Week of April 12, 2020

Collection and Causation

Casual historians and behavioral researchers alike seem to agree that one insurmountable mark of distinction between humanity and adjacent animal species is our capacity for sustained innovation, both conscious and unconscious. We developed technology, according to this “long” view (popular at forward-thinking centers like Santa Fe Institute), as a part of a broader process of “cumulative cultural evolution,” by which useful or popular ideas discovered in pre-existing generations are passed on—unwittingly, for most of history—in various forms to future descendants. Our capacity for transmitting and modifying technologies, ideologies, and paradigms across temporal boundaries renders us capable of progression toward civilizational complexity unparalleled even among fellow hominids. Such thinking leads one inevitably toward Whig historiography:

Throughout human evolutionary history, individuals have developed new ideas, materials, and technologies, then passed them on to other individuals and groups. Over time, cultural elements grow more complex; Our earliest permanent writing systems began as etchings in rock before the advent of papyrus and paper, which came before the invention of the printing press. Now, much of our writing happens on computers.

First came the sketch, then the singularity—such is the irresistible force of time. A more charitable view is stated here, in a recent Edge.org interview with futurist philosopher Toby Ord:

Humanity is not a typical species… An individual human is not that remarkable on the Savanna compared to a cheetah, or lion, or gazelle, but what set us apart was our ability to work together, to cooperate with other humans to form something greater than ourselves… By making small innovations and passing them on to our children, we were able to set a chain in motion wherein generations of people worked across time, slowly building up these innovations and technologies and accumulating power… There have been around about a hundred billion humans who've ever existed, and 7 billion now. These hundred billion lives have put together these innovations and accumulated information and power about the natural world and how we can influence it. This escalating power has gone through major transitions and has started increasing the rate of progress…

There is a great deal more to examine and critique at the link, but the selection here will provide more than enough fodder for today. Leaving aside the assumptions of human uniqueness and the Baconian emphasis on “power over nature,” Ord’s assertion that the apparent “J-Curve” in technological progress is due to gradual accumulation is debatable. We’ve been talking frequently about the history of technology and scientific research around here, so it seems appropriate to offer some evaluation. No doubt Ord is right to assert that, by comparison with our pre-literate ancestors, humanity collectively innovated faster in 1200, faster again in 1700, and in 1800, and so on. Some prominent studies, such as Michael Kremer’s “Population Growth and Technological Change: One Million B.C. to 1990,” suggest that this is an inevitable function of random invention in an expanding species. Technology is “nonrival,” permitting exploitation by anyone, anytime. The more people there are, the luckier civilization is likely to be in adding useful tools to the endlessly filling box. A billion people are likelier to craft more and better instruments than a thousand, especially given the retention of the thousand’s own achievements for the use of the later billion.

Like any other stock, however, intellectual capital is actually prone both to poor investment and depreciation. The history of science is a catalog of dead ends, mystifying stagnations, and outright regressions. From Aristotelian cosmology to Galenic medicine, brilliant and prolific scholars have not only churned out faulty research, but induced generations of students to waste time uselessly modifying irrelevant paradigms and to repress genuinely revolutionary novices in the name of tradition—and not always of the theological kind. The weight of history can be too stultifying for one man to lift. When lifters arrive, they frequently cast off all the old error-strewn literature and start again. In the present, the supposed heyday of scientific endeavor, replication crises bedevil medicine and social science—distorting the cumulative incentive—and disciplinary hierarchies reign worryingly supreme. Even if one argues that scientific delusions cannot halt the background march of practical technology, as discussed in previous weeks, the literature provides substantial challenges. Humanity has a surprising tendency to forget extraordinarily useful things. The Greeks sank their Antikythera mechanism; the Romans invented and discarded the water mill; and the Chinese lost spinning machines, coke smelting, and cannon foundry centuries before the West turned them into an Industrial Revolution. David Landes addresses this dilemma directly:

One generally assumes that knowledge and know-how are cumulative and that a superior technique, once known, will dominate older methods and remain in use. But Chinese industrial history offers a number of examples of technological regression and oblivion… the Chinese never learned to make modern guns. Worse yet, they had known and used cannon as early as the thirteenth century but had forgotten much of what they had once known. Their city walls and gates had emplacements for cannon, but no cannon. (Landes 2006, 5-6 & 13).

Even powerful, enlightened civilizations—China was a regional and cultural hegemon—cannot safeguard against error and ignorance. Institutions, ideologies, and environments can still exert colossal influence on the rapidity and direction of research, as well as popular receptivity to it. Practical ideas came thick and fast (relatively speaking) during the Neolithic Revolution, but not consistently and not at the same time; the flow slowed markedly during subsequent millennia, and then potentially stopped altogether during classical antiquity. The much-vaunted Baconian empirical paradigm is hardly a universal constant of human thought. There is evidence, as I have argued elsewhere, that the rate of scientific discovery is slowing altogether, as evidenced by the rise of teams and the secular decline in economic growth.

The issue is not that ideas do not accumulate. On a fundamental level, disciplines from agricultural economics to political philosophy do represent heaps of inherited wisdom. The Age of Revolution was also an Age of Recapitulation, as classical notions of republican government were pulled from dusty libraries and poured onto the youthful constitutions of America, Haiti, and France. The issue is that this process does and will not occur everywhere and at every time.

