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The big idea is that 'Environmental changes have had far greater impact than kings and battles'. And every unexplained major change in history was due to climat

by mjfl 3y ago

The big idea is that 'Environmental changes have had far greater impact than kings and battles'. And every unexplained major change in history was due to climate change. Why did the Mayan civilization collapse? Not war, you anthropocentric barbarian, it was climate change. Vikings? Climate change. Egypt? Climate change. Indo European emergence? Climate change. Mongols? Climate change. Hard to disprove because it's hard to find evidence of major battles in archaeological record. Y chromosome replacement is obvious in genetic data, but the Indo European invaders weren't violent barbarians who invaded areas, killed off all the men and took the women. No, they were better adapted to climate change and respected nature, and the women of neighboring tribes appreciated that, so they voluntarily left all the men of their native tribes to become third wives of these Indo Europeans. Their conservative male relatives who didn't respect climate change were unsexy because of their lack of awareness of climate change, and their Y chromosomal lineages died out.

marcosdumay 3y ago
Well, if you have strong evidence of abrupt climate change at around the same time that a large social change happened, you should indeed ask yourself quite intensely if it isn't the large change in climate that caused the social one. That's basic intellectual honesty. And no, none of the rest of your comment is implied. It's just a bunch of non-sequiturs.
dmreedy 3y ago
The big idea is that the first lesson of history, to the point of self-parody, is that, for a given it, it started earlier and it was more complicated. The obvious, traditional vectors of change throughout history suffer the exact same recursive "but what caused that" loop as any other broad question about the nature of things. God made creation, but who made God? You can either choose an arbitrary place to stop (God is the prime mover) or you can keep recursing, trying to put the first order threads ("A war was waged") into their contexts ("Why wage a war? Wars are expensive and risky. What drove these forces into play?) When you start to look at the motivating factors that drive the first-order events of textbook history, the scope inevitably becomes larger and fuzzier, as you're dealing with many more variables across many more moments of decision. It can definitely start to feel very speculative, and it is speculative. But it also provides the framework for more testable hypotheses to be explored. At the very least, it should give pause to anyone who thinks anything is obvious.

by mjfl 3y ago

marcosdumay 3y ago

Well, if you have strong evidence of abrupt climate change at around the same time that a large social change happened, you should indeed ask yourself quite intensely if it isn't the large change in climate that caused the social one. That's basic intellectual honesty. And no, none of the rest of your comment is implied. It's just a bunch of non-sequiturs.

dmreedy 3y ago

The big idea is that the first lesson of history, to the point of self-parody, is that, for a given it, it started earlier and it was more complicated. The obvious, traditional vectors of change throughout history suffer the exact same recursive "but what caused that" loop as any other broad question about the nature of things. God made creation, but who made God? You can either choose an arbitrary place to stop (God is the prime mover) or you can keep recursing, trying to put the first order threads ("A war was waged") into their contexts ("Why wage a war? Wars are expensive and risky. What drove these forces into play?) When you start to look at the motivating factors that drive the first-order events of textbook history, the scope inevitably becomes larger and fuzzier, as you're dealing with many more variables across many more moments of decision. It can definitely start to feel very speculative, and it is speculative. But it also provides the framework for more testable hypotheses to be explored. At the very least, it should give pause to anyone who thinks anything is obvious.