The Slow Crash
by Jason GodeskyThe twentieth century, in popular imagination, was a time of unprecedented growth and achievement: the end of imperialism, the triumph of democracy, and unparalleled achievements like the lunar landing are supposed to mark the high points of civilization. But to what extent does this view really capture the dynamics of the twentieth century? This article introduces a new series in which we’ll take a look at the twentieth century through the lens of energy and social complexity, viewpoints which seem to suggest that rather than representing our civilization’s greatest heights, that our civilization actually peaked almost a hundred years ago—and that we’re now already a century into collapse.
Charles Mann (2005) describes the evidence that has forced us to rethink the shape of the pre-Columbian world, including the notion that in 1491, the bulk of the world’s population lived in the Americas. In “The Age of Exuberance,” we looked at the dire straits Europe was in by 1491, pressed with plague, overpopulation, and massive mortality, and how the discovery of the New World changed Europe’s social, economic and political dynamics, and brought with it new philosophies and world views that matched the new sense of “limitlessness.” What followed in Europe was an age of imperialism unseen since the Roman Empire, as European civilization moved out of the stagnation of the High Middle Ages, and began an era of unquestionable growth. In the New World, the cataclysmic spread of Old World plagues through the Native population decimated most Native cultures. The loss of a Native population to press into labor led Europeans to begin exporting Africa’s population en masse to make up for the deficit with the global slave trade. (Mann, 2005) Within a few centuries, European powers dominated most of the world. The Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution all represented undeniable leaps in social complexity.
This basic sketch sets the scene for the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1900, the world was divided amongst 57 countries. By 2000, that had quadrupled to 192.
Between 1860 and 1895, about 80 countries were wiped off the map, through (1) the Risorgimento in Italy, which abolished 4 dukedoms and one small kingdom; (2) German unification (37 small-to-medium-sized kingdoms and principalities); and (3) colonial ventures with colorful names like “the Great Game” and the “Scramble for Africa,” which extinguished or converted into ‘protectorates’ three Central Asian khanates, about 25 African states, four Pacific island kingdoms, six Southeast Asian monarchies and numerous smaller tribal associations. By the mid-1890s Europe’s total count of independent countries had dropped to 24, Asia’s to five, and Africa’s to two. By Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee ceremony in 1897 — held just after the curtain went down on the monarchies of Hawaii, Tonga, Madagascar, Aceh, and Sulu — there were about 56 independent countries worldwide, which is probably an all-time low.
The 20th-century trend toward more countries began with Cuban independence in 1898; Australia, Panama, Norway and Albania followed in the next decade. Since then, about 130 more countries have emerged with the breakup of tsarist Russia, Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman empire after World War I; then decolonization in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, the Caribbean, and the Pacific between 1945 and 1980; and the collapse of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The official U.S. count now lists 192 independent countries, the newest being four small Pacific island states; with 64 other territories of varying political status listed, there is still room for growth.a
Joseph Tainter (1990) defined collapse as the sudden loss of an established level of complexity. The proliferation of nation-states throughout the twentieth century comes primarily from freed colonies siezing autonomy from European control, a clear-cut example of a loss of an established level of complexity. The increasing number of nation-states, then, is as clear an indication of collapse as one could ask for.
The history of civilization is primarily a story of empires, and while the nation-state has emerged recently, we can see a general long-term trend of decreasing imperial longevity.
Empires, more than nation-states, are the principal actors in the history of world events. Much of what we call history consists of the deeds of the 50 to 70 empires that once ruled multiple peoples across large chunks of the globe. Yet, as time has passed, the life span of empires has tended to decline. Compared with their ancient and early modern predecessors, the empires of the last century were remarkably short lived. This phenomenon of reduced imperial life expectancy has profound implications for our own time.2
Empires arise when and where the energy exists to support such high levels of social complexity; their rises and falls chart the general trajectory of civilization, much as individual oils wells contribute to the petroleum production curve of a whole region. This trend of shorter empires, reaching new heights in the twentieth century, could be seen as signalling that civilization as a whole is approaching a global point of diminishing returns—the resources grow more scarce, while the energy demands required grow more intense, leading to shorter-lived empires as they more quickly fail to meet the increasing challenge.
When we look at the status of these succeeding nation-states, a picture of collapse becomes even clearer. The Failed States Index shows nearly all of the post-colonial world ranging between “Alert” and “Warning.” But the index does not show other significant areas of collapse: it shows Australia as “Sustainable,” despite mounting signs of ecological collapse (Diamond, 2005). It does not make any mention of the similar pressures in Montana (Diamond, 2005). Neither does it highlight post-Katrina New Orleans.3, 4 A map of the Failed States Index highlights that for most of the world, collapse is not a future possibility but a very present reality, yet it is still too rosy a picture. Collapse even looms large in the First World.
