this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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So as you might be aware, you've actually chosen an example with 2 simultaneous inventors. Alfred Russel Wallace came up with the same idea at the same time, actually sent Darwin a letter about it before anything was published, and was credited for it. To be fair, they had similar backgrounds, and like you say were a small group. However, there's plenty of inventions of the same thing separated across lots of time and space. Writing was invented several times is fairly isolated civilisations, and Gaussian elimination bears a German man's name, and was thought to be fairly new, but can be found in ancient Chinese works as well.
Who started the enlightenment? Voltaire is often on people's lips, but if it wasn't for the French revolution in his area just a few decades after his death, and which made him a sort of saint, he would have a much smaller profile. Meanwhile, if you go back further there's someone advocating some enlightenment-ish idea recorded from probably every century. Famous names taper off towards the middle ages in Europe, but then so does the record in general, and Arabs like Avicenna or Al-Ma'ari pick up the slack.
But every time writing was invented it had to be invented by a specific dude or a small group of dudes. It did not just come to be out of thin air, someone had to invent it and someone had to popularize it. And so with enlightenment - someone (maybe we don't even know her name) has to come up with an idea and others, whose names we know have to popularize it.
I get that you are saying that it might have been another person (or small group), sure - but in the end it has to be someone.
Okay, well, sure. Even if it's inevitably someone, there is an individual or individuals that it turns out to be in the end. I think it would be a large group for the Enlightenment, even if you remove the forgotten advocates of it, but I guess that's a nitpick. I'm a huge fan of it too, pretty much every other good thing has been a product of it.
On the subject of this way of viewing history, which came up in another place, yeah, it could be depressing, but it depends on how you look at it. Schopenhauer said we're almost powerless and it's awful, Nietzsche said we are and it's great. They were often speaking in more cosmic terms, but I think it applies here. It's also a lot less pressure, right? And, beyond that, I think it just fits the data really well.
I think it's important to note that what I'm talking about is a bit like statistical mechanics in physics (small, unpredictable events adding up to a more predictable whole), and statistical mechanical systems are often complex or non-deterministic. I don't think without heroes human society is actually much diminished; or are our moral responsibilities within it.
But without "heroes" who is doing the actual work? Like again: Darwin, Huxley and couple other dudes actually had to make observations, collect data, come up with an, at that time, absurd sounding idea and defend it against societal pressure. And you don't think that they have influenced history and could be replaced by anyone else? I vehemently disagree that the data fits your perspective.
Sure, if Darwin had been hit by a horse-drawn bus, we'd still have evolution. And probably a YouTube short about "The sailor-naturalist who almost discovered evolution (but died)". It would just be Wallace's theory of natural selection. There you go, one data point.
I was going to bring up some less clear-cut examples, but I guess I should ask what your point is, because I feel like I'm missing something. I think Darwin was a cool guy, but I don't think he was unexpected. Yeah, they did the work, but work is cheap, every peasant in history did work. Why should I care more about Darwin than the people who fed Darwin, and who were themselves (something like) inevitable?
Wait lets back up und make sure we understand each others point:
The way I see your perspective: you say that individual role in history is rather unimportant, we are all just part of some complex process wich leads to an inevitable progress through forces mostly outside individual control. Is it fair representation or did I miss something?
My perspective is: in the end it's individuals/groups who make specific things that contribute to progress, while sometimes the individuals might be replaceable, they sometimes also leave their individual marks on the events or theories they create (Freund vs. Jung for example - if Jung was more influential we might have quite different psychology). And even if they are replaceable, in the end it's still individuals that have to make things happen.
I actually have no idea where the process is going, and can't rule out the enlightenment as a transitory phase, which scares me more than anything. If you just meant progress as in evolving some way, then yes.
And this is where I agree, but don't see the significance. In the end the set of possible outcomes and their probabilities are the same. Is this a free will vs. determinism thing, maybe? Or maybe you're thinking in normative terms, while I'm thinking in in descriptive terms.
I think this more of a perspective thing, that might be related to free will vs. determinism.
Lenin or Trotkij taking power leads to rather different outcomes in my opinion.
(I assume you mean Stalin, unless this is a different guy I don't know about)
So far, yeah. I estimated two centuries for individual actions to wash out, though, and that was just one ago. On the other hand, if it would have lead to some complex chain of events ending in certain MAD, that could take millennia to become a human footnote, and would leave extinctions that may not ever be reversed. The 20th century was kind of a metastable point where everything is amplified.
I hear Trotsky was also pretty unpopular. He was Lenin's chosen heir, so I'm guessing he had a chance, but even if Stalin had died at some point pre-revolution it's possible Zinoviev or someone would have taken his place.
No I actually meant Leon Trotsky, just wrote his name from memory. He wanted more the Cambodian way of communism.
Even if I would accept that estimation, in those two hundred years the lives of many humans are greatly impacted, which is for me all that matters in the end. Since I like to view history from human point of view this seem pretty relevant. If you take an impartial abstract point of view - than nothing really matters since the universe will disappear anyway at some point. Maybe that's the difference in our perception.
Yeah, Trotsky vs. Stalin. You wrote Lenin, who you probably know was a predecessor to both of those two rivals, and who died of apparent natural causes related to old age shortly after the revolution.
Oh absolutely! We're not totally powerless, just nearly. In some ways that's harder, because we still have to try if there are some things we can make better.
In real life, I do activism, and I've been a vegetarian for years. What this has changed is that I focus more on the quiet background side of activism, and I don't stress out about being super ambitious. If I had money, I'd do philanthropy. If I was born into an autocracy, I'd just have to settle for being kind to whoever I come across, and supporting the less-terrible side when, outside of my control, wartime or revolution comes. And sometimes, I also try and contribute to the discussion intellectually.
The same would apply if I had been born Charles Darwin. I'm not Darwin, though, and the only thing I control are my own actions. He's just a part of history, like everyone else in that era. Many argue about the free will of individuals, but large groups definitely have no free will. For example, advertising and political campaigning, major industries, are built on top of that fact.