Computer Simulations Suggest War Drove the Rise of Civilisations (2013)
ua-magazine.com
ua-magazine.com
I think rounding that up to "drove the rise of civilizations" is a crude way to put that. For example, the simulation pits "agriculture plus military" against "agriculture". Then they found that including both food security concerns and physical security concerns more closely predicted known outcomes.
Had they put "agriculture plus military" against "military" and found that including both was better than just simulating physical security we would have gotten the title "Computer Simulations Suggest Food Drove the Rise of Civilizations".
I think the takeaway (besides how not to model and report on models) is that geostrategy is an important factor in the development of human and international relations and that broadly laymen are completely ignorant of it.
A layman equipped with some of this knowledge, for example, will be much more able to understand current events in the South China Sea, the infrastructure projects across Eurasia, the proxy war in Syria, the importance of the Crimea to Russia, the crisis in America over its policies toward Cuba, and much more.
Unfortunately the layman instead is fed a steady diet of "good versus evil" narratives, informing him instead about how he should feel about each case to emotionally and financially support his military.
A more apt comparison might be pastoralist raiders as mentioned in Turchin's War and Peace and War, whose nomadic lifestyle led naturally to the development of military skills that could be applied in raids on settled communities. Turchin wrote a lot about the Tatars and the Mongols could also be a good example.
Their empire was, of course, extremely short, as it collapsed with the death of their Great Kahn soon after it established itself and its following leaders abandoned the previous inroads in the West to focus on the prize of capturing China (that ultimately failed).
Our history tends to focus on the expansion of their empire rather than its subsequent administration, I think in part for that reason.
Remember the story of the Danes was told by the recipients of their raids, who had an interest from a religious standpoint to portray them as awful pagans.
IMO, all empires are small compared to the Mongols. They had it all.
The Danes just had lousy farmland and good boats, especially during long cold spells. The Northmen in general had more impact as traders than as raiders.
A similar pattern emerges in the Americas - the Apache word for the Comanche is Apache for "those a$$holes" because the Comanche were much more predatory of the Apache than the other way 'round.
A tribe of pillagers could destroy a hamlet, but could never compete with the resources of a walled down.
Age of Empires taught me that the key to world domination is control of the natural resources plus growing as fast as possible. To win a long game you must control the remote resources as well as those in your immediate area. Try to consume the non-local resources first.
- if you're not spending as much as you're mining, you're losing
- keep expanding to mine more and simultaneously, so you can spend more simultaneously
- push, push, push
Any recommendations on good places to learn / keep abreast of this kind of info? I'd love to read news that was more high-level about what's really going on, but it's hard to find.
Many years ago, Stratfor had a free weekly newsletter that had excellent info along these lines, but after they got hacked that went away (and with all the weird things leaked about them it got a little sketchy trying to understand where their biases lay).
The press briefings at the State Department are pretty good from a reporting side, but you need to follow for a long time before you see the forest instead of the trees.
A good direct source is the Strategic Studies Institute. They publish primarily academically minded geostrategy reports and assessments, and are mostly centered in the military War Colleges and a couple universities that offer Strategic Studies programs.
Establishments that host pre-PRified documents from strategy organizations are a good source of mostly historic but sometimes current documents. Looking up, for example, the Pentagon Papers or pre-PR version of the Wolfowitz Doctrine are very clear. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) does a good job documenting some of these documents. Of course Wikileaks and others who have copies of documents (like the Stratfor docs you mentioned) is another.
But let's put that out to Hacker News: what are your sources?
As a German reader, I was surprised about how good "Foreign Policy" is to get a coherent understanding of certain viewpoints in geostrategy. Such publications would be the exception here, because they are not very "journalistic". I think it doesn't necessarily satisfy parents question about "what really is going on", because what's going on is dependent on exactly those viewpoints. That's the nature of political discourse, and I find it more helpful to read about coherent versions rather than a holistic "truth".
I also follow Foreign Policy but despise their editorializing, since it takes the meat out of the reporting and skews it toward PR.
You will get "more important" news on the international front from ForeignPolicy, but it's going to remain in the format of news journalism. They will include cheesy pictures of world leaders “we don’t like” and nice pictures of the ones we do. They occasionally use Buzzfeedlike headlines like “Will Russia drop a nuclear weapon?” and report in a one sided manner on a number of issues (“Russia flew near NATO with a nuclear bomber” but never “US flew near the Caucauses with a nuclear bomber”).
