Listening to: Kevin Yost - Small Town Underground
Weather: post-rain muggy
Currently reading:
One Thousand Years of Non-Linear History - Manuel De Landa
Also reading:
After the Quake - Haruki Murakami
Manuel de Landa's book has redeemed itself and I have to admit, it was probably my general irritation with radical-left/anti-Bush crowd that was coloring my read. I get really irritated by people who think they are intellectuals and honestly believe that if you cannot understand what they are saying then it must be because you are stupid... in any case it is certainly not their inability to express their thoughts clearly... but enough of that.
De Landa's book has made some interesting points so far. In fact as the first chapter closed, it led me to another De Landa book:
War in the Age of Intelligent Machines. De Landa credits the rapid advancement in Europe in the 1300s to the heterogeneous cultural and political landscape present there. Though Islam and China were equally talented in developing innovations there was no inherent competition with those cultures to drive the innovation forward. Both cultures had a more or less centralized power base. In Europe, many cultures, religions and languages competed within Christendom for an edge. This competition drove innovation forward at much faster rates than in China or the Muslim world. In looking at what De Landa calls the arms race in Medieval Europe, I happened upon his other book which begins with the thirty years war in Europe.
Researching this era, one can see the principles De Landa describes in
One Thousand Years of Non-Linear History at work. As Maurice of Nassau liberates the Netherlands from Spanish rule and Gustavus Adolphis of Sweden defeats Tilly and the Imperial Army in Germany, the force of evolution in battle tactics is apparent. Innovation becomes the only way to stay alive in the 1600s. It's important to remember that until the 1300s vast areas of Europe were controlled by the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire and the Moores. For Europe adapting the strengths of the enemy and innovating and improving them they were able to outpace the Muslim invasion and turn the tide. Islam was not particularly flexible. It was a sin to adapt the ways of the infidels so innovations generated by Europeans were not flowing back into Islam. However with Europe the meshworks or power and influence traded new ideas back and forth developing them and improving them. For example Gustavus of Sweden adopted the tactics of Maurice of Nassau for use against the Catholics and perfected them for large scale use on the battle field.
What really intrigued me about the Lavas and Magmas chapter was the idea that a huge centralized culture or governing body generally precluded the kind of innovation we see during the Renaissance in Europe. Heterogeneity and competition generally push advancements. It dawned on me that the United States was originally set up on this model. A central government for some things and 50 smaller governments competing with each other to drive competition and advancement. This is a meshwork of what De Landa calls "Central Place Systems". The United States is also home to many large metropolises which act as nodes on the global network system and function more or less as city states - sprawling across state lines and into each other. Sadly, however, the current trend is toward more megalithic centralized federal government rather than this diverse meshwork of individual states and cities. The U.S. is heading into the same sort of situation that Islam and China were in just 1,000 years ago... a powerful state with no inherent competition to motivate it.
