as much as I’d like to keep benefiting from scientific innovation, on a social level, I might prefer a society governed by the ethics of Buddha or Confucius over the so-called “Christianity” of the retrograde MAGA movement. Nowadays if I want to get in touch with the teachings of Jesus, I find myself in the company of Bahá’ís. “Christian” techno-fascism is a poor substitute for the Gospel. Beyond a Second Renaissance, a Second Reformation may also be very much in order!