Posts Tagged ‘civilization’
“Beans, Beans, the Musical Fruit”*…
Then remarkable Umberto Eco on his candidate for the most important innovation of the last millennium. After considering the stern mounted rudder, the horse shoe, the yoke, the improved plough, crop rotation, gunpowder, and other candidates, he nominates a humble but central development…
… But what I really want to talk about is beans, and not just beans but also peas and lentils. All these fruits of the earth are rich in vegetable proteins, as anyone who goes on a low-meat diet knows, for the nutritionist will be sure to insist that a nice dish of lentils or split peas has the nutritional value of a thick, juicy steak. Now the poor, in those remote Middle Ages, did not eat meat, unless they managed to raise a few chickens or engaged in poaching (the game of the forest was the property of the lords). And as I mentioned earlier, this poor diet begat a population that was ill nourished, thin, sickly, short and incapable of tending the fields. So when, in the 10th century, the cultivation of legumes began to spread, it had a profound effect on Europe. Working people were able to eat more protein; as a result, they became more robust, lived longer, created more children and repopulated a continent.
We believe that the inventions and the discoveries that have changed our lives depend on complex machines. But the fact is, we are still here — I mean we Europeans, but also those descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers and the Spanish conquistadors — because of beans. Without beans, the European population would not have doubled within a few centuries, today we would not number in the hundreds of millions and some of us, including even readers of this article, would not exist. Some philosophers say that this would be better, but I am not sure everyone agrees.
And what about the non-Europeans? I am unfamiliar with the history of beans on other continents, but surely even without European beans, the history of those continents would have been different, just as the commercial history of Europe would have been different without Chinese silk and Indian spices.
Above all, it seems to me that this story of beans is of some significance for us today. In the first place, it tells us that ecological problems must be taken seriously. Secondly, we have all known for a long time that if the West ate unmilled brown rice, husks and all (delicious, by the way), we would consume less food, and better food.
But who thinks of such things? Everyone will say that the greatest invention of the millennium is television or the microchip. But it would be a good thing if we learned to learn something from the Dark Ages too…
What innovation was most instrumental in creating the modern world? “Best Invention: How the Bean Saved Civilization” (gift link) from the April 18, 1999 edition of @nytimes.com.
(Image above: source)
* children’s playground saying
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As we lionize legumes, we might note that today is National Buffet Day, a celebration of an occasion to heap one’s plate with beans (or whatever).
“History is not the past but a map of the past, drawn from a particular point of view”*…
To that point, The Economist reviews Josephine Quinn’s new book, How the World Made the West, a re-examination of what we think we know about civilizations…
Asked what he thought of Western civilisation, Mahatma Gandhi is said to have quipped that such a thing “would be a good idea”. (The West, he suggested, was not so enlightened.) But as Josephine Quinn makes clear in her new book, Western civilisation has always been a bad idea, or at any rate a wrong-headed one. To compartmentalise history into a set of distinct and essentially self-contained civilisations is a misguided quest that has dangerously distorted our understanding of the world, Ms Quinn asserts: “It is not peoples that make history, but people, and the connections that they create with one another.”
Ms Quinn, a historian and archaeologist who teaches at Oxford, does not spend 500-odd pages trashing what generations of schoolchildren have been taught to take pride in as European achievements. Instead, she demolishes the underlying concept of what she calls “civilisational thinking”. Her argument is simple, persuasive and deserving of attention.
The idea of civilisation, Ms Quinn points out, is relatively recent. The word was first used only in the mid-18th century and did not take hold of Western imaginations until the late 19th century. In that imperialist age, historians found that Greek, Roman and Christian civilisations made nice building blocks that could be stacked into a grand-looking construct, which they labelled “Western” or “European” civilisation. To this they attributed a host of inherited “classical” virtues: vigour, rationality, justice, democracy and courage to experiment and explore. Other civilisations, by contrast, were regarded as inferior.
It does not take much unpacking by Ms Quinn to expose the folly of this approach. Behold, for instance, John Stuart Mill, a philosopher in the 19th century, claiming that the Battle of Marathon, Persia’s first invasion of Greece in 490BC, was more important to English history than William the Conqueror’s triumph at Hastings in 1066. (Without an Athenian victory, the logic goes, the magical seed of Greek civilisation might never have grown into Western civilisation.) Or consider “The Clash of Civilisations” (1996) by Samuel Huntington, an American historian, who declared it impossible to understand history without classifying humanity into mutually hostile civilisations between which, “during most of human existence”, contact has been “intermittent or non-existent”.
