10 ms·

Are There Laws of History?

118 points by benbreen 6y ago

evdev 6y ago
It's cargo-culting physics to assert that there are a set of "high level" laws in some area without having in hand the reductionist mechanics. This cart-before-the-horse is so pervasive in social sciences, and developing sciences like neuroscience, that it's understandable one would ask why history can't get in on the action. The glib invocation of phlogiston theory is telling. The essence of phlogiston theory is not wrong!
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  In your view, what is the not-wrong essence of phlogiston theory?
  - jshevek 6y ago
    I don't agree that the essence is not wrong, but I can imagine a decent argument for that position predicated on considering Phlogiston as chemical energy. Some substances can easily release energy through oxidation, others not so much.
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    A lack of understanding is like dirty glasses, everything blurs together and it becomes impossible to distinguish between right and wrong ideas.
  - yk 6y ago
    That the energy output of a flame is regulated by the oxygen flux. Phlogition theory suggests a phlogiston flux that is just the oxygen flux with a sign reversed and consequently when they measured the mass of the phlogiston, they got a negative value.
- gnulinux 6y ago
  I strongly disagree with this view. I sympathize with you that it's probably true that scientists are inclined to cargo-cult their science after physics. But the endeavor here is not wrong, so even if it's cargo-cult, it's good. Science's primary objective is to find models. A model should do predictions, and then scientist should collect data of interest, and make sure the data isn't falsified by the model's predictions. Any scientist who cannot do predictions, and verify that data doesn't contradict predictions, is no scientist at all. Once you have models, it's simply too tempting to formalize them and build mathematical theories for them. If nothing, for computational advantage, so you can make computers make predictions, this way you can eliminate human errors. So, it seems like any science will eventually build models that can generate predictions from first principles. It is one thing to claim the entire human history can be predicted from first principles of a theory X. Clearly, we have no such X. Maybe we never will. It's another, and totally reasonable thing, to build a theory X from first principles that correctly predicts some data.
  - jdm2212 6y ago
    No one has ever built a historical model that predicts the future with any accuracy. There are plenty of overfit models that "predict" the past, but none hold up on new events. Interesting book on the topic from the world's leading researcher, if you're curious: https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Art-Science-Prediction/dp/B0131HGPQQ/ https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Art-Science-Predicti...
    - drdeca 6y ago
      Does Moore's law count as a historical model? Perhaps it is too recent and limited in scope, but it is about, like, some measurable things about society, which is based on past observations, and it has been somewhat predictive? (though, perhaps it being somewhat predictive has been in part due to it becoming somewhat prescriptive?)
      - jdm2212 6y ago
        I don't know that Moore's Law is what most people would mean by a historical law, but it has held up surprisingly well even for a non-historical law :)
- nahuel0x 6y ago
  Boyle's gas law can be discovered without knowing anything about a kinetic theory of gases or quantum mechanics. You can discover "high level" laws (effective but incomplete approximations to reality) without knowing how to model the system components at the individual level. Inexact, sure, but with (limited) analytic and predictive power. In Biology you don't know how all the cells of a population of wolves and rabbits works or his present state. But you can use predator-prey models to predict (at some level) population fluctuations. If science awaited to have a complete description at the most fundamental level to make predictions, there will be no progress at all. By discovering "high level" laws you can get closer to "lower level" ones, as Boyle is an step to get to QM (what's the cart and what's the horse). Maybe all "laws" are emergent and our models only approximations, and there is no fundamental ones to be discovered, so gravity, etc, are much more complex and "systemic" we think. But sure, there is lot of epistemological traps, pseudoscience, bullshit and honest dead ends in the process.
- lonelappde 6y ago
  It's also falling that a historian would discredit an idea by referring to "phlogiston" which is only the go-to cliche for "haha ridiculous premodern scientific bad idea" just because the name sounds old-timey and obsolete.
- canjobear 6y ago
  It's absolutely possible to argue persuasively for high level laws without having a full reductionist mechanics. For example, Darwin's arguments for evolution by natural selection were strong even though the physical/chemical basis of heritability was totally unknown in his time. He didn't even know Mendel's laws. Fisher also developed his models of evolutionary dynamics without knowledge of the underlying mechanics of heritability, and his models still stand. In fact, I'd argue that a big part of what makes a good scientific theorist is the ability to formulate and test high-level laws without complete knowledge of lower-level mechanics.
  - evdev 6y ago
    ... "natural selection" IS the mechanics. The reason it's convincing is you can imagine what would arise, systematically, from imperfect reproduction under forces of selection, NOT because it's an attractive theory you saw in the tea leaves of the complexity of the world.
tetris11 6y ago
This has a real Asimov-like feel
- justicezyx 6y ago
  Psychohistory [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)
- JKCalhoun 6y ago
  Exactly what I was thinking. ;-)
- mark-r 6y ago
  Just the title had me thinking of the Foundation series.
  - soylentcola 6y ago
    I've been noticing similar concepts in modern sci-fi/tech thrillers lately. Devs and the most recent season of Westworld come to mind. It got me thinking about how certain "threats" or big changes can affect our fiction and be reflected in our scary stories. In Asimov's time, psychohistory was pitched as some amazing tool that could be used to improve (or at least prevent the total destruction of) human civilization. Now it's all about modern/fictionalized computing power being used to model humanity's actions, but not necessarily for positive ends. Even if some of the characters think they're working for the best, it's pitched as a something unnatural to revolt against. I guess the obvious read would be that Asimov didn't have any real world examples to draw upon so it was easier to extrapolate the day's advances in math and computing into something more powerful and empowering. Today we look at the potential abuses of powerful algorithms and behavioral modeling and imagine something similar but much more powerful and dangerous.
- spacedcowboy 6y ago
  Absolutely, yes -Hari
49531 6y ago
