10-07-2016, 08:41 PM
(10-07-2016, 05:48 PM)Odin Wrote: Turchin's book is causing some rustled jimmies in Reddit's /r/BadHistory board, with people accusing Turchin of, well, bad history.
Apparently a lot of historians have a knee-jerk hate for quantifiable "grand unified theories" of history.
People who dislike a theory of history almost invariably see the history as "bad history". Thus
Quote:“The American polity today has a lot in common with the Antebellum America of the 1850s; with Ancien Régime France on the eve of the French Revolution; with Stuart England during the 1630s; and innumerable other historical societies,” Turchin writes.
elicits:
Quote:Okay, yeah: the American polity today has a lot in common with those examples. For instance, it is populated by carbon-based life forms. On the other hand, it is extremely unlike them in other ways: for instance, it is not a monarchy, her institutions are more or less designed to respond quickly to public crises and a few dry years in a row means a bunch of loan defaults rather than mass starvation.
Of course, we're all aware than Malthus is pretty much completely discredited by now, to the point where his ideas are used as an Awful Warning about the dangers of plausible theorizing in the absence of data. So it's kind of funny that he should be mentioned in this context; some kind of Freudian slip?
Face it -- if you are to compare the weird style of government in North Korea, wouldn't you be tempted to compare it to Uganda under Idi Amurderin' or to Russia under Ivan the Terrible and not to something socialist like Hungary under Kadar or Poland under Jaruzelski? But North Korea is a "People's Democratic Republic" (it does not serve the people of North Korea, it is certainly undemocratic, and it is clearly no republic), and not a formal monarchy.
Absolute power from father to son to grandson. That looks like a monarchy. And that is not the benign sort that one associates with the UK or even the effete monarchy of Louis XVI.
We have severe inequality in the USA, much of it the consequence of a few people making huge amounts of easy money from what have become largely-passive investments while working people find themselves squeezed all the harder on behalf of economic elites becoming increasingly distant and irresponsible. We have government by lobbyists, which is not democracy as Washington, Jefferson, Hamilton, Franklin, Jay, Madison, Monroe, and Adams (either one) saw as democracy.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.