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V. Illych L. posted:I have literally never seen any good arguments for "human agency" even being a Thing historically. The notion smacks of romanticism to me, and I'd appreciate it if someone well-versed in the theory could explain why modern historians seem to insist on taking human subjectivity seriously on a grand level. Have you read "Logics of History"? by Sewell?
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Feb 8, 2014 14:18
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No, I haven't. I take it it's pertinent to this discussion? Could you give me a quick rundown?
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Feb 8, 2014 14:21
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V. Illych L. posted:No, I haven't. I take it it's pertinent to this discussion? Could you give me a quick rundown? Sure. It makes the arguments that both those who look for 'rules' (or concoct 'stage theories') of history, and those who think it's all the doings of individuals, are mistake. The main focus is on how the study of history and sociology needs to examine how the systems change, that that contingency is key. Here is a key paragraph: quote:Humans, unlike planets galaxies, or subatomic articles,are capable of assessing the structures in which they exist an of acting-with imperfectly predictable consequences--in ways that change them. While there certainly are turning points or crucial events in human history,there cannot be big bangs. To construct historical arguments on an analogy with astronomy results in a teleology in which some crucial past events are misconstrued as a pure origin that contains the entire future of the social system in potentia and in which the partially contingent events that occur subsequently are robbed of their efficacy and reduced to the status of markers on the road to an inevitable future. He makes an argument that while we cannot discover rules, we can discover analogies, we can compare and contrast things that are highly similar and understand the particular contingencies (which often involve individuals involved being different) that led to different outcomes. He makes the point that in many cases, there's a potential for change that is unrealized until a particular individual, group, or set of circumstances arrives that cathects that change. In addition, these changes change the system: the easiest example of this is the Enlightenment, or the European discovery of the Americas. There was no possibility of simply going back, of systems remaining unchanged after these events; they changes the rules of the game. Modern-day young earth creationists are very different from young-earth creationists before the scientific method. He gives a brilliantly instructive example of a particular organization that existed in the context of the French Revolution of 1848, the National Workshops, contrasted with the Mobile Guard, who wound up literally fighting each other in the streets. Marx's explanation was that the Mobile was recruited from lumpenproletariat, but this is proved false by historical examination; the National Workshops and the Mobile drew from essentially the identical population. To examine, then, how individuals whose class system and other social and cultural systems were shared wound up on opposite sides of a revolution, the actual paths of each organization are examined. The National Workshops were organized as a sop, basically, to keep revolutionary spirit down, the man put in charge of them was a highly competent, passionate, but highly moderate liberal who simultaneously organized the Workshops and their workers into a tightly-bound group with high espirit de corps, while co-opting and frustrating the more radical would-be leaders among those workers. The result was a group that was very moderate, but filled with extremely closely bound individuals, many of whom were more radical than the organization itself. The Mobile, meanwhile, were separated into barracks from the civilian population, had officers from the regular army, and had their grievances addressed: they got uniforms, pay, and also generated a high espirit de corps. Then the man who had been the head of the National Workshops, the moderate, was summarily dismissed, and the Workshops largely abandoned. However, precisely because of the work he had done in forging the workers together in camradrie, the groups could not simply be disbanded, they knew each other, they were used to organizing together and to taking action together. All the removal of him did was remove the moderating influence, which led to the group being largely taken over by the radical elements, which meant these groups formed a core group of the rebellion. Meanwhile, the Mobile members had experienced an uplift of their living conditions, fair treatment from officers, and so wound up shooting down childhood friends in the street. So here we see a large number of Sewell's points demonstrated: If the National Workshops had not had a competent moderate at the head of them, they wouldn't have organized as they did. A radical would never have been appointed, and if by some fluke he had been as soon as he showed he was radicalizing rather than moderating he would have been removed, and the groups would not have achieved the solidarity they did under the moderate's leadership. If they had not stupidly removed that moderate from the leadership, the radical elements would not have been able to take control of these tightly-organized groups, ideal for a revolution. If the Mobile's leaders had not been regular army officers, but drawn from within, they might not have separated themselves so much from the community; likewise, if they had not been housed in barracks but lived among the civilians, or if their grievances had not been addressed. Finally, in the inability of the government to simply disband the National Workshops after their organization, we can see the structure being irrevocably changed. This has been a hasty and incomplete accounting of the book, which I think is the most brilliant and incisive book of modern sociology. I cannot recommend it highly enough. Obdicut fucked around with this message at 18:30 on Feb 8, 2014 |
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Feb 8, 2014 15:08
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icantfindaname posted:You laugh but I'm beginning to think Fojar38 is literally Tom Friedman or Niall Ferguson IRL. Maybe they're sharing an account or something. I thought Friedman believed in the Rise of China concept that Fojar was attacking. At least he sometimes does; Friedman is not always consistent.
