I mean, we actually know that not only was there pitifully little scientific advancement during that period (especially as you point out in the first half), but that science and technology regressed massively and entire fields were completely forgotten. For example, there was a gap of over a thousand years before anybody could build large domes again, and even then it had to be completely reinvented.
Like a few commenters here, you're confusing the dark ages and the middle ages. You can quibble over semantics and say that the middle ages includes the dark ages, but that obscures the point of the original post.
The standard narrative of Western intellectual progress looks like this:
~300BC to ~400AD: classical civilisation, high intellectual culture
~400AD to ~1500AD: Europe under the dominion of the Church, science and reason suppressed
~1500AD: bam, Renaissance
~1700AD: bam, Enlightenment
~1700AD - present: humanity freed from the yoke of religion, knowledge flowers again.
The revisionist view is as follows:
~300BC to ~400AD: classical civilisation, high intellectual culture
~400AD to ~1000AD: Europe in the dark ages due to barbarian invasions, underpopulated and poor, classical tradition barely kept alive in monasteries
~1000AD to ~1400AD: Europe begins to get wealthier, knowledge flowers in Church-sponsored universities
~1600AD: bam, Protestant Reformation
~1600AD - present: science builds on knowledge and philosophy developed by Catholic church, but Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda creates the false narrative of Church suppression of knowledge.
I don't know why this perspective is hitting the zeitgeist now, but one reason might be that the internet enables niche communities to share such ideas.
And a final group are the reactionaries, a group who see the modern ideals of progress as a myth - here's a good starting point on the idea that modern 'progressive' ideas are largely derived from Protestantism: http://unqualifiedreservations.wordpress.com/2007/09/26/how-...
Anyone who's interested and has the free time, please do dig around those blogs - you may realise, as I did, that the 21st century is quite an intellectually narrow and ignorant time.
The Enlightenment is a direct consequence of the Protestant Reformation that preceded it a few centuries prior. The key ideas of Protestantism was that faith should be a) based on reason and b) involve a direct communion with God, without intervening priests, ritual or hierarchy.
If this sounds appealing to you, you are basically a Protestant, possibly a post-God Protestant aka "atheist"/"agnostic"/"secular". In Catholicism, as with most religions, God (or gods or spirit) is intertwined with every aspect of life. The idea that religion is purely about beliefs is a Protestant idea - for most people, their religion is about community, ritual, and accessing deep emotions or altered states of consciousness. Protestantism rejected most of this in favour of a purely 'rational' faith, from where it's baby steps towards giving up faith entirely in favour of pure reason. (Evidence: atheism flourished in the traditionally Protestant countries of Northern Europe and the Anglosphere).
"People are going to have to choose to believe that their religious beliefs are "just religious" and have no serious relevance to the material world (the exact notion their religion decries as the ultimate heresy) and join the modern world"
Has no relevance to the material world === "not real"; in other words, people are going to have to give up their religions.
"Those ideas are absolutely and totally required to support the idea of coexistence of peoples of different faiths."
I.e., for people of different faiths to co-exist they have to give up their faiths (in favour of 'secularism' or 'moderate-ism' aka Protestantism).
Related point: the West has 'Protestant-ised' several world faiths (in fact the concept of 'world religion' is arguably the creation of 19th century Protestant missionaries and scholars).
I'm very curious to hear more. Contrary to this article, I don't see any evidence of "pro-torture propaganda", because everyone in this thread and almost every source I find is anti-torture.
It seems like torture would work, not in a "ticking time-bomb: scenario, but in a situation where you had a long time to corroborate intelligence gathered from torture with other sources. Interrogate the captive on stuff you already know about, and if they lie, punish them with worse forms of torture. And if people are prone to losing their minds under torture - you can merely submit them to one session of brutal torture, then leave them for a few weeks or months before resuming normal interrogation - with the threat of more torture if they don't comply.
You summoned me with your comment above so I feel compelled to respond to this interesting comment.
I agree that there are many interesting developments in political philosophy on the nature of democracy. The issue is that such academic debates have almost no impact on any current political system that describes itself as a "democracy" and the poor citizens that live under it.
One of the best ideas I got from reading Marx (which also shows that people who read Moldbug tend to read widely, hey) is that political ideals aren't real. They don't matter. All that matters is the living breathing primates that inhabit our political systems, the stuff those primates have, and whether the primates are happy. Bad political systems are bad because they cause cruelty to animals.
