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> 8/ A revolutionary idea is that governments should leave people alone so they could pursue their well-being in a bottom-up fashion via social interactions in

by dghf 7y ago

> 8/ A revolutionary idea is that governments should leave people alone so they could pursue their well-being in a bottom-up fashion via social interactions in their local area. In fact, that’s how the world was before the advent of nation-state. That depends on how you define "people". In much of mediaeval Europe, for example, it was the heavily armed aristocracy who were left alone "so they could pursue their well-being": the lightly armed or unarmed peasantry that they ruled over, not so much. (And when the latter did attempt to pursue it in an unapproved manner, they were put down with violence: see Wat Tyler's Revolt, for example.) > 9/ Nation-state was inevitable because humans reasoned they could efficiently defend against enemies if they pooled their resources. Notice what got lost in this optimization of defense: the complex, local web of interactions that everybody was a part of, and yet nobody understood. That suggests that a nation-state was a collaborative exercise of its people as a whole, rather than the result of the consolidation of power by its monarchs over time. That sounds more like a "Just So" story than history.

looeee 7y ago
> In fact, that’s how the world was before the advent of nation-state AKA the Golden Age fallacy
- arthev 7y ago
  Sounds like you might have a case of the fallacy fallacy :)
  - LeonB 7y ago
    Or this could be the fallacy fallacy fallacy, an infinite regress of fallacy? :-)
- KirinDave 7y ago
  Large-scale organized governments are a technology enabled by (at a minimum) writing and mathematics. It's not so much a golden age as a tautology to say that before those things existed these structures had less authority.
  - Balgair 7y ago
    That's possible, but this area of archeology is still undergoing a lot of change in understanding. Göbekli Tepe is a recent example of organization around (presumed) religious lines without writing or math (maybe)[0]. The farming systems of the Egyptians were largely preformed by illiterate peoples with some wirting and math in the priestly classes and aristocracy [1]. The Inca used a very different system of combined writing and math in their quipu [2]. The quipu are still nearly undecipherable today and may have been just memory aides and not a true writing system at all. In the end, there are very good arguments against the necessity of writing and math for 'civilization' to occur. It's a very active field still. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_agriculture [2] https://www.ancient.eu/Quipu/ https://www.ancient.eu/Quipu/
    - KirinDave 7y ago
      This is interesting, and you could also make the argument that without perfect records the early societies without writing might have been very widespread and we'd simply never know because no information was passed on to us. Still, I think your examples support my sloppily presented idea more than they discredit them. So there is that.
      - Balgair 7y ago
        I'm sorry that my examples led you to believe that your idea was supported. I meant no such thing. What I did mean to say was that your idea is possible among a multitude of other ideas and that the field is still very active in this area; we can neither confirm nor deny that math and writing are necessary for civilization at this time; more data is required.
        KirinDave 7y ago
        This would have been a lot faster if you had just made that argument in the first place. I'm still waiting for a single counter example. We might rephrase my argument to the more honest: "We don't have concrete examples of this type of social structure without writing and some form of mathematics." While you're here to quibble, could you perhaps look at the parent thread? This whole notion that markets and authoritarian social structures are the human default is at least as concerning as my statement, surely. There are many forms of this argument being displayed here; some quite subtly. If my statement is merely unverifiable, the idea that markets represent an asymptotically optimal modeling of society is positively counterfactual and you may have stake in correcting that.
jacobush 7y ago
9 - It can be a little bit of both. Often the King sided with the peasantry against the feudal system. A fractal if you will hehe.
paraschopra 7y ago
I agree that interpretations about history are subjective. I was indicating that the legitimacy of monarchs in the general populace came from their protection against aggressors. In fact, one of the main functions of a nation-state is to put up defence against other nation-states. This book is full of examples of people coming together: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonzero:_The_Logic_of_Human_Destiny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonzero:_The_Logic_of_Human_De...
- dghf 7y ago
  > I was indicating that the legitimacy of monarchs in the general populace came from their protection against aggressors. To a point. But as jacobush points out in a sibling comment to yours, those aggressors could be local as well as foreign: the myth of the benevolent king protecting the poor from rapacious nobles. Think of Richard II rallying the revolting peasants in the wake of Wat Tyler's death (ultimately to those peasants' detriment, alas). And arguably the main source of a monarch's legitimacy was religious: he (or she) was seen as ordained by God. > In fact, one of the main functions of a nation-state is to put up defence against other nation-states. Well, yes. But providing a social safety-net for its most vulnerable people is also one of the main functions of a nation-state: it doesn't thus follow that nation-states formed for that reason. A nation-state will likely be more able to defend itself than a looser, more heterogeneous polity, but it will also provide a better vehicle for aggression, and that aggression will typically be employed in pursuit of the interests of the powerful. When the Tudors laid the foundations of a nation-state in 16th century England, was it as a defensive measure, or to pursue dynastic interests in France and Scotland? With a few exceptions (Switzerland comes to mind), the idea that a nation-state represents the conscious union of a people as a whole for defence against outsiders seems more like propaganda and national myth-making than an accurate recounting.
