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176 comments on Unintended Consequences: The Long Term Impacts of Crisis Blogging
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176 comments on Unintended Consequences: The Long Term Impacts of Crisis Blogging
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" financial products and mechanical innovations will somehow cut a door for us at the very last second."
Is that really such a stretch ? Western civilization has hit a thousand resource limits already. And we're hitting a new one every year or so. 2 years ago Cobalt, I believe, all but ran out. These days, despite the high prices, gold production is down a lot. A few older examples :
Natural stone ran out
Wood ran out (and therefore energy ran out)
Charcoal as a fuel source ran out
Coal has run out in quite a few countries
Fish ran out (not every last species *yet*, but many species did, more do every year)
Climate changed severely on 3 occasions (2 were global warming ... with very positivie results (but still requireing many adjustments), one was global cooling with disastrous results, but again many adjustments later everything was alright (eventually growing potatoes))
Wars depleted just about every resource on at least 3 occasions
...
We dealt with all these crises, surprisingly well. Of course many other civilizations did not deal with a specific crisis, resulting in total annihilation. The best known example is the culture of the easter island, but in reality just about every culture did this : the muslims (first the mamluks, then the ottomans), the chinese (again they did this many times).
It seems to me that a number of factors are very beneficial to western civilization : the relatively low birthrate pushed by christianity, the presence of free enterprise¸ the fact that christian ideology tries to get people to help one another and disregard class, thereby never causing the farming/working class to die off (which happened to muslims, who used slaves, many times in their history, often with disastrous results. Also the fact that christianity was massively opposed to slavery prevented class wars in western europe for a millenium, so a destructive and idiotic state like the muslim mamluks never came into existence. The divided nature of western europe, as opposed to the singular control centers of the muslims have turned out to have been massive advantages. The fertility rate of muslim slaves(/farmers/workers) is so low it is hard to believe. We're talking between 0.2 and 0.05. This is one of the factors that pushed then to conquer (jihad) africa and totally destoy that continent). This did not prevent various slave classes from destroying nearly all infrastructure in muslim lands. Now I realise many advantages that western civilization had had nothing to do with the civilization itself, for example the widely distributed nature of the west is more a result of that being possible, than of any ideological issue. The distribution, and being out-of-reach of armies led to groups that had to fend for themselves, giving 2 massive advantages : a hell of a lot of research was done, and due to the lack of interdependency any disaster never had any systemic effect.
Clearly the recipe for continuing to exist is (was ?*) rather simple : you need a growing, BUT slow-growing population that uses individualism to try out as many potential solutions as possible, and you need to defend that population from immigration, which would destroy the advantages they had. This lead, ever since the greeks, to rapid technological advancement (even in the dark ages western europe advanced much faster than china or the middle east, even though the damage muslims had done to the knowledge infrastructure of the west was terrible. Both southern italy and egypt, the centers of knowledge of respectively the ex-western roman empire and the eastern roman empire, were burned down by muslim invaders). The advancement of knowledge, and the speed at which it occured were much larger factors than the available knowledge at the time. All of muslims, chinese, some african kingdoms and even mayans had technological advantages at the start of the dark ages. Muslims were not interested in expanding knowledge, and killed the very few scientists they had when science attempted to get started in muslim lands in Egypt and Damascus, neither were mayans. Mayans must have inherited(or conquered) their knowledge like the muslims, and chose not to advance it.
But in the west knowledge advanced. Advancing knowledge led, as we all know, to massive advantages, even if generally not for the inventers. But for nearly a thousand years, advancing knowledge was nearly exclusively done by the church. You see, these days knowledge can be translated immediately to products, and therefore research is an activity that can pay for itself. Even today, however, that only goes for some types of research, like electronics manufacturing and does not work for others, like astronomy or mathematics. Research companies were impossible until 1850 or so, and in most of the world they've only just entered the realm of feasability. Christian clerics, priests, monks and what-have-you, who formed the medieval state, chose to research (apparently to see "the full beauty of God's creation", to illustrate and expand their understanding of the bible), and muslim clerics and chinese ... well, warlords did not. Neither did the mayan (also theocratic) state.
* obviously it's not because this worked in the pas that it works today
Amen.
There are very,very few Christians.
There are very,very many who pretend to be.
I once was a Christian or pretended to be. I am now lost, thank God. There is a God, I am sure. He stands outside the doors of those brick buildings of organized religion and laughs.
For those who are Real Christians? They do not need those buildings. There work is before them and not in those buildings built of stone or brick as tributes to something else,ego,greed,,etc. Where all those egotistical prayers hardly reaches the ceilings. Yes outside the doors where He might wonder...why are they in there when stuff is out here?
Well then to the work...but...........well stuff happens.....
Airdale
As someone pointed out to me recently:
"So many Christians, so few Lions".
FMagyar, thanks for pointing out the rhetorical strategy. That was so dense that I completely lost my bearings.
Nice to see some history that gets beyond the p.c. revisionism being "taught" by the "educational" system nowadays!
as in, 'OUR Revisionism is better than THEIR revisionism..'
You think that history lesson above wasn't revisionist?
I'll add more later.. it's a family day.
Please save yourself the bother, jokuhl, you've already spilled more than enough cherished myths in my direction. Answer those Qur'an quotes I suggest before you write again about the subject.
The "incomprehension" of the above commenters is exactly analogous to "you can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink".