Isn't dialectical materialism an attempt at finding laws of history? I've always understood it as a sort of evolutionary biology for social science. This article mentions Marx, but only as a guy who had an idea of a communist society? Right after mentioning Marx the author states: > The idea that such progress was inevitable was sharply derailed by the genocides and totalitarianism of the mid-20th century... Dialectical materialism (while not infallible) is not derailed by genocides and totalitarianism but rather predicts such events, as well as things like imperialism, colonialism, and recessions / depressions cycles. I, personally, think it can easily become reductive to push everything into dialectical materialism, and many people have added onto Marx's analysis. But if you're going to try and nail down some laws around history I think it might be a good idea to read about thinkers in the past who have already tried to answer the question.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  If I recall Marx's thesis correctly, my recollection is that he thought that capitalism would spontaneously lead to the proletariat revolution. And 150 years later... well, the two most spontaneous communist revolutions occurred in the most backward, feudal states among the great powers, and in the context of a multi-factional civil war in a state that was losing to foreign powers. It's not exactly a ringing endorsement of your ideology if you're promoting a scientific view of the world that makes predictions that failed to come to pass.
  - gnulinux 6y ago
    150 years is blink of a second in the order of history. Think about how long feudalism has lasted and how long it took bourgeoisie to eliminate the ruling class. Also, it's debatable if Russian Revolution was a communist revolution per se. There is sufficient literature that goes both ways, i.e. arguing it was more of a bourgeoisie revolution against the monarchy than a proletarian revolution. Of course, Marx himself predicted (which is not a prediction of his theory) that a communist revolution will happen in his lifetime. It might be him overfitting to his own era which saw successive revolutions. I personally don't find this a big deal since it doesn't have any important implication to materialism. It just makes Marx's prediction wrong. For an updated/modern view on Marxism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-systems_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-systems_theory
jdm2212 6y ago
My dad is a historian, and it's always pretty entertaining to run the current faddy "big idea" in popular history past him. There's always two parts to his response: 1. $bigIdea is not a result of serious historical research; it's a reflection of laypeople projecting their preferred narratives onto history 2. literally dozens of counterexamples that he can cite on the spot from across different continents and historical eras My takeaway: laws of history are the stuff of cranks and oversimplified history popularizations.
- plemer 6y ago
  What would you make of “The Lessons of History” by Will Durant? To me, all models are wrong but some, like his, are useful.
  - jdm2212 6y ago
    If you're just interested in having some understanding of the past, books like that are great. If you want to predict the future, your analysis should be about 98% detailed study of the present, and 2% history. Much as you would consult mostly this week's weather forecast when deciding to go for a picnic, but maybe adjust slightly based on historical error rates in weather forecasting. The real usefulness of history research in prediction/policymaking often seems to be in debunking popular myths that shape/bias how we analyze the future and present. The conduct of the Iraq War, for example, was substantially a result of a popular American myth/narrative about how other cultures are, deep down, like us, and democracy is the equilibrium every society gravitates towards. In hindsight those are both obviously false, but at the time a lot of people believed them. Historians help identify and make us cognizant of those narratives.
    - aabeshou 6y ago
      > The conduct of the Iraq War, for example, was substantially a result of a popular American myth/narrative about how other cultures are, deep down, like us, and democracy is the equilibrium every society gravitates towards. can you please elaborate on this? it sounds like you're proposing the offensively wrong notion that the Iraq War was noble and well-founded, truly aimed at restoring democracy to Iraq, but went wrong because the Iraqi people are simply allergic to democracy
skybrian 6y ago
Here is a "law" of history that I think is pretty well justified: you will occasionally be surprised by important, unpredictable events. Get used to uncertainty and distrust confident predictions.
remexre 6y ago
reminds me of the communists in Hail Caesar
mannykannot 6y ago
"In February 2010, Peter Turchin, an ecologist from the University of Connecticut, predicted that 2020 would see a sharp increase in political volatility for Western democracies." I get the impression that the author of the article believes that this has come to pass, though she does not say so explicitly. We are now in the middle of May, and from my perspective, nothing of the sort has happened - in fact, the political institutions of the Western democracies seem to be functioning about as well as they were before, despite the major disruptions caused by Covid-19. By "as well as before", I mean that they are functioning, not particularly efficiently, but at least so far with no scocietal collapse, and while there is more volatility than necessary, the level does not seem to have changed markedly from the norms of the preceding decade (i.e. since the prdiction was made.) So we are still waiting to see if Turchin's prediction will come to pass. Furthermore, for his model to be in any way validated by such an outcome, it would have to happen for the reasons he proposed, and not, say, as a consequence of Covid-19, which he did not predict.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  Such predictions are not falsifiable, because its proponents use confirmation bias to prove them true.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    not to mention that this particular prediction doesn't even need any sort of quantitative or scientific methods. The idea of cyclical politics and periodic decay is as old as ancient Greece, comes up in virtually any religion, and you don't need a TI 84 to arrive at the conclusion that roughly every few decades something awful is going to happen.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Just as their opponents use their own confirmation bias to "prove" them wrong. Politics in the UK and US and is clearly far more polarised and far more extremist in tone - especially on the right - than was the case ten years ago. The Brexit nationalist nonsense in the UK was almost unthinkable in 2010. It was literally considered fringe lunacy. A senior politician on the right literally called the people in favour of it "swivel-eyed loons." Now it's mainstream policy, with huge popular support - balanced against a slightly larger segment of the population who still consider it self-harming folly. That's your instability right there. You can Google any number of people on both sides saying that they cannot remember a time when the country was this polarised, and an utter absence of anyone saying the opposite. This is not normal. If you want to claim it is, prove it.
lihaciudaniel 6y ago
Yes there are rules in history. > Communism always failed, many times > Usually the first or the different is the most true >truth is subjective, the winners write history.
allemagne 6y ago
What seems clear is that we're not ready to declare a set of "laws of history". We're not even close. I think this can be parsed pretty easily by reading between the lines of basically every historian's response to grand unified theories of history like this, and the author of this piece clearly recognizes "cliodynamics" as hubris, despite all our seemingly impressive advancements in data analysis. I don't know if the scope of asserting this is fully appreciated. One of the most influential ideologies in history is based on the idea that certain laws of history were essentially cracked in the mid-1800s. Ctrl+F "Marx", 1 throwaway mention. "Hegel" 0 mentions.
jkingsbery 6y ago