- nradov 7y ago
  There were multiple factors. In medieval Europe much of a monarch’s legitimacy derived from church teachings about the divine right of kings.
- Jedi72 7y ago
  > one of the main functions of a nation-state is to put up defence against other nation-states This is the synergystic existense between so-called leaders. They keep each-other in power, both using the threat of the other.
_Schizotypy 7y ago
Medieval Europe was a form of nation state....
- dghf 7y ago
  In what way?
  - _Schizotypy 7y ago
    the top down organization of humans and labor, complete with warring states. I'm rather unsure how this would NOT be considered similar to nation-state organization. Yes, a slightly smaller scale in some cases perhaps but there is still the over-arching governmental authority edited to add: I love how people down-vote impulsively without context for argument
    - dghf 7y ago
      First, you didn't have the strong identification between the nation (in the older sense of "people") and the state. So rather than a single French people, say, there were several: Bretons, Normans, Gascons, etc. Second, you generally didn't have the centralisation and uniformity associated with the nation-state as we understand it today: the king's authority was limited or mediated in parts of his realm, bits of which (sometimes quite small bits) had their own time-honoured and diverse laws/rights/privileges. For example, the Bishop of Durham had quasi-regal powers within his diocese, and the great dukes and counts of France were all but sovereigns within their domains, sometimes with a barely nominal allegiance to the king.
      - _Schizotypy 7y ago
        It is apparent that we don't agree on what defines a group of humans to be a sort of 'nation-state' At which exact point in history would you point to as the defining moment where 'nation-states' begin? Do you judge all historical concepts purely by how they are in the current day? Concepts develop over time, those societies are absolutely part of the beginning of current day nation-states no matter how diverse in culture they may have been (which is something we still see today)
dalbasal 7y ago
Nation states are a thing that is now so prevalent it's hard to even think about them. Nations, nation states & nationalism are such core political institutions that we think of them today as synonyms to "polity." Obviously the nation's is the polity and the polity is a nation state. The whole world is carved into nation states politically today. It's so prevalent that we forget that it's new. Less than 100 years ago it was less than half the world. Before that it was rare. In any case, I disagree that war is what made nation states. War always existed and nation states haven't always been the dominant type of state. I think democracy/liberalism/republicanism is a more likely culprit. The timing lines up, and so does the political group psychology.
- opportune 7y ago
  You can argue that the printing press made nation states as it began to more tightly bind culture to the speakers of particular languages. People often forget that the concept of "nation" from the 19th-20th centuries is tightly linked to common culture, ethnicity, and language
KirinDave 7y ago
> That depends on how you define "people". In much of mediaeval Europe, for example, it was the heavily armed aristocracy who were left alone "so they could pursue their well-being": the lightly armed or unarmed peasantry that they ruled over, not so much. (And when the latter did attempt to pursue it in an unapproved manner, they were put down with violence: see Wat Tyler's Revolt, for example.) I'm not sure the author is implying anything other than this. It seems to me that you're presenting a compatible assertion as a contradiction. > That suggests that a nation-state was a collaborative exercise of its people as a whole, rather than the result of the consolidation of power by its monarchs over time. That sounds more like a "Just So" story than history. The notion of humans forming communities predates the advent of monarchy. Both you and the author are trying to create "just so" stories around authoritarianism as a motivating factor for human culture. While there are cases where we can find communities that are entirely synthetic (created from scratch by existing power structures for strategic reasons), this doesn't seem to hold as a general rule. Absolute authority tends to appear after prosperity. It seems pretty unfair to accuse the author of just-so-ing a condition and then rebutting with an assertion that's like in kind.
- dghf 7y ago
  > It seems to me that you're presenting a compatible assertion as a contradiction. How is the domination of a large agricultural class by a much smaller military class (who were prepared to perpetuate that domination by violence, and did so) compatible with the assertion that before the advent of the nation-state, governments left people alone "so they could pursue their well-being in a bottom-up fashion via social interactions in their local area"? Unless, that is, you exclude that military class from the definition of "government" (which I don't think you can, as they provided governmental functions, in particular justice, law enforcement, and defence), or the agricultural class from the definition of "people". > The notion of humans forming communities predates the advent of monarchy. Both you and the author are trying to create "just so" stories around authoritarianism as a motivating factor for human culture. But we're not talking about communities and human culture in general; we're talking about the specific concept of the nation-state. And as far as I'm aware, there's little evidence of their creation by a group of people as a whole banding together for common defence (as suggested by the article), and plenty of their creation (gradually, over time) as a means of extending and entrenching the power of the people at the top: the promulgation of symbols and myths that support the idea of a single national identity, the quashing of rival power centres, and the uniformisation of laws and bureaucracy at the expense of local privileges. But if you have evidence to the contrary, I'm happy to be corrected.