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Feb 8, 2014 16:46
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Fojar38 posted:Right, I know that with South Korea they were under a military dictatorship for some time. However, during this period they didn't have much in the way of technological or scientific advances, which are things that didn't start until relatively recently. This coincided with South Korea becoming more liberal and more democratic. This is blatantly false. While South Korea grew slowly under Rhee's administration, the country experienced such rapid economic and technological growth under the dictatorship of Park Chung-hee that his administration has been called the "Miracle on the Han River". South Korea was already established as a technologically-advanced nation with rapidly-growing wealth long before the country transitioned into democracy, and in fact democracy failed to protect the country from the Asian Financial Crisis that put an end to that rapid growth. V. Illych L. posted:I have literally never seen any good arguments for "human agency" even being a Thing historically. The notion smacks of romanticism to me, and I'd appreciate it if someone well-versed in the theory could explain why modern historians seem to insist on taking human subjectivity seriously on a grand level. People hate the idea that anything is so deterministic and that the choices and efforts of individual humans (no matter how brilliant) ultimately don't matter. We like to feel in control of our surroundings, and there's a lot of historical tradition and pride built up so no one likes to think that their favorite leaders and national heroes were ultimately irrelevant, that the faithful efforts of thousands of conquerors and generals were basically just following the lead of environmental factors that already existed. Personally, I don't think the "human agency" argument passes muster, because while one person's whims can certainly change the fate of quite a few others, the question "Why did Europe ultimately become dominant over the entire rest of the world" is so huge in scope and covers so many people and organizations and nations that I simply don't think it's possible to put forth a "human agency" argument that isn't racist. You can't just say "well, Europeans made better choices than the Chinese and the Africans and the various natives all over the world", you have to explain why basically every prominent individual in basically every country in West Europe consistently made better choices than basically every other prominent individual in every other country in the world for periods of time spanning centuries or even longer. The number of people involved is simply too large to blame it entirely on chance. Human choices are obviously a factor, but only in terms that human behavior was shaped by external influences present in Europe - if you won't point to deterministic influences that pushed Western Europe in a different direction from other regions, then why did the human agency of Western Europeans allow them to dominate over the human agency of, eventually, the entire rest of the world? Why didn't Africa or China use their human agency to dominate over the Europeans?
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Feb 8, 2014 18:31
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Main Paineframe posted:This is blatantly false. While South Korea grew slowly under Rhee's administration, the country experienced such rapid economic and technological growth under the dictatorship of Park Chung-hee that his administration has been called the "Miracle on the Han River". South Korea was already established as a technologically-advanced nation with rapidly-growing wealth long before the country transitioned into democracy, and in fact democracy failed to protect the country from the Asian Financial Crisis that put an end to that rapid growth. China did use its human agency to dominate back in the day, though. European dominance is a relatively recent thing in the grand scheme of things. With Sub-Saharan Africa the Diamond perspective makes more sense, but North Africa has also been quite successful at times.
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Feb 8, 2014 18:39
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icantfindaname posted:You laugh but I'm beginning to think Fojar38 is literally Tom Friedman or Niall Ferguson IRL. Maybe they're sharing an account or something. Unrelated to how awful Fojar is, but I swear I keep getting Niall Ferguson mixed up with some other author with a very similar name.
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Feb 8, 2014 19:48
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Main Paineframe posted:This is blatantly false. While South Korea grew slowly under Rhee's administration, the country experienced such rapid economic and technological growth under the dictatorship of Park Chung-hee that his administration has been called the "Miracle on the Han River". South Korea was already established as a technologically-advanced nation with rapidly-growing wealth long before the country transitioned into democracy, and in fact democracy failed to protect the country from the Asian Financial Crisis that put an end to that rapid growth. Plus, you know, Meiji. quote:People hate the idea that anything is so deterministic and that the choices and efforts of individual humans (no matter how brilliant) ultimately don't matter. We like to feel in control of our surroundings, and there's a lot of historical tradition and pride built up so no one likes to think that their favorite leaders and national heroes were ultimately irrelevant, that the faithful efforts of thousands of conquerors and generals were basically just following the lead of environmental factors that already existed. Okay, so again with domination in terms of, well, Sid Meier's Human History as the be all end all measure of success aside, Europe wasn't fated and the world is way less determined than you think it is. Saying that someone sat back and was like 'so here's how we manufacture a combination of capitalist exploitation with a few key technological developments, then carefully exploit local conflicts which are totally inherent guys*' sure, that never happens. But sometimes someone sits up and says 'you know what, this is what I want, this is what I'm going to do.' And looking at how and why people do what they do, that's important. That's also your much feared human agency. *Due to racial make up, culture, or vague geographic conditions. V. Illych L. posted:I don't think that this is an obviously constructive way to look at it. It seems reductive and, in the end, fairly unrewarding. Ugh. Yes it is. It's also a meaningless loving statement. a. people are terribly irrational and often acting on bad information. b. these 'interests' are historically contingent. That's the rub. That's human loving agency there, studying that, figuring out why people are doing what they're doing. And no one, I don't think, is saying that it's 'the only thing that matters.' But it is, as you point out a big loving deal and a huge part of what goes on. Okay, so let's look at fascism. You can take the gloss view. Ah, well, you see, war indemnities blah and they lost their cores which lead to a high revanchism score, and someone had research Nietzsche and unlocked the Will to Power modifier so clearly the conditions were just right. And that's a model so it's good. So we should stop searching at all, and so long as no one tries to disarm any other country it will never happen again. Then there's this. This doesn't stand in opposition to that model, because, you know, history can specialize, it can exist beyond the generalist textbooks that reduce everything down to a few paragraphs. This is a case study at the village level. You can see individuals interacting, view on that level the actions and choices that led, in a single year, to total Nazi domination in this town. Now it doesn't pretend to be a model for the rest of Germany, but it's a much more granular view. Now, in the grand arena of history, if the model is wrong you have to loving change your model. But you don't know if it's wrong until you start testing the drat thing. That happens when you get granular. Silver2195 posted:China did use its human agency to dominate back in the day, though. European dominance is a relatively recent thing in the grand scheme of things. With Sub-Saharan Africa the Diamond perspective makes more sense, but North Africa has also been quite successful at times. No, it doesn't, it's just that you're a. thinking of history like a video game and b. don't know enough about Sub-Saharan Africa.