> What caused the collapse of the Roman Empire? More than 200 explanations have been proposed, but there is no consensus about which explanations are plausible and which should be rejected. This situation is as risible as if, in physics, phlogiston theory and thermodynamics coexisted on equal terms. (From the linked page https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a). Multiple problems here. My understanding (as a pretty-well-read-for-an-amateur in the subject) is that this claim is overstated. Most historians today seem to agree that - Rome had long since stopped being the capital city of the Empire. It wasn't even the most important city in Italy in the Late Empire. - Romans at the time wouldn't have known about a "fall." It had been a long time since Italians ruled the empire. The empire simply passed from rule by Romanized-non-Italians to foreign conquerors. - The Roman empire didn't fall, it moved; it persisted in the East until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The Emperor in Constantinople would have called himself 'Roman' for those 1000 years, and the term 'Byzantine' is a later invention. - There were lots of contributing factors to the fall of the Western Empire that worked together. Some of these were external (migrations of the German tribes, invasions), some of these were internal (cultural divergence between East and West). There is some debate about the relative importance of these different factors. The question can't be answered not just because the answer itself is complicated, it's because the meaning to the question is ambiguous in a way that the questions answered by thermodynamics are not. For related, more specific questions, we actually do have consensus on the answer. It's also cherry-picking one example. There are lots of cases of historians coming to a better understanding of an event over time, and concluding earlier explanations of the event are incorrect. While I can see why it would be good to have a "science of history," we've proven largely unable to do this in much simpler areas. Analytics applied to the game of baseball, a game where we have complete information about everything that happens today, including where people are standing on the field and the ball's spin rate, has only recently gotten to the point where there's a quantitative science around it. Human history is a lot more complex than baseball.
- DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
  > Romans at the time wouldn't have known about a "fall." The sack of Rome in 410 came as a giant shock to the Roman world, and led to debate among Romans about the cause of the crisis of the Empire. Augustine's "City of God" was written to defend Christianity from the accusation that it was the cause of Rome's decline. The Western Roman Empire did not disappear overnight after the sack of Rome, but that was clearly a sign that the Empire was badly weakened. By the late 5th Century, the Western Roman Empire had been completely taken over and divided up by rather barbarous Germans, and it would have been obvious to any Roman that the Empire was extinct in the West. The idea of a "transformation" of the Roman Empire in the West, as opposed to a collapse, really isn't tenable, in my opinion. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_God
csours 6y ago
If "those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it", are 'those who do not understand what is going on right now simply doomed?'
motohagiography 6y ago
Philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt noted that the very idea of history being a dynamic process of "progress," is itself an idea with an explicit logic - an idea-ology - where once you have accepted it, all political reason operates within the iterated logic of that idea. So it's not history that has laws, but rather the implicit logic flowing from only tacitly held notions forms what someone would interpret as a "law." What is history useful for? Locating essential human experiences, but like statistics, the drunk uses a lamp post for support not illumination.
- friendlybus 6y ago
  Many postmodern philosophers and french intellectuals have said the same thing. We can choose to step outside the shadow of history, nearly with trivial effort. But for what purpose.
- mellow2020 6y ago
  > Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility. - Hannah Arendt
jshevek 6y ago
>Historians believe that the past is irreducibly complex and the future wildly unpredictable. Scientists disagree. Who’s right? Opening quote is an equivocation fallacy. Most scientists agree with historians that the issues historians investigate are too complex to be treated the way we treat motion or thermodynamics, with the tools we have at this time.
samirillian 6y ago
A lot of this depends on the definition of "law." It also implicitly depends on what we consider scientific. That is, history may or may not ever be a mathematical science, but it could be a science or field that just does other things than other sciences. The problem of coming up with laws of history is that we have to decide what kind of science takes history as its object in the first place; what kind of laws would be commensurate with that framing? Is "history repeats itself" the kind of thing that we would call a law if proven adequate to the science? What about "might makes right"? Is "genealogy" an adequate scientific field or methodology, in its own way, on its own terms? What about dialectical materialism? I don't think polling existing history departments or historians will necessarily get you there either.
wespad 6y ago
Usually we think of history as what happened, but it's really more historiography, the story we tell about what happened. In college we would read 4 different academic sources about an event, and try to determine why they were so different. We'd start with the author's bio, see what university they teach out and try to determine their influences and models of interpretation.
- magicsmoke 6y ago
  I've found that the stories different societies tell about their own history that are far more interesting than the objective facts of what happened, because those stories reflect quite a bit about what those societies think about themselves and their place in the world.
- WalterBright 6y ago
  Accounts of the American Founding Fathers alternate between casting them as heroes and as goats. Currently they're goats (read an article recently that said America was founded on slavery and genocide).
urbleflan 6y ago
Taleb has some good comments about this, which is that just as you can make a prediction and have it come true by pure chance, we can view evidence from history and fit a pattern to it (even though that pattern occurred only by chance). Personally I think the best way to view history is as a series of poorly controlled experiments. As with scientific experiments, the evidence may be suggestive of some pattern, but we should embrace an attitude of skepticism and openness to counterexamples. The patterns we see may tend towards "laws," but we should assume some level of imperfect resolution and control and therefore associate a confidence percentage with our inferences.
- friendlybus 6y ago
  You can line any reasoning up against chance. Theres a chance that the sun will rise tomorrow. Measuring a prediction against chance says nothing for the validity of the knowledge or structures you used to build that prediction. People have to build paths through life that span years and decades, one does not need chance or randomness to know those plans might fail.
Stanish 6y ago
Whether you are an adherent or not, the absence of any mention of historical materialism[0] in this essay is like discussing the world's largest ravines without mentioning the grand canyon. The only mention of Marx is towards a cartoonish representation of his vision of the future, a practice he pretty much refused to do. You hate to see it. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism
082349872349872 6y ago
law of history: telling people who sit at the bottleneck of a trade network that it's their culture that made them rich will always get you invited to dinner.
has2k1 6y ago
"One of history’s fews iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations." Sapiens, By Yuval Noah Harari This quote stood out for me when I read Sapiens.
