War and Peace and War
Like Jared Diamond in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Peter Turchin in War and Peace and War uses his expertise in evolutionary biology to make a highly original argument about the rise and fall of empires. Turchin argues that the key to the formation of an empire is a society's capacity for collective action. He demonstrates that high levels of cooperation are found where people have to band together to fight off a common enemy, and that this kind of cooperation led to the formation of the Roman and Russian empires, and the United States. But as empires grow, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, conflict replaces cooperation, and dissolution inevitably follows. Eloquently argued and rich with historical examples, War and Peace and War offers a bold new theory about the course of world history.
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What Hacker News says
- My unscientific guess is that the mutation allowed for greater group dependence and cohesion. This article and Harari's book sort of dance around this, but I think it's some type of emotional gene that we are emotionally hard wired to NEED to connect with people. Like a tiger stalks with your back turned to it, people emotionally need to be connected to other people in a deep, meaningful way.
Humans are not only unique in their abilities like problems solving and language, but also in their 100% dedication to the tribe.
I think it is this combination that allows for us to work together in such large groups and successfully.
Harari calls it "fictions" that bind us together, but that doesn't quite seem to work for me.
The question I ask is WHY do these "fictions" work so well?
Why would a Nebraska farmer go half way across the world and climb French beaches with German guns shooting at him?
Why are we so compelled to identify with a group?
A comedian has a great joke about this. Essentially, the WORST thing you can do to a person is put them in solitary confinement. Even being surrounded by criminals and prison guards is infinity better than being forced to be alone in a room. We desperately need to connect with people. It seems hard wired genetically to me.
I think culture helps serve this purpose of binding us together.
Art, music, theatre, and even sports are all a part of the process of group cohesion.
Group cohesion and dependency is so powerful that it's often the number one factor in determining which societies/countries/groups come out victorious with intergroup conflict.
A great book called "War and Peace and War" by Peter Turchin is a fantastic book to read if this concept interests you.
Another one, "Tribe" by Sebastion Junger also explores this topic.
- You might also be interested in Peter Turchin's War and Peace and War -- which depicts social cohesion as the measure of social health, and internal competition among like-minded members of a society as the beginning of the end. (This is confirmed repeatedly by history, especially Chinese history; I'm also reminded of how corruption and lack of internal cohesion doomed the post-Roman British kingdoms in their should've-been-a-cakewalk defense against the Anglo-Saxons.)
- I'd refer you to Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War. He argues that it's not capitalism that leads to wealth concentration, it's peace, stability, and prosperity -- since we can see this problem worldwide, and very far back in history. Since peace breeds wealth concentration, it eventually ends in a crisis (normally a period of major wars); the crisis mostly kills people and ruins lives, but it also disrupts concentrations of wealth as a side-effect. Eventually the wars end in a peace of exhaustion, with wealth a little more equitably distributed (or at least enough wreckage that everyone can make money by rebuilding), and a period of peace and wealth concentration begins again.
Solutions to this problem that have been tried and failed include:
* Endless war. This doesn't do much the problem of concentration of wealth (warlords as well as capitalists have high wealth concentration), and it creates sociological problems; for details in a familiar context, read Albion's Seed, specifically the section on the Borderers/hillbillies/Scotch-Irish.
* State ownership of some productive capital (Britain after WWII) or basically all productive capital (the USSR). This works well for a while (see How Asia Works), but if kept around for too long it breaks down, producing complacency, mismanagement, and an inevitable fiscal crisis. Thatcher and Gorbachev did pretty much the same thing, for pretty much the same reasons.
* Wage controls, price controls, tariff walls, heavy internal regulation. The New Deal, Ireland under De Valera, all European governments before the 1700s (see Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life), and the Tokugawa Shogunate did this. For as long as the will to enforce everything exists, this approach sort of works, and it slows down wealth concentration and the development of crises; but it doesn't stop them entirely, and the crises are likely to be really explosive when they hit. (See also the 1700s, 1968, and the fall of the Tokugawas.) It also leads to technological stagnation, which has other obvious problems.
* Letting the market work its magic. See Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, for why this is intolerable in practice.
Don't ask me for a magic bullet, none of the ones above work and I don't know what others there could be. Perhaps the solution is to just be aware of the problem and try to manage it...
- You'll have to be a little more specific about what you're looking for. Are you looking for world history? US history? Philosophy? History in tech?
I can't say much about world history, but I've been reading some books to get a better understanding of American politics:
- "War and Peace and War: The Rise and Fall of Empires": Interesting analysis on the rise and fall of conquering civilizations. Tons of parallels between dead empires and the US empire.
- "The Death and Life of Great American Cities": Nations are built on cities, and America's cities are very poorly built. What are we doing wrong, what could we do better?
- "The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War": Very dense, lots of data. Suggests that our current political turmoil is due to our economy and society expecting unrealistic growth, and a disconnect between reality and the expectation of citizens.
- The Origins of Totalitarianism: "Slippery slope" gets thrown around a lot w.r.t. suspicious legislation. This book provides context on past societies that slipped, and where we stand on that slope.
- "Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization": Optimistic look at the future of globalism.
- "1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed": An analysis of the cascade failure that took out almost all the great bronze-age civilizations around the Mediterranean region in 1177BC.
"Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies" - I haven't read this, but this is the #1 book that pops up in conversations.
- These societies' problems are certainly not recent, and they're not just due to drugs. For Appalachia, read _Albion's Seed_ or at least Slate Star Codex's review ("the sensibility is positively Orcish"); for Sicily, read Peter Turchin's _War and Peace and War_ (watch for the section on "asabiyya black holes"), and probably _The Moral Basis of a Backwards Society_. Both of these societies have been absolutely awful for centuries.
- I wouldn't bet on the US's longevity. Read Peter Turchin, War and Peace and War (discussed here a week or two ago), particularly noting his part about how multiple imperial peoples can't coexist in a single country...
The Fourth Turning -- on the patterns that generations tend to fall into -- might also be interesting.