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Feb 8, 2014 21:04
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Really the importance of human agency in whatever period of time being studied is inversely proportional to the period's length and scope of area. If you want to examine like one day in history or a small battle or village, individual actions become important to note. Whereas if you're examining the history of Europe between 1200-1500AD its going to be more accurate to examine trends amongst populations with maybe the mentioning of an important king or two.
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Feb 8, 2014 22:11
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the JJ posted:Ugh. Yes it is. It's also a meaningless loving statement. a. people are terribly irrational and often acting on bad information. b. these 'interests' are historically contingent. That's the rub. That's human loving agency there, studying that, figuring out why people are doing what they're doing. And no one, I don't think, is saying that it's 'the only thing that matters.' But it is, as you point out a big loving deal and a huge part of what goes on. That's a very uncharitable reading of what I wrote. I will, however, try to hash out some sound objections to what you're writing here. Of course individuals and their choices are interesting in small-scale situations. That was never in question, and I sincerely doubt that even Marx would object to that. What I'm saying is that people's choices are basically motivated by material circumstance, and looking at these circumstances rather than the choice as focus seems to be much more theoretically sound. So, for instance, Diamond will cite the availability of better animals for domestication as a major factor in why Eurasia was so dominant for so long; people's choices have very little to do with this - if there are horses and sheep, people will domesticate those. If all you have are llamas, they make do with those. The original argument was someone criticising Jared Diamond, not for building an unsound model in itself, but for his model being too 'deterministic' and failing to take 'human agency' into account when explaining why Europe in particular and Eurasia in general have tended to dominate the world. I do not understand how 'human agency' could have prevented or caused the Industrial Revolution, the great colonisations or the advent of revolutionary ideas; with or without Marx, a radical, anticapitalist mass movement would have originated, because that's how capitalism works. Any given capitalist can be as cruel of benevolent as they wish, it doesn't change the nature of the beast. My argument is specifically in the grand scale, where metanarratives claim to rule - of course you're interested in individuals when looking at, for instance, the fate of nations - Spain might not be one country today if not for several important historical individuals, for sure - but there is a room for grand-scale theories to account for the grand movements in history, and within those grand-scale theories, human agency seems to be a complete theoretical dead end. Basically, I don't think that people *could* have made choices to the effect that Eurasia did not dominate the world at the advent of certain technology - our decisionmaking is simply too streamlined for that. OK, I'll see if I can check it out. What you're saying here doesn't *seem* to clash with my position, but I'll go for it and see for myself.
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Feb 8, 2014 22:52
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V. Illych L. posted:That's a very uncharitable reading of what I wrote. I will, however, try to hash out some sound objections to what you're writing here. The biggest problem with Marxist-style historical determinism in my opinion is that according to it, the social superstructure (politics, culture, religion, ideology, etc.) are all influenced by material conditions of natural resources, labour, and the means of production. I don't see how this is a tenable view of history unless you are deliberately trying to find a material connection, no matter how obscure, to any given historical event regardless of what the participants at the time actually thought or believed. To put it more simply, a Marxist might say that Pharaoh was considered divine because lots of people performed labour for him, but you could just as easily say that lots of people performed labour for Pharaoh because they considered him divine. You cannot write off the human factor in favour of statements like "x would've happened because that's just how y works." What people think and feel is equally important to the material causes.
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Feb 8, 2014 23:14
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Fojar38 posted:The biggest problem with Marxist-style historical determinism in my opinion is that according to it, the social superstructure (politics, culture, religion, ideology, etc.) are all influenced by material conditions of natural resources, labour, and the means of production. I don't see how this is a tenable view of history unless you are deliberately trying to find a material connection, no matter how obscure, to any given historical event regardless of what the participants at the time actually thought or believed. To put it more simply, a Marxist might say that Pharaoh was considered divine because lots of people performed labour for him, but you could just as easily say that lots of people performed labour for Pharaoh because they considered him divine. You cannot write off the human factor in favour of statements like "x would've happened because that's just how y works." That is the substance of historical materialism yes. It's not a reason why it would be wrong. The reason you keep giving is essentially 'well it doesn't make sense to me'. Materialism is a logical conclusion if you assume people will act to further their own interests. You keep complaining about this assumption but you have not given any sort of alternative assumption on which to base predictions of human behavior. What I draw from your examples seems to be that people act to further some ideology, for no particular reason, except when they're furthering an opposite ideology for no particular reason. The Chinese are influenced by Confucianism, a pro-state ideology, while Europeans act in favor of an anti-state ideology. Why? Because you said so I guess. And besides, materialism applies just as well to individuals as it does to groups and classes. You could theoretically predict what action an individual would take given a description of their economic background, how much if any capital they own, etc. Fojar38 posted:What people think and feel is equally important to the material causes. Why? Your entire reasoning has been 'well that makes sense to me'. It doesn't explain the real world as well as materialism and it doesn't actually make any sense when you consider that people would be acting against their own material interests. icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 23:45 on Feb 8, 2014 |
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Feb 8, 2014 23:38
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V. Illych L. posted:
It both does and doesn't; one of the key pieces of contingency is that individual decisions highly matter, individual people highly matter. Even if the conditions are ripe for something to happen, it can still take an extraordinary person to make that happen, and they don't actually come up that often. And even when you examine class conditions that you'd think would produce similar outcomes, you can in fact wind up with diametrically opposing situations, and contrary to what you're saying, the explanation is not differing material situations, but due to actual thoughts in people's heads. This is what Sewell means by the 'big bang', that you're saying that given certain conditions, something is an inevitable consequence. The people involved in Britain's fight for religious tolerance of Puritan sects mattered a lot; as they struggled without a certain result, more and more Puritans emigrated to America. There are a hell of a lot of contingent circumstances involved in colonization. If you're saying that it would have been exploitative because of the character of European intellectual thought at the time, it's extremely likely, but not certain, that that would be the case. But the degree of cruelty in that exploitation was huge, and while in a large part destruction of the American Indian civilizations had actually already occurred--as disease swept through their populations; it's important to remember that the American Indian civilizations had just undergone an enormous level of turmoil right at the beginning of colonization--there were giant degrees in things like how much history was preserved, and the extent to which treaties with them were honored. The corruption of the US government bureau's of Indian Affairs wasn't inevitable either, there were some very distinctly key people who were responsible for a ton of the corruption. Andrew Jackson wasn't an inevitable person, his psychotic cold-bloodedness colored a lot of our original contact with the American Indians. This is not saying "Well some Dutch commander may have made his guys wash his hands more and thus prevented the Spanish Flu", but instead that especially in systems which grant power to individuals, like governments, the actions of individuals do matter a lot. They may be making those decisions based on conferencing with others, and they may all share class interests, but they are still decision-makers that weild linchpins of power. Often, the person is only visible afterwards--nobody could have predicted A. Philip Randolph, for example, but you could and can predict that W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk would inspire people to action on civil rights. It's still important to put human action in the center of this, because all these thoughts and influences, including how we think about our physical circumstances, are dictated by humans; humans limited by the structure within which they exist, but capable of changing that system. icantfindaname posted:
Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding you, but people act against their own material interests all the time. Are you asserting people always act in their material interests?
