Lengthening Low-Tech History

[Sindri]

A lot of fantasy (And speculative fiction in general.) worlds have histories that are with respect to their length given the tech level rather... exaggerated. There is a good reason for this of course. More history (Not more years, more history.) is generally better than less history.

Of course speculative fiction is in love with means of messing with tech level to best approximate the desired mix of technologies while maintaining other factors so a lot of ink virtual and otherwise has been spilt on the subject that doesn't need repeating here.

My question is: before taking into account technology crashes, deliberate suppression or situations leading to lack of incentives for specific innovations and similar methods used to mess with technological development how slowly can technology advance while still making progress (From TL 1ish to TL 4ish say.) with the various combinations of bad luck, bad surroundings and cultural factors that slow development.

[Flyndaran]

I think the best way to slow technological advances down is to make travel and communication very difficult between isolated groups. A world of a thousand populations of X people will not advance anywhere near as fast a world of a thousand times X people.

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by Sindri

A lot of fantasy (And speculative fiction in general.) worlds have histories that are with respect to their length given the tech level rather... exaggerated. There is a good reason for this of course. More history (Not more years, more history.) is generally better than less history.

Of course speculative fiction is in love with means of messing with tech level to best approximate the desired mix of technologies while maintaining other factors so a lot of ink virtual and otherwise has been spilt on the subject that doesn't need repeating here.

My question is: before taking into account technology crashes, deliberate suppression or situations leading to lack of incentives for specific innovations and similar methods used to mess with technological development how slowly can technology advance while still making progress (From TL 1ish to TL 4ish say.) with the various combinations of bad luck, bad surroundings and cultural factors that slow development.

It can nearly stagnate for thousands of years, if you just make sure to not allow lasting cities. A history of regular devastating earthquakes such as what would be expected you were playing on a Space world with high vulcanism and tectonic activity would slow technological advance to a crawl. And while I'm foggy on why pre-columbian civilization in the western hemisphere kept experiencing demographic collapses that seemed to work nearly as well.

[nanoboy]

The institution of slavery is another thing that can retard technological development. Some have hypothesized that by using slaves for menial labor, the owners can avoid developing the technologies that would make work more efficient. Slaves have neither the means nor the incentives to find new ways of plowing fields, extracting ore, or felling trees.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by nanoboy

The institution of slavery is another thing that can retard technological development. Some have hypothesized that by using slaves for menial labor, the owners can avoid developing the technologies that would make work more efficient. Slaves have neither the means nor the incentives to find new ways of plowing fields, extracting ore, or felling trees.

Maybe.

Except that slave owning societies like the United States, Ancient China, Muslim Spain, Classical and Hellenistic Greek states, etc have often been at the forefront of technological progress.

[Flyndaran]

As an offshoot or more general form of that....
Only those well off have the time and resources to push for advancement. If they, for whatever reason, really really want to maintain the status quo, then they won't be so gun ho about messing it up.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

Maybe.

Except that slave owning societies like the United States, Ancient China, Muslim Spain, Classical and Hellenistic Greek states, etc have often been at the forefront of technological progress.

When owning slaves was economically rational, it was popular. When it wasn't, it became less popular.
Racism could keep people slaves and force the market to find a use for them even if a more economically feasible option was available.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

When owning slaves was economically rational, it was popular. When it wasn't, it became less popular.
Racism could keep people slaves and force the market to find a use for them even if a more economically feasible option was available.

I'd say that you are generally right about the importance of economic feasibility, but I'd caution you against assuming everyone makes decisions solely on a 'rational' economic basis. Indeed, your comment about 'racsim' seems to argue against such an assumption. But what is this about racism forcing the market to find a use for slaves when more economically feasible options were available? You'll have to give examples, because I don't understand what you mean.


Have you read Time on the Cross, or more recent studies of the profitability of slavery in the antebellum USA?
Unlike ancient or medieval slavery, we have fairly good data for slavery in our country.