- urbleflan 6y ago
  It's a little strange to use the phrases "tend to" and "iron law" in the same sentence.
  - some_furry 6y ago
    With a sufficiently hot take, iron laws become malleable.
  - jshevek 6y ago
    A tendency can be shown to be present in all known categories of samples (justifying 'Iron') , while not occuring in every single sample, making it a tendency. Separately, tendency can mean a type of outcome is more likely, or that there is an underlying force acting in a direction, regardless of whether that force is cancelled by other forces.
  - has2k1 6y ago
    May be strange at a first glance but binary/boolean logic/reasoning/quantification is just a special case of probability theory. This is covered exhaustively in Probability Theory: The Logic Science, by E.T Jaynes. And so "tend" and "iron law" are interpreted as assertions of different levels of certainty, where "tend" implies a certainty greater than 50% and "iron law" a certainty closer to 100%.
  - monkeydreams 6y ago
    > It's a little strange to use the phrases "tend to" and "iron law" in the same sentence. Not really. Tendency denotes a general inclination, such as objects tending to move toward the centre of mass. Tectonic plates tend to shift slowly. In both cases these are very solid and reliable predictions which are almost certainly true in a vast majority of cases. I would not agree with the statement vis-a-vis luxury items and necessity (fur coats, diamond rings, harems, are not demanded by all), but there is a tendency for certain classes of items to be considered "essential" over time.
totemandtoken 6y ago
I'm not sure I buy the idea of cliodynamics as useful for making predictions about the future, but I do like the idea of at least some researchers talking about history with data and through a data-driven lens. I don't get why there's such controversy over the idea of a data-driven understanding of history
- testing312 6y ago
  Because it is ridiculously easy to overfit your models, and the combined human behaviour producing 'history' is so complex and ever-changing that it cannot be simulated. Also, if such a law were proposed, a widespread (dis)belief in that law could undo it.
  - totemandtoken 6y ago
    Oh, I don't believe in a law of history or anything like that. I'm just saying the coupling the practice of history with data analysis is some cases could be fruitful - kind of like anthropological history, but with a bit wider focus
nahuel0x 6y ago
The article mentions Kondratiev long waves, this idea was very debated in marxists circles in the twenties. Here is a very interesting criticism, by Trotsky: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/04/capdevel.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/04/capdevel.ht... Some more: https://www.marxist.com/marxism-theory-long-waves-kondratiev141100.htm https://www.marxist.com/marxism-theory-long-waves-kondratiev...
yters 6y ago
That those who believe there are laws are sure to be wrong?
Koshkin 6y ago
I would love to see a history book that would describe the past in more generalized terms (i.e. without necessarily mentioning particular dates, names, events, places or artifacts, while still with just enough detail) so as to emphasize the natural, as it were, progression of the development of the civilization. History is far from being random as it might seem to some.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  David Christan, Big History: https://www.bighistoryproject.com/about https://www.bighistoryproject.com/about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History https://www.worldcat.org/title/big-history/oclc/940282526 https://www.worldcat.org/title/big-history/oclc/940282526 Vaclav Smil's Energy and World History accomplishes a similar end: https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/925213966 https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/... His later Energy and Civilization largely updates this, though shifting the historical focus somewhat. https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-history/oclc/1029804020 https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-his...
dacracot 6y ago
First law of history... The victors get to write it.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  "History is Written by the Losers" https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2016/11/history-is-written-by-losers.html https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2016/11/history-is-writt...
hodgesrm 6y ago
As a thought exercise let's stipulate it's possible to model political economies over time and run experiments on them. This would be a pre-condition for identifying "laws" and demonstrating their effects. Such a model would be more complex and require more inputs than weather modeling. We can't reliably forecast weather for more than a few days. It's implausible that you can do anything even close for human history. It's possible to draw robust conclusions about human behavior. But you have to use other approaches and frame the problem differently from "discovering laws of history."
dntbnmpls 6y ago
The only law of history is that it is told from the perspective of those in charge. That's it. History is perspective, narrative, interpretation and propaganda. What other laws can you derive from a subjective and arbitrary field? History has always changed with the times as different people in charge manufacture history to suit their needs. There is nothing in history that is even universally agreed upon - civil war, ww1, ww2, vietnam war, etc. Heck even factual items like the date of the beginning of ww2 is in dispute.
tim333 6y ago
The application of science to history that seems to work is to notice patterns that repeat over and over. So if you were studying cats you might notice that they tend to meow, chase mice and get in catfights. Likewise with humans they tend to form political coalitions, try to gain power, have wars with neighbouring countries and the like. If you read the history of Europe it's pretty much ruler of A gained power over B or was overthrown etc. repeated about 3000 times. As to exactly what happens when you can't tell really. Some of the patterns of behaviour long predate humans - birds build nests, defend their property and go out to work getting food for the offspring, chimps conduct war like activities against their neighbours and so on. It's mostly rooted in evolution. Another thing you can predict is long running technical advances along the lines of Moore's law which will probably have notable effects during our lifetimes - more powerful computers, cheaper solar and the like.
- swagasaurus-rex 6y ago
  Thinking about the meaning of life, I can only really say this about it: We take up space on the surface of a planet. Perhaps all of the war and misery is really just due to having too little space to share amongst too many people. I'm sure Malthus would agree.
  - shadowprofile77 6y ago
    What an absurd conclusion. We have been having wars and misery for pretty much all of our history as a civilization (plenty more misery before that and proto-wars on a terrible scale on a population basis) Our population has for most of that long time been very small, much smaller than it is now. In fact, in the last 70 or so years since WWII, our wars have become less absolutely violent, less deadly and less widespread than ever, while absolute misery among humans has also declined immensely, despite there being more than ever before of us during the same time.Malthus himself was also shown to be badly wrong, so yes, maybe he would agree with you.
    - watwut 6y ago
      I think that ISIS behavior was almost there compared to the Nazi. They even had genocide of their own. Rwandan genocide was in 1994, long after WWII. Mao Zedong ruled between 1958 to 1962 and his Great Leap Forward policy killed more people then Hitler or Stalin. The difference is that non of these happened in Europe and United States.
monadic2 6y ago
Marx would like a word....