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Feb 8, 2014 23:45
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icantfindaname posted:That is the substance of historical materialism yes. It's not a reason why it would be wrong. The reason you keep giving is essentially 'well it doesn't make sense to me'. Because peoples "interests" are not exclusively material. Yes, interests like food and sex and material wealth are the most common human interests and basically everyone holds them, but other interests like religious interests, varying cultural values which would create different interests, ideological interests like "we have to defeat those other guys because they are tyrants" or in some cases pure altruism. Sometimes political interests are surprisingly personal, with wars being waged over a personal grievance one king has with another, or held not for the sake of material wealth but for power's own sake. I don't know why you keep on expecting me to pull out some document or thesis by some historian "proving" that people have interests beyond the material because it's common knowledge, yet historical materialism completely ignores it, or at least for some reason thinks that it can't influence the base (it can and frequently does.)
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Feb 8, 2014 23:52
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the JJ posted:Okay, so again with domination in terms of, well, Sid Meier's Human History as the be all end all measure of success aside, Europe wasn't fated and the world is way less determined than you think it is. Saying that someone sat back and was like 'so here's how we manufacture a combination of capitalist exploitation with a few key technological developments, then carefully exploit local conflicts which are totally inherent guys*' sure, that never happens. But sometimes someone sits up and says 'you know what, this is what I want, this is what I'm going to do.' And looking at how and why people do what they do, that's important. That's also your much feared human agency. That's not a "why", that's a "how" - and is also meaningless. It amounts to "Europe is dominant because they did everything right and everyone else did everything wrong". That's because of one important factor - human agency isn't a thing that happens "sometimes" to "someone". Everybody has human agency, all the time. Everybody sits down and says "you know what, this is what I want, this is what I'm going to do". It's not something that's unique to Europe. The question is why the choices and pursuits the Europeans made led them to be dominant over every other people that was also making choices and pursuits. What factors made the Europeans' human agency triumph over Chinese and Ottoman and African and native human agency? As far as I can see, there's only a few things that could possibly be put forward to explain the difference in outcomes: differences in their material circumstances and surroundings, some form of cultural or racial superiority, or extreme coincidence. Attributing European dominance to a few hundred billion cosmic rolls of the dice doesn't sit well with me, and the cultural/racial arguments are dumb and lovely, so that just leaves the material circumstances, which shaped a lot of other social and technological decisions throughout history. For example, the Native Americans never really invented the wheel. Why? Is it because somebody in Europe or Asia sat down one day and decided "I'm going to invent the wheel, that's a thing I will do" and all the natives sat down and decided "no, we don't feel like inventing the wheel"? Of course not. Was it because the natives were too dumb to invent even simple tools? Of course not. Instead, it was because of environmental factors - there were no draft animals that could be domesticate and were capable of pulling wagons or heavy loads in the Americas, so there wasn't much need to invent wagons to allow animals to carry more than what could be fit on their back, and therefore no need to invent things to stick onto the bottom of a wagon to make it easier for an animal to carry. Ultimately, the wheel was invented by people in Eurasia and not people in the Americas, and the Eurasians certainly used their "human agency" to solve the problem of hauling heavy loads. The reason they came up with it and the Native Americans didn't wasn't because their human agency made better choices, but rather because their human agency made use of the options their environment provided to solve the problems posed by their environment. The invention of the wheel, while carried out by humans, was ultimately dependent on deterministic factors; if you teleported the first Eurasians to the Americas and the first Native Americans to Europe, the wheel still would have been invented in Europe but not in the Americas, because there was simply not nearly as much use for a wheel in the Americas and that had far more of an effect on the invention of the wheel than any amount of "human agency" could have. It's just like how peoples who lived by certain bodies of water were more likely to invent decent boats than people who didn't live anywhere near water - not because the "human agency" of the coastal peoples coincidentally directed them in the direction of boat-making, but because the environment and circumstances of the coastal peoples were more suitable to needing to build and innovate on boat designs than people who lived a week's walk from the sea. Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 00:09 on Feb 9, 2014 |
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Feb 9, 2014 00:06
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Obdicut posted:Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding you, but people act against their own material interests all the time. Are you asserting people always act in their material interests? Not all the time no, but that seems to be a good predictor in general. I'm just pointing out that fojar has offered no alternative that makes any more sense. If you're going to explain an action with either adherence to some abstract value, or material interest, generally speaking material interest is a better choice. Raskolnikov38 posted:It'd be more accurate to say that people act in accordance to what they perceive to be their material interest. This is correct, and better worded than what I said. This is still different from Fojar's position, which is that people act in accordance with non-material factors icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 00:22 on Feb 9, 2014 |
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Feb 9, 2014 00:15
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It'd be more accurate to say that people act in accordance to what they perceive to be their material interest.
