(2011-03-11) Rao Return Of Barbarian Vs Civilization

Venkatesh Rao on the return of the Barbar Ian.

History is only written by the winners if the winners can actually write. At their apogee, when Civilization-s have the most surplus wealth, they indulge in the most refined forms of writing: writing histories with autocentric conceit, they focus on the visibly-refined glories of their own age, rather than the higher-barbarian sensibilities at the foundations.

Hunter Gatherer-s and settled modern civilizations loom large, as bookends, in our study of history. The more I study history though, the more I realize that hunter-gatherer lifestyles are mostly of importance in evolutionary prehistory, not in history proper. If you think about history proper, a different lifestyle, Pastoral Nomad-ism, starts to loom large, and its influence on the course of human history is grossly underestimated. Modern hunter-gatherer lifestyles are cul-de-sacs in cultural evolution terms. They stopped mattering by around 4000 BC, and haven’t significantly affected world events since. Pastoral nomads though, played a crucial role until at least World War I. Until about 1405 (the year Timur died), they actually played the starring role. And in reconstructed form, the lifestyle may again start to dominate world affairs within the next few decades. (PreIndustrial vs PostIndustrial?)

From hunter-gatherers to early pastoral nomads, you get a gradual evolution, and at some point (the Neolithic revolution, probably between 15,000 to 10,000 BC) you get a fork in the road. One path leads to settled civilizations and the other leads to increasingly sophisticated modes of pastoralism.

Basically, if anything looks like it came out of a mobile lifestyle, pastoral nomads probably invented it. At a more abstract level, barbarian cultures create fundamentally predatory technologies: technologies that allow you to do less work to get the same returns, freeing up time for idleness. What Hegel would have called “Master” technologies. The barbarian works to earn the idleness which the luckier savage gets for free. Barbarian technologies, like savage technologies, are fundamentally sustainable, since using them tends to fulfill immediate needs rather than causing wealth accumulation. The connection to mobility is central to this characteristic: nomadic cultures do not accumulate useless things. It is a naturally self-limiting way of life. If it doesn’t fit in saddlebags or is too heavy to be carried by pack animals, it isn’t useful.

The mark of “Civilization” is the replacement of sustainable predatory patterns of life based on immediate consumption with UnSustainable non-predatory ones based on accumulation. Civilized cultures create different types of technology compared to barbarian cultures. What Hegel would have called “Slave” technologies. Technologies that keep you working harder and harder to accumulate stuff.

“Barbarians” are on average, individually smarter, but collectively stupider than a thriving settled civilization. One-on-one, a lower barbarian can outthink, outfight, and out-innovate a civilized citizen any day. But a settled civilization at its peak can blow a lower barbarian civilization away. (Collective Intelligence) The ideas of the smartest people (usually embedded higher barbarians) are externalized and encoded into the design of institutions, which can then make far stupider people vastly more effective than their raw capabilities would allow (this is the reason why the modern economic notion of “productivity” is so misleading).

At some point, you get a peak, and the decline begins. As entropy accumulates, it becomes a simple matter for another wave of lower barbarians on the periphery to take down the civilization. The reason this seems like a strange phenomenon is that we confuse refinement with advancement. Finely-crafted jewelry is not more advanced than roughly-hewn jewelry. A Boeing 747 is about a million times more capable than the Wright Flyer I, but it does not contain a million times as much intelligence. It is merely more refined (in the sense of cocaine, by the same logic I applied in The Gollum Effect). The difference between advancement and refinement is clearest in disruption. A beautifully-crafted sword is not more advanced than a crude gun. It is merely more refined. (Disruptive Innovation) The intelligence manifest in an artifact is simply the amount of human thought that has been externalized into it. Refinement on the other hand, is a measure of the amount of work that has gone into it. In Hegelian terms, intelligence in design is fundamentally a predatory quality put in by barbarian-Masters. Refinement in design is a non-predatory quality put in by civilized-Slaves.

Today as institutions of all sorts crumble and collapse, and the written word becomes a living, dancing, hyperlinked thing that would have made Plato happy, the barbarian is set to return. I’ll blog about this in a future piece.