Overall I would rate FP a solid 5 out of 10. But that’s in comparison to venues like CNN that might get a 2 or 3.
Their subscription model really isn't that bad, yet I think prevents many people from linking their articles, etc.
I just learned how India's economy seems to be crippled by labour regulations, land acquisition laws, and a crazy localized tax system (one truck ride takes 36 checkpoint stops and takes 10 days to go between New Delhi to Mumbai due to paperwork). Made worse by an impotent polticial system. The fact that India is even growing at 7% a year in that environment is the amazing thing. Imagine their potential if they got their shit together. https://youtu.be/hVwIZzGHxwc
I've heard India's economy works at night while the government sleeps. Indeed...
Looking forward to more videos.
@CaspianReport: Another gate-keeping operation(see Noam Chomsky for ref). One dimensionality, designed, produced and moderated(either knowingly or unknowingly .. for the "narrator") to keep _you_ - the curios mind - at a safe distance. If you want to get a glimpse of the real world, you will have to take a dive into the mostly paid disinformation so-called alternative media waters. Among the un-educated, intellectually challenged, psychologically uneven freaks, paid "disinformation agents", double-speak conferences(davos, cfr etc) and gate-keeping (not only)academic speakers from across the globe, you'll have to learn how to distill information these shady organizations(across thousands of yt channels and blogs from 100 to several 100k views) have to use to deliver their disinfo. Pick your world axioms(wisely), learn the contexts, follow links to sources, do your own reading - even though presented by a fool, misrepresented or otherwise intellectually mutilated, sources that were given/sent to that fool may still be valid and _very_ eye-opening. Don't be your own censor, there are a lot of large-scale disinformation operations (like "flat earth", "9/11", "homeopathy-*" etc) you may encounter - but keep in mind, they have to use _something_ to sell their disinfo.. Below 2 operations(yes, they are ops I;m sad to say) are worth visiting for start:
Put your self-censorship hat off and watch at least few of these in-full! In regards to the last one, named after Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope[3] - you can find that book online, jump to site 430+/- for an overview of how it was the UK as the tool behind both WWs (even though there is a lot of self-censorship at best in that book .. and it was written or edited as to be very hard to read)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/user/corbettreport [1] https://www.youtube.com/user/1138Porkins // quality depends on the region/topic cowered, kaukazuz are OK [2] https://www.youtube.com/user/TragedyandHopeMag // especially older pieces [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_and_Hope
Though I never made any recommendation to read military history, which should have made my list.
"never get involved in a land war in Asia"
That about sums it up for Russia vs. USA.
Possibly the only solution is to get way smarter by gene editing and preserve as much data as we can from our age.
A Farewell to Alms discusses this in great detail; England began the Industrial Revolution (i.e. broke out of the Malthusian trap) in the late 18th century, but if not for them, the Continent would have done it in the 19th; if not the Continent, then Japan in the late 19th or China sometime in the 20th.
So it goes with civilizations. Any given civilization will eventually break up and disintegrate, but the idea of civilization itself continues to progress.
Which doesn't preclude a circumstance where almost no civilization anywhere keeps its sh!t together long enough to send itself to the next star.
Latest example: Why go to a different planet? Personally, just for the heck of it. The financial problem is entirely artificial, because much larger sums than what Musk is talking about are being played with all the time. This amount of money could be in anybody's pocket tomorrow should the right people feel so inclined (say a couple very wealthy persons taking a fancy). I want to go for the heck of it because fascinating things can, and most probably will, come out of it. What exactly, I have no idea. It's the simple act of doing something new because, why not? What else is there to do except keep bashing each others' heads in?
This is extremely hard to convey to somebody who wasn't born with, wasn't taught, or whose sense of adventure was ripped out in the course of growing up.
My point is, humanity's many civilizations' instability caused by war is an artifact of evolution. Throughout mankind's history, bashing your foe's head in was the best way to survive, and humanity has yet to overcome this rather primitive and impulsive behaviour.
On a side note, not every species survives by war, but by symbiosis.
It still shocks me that no one person predicted the carnage of the American Civil War. It shocks me even more than in WWI, the Civil War was studied but not applied to the problem at hand.