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Feb 9, 2014 00:21
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Main Paineframe posted:That's not a "why", that's a "how" - and is also meaningless. It amounts to "Europe is dominant because they did everything right and everyone else did everything wrong". That's because of one important factor - human agency isn't a thing that happens "sometimes" to "someone". Everybody has human agency, all the time. Everybody sits down and says "you know what, this is what I want, this is what I'm going to do". It's not something that's unique to Europe. The question is why the choices and pursuits the Europeans made led them to be dominant over every other people that was also making choices and pursuits. What factors made the Europeans' human agency triumph over Chinese and Ottoman and African and native human agency? As far as I can see, there's only a few things that could possibly be put forward to explain the difference in outcomes: differences in their material circumstances and surroundings, some form of cultural or racial superiority, or extreme coincidence. Attributing European dominance to a few hundred billion cosmic rolls of the dice doesn't sit well with me, and the cultural/racial arguments are dumb and lovely, so that just leaves the material circumstances, which shaped a lot of other social and technological decisions throughout history. God does not play dice with the universe, ergo, we should look at these environmental factor determined by... chance. I'm not saying that environments aren't the same, but the course of history is not an inevitable one and choices people make are very important to determining how things shake out. Anything that happens is alway only ever going to be the culmination of everything that has come before. These are the butterflies that flap their wings. History is the study of these butterflies, and the ramifications of the storms caused. Sometimes, those butterflies are geographical, sometime they are human, but you have to be holistic about it or your model is going to fail. quote:For example, the Native Americans never really invented the wheel. Why? Is it because somebody in Europe or Asia sat down one day and decided "I'm going to invent the wheel, that's a thing I will do" and all the natives sat down and decided "no, we don't feel like inventing the wheel"? Of course not. Was it because the natives were too dumb to invent even simple tools? Of course not. Instead, it was because of environmental factors - there were no draft animals that could be domesticate and were capable of pulling wagons or heavy loads in the Americas, so there wasn't much need to invent wagons to allow animals to carry more than what could be fit on their back, and therefore no need to invent things to stick onto the bottom of a wagon to make it easier for an animal to carry. Ultimately, the wheel was invented by people in Eurasia and not people in the Americas, and the Eurasians certainly used their "human agency" to solve the problem of hauling heavy loads. And you see, the wheel is really low on the tech tree in Civ games, so that means they're doomed to fail. We can now write of the whole of Mesoamerican history because they don't matter and nothing they ever did mattered. That's where this logic goes. This is why inserting agency is big deal in historiography. (Not history, historiography.) Certainly no native americans, that whole unitary group that spanned two continents, ever did anything that affected the what happened to history because they didn't invent the wheel. So we should stop writing about them and start talking about the best sorts of wheels given the right road conditions. quote:The reason they came up with it and the Native Americans didn't wasn't because their human agency made better choices, but rather because their human agency made use of the options their environment provided to solve the problems posed by their environment. The invention of the wheel, while carried out by humans, was ultimately dependent on deterministic factors; if you teleported the first Eurasians to the Americas and the first Native Americans to Europe, the wheel still would have been invented in Europe but not in the Americas, because there was simply not nearly as much use for a wheel in the Americas and that had far more of an effect on the invention of the wheel than any amount of "human agency" could have. It's just like how peoples who lived by certain bodies of water were more likely to invent decent boats than people who didn't live anywhere near water - not because the "human agency" of the coastal peoples coincidentally directed them in the direction of boat-making, but because the environment and circumstances of the coastal peoples were more suitable to needing to build and innovate on boat designs than people who lived a week's walk from the sea. No one is saying that this isn't unimportant. But there are lots of factors that go into how history works. If we want to talk substructure/superstructure, that's one way to divide it up, but that's not the same as denying the existence of the superstructure, which is what's going on here.
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Feb 9, 2014 00:33
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Raskolnikov38 posted:It'd be more accurate to say that people act in accordance to what they perceive to be their material interest. There are a loooooooooooooooot of cases in history where this doesn't hold true. Humans can be motivated by things other than their material interests, that's sorta the point of Marxism, that the proletariat were locked by a system into a situation where, for the vast majority of the people, they were expected to act against their own interests. A lot of more modern Marxists (Althusser, Gramsci, Hobsbawm come to mind) spent most of their careers grappling with this and trying to explain how and why, more or less, people don't act according to their material interests. So, for instance, what part of the environment demanded that the Holocaust happen? Or, equally irrationally, why did the Jews insist on returning to Israel in particular, that marginal spit of desert surrounded by people who hated them?
