Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcranmer | Hacker News Reader

> Unlike the Greeks, they did not leave the world a better place at the end of their power than they found it at the start.

Roman law fuels most of the world's modern legal codes. Roman languages are among the most widely spoken today, and is closer to universal if you look at written language (even now, we're writing using the Roman alphabet). The largest world religion is Roman religion. Roman infrastructure forms the backbone of European infrastructure in much of the world.

That's more impact than the Greeks had.

View on HN

I think not. Roman law is not a scientific study by any means, and the reputation of the destructive Roman impact upon general scientific knowledge is felt in many fields.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/what-did-the-romans-...

> That's more impact than the Greeks had.

Our careers would not be possible if it was not for the mathematical and scientific contributions of the ancient Greeks. Not only did they greatly contribute to the foundations of math, but the way they formalized logical thinking enabled further discoveries.

None of this shit comes out of a magic hat, we're all ostensibly observing the same phenomena - that is to say there's hardly any reason whatsoever to attribute the gleaning of some fact derivative of the shared reality to a people. And I think this can be duly evidenced by the fact many people come to nearly simultaneous independent conclusions.

This can be reduced to something like Newton didn't discover gravity, Newton formally described it in mathematics, and anyone dedicated enough to pursue the formal description could have done much the same. Much in the same way, the Eurocentric view is wrong to attribute things and with the way cultural interaction spheres tend to work it's even more difficult to attribute developments to a given culture or individual. E.g. not only are we "standing on the shoulders of giants" but the scientific domain is pruning viable explanatory paths with each passing moment, narrowing the scope of positive knowledge and increasing the sharpness of the borders of negative knowledge. For instance China had what was effectively fiat currency well before it became widespread in European nations; they also managed to invent moveable type which was ineffectual and thus discarded - but Gutenberg gets the attribution?

But why did China discard movable type, while it was transformative to Western culture?

One reason is that Greece invented proto-empiricism. Other cultures invented math, but because of Plato only Greece elevated research and abstraction into a process of formal discovery rather than just a set of neat tricks for a limited set of problems.

China was a bureaucratic empire and didn't see the need. Rome was a fascist militarist slave owning culture which soon turned into a dictatorship. Both developed philosophies which were more oriented towards ethics and morality than empiricism.

So there was no formal culture of curiosity and invention. Inventions appeared and then they disappeared again. There was no momentum driving the process forward.

The West did develop an empirical culture. This was partly because it inherited the principle of formal abstraction from the Greeks, and partly because a tradition of physical exploration, with accompanying developments in ship technology and weapons.

China and Japan both turned back in on themselves. Rome was more interested in conquest than exploration.

The West explored - physically in search of gold and trade, but also philosophically and practically.

So IMO the real reason the industrial revolution happened is because the West had a culture that incubated technology and invention in a way that other cultures didn't. Not only were there associations for the advancement of knowledge like the Royal Society, and informal networks of researchers and mathematicians, there was also a practical tradition of engineering in wood, iron, stone, glass, fire, and water, on land and on the sea.

And also an economic reward system - abstracted from imperialism - which made practical engineering individually profitable.

And, as stated elsewhere, a middle class that could consume it.

The West "explored" but also in a fairly aggressive way and only after a history of violent conflict post-Rome. I read Metropolis by Ben Wilson, which focused on histories of cities, and the Middle East was experience a trade-driven era of prosperity before being "discovered" by religious explorers/conquerors from Portugal. The Portuguese didn't initially have much valuable to those societies to trade - but they did have much better weapons to use against them from that history of conflict instead of a history of trade, and an aggressive religious mindset.

I think it's a very open question if the warring, violent nature of those Western cultures actually led to overall faster/better technological advancement than if they'd interacted with the other cultures they came across in a peaceful, trade-oriented way.

The west was not a more violent culture than others. There was as much war everywhere. And the idea that Middle-East people were peaceful trader and European aggressive warriors is not bases on reality : Just one example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade

I'd actually be interested to see you quantify that, but I'm reviewing the timelines of Wars on Wikipedia at the moment, and from what I'm seeing, the "West", kind of a nebulous term - depending on where you draw the lines, was culprit to more wars. I'm a little lazy so I'm just keeping mental account.

I expect you're speaking in terms of qualitative violence?

You are reading a list that is eurocentric. Anyone with an interest in non-European history knows how sparse Wikipedia can be for their subject.