"Freedom" is simply a matter of the monkeys being able to do what they want and not feeling like they are being bossed around by bigger monkeys. "Equality" is a matter of ensuring that the low status monkeys don't feel too low status.
As for "democracy" - well, it turns out that monkeys are generally happier living in industrial economies (with their abundant iPads, cappuccinos, etc), but that such economies require huge centralised bureaucracies to run effectively. The theatre of frequent elections is a convenient way to make every monkey feel like an alpha monkey whose opinion is important and not simply a well-pampered slave.
Both the first year college students with their "laughably simplistic definition of democracy" and "Rawls, Dworkin, Gutmann, Thompson, Bohman, Dryzek, Young, Mansbridge, etc. -- and of course Habermas" with their highly nuanced definition of democracy are in the same category as people discussing programming language theory on the Haskell mailing lists. They have a fun intellectual pastime, and all power to them. But the latest mind-expanding discoveries in category theory have no effect on actual developers maintaining crappy PHP code. (The best they can hope for is that some enlightened and energetic project manager decides to let them rewrite part of the system in Rails.) Likewise, the latest advances in democratic theory have no impact on the people staffing the enormous bureaucracies which run advanced economies. At least the Haskell guys can write Tetris apps in 4 lines of code to show off. It'd be cool if Rawls would gather 100,000 followers to some private island to test-drive his own political system, but it's unlikely to happen. (On a side note, did you hear that seasteaders are evil fascist brogrammers and that charter cities are neoliberal colonialism?)
I'd actually be glad to hear you correct me and tell me that no, actually most Western democracies hand out books by the authors you cited to civil service employees, who hold regular workplace seminars on how to best implement such ideas and bring real democracy (tm) to the world.
EDIT: I realise that I never responding to the grandparent question about freedom and democracy. Well, there are many forms of "freedom" and democracy is certainly compatible with some of them. But I note that democratic states, lacking strong leaders with ability to make more than token cuts to government spending, tend to show a monotonic increase in the number of government departments that decide to regulate ever more and more aspects of life. The thing with regulation is that every individual item of regulation sounds sensible (how can we let people get away with poorly fitted child car seats? the humanity!) but over time people forget that a) they survived perfectly well in ages past when governments tended to leave shit alone and b) they were actually much happier being left free to take their own risks and make their own stupid decisions than have someone prevent them doing so.
An even bigger issue is the fact that if you are a paycheck employee (especially if you have a mortgage, debt and a family) you are in many ways a comfortably-off serf. An ever-growing government takes an ever-growing share of your salary, and since taxpayers are close to being an electoral minority in many countries (did you snark at Mitt Romney's 48% comments?) you are likely to spend ever more of your limited time on Earth working hard to fund TSA agents, drone strikes and the healthcare of aging pensioners. An anglo-saxon freeman had more personal autonomy. At least if you're reading this site you can make plans to build a bootstrapped passive income and move to Thailand.
Personal thoughts (trying to channel pg with a huge stack of applications to get through - I imagine the guy who first applied Naive Bayes to email spam being quite comfortable making snap decisions over small variables):
This guy seems smart, but not outstanding. Idea is decent but not amazingly novel. I feel like I've met both this guy and this idea 100 times before.
Solo founder without an amazingly impressive background. The t-shirt website is really cool - but sadly these days it's not that novel an achievement. "the t-shirt that I was selling didn't even exist until weeks later" - come on, everybody here's read the Lean Startup/4HWW. Again for the "AirBnB' feat - he wasn't the first person to do something like this.
Again, this isn't a reason to say 'no' - he's clearly smarter and more entrepreneurial than 95% of the population - but as a solo founder he needs more than that, he needs a strong reason to say "yes".
Onto the idea itself. His early traction is pretty impressive - I wasn't sure if writers would be interested in a tool like this. My main questions are a) how do you balance power and usability for users who might find version control hard to understand and b) is there a significant reachable market of people who would pay for this? Lots of little competitors suggests that this is an idea many people have had but not necessarily with a significant market.