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Feb 9, 2014 00:41
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icantfindaname posted:Not all the time no, but that seems to be a good predictor in general. How so? On what basis are you making this claim? It is immensely easy to point to examples of people working against their material interests on a regular basis. In addition to this, many 'material interests' are contradictory, including long vs. short term material interests, and personal vs. small group material interests. quote:It'd be more accurate to say that people act in accordance to what they perceive to be their material interest. This is also not true. One of the easiest examples is people who vote against their own class interest based on racial animus. Unless you start stretching 'material' to mean all sorts of things it doesn't, it's not accurate, and if you stretch it like that, it's not useful. And it suffers the same problem of the modified sentence, that such interests are different over different scales. In addition, it doesn't have an explanation for a very, very frequent human occurrence, which is inaction. It is in people's perceived material self-interest to do a lot of productive things that they don't do, even though they can accurately say they'd be better off if they did them--stuff as simple as working out.
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Feb 9, 2014 00:54
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the JJ posted:And you see, the wheel is really low on the tech tree in Civ games, so that means they're doomed to fail. We can now write of the whole of Mesoamerican history because they don't matter and nothing they ever did mattered. That's where this logic goes. This is why inserting agency is big deal in historiography. (Not history, historiography.) Certainly no native americans, that whole unitary group that spanned two continents, ever did anything that affected the what happened to history because they didn't invent the wheel. So we should stop writing about them and start talking about the best sorts of wheels given the right road conditions. What the hell are you talking about? I'm not suggesting that the Native Americans didn't matter, nor am I suggesting that they were all one group (though they all shared the distinctions of not inventing wheels or sailboats and being handily conquered by European invaders). I'm not proposing some kind of videogame laws of the universe or some poo poo like that, I'm not suggesting that the Native Americans "weren't advancing along the tech tree" or some poo poo like that, all I'm suggesting is that nearby natural resources and features influence the choices people make and even the choices available to them in the first place and highlighting some particularly clearly known specific examples to show how these factors could possibly apply to other, less clear choices that led to people with horses, iron or steel armor, and primitive firearms sailing across the loving Atlantic to enslave, kill, or rob every non-Christian they could find, all of whom lacked horses, iron, oceangoing sailboats, and guns. I'm not sure how it's any less sensible than "well, human agency meant every single European just made smarter choices than all the natives in the world combined, all the time, until all the natives were dead". While you're at it, mind explaining to me how "human agency" was responsible for the massive death tolls wrought among the natives by smallpox and other European diseases?
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Feb 9, 2014 00:58
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Main Paineframe posted:What the hell are you talking about? I'm not suggesting that the Native Americans didn't matter, nor am I suggesting that they were all one group (though they all shared the distinctions of not inventing wheels or sailboats and being handily conquered by European invaders). I'm not proposing some kind of videogame laws of the universe or some poo poo like that, I'm not suggesting that the Native Americans "weren't advancing along the tech tree" or some poo poo like that, all I'm suggesting is that nearby natural resources and features influence the choices people make and even the choices available to them in the first place and highlighting some particularly clearly known specific examples to show how these factors could possibly apply to other, less clear choices that led to people with horses, iron or steel armor, and primitive firearms sailing across the loving Atlantic to enslave, kill, or rob every non-Christian they could find, all of whom lacked horses, iron, oceangoing sailboats, and guns. I'm not sure how it's any less sensible than "well, human agency meant every single European just made smarter choices than all the natives in the world combined, all the time, until all the natives were dead". While you're at it, mind explaining to me how "human agency" was responsible for the massive death tolls wrought among the natives by smallpox and other European diseases? But they weren't handily destroyed. By boiling history down to geographical accidents and technological dickwaving you leave the subjects you are treating as helpless victims. It's terribly Eurocentric. Sure, it's not Euro-worshipping, but it is Euro-centric. Okay, so you want to talk agency? How about the Tlaxcalans. According to your narrative they just sat there and died. Only they didn't that's not how history works. But the popular story can be boiled down to GGS and then GG Europe wins. It's not that simple. The fight for agency is a fight to take people reduced to 'eats maize, uses obsidian weapons, dies' and make them, you know, people. It's not about Europeans making smarter choices. It's about people being people and not machines built to eat, poo poo, and acquire money.
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Feb 9, 2014 01:13
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If I'm understanding correctly JJ, the question "why didn't native Americans invent the wheel?" is ultimately kind of a pointless question then?
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Feb 9, 2014 02:12
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Mecca-Benghazi posted:If I'm understanding correctly JJ, the question "why didn't native Americans invent the wheel?" is ultimately kind of a pointless question then? No, it's just not the only part of history. For one, I'd like to see it rephrased less around 'why didn't the Native Americans do [thing that Europe did]' and more 'what did this particular group of Native American's do and why?'
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Feb 9, 2014 02:17
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Main Paineframe posted:though they all shared the distinctions of not inventing wheels or sailboats and being handily conquered by European invaders They had wheels...
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Feb 9, 2014 02:26
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The wheel, or, really, the wheel-and-axle in a useable fashion, is actually a really technologically challenging thing to build. If you don't believe this, go and try to build one. The biggest challenge is getting the axle to move with as little friction as possible, and getting an axle that was as straight as possible. This takes metal tools, so for North America the question retreats to "Why didn't American Indians do much copper smelting"? This is another contingent line--previous discoveries, previous advances have enormous downstream effects. Any Muscogee who came up with the idea for the wheel and axle was going to be pretty much out of luck because the surrounding technologies necessary to engineer a wheel and axle weren't around.
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Feb 9, 2014 02:47
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Mecca-Benghazi posted:If I'm understanding correctly JJ, the question "why didn't native Americans invent the wheel?" is ultimately kind of a pointless question then? it is a pointless question because without horses or camels the natives didn't really have any use for wheels.