Of course, this seems like an almost ridiculous assertion. The nation-state has been heralded as “empire’s nemesis,” (Lieven, 2000) by its “claims to represent a distinct and legitimate political community,”5 marrying political domination to myths of ethnic identity. The origins of this view of politics reach all the way back to the beginnings of European imperialism, with the first European empire created by the union of Castille and Aragon into modern Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella, who finished the Reconquista, and used the printing press to create a shared sense of national identity through shared language (Diamond, 1997). The legal and political structures of the state followed soon after, seperating “government” from the body of the sovereign personally, with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Nationalism arose to unite the first European empires and inspire the mythically-constructed European “nations” to unite in the imperial cause. That plan ultimately led to the undoing of those same empires when that same sense of national identity reached the peoples Europe hoped to colonize.
Many historians and commentators stop there—they see the current issues of terrorism and globalization through this lens of national identity and the struggles for national sovereignty. As a cultural materialist, I find this view unsatisfactory. These psychological dynamics of what people want provides one level of understanding, but more importantly, what are the factors that allowed this dynamic, rather than some other, to take hold? In other words, what are the changes in energy, and following that social complexity, that have brought us to our current state of affairs?
According to the conventional view of the twentieth century, it marks the triumph of technology as civilization’s shining achievement, most often marked by the accomplishments of landing men on the moon, and harnessing the atom. But as David Edgerton (2006) points out, these achievements have been largely irrelevant to the way we lead our lives. While technology revolutionized patterns of living from 1800 to 1900, the inventions from 1900 to 2000 did little of the sort—rather, they generally elaborated, condensed or improved previous inventions. Major technological revolutions have become rare; instead, the twentieth century was mostly about sorting through the ramifications of the inventions of the nineteenth century.
I rise each morning, shave with soap and razor, don clothes of cotton and wool, read a paper, drink a coffee heated by gas or electricity and go to work with the aid of petrol and an internal combustion engine. At a centrally heated office I type on a Qwerty keyboard; I might later visit a pub or theatre. Most people I know do likewise.
Not one of these activities has altered qualitatively over the past century, while in the previous hundred years they altered beyond recognition. We do not live in the age of technological revolution. We live in the age of technological stasis, but do not realise it. We watch the future and have stopped watching the present.6
Edgerton points out that what we might readily call the most revolutionary inventions of the twentieth century, the computer and the internet, have yet to even reach the majority of the world, and even where they are in wide-scale use, those uses are generally supplemental to the postal service and the telephone, both nineteenth century inventions.
Of course, the computer has radically speeded communication. But for the overwhelming bulk of users (still only half of Britons and a tiny fraction of the globe) it merely supplements the post and the telephone. Most people send emails back and forth twice a day, roughly the same exchange as the Victorian letter post achieved. Amazon and eBay have replicated but not replaced the retail market. Television, 80 years old, and radio have improved but not changed over time. Both were essentially Victorian innovations.
The greatest techno-dazzle involves flying. The glamour of defying gravity created a global Icarus complex. Air forces have won over every generation of 20th-century politician, yet have never delivered. They have killed civilians and wrecked property but not won wars. More serious, the cost of new planes so overwhelms budgets as to leave land troops underequipped—as is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan.7
These examples bear out some surprising quantitative data that upsets our general view of technological progress in the twentieth century: rather than accelerating, our rate of invention is actually declining.
There are, morevoer, other data suggesting declining productivity of inventing activity in the industrial world. Hornell Hart has demonstrated consistent patterns of increasing and then declining rates of patenting (logistic curves) in many fields that are partially or wholly unrelated to military R&D. These include airplanes, automobiles, cotton machinery, electric meters, radios, sewing machines, spinning machinery, sulky plows, telegraphy, telephony, typewriters, and weaving machinery. He also noticed that the same patterns are evident in the major inventions and discoveries of the Western world, and in patents sealed in Great Britain between 1751 and 1820, and between 1821 and 1938.
Thus, it seems that military R&D cannot account for more than a small part of the decline in patents. Furthermore, the decline is so widespread in so many fields, over such a long time, that declining propensity to patent can hardly account for it either. Recent research shows that there is in fact a strong positive relationship between R&D and patenting. Thus the patent statistics appear to be a reliable indicator of inventing accomplishment.
It would appear that there has indeed been a genuine drop in the inventive productivity of research and development, and that as investments in R&D have increased (from 0.1 percent of gross national product in 1920 to 2.6 percent in 1960), the marginal product of these investments has declined. Although there are some demurrals, many economists recognize this trend. (Tainter, 1990)
In thesis #15, arguing that our civilization has already passed the point of diminishing returns for social complexity, common dates continue to emerge, hovering about the turn of the last century, for peaks of various aspects of social complexity, as one would expect, given that complexity rises or falls as a more-or-less unified phenomenon, and as a function of energy. That the dates hover about the turn of the last century, though, suggest a somewhat startling conclusion: that the twentieth century was actually the first 100 years of collapse.