A great example is the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. According to your list only a single war took place for nearly 80 years in china, until the Song dynasty, which formed and unified (most of) china without a single war, attacks Vietnan, whereas in China it's known as a period of endemic warfare until the Song reunified china through conquest. Compare that to a Viking raid on Lisbon that does get its own place on the list.

> But why did China discard movable type, while it was transformative to Western culture?

A simpler explanation: That Chinese characters number in the 10,000s, while the characters in the Western alphabet number 26. This means that the latter is much easier than to former to turn into a profitable business, because the early movable types themselves are costly in time and capital to make, and easy to break or so I'd imagine. With 10,000 replicas of 26 characters you can print 24/7. However, with 26 replicas of 10,000 characters, your business will be halted every type the movable type of characters you need are inevitably broken and wait for an artisan to make new ones.

Cursory google shows that you need about 2500 characters, of a total of approximately 50,000 in the Cantonese branch alone. I don't know how many characters Gutenberg was working with, but having experienced modern German, English, French, and Spanish writing - I'm sure it wasn't 2500. Alongside the formatting. I suspect that is why it faltered.

I think your postulations on the Greeks are interesting. I do have to wonder at the level of accessibility of the Greek thinkers into the Middle Ages and into the Enlightenment - from my understanding Archimedes, for example, a very late Greek thinker, was only rediscovered as a product of translations from the Arabic world - a product I suspect of the Church, which was itself an institution of incomparable power since before the fall of Rome. If this is correct that's a thousand-year period without the Classical thinkers, and yet Europe was still, in my opinion (and many others), highly functional.

I believe Toynbee came up with the Goldilocks hypothesis for civilization; not too challenging, but not too easy. If you'll allow me, I would posit this exists at the intersection and overlap of cultures as well. My history is fast and loose, you'll have to forgive me: but the Axial age coincides with lots of warring in just about every major old-world society - thus "we" derived challenge - readily modulated by various developments, resource limitations, and etc... It's my impression that "Europe" was particularly violent, thus a constancy of the "challenge" was thematic of the West. I see this as something that created a persistent arms race which escalated with the passage of time. I would suggest this has little to do with empiricism and more to do with the necessity of maintaining the balance of power - right up to MAD.

Finally, with the Age of Discovery, and the discovery of the New World with it, a vast and untapped land which was available with little contest thanks to contagious disease, virgin soil, and a people who may have even been susceptible beyond that... The tradition was allowed continuity, and all of the philosophy active in that era was allowed to persist uncontested a la your reward system, which may have actually been copped from the Arabic market traditions albeit in a seriously perverted fashion.

> they also managed to invent moveable type which was ineffectual and thus discarded - but Gutenberg gets the attribution?

Gutenberg gets the attribution because, not only does he appear to be the first person to use a press for printing, but also he developed a new way of producing metal type for printing and invented a new alloy for type. This is a rather dramatic leap forward in the history of printing in much the same way as HMS Dreadnought was for naval warships or especially Stephenson's Rocket was for locomotives.

> we're all ostensibly observing the same phenomena

Then why was there no Industrial Revolution when many other civilizations for thousands of years observed these same phenomena? I don't know the answer but it is curious. I do believe when you look back you can see connections - it might be trite at times but James Burke's series 'Connections' tries to tease out the road to a current day technology going back through the past and all the seemingly unrelated things that needed to happen to finally arrive at the solution. Solutions always seem obvious in the present but usually they aren't quite so obvious in the past.

I'd like to think it's about cultural priorities. While in the perspective of the Western frame it would seem "irrational" to eschew modern advancements - it's just that, a perspective of the Western Frame and not objective. Even elements within the WF such as Marx and cohort identified generally negative elements like alienation. As an aside, there are people like the Sentinelese - a people contemporaneous with us still living in the stone age evidence that we don't need modernity, industry, and so on in order to continue as a species.

Toynbee on the Genesis of Civilization via Wikipedia [0]:

He argues that for civilizations to be born, the challenge must be a golden mean; that excessive challenge will crush the civilization, and too little challenge will cause it to stagnate.

One of the big history book authors has an oft-repeated joke, one permutation of it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/bsnud/is_this_a_joke...

Why do all that work when you could just sit your ass on a beach or in a nice Mediterranean-esque corner of the world?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Study_of_History#Genesis_and...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com