How the neo-medieval 21st century will be more like the 12th century | Hacker News Reader

How the neo-medieval 21st century will be more like the 12th century

paragkhanna.com

75 pointscwan39 comments

If you ignore the millions of ways the world has changed since the 12th century, and focus only on one superficial broad-brushed similarity, then this article is persuasive. Otherwise, not.

It's a good article, with a nice analysis of the 12th century Eurasian system.

Yes, this is clearly not the 12th century, but the parallels can give a good deal of insight into our present world-system.

I think the most interesting thing about looking at the parallels is how similar the models are between 12th century and present. Yes, we move and communicate a lot faster, and there are a lot more of us, but at the core you can still see the same sorts of organizational units showing up, and the relationships between those organizational units function very similarly. That said, you can see some fundamental shifts in the nature of organizations. Slavery is almost universally shunned, which marks one institution that has shifted radically in social importance. Democracies are consequently very different from their historical predecessors.

There's a lot of interesting stuff here. Your post, on the other hand, is reductive and boring.

Actually, it is said that there are more slaves today than at any point in history

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=859770

>> Your post, on the other hand, is reductive and boring.

So mean and bad mannered ;)

This guy, Parag Khanna, have been shown in school and Hollywood movies an extremely simplified model of the 19th and 20th centuries world. A model where all events are explained through the state politics and big business is ignored. Based on that stupid assumption he is saying that now the world is different, because there are powers outside the states.

The similarity he's talking about is a lot more than superficial:

"You have to go back a thousand years to find a time when the world was genuinely western and eastern at the same time.... Now, globalisation is again doing much the same, diffusing power away from the west in particular, but also from states and towards cities, companies, religious groups, humanitarian non-governmental organisations and super-empowered individuals, from terrorists to philanthropists."

Admittedly, my comment itself was superficial and broad-brushed, but I still have a hard time seeing our world, even accepting the truth of the author's premises, becoming anything evenly remoting resembling the 12th century world. So much else is so different.

you're so right. now that we have american idol nothing like that can ever happen again.

One thing the author gets exactly right: loyalty accrues to those who reliably delivers the goods. And the tendency to trust states, companies, unions, or even families by default is busy eroding at a remarkable pace.

Different people in different places will find equilibrium in very different ways. Or they won't. In either case, they're unlikely to share a common conception about where it 'should' come from.

And once that widely shared framework of "what works for everyone" goes, then the world does look considerably more feudal and transitional than it did a generation ago. In that regard, the 12th Century is a useful source of patterns. So is the late 15th - early 17th. Maybe even more so, since this is when empirical science, truly global trading operations and commercial printers all came to the fore.

12th century?

Just few day ago I was thinking, that we(people) are loosing some very basic rights, established for the first time back there in 13th century (1215) in medieval England by Magna Carta.

For example:

+ (39) No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled, or deprived of his standing in any other way, nor will we proceed with force against him, or send others to do so, except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land.

+ (40) To no one will we sell, to no one deny or _delay_ right or justice.

I wanted this article to be interesting, but it's quite flawed actually. The comparisons are weak, at best. You can't ignore how much more ubiquity there is in the world today. The Middle Ages were a time of discovery, in many ways. There was no global culture like there is today. This is due, in part to the fact that the globe is much more accessible, in terms of physical travel and information distribution (thanks, internet). This article is a great attempt to make the facts fit the assertion, but that doesn't make the assertion true.

There is still no global culture today. Also there are so many more poeple today that the number of people who don't do _ (ex: "speak English", "have access to the internet", "know how to read") has dramatically increased.

Culture was probably not the word I wanted. There is a global "community", or "connectedness" that did not exist in the 12th Century. While there may be many people who don't participate in this community, they are still affected by it (directly or indirectly) and the world operates in an extremely different way because of it. In the 12th Century, information traveled one way (by foot), and the printing press wasn't even invented and wouldn't be for several hundred years. Now we can share information instantly across the globe, and if I really wanted to, I could hand deliver a letter to someone half-way around the world tomorrow.

There are probably people 1/2 way around the world you could hand deliver a letter within 24 hours, but I suspect there are more people you can't hand a message to within 24 hours now than there where alive in the 12th century. At the extreme, a random Peasant in North Korea and someone staying at mcmurdo station in Antarctica are both fairly inaccessible in those time scales, but so is most of China, and India.

PS: Granted, extend it to a week and the numbers shift, but at the edges the world is really not all that connected. Getting within 1000 miles of someone may be easy, but that's not contact.

Yes and no. The world is a lot more populated, but also increasingly urban, which by its nature(more communication and transportation services in town) means a larger proportion of people are easy to access.