Of course, the other major untold story of the twentieth century is the inflection point of human population. While population has risen dramatically since the Agricultural Revolution, it is the twentieth century that saw the turning point of exponential growth. The human population reached its first billion in 1804; by 1900, that had reached 1.6 billion. In sixty years, the world’s human population tripled to 3 billion, and it doubled again over the next forty, to reach 6 billion in 1999. A half a billion people—more than the world’s entire population of 310 million in 1000—were added in just the six years from 12 October 1999 to 25 February 2006. UN estimates, relying on the expectation that Third World living standards will rise to First World standards so that everyone on earth enjoys a wealthy lifestyle that would require far more resources than the planet could ever possibly produce, predict that this trend will slow down and level off to just 9 billion human beings in 2050. Even in this impossibly rosy scenario, the ecological impact and resource needs of 9 billion people far exceeds anything the planet can possibly withstand.
John Michael Greer has written a great deal about the “slow crash,” ammending Tainter’s definition of collapse as something that happens quickly, while I have seen in his work evidence that collapse accelerates itself. I see this as a difference of perspective. The examples that Greer points to are recognized by historians today, but were largely unrecognized by contemporaries. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire, for instance, unfolded over centuries, but it was a few decades in the Third Century Crisis that did most of the damage. For the Britons, the collapse of Roman rule came very quickly indeed in 410 CE. Indeed, our current attitudes towards our civilization are not very much unlike the attitudes Romans espoused about their empire in its last days, ranging from contemplation of its imminent and apocalyptic end, to widespread assurances that the Empire would endure, or even that it was at its very height.
From this perspective, the swift collapse I have predicted to become evident in 2012-2015 is perfectly compatible with a long, slow crash, with some cities holding on even for a century to come, while most of the world will be dealing with building a post-civilized culture perhaps even as soon as 2025 or 2050, just as the Gallic baucaudae were already dealing with a largely post-Roman world while “emperors” still ruled from Rome (or, perhaps even more often, Ravenna). Given what we have seen about declining technological innovation and a general stagnation of increasing complexity while the human population has positively exploded, a collapse seems unavoidable. Indeed, as this series of articles will argue, we now have just enough historical distance to see that we’re already a century into collapse.
In the next article, we’ll look at the expansion of European imperialism in the nineteenth century as a function of the Industrial Revolution, and thus, of coal, and how the end of cheap coal and the transition to petroleum led to the breakdown of European imperialism and the shifting of power to the United States via the World Wars. After that, we’ll take a look at the rise and fall of the Soviet Union as it relates to petroleum production. Then, we’ll conclude with an examination of our current state of affairs, with globalization, the failure of the nation-state, the emergence of corporations and terrorist networks of “the new map,” and how they relate to the next great energy transition promised by the Hubbert peak of global oil production.
Bibliography
- Diamond, Jared, 1997, Guns, Germs & Steel, W. W. Norton.
- Diamond, Jared, 2005, Collapse, Viking Books.
- Edgerton, David, 2006, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900, Oxford University Press.
- Lieven, Dominique, 2000, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals, Yale University Press.
- Mann, Charles C., 2005, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, Knopf.
- Tainter, Joseph, 1990, Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press.
Welcome back! I hope the winter has been well and you’ve accomplished some of those skill-learning goals you mentioend some time ago.
The idea of the slow collapse makes sense to me, and your take on it is great. I especially like the point that the technological advances of this century have not substantially changed the character of our nineteenth century lives. And, though it’s been made before, the point that the contemporary Romans by and large didn’t recognize their own collapse speaks to our own age and bears repeating.
Again, welcome back!
Comment by Archangel — 16 April 2007 @ 3:32 PM
Hey Jason,
Great to see you writing again.
By the way, wanna place your bet?
http://www.longbets.org/283
Comment by Locke — 16 April 2007 @ 11:44 PM
Glad to see things back in action, as you said they would be on mefi.
- NC
Comment by dagnabit — 17 April 2007 @ 1:54 AM
Thanks for the warm welcome, everybody! That was a bit of an unplanned hiatus, but it just goes to show, even when you think otherwise, you still live in the hands of the gods, eh?
Oh, winter’s a time when only the hardcore can get any of that in—I’m still softcore, which is still an improvement, since at least there’s a discernable core now. I’m going crazy waiting for winter to finally end, though; doesn’t seem to want to give up this time, and I can’t wait to get in some dirt time as soon as it warms up.
Ha, maybe I will at that.