For YC it makes sense to reject, for loren, the most interesting card in your hand right now is the feedback from publishers who face this problem and don't have a good solution - worth focusing on them and building an MVP for their needs (if you're not already). It might help to partner up with a biz dev guy who has experience in that industry who could help hack around the slow procurement processes that are likely common in that industry. See if you can get some smallish publishing house on board as a demo user.
I note that an existing YC startup "Kivo" is also doing "Git for the masses" though they're in a more lucrative space (Powerpoint).
People (with a few exceptions, usually the result of excellent breeding, education or culture) are much weaker and worse than that.
It's important not to forget that all people have limited potential, though some are much more limited than others.
Do you know Plato had a name for the man who was ruled by passion? Every man has to place some principle on the throne of his heart. The true aristocratic man, the philosopher-king, is ruled by wisdom. The timocrat, leader of a warrior state, is ruled by honour.
Going further done the list, the oligarch is ruled by desire for wealth - which at least gives him the motivation to work hard, if nothing else. The democratic man is ruled by freedom, and his life therefore involves being blown around his own whims.
But the lowest of all is the man ruled by passion - the tryant. People here should read The Republic (or knowing HN readers, skim the Wikipedia article describing the 5 different types of polis): he describes modern culture (including Occupy Wall St) pretty well, which just shows that human nature hasn't changed.
Make a new account, set up a voting ring (a proper voting ring this time, where the accounts have some history - ask your HN-using friends to help out). You only need about 4 upvotes to make the front page and then momentum will help you if you're any good. Ever wonder how the Buffer guys keep making the frontpage despite basically rehashing the same article over and over?
The founders were smart guys and the Constitution is a clever piece of political engineering, but you might as well be saying that the government is doing badly because they stopped following the Bible. As a non-American, I find the idolisation of the Constitution pretty amusing.
Yours is the standard post-cynical view of democracy. It's common among very smart people. Think Churchill's "two cheers for democracy". It's what I used to believe. I don't now.
"Power tends to corrupt." If this is true, then democracy may well be the maximin solution. But is it true? The word "autocrat" makes people think of Hitler and Stalin. They don't think of Frederick the Great or Deng Xiaoping.
Power often corrupts, but not always.
1. When power is insecure, it is dangerous, like a cornered wild animal: totalitarian spying against potential conspirators, suppression of dissent, brutal retaliation against political opponents. Secure power has less need for such behaviour. As Bismark said of the press "they can say what they want, and I will do what I want".
2. When power is a "family business", the leader's time preferences change and they want to ensure they pass a prosperous country onto their children. That's why old-school monarchs, for all their faults, were less rapacious than third-world dictators - the dictators knew their time in power was limited, so they made out like bandits while they could.
3. Many people are actually quite nice and will use their power to help their fellow men (or at the very list, fellow countrymen).
Consider that Communist China has transitioned from Maoist schizo-state to pragmatic autocratism and now to some kind of quasi-democracy, all without major revolutions. I see the real danger of technocracy being Brezhnevism, not Stalinism, but the same thing has happened with modern day democracy. (The current "democratic" system is designed to prevent charismatic populist politicians (ie, potential Hitlers and Stalins) from making much significant difference - how much personal impact over government policy did Bush have, for example? Or, for that matter, Obama? - and instead most power rests with hundreds of unelected but government-funded agencies.)
"So the best government isn't one that is not subject to control by any political interest, because objectivity and neutrality in politics are never going to be anything more than daydream. Rather, I think the best government is one that is open to control by so many conflicting interests in so many different ways that the vectors eventually balance one another out. Politics is meant to be dull, boring, and utterly predictable. Because when politics gets exciting, people die! It's OK when it's your own life, but don't put others' lives and human rights in peril."
I definitely agree with your last 3 sentences. The thing is any kind of true democracy is going to be full of exciting politics. Your ideal of a system where the vectors balance out is savvy (were you a British colonial administrator in a previous life?) and is also quite close to the current system. Designing a government that is ineffective by design is a good way to prevent tyranny. Unfortunately, it also makes it unable to make difficult-but-necessary decisions. Example: who in the USG actually has the power to reduce the deficit? Will this situation change in the next 20 years?
Here's something interesting: various Chinese think tanks wonder publicly about if, and when their country will transition to democracy. (Yes, they can get away with this - the unwritten rule is that they can't say "China should become a democracy in the next 5 years" but discussions of longer time periods are not considered a threat).