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Feb 9, 2014 02:50
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Miltank posted:it is a pointless question because without horses or camels the natives didn't really have any use for wheels. And for those who are wondering - something like the Rickshaw is unlikely because that device was only invented in Japan in the mid 19th Century.
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Feb 9, 2014 02:53
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Hopefully this doesn't get brushed over in cleverly disguised merits of Marxism chat, but I'm interested in learning some more about this guy, and terrorism from unassociated rebel groups in the Civil War in general.  His name is William Quantrill, and he was a pro-confederate rebel leader. The raid I saw that interested me in all this was called the Lawrence Massacre. quote:The attack on August 21, 1863, targeted Lawrence due to the town's long support of abolition and its reputation as a center for Jayhawkers and Redlegs, which were free-state militia and vigilante groups known for attacking and destroying farms and plantations in Missouri's pro-slavery western counties. This was evidently the group that Jesse James got his start in, as well. Obviously, there's no shortage of events like this that happened in the Civil War, but what were some of the other factions that rose up outside the Union-Confederacy, and what effect did that have on the war and the scale of atrocities?
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Feb 9, 2014 03:15
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the JJ posted:There are a loooooooooooooooot of cases in history where this doesn't hold true. Humans can be motivated by things other than their material interests, Well yes people do act in their immaterial interests such as taking a vow of poverty to gain entrance to heaven after death. Hence why I said it would be more accurate, not correct to say material interests guide the majority of human decision making. quote:that's sorta the point of Marxism, that the proletariat were locked by a system into a situation where, for the vast majority of the people, they were expected to act against their own interests. A lot of more modern Marxists (Althusser, Gramsci, Hobsbawm come to mind) spent most of their careers grappling with this and trying to explain how and why, more or less, people don't act according to their material interests. It is far easier for us to say for example a poor person voting republican is acting against their own interests than for us to get that person to perceive why that is so. A German supporting the nazis believed that the Jews were harming Germany and by extension themselves and thus had to be dealt with. A nazi organizing the holocaust believes the only way to prevent said harm is by killing the Jews and thus he improves Germany and his own material interests. Jews desiring the state of Israel wanted a homeland where they could live their lives, do their jobs and be Jews without facing anti-semitism and genocide. That they settled in the holy land is due to factors material and immaterial such as the political situation in Palestine, Jews already settled there and that is the land there has been given to them by God. Obdicut posted:This is also not true. One of the easiest examples is people who vote against their own class interest based on racial animus. Unless you start stretching 'material' to mean all sorts of things it doesn't, it's not accurate, and if you stretch it like that, it's not useful. And it suffers the same problem of the modified sentence, that such interests are different over different scales. Well what's your definition of material because this is the one I'm using: quote:ma·te·ri·al
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Feb 9, 2014 03:19
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I apparently have family that was involved with those raids, or at least who were victims of it. My (I believe) great-great grandfather was a boy in Grain Valley Missouri during the Civil War and he remembered the soldiers pass by. Later, his farm was burned down and they had to squat in a barn for a few years, and his mom(?) went insane and slaughtered a horse. e: I found my grandfather's memoirs to confirm: quote:I believe my Grandfather Johnson was just a boy during the Civil War and his memory was of sitting on a rail fence watching the soldiers marching by. This would be General Order #11: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Order_No._11_(1863) computer parts fucked around with this message at 03:41 on Feb 9, 2014 |
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Feb 9, 2014 03:28
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ma·te·ri·al ... adjective 1. denoting or consisting of physical objects rather than the mind or spirit. "the material world" Okay, now let's... Raskolnikov38 posted:Well yes people do act in their immaterial interests such as taking a vow of poverty to gain entrance to heaven after death. Hence why I said it would be more accurate, not correct to say material interests guide the majority of human decision making. So I just bolded everything immaterial in there. That's a lot of things.
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Feb 9, 2014 03:35
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Raskolnikov38 posted:
Yeah, that's my definition. People act contrary to material interests, in favor of interests of the 'mind' or 'spirit' all the time. And again, people also simply fail to act in their own material interests, too. If people acted in their own material interests consistently, we would have a hella buff citizenry, because most people think that it would be better for them to be in shape. Coming up with an explanation of why some people actually do get into shape and others don't requires a much more complex explanation. "Material interest" is always going to either be meaninglessly broad or insufficient to explain a ton of human behavior. What could be said is that it's rare to find something that doesn't have a portion of material interest to it, because that's one of the many reasons that humans do stuff. But if you consider, for example, the Southern support of slavery by non-slave owners, that was very much an allegiance not born of any sort of even perceived material gain, but very much an ideological position.
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Feb 9, 2014 03:49
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computer parts posted:I apparently have family that was involved with those raids, or at least who were victims of it. My (I believe) great-great grandfather was a boy in Grain Valley Missouri during the Civil War and he remembered the soldiers pass by. Later, his farm was burned down and they had to squat in a barn for a few years, and his mom(?) went insane and slaughtered a horse. Reminds me of Syria. Must have been rough just trying to live day to day while events like that were unfolding in your backyard.
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Feb 9, 2014 03:54
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Obdicut posted:The wheel, or, really, the wheel-and-axle in a useable fashion, is actually a really technologically challenging thing to build. If you don't believe this, go and try to build one. The biggest challenge is getting the axle to move with as little friction as possible, and getting an axle that was as straight as possible. This takes metal tools, so for North America the question retreats to "Why didn't American Indians do much copper smelting"? computer parts posted:And for those who are wondering - something like the Rickshaw is unlikely because that device was only invented in Japan in the mid 19th Century. Intriguing- a lot of the way we think seems to be built on the assumption that all the stuff we have today that looks simple must have been around a long time because the utility is so obvious. Then if you take a look back at those old times it seems kind of clear that not only did people at the time have little interest in this stuff, but even a time traveler from the present day probably wouldn't be able to recreate these inventions unless they were a specialist in that particular field.