Oh, I think most here would’ve missed that particular bout.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 April 2007 @ 9:57 AM
Welcome back!
I’m eager to see the following articles in this series.
Comment by Rix — 17 April 2007 @ 12:40 PM
Welcome back, Jason.
It seems disingenuous of Edgerton to effectively place the TV into the previous century and then to ignore the influence of the automobile and the television on modern life.
In his precis of modern life “I rise each morning…” he purposely minimizes those aspects of his day that are most reflective of our social changes. We don’t get up and read the newspaper, we watch the TV or hit the web. Our commute to work is flooded with drive-time radio, either NPR or the ubiquitous morning show. Our workplace and home are significantly further apart and the pub or cinema we stop at is more likely to be a sports bar and a mall.
None of this takes away from your main point that collapse has already begun.
I had been thinking on this topic recently and had considered placing the beginning of the end in 1969. With the moon landing man reached as far from home as he is likely to get. By not being able to return and establish a presence in space, we have written in signs that can be read by anyone that we are no longer able to expand.
JimFive
Comment by JimFive — 17 April 2007 @ 2:50 PM
That’s true, but in terms of its impact on how we live, to what extent is television simply a fancy radio?
I can see a lot more for the automobile. Dating, suburbia, the whole pattern of American life owes a great deal to the automobile.
That’s actually Simon Jenkins, writing a review of Edgerton’s book for The Guardian. Yes, it’s a gloss, as journalists are wont to do.
There’s a bit of cultural difference here, too; this was written for a British audience, and because Britain is smaller, the automobile’s had less of an impact there (an old joke says that in Britain, 100 miles is a long way, and in the U.S., 100 years is a long time). But yes, I’d say that the automobile probably stands out, at least in America, as a real change in lifestyles during the 20th century. Of course, compared to the changes of the nineteenth—radio, electricity, earning wages in an urban setting overwhelming subsistence farming in a rural setting—that’s still quite modest.
Yes, there’s definitely something to that, I’d say.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 April 2007 @ 3:46 PM
Jason and all,
A good post with valid points. One thing that might be useful to work into the analysis is that the decline of a civilization is a summation of many curves of decline — different regions, economic sectors, and aspects of culture each slide at their own pace, and some can still be going up while others are skidding downhill. Thus the fact that computer technology improves in a particular period, say, and brings significant changes to daily life, does nothing to negate the fact that most other aspects of life in the industrial world have been in decline and some are in freefall.
I’ve often thought that late 19th century French writers and artists such as Josephin Peladan, who argued in the 1880s that western civilization had peaked and was entering on its own decline and fall, were spot on. They caught the beginning of cultural decline; other aspects — political, economic, and eventually technological — are following at their own pace.
– JMG
Comment by John Michael Greer — 17 April 2007 @ 4:46 PM
Since the first daily radio broadcast was in 1920, That would be the 20th century also.
http://inventors.about.com/od/rstartinventions/a/radio_2.htm
Comment by JimFive — 17 April 2007 @ 5:00 PM
Welcome back dude! Great article. Hope everything is going well with the fifth world.
Comment by Urban Scout — 18 April 2007 @ 12:36 PM
So radio transmission and reception was essentially developed in the late 19th Century? I wasn’t aware of this. Also, the first flight of the Wright Brothers was in the 20th Century, but pretty close to the cut-off between centuries.
I can see putting the start of the “decline-in-earnest” in 1969 because of the Moon Landing (but who knows, perhaps we could have gotten a human crew to Mars and back had we truly wished to do so?), but I would put it a bit earlier. 1960 was when the population hit 3 billion, probably the absolute pre-petroleum agriculture carrying capacity of the planet (not to say even that’s sustainable, though). After that, fossil-fuel agriculture totally took over, and the population explosion really mushroomed. Both have had a measurable detrimental effect on overall planetary quality-of-life. Also, North American Baby Boomers remember their childhood years as being a time when it seemed as if quality-of-life would stay on a perpetual upward trajectory; on the other hand, Gen-Xers who were not in ideology-driven denial had a feeling from pretty early on of living in a period of decline.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 18 April 2007 @ 1:10 PM
Another thing: I would add the 18th Century to the time civilization was at its peak according to this thinking. Much of the technology that made the industrial era possible was in fact invented during that century.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 18 April 2007 @ 4:05 PM
jason:
As much as I love reading articles of yours like this one, I really think you should contemplate writing a book. The direction you are going with this last article is one that I could read on for hours. Consider it. I think you have a huge audience out there drooling over the prospects. I’m glad you are writing again.
Comment by david preslicka — 18 April 2007 @ 9:38 PM
Nuclear power is missing entirely from your list of 20th century accomplishments. Why is that? Nuclear power changed a lot of our thinking forever, for the first time in history giving us the ability to catastrophically exterminate humanity, and more importantly, allowing us to realize that such extermination is a real practical threat.