A lot of the left-leaning think tanks believe China should gradually become more democratic, building from the village elections they have now to city, province and ultimately national elections.
Some of the right-leaning think tanks have a more original idea - China remains a one-party state, but with increasingly sophisticated methods of soliciting public opinion. Basically technocracy.
I think the EU is converging on the same system of government from a different direction.
I'm not saying technocracy is a wonderful system of government either, but it won't be hard to do a better job than democracy.
Pretty much everything bad people have predicted about democracy has come to pass:
- many people will vote on ethnic/tribal lines (true even in the US)
- people's voting patterns will be mainly determined by the media, making the media and whoever controls it extraordinarily powerful (if you're Chomsky, this is the corporations, if you're UKIP, this is the "metropolitan liberal elite" - actually, they're both right).
- the idea of having rotating politicians managing a permanent civil service is insanely impractical, is not implemented by any non-governmental organisation, and has had the entirely predictable result that the civil service pretty much does what it wants regardless of who is in power.
- eventually the population realise they can vote themselves largesse out of the treasury. This is the equivalent of injecting smack for polities; it's insanely addictive, it's incredibly painful for them to quit, and it will probably eventually kill them.
- it doesn't even really give a voice to voters. Seriously, all your opinions and preferences are reduced to 1 bit of information every election cycle? And in practice its less than that, because you probably live in a non-swing region, or your preferences are highly predictable (eg, in information theoretic terms, an urban highly-educated media professional who votes left-wing probably only gives you about 0.2 bits of information, because you knew they were gonna vote left-wing anyway).
Something like Singapore is one good example of what a well-managed non-democratic state can look like. (INB4 caning: OK, corporal punishment isn't very nice, but neither are most criminals, and since Singapore has a low crime rate its "draconian" law enforcement leads to less overall suffering than, say, the American policy of placing two million people in rape-infested concentration camps. Free speech? You noticed how Jezebel and similar outlets have started threatening the employment of people who say things they don't like? I used to be a lot more libertarian, but I'm seriously coming around to the idea that people have more practical freedom in an orderly state than a libertine one).
People here interested in this stuff should seriously read Moldbug if they haven't already: http://moldbuggery.blogspot.co.uk (start with "The Case Against Democracy: Ten Red Pill" and then maybe move to the "Open Letter" series).
You misunderstand my argument. Obviously Jesus says that you should do good. Apparently that was a big part of his shtick. But if you want to actually do good you need to have a pretty fucking clear idea of how the world works. Because, y'know, wolves. It's not that America must act like a criminal gang, it's that it lives in a neighbourhood patrolled by a number of criminal gangs, so even if its ultimate goal is to kumbayah the world into submission it should probably keep a few guns in reserve, just in case.
"I feel unfortunate to live in a world filled with others who feel the same as you."
Judging by the comments here, I think its filled more with people who feel the same as you. It's not since the 19th century that people like me have been common, though the ideas I'm riffing on were already old during the Roman Empire, who succesfully implemented the only known formula for world peace discovered to date (si vis pacem, para bellum). The 20th century was full of idealistic visionaries who tried flipping this ancient wisdom, with predictable results.
You should feel unfortunate in about two or three decades though: that's when I forecast the West's technological and economic boons peter out and its various infringements of natural law finally catch up with it, and the east Asian nations bring back the old order: national sovereignty over world policing, mercantilism over outsourcing, savings over debt, and good governance over democracy.
Thank you - this is the most sensible comment I've seen in this thread.
Many thinkers throughout history have noted that states and criminal gangs are effectively the same. They are both inherently violent organisations. Criminal gangs are tiny states; states are large, settled criminal gangs.
The Yakuza in Japan or the Cray family (when they ruled half of London) are examples of intermediate forms: criminal gangs that have taken on some of the role of the state. Rather than arbitrarily robbing people, they instead ask for protection money. This is more than just a polite form of robbery: they legitimately protect you from other criminal gangs. Though I doubt anyone here has had to make the decision, I think everyone would prefer to deal with one predictable criminal gang than many competing unpredictable gangs.