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Feb 9, 2014 04:32
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Obdicut posted:The wheel, or, really, the wheel-and-axle in a useable fashion, is actually a really technologically challenging thing to build. If you don't believe this, go and try to build one. The biggest challenge is getting the axle to move with as little friction as possible, and getting an axle that was as straight as possible. This takes metal tools, so for North America the question retreats to "Why didn't American Indians do much copper smelting"? If memory serves the reasons that the wheel never really caught on in the Americas was varied. They didn't really NEED them. Culturally, they tended to travel pretty light and not own much. One thing Europeans were confused about was how happy natives generally were with practically nothing. European culture was generally about being as wealthy as possible and having lots of stuff. Natives would have no more than they needed in a lot of cases. Natives also didn't develop metalworking because of obsidian. I'm going to forget some of the details but if memory serves Mesoamerican civilizations did, in fact, develop copper and bronze working but said "you know what? gently caress this poo poo" because obsidian, which was plentiful, was much sharper and easier to deal with. It's so sharp that surgeons have apparently been using more and more obsidian scalpels these days because it's just plain better than steel. It also depends on how you decide what "advanced" means. Natives did all sorts of things that were actually extremely clever and inventive but geared toward the terrain and conditions of America rather than Europe. You especially saw this in places like where the Inca, Aztecs, or Maya lived as the terrain didn't really work well for European styles of technology. A lack of pack animals mixed with mountainous tropical terrain made roads as Europeans would think of them difficult to impossible to maintain or impractical to use. American civilizations managed to build pyramids, cities, monuments, and trade networks with totally different technologies. They weren't inferior they were just different. Which is, of course, why the Eurocentrism of history and this attitude of "white man technology is how this poo poo goes" is pretty stupid. Different conditions led to different advancements.
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Feb 9, 2014 06:22
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ToxicSlurpee posted:If memory serves the reasons that the wheel never really caught on in the Americas was varied. They didn't really NEED them. Culturally, they tended to travel pretty light and not own much. Who are you talking about? There are plenty of American Indian civilizations that didn't really travel much at all. You are making some broad categorizations about incredibly diverse civilizations here. quote:Natives also didn't develop metalworking because of obsidian. Why do you believe this to be true? You know there's a lot of obsidian in Greece, right? I'd say the reasons why large-scale metal smelting didn't take off in the Americas is a very interesting topic; I don't know the answer, but I am pretty sure it's not "They had obsidian", because the Greeks had obsidian too. quote:Natives did all sorts of things that were actually extremely clever and inventive but geared toward the terrain and conditions of America rather than Europe. You especially saw this in places like where the Inca, Aztecs, or Maya lived as the terrain didn't really work well for European styles of technology. A lack of pack animals mixed with mountainous tropical terrain made roads as Europeans would think of them difficult to impossible to maintain or impractical to use. Like the Mongols, the Europeans technologies specifically allowed them logistical and military advantages. There's no definitive relationship between cleverness of technology and supremacy in warfare. The Europeans sucked at terrace farming compared to the Inca, but that farming superiority didn't help them in the particular clash. Neither did their superiority in accounting.
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Feb 9, 2014 06:38
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Even if obsidian made superior weapons than bronze or iron, as was said earlier they tended to shatter when encountering non-fleshy resistance. I wonder why metal armor never became a thing in pre-Columbian America.
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Feb 9, 2014 06:43
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For me the metal working thing is the most interesting about pre-Columbian America. Obviously the Mesoamericans and Andeans knew about metal and metal working, because they had bronze and crap load of gold and silver. Why they didn't use it for armor, or that apparently nobody discovered the usefulness of iron, or that it didn't spread to Northern America is something I'd really like to know, but I don't know that we ever will. Maybe it just was some random cultural fluke, where they though metal was pretty alright, but only really thought about it in soft forms. It's not just warfare either; the Mesoamericans and Andeans (and also the Amazonians, though I wouldn't have expected them to become masters of metal working) were crazy good at farming in rather difficult terrain, and you'd think iron implements would have been very useful for them. PittTheElder fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Feb 9, 2014 |
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Feb 9, 2014 06:49
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Obdicut posted:Like the Mongols, the Europeans technologies specifically allowed them logistical and military advantages. There's no definitive relationship between cleverness of technology and supremacy in warfare. The Europeans sucked at terrace farming compared to the Inca, but that farming superiority didn't help them in the particular clash. Neither did their superiority in accounting. For instance, the Europeans were fresh out of several plagues, had some of the most disgusting city infrastructure on earth, and believed that bathing with water was unclean because sins of the flesh or some craziness. The natives largely put emphasis on cleanliness and personal appearance, and as such, hadn't had any exposure to the diseases that the Europeans lived in and brought with them, so they hadn't built up immunities. It was so extreme among some societies that I've even heard of native women who got smallpox committing suicide over the diseases effects on their appearance. The natives prioritizing advances in hygiene played a huge role the initial plagues that ravaged North America before the Europeans even began any type of conquest, and Europeans wouldn't achieve that level of hygienic society until much later. I wouldn't say the Europeans were substantially more advanced than native societies, they just prioritized things that aided conquest, whereas the natives weren't as worried about making sacrifices for progress as much as living healthily and peacefully (by the era's standards). Volkerball fucked around with this message at 06:56 on Feb 9, 2014 |
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Feb 9, 2014 06:53
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