Nuclear powers cannot be conquered by military conquest, for the first time in history, there is an absolute limit to military conquest. No matter how big an economy or an army, no power can conquer and occupy a nuclear power. This is new.
You dismiss internet too quickly.
Without internet, most of the scientific progress of the last 15 years could not occur.
The internet makes it much easier for scientists to collaborate and enables very complex research.
Our understanding of molecular biology to give one example, advanced by epochs in the last 20-30 years. The introduction of genetically modified organisms is accelerating, and genetic modification techniques are becoming more precise.
We are still keeping lead on bacteria in antibiotic arms race.
Internet access is becoming cheaper.
Now, perhaps the empires are more short-lived now, but old empires were not designed to rule billions of people who have easy access to cheap automatic rifles and grenade launchers. New imperial techniques have to be developed to adapt to present conditions.
Comment by _Gi — 19 April 2007 @ 11:09 AM
Thank you, but you should probably see this.
Much of the questions about nineteenth versus twentieth century inventions rather misses the point: the peak in innovation occured about the turn of the century. That obviously means that inventions occurred in the twentieth century (though they were in decline, they need to happen to be in decline), it simply means those inventions are less significant in their impact, and come more rarely. Sure, we can point to plenty of twentieth century inventions, but how do they compare to nineteenth century inventions in terms of their effects on our daily lives? More importantly, how do they compare in number?
John Michael Greer, thanks for joining us.
This is absolutely true, and speaks to the heart of what I was mentioning above about 19th vs. 20th century inventions. It’s much too easy to be sidetracked with exceptions, and lose sight of the general trend.
As for placing the peak at 1960 with our territorial apex, it’s worth noting that territorial peaks often lag behind a civilization’s energy peak, as if moving by inertia. The Roman Empire paid for future existence from past conquests, but by the time of Augustus, the era of expansion was generally over—yet Rome didn’t reach its territorial maximum until the reign of Trajan.
The invention of the radio was contentious, including possible inventors like David E. Hughes in 1878, Heinrich Hertz in 1888, and Nikola Tesla in 1891, the latest possible date. Tesla was awarded the patent for the radio in the U.S. Of course, Guglielmo Marconi generally did the most work in what would become the first radio, mostly through the 1890’s.
Absolutely, but at the time, invention was still accelerating. Things were going up. That ended at about the turn of the 20th century, and most of the 20th century, we were in decline.
Because it hasn’t changed the way we live at all. Nuclear power provides a tiny minority of the world’s energy, and uranium production has already peaked. Nuclear weapons may weigh heavily on us psychologically, but the United States remains the only country to ever use them. They might have the potential to change things, but to date, the Manhattan Project has yet to have any real impact on our day-to-day lives. As Edgerton points out, modern wars are not fought with weapons of mass destruction, but simple infantry rifles. Even the most famous model, the AK-47, is so named because it’s the automatic rifle designed by Mikhail Kalashnikov in 1947—sixty years ago.
That smells like B.S. to me—do you have anything to back up such an assertion? Of course, it’s also worth noting that the scientific progress of the last 15 years was less than the scientific progress of the 15 years before that.
No we’re not. And of course, that’s an idiotic race to get into—you can’t ever possibly win.
That assumes that such techniques are possible. As John Robb’s been suggesting, present conditions make imperial control antiquated.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 April 2007 @ 12:27 PM
“Nikola Tesla patented the basic system of radio in 1896″
http://www.teslasociety.com/biography.htm
When his experiments just after 1900 were found to be attempts at “free energy” for all, JP Morgan cut his funding. Even elements of the “Star Wars” project were credited to his original concepts (Death Ray Gun). As crazy as many of his concepts sounded at the time to his contemporaries, they didn’t all turn out so crazy by today’s standards (VTOL airplane, wireless power transmission, unmanned/remote controlled air and sea vehicles, and a few other really crazy ideas like earth-quake machines). Tesla never disputed patents of X-Rays by Roentgen. Marconi’s patents were turned over in 1943, just after Tesla’s death.
Comment by -Sean. — 19 April 2007 @ 12:37 PM
I see podcasts on your site.
Podcasts would not be possible without some interesting applications of quantum mechanics. I see, you have some like-minded people exhanging ideas with you. If it weren’t for the internet, you would be more isolated, and perhaps more reluctant to voice your ideas.
I see youtube is taking off. Internet gives people the power to publish their viewpoint for all the world to see. This is new.
Football is televized. And anyone can make their own movies and show them to their friends.