by dghf 7y ago

looeee 7y ago

> In fact, that’s how the world was before the advent of nation-state AKA the Golden Age fallacy

arthev 7y ago
Sounds like you might have a case of the fallacy fallacy :)
- LeonB 7y ago
  Or this could be the fallacy fallacy fallacy, an infinite regress of fallacy? :-)
KirinDave 7y ago
Large-scale organized governments are a technology enabled by (at a minimum) writing and mathematics. It's not so much a golden age as a tautology to say that before those things existed these structures had less authority.
- Balgair 7y ago
  That's possible, but this area of archeology is still undergoing a lot of change in understanding. Göbekli Tepe is a recent example of organization around (presumed) religious lines without writing or math (maybe)[0]. The farming systems of the Egyptians were largely preformed by illiterate peoples with some wirting and math in the priestly classes and aristocracy [1]. The Inca used a very different system of combined writing and math in their quipu [2]. The quipu are still nearly undecipherable today and may have been just memory aides and not a true writing system at all. In the end, there are very good arguments against the necessity of writing and math for 'civilization' to occur. It's a very active field still. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_agriculture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_agriculture [2] https://www.ancient.eu/Quipu/ https://www.ancient.eu/Quipu/
  - KirinDave 7y ago
    This is interesting, and you could also make the argument that without perfect records the early societies without writing might have been very widespread and we'd simply never know because no information was passed on to us. Still, I think your examples support my sloppily presented idea more than they discredit them. So there is that.
    - Balgair 7y ago
      I'm sorry that my examples led you to believe that your idea was supported. I meant no such thing. What I did mean to say was that your idea is possible among a multitude of other ideas and that the field is still very active in this area; we can neither confirm nor deny that math and writing are necessary for civilization at this time; more data is required.
      - KirinDave 7y ago
        This would have been a lot faster if you had just made that argument in the first place. I'm still waiting for a single counter example. We might rephrase my argument to the more honest: "We don't have concrete examples of this type of social structure without writing and some form of mathematics." While you're here to quibble, could you perhaps look at the parent thread? This whole notion that markets and authoritarian social structures are the human default is at least as concerning as my statement, surely. There are many forms of this argument being displayed here; some quite subtly. If my statement is merely unverifiable, the idea that markets represent an asymptotically optimal modeling of society is positively counterfactual and you may have stake in correcting that.

jacobush 7y ago

9 - It can be a little bit of both. Often the King sided with the peasantry against the feudal system. A fractal if you will hehe.

paraschopra 7y ago

I agree that interpretations about history are subjective. I was indicating that the legitimacy of monarchs in the general populace came from their protection against aggressors. In fact, one of the main functions of a nation-state is to put up defence against other nation-states. This book is full of examples of people coming together: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonzero:_The_Logic_of_Human_Destiny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonzero:_The_Logic_of_Human_De...

dghf 7y ago
> I was indicating that the legitimacy of monarchs in the general populace came from their protection against aggressors. To a point. But as jacobush points out in a sibling comment to yours, those aggressors could be local as well as foreign: the myth of the benevolent king protecting the poor from rapacious nobles. Think of Richard II rallying the revolting peasants in the wake of Wat Tyler's death (ultimately to those peasants' detriment, alas). And arguably the main source of a monarch's legitimacy was religious: he (or she) was seen as ordained by God. > In fact, one of the main functions of a nation-state is to put up defence against other nation-states. Well, yes. But providing a social safety-net for its most vulnerable people is also one of the main functions of a nation-state: it doesn't thus follow that nation-states formed for that reason. A nation-state will likely be more able to defend itself than a looser, more heterogeneous polity, but it will also provide a better vehicle for aggression, and that aggression will typically be employed in pursuit of the interests of the powerful. When the Tudors laid the foundations of a nation-state in 16th century England, was it as a defensive measure, or to pursue dynastic interests in France and Scotland? With a few exceptions (Switzerland comes to mind), the idea that a nation-state represents the conscious union of a people as a whole for defence against outsiders seems more like propaganda and national myth-making than an accurate recounting.
nradov 7y ago
There were multiple factors. In medieval Europe much of a monarch’s legitimacy derived from church teachings about the divine right of kings.
Jedi72 7y ago
> one of the main functions of a nation-state is to put up defence against other nation-states This is the synergystic existense between so-called leaders. They keep each-other in power, both using the threat of the other.