Eventually the gang leaders realise that it's in their own interest to build a stable, prosperous society: its better to be a Caesar than a barbarian warlord. If nothing else, the wine is nicer. Passing laws and promising that even the leaders will abide by them makes the citizens comfortable dealing with one another and makes everyone richer. Once everyone is comfortable with the idea of the law being supreme, the mob might realise they can do away with kings and bring in constitutions and parliaments and so on. Democracy works (and only works) because the mob agrees that these are the set of rules they will live by, and that therefore it's not wise to ignore them.
Still, rights and laws remain contingent on power. Human rights only extend as far as the military reach of states that support human rights. Until we build a world government, the only universal law over humanity is the same as it was in 10000 BC: raw power, physical force, violence. The world as a whole is essentially a lawless realm consisting of about 200 gangs; the only thing that stops everything turning into bloods vs crips is a shaky system of alliances, treaties and, ultimately, mutually assured destruction.
One obvious counterpoint is that France no longer needs to fear Germany because the Germans and French are suddenly BFFs and neither will vote to go to war with the other. The "international community" is slowly coming to resemble a federated state, with one set of laws. But this community is not truly international. Russia and China can violate your right to privacy all they want. Ultimately, this is because they have H-bombs. Likewise, we can violate Sharia Law as much as we like and Iran can't stop us.
My point is this: most of these complaints would make sense if America truly was a world government, achieving legitimacy via just consent of the 7 billion governed. But it's not, and it can limit its citizenship however it pleases. The fact that America was historically built on immigration doesn't give me, a foreigner, the "right" to live there. The very concept is nonsensical - the USG has more guns than me, and so they can decide who's in and who's out. The idea that people should be able to live wherever they want is a beautiful dream but is entirely counter to the way the world is going, and is also horrendously impractical.
I've travelled to China a few times over the last few years and each time the visa requirements have gotten stricter. They've decided they don't need any more foreigners, and I can't contest the morality of this with the CPC because again, they have more guns than me. As the world gets more crowded, other middle income countries will follow suit. The walls are going up everywhere. As much as I, personally, would benefit from the US tearing down its borders and letting me live there without restriction, it doesn't make a lot of sense if they do so and other countries don't.
Americans can constrain their intelligence agencies and open their borders as much as they like. They can't force other countries to do the same, which means that these policy proposals are equivalent to "we should make our intelligence gathering less capable than that of China and Russia" and "we should import Latin Americans until our quality of life is equal to that of Honduras". If America wants to reenact the fall of Rome, that's their prerogative, but as a foreigner I wish other foreigners would not cheerlead them as they do so. No America means no "international community" (what can the EU do against China and Russia?), and good luck petitioning China to respect your human rights as a global citizen.
Although you might not believe it, I'm not actually a cynic about human nature or pessimistic about our future. We built stable, peaceful societies in a violent world. Go humanity! But we have to remember that this was not achieved by the divine intervention of the Great God Human Rights, but by working within the universal laws of power. Good can triumph over evil, but as even Jesus said, it needs the "cunning of snakes" to succeed.
It's funny, I actually agree 100% with the author on skpeticism being blind to the fact that we only understand reality via mental models (all models are wrong, but some are useful, as they say), and science being more of a social process with it's own biases and ossified traditions than a grand search for capital-t Truth.
And yet, I also disagree completely with his politics. I used to be both a skeptic and a progressive. Now I'm spiritual and a reactionary. I believe that drugs, meditation and religious experiences can help us access aspects of reality that are normally invisible. I also believe that democracy is an outdated system of government, and the particular brand of feminism the author defends is just another batshit crazy ideology. (I'm all for the Sheryl Sandbergs of the world, but when people start talking about patriarchy and privilege they might as well be talking about sin and Satan for all I care).
Also, why are people on the left so keen to defend Islam at the drop of a hat? Is it just an "enemy of my enemy" kind of deal? (We hate America, Radical Islamists hate America, hey, these Muslims seem pretty smart doncha know!) I have respect for FEMEN and other second-wave feminist handouts who at least try and keep their worldview consisistent and criticise the treatment of women in Muslim countries.
I don't know what that makes me, other than "odd".
Post-script: Two of my favourite bloggers describe the same conflict between society's elites. Mencius Moldbug describes them as Optimates and Brahmins. Michael o'Church describes them as E1 and G1. Oddly enough, although they describe the two sides almost identically, they're on opposite teams (Moldbug seeing the left-wing elite as all-powerful, and Michael o'Church seeing the opposite).