War may still be fought with rifles, but the strongest armies in the world no longer have the fight in them. They no longer fight for survival. They follow complicated rules of engagement, because they are so powerful, that they can afford it, and cannot afford not to. There is no more danger of France invading England, or Germany invading France. This danger is gone forever.
Any country with nuclear weapons need not suffer foreign military on its soil. This is new. Oh, and you don’t have to prepare for war if you don’t want to, because there is no longer a draft.
People are changing climate on a global scale and now they are aware of it, this is new.
DNA discovery was a big news, and it changed the world. The very food you it contains genetically modified organisms, some, hybrids to which evolution would never lead on its blind own. This will continue. Food irradiation prevents our food from spoiling.
Millions of people know CPR and can help a dying stranger, this was not so a 100 years ago.
We have effective and cheap birth control available to anyone, this was not available a 100 years ago, and it changed the world radically. The attitudes towards procreation itself changed a lot.
We have plastics everywhere, and they are cheap and very versatile, but a hundred years ago we did not have them. We also have synthetic fabrics, which we did not have before.
Organ transplants are saving lives.
Eye surgery is saving people from blindness.
We can identify and treat chemical imbalance in someone’s brain.
Anyone can have aspirin now, but a hundred years ago only a few people could get something similar.
No one could have insulin
Vitamins were unknown
Polio was a threat, smallpox was a killer too, but not any more.
With GPS systems, navigation is no longer an art, anyone can do it.
You can view any point of the globe with Google Maps. This is new.
You can shop at the supermarket, this did not exist a 100 years ago.
We’ve had some progress last century
Comment by _Gi — 19 April 2007 @ 3:47 PM
Huh? Podcasts have nothing at all to do with quantum mechanics—quantum mechanics are still entirely theoretical. All you need for a podcast is an internet connection, a means of recording audio digitially, and RSS. Where do you figure quantum mechanics fits into that?
Yes, but like Edgerton pointed out, a century ago I would have subscribed to a particular newspaper. The presses and newspapers protected by America’s Founding Fathers, for instance, were primarily means of reaching people with particular sets of ideas. I’d begin corresponding with others I see who write letters to that paper, and we’d keep in touch by mail. The internet has speeded that up. Today, I go to websites on subjects I agree with, and find comments by others who frequent them, and we keep in touch by email. The process has not changed, it’s simply been refined and sped up. The improvements of the 20th century have been of scale, not kind. Take a look at this USA Today editorial from two years ago: “Chill, blogophiles; you’re not the first to do what you’re doing.” He points out that the pamphlets of writers like Thomas Paine fulfilled the same function as the modern blog: all blogging has done has been to reduce the cost. When the Constitution of the United States guaranteed freedom to the press, it was not the monolithic corporate entity we know today; they were offering protection to special interest communities more akin to this website, than to CNN. It’s been sped up by the improvements in scale, but the essential nature of it has not changed. As Edgerton notes, people generally email about as often as they once wrote letters.
No, not really. A few centuries ago, you had small presses that did much the same thing.
Hardly. We’ve entered a short period of calm, but that danger isn’t gone forever. The same rule that civilized governments have always followed remains in effect: fight to the death for the things you need to expand. For most of history, that was as simple as arable soil, and the name of the game was territorial conquest. Germany, France and England played that to the hilt. That changed in 1960, when the last bit of arable land was farmed. A new way to expand was necessary, so we came up with the Green Revolution. Now, what countries need isn’t soil, but oil. They continue to fight that war as ruthlessly as any ancient battle. Sure, it means that France won’t invade Germany anytime soon, but it means that the Middle East will be embroiled in horrific violence on our behalf until Peak Oil has destroyed our industrialized economy. Then, countries will need something else, and what they’re fighting for will change again. The danger isn’t gone forever—it’s just gone until what they need has changed again, and that won’t be very much longer anyway.
This isn’t really true. Nuclear powers tend to have significant other capabilities, but India, Pakistan, Iran and North Korea have all faced severe saber-rattling, even with the threat of nuclear power.
For the moment, because, for the moment, the things we war over have shifted, and conscription isn’t as useful. This is only a narrow window since Viet Nam (in the 1960s, when we shifted from needing soil to needing oil), and already, they’re talking about ending it, because the things we war over are changing again.
Perhaps the awareness, but not the shifting. Look up Ruddiman’s “Early Anthropocene Hypothesis.” I hate the hubris implicit in this “Antrhopocene” business, but that’s what you’ll find it under.
It changed our understanding, but it doesn’t have much actual effect on our lives.
Of course it will continue, it goes all the way back to the Agricultural Revolution. Today’s DNA splicing has little real difference from the selective breeding that’s been done for centuries, and produced our domesticated species. All that’s changed is our level of understanding. The geneticists involved are the first to leap to that argument (in defending that it’s OK).
