4 ms·

I tend to think of it as not dependency gated but social-technology gated. As you say, the critical resource was leisure, sufficiently widely distributed as to

I tend to think of it as not dependency gated but social-technology gated. As you say, the critical resource was leisure, sufficiently widely distributed as to lead to humans playing status games like, "who can polish the shiniest mirror." And that requires a fairly sophisticated society in terms of number of classes, the way they depend on each other, possibilities of social mobility, resilience to sudden resource constraints, etc., etc.

kragen 4y ago
i don't think the critical resource was leisure; hunter-gatherers have plenty of leisure time, and the leisure time of chinese emperors and the roman élite was so notorious that it toppled a number of dynasties. john plant has had less leisure time in his life than almost any individual noble, scribe, sadhu, or other monk, in most civilized societies throughout most of history and i don't think that we have good evidence that the wildly innovative hellenistic society was noticeably more sophisticated in these ways than the imperial society that ground the intellectual face of mediterranean society under its boot for the following 16 centuries, ceding leadership in math, science, and technology to india and china until the renaissance i think it's a mistake to think of intellectual and technological progress as something that will inevitably happen at the fastest rate allowed by some critical resource; historically progress was the exception, not the rule, and that remains true worldwide today. it requires a delicate constellation of favorable conditions
- abecedarius 4y ago
  I liked Ober's The rise and fall of classical Greece for more background bearing on this for greater Greece. It argued that literary sources underweighted things like classical Greece's relative economic dynamism (shown by archaeology).
  - kragen 4y ago
    interesting, i'll have to check it out i still haven't finished russo's book you recommended me, which was another huge mind bomb for me

kragen 4y ago

i don't think the critical resource was leisure; hunter-gatherers have plenty of leisure time, and the leisure time of chinese emperors and the roman élite was so notorious that it toppled a number of dynasties. john plant has had less leisure time in his life than almost any individual noble, scribe, sadhu, or other monk, in most civilized societies throughout most of history and i don't think that we have good evidence that the wildly innovative hellenistic society was noticeably more sophisticated in these ways than the imperial society that ground the intellectual face of mediterranean society under its boot for the following 16 centuries, ceding leadership in math, science, and technology to india and china until the renaissance i think it's a mistake to think of intellectual and technological progress as something that will inevitably happen at the fastest rate allowed by some critical resource; historically progress was the exception, not the rule, and that remains true worldwide today. it requires a delicate constellation of favorable conditions

abecedarius 4y ago
I liked Ober's The rise and fall of classical Greece for more background bearing on this for greater Greece. It argued that literary sources underweighted things like classical Greece's relative economic dynamism (shown by archaeology).
- kragen 4y ago
  interesting, i'll have to check it out i still haven't finished russo's book you recommended me, which was another huge mind bomb for me