118 points by benbreen 6y ago

It's cargo-culting physics to assert that there are a set of "high level" laws in some area without having in hand the reductionist mechanics. This cart-before-the-horse is so pervasive in social sciences, and developing sciences like neuroscience, that it's understandable one would ask why history can't get in on the action. The glib invocation of phlogiston theory is telling. The essence of phlogiston theory is not wrong!

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
In your view, what is the not-wrong essence of phlogiston theory?
- jshevek 6y ago
  I don't agree that the essence is not wrong, but I can imagine a decent argument for that position predicated on considering Phlogiston as chemical energy. Some substances can easily release energy through oxidation, others not so much.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  A lack of understanding is like dirty glasses, everything blurs together and it becomes impossible to distinguish between right and wrong ideas.
- yk 6y ago
  That the energy output of a flame is regulated by the oxygen flux. Phlogition theory suggests a phlogiston flux that is just the oxygen flux with a sign reversed and consequently when they measured the mass of the phlogiston, they got a negative value.
gnulinux 6y ago
I strongly disagree with this view. I sympathize with you that it's probably true that scientists are inclined to cargo-cult their science after physics. But the endeavor here is not wrong, so even if it's cargo-cult, it's good. Science's primary objective is to find models. A model should do predictions, and then scientist should collect data of interest, and make sure the data isn't falsified by the model's predictions. Any scientist who cannot do predictions, and verify that data doesn't contradict predictions, is no scientist at all. Once you have models, it's simply too tempting to formalize them and build mathematical theories for them. If nothing, for computational advantage, so you can make computers make predictions, this way you can eliminate human errors. So, it seems like any science will eventually build models that can generate predictions from first principles. It is one thing to claim the entire human history can be predicted from first principles of a theory X. Clearly, we have no such X. Maybe we never will. It's another, and totally reasonable thing, to build a theory X from first principles that correctly predicts some data.
- jdm2212 6y ago
  No one has ever built a historical model that predicts the future with any accuracy. There are plenty of overfit models that "predict" the past, but none hold up on new events. Interesting book on the topic from the world's leading researcher, if you're curious: https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Art-Science-Prediction/dp/B0131HGPQQ/ https://www.amazon.com/Superforecasting-Art-Science-Predicti...
  - drdeca 6y ago
    Does Moore's law count as a historical model? Perhaps it is too recent and limited in scope, but it is about, like, some measurable things about society, which is based on past observations, and it has been somewhat predictive? (though, perhaps it being somewhat predictive has been in part due to it becoming somewhat prescriptive?)
    - jdm2212 6y ago
      I don't know that Moore's Law is what most people would mean by a historical law, but it has held up surprisingly well even for a non-historical law :)
nahuel0x 6y ago
Boyle's gas law can be discovered without knowing anything about a kinetic theory of gases or quantum mechanics. You can discover "high level" laws (effective but incomplete approximations to reality) without knowing how to model the system components at the individual level. Inexact, sure, but with (limited) analytic and predictive power. In Biology you don't know how all the cells of a population of wolves and rabbits works or his present state. But you can use predator-prey models to predict (at some level) population fluctuations. If science awaited to have a complete description at the most fundamental level to make predictions, there will be no progress at all. By discovering "high level" laws you can get closer to "lower level" ones, as Boyle is an step to get to QM (what's the cart and what's the horse). Maybe all "laws" are emergent and our models only approximations, and there is no fundamental ones to be discovered, so gravity, etc, are much more complex and "systemic" we think. But sure, there is lot of epistemological traps, pseudoscience, bullshit and honest dead ends in the process.
lonelappde 6y ago
It's also falling that a historian would discredit an idea by referring to "phlogiston" which is only the go-to cliche for "haha ridiculous premodern scientific bad idea" just because the name sounds old-timey and obsolete.
canjobear 6y ago
It's absolutely possible to argue persuasively for high level laws without having a full reductionist mechanics. For example, Darwin's arguments for evolution by natural selection were strong even though the physical/chemical basis of heritability was totally unknown in his time. He didn't even know Mendel's laws. Fisher also developed his models of evolutionary dynamics without knowledge of the underlying mechanics of heritability, and his models still stand. In fact, I'd argue that a big part of what makes a good scientific theorist is the ability to formulate and test high-level laws without complete knowledge of lower-level mechanics.
- evdev 6y ago
  ... "natural selection" IS the mechanics. The reason it's convincing is you can imagine what would arise, systematically, from imperfect reproduction under forces of selection, NOT because it's an attractive theory you saw in the tea leaves of the complexity of the world.

tetris11 6y ago

This has a real Asimov-like feel

justicezyx 6y ago
Psychohistory [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistory_(fictional)
JKCalhoun 6y ago
Exactly what I was thinking. ;-)
mark-r 6y ago
Just the title had me thinking of the Foundation series.
- soylentcola 6y ago
  I've been noticing similar concepts in modern sci-fi/tech thrillers lately. Devs and the most recent season of Westworld come to mind. It got me thinking about how certain "threats" or big changes can affect our fiction and be reflected in our scary stories. In Asimov's time, psychohistory was pitched as some amazing tool that could be used to improve (or at least prevent the total destruction of) human civilization. Now it's all about modern/fictionalized computing power being used to model humanity's actions, but not necessarily for positive ends. Even if some of the characters think they're working for the best, it's pitched as a something unnatural to revolt against. I guess the obvious read would be that Asimov didn't have any real world examples to draw upon so it was easier to extrapolate the day's advances in math and computing into something more powerful and empowering. Today we look at the potential abuses of powerful algorithms and behavioral modeling and imagine something similar but much more powerful and dangerous.
spacedcowboy 6y ago
Absolutely, yes -Hari

49531 6y ago

Isn't dialectical materialism an attempt at finding laws of history? I've always understood it as a sort of evolutionary biology for social science. This article mentions Marx, but only as a guy who had an idea of a communist society? Right after mentioning Marx the author states: > The idea that such progress was inevitable was sharply derailed by the genocides and totalitarianism of the mid-20th century... Dialectical materialism (while not infallible) is not derailed by genocides and totalitarianism but rather predicts such events, as well as things like imperialism, colonialism, and recessions / depressions cycles. I, personally, think it can easily become reductive to push everything into dialectical materialism, and many people have added onto Marx's analysis. But if you're going to try and nail down some laws around history I think it might be a good idea to read about thinkers in the past who have already tried to answer the question.