The generals of the Civil War studied Clausewitz and Napoleon, and the troops went to war with smooth-bore bronze cannon and Napoleonic fire drill. They were largely tempered in the brief, not-too-bloody, and glorious Mexican-American War. It took them a few years and tens of thousands of casualties to learn what havoc accurate, long-range rifles, even if muzzle-loading, could do.
Militaries are eternally building themselves to fight the last war. When they do learn from their experience, quite often the lessons learned are the wrong ones.
The US has always had a charming dread of standing armies.
As you may know, chimpanzees wage wars, some being territorial, some more resource-targeted. They even pick fighting grounds, do all kinds of dirty tricks(set traps, prepare stones-to-throw etc) - but to the point. Whenever a "chimp tribe" is threatened, whether its by resource shortage or a competing tribe, they "pick"(as in "tolerate") the most aggressive, asocial, psychopathic chimp of their own to lead them since thats what increases their chances of survival. That chimp may and usually does commit, at wimp, all kinds of atrocities, towards enemies and even his own _but_ when the danger is over, when that tribe no longer competes for their territory, whenever there is enough resources - they simply get rid of him.
We are in a state of prosperity, technologically, environmentally, there is nothing hindering our civilization to live in peace .. except, we are suffering under the same hierarchical [] power-structure we know from medieval(or even much older) periods. Yes, they are still here(structure, not necessarily blood-lines whatever some may want to tell them selves) .. they are not visible, you may not feel their presence, but they are here, creepy version of Asimov's Foundation, there were here all the time(when incl. turbulences within their ranks), now largely consolidated, mostly united, metastasizing across the planet, leading humanity into its abyss, effectively into a 2 species society .. Pharaos as immortal gods, few layers of abstractions(with its own nobelity) and as much slaves as they need for whatever they need, kept in the dark, with no chance to revolt, ever ..
Now I wont be angry when this one gets flagged but I hope at least some of you young minds do get the chance to read and dismiss the claims above .. because they might come handy in the (near) future
I'm not convinced that "Turchinian cohesion" is really a good thing, though; it seems to be a way to get people who hate each other to toe the line and work together nonetheless, and he kind of praises how all cohesive societies suppress dissenters...
Another book to read, for those interested in neo-Toynbean searches for underlying patterns: The Fourth Turning, which deals with generational cycles of values. The authors, writing around 1990, expected a high risk of some sort of crisis -- possibly even a large terrorist attack -- somewhere around 2000, and a general atmosphere of crisis that would last about 20 years afterwards. Either their model's pretty good, or they just got lucky; if they followed their own investment advice, I imagine they came out pretty well.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caral 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef0jSXv9Jyk
Probably due to our history, there is a large amount of interest among Russians about rise and fall of civilizations. Lev Gumilyov's [2] work is something else that comes to mind, although much less mathematical.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentin_Turchin [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Gumilyov
Whether it's really on a timeline or adapted, it's kind of an interesting idea that much of that old book is about that. It's especially interesting when you consider the idea that in order to survive, a system like that has to become ephemeral; that Judaism survived the destruction of various temples because it became much more of an idea than a place or thing.
But we remember the conquerors because the stories are better :)
It's important to differentiate between this type of war and simple conquest and commandeering of resources (human, natural, etc.)
In both cases, as the scale increases, the sophistication required to support the effort increases... One needs better social structures, better technology, supply chain management, etc.
So these "civilized" aspects are in fact prerequisites for victory in war, though war may offer an incentive to focus on improving those systems and their coordination at the expense of other aspects of society.
So just as eating food strengthens a person enough that he/she may grow, survive, and thus desire to eat larger meals in the future, eating is not the cause of hunger.
What we must also realize (for history and for the present day) is that war utterly wipes out culture and the history of humans, and replaces it with some politicized narrative imagined by the victors. We know little about indigenous Americans, and the future will know little about the Afghanistan and Iraq of the early 21st century and earlier. There will be volumes of information, but it will be written by scholars beholden to the occupying hegemon.
Iran was originally wooded, but the forests were marginal -- not very fertile, easy to lose, mostly valuable for keeping topsoil in place. These were cut at rates faster than they could regenerate, and the country desertified. The ancient Persians were superb engineers (their air-conditioning and water-transport methods, in particular, get a lot of attention in sustainability circles today), but poor foresters.