_Schizotypy 7y ago

Medieval Europe was a form of nation state....

dghf 7y ago
In what way?
- _Schizotypy 7y ago
  the top down organization of humans and labor, complete with warring states. I'm rather unsure how this would NOT be considered similar to nation-state organization. Yes, a slightly smaller scale in some cases perhaps but there is still the over-arching governmental authority edited to add: I love how people down-vote impulsively without context for argument
  - dghf 7y ago
    First, you didn't have the strong identification between the nation (in the older sense of "people") and the state. So rather than a single French people, say, there were several: Bretons, Normans, Gascons, etc. Second, you generally didn't have the centralisation and uniformity associated with the nation-state as we understand it today: the king's authority was limited or mediated in parts of his realm, bits of which (sometimes quite small bits) had their own time-honoured and diverse laws/rights/privileges. For example, the Bishop of Durham had quasi-regal powers within his diocese, and the great dukes and counts of France were all but sovereigns within their domains, sometimes with a barely nominal allegiance to the king.
    - _Schizotypy 7y ago
      It is apparent that we don't agree on what defines a group of humans to be a sort of 'nation-state' At which exact point in history would you point to as the defining moment where 'nation-states' begin? Do you judge all historical concepts purely by how they are in the current day? Concepts develop over time, those societies are absolutely part of the beginning of current day nation-states no matter how diverse in culture they may have been (which is something we still see today)

dalbasal 7y ago

Nation states are a thing that is now so prevalent it's hard to even think about them. Nations, nation states & nationalism are such core political institutions that we think of them today as synonyms to "polity." Obviously the nation's is the polity and the polity is a nation state. The whole world is carved into nation states politically today. It's so prevalent that we forget that it's new. Less than 100 years ago it was less than half the world. Before that it was rare. In any case, I disagree that war is what made nation states. War always existed and nation states haven't always been the dominant type of state. I think democracy/liberalism/republicanism is a more likely culprit. The timing lines up, and so does the political group psychology.

opportune 7y ago
You can argue that the printing press made nation states as it began to more tightly bind culture to the speakers of particular languages. People often forget that the concept of "nation" from the 19th-20th centuries is tightly linked to common culture, ethnicity, and language

KirinDave 7y ago

> That depends on how you define "people". In much of mediaeval Europe, for example, it was the heavily armed aristocracy who were left alone "so they could pursue their well-being": the lightly armed or unarmed peasantry that they ruled over, not so much. (And when the latter did attempt to pursue it in an unapproved manner, they were put down with violence: see Wat Tyler's Revolt, for example.) I'm not sure the author is implying anything other than this. It seems to me that you're presenting a compatible assertion as a contradiction. > That suggests that a nation-state was a collaborative exercise of its people as a whole, rather than the result of the consolidation of power by its monarchs over time. That sounds more like a "Just So" story than history. The notion of humans forming communities predates the advent of monarchy. Both you and the author are trying to create "just so" stories around authoritarianism as a motivating factor for human culture. While there are cases where we can find communities that are entirely synthetic (created from scratch by existing power structures for strategic reasons), this doesn't seem to hold as a general rule. Absolute authority tends to appear after prosperity. It seems pretty unfair to accuse the author of just-so-ing a condition and then rebutting with an assertion that's like in kind.

dghf 7y ago
> It seems to me that you're presenting a compatible assertion as a contradiction. How is the domination of a large agricultural class by a much smaller military class (who were prepared to perpetuate that domination by violence, and did so) compatible with the assertion that before the advent of the nation-state, governments left people alone "so they could pursue their well-being in a bottom-up fashion via social interactions in their local area"? Unless, that is, you exclude that military class from the definition of "government" (which I don't think you can, as they provided governmental functions, in particular justice, law enforcement, and defence), or the agricultural class from the definition of "people". > The notion of humans forming communities predates the advent of monarchy. Both you and the author are trying to create "just so" stories around authoritarianism as a motivating factor for human culture. But we're not talking about communities and human culture in general; we're talking about the specific concept of the nation-state. And as far as I'm aware, there's little evidence of their creation by a group of people as a whole banding together for common defence (as suggested by the article), and plenty of their creation (gradually, over time) as a means of extending and entrenching the power of the people at the top: the promulgation of symbols and myths that support the idea of a single national identity, the quashing of rival power centres, and the uniformisation of laws and bureaucracy at the expense of local privileges. But if you have evidence to the contrary, I'm happy to be corrected.