jcranmer 6y ago
If I recall Marx's thesis correctly, my recollection is that he thought that capitalism would spontaneously lead to the proletariat revolution. And 150 years later... well, the two most spontaneous communist revolutions occurred in the most backward, feudal states among the great powers, and in the context of a multi-factional civil war in a state that was losing to foreign powers. It's not exactly a ringing endorsement of your ideology if you're promoting a scientific view of the world that makes predictions that failed to come to pass.
- gnulinux 6y ago
  150 years is blink of a second in the order of history. Think about how long feudalism has lasted and how long it took bourgeoisie to eliminate the ruling class. Also, it's debatable if Russian Revolution was a communist revolution per se. There is sufficient literature that goes both ways, i.e. arguing it was more of a bourgeoisie revolution against the monarchy than a proletarian revolution. Of course, Marx himself predicted (which is not a prediction of his theory) that a communist revolution will happen in his lifetime. It might be him overfitting to his own era which saw successive revolutions. I personally don't find this a big deal since it doesn't have any important implication to materialism. It just makes Marx's prediction wrong. For an updated/modern view on Marxism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-systems_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World-systems_theory

jdm2212 6y ago

My dad is a historian, and it's always pretty entertaining to run the current faddy "big idea" in popular history past him. There's always two parts to his response: 1. $bigIdea is not a result of serious historical research; it's a reflection of laypeople projecting their preferred narratives onto history 2. literally dozens of counterexamples that he can cite on the spot from across different continents and historical eras My takeaway: laws of history are the stuff of cranks and oversimplified history popularizations.

plemer 6y ago
What would you make of “The Lessons of History” by Will Durant? To me, all models are wrong but some, like his, are useful.
- jdm2212 6y ago
  If you're just interested in having some understanding of the past, books like that are great. If you want to predict the future, your analysis should be about 98% detailed study of the present, and 2% history. Much as you would consult mostly this week's weather forecast when deciding to go for a picnic, but maybe adjust slightly based on historical error rates in weather forecasting. The real usefulness of history research in prediction/policymaking often seems to be in debunking popular myths that shape/bias how we analyze the future and present. The conduct of the Iraq War, for example, was substantially a result of a popular American myth/narrative about how other cultures are, deep down, like us, and democracy is the equilibrium every society gravitates towards. In hindsight those are both obviously false, but at the time a lot of people believed them. Historians help identify and make us cognizant of those narratives.
  - aabeshou 6y ago
    > The conduct of the Iraq War, for example, was substantially a result of a popular American myth/narrative about how other cultures are, deep down, like us, and democracy is the equilibrium every society gravitates towards. can you please elaborate on this? it sounds like you're proposing the offensively wrong notion that the Iraq War was noble and well-founded, truly aimed at restoring democracy to Iraq, but went wrong because the Iraqi people are simply allergic to democracy

skybrian 6y ago

Here is a "law" of history that I think is pretty well justified: you will occasionally be surprised by important, unpredictable events. Get used to uncertainty and distrust confident predictions.

remexre 6y ago

reminds me of the communists in Hail Caesar

mannykannot 6y ago

"In February 2010, Peter Turchin, an ecologist from the University of Connecticut, predicted that 2020 would see a sharp increase in political volatility for Western democracies." I get the impression that the author of the article believes that this has come to pass, though she does not say so explicitly. We are now in the middle of May, and from my perspective, nothing of the sort has happened - in fact, the political institutions of the Western democracies seem to be functioning about as well as they were before, despite the major disruptions caused by Covid-19. By "as well as before", I mean that they are functioning, not particularly efficiently, but at least so far with no scocietal collapse, and while there is more volatility than necessary, the level does not seem to have changed markedly from the norms of the preceding decade (i.e. since the prdiction was made.) So we are still waiting to see if Turchin's prediction will come to pass. Furthermore, for his model to be in any way validated by such an outcome, it would have to happen for the reasons he proposed, and not, say, as a consequence of Covid-19, which he did not predict.

WalterBright 6y ago
Such predictions are not falsifiable, because its proponents use confirmation bias to prove them true.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  not to mention that this particular prediction doesn't even need any sort of quantitative or scientific methods. The idea of cyclical politics and periodic decay is as old as ancient Greece, comes up in virtually any religion, and you don't need a TI 84 to arrive at the conclusion that roughly every few decades something awful is going to happen.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Just as their opponents use their own confirmation bias to "prove" them wrong. Politics in the UK and US and is clearly far more polarised and far more extremist in tone - especially on the right - than was the case ten years ago. The Brexit nationalist nonsense in the UK was almost unthinkable in 2010. It was literally considered fringe lunacy. A senior politician on the right literally called the people in favour of it "swivel-eyed loons." Now it's mainstream policy, with huge popular support - balanced against a slightly larger segment of the population who still consider it self-harming folly. That's your instability right there. You can Google any number of people on both sides saying that they cannot remember a time when the country was this polarised, and an utter absence of anyone saying the opposite. This is not normal. If you want to claim it is, prove it.

lihaciudaniel 6y ago

Yes there are rules in history. > Communism always failed, many times > Usually the first or the different is the most true >truth is subjective, the winners write history.

allemagne 6y ago

What seems clear is that we're not ready to declare a set of "laws of history". We're not even close. I think this can be parsed pretty easily by reading between the lines of basically every historian's response to grand unified theories of history like this, and the author of this piece clearly recognizes "cliodynamics" as hubris, despite all our seemingly impressive advancements in data analysis. I don't know if the scope of asserting this is fully appreciated. One of the most influential ideologies in history is based on the idea that certain laws of history were essentially cracked in the mid-1800s. Ctrl+F "Marx", 1 throwaway mention. "Hegel" 0 mentions.

