big ideas – Book and Sword

Who Said “Technology Makes the World Smaller”?

an embossed terracotta with a gorgon's head with some of the gorgon's hair and headcloth broken away leaving only pairs of sharp fangs, almond-shaped eyes, and curled hair — An antefix (cap for the end of the peak of a tiled roof) with a gorgon’s head from around 580/570 BCE in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The technology of mass-producing terracottas in moulds goes back to Old Babylonian Mesopotamia about 1200 years before this was made, and the headcloth shows that this Gorgon is influenced by Egyptian art. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/248331 (Accession Number 10.210.44)

Today I will put on my Quote Investigator hat to ask a simple question: where did the cliche that technology makes the world smaller comes from? Back in 2005 Thomas Friedman had to torture metaphors to declare that The World is Flat because ‘the world is small’ was too common a topos in the business press. As I was refreshing my memory of the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three German Intellectuals defending Kaiser Wilhelm’s invasion of Belgium, I noticed a familiar phrase in the pacifist counter-manifesto. That sent me to Google Books to look for parallels.

What Are ‘Big Idea’ Books?

Over on the group blog Crooked Timber there is a retrospective post on David Graeber’s Debt ten years after they hosted a discussion of the book on the blog. The post and comments say something very important about ‘big ideas’ books which scientists mostly take for granted, but might not be obvious to curious, clever people who are not active in research:

I think the best way to understand Graeber is as a writer of speculative nonfiction. He is often wrong on the facts, and more often willing to push them farther than they really ought to be pushed, requiring shallow foundations of evidence to bear a heavy load of very strongly asserted theoretical claims. But there is value to the speculation – social scientists don’t do nearly enough of it. Sometimes it is less valuable to be right than to expand the space of perceived social and political possibilities. And that is something that Graeber was very good at doing.
Henry Farrell

Violence Makes Permanent

The ancestral apple orchard is almost ready for harvest Military historians tend to dislike the idea of the Decisive Battle. Its surprisingly hard to find a time where a single battle decided a war over something more complicated than who should be king. Battles make for great stories but they are only a small part... Continue reading: Violence Makes Permanent

W.G. Lambert on Theological Imperialism

Assyriologists have a lot of big ideas which nobody outside the field seems to know. When I was living in Innsbruck, I stumbled over this article while looking for a different one. It was so striking that I took a few minutes to make a photocopy: Religious controversy was probably more common in Babylonia from... Continue reading: W.G. Lambert on Theological Imperialism

Democratic Peace but Warlike Democracy

When I was growing up a fashionable big idea stated that two democracies almost never go to war with one another. The exceptions tend to be very old (like Athens vs. Syracuse or Rome vs. Carthage) or very small (such as the Western Allies v. Finland in 1941-1944 and some armed fishing disputes after 1945). This democratic peace theory fit the mood in the 1990s because it said we could put an end to war just by changing political systems and not tedious negotiations about arms control and international law. My amateur understanding is that its not a bad theory as long as you treat it as a rule of thumb not an absolute (both ‘war’ and ‘democracy’ are vague enough that advocates and critics can interpret things the way they want). But there is another observation that democracies are often more warlike (and put more resources into war) than kingdoms or oligarchies or one-party states or military rule. I was reminded of this by Raimund Schulz’ article on the Persian Wars in the Journal of Ancient Civilizations.