Of course, regenerative forestry was only invented in the 19th century. Persia isn't the only part of the world where marginal forests were over-harvested and lost; the forests that survived were those in very tree-friendly regions, or in uninhabited regions, or both. In Persia, the temperate-rainforest zone north of the Elburz Mountains (on the south shore of the Caspian Sea) was forested much longer, although these days it's more urbanized than anything else.
The problem in Iraq -- Mesopotania -- was a different one: the Babylonians put in irrigation canals, but, over time, irrigation canals render the soil salty and toxic to plants. This takes thousands of years; but by the time the Mongols arrived, parts of Iraq were already a salt marsh, and after Hugalu Khan destroyed the irrigation systems, no one could get much value from rebuilding them. The climate is still mild and pleasant; the soil, much less so.
He makes a case for not just Kahn and his descendants being a huge factor in history, but for every ruler who has gone in and shaken up the foundations of civilization through conquest. Khan, Alexander and Napoleon are prime examples given (and I'm avoiding another key example but you'll know who it is if you listen to the podcast). He speculates that at various times in history, civilization stalled out, but these rulers came in and got things moving again simply by clearing entire parts away and making room for new ideas and new forms of government. Its a fascinating theory and I think this data corroborates that.
Looking at the little maps in the article, I might hesitate a guess that this model has been over-fit to a certain idea of "civilization". It predicts Egypt and Rome and Greece, things people know about. But it doesn't seem to predict the Byzantines, Sogdian and other Central Asian empires, peaks and troughs of Chinese dynasties, etc., which were just as long-lived and influential but are less well-known.
I wonder what would happen if they modeled resource availability, language overlap over time, political ideology (large empires tend to become inward-looking), etc. War is certainly an important factor, but not the only one.
1. Wiki About: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_History_of_Warfare
Each of these requires vastly different strategies in different circumstances. Each scales out in a way that becomes more nuanced and complex the bigger the system. Each one, and various ones in combinations drive out other complex, emergent behavior like religion or language.
Intelligence, at least on this planet, seems to thrive in a state of stress and moderate, creative chaos. There are a lot of idealists in the world who want to build something totally peaceful where all needs are taken care of and there's very little risk. If I'm correct, this would effectively kill the species over the long run.
This seems backwards. Wouldn't the intense pressure of societies bumping up against each other drive warfare, and not the other way around?
Two societies pushing against each other lead to pressure. This pressure results in military conflict. Whoever wins the military conflict can exert increased pressure.
The necessity of winning wars put pressure on the society to develop better ways of winning wars. These better ways put more pressure on external societies, etc.
China was the most wealthy, educated civilization in the world in the 1400's. They stagnated basically becuase there was little to no fighting.
Meanwhile Europe was busy finding newer more elaborate ways to slaughter each other, and to avoid being slaughtered.
A fair assessment, but now I realize that another way to say this is -
They stagnated because there was little to drive innovation.
Stated this way, it at least makes us consider that there might be an alternative to constant warfare as a driver of progress. Maybe recognition of this is some kind of societal turning point as well?
How about the existential threat of climate change? Either way though, the driver is survival.
For China, Turchin talks of how the constant confrontations with unconquerable nomads kept the civilization alive much longer than it would've otherwise endured. Toynbee thought that China should've fallen apart for good during the Three Kingdoms -- that the Han Dynasty was its universal state. China eventually stagnated, but has been the same culture since the 200s BC; the only other civilization to endure like that was ancient Egypt.
I'd really strongly advise that you look up War and Peace and War. It sounds like you understand the book's premises well, and could get a lot out of it.
Just looking at recent history will show that outright war, or the imminent threat of same, has driven perhaps the biggest technological push in known history.
How else are you going to centralize a way of life besides killing everyone who doesn't agree to it?
So-called Cold War and Arm-racing is the most recent examples.
Continuous competition for everything, not just survival and reproduction, is what makes evolution (biological or social) possible.
Rob Allan wrote a survey of agent based modelling toolkits available at http://www.grids.ac.uk/Complex/ABMS/ (in 2011 though so some things are out-of-date).
It's important to strive towards models that are as simple as possible so you don't end up "simulating the world" and so you can better understand and analyze the processes that led to the interesting results. It's also important that you document and open your source code to review because as we all know, it's trivial to hardcode your assumptions into a program to tell you what you want to see.