What is non-existent is any truth to that notion. Ms. Quinn’s brisk, scholarly romp across the arc of European history shows that, far from being rare, contact across and between cultures, often over surprisingly long distances, has been the main motor of human advancement in every age. Rather than being prickly and inward-looking, most societies have proved receptive to ideas, fashions and technologies from their neighbours…
As The Economist observes, “anyone who thought history was passé could not be more wrong”: “The history of the West is not quite what you learned in school” (gift link)– @TheEconomist on @josephinequinn.
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As we ponder the past’s presence in our present, we might send civilized birthday greetings to a man who contributed mightily to the paradigms that Quinn questions, Bernard Ashmole; he was born on this date in 1894. A historian, archaeologist, and art historian, he taught at both the University of London and Oxford and served as Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum from 1939 to 1956.
“The evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today”*…
Linguists and archaeologists have argued for decades about where, and when, the first Indo-European languages were spoken, and what kind of lives those first speakers led. As Kurt Kleiner reports, a controversial new analytic technique offers a fresh answer…
Almost half of all people in the world today speak an Indo-European language, one whose origins go back thousands of years to a single mother tongue. Languages as different as English, Russian, Hindustani, Latin and Sanskrit can all be traced back to this ancestral language.
Over the last couple of hundred years, linguists have figured out a lot about that first Indo-European language, including many of the words it used and some of the grammatical rules that governed it. Along the way, they’ve come up with theories about who its original speakers were, where and how they lived, and how their language spread so widely.
Most linguists think that those speakers were nomadic herders who lived on the steppes of Ukraine and western Russia about 6,000 years ago. Yet a minority put the origin 2,000 to 3,000 years before that, with a community of farmers in Anatolia, in the area of modern-day Turkey. Now a new analysis, using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology, has come down in favor of the latter, albeit with an important later role for the steppes.
The computational technique used in the new analysis is hotly disputed among linguists. But its proponents say it promises to bring more quantitative rigor to the field, and could possibly push key dates further into the past, much as radiocarbon dating did in the field of archaeology…
Fascinating– both for what it suggests about our linguistic roots and for the epistemological questions it raises: “A new look at our linguistic roots,” from @kgkleiner in @KnowableMag.
Apposite: “Flow of time: reality or illusion?” (on language and our experience of time)
* Richard Leakey
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As we untangle tongues, we might spare a thought for Leonard Woolley; he died on this date in 1960. An archaeologist, he is best known for his excavations at Ur in Mesopotamia— for which he is recognized as one of the first “modern” archaeologists, who excavated in a methodical way, keeping careful records, and using them to reconstruct ancient life and history.
His work greatly advanced knowledge of ancient Mesopotamian civilization, enabling scholars to trace the history of the city from its final days during the 4th century BC back to its prehistoric beginnings (c. 4000 BC). His finds revealed much about everyday life, art, architecture, government, religion– and relevantly to the piece above, language and literature– in this “cradle of civilization.”
“All history must be mobilized if one would understand the present”*…
… especially, one might conclude, when it comes to understanding civilizational challenges like climate change. But as Deborah Coen explains, that’s not so straightforward…
Never before in human history has Earth experienced a change in climate as rapid as the shift we’re living through today. Can history hold clues to an upheaval without precedent? That depends on how we frame the question. Scientists tend to have two questions. They want to know how past societies have been impacted by less dramatic episodes of climate variability, and they want to know what has motivated societies to switch from one fuel source to another. Over the past 20 years, historians’ answers have influenced the reports of major international scientific bodies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Union of Geological Sciences. And yet, following the lead of scientists has constrained how climate historians think about drivers of change. Scientists like to think that change comes from bold new theories and technological breakthroughs. The chemist Paul Crutzen, for instance, popularized the term “Anthropocene” in part to underscore his faith that the solution to the environmental crisis would come from human ingenuity. Today, scientists seek funding for massive projects, from shoring up a melting glacier to constructing climate research centers on the scale of the Manhattan Project. In this spirit, climate historians have tended to tell dramatic stories in which societies fail or succeed according to their ability to impose top-down change. What these accounts miss are the humble drivers of change that unfold at the scale of everyday life and grow bottom-up rather than top-down. Indeed, a third question is emerging for historians today: what small-scale mechanisms might trigger a transition to a more equitable and sustainable future?…
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The appeal of both historical frameworks—collapse and resilience—lies ultimately in their framing of human societies as complex systems that can be modeled much like other components of the “Earth system.” In this respect, historians have dutifully answered the question posed by scientists, and they have done so in scientists’ terms. They have thereby made it possible to integrate the human factor into the models that scientists use to study and predict global change. As one 2018 paper put it, “the idea of building a forecasting engine for societal breakdown is too tempting to resist.”