I'm convinced by the evidence that slavery generally did pay in the labor intensive cash crop agriculture of the Southern states. Slaves were used in many areas outside agriculture, too, of course.
Quite a few antebellum planters (who owned the largest numbers of slaves) were interested in new technology and improvements in agronomy, and quite a few experimented with things like mineral-based fertilizers, clock-timed labor,and other new tools or methods.

I think that we should be wary of broad ideas like 'slavery retards the progress of technological or economic development.' I see no strong case for this with American slavery or slavery in European colonial systems. Maybe one can make a case in other historical contexts. But what would be the basis for comparison? Slavery in various forms (or various things lumped together as ‘slavery’ in a simplistic fashion) was pretty common to most civilized nations until rather recently.

[Seneschal]

Originally Posted by Sindri

Before taking into account technology crashes, deliberate suppression or situations leading to lack of incentives for specific innovations and similar methods used to mess with technological development how slowly can technology advance while still making progress (From TL 1ish to TL 4ish say.) with the various combinations of bad luck, bad surroundings and cultural factors that slow development.

I presume the answer to that is something anthropologists write papers on, so you might be disappointed with the vague answers here.

Of course, there are civilizations that don't innovate beyond the basics, like modern tribal societies, and there civilizations that seem to "decide" (at least apparently) not to advance further than what they're comfortable with, like the Minoan civilization. It was was culturally quite sophisticated; they had games, professional entertainers, fashion, many of the things we don't readily think of as "primitive", but (according to my archaeologist friend) they had a certain disdain towards raising children and had them do most menial jobs. Despite their perpetual TL1-ness, they were actually quite egalitarian and enlightened for their era.

It seems to be that the urge to progress is not something inborn, inescapable and inherently human - all throughout the middle and upper paleolithic we struggled to even light a fire, and there's no way of knowing, if you went to, say, 60,000 BCE and revealed to the guys there the joys of sedentary life and agriculture, whether they would establish their equivalent of Mesopotamia within a decade, or just be baffled and continue being nomads for 50,000 more years. By what we know now, the man of the upper paleolithic wasn't biologically all that different from ourselves so, except for the huge paradigm shift that the new technology would represent for him, there would be nothing inherently stopping him from understanding/using it.

Certain catalysts foreshadow massive technological development in almost all cases - written language, transportation, agriculture, infrastructure, metalworking, etc. Before you introduce them, I'd say that TL0 may continue indefinitely. Afterwards, it's a bit trickier, since every one of those things fosters further discoveries that are hard not to figure out, given time. I'm not saying it's impossible to stall progress, but it certainly strains belief in a fictional work. Even if you go for the "psychologically static" card, it's difficult to use wheels, pulleys and bows and not figure out the basics of movement and energy transfer (even if you don't call them that or understand how they relate to other things).

A potentially good plot-tool and reason for remaining at a given TL is a lack of understanding of underlying principles. If there was no gradual accumulation of knowledge leading to certain discoveries - if they were just dumped in somebody's lap with a brief instruction manual - there would be no means to reverse-engineer the technology. We could use it, but we couldn't build on it without knowing what drives it, especially if it's easy to use, difficult to understand, and requires trained scientific methodology (which we might not have yet developed) to study. An example of that would be the Covenant from Halo, that starts out more advanced than its human enemies, but regards its scavenged Precursor technology as divine, and considers studying it to be heresy. The humans surpass them in some areas very quickly.

There's the Traveller variant where humans exceed one of those "psychologically static" species. This usually doesn't sit well with me because it's a tired cliché to make the aliens "unimaginative" so the humans could stand out (like in Mass Effect, that doesn't really handle it very well). In Traveller it's justified with the limitations of jump technology, the size of the empire, and the cultural/philosophical/bureaucratic leanings of the Vilani - fair enough, there were "advanced" societies on Earth that might appear to be slowing themselves down purely over culture or psychology. However, I don't buy that when we're talking about seven thousand years of stagnation, as depicted in A Song of Ice and Fire, where Westeros remains at TL3 because GRRM thinks he can just handwave it.

Sorry, I'm meandering a bit. I'll stop.

[Purple Haze]

Read the book Why Nations Fail (blog http://whynationsfail.com/). Extractive institutions cause development to stagnate because it threatens the hegemony of the ruling elite.