A century ago, most people in North America lived on farms, and could not only do things akin to CPR, they knew how to gather medicinal herbs and brew their own medicine, simply because the doctor was all too often too far away.
This is true—the economics changed. With increasing complexity, children became costlier (more education necessary), and yielded less benefit (can’t send them into the fields, child labor laws). So children became economic burdens you had for purely sentimental reasons, rather than an economic investment in your family’s prosperity. But this is because of the declining marginal returns on complexity. There’s more complexity, but less benefit from it, making children more of a raw deal.
And what roles do plastics fill that were unknown before? They may replace fabrics and metals, but they haven’t invented any new categories of things. They haven’t revolutionized our lives; at best, they’re improvements of scale, not kind.
Then, they stripped the bark right off the willow tree, which gave them the effect of aspirin, but without the upset stomach or most of the other side effects (aspirin came from the acid in willow bark, which people have used for headaches for millennia).
No, now we have AIDS and ebola.
Yes, but that’s an improvement, not a revolution. Anyone could read a map a century ago, too.
But maps are not.
Yes, then you had a farmer’s market, which we’re learning now is much better.
Well of course we have. That’s not the question. If invention suddenly stopped, that wouldn’t be a decline in invention, would it? That would be an end to it. Decline implies that it’s still going on. Of course there were innovations in the 20th century. What’s important is that they didn’t revolutionize the patterns of our lives, the way the innovations of the 19th century did. They mostly improved older technologies, rather than breaking out into whole new patterns of operation. That’s because during the 20th century, the marginal return on complexity declined. Inventions became costlier, but they gave us less. Our capacity for innovation has diminished. It hasn’t disappeared entirely, but it has diminished. There’s been some “progress,” but not as much “progress” as there was in the century before that. It’s been a century of decline. We peaked.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 19 April 2007 @ 4:23 PM
_Gi wrote:
[quote]
War may still be fought with rifles, but the strongest armies in the world no longer have the fight in them. They no longer fight for survival. They follow complicated rules of engagement, because they are so powerful, that they can afford it, and cannot afford not to.
[/quote]
Uh… no.
I recommend catching up military history in general and modern tactics and issues specifically.
A good place to start is with the “War Nerd”, which, whatever else can be saidd about him and his views, I completely agree with his take on modern warfare. And if you don’t agree there, go and read Jeff Vail’s site a few times.
Be sure to check out #3 in the link below:
[url]http://www.exile.ru/2006-November-03/the_doctrine_of_asymmetrical_war.html[/url]
[quote]
Any country with nuclear weapons need not suffer foreign military on its soil. This is new.
[/quote]
So you think starting a nuclear war is in some way preferable to having a foreign army on your soil?
Surely not…?
[quote]
Oh, and you don’t have to prepare for war if you don’t want to, because there is no longer a draft.
[/quote]
?? This isn’t even a technology. It’s not really even enabled by technology per se. It’s enabled by energy, specifically the greater quantities of energy controlled by the US vs the rest of the world, but not technology, and certainly not invention….
[quote]
People are changing climate on a global scale and now they are aware of it, this is new.
[/quote]
Again, not technology and not invention, and so far I haven’t seen any tech driven responses that are even remotely viable.
[quote]
Millions of people know CPR and can help a dying stranger, this was not so a 100 years ago.
[/quote]
Again, not technology, and not really invention either.
[quote]
We have effective and cheap birth control available to anyone, this was not available a 100 years ago, and it changed the world radically.
[/quote]
I’m not even convinced that we have any more effective methods of birth control than we did 100 years ago. Or, perhaps, more to the point, what good is effective birth control if the human population continues to grow? In what way has it profoundly changed our (collective) lives?
Comment by jhereg — 19 April 2007 @ 6:25 PM
Hey, welcome back! Very happy to see new posts at Anthropik.
Totally off-topic: Guilanna, your “Oracle” piece was just great. Very well-written & imaginative. Looking forward to more fiction if you ever have the time & inclination.
Comment by Paula — 19 April 2007 @ 9:18 PM
Thanks, Paula.
Comment by Giulianna Lamanna — 19 April 2007 @ 9:52 PM
Indeed. Read up on Systemic Candidiasis. The symptoms listed in the article are only the tip of the iceberg of how candidiasis can impair one’s quality of life. I experience a nasty rash on my nether regions (controlled with a nutritional supplement), Irritable Bowel Syndrome, occasional chronic fatigue, and problems with nasal congestion. And there are a lot of people who have it a lot worse than I do. Anti-biotics are how I and many other people got it (though in my case, years of very poor nutrition and cigarette smoking, which I quit a while ago, didn’t help).