jkingsbery 6y ago

> What caused the collapse of the Roman Empire? More than 200 explanations have been proposed, but there is no consensus about which explanations are plausible and which should be rejected. This situation is as risible as if, in physics, phlogiston theory and thermodynamics coexisted on equal terms. (From the linked page https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a https://www.nature.com/articles/454034a). Multiple problems here. My understanding (as a pretty-well-read-for-an-amateur in the subject) is that this claim is overstated. Most historians today seem to agree that - Rome had long since stopped being the capital city of the Empire. It wasn't even the most important city in Italy in the Late Empire. - Romans at the time wouldn't have known about a "fall." It had been a long time since Italians ruled the empire. The empire simply passed from rule by Romanized-non-Italians to foreign conquerors. - The Roman empire didn't fall, it moved; it persisted in the East until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The Emperor in Constantinople would have called himself 'Roman' for those 1000 years, and the term 'Byzantine' is a later invention. - There were lots of contributing factors to the fall of the Western Empire that worked together. Some of these were external (migrations of the German tribes, invasions), some of these were internal (cultural divergence between East and West). There is some debate about the relative importance of these different factors. The question can't be answered not just because the answer itself is complicated, it's because the meaning to the question is ambiguous in a way that the questions answered by thermodynamics are not. For related, more specific questions, we actually do have consensus on the answer. It's also cherry-picking one example. There are lots of cases of historians coming to a better understanding of an event over time, and concluding earlier explanations of the event are incorrect. While I can see why it would be good to have a "science of history," we've proven largely unable to do this in much simpler areas. Analytics applied to the game of baseball, a game where we have complete information about everything that happens today, including where people are standing on the field and the ball's spin rate, has only recently gotten to the point where there's a quantitative science around it. Human history is a lot more complex than baseball.

DiogenesKynikos 6y ago
> Romans at the time wouldn't have known about a "fall." The sack of Rome in 410 came as a giant shock to the Roman world, and led to debate among Romans about the cause of the crisis of the Empire. Augustine's "City of God" was written to defend Christianity from the accusation that it was the cause of Rome's decline. The Western Roman Empire did not disappear overnight after the sack of Rome, but that was clearly a sign that the Empire was badly weakened. By the late 5th Century, the Western Roman Empire had been completely taken over and divided up by rather barbarous Germans, and it would have been obvious to any Roman that the Empire was extinct in the West. The idea of a "transformation" of the Roman Empire in the West, as opposed to a collapse, really isn't tenable, in my opinion. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_God https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_City_of_God

csours 6y ago

If "those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it", are 'those who do not understand what is going on right now simply doomed?'

motohagiography 6y ago

Philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt noted that the very idea of history being a dynamic process of "progress," is itself an idea with an explicit logic - an idea-ology - where once you have accepted it, all political reason operates within the iterated logic of that idea. So it's not history that has laws, but rather the implicit logic flowing from only tacitly held notions forms what someone would interpret as a "law." What is history useful for? Locating essential human experiences, but like statistics, the drunk uses a lamp post for support not illumination.

friendlybus 6y ago
Many postmodern philosophers and french intellectuals have said the same thing. We can choose to step outside the shadow of history, nearly with trivial effort. But for what purpose.
mellow2020 6y ago
> Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility. - Hannah Arendt

jshevek 6y ago

>Historians believe that the past is irreducibly complex and the future wildly unpredictable. Scientists disagree. Who’s right? Opening quote is an equivocation fallacy. Most scientists agree with historians that the issues historians investigate are too complex to be treated the way we treat motion or thermodynamics, with the tools we have at this time.

samirillian 6y ago

A lot of this depends on the definition of "law." It also implicitly depends on what we consider scientific. That is, history may or may not ever be a mathematical science, but it could be a science or field that just does other things than other sciences. The problem of coming up with laws of history is that we have to decide what kind of science takes history as its object in the first place; what kind of laws would be commensurate with that framing? Is "history repeats itself" the kind of thing that we would call a law if proven adequate to the science? What about "might makes right"? Is "genealogy" an adequate scientific field or methodology, in its own way, on its own terms? What about dialectical materialism? I don't think polling existing history departments or historians will necessarily get you there either.

wespad 6y ago

Usually we think of history as what happened, but it's really more historiography, the story we tell about what happened. In college we would read 4 different academic sources about an event, and try to determine why they were so different. We'd start with the author's bio, see what university they teach out and try to determine their influences and models of interpretation.

magicsmoke 6y ago
I've found that the stories different societies tell about their own history that are far more interesting than the objective facts of what happened, because those stories reflect quite a bit about what those societies think about themselves and their place in the world.
WalterBright 6y ago
Accounts of the American Founding Fathers alternate between casting them as heroes and as goats. Currently they're goats (read an article recently that said America was founded on slavery and genocide).

urbleflan 6y ago

Taleb has some good comments about this, which is that just as you can make a prediction and have it come true by pure chance, we can view evidence from history and fit a pattern to it (even though that pattern occurred only by chance). Personally I think the best way to view history is as a series of poorly controlled experiments. As with scientific experiments, the evidence may be suggestive of some pattern, but we should embrace an attitude of skepticism and openness to counterexamples. The patterns we see may tend towards "laws," but we should assume some level of imperfect resolution and control and therefore associate a confidence percentage with our inferences.

friendlybus 6y ago
You can line any reasoning up against chance. Theres a chance that the sun will rise tomorrow. Measuring a prediction against chance says nothing for the validity of the knowledge or structures you used to build that prediction. People have to build paths through life that span years and decades, one does not need chance or randomness to know those plans might fail.

