4 ms·

Carlyle is the progenitor of GMT; making him the ultimate authority on how GMT is applied as a historical analysis is a bit like making Newtown the ultimate aut

Carlyle is the progenitor of GMT; making him the ultimate authority on how GMT is applied as a historical analysis is a bit like making Newtown the ultimate authority on gravity. And note: the fixation on science as a category isn’t coherent from Carlyle’s 18th century perspective. (But how does any of this make the original post a straw man? You can replace the figures in it with Mohammed and Shakespeare without meaningfully altering the claim.)

keiferski 3y ago
That's what Great Man Theory is. Your impressions of it are not. It's wrong because the concepts of invention and scientific discovery are entirely different from political action. I agree with you that science/technology is not contingent on certain individuals and is better understood as a larger historical process. The discovery/invention of calculus is a good example. I don't agree that political history works the same way, nor do I think that historical actors like Muhammad or Napoleon are simply interchangeable cogs that could have easily been replaced by anyone else. Certainly they were shaped by their circumstances, but I think you would have a very difficult time arguing that history wouldn't have been drastically different if say, Muhammad the individual hadn't made the decisions he did. Technological development and individual political action are two different things. By using discoveries to argue against the theory as a whole, you are setting up a straw man.
- throwanem 3y ago
  Always good to see representation on HN from the strict constructionist school of historiography.
- DrScientist 3y ago
  I think that's an important distinction. Buying books online was inevitable - just a question of time. The invasion of Iraq ( for example ) was not - in the end that came down to one or two people deciding.
- roenxi 3y ago
  > It's wrong because the concepts of invention and scientific discovery are entirely different from political action. We must also draw a distinction between invention/discovery and mass use. I'd like to point at nuclear energy - it seems unlikely that invention or scientific discovery in the field have been slowed down, but mass adoption of the technology was shut down by anti-nuclear activists. Environmentalists had at least a good ten year stretch where nuclear was all but unacknowledged as a good-to-go solution to all the problems being bought up. Even now there is a pretty good chance that with some political cover for the capital investment required it is a better choice for powering a country. It is actually easy to imagine one motivated, charismatic person in the right place and right time completely changing the practical landscape without any change to the pace of scientific advancement.
- dmn322 3y ago
  "I think you would have a very difficult time arguing that history wouldn't have been drastically different if say, Muhammad the individual hadn't made the decisions he did." Would it make you feel differently if you knew that there were dozens of competing offshoots of Abrahamic religions in the area at the time? What if you viewed the Abrahamic religions as a set of policies and processes that were basically the genetic code of a society. Lots of what is in the Abrahamic texts is about how to conduct transactions effectively, establish a trusting relationship with strangers so you can edify an in-group while conducting trade with outsiders. IMO, his variation was based on determining how to set up an effective merchant society economy among groups of nomads where conflict was minimized enough to get spices from one location to another. Many elements of islam were consistent among all the different abrahamic religious variations of the time. The fact that islam is so conservative is a result of continued incentives propagating more conservative forms of the religion. It's not inherent to the religion itself. There have been many less conservative islamic societies.
  - keiferski 3y ago
    Well I don’t think it’s a given that some form of Abrahamic religion would have inevitably become Islam-like and had the same trajectory. There were a lot of unique features of Muhammad that ending up having a major positive effect on the subsequent conquests. Not to mention the particular historical situation of the Byzantines and Persians that allowed for such expansion. If someone other than Muhammad had come a few decades earlier or later, there’s a good chance the outcome would have been different. Otherwise yes certainly Islam is as diverse and variant as any other religion and its current iteration (in the Middle East, at least - India and Indonesia being different situations) is mostly a consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
    - dmn322 3y ago
      > There were a lot of unique features of Muhammad that ending up having a major positive effect on the subsequent conquests I'm not sure I buy it... I just don't think things hinge so delicately on individuals. Generally if one person has an idea, thousands of people around them have the same idea. The limiting factor is how many of those thousands have the time, resources, and will to follow through with the idea. The distribution of excess time, resources & will has a pretty strong correlation to environmental & socioeconomic factors. As for the borders of whatever empire expanded from that region, sure they would have been different. I don't think there would have been an exact correlate of Islam necessarily. But if you look at the period of ~500s to ~1500s as a golden age for merchant kingdoms in that region, where they built off the intellectual foundations that were spread by rome, I think that was basically inevitable. I also think it makes sense that something like a religious ideology would be a catalyst for that, to unite so many disparate people in a way they can trust each other and work together in a decentralized fashion. And for that religious ideology to stick around and take a conservative turn after centuries of antagonism, colonialism, and interference from the west, that also seems like a pretty natural course of events. The specifics of each country definitely have variance and could have turned out differently. But as you zoom out I think that if trends are happening on a scale of 10s or 100s of millions people, it's got a deeper underlying cause. I think of it in terms of physics. A person can't lift a huge steel beam by themselves. There's a larger force at play when the beam gets lifted... a larger well of potential energy. The aligning of that well of potential energy to the goal of lifting the beam takes a certain amount of time. One person could lift it by themselves over time if they create a lever and add counterweights, but it would take more time. However a skyscraper? A single person could never build a skyscraper on their own. Think of how much mass is in an army and how much energy is exerted in moving that army across a continent. How can a person deliberately cause so much mass to be moved? They can only do so by tapping into a well of potential energy that already was created. That potential energy must come from somewhere, and when the army moves across the continent, they are expending that potential energy. The process can only continue if the energy well is being replenished. That replenishment is part of the machinery of society. An individual person isn't going to singlehandedly author that machinery in a group larger than the size of an ape troupe. It takes a lot of energy to modify that machinery at the scale of even a small city. A single person can only make minor contributions to the modification of the machinery at the historical scale.

