History through this lens seems very different from the history presented in e.g. textbooks. For example: Many wars and power struggles barely matter. My summary doesn’t so much as mention Charlemagne or William of Orange, and the fall of the Roman Empire doesn’t seem like a clearly watershed event.
I think this is a useful way of thinking about history: what are the key outcomes within particular domains, and when did they happen? I think that doing this ends up highlighting certain outcomes as being especially important, and leads to some surprising reflections on how things developed at different times and in different places. You’ve highlighted a lot of cool stuff in this post, and I like the summary table a lot.
But I think that the approach tends to strip out much sense of causation, especially but not solely indirect causes of important outcomes.
For instance, it seems unclear to me what the counterfactual impact of various enlightenment ideas (highlighted in bold green on your timeline) would have been were it not for the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (included in the “other” category), which I am under the impression did quite a lot to forcibly spread Enlightenment ideals around Europe. Perhaps, under less favourable socio-political conditions, some of the thinkers and ideals we now think of as very important and influential would never have attained the reach that they did, and ended up more as curious asides along the lines of...
Porphyry, the Greek vegetarian. Did you know that there was an ancient Greek who was (according to Wikipedia) “an advocate of vegetarianism on spiritual and ethical grounds … He wrote the On Abstinence from Animal Food (Περὶ ἀποχῆς ἐμψύχων; De Abstinentia ab Esu Animalium), advocating against the consumption of animals, and he is cited with approval in vegetarian literature up to the present day.”
Political events, changes in social and economic organisation, etc can all affect the domains and outcomes you/we care about, sometimes in difficult to perceive ways.
As another example, among the various social movements focused on some form of moral circle expansion that have been driven by allies rather than the intended beneficiaries themselves, many seem to have picked up substantially (in terms of resources and attention dedicated to them, if not also success) from the ~1960s onwards:
The environmental movement
The anti-death penalty movement
The anti-abortion movement
The children’s rights movement
The animal rights movement
The Fair Trade movement (and probably other efforts to help people in the Global South)
I haven’t fully got my head around what’s going on there, but I suspect there are some important underlying social/economic forces that don’t get picked up by studying each “Moral progress and human/civil rights” outcome as a discrete category.
(Some overlap with SammyDMartin’s point, but they phrased it in terms of “ideas on empowerment and well-being down the line”, whereas my point is about causation more broadly.)
I broadly agree that my summary has this issue. If there were causal stories I were confident in, I would try to include them in the summary; but in fact I feel very hazy on a lot of multiple-step causal stories about history, and have defaulted to leaving them out when I think the case is quite unclear. I’m sure this leaves my summary less informative than it would ideally be (and than it would be if I knew more about history and were more confident about some of these multiple-step causal stories).
I think this is a useful way of thinking about history: what are the key outcomes within particular domains, and when did they happen? I think that doing this ends up highlighting certain outcomes as being especially important, and leads to some surprising reflections on how things developed at different times and in different places. You’ve highlighted a lot of cool stuff in this post, and I like the summary table a lot.
But I think that the approach tends to strip out much sense of causation, especially but not solely indirect causes of important outcomes.
For instance, it seems unclear to me what the counterfactual impact of various enlightenment ideas (highlighted in bold green on your timeline) would have been were it not for the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (included in the “other” category), which I am under the impression did quite a lot to forcibly spread Enlightenment ideals around Europe. Perhaps, under less favourable socio-political conditions, some of the thinkers and ideals we now think of as very important and influential would never have attained the reach that they did, and ended up more as curious asides along the lines of...
Political events, changes in social and economic organisation, etc can all affect the domains and outcomes you/we care about, sometimes in difficult to perceive ways.
As another example, among the various social movements focused on some form of moral circle expansion that have been driven by allies rather than the intended beneficiaries themselves, many seem to have picked up substantially (in terms of resources and attention dedicated to them, if not also success) from the ~1960s onwards:
The environmental movement
The anti-death penalty movement
The anti-abortion movement
The children’s rights movement
The animal rights movement
The Fair Trade movement (and probably other efforts to help people in the Global South)
I haven’t fully got my head around what’s going on there, but I suspect there are some important underlying social/economic forces that don’t get picked up by studying each “Moral progress and human/civil rights” outcome as a discrete category.
(Some overlap with SammyDMartin’s point, but they phrased it in terms of “ideas on empowerment and well-being down the line”, whereas my point is about causation more broadly.)
I broadly agree that my summary has this issue. If there were causal stories I were confident in, I would try to include them in the summary; but in fact I feel very hazy on a lot of multiple-step causal stories about history, and have defaulted to leaving them out when I think the case is quite unclear. I’m sure this leaves my summary less informative than it would ideally be (and than it would be if I knew more about history and were more confident about some of these multiple-step causal stories).