As well, the proliferation of cell phones into rural areas is a inestimable breakthrough in communication. We've only started to see the impact of this.

A good time to plug "The Rise and Fall of Great Powers" by Paul Kennedy. I'm some of the way through this and it's a superb book.

Yet another comparison is temperature. The 12th century was in the medieval warm period. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period for more on that.

If America is in a period of Byzantinian decline then how do the great tech-hub city-states like San Francisco and New York play into this narrative? This doesn't seem consistent.

Byzantium also had perhaps the greatest city of its time, Constantinople.

The document says that cities not states become the centers of power which is matches your SF/NY example.

IMO, I don't think America is represented at all by SF or NY, in fact I think they're the exceptions. Other than a few regions and city-states (New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Dallas, Silicon Valley, Seattle, Portland) in the US I'd say the US largely lives in perpetual willful ignorance and continues to pat itself on its back for World War II.

To quote The Wire, "We used to make shit in this country." Now? Some do, but not so much anymore. I feel like more than every America is diverging.

That's a myth, the US continues to be manufacture ~ 20% of the world's output (this has held since at least 1982). The real story is that manufacturing jobs have eroded though.

Not only do we do so with a much smaller number of people, but certain industries seem to dominate the export scene (e.g. aerospace) and more than that, our dynamicity in manufacturing is no longer there.

The hot fields, like where our iPads and their batteries are made, is focused in places like Japan, Germany and China, where the former two make the interesting components and the latter is where it is assembled. The interesting work we do is in the high-level engineering and design of the devices.

What are some interesting things we build here? People cite cars, but for a lot of that, the design is done overseas (e.g. Toyota). Airplanes, medical devices and heavy equipment aren't exactly fast moving fields.

Apart from GM corn [I don't want] I can't think of any USA products that I come in contact with; could you give a list of the major ones or a link to such?

TBH the same is true of my own country (excepting food). Perhaps it's just that China market themselves well by ensuring China itself is a global brand (as in "China" appears on so many products).

Edit: Silly me, TV+Films+Music, what else?

Our industrial production has done nothing but increase (recessions and minor blips excluded). We make more than just TV shows.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/INDPRO

Everyday stuff made in the US: cars (e.g., my mom's Toyota), airplanes, medical devices, construction supplies.

Interestingly, a significant US export is industrial machinery. Many of those factories in China use industrial machinery built in the US.

>Everyday stuff made in the US: cars (e.g., my mom's Toyota), airplanes, medical devices, construction supplies.

Cars appear generally to be bought/made close to the point of use - "far eastern" cars are made in the UK for example. I'd guess that Toyotas used in Europe are mainly made in Europe now, but stand to be corrected. Sp[eculating further I'd say the same will be true of construction supplies - I've heard of prefab stuff being moved around Europe a lot but I imagine demand and transportation costs allow/require production close to point of use. Aeroplanes and medical devices, yes they should have come to mind.

I've also heard that it is best to have precision dies and things made elsewhere and then shipped to China for the mass production part of the process.

WRT the link I wonder how resource use has increased over that time too. How much of this increased level of production is down to increasing population confounded with a per head increase in resources?

Thanks for your reply.

My external hard drive was made in the US.

Which company was that, did they manufacture the internals or just the box the drive comes in? Maybe Seagate?

My US-made computer keyboard: http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/cus101usenon.html.

On second thought, this isn't a major product at all. It's actually quite obscure. I just like it a lot.

RIP Frank Sobotka

The article's recommendation that the U.S. imitate the "diplomacy and deception" of Byzantium is a complete non-starter. The commitment (even if flawed) of the U.S. to an open society plus new technology - emphatically illustrated in recent months - doubly underscores Benjamin Franklin's quip: "Two may keep a secret - if one of them is dead."

Really hard to take this article seriously with sentences like this:

"The 21st century will resemble nothing more than the 12th century."

Nothing more? Like, exactly the same?

I think you're parsing the sentence incorrectly. It is not "The 12th century is the only thing the 21st century will resemble." It's "There is nothing that the 21st century will resemble more than the 12th century." It doesn't entail "exactly the same."

Ah, that makes more sense. Thanks. :-)

Still think he's overstating his case though.

The wording is a bit too strong, but I take it to mean that the 21st century most closely resembles the 12th. Not exactly the same, but most similar among centuries.

He doesnt really address the obvious retort it most resembles the 20th century.

Everything old is new again! Including, like, horses pooping on muddy streets.

Greener than a Prius!

Yes, and the Black Plague killing off 25% of the world population from time to time...

history does repeat itself!

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