SLAVERY BY OPIUM!
On an observational note, the most realistic free-market economy based games ended up being the most fun, even if they were skewed in one way or another.
I cite old Star Wars Galaxies. The only other game that parallels SWG at that level of realism as far as market based economics are concerned is Eve-Online which is also a fun one.
Slavery disappeared in Europe itself, ignoring any influence ideologies played, because of the fact there was no economic use for slaves in Europe; the land was not organized in large plantations like in areas where slavery flourished. In addition, there is a strong correlation between nations that depended on slavery for economic reasons, and the length of time it took them to abolish the institution.
This is how I think it went down.
The agricultural revolution made rapid gains in human prosperity possible. But then a formula of violence and brainwashing was discovered which enabled some men to become persistent parasites of that prosperity (the state).
A historical accident disrupted the winning formula of the state. This historical accident was the nature of the fall of the Roman Empire. For the first time in history, the brain and the muscle of the state were sundered. The existence of an independent Catholic Church challenging and hobbling European rulers (who themselves challenged and hobbled the Church in return). This resulted in the high middle ages and its largely ignored industrial and intellectual revolutions. The stronger property rights that arose under conditions of political fragmentation and weakness led to dramatic innovations in the harnessing of water and wind power and in agricultural techniques, which in turn led to an explosion in the production of food, metals, textiles, and other goods. A linguistically unified network of clerics sundered from unified secular power fostered the rise of Aristoteleanism and the university system, which engendered a bourgeoning intellectual class of rapidly increasing sophistication not beholden to a central state.
With the breakdown of the independence of the Catholic Church in the 14th century, the state became resurgent, and economic growth plummeted. But the seeds of freedom had already been sown. When the spread of resurgent autocracy reached England in the form of the Tudor dynasty, it met with stiff resistance, which eventually evolved into the English Civil War. This war and the conflicts following it dramatically weakened the English state, which made possible the industrial revolution in that country as well as the spread of liberal philosophy. The Age of Revolution was basically an attempt in other European and colonial nations to copy the success of the English experiment.
Empire was an effect of prosperity ill-used, not a cause of prosperity’s explosive growth. Modern empire was made possible by the wealth accumulated in the industrial revolution. Of course some wealth was squeezed out of imperial subjects, as has always been the case with empires. But such rapacity is minute in comparison to the primary factor of freedom in generating wealth.
The historical accident that started this all happened in Europe, which is why its eventual consequences happened in Europe.
He is asking for a question: “Why did so called “western” nations develop faster than what are now 2nd and 3rd world nations?”
No it’s easy. The western Nations are inhabited by White people, while the third-world countries are inhabited by non-White or mixed race people. The mentality of White people allows for the building and maintaining of institutions that advance social and technological progress.
What is “the mentality of white people”?
This catholic propaganda has absolutely nothing to do with reality. The catholic church was the church of the roman empire since 315, though, of course, it was a player in power politics before that. The catholic church was a partner of european states and their crimes for more than 1500 years and it still is.
Why 3º world nations are so far behind the 1º world?
1º Corrupt leaders and political parties
2º Distrust and envy among neighbors
3º Socialism
4º Huge remittance and charity donations from 1st world country which ultimately supresses 3rd world country’s to remain in the state that they are
5º Huge amount of emmigration to financially support the means of point 4 (average age in honduras is 25)
6º Huge amounts of dept and ecnomic termoil brought on by the IMF.
Actually, third world nations were usually controlled by the military, the church and landowners - of course, those are all socialists in a way, but they are also known as the ‘right wing’. Now power is divided between those old oligarchies and social democrats.
But, while the “largely ignored” revolutions (would you mind elucidating more on that point) lead to nowhere, while in England, and Scotland, where there was a rather interventionist state, the industrial revolution bloomed, and prospered. So I don’t think that this point can properly explain the historical evidence, unless you have some that I have never seen.
Its ironic, the strongest victory for property rights, at least in Great Britain, was the result of state action with enclosurement.
It was the advent of empiricism, not the rise of Aristoteleanism, that best prepared Europe for the industrial revolution, and the scientific revolution that followed yielded much of the technological knowledge that lead to the industrial revolution.
The English state was pretty powerful, and was rather active in the economic lives of its citizens - see Karl Polyani’s The Great Transformation.
Have you read Karl Polanyi? If so have you also read the works addressing and challenging his own (esp. on antiquity)?
Oh and this…
is unsubstantiated. Science proceeded regardless of what “empiricists” mused about one day or the other. In fact, the “empiricists” (like Locke) tried to model their beliefs on the scientific advances of the time, leading to abject failures like mechanism. A proper estimation of reason and free thought, and not anything on behalf of the “empiricists”, led to scientific revolutions… it was the general philosophical climate of the time.
Can you actually make arguments against Polyani, or does merely speaking his name as if only an idiot would even consider him reference to quote suffice?