Thanks for posting this. The most obvious point (to me) is that it would be very hard to install a 1984-style regime in a nation where almost every educated person has read 1984.
Anything that even has the slightest overtone of old-school totalitarianism gets mocked and derided by the media and the educated classes. No-one intelligent takes the "war on terror" seriously, for example.
In a democracy, whoever influences public opinion is basically in charge. We live in a weird society where most media outlets are controlled by big business, and yet most people who work in media are very progressive (you might not believe me, but it's true: Fox News/the Daily Mail/etc do not have some secret source of right wing humanities graduates, and so most of their reporters are typical young, metropolitan, educated liberals). That makes the media a weird Rorschach test where from one perspective it's under the thumb of big business and from another it's under the thumb of the "liberal elite".
The best model I could come up with to understand Western society is that there are basically two power structures that rarely openly compete but continually grind against each other like tectonic plates. One power structure consists of large corporations, finance, the military, and so on. The other consists of the media, academia, many government agencies (most government workers are again, progressive) and various international organisations. Silicon Valley, like Hollywood, is considered a left-wing outpost in right-wing capitalism, which is why Marc Andreesen was condemned for coming out as Republican, and why tech employees can be fired if they offend the enforcers of "social justice".
The best evidence I can give of this is one paper that studied the policies of right-wing and left-wing governments. They found that right-wing policies favoured the top 2% of society. Left-wing policies tend to favour the top 5%.
This post http://www.macroresilience.com/2013/04/08/radical-centrism-u... explains the paper and how our current system basically gives us the worst of both worlds: "Where the government was the sole operator, such as prisons and healthcare, “pragmatic” privatisation leaves us with a mix of heavily regulated oligopolies and risk-free private contracting relationships. On the other hand, where the private sector was allowed to operate without much oversight the “pragmatic” reform involves the subordination of free enterprise to a “sensible” regulatory regime and public-private partnerships to direct capital to social causes."
I have no idea how this will end, but I'm not optimistic about the future of democracy. Too many people squabbling over deckchairs while the Titanic keeps sailing towards the icebergs (whether or not Sesame Street retains its government funding is irrelevant, when both military and social security spending keeps going up and up).
The successful governments of the twenty-first century will probably be a mix of corporate nationalists, like China and Russia, (basically Fascism with some self-control) and pragmatic city-states like Singapore.
Like a few commenters here, you're confusing the dark ages and the middle ages. You can quibble over semantics and say that the middle ages includes the dark ages, but that obscures the point of the original post.
The standard narrative of Western intellectual progress looks like this:
~300BC to ~400AD: classical civilisation, high intellectual culture
~400AD to ~1500AD: Europe under the dominion of the Church, science and reason suppressed
~1500AD: bam, Renaissance
~1700AD: bam, Enlightenment
~1700AD - present: humanity freed from the yoke of religion, knowledge flowers again.
The revisionist view is as follows:
~300BC to ~400AD: classical civilisation, high intellectual culture
~400AD to ~1000AD: Europe in the dark ages due to barbarian invasions, underpopulated and poor, classical tradition barely kept alive in monasteries
~1000AD to ~1400AD: Europe begins to get wealthier, knowledge flowers in Church-sponsored universities
~1600AD: bam, Protestant Reformation
~1600AD - present: science builds on knowledge and philosophy developed by Catholic church, but Protestant anti-Catholic propaganda creates the false narrative of Church suppression of knowledge.
I don't know why this perspective is hitting the zeitgeist now, but one reason might be that the internet enables niche communities to share such ideas.
One such group is Catholics - here's a Catholic blogger explaining exactly how the heliocentrism vs geocentrism debate played out: http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-great-ptolemaic-smac...
Another group are environmentalists - here's an interesting blogger writing about how classical knowledge was preserved through the dark ages: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com.au/2010/06/merlins-ti...
And a final group are the reactionaries, a group who see the modern ideals of progress as a myth - here's a good starting point on the idea that modern 'progressive' ideas are largely derived from Protestantism: http://unqualifiedreservations.wordpress.com/2007/09/26/how-...
Anyone who's interested and has the free time, please do dig around those blogs - you may realise, as I did, that the 21st century is quite an intellectually narrow and ignorant time.