Review

Cannibals and Kings (1977), by Marvin Harris

Writers usually leave classification to the critics, but Harris is an avowed “cultural determinist.” In Cannibals and Kings, his classic study of the origins of civilized life, this manifests in a neat sort of neo-Malthusianism (in the language of Marx). He theorizes that from the end of the Pleistocene, ecological pressures resulting from high population densities have demanded the “intensification” of production, often in a complete systematic alignment by way of an industrial revolution. The first of these occurred at the close of the Ice Ages, as over-hunting and climate change killed off big game species across North America and Eurasia and induced the introduction of domesticated plants to supplement now-insufficient caloric intake. Human societies from Mesoamerica to the Ganges were consistently faced with two alternatives: shrink or innovate, and those that evolved (he invokes Darwinian cultural evolutionism, too) to higher forms did the latter—whether through economic transformation, religious stricture, or political reorganization. Harris’s intensification theory is all-embracing and almost all-explaining: its influence can be detected in nearly all of history’s great ruptures, from the emergence of vegetarianism to the fall of feudalism.

The basic trajectory of Harris’s genesis arc is as follows: humanity exacerbates the Pleistocene extinction of large game animals (woolly mammoths, rhinos, etc.) on both the American and Eurasian landmasses, creating a new demand for sustenance. A transition toward the “broad-based” Mesolithic diet follows, with protein occupying a decreasing share as plants are first foraged and then replanted with increasing skill. In Mesopotamia, around 11,000 BC, the hunters start settling down and planting, as well as domesticating a few species (cattle, sheep, pigs, goats) attracted by consistently-available grain crops. The same process occurs later and in the opposite order in the Americas, where domesticable species were unavailable, necessitating the retention of mobility for hunting. Delayed settlement in Latin America, declares Harris, explains the subsequent Great Divergence between the continents. Eurasians had a two-millennium head start on scientific, cultural, and political development. From stationary societies arose first tribal bands and then “pristine states,” initially through a generous “big man” provider whose inevitable differentiation from the masses allowed him to monopolize violence and stored resources. Further expansion and environmental pressures reduced the obligations of the leaders until voluntary contributions became taxation, and hosts became kings. Harris then branches out to explain various resultant types of society and cultural practice in Mesoamerica, Asia, and Western Europe, concluding (after lengthy dietary digressions) with the rise of modern capitalism and the Industrial Revolution.

The sheer ambition of Cannibals and Kings leaves it vulnerable to repeated error and oversimplification, and the dullest critic will doubtless find some logical leap at which to object. Harris's anxieties for the future are of a distinctively ‘70s flavor—ecological crises, fuel shortages, overconsumption—and are probably reflective of his entire methodological approach. Nevertheless, his insights, if exaggerated, are more frequently useful than not. Malthusian dynamics offer a nuanced explanation of the near-ubiquity of patriarchies, which arose from the need to motivate male warriors to drive off rivals under population constraints; so too for the ideal conditions for statehood, which emerged most quickly where geographical boundaries forced potential dissidents to join or starve. Harris’s obsession with dietary practices, meanwhile, explicates several apparently random dietary trends in material terms, and his elucidation of Wittfogel’s hydraulic theory—“oriental despotisms” monopolized irrigation—is superb. His analysis breaks down most significantly in the modern era. His gloss of feudalism is crude, inaccurate, and teleological, omitting essentially all of the economic complexities of the Middle Ages, and his explanation of the emergence of capitalism (a transformation of lords) suspect. As he excused Malthus and Marx for their missed predictions, Harris deserves forgiveness for not quite predicting the present; nevertheless, he allowed his own historical moment to color his understanding of how society arrived there. Perhaps he saw the end times while waiting in line at a gas station.

Links

Coronavirus and Our Age of Discord, by Peter Turchin

A provocative theorization of pandemics as typical outcomes of “Ages of Discord,” one of which we inhabit. Speculative, but worth the short reading time, if only to for the entertainment of Turchin’s macrohistorical pattern-matching: e.g. “[t]here is a very strong (although not perfect) statistical association between these globalizations, general crises, and pandemics, from the Bronze Age to the Late Medieval Crisis.”

Hayek, Friedman, and the Illusions of Conservative Economics, by Robert Solow

The distinguished economist Robert Solow offers a (predictably) negative review of the Mont Pelerin Society, once the beating heart of libertarian thought in the United States. He also admits to the existence of a “Good Hayek” who contributed to economic theory, and pits him against “Bad Hayek” the ideologue.

Chaebols and Firm Dynamics in South Korea, by Philippe Aghion et al

A concise gloss of the transition of South Korea from a Chinese-style development economy toward increased openness and the consequences thereof—in short, improved creativity in R&D and patenting, as well as maintained economic growth.

The Decline of the Soviet Economy, by Robert C. Allen

This is an older paper, but it remains an essential read as a counterpoint to the deterministic institutional critiques of Soviet economic direction. Allen attributes the slowdown in Soviet productivity growth occurring during the 1970s to deficient investment choices rather than to endemic structural inhibitions—tied to failed leadership.