Well, science barely proceeded before the rise of empiricism in the 1500s, hitherto the only science to have truly progressed beyond the Classical understanding, Roger Bacon’s work in optics never caught on (Roger Bacon was also a strong adherent to empiricism), in Europe was astronomy in Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium. It was the experimental works of scientists such as Sir Francis Bacon, an empiricist, that lead the way for the scientific revolution. Empiricism is far more than the work of John Locke, I would personally say that Bacon’s Novum Organum, from which all modern empirical methodologies can be traced back to, is more important than Locke’s own works in the perspective of empiricism that I discussed. In addition, mechanism was not an “abject (failure)”; rather, mechanism was a scientific paradigm that proved extremely useful, maybe even necessary, for science for at least a century ( see Karl Popper’s essay “Of Clouds and Clocks”) so to refer to it as such is utter nonsense. Furthermore, the scientific revolution was not brought on by whatever “proper estimation of reason and free thought” you speak of; rather, its catalyst was empiricism, and the new experimental techniques pioneered by both Galileo, and Bacon. The scientific revolution was the result of men testing hypotheses against nature rather than trying to use their reason; in fact, the latter brings to mind Descartes’ attempts to reason the laws of motion, and we all know how that venture fared.
Can you actually answer my question as to whether you read him, or whether you’re just name-dropping to seem smart?
According to whom?
Yet it was a lot of nonsense, regardless of what good came of it.
Oh I see, you’re going to try conflate reason with armchair reasoning. Cute trick. Too bad it won’t work. Perhaps you genuinely are clueless of how Aristotle conceived of the scientific method when you wish to say that this stuff is all novel, as if before the empiricists no one had ever thought of it? Well?
Sorry, Descartes is a very important character in the development of ‘empirical’ science. I suggest you look up ‘analytical geometry’.
I agree with your point about empiricism and technological development but that doesn’t mean that all rationalism must be written off as useless.
Led to nowhere? The high middle ages were a time of tremendous economic growth.
During the middle ages, extensive water and wind mills peppered Europe like never before before. The increased energy thus harnessed and its automaticity had an explosive effect on productivity. Cereals grains were processed with unprecedented efficiency. The greater heat of medieval furnace technology initiated the true iron age, during which quality iron was available for mass productive use for the first time. There were huge improvements in agricultural technique, including in field rotation. The medieval harness unleashed the use of the horse in agriculture, which dramatically increased productivity. Scientific husbandry at monastery sheep farms led to an explosion in wool productivity. All this happened, and much much more.
England and Scotland was more interventionist in the late 17th and early 18th century than they themselves were later, but much less interventionist than other European countries at the time. Just think of France under Louis XIV and his successors.
Yes, empiricism was an important correction of Aristotelean thought. But it sprang out of the seedbed of the European intellectual culture, which would have never been possible under the Caesaro-Papism that reigned over every other state in the world up until then. In fact, empiricism arose from the Franciscan intellectual tradition, which was a branch of Aristotelean scholasticism.
It’s funny because many of the empiricists had cranky ideas of their own. Both the rationalists and the empiricists shared a commitment to truth and reason. Leibniz independently discovered calculus. I dunno why some people wish to act like empiricists are the sole reason that science advanced…
Of course, empiricism without a rational/a-priori basis is nonsense - things built by empiricists may indeed work according to plan, but that doesn’t validate the philosophical positions of their builders.
Of course I’ve read Polyani.
The historical record.
It isn’t nonsense; read Popper’s “Of Clouds and Clocks” if you want to figure out why it isn’t nonsense for I’m not going to go step by step here to prove it isn’t. In addition, I highly doubt you’re going to reject Newton’s Principia as “a lot of nonsense” despite its very heavy mechanistic perspective.
Aristotle never experimented, nor did he ever recommend it in his works; while the scientific method very heavy on the experimental process. In fact, it is in their emphasis on experiments that both Bacon, and Galileo created the scientific method as we know it.
A nation being less interventionist than Louis XIV’s France does not mean much.
I don’t understand what your trying to assert here in the second sentance. From what I do understand, I would say that it is a baseless assertion seeing that Scholasticism thrived, all that the rise of empiricism would have necessitated is scholars becoming empiricists rather than Scholastics; there is no reason why Caesaro-Papism would have impeded empircism.
One cannot underestimate the effect of the Muslim philosophers, like Alhazen, on the advent of empiricism.
I’m just pointing to France as one example. The rest of continental Europe was also hugely interventionist in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.
Every intellectual in the high middle ages was a scholastic. And the empiricism of the early modern age arose out of the intellectual tradition of the high middle ages. There was no foreign incursion of empiricist thinkers; it was a gradual process.
Isn’t it curious that the Byzantine east (the study of which generated the very term "Caesaro-Papism) never made a serious general improvement in the sciences although it had the full benefit of surviving works of the Greek masters to work from for many hundreds of years before the Latin west did?
Although the virtues of Aristoteleanism itself is a side note from the main question we are discussing, I would simply mention that the Golden Age of Islamic Science was highly Aristotelean itself.