Stanish 6y ago

Whether you are an adherent or not, the absence of any mention of historical materialism[0] in this essay is like discussing the world's largest ravines without mentioning the grand canyon. The only mention of Marx is towards a cartoonish representation of his vision of the future, a practice he pretty much refused to do. You hate to see it. [0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism

082349872349872 6y ago

law of history: telling people who sit at the bottleneck of a trade network that it's their culture that made them rich will always get you invited to dinner.

has2k1 6y ago

"One of history’s fews iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations." Sapiens, By Yuval Noah Harari This quote stood out for me when I read Sapiens.

urbleflan 6y ago
It's a little strange to use the phrases "tend to" and "iron law" in the same sentence.
- some_furry 6y ago
  With a sufficiently hot take, iron laws become malleable.
- jshevek 6y ago
  A tendency can be shown to be present in all known categories of samples (justifying 'Iron') , while not occuring in every single sample, making it a tendency. Separately, tendency can mean a type of outcome is more likely, or that there is an underlying force acting in a direction, regardless of whether that force is cancelled by other forces.
- has2k1 6y ago
  May be strange at a first glance but binary/boolean logic/reasoning/quantification is just a special case of probability theory. This is covered exhaustively in Probability Theory: The Logic Science, by E.T Jaynes. And so "tend" and "iron law" are interpreted as assertions of different levels of certainty, where "tend" implies a certainty greater than 50% and "iron law" a certainty closer to 100%.
- monkeydreams 6y ago
  > It's a little strange to use the phrases "tend to" and "iron law" in the same sentence. Not really. Tendency denotes a general inclination, such as objects tending to move toward the centre of mass. Tectonic plates tend to shift slowly. In both cases these are very solid and reliable predictions which are almost certainly true in a vast majority of cases. I would not agree with the statement vis-a-vis luxury items and necessity (fur coats, diamond rings, harems, are not demanded by all), but there is a tendency for certain classes of items to be considered "essential" over time.

totemandtoken 6y ago

I'm not sure I buy the idea of cliodynamics as useful for making predictions about the future, but I do like the idea of at least some researchers talking about history with data and through a data-driven lens. I don't get why there's such controversy over the idea of a data-driven understanding of history

testing312 6y ago
Because it is ridiculously easy to overfit your models, and the combined human behaviour producing 'history' is so complex and ever-changing that it cannot be simulated. Also, if such a law were proposed, a widespread (dis)belief in that law could undo it.
- totemandtoken 6y ago
  Oh, I don't believe in a law of history or anything like that. I'm just saying the coupling the practice of history with data analysis is some cases could be fruitful - kind of like anthropological history, but with a bit wider focus

nahuel0x 6y ago

The article mentions Kondratiev long waves, this idea was very debated in marxists circles in the twenties. Here is a very interesting criticism, by Trotsky: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/04/capdevel.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1923/04/capdevel.ht... Some more: https://www.marxist.com/marxism-theory-long-waves-kondratiev141100.htm https://www.marxist.com/marxism-theory-long-waves-kondratiev...

yters 6y ago

That those who believe there are laws are sure to be wrong?

Koshkin 6y ago

I would love to see a history book that would describe the past in more generalized terms (i.e. without necessarily mentioning particular dates, names, events, places or artifacts, while still with just enough detail) so as to emphasize the natural, as it were, progression of the development of the civilization. History is far from being random as it might seem to some.

dredmorbius 6y ago
David Christan, Big History: https://www.bighistoryproject.com/about https://www.bighistoryproject.com/about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_History https://www.worldcat.org/title/big-history/oclc/940282526 https://www.worldcat.org/title/big-history/oclc/940282526 Vaclav Smil's Energy and World History accomplishes a similar end: https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/925213966 https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/... His later Energy and Civilization largely updates this, though shifting the historical focus somewhat. https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-history/oclc/1029804020 https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-and-civilization-a-his...

dacracot 6y ago

First law of history... The victors get to write it.

dredmorbius 6y ago
"History is Written by the Losers" https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2016/11/history-is-written-by-losers.html https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2016/11/history-is-writt...

hodgesrm 6y ago

As a thought exercise let's stipulate it's possible to model political economies over time and run experiments on them. This would be a pre-condition for identifying "laws" and demonstrating their effects. Such a model would be more complex and require more inputs than weather modeling. We can't reliably forecast weather for more than a few days. It's implausible that you can do anything even close for human history. It's possible to draw robust conclusions about human behavior. But you have to use other approaches and frame the problem differently from "discovering laws of history."

dntbnmpls 6y ago

The only law of history is that it is told from the perspective of those in charge. That's it. History is perspective, narrative, interpretation and propaganda. What other laws can you derive from a subjective and arbitrary field? History has always changed with the times as different people in charge manufacture history to suit their needs. There is nothing in history that is even universally agreed upon - civil war, ww1, ww2, vietnam war, etc. Heck even factual items like the date of the beginning of ww2 is in dispute.

tim333 6y ago

The application of science to history that seems to work is to notice patterns that repeat over and over. So if you were studying cats you might notice that they tend to meow, chase mice and get in catfights. Likewise with humans they tend to form political coalitions, try to gain power, have wars with neighbouring countries and the like. If you read the history of Europe it's pretty much ruler of A gained power over B or was overthrown etc. repeated about 3000 times. As to exactly what happens when you can't tell really. Some of the patterns of behaviour long predate humans - birds build nests, defend their property and go out to work getting food for the offspring, chimps conduct war like activities against their neighbours and so on. It's mostly rooted in evolution. Another thing you can predict is long running technical advances along the lines of Moore's law which will probably have notable effects during our lifetimes - more powerful computers, cheaper solar and the like.

swagasaurus-rex 6y ago
Thinking about the meaning of life, I can only really say this about it: We take up space on the surface of a planet. Perhaps all of the war and misery is really just due to having too little space to share amongst too many people. I'm sure Malthus would agree.
- shadowprofile77 6y ago
  What an absurd conclusion. We have been having wars and misery for pretty much all of our history as a civilization (plenty more misery before that and proto-wars on a terrible scale on a population basis) Our population has for most of that long time been very small, much smaller than it is now. In fact, in the last 70 or so years since WWII, our wars have become less absolutely violent, less deadly and less widespread than ever, while absolute misery among humans has also declined immensely, despite there being more than ever before of us during the same time.Malthus himself was also shown to be badly wrong, so yes, maybe he would agree with you.
  - watwut 6y ago
    I think that ISIS behavior was almost there compared to the Nazi. They even had genocide of their own. Rwandan genocide was in 1994, long after WWII. Mao Zedong ruled between 1958 to 1962 and his Great Leap Forward policy killed more people then Hitler or Stalin. The difference is that non of these happened in Europe and United States.

monadic2 6y ago

Marx would like a word....