[ranting raving tangent] The skeptiviks claim that this disorder doesn’t really exist and people who “think” they have it actually have psychological problems. I think that’s great, because it shows so well how so-called “rational” skeptics are just as bad as fundamentalist Xtians in dealing with anything that threatens their world view in any way by making it not exist in their minds. Perhaps the lot of them should have a good astrologer look at their natal charts to help them understand why they need to be so foaming-at-the-mouth fanatical.
[/RRT]
Comment by venuspluto67 — 19 April 2007 @ 11:04 PM
What I was trying to say but did so a bit vaguely, was that if 1900 was the peak, 1960 was the start of terminal decline. I think I also read somewhere that peak energy availability happened around 1980, so one might also place the start of terminal decline around that time.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, average people, many of them illiterate, were able to do an awful lot of things that were very useful to surviving without some big centralized system doing everything for them. It’s really chilling to think how deeply dependent us folks in the so-called Developed World have become in the past 100 years or so.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 19 April 2007 @ 11:49 PM
Wow, looks like I really butchered the spelling of ‘Giulianna’ — sorry about that.
Comment by Paula — 20 April 2007 @ 9:19 AM
I’m not even convinced that we have any more effective methods of birth control than we did 100 years ago. Or, perhaps, more to the point, what good is effective birth control if the human population continues to grow? In what way has it profoundly changed our (collective) lives?
Ever heard of sexual revolution? You think it did not change people’s lives?
Effective birth control gives people control over their procreation. You can have as much sex as you want without populating the Earth with your offspring. This is definitely new. The only reason population is growing still is that birth control is not yet affordable everywhere in the world.
Comment by _Gi — 20 April 2007 @ 12:02 PM
No–the “sexual revolution” was a blip, it changed nothing. Sexuality in the U.S. today is pretty much the same as it was in WW2.
This isn’t new at all. We’ve had effective birth control, and recreational sex, since long before the dawn of civilization. What was it you think St. Augustine was proscribing with the missionary position? What were Augustus’s laws against? Recreational sex and effective birth control are as old as cave paintings. “The pill” hasn’t changed that much at all.
Flat out, undeniably wrong. Population is growing in the Third World in spite of the fact that they already have very effective means of birth control because more kids give you more wealth in an agrarian economy. The wealthiest people in any Mali village are the people with the most kids, because those kids provide free farm labor. Population is soaring in those countries because in their economic situation, children aren’t a burden, they turn a serious profit. Now, make them more complex, and that balance will tip, and children will cost more than they bring in, but then you won’t have a society to outsource to, so the complex counties won’t be able to afford their lifestyles anymore, and we’ll be the farmers with 17 kids. It’s about the global balance of complexity; hasn’t a thing in the world to do with birth control. Everybody has birth control, has for millennia, and its effectiveness hasn’t really changed since the Paleolithic.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 20 April 2007 @ 12:13 PM
Could you lay out which inventions from the 1900s and earlier revolutionized the way we live our lives? And how they did so? If not, is there someplace else that discusses these ideas? Just so we can contrast them to the more recent inventions. Thanks.
Comment by Jhyde — 20 April 2007 @ 1:01 PM
Not sure how many of you are already aware of this, but you can watch the collapse as it happens right here:
http://community.livejournal.com/so_very_doomed/
Comment by Locke — 21 April 2007 @ 5:24 PM
Locke:
I’m a member of that community on LJ. It seems that its articles these days fill up a good 80% of my “friends” page.
Comment by venuspluto67 — 22 April 2007 @ 12:12 PM
Hey, I’m not sure where the best place to post this would be, but I figured your most recent string on collapse would be most appropriate. Folks here might be interested in checking out a new web page I just designed. Take a look at: http://www.guardianwarrior.org and let me know what you think.
wild peace folks,
Comment by RedWolfReturns — 15 May 2007 @ 6:20 PM
Thanks for letting us know–in general, if you’re not sure where the best place for a comment might be, it probably belongs in the forum. I know it doesn’t see as much activity as it should, but the only way that’ll change is if people start using it. It’s a Catch 22.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 16 May 2007 @ 9:36 AM
“The improvements of the 20th century have been of scale, not kind.”
They’ve been of both. But regarding
scale, or quantity v. quality: past a
point, quantity *becomes* quality.
Blogs and youtube (and etc.) are
different from 19th century
self-publication not because of
inherent and necessary differences
**of given instances** of what is
communicated, but because the
huge increased volume of instances
renders the “what” (the message
itself) of a different nature. You’ll
note that I did not say that this
is good, or an improvement.
Comment by alan2012 — 19 May 2007 @ 11:51 AM
There have been some innovations of kind, but they have become rarer. An increasing amount of innovation is of scale, rather than kind, and innovations of scale are becoming smaller and smaller in their scale. It’s precisely what you’d expect in a situation where innovation is slowing down.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 21 May 2007 @ 11:11 AM