Such “integrated assessment models,” which incorporate demographic and economic trajectories into forecasts of environmental change, gained currency in the 1990s with the rise of international diplomacy around global warming. The models raised the second thorny question mentioned above: How do energy transitions unfold? What motivates a society to replace one fuel source with another?
Again, the framing of the question conditioned the answers. Implicit is the assumption that human history has inevitably marched towards increasingly energy-dense fuel sources. With the onset of industrialization, animal power, wind power, and waterpower were replaced by coal and peat, which in turn gave way to gas and oil. The task of the historian became a narrow search for the factors that induced a fuel switch in the past—and which, by extension, might motivate a transition to “clean” energy in the future…
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Morris and McNeill [Ian Morris’s 2015 Foragers, Farmers, and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve and J. R. McNeill’s Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World] gave the scientists what they were looking for: a universal, quantitative version of human history. And yet, these historians obscured what I would call the most important feature of history: contingency. The problem stems, first, from their reliance on historical sources—such as bureaucratic records and monumental remains—that tell history from the point of view of states and their elites. Secondly, these histories constrain their field of view by adopting the language of science and policy. The very concept of “sustainability,” much like its partner, “development,” implies that the goal is to continue along the path that got us here. Reading Morris and McNeill, it is hard even to imagine what an alternative would look like—let alone how we could bring it about.
Fortunately, other historians have shown us that the course of industrialization was by no means inevitable. Energy transitions did not go unchallenged. Recent histories of coal mining (Victor Seow, Thomas G. Andrews) and fracking (Conevery Valencius) reveal that ordinary people objected to the extraction of these fuels due to the risks they posed to local communities. Dismissing past critics as shortsighted or irrational misses the point: history could have gone differently…
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David Graeber and David Wengrow build on Scott’s insights [James Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States] in their monumental synthesis, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (2021). They argue that what has looked to archaeologists like the remains of collapsed early states might be evidence of a conscious decision to abandon the experiment. In sharp contrast to the inevitability of the evolutionist narrative, Graeber and Wengrow stress that humans have repeatedly exercised their freedom to opt out of hierarchical societies and live otherwise. Their message: We might do the same. Our values need not be dictated by the economic choices made by our forebears…
… Morris’s critical review of The Dawn of Everything claims that its attention to exceptions cannot disprove his model. Well then, what can? For a scholar so concerned with scientific credibility, Morris is remarkably unconcerned that his theory fails to pass Popper’s falsifiability test. He closes his review by chiding the authors for their utopianism: “It would be uplifting to think that whatever we dislike about our own age only persists because we have hitherto lacked the imagination and courage to put something better in its place.” One has to wonder: who is this “we” who lacks imagination and courage? Clearly, Morris has missed their point. “Something better” has been put in place again and again, flourishing at smaller or larger scales throughout human history.
Environmental historians Ian Jared Miller and Paul Warde diagnose the problem this way: “Purely quantitative or global approaches to energy” tend to overlook the experiences of those who are not making the decisions but whose lives are affected by them. This oversight is a result of methods that make it “difficult to grasp everyday experience as a prompt to action and an agent of change.” Otherwise put, historians miss a great deal when they rely on the quantitative tools of scientists.
History will never provide a crystal ball, and that’s not what we should ask of it. Nor should we be limited by theories of historical change that consider “events” only as unusual occurrences that were recognized as such by contemporaries. Change can also be the result of an accumulation of small disruptions that goes unnoticed by mainstream observers. Climate historians know this well, since the variability they study was often unremarked upon by those living through it. And yet, climate historians have taken little interest in processes of change that run bottom-up rather than top-down.