keiferski 3y ago

That's what Great Man Theory is. Your impressions of it are not. It's wrong because the concepts of invention and scientific discovery are entirely different from political action. I agree with you that science/technology is not contingent on certain individuals and is better understood as a larger historical process. The discovery/invention of calculus is a good example. I don't agree that political history works the same way, nor do I think that historical actors like Muhammad or Napoleon are simply interchangeable cogs that could have easily been replaced by anyone else. Certainly they were shaped by their circumstances, but I think you would have a very difficult time arguing that history wouldn't have been drastically different if say, Muhammad the individual hadn't made the decisions he did. Technological development and individual political action are two different things. By using discoveries to argue against the theory as a whole, you are setting up a straw man.

throwanem 3y ago
Always good to see representation on HN from the strict constructionist school of historiography.
DrScientist 3y ago
I think that's an important distinction. Buying books online was inevitable - just a question of time. The invasion of Iraq ( for example ) was not - in the end that came down to one or two people deciding.
roenxi 3y ago
> It's wrong because the concepts of invention and scientific discovery are entirely different from political action. We must also draw a distinction between invention/discovery and mass use. I'd like to point at nuclear energy - it seems unlikely that invention or scientific discovery in the field have been slowed down, but mass adoption of the technology was shut down by anti-nuclear activists. Environmentalists had at least a good ten year stretch where nuclear was all but unacknowledged as a good-to-go solution to all the problems being bought up. Even now there is a pretty good chance that with some political cover for the capital investment required it is a better choice for powering a country. It is actually easy to imagine one motivated, charismatic person in the right place and right time completely changing the practical landscape without any change to the pace of scientific advancement.
dmn322 3y ago
"I think you would have a very difficult time arguing that history wouldn't have been drastically different if say, Muhammad the individual hadn't made the decisions he did." Would it make you feel differently if you knew that there were dozens of competing offshoots of Abrahamic religions in the area at the time? What if you viewed the Abrahamic religions as a set of policies and processes that were basically the genetic code of a society. Lots of what is in the Abrahamic texts is about how to conduct transactions effectively, establish a trusting relationship with strangers so you can edify an in-group while conducting trade with outsiders. IMO, his variation was based on determining how to set up an effective merchant society economy among groups of nomads where conflict was minimized enough to get spices from one location to another. Many elements of islam were consistent among all the different abrahamic religious variations of the time. The fact that islam is so conservative is a result of continued incentives propagating more conservative forms of the religion. It's not inherent to the religion itself. There have been many less conservative islamic societies.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Well I don’t think it’s a given that some form of Abrahamic religion would have inevitably become Islam-like and had the same trajectory. There were a lot of unique features of Muhammad that ending up having a major positive effect on the subsequent conquests. Not to mention the particular historical situation of the Byzantines and Persians that allowed for such expansion. If someone other than Muhammad had come a few decades earlier or later, there’s a good chance the outcome would have been different. Otherwise yes certainly Islam is as diverse and variant as any other religion and its current iteration (in the Middle East, at least - India and Indonesia being different situations) is mostly a consequence of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.
  - dmn322 3y ago
    > There were a lot of unique features of Muhammad that ending up having a major positive effect on the subsequent conquests I'm not sure I buy it... I just don't think things hinge so delicately on individuals. Generally if one person has an idea, thousands of people around them have the same idea. The limiting factor is how many of those thousands have the time, resources, and will to follow through with the idea. The distribution of excess time, resources & will has a pretty strong correlation to environmental & socioeconomic factors. As for the borders of whatever empire expanded from that region, sure they would have been different. I don't think there would have been an exact correlate of Islam necessarily. But if you look at the period of ~500s to ~1500s as a golden age for merchant kingdoms in that region, where they built off the intellectual foundations that were spread by rome, I think that was basically inevitable. I also think it makes sense that something like a religious ideology would be a catalyst for that, to unite so many disparate people in a way they can trust each other and work together in a decentralized fashion. And for that religious ideology to stick around and take a conservative turn after centuries of antagonism, colonialism, and interference from the west, that also seems like a pretty natural course of events. The specifics of each country definitely have variance and could have turned out differently. But as you zoom out I think that if trends are happening on a scale of 10s or 100s of millions people, it's got a deeper underlying cause. I think of it in terms of physics. A person can't lift a huge steel beam by themselves. There's a larger force at play when the beam gets lifted... a larger well of potential energy. The aligning of that well of potential energy to the goal of lifting the beam takes a certain amount of time. One person could lift it by themselves over time if they create a lever and add counterweights, but it would take more time. However a skyscraper? A single person could never build a skyscraper on their own. Think of how much mass is in an army and how much energy is exerted in moving that army across a continent. How can a person deliberately cause so much mass to be moved? They can only do so by tapping into a well of potential energy that already was created. That potential energy must come from somewhere, and when the army moves across the continent, they are expending that potential energy. The process can only continue if the energy well is being replenished. That replenishment is part of the machinery of society. An individual person isn't going to singlehandedly author that machinery in a group larger than the size of an ape troupe. It takes a lot of energy to modify that machinery at the scale of even a small city. A single person can only make minor contributions to the modification of the machinery at the historical scale.