Some of the methods by which Western Civilization overcame past resource constraints (not all deliberate):
The Crusades, The Black Plague, The 30 Years War, Colonizing the Americas and Australia, taking resources from every country not strong enough to stop it (India, Africa, China, Greater Persia), WW1, WW2.
Western Civilization will probably survive, but that doesn't mean that the resource constraints we face now aren't real or that getting past them to whatever the next functional paradigm is will be at all pleasant for the participants.
I doubt the black plague functioned as a way to overcome resource limits. It slowed down growth, when there was plenty of room left. Now for the west as a whole this may have been a positive function. Neither were the crusades a way to overcome resource limits. The black plague's most "useful" result was embedding basic quarantine procedures, especially for ships, VERY deeply into the west's psyche, and it's only failed to prevent the spread of disease twice since the middle ages. The muslims, by contrast were devasted by disease 5 times in the second half of the 19th century, Europe only once, most muslim countries still have regular outbreaks of leprosy, polio, tyfus and tbc, even some of the richer ones, something which did not happen in the west for close to 250 years now.
You also seem to forget that other civilizations robbed other countries of resources too, yet it didn't save them. The mayans, the incas, the romans, the chinese and the mongols were good at this, just to name a few, and nothing surpasses the devastastation muslims wrought in africa in their search for slaves (the pre-oil "black gold") (not that anyone blames them : you see they killed every last black slave in their lands, so no-one blames them for anything, whereas America let slaves live and survive. Big mistake, apparently, or at least that's the message progressive "equal rights and equal outcome" idiots are giving off by exclusively blaming the ones who did not commit a racist massacre against their slave populations)
The point is that these methods were attempted by just about every civilization. Every one of them failed, except the west. It certainly wasn't for lack of conquests that these civilizations failed. Incas, Mongols and Chinese conquered areas much larger than the Europeans ever did, and it did not help them survive. The muslim ottoman theocratic empire, which conquered at least 40% of the globe (from the gold mines of south africa to hong kong was continuous ottoman territory at one point in time), yet such territorial and material advantages did not help them against the faster pace of innovation in the west.
Chinese civilization has a longer track record than European civilization, and isn't dead yet.
The Mongols relied too heavily on conquest and the leadership of a single individual, they were forced back when the leadership failed. I'd hardly count their empire as a "civilization" in the same sense, though they did manage a fairly good run and defeated all comers while they were in their prime.
What you are missing is that some of these periods (The 30 Years War in particular) were outright failures of civilization, and others were deliberate attempts to get rid of "surplus population". I skipped the Irish Potato Famine which straddles both categories.
The Spanish, French, and English Empires all had lifespans similar to the Ottoman and Russian Empires.
The American Empire appears to be on track for a similar lifespan, possibly shorter if you count it as starting from WW II.
Such is the "success" of Western Civilization.
Not all that spectacular, really.
Exactly, I think the whole Christian argument was meant to be tongue and cheek.
Christians for hundreds of years have been pushing for lower birthrates, by slaughtering people to steal their stuff, before they can have children.
Look at the Spanish Conquistadors for instance, slaughtering and enslaving heathens for Jesus and gold.
The whole Christian argument was clearly a joke.
Wow, so much you wrote is wrong, but I'll limit it to the "reinterpreting history through the Christianity good, Muslims all bad" perspective:
christianity was massively opposed to slavery
Wrong. The old testament is full of slave owning tips and Jesus seemed fine with slavery. Please post any scriptural opposition to slavery (in general, not just Israelites should own slaves not be them)
for nearly a thousand years, advancing knowledge was nearly exclusively done by the church.
This was a church-induced dark ages, where "knowledge" was debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Worldly matters, especially those that presented evidence that contracted holy-books, was actively punished.
Muslim scholars in the dark ages preserved Greek texts ("western" thought) and advanced mathematics.
Yes, they went into their own dark ages later.
A whopper of a myth there. What really happened was that all the ancient texts rotted in the humid north but were preserved in the dry Muslim-conquered areas. And the so-called Muslim scholars were in reality Non-Muslims living in dhimmitude (third-class subjects) in the vast jihad-conquered areas.
You don't have to spend much time studying the unchangeable flawless Last Testament to see why scholarship and Muslim don't go together very well. You can see in the Acts of the Apostles the embodiment of the principle of arguing ones's case rather than fighting it; and conversely Saint M's principle of winning one's arguments via violence against dissenters, the notion repeated stated that military victory comes to the "righteous"
The Old Testament is the Jews' ancient history book, and the whole point of Christianity is that it changes from and supercedes it. The principles expounded by JC & Co did not explicitly at any point challenge the Romans' legal principles (because they would have been very quickly executed if they had--which is why Christ's reply "Render to Caesar what is Caesar's and to God what is God's" was such a clever reply to his enemies' trick question). But those Christian principles of loving one's neighbour as oneself etc most certainly are incompatible with any form of slavery other than one that makes the concept meaningless.
You will search for that in the Qur'an in vain. The Q spends a lot of time discussing the making and taking and keeping of underdogs of various sorts.
No it was not a church-induced Dark Ages, it was caused by the collapse of militaristic Rome and the pagan barbarian gangs' Volkerwanderung. In the midst of a vast reversion to wood-age darkness, the lights were kept shining only in the refuges of the Church. And only out of that church everything about the modern civilisation arose. See Tonybee a study of history.