Societies' Individuals Compete using Technology
"An Equal Measure of Tolerance and Tyranny" asserted that Societies Compete. What does that mean? "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins, provides many clues. What an exceptional work, no wonder it is in print nearly thirty years after it's first printing. Dawkins goes to some length to discredit the concept of Group Selection, where, in the E.O. Wilson formulation from his book, "Sociobiology", a mechanism for explaining altruism was purported to be that individuals would sacrifice themselves for the good of the group as a whole.
I find Dawkins' arguments against such ideas compelling. Societies are ecosystems where individuals compete amongst each other. Competition among individuals gives rise to society's structures (such as police forces, laws, property) and a certain cohesion results from those structures (a society can have military forces) which can be used to compete against other societies. Still, the deployment of such forces results from a confluence of interests of individuals within a society.
The most thorough history of societal competition is Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs, and Steel'. In GGS, human groups destinies in terms of cultural advancement are determined by their geography.
Jared Diamond's History of the world (abridged)
If you have a lot of domesticable animal species in the area, and you have good domesticable crop species, then agriculture will naturally arise and out-compete the way humans had always lived before (as hunter-gatherers.) This happenned first in the middle east, but then the middle east peoples exhausted their climate, by cutting down too many trees, and the climate became too arid so development there slowed down. At that point though, they had brought their crop packages to the rest of Eurasia, which they could do, because Eurasia, being on a East-West axis, meant that the crops (which are usually meant for certain latitudes) could travel far and still useful.
Europe, with a more robust climate (higher rainfall) was able to resist humans' constant cutting down of things for several millenia. So they could develop denser populations, and therefore more technologies. Eurasia also featured a number of large agricultural societies and inventions from each diffused to the others, enriching the total number of known technologies available to all.
Europe was also 'just-right' in the Goldilocks sense of being not too balkanized (enough larger states to support technology, enough geographical barriers to prevent unification), and not too centralized (like China was subject to the whims of a single emperor, because the main state has few barriers.) So Europeans developed advanced technology and moved all over the world (in temperate latitudes where the same crops would grow), wherever they could grow their crops (i.e. not Panama, not the Andes, not the Australian outback, nor New Guinea... nowhere where their crop packages would not take hold)
In other parts of the world, the americas, and southeast Asia, similar duels of crop cultures occurred, with similar patterns of population replacement. The course of the Austronesian (roughly Polynesian?) peoples spread from China to Taiwan, thence to the Phillipines & Indonesia, back to mainland Vietnam, and east to found polynesia, but skipping over New Guinea where Agricultural societies were already thriving. In Africa, the Bantu expansion is the story of a tropical crop package enabling people from West Africa to colonize all of southern africa, replacing the original populations there. So when new ways of living which have higher technology and support higher population density arise, they naturally expand and overwhelm previous populations.
The End.
The story explains how history unfolded without the need to invoke bigotry of race, religion or culture. Myriad available facts on human racial distributions are elegantly presented and cogently explained.
Individuals in societies have technology "packages" that can include guns, germs and steel, as well as crops, that can over power other peoples without these packages. What happens when two peoples meet is predicted by the technologies available to the two groups far more than it is by the nature of the leaders, the bravery of the soldiers, or the goodness of the missionaries. Individuals compete among each other, and individuals with technology packages better suited to the local environment inevitably displace or assimilate the former population.
Europeans did not conquer the Americas because they were good or righteous, or because they brought their superior religion. They did so because the vast majority of the population succumbed to diseased for which they had no immunity, and the remainder were subdued by the far superior technology (in both materiel, knowledge, and tactics) of their conquerors.
Culture, in the form of religion, language, and customs, was along for the ride. These days, we are accustomed to having science and technology be considered the primary vehicle for "advancement" of a society (more neutrally, as a leading driver of change) . Many express the thought that religion and culture were key to dominance in the past. What Diamond reveals is that the fate of cultures has always been in the hands of its technologies. The age of enlightenment accelerated the pace and made the importance of technology too obvious to miss, but it has always been a dominant but silent partner to God, King, and Country.
References:
I find Dawkins' arguments against such ideas compelling. Societies are ecosystems where individuals compete amongst each other. Competition among individuals gives rise to society's structures (such as police forces, laws, property) and a certain cohesion results from those structures (a society can have military forces) which can be used to compete against other societies. Still, the deployment of such forces results from a confluence of interests of individuals within a society.