This is why climate historians have much to learn from historians of disenfranchised populations…
These histories show that human feelings and values are not dictated by the economic system in which we happen to find ourselves. On the contrary, emotions are unruly and uncontainable; they cannot be quantified and will never serve as input for Earth system models. They can, however, point towards alternative ways of living and relating. Where those alternatives lead, no one can know. But the very fact that human relations are emergent and unpredictable is grounds for hope.
Eminently worth reading in full: “What’s Next for Histories of Climate Change,” from @LAReviewofBooks.
* Fernand Braudel
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As we include, we might send grateful birthday greetings to a historian with a different focus, but that same urge to inclusion– Alan Lomax; he was born on this date in 1915. A historian, folklorist, musician, and ethnomusicologist, he collected, archived, and distributed recordings of vernacular American music that would surely have otherwise been lost.
The many, many artists Lomax is credited with discovering and bringing to a wider audience include blues guitarist Robert Johnson, protest singer Woody Guthrie, folk artist Pete Seeger, country musician Burl Ives, Scottish Gaelic singer Flora MacNeil, and country blues singers Lead Belly and Muddy Waters. Lomax recorded thousands of songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Song (of which he was the director) at the Library of Congress; and he produced recordings, concerts, and radio shows in the US and in England, which played an important role in preserving folk music traditions in both countries and helped start both the American and British folk revivals of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s.
“No one hates war like a soldier hates war”*…
… Which can be a problem for military leaders, one they’re looking to technology to help address. First, we make soldiers stronger…
Cyborgs and genetically enhanced “supersoldiers” are projected to be the warfighters of the future, according to a recent RAND Corporation report. Published on January 2, 2024, the report, “Plagues, Cyborgs, and Supersoldiers: The Human Domain of War,” highlights advances in human-machine systems, along with AI and synthetic biology as being among the technologies that will be used to engineer the future warfighter.
According to the report, these technologies will give rise to seemingly telepathic capabilities where soldiers will be able to control machines using their thoughts, along with the ability to genetically modify warfighters, so that they will be able to survive in “the harshest of combat environments.”
“The Future of War According to RAND; Cyborgs and Genetically Enhanced Supersoldiers”
… then we numb them to feeling…
The Pentagon is looking toward a future where the U.S. deploys “super soldiers” directly inspired by Captain America and Iron Man, officials said at a recent conference…
[Research scientist J.J.] Walcutt talked about synthetic blood and replacing night vision goggles with eye drops (two things the Pentagon is working on) while a slide behind her showed off a “soldier of the future” whose body is “flooded with pain-numbing stimulants” and has the “ability to regrow limbs & quickly heal wounds like a lizard.”
Next to this was a quote that referenced Robocop. “Enhanced soldiers would be reduced to bionic men, who run fast, do not need to sleep, eat and drink very little, and can fight all the time. A new species is born: Homo robocopus,” it said. It’s a direct quote from a 2019 European report about the ethical concerns of the world’s superpowers attempting to engineer super soldiers…
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“So if you do these kinds of changes to an individual, what do you do when their service is up? What happens? Or are they just literally owned by the government for life,” [the moderator asked].
“Termination,” [Irwin Hudson of the U.S. Army Developmental Command] said, making a grim joke.
The panelists laughed.
“Pentagon Scientists Discuss Cybernetic ‘Super Soldiers’ That Feel Nothing While Killing In Dystopian Presentation“
Both articles are chilling– and worth reading in full.
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As we contemplate conflict, we might wish a wistful Happy Birthday to a man whose voice is sorely missed in conversations like these– the mathematician, biologist, historian of science, literary critic, poet and inventor Jacob Bronowski; he was born on this date in 1908. Bronowski is probably best remembered as the writer (and host) of the epochal 1973 BBC television documentary series (and accompanying book), The Ascent of Man (the title of which was a play on the title of Darwin’s second book on evolution, The Descent of Man)… the thirteen-part series (which is available at libraries, on DVD, and on and off on streaming platforms), a survey of the history of science– from rock tools to relativity– and its place in civilizations, is still an extraordinary treat… and a reminder of the importance of bringing a humanistic perspective to any discussion of what science and technology might make possible.
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