The most thorough history of societal competition is Jared Diamond's 'Guns, Germs, and Steel'. In GGS, human groups destinies in terms of cultural advancement are determined by their geography.
Jared Diamond's History of the world (abridged)
If you have a lot of domesticable animal species in the area, and you have good domesticable crop species, then agriculture will naturally arise and out-compete the way humans had always lived before (as hunter-gatherers.) This happenned first in the middle east, but then the middle east peoples exhausted their climate, by cutting down too many trees, and the climate became too arid so development there slowed down. At that point though, they had brought their crop packages to the rest of Eurasia, which they could do, because Eurasia, being on a East-West axis, meant that the crops (which are usually meant for certain latitudes) could travel far and still useful.
Europe, with a more robust climate (higher rainfall) was able to resist humans' constant cutting down of things for several millenia. So they could develop denser populations, and therefore more technologies. Eurasia also featured a number of large agricultural societies and inventions from each diffused to the others, enriching the total number of known technologies available to all.
Europe was also 'just-right' in the Goldilocks sense of being not too balkanized (enough larger states to support technology, enough geographical barriers to prevent unification), and not too centralized (like China was subject to the whims of a single emperor, because the main state has few barriers.) So Europeans developed advanced technology and moved all over the world (in temperate latitudes where the same crops would grow), wherever they could grow their crops (i.e. not Panama, not the Andes, not the Australian outback, nor New Guinea... nowhere where their crop packages would not take hold)
In other parts of the world, the americas, and southeast Asia, similar duels of crop cultures occurred, with similar patterns of population replacement. The course of the Austronesian (roughly Polynesian?) peoples spread from China to Taiwan, thence to the Phillipines & Indonesia, back to mainland Vietnam, and east to found polynesia, but skipping over New Guinea where Agricultural societies were already thriving. In Africa, the Bantu expansion is the story of a tropical crop package enabling people from West Africa to colonize all of southern africa, replacing the original populations there. So when new ways of living which have higher technology and support higher population density arise, they naturally expand and overwhelm previous populations.
The End.
The story explains how history unfolded without the need to invoke bigotry of race, religion or culture. Myriad available facts on human racial distributions are elegantly presented and cogently explained.
Individuals in societies have technology "packages" that can include guns, germs and steel, as well as crops, that can over power other peoples without these packages. What happens when two peoples meet is predicted by the technologies available to the two groups far more than it is by the nature of the leaders, the bravery of the soldiers, or the goodness of the missionaries. Individuals compete among each other, and individuals with technology packages better suited to the local environment inevitably displace or assimilate the former population.
Europeans did not conquer the Americas because they were good or righteous, or because they brought their superior religion. They did so because the vast majority of the population succumbed to diseased for which they had no immunity, and the remainder were subdued by the far superior technology (in both materiel, knowledge, and tactics) of their conquerors.
Culture, in the form of religion, language, and customs, was along for the ride. These days, we are accustomed to having science and technology be considered the primary vehicle for "advancement" of a society (more neutrally, as a leading driver of change) . Many express the thought that religion and culture were key to dominance in the past. What Diamond reveals is that the fate of cultures has always been in the hands of its technologies. The age of enlightenment accelerated the pace and made the importance of technology too obvious to miss, but it has always been a dominant but silent partner to God, King, and Country.
References:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel Great wikipedia article on GGS
- http://www.pbs.org/gunsgermssteel/ PBS micro-site about GGS
- Google books link for "The Selfish Gene" http://books.google.ca/books?id=WkHO9HI7koEC&dq=The+Selfish+Gene&pg=PP1&ots=S60KGiwnY3&sig=3LwjcnisRed8XNPK3x0bopXhCG8&prev=http://www.google.ca/search%3Fq%3DThe%2BSelfish%2BGene%26ie%3Dutf-8%26oe%3Dutf-8%26rls%3Dcom.ubuntu:en-US:official%26client%3Dfirefox-a&sa=X&oi=print&ct=result&cd=1#PRA1-PA349,M1
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene -- Wikipedia again does a great job on "The Selfish Gene"
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociobiology:_The_New_Synthesis ... Short article about E. O Wilson's book.
- http://www.amazon.com/Sociobiology-New-Synthesis-Twenty-fifth-Anniversary/dp/0674002350
posted by philobyte at 6:38 PM
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