Lengthening Low-Tech History

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Just so. Enough ethnocentricism makes racism rather superfluous. As long as people don't accept anyone who didn't grow up alongside them as human, it doesn't really matter whether they are predisposed to classifying strangers according to skin colour. If everyone except fairly close relations* is considered a dangerous potential mutant, prone to cannibalism and random acts of gruesome terrorism, it doesn't really matter whether you're trying to make common cause with distant relations or with exotic tribes. It's always going to be hard to view others as reasoning beings.

*The norm during most of human history.

IMO, the really insidious part about the 'scientific' American style system of racism (and its European antecedents and cousins) is that 'race' was conceived of as an innate, inborn, essentially unchangeable quality (at least in one generation). A system of religious oppression will often allow for conversion. The same with political ideology. Even the common sort of ethnic prejudices might be overcome by adopting local customs, marrying into the tribe, etc. But 'true' racism is especially nasty because the people on the bottom of the racial hierarchy are fixed there forever.

Some systems of 'racial hierarchy' or caste allow for more granularity and flexibility than all that, of course. Latin American ideas about 'race', rooted in the old castas systems, seem to be more nuanced. Not that I'd want to be an Indian in some of those countries!

The system that we had in most of the United States from the 19th through the mid 20th Century was harsh.
I don't mean that there weren't black folks, Indians, etc who did well for themslves, or that all whites treated all non-whites like dirt. Exceptions are not hard to find-- but the brutality of historical American racism is hard to deny.

I'm sad to say that racialist thinking remains a problem in my country. The problem is heavily concentrated on the political left wing and in the cruder parts of popular culture. It shows in lower expectations/double standards, special interest paternalism, ugly media exploitation, and divisive 'identity politics'-- and it remains harmful.

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by 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.

Yes that's quite true.

Originally Posted by David Johnston2

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.

Interesting solution with the vulcanism and tectonics. It seems like cities would develop wherever safe zones are if people can reach them though just having less cities is helpful too. Of course too harsh an environment might end up totally stopping things.

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.

And it's a theory that tends to come up in connection with the "the ancient Greeks could have had steam power for use beyond what was basically toys but chose not to."

I think it's not slavery but easy and cheap access to labour that is deleterious to technological progress and even then it's of limited effect.

Originally Posted by Seneschal

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

I know the question isn't exactly easy to answer in detail but the GURPS forums are full of people with all kind of expertise and so far I've been pretty happy with the thread.

Originally Posted by Seneschal

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).

Yeah my concern was really how to slow down societies that already have the technology development quickening technologies

Originally Posted by Seneschal

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.

The "dumped into lap" idea is quite interesting but it's difficult to have people capable of reproducing a technology's products while not quickly learning the theories behind them.
Are there any historical examples of people using technology they can duplicate without relatively quickly getting the underlying theory? SF can bypass this by using crazy durable tools and possibly automated factories but it seems hard to justify in fantasy. I suppose having one of the societies in the world that otherwise might advance faster be slowed by depending lap technology might be useful for variety.

Originally Posted by Seneschal

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.

I'm pretty okay with having some variety of slowed innovation but I don't really consider it something you can just say and consider the problem solved. People who are otherwise human-like aren't just going to not advance for very long periods of time without active suppression. It's worth noting that ASOIAF dates are substantially exaggerated in-universe in the opinion of the maesters.

Originally Posted by Seneschal

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

The meandering has been great! Please feel free to continue.

Originally Posted by 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.

Hmm. I'm interested in the titular subject but I'm unsure to what degree it can answer how to slow down technological development over an area larger than any nation over a period of time of thousands of years since even if their theories about "extractive institutions" are true for obvious reasons making everything an extractive institution won't slow things down much compared to historical advancement.

Originally Posted by Bruno

The reason why much fiction that was written after the 1900s-ish and before 1940s-ish seems to have long long long history (Conan, and Cthulhu, I'm looking at you two very hard) is that the idea that the world was older than 6000 years was really beginning to take hold in western culture - but there wasn't the science to try and estimate how old it actually was.

It's like having the bottom fall out of your history books - suddenly instead of a nicely bounded existence there's a vast unknown gulf. So a lot of writers just went hog-wild and made up fun-sounding numbers. Or stole numbers from the Theosophists, who'd gone hog-wild etc. :)

And of course once people started growing up reading those books, they started writing more settings with long long histories, and a trope is born.

Interesting perspective. I was thinking more of the standard post-Tolkien fantasy thing "After a slumber of ten thousand years during which men have used swords and plate armour the entire time the Dark Lord has arisen to try to take over the world!" then Conan but this seems like a plausible origin for the idea when combined with the attempt to increase the epicness by throwing a few zeros on the end which is after all seen in SF too.

Originally Posted by Dalillama

This would work quite well in many fantasy settings. Many mythologies hold that some deity or other was the first one to teach humans technology x (Agriculture, metalworking, etc). In a world where that's literally what happened, the humans just know that the God of Smiths says this is how you smelt ore and forge metal, and that's it. Why does it work that way? Because the gods said so, that's why. David Weber's Safehold books explore a sci fi variant of this, where the founders of a colony world used mindwipe and other technologies to set themselves up as 'Archangels' and deliberately set out to build a permanently technologically stagnant society.

Yeah but that's just the start. Once you get a hold of the technology you would normally start to mess with it. I suppose starting with just no messing with stuff tradition at all and reasonably easy conditions might leave things in a static situation.

Originally Posted by malloyd

Infinitely?

Seriously, "progress" may be more unusual than not. Many technology packages changed very little over quite long spans of time. Once you are far enough into TL1 to be generating city supporting surpluses you may be doomed to some progress - cities generate new problems needing solutions regularly, the surplus that keeps them alive also allows diversion of resources to try out new stuff, and having a lot of people in one place greatly enhances the chance a hyperspecialist will be able to find a market for his craft and an apprentice to teach it to before he dies. But even then, pretty much all the world's ancient urban centers ran through a couple millenia and two or three replacements of dominant cultures without leaving TL1.

The thing is is that I want the doom of progress stage to be hit and I want progress to happen. Things just totally stalling is worse than things progressing too quickly. How long do you think an area can stay in TL1 once they have hit the progress of doom stage?

[combatmedic]

I've come across the "Hellenistic or Roman steam age derailed by slave labor' argument, but I'm doubtful that it can be defended strongly. Labor supply and cost might have been part of the equation, sure, but from what I have read it seems that the engineers and artificers really weren’t close to a working steam engine that would actually be useful in industry. Some cool gadgets> Yes. But metallurgy, mining technology, and a whole host of other factors made an Alexandrian industrial look highly unlikely.
Not impossible, but unlikely.
Or maybe it only looks that way in retrospect? That’s the tricky part about history, ours and alternates. We cannot know. We have no way to reproduce the exact conditions of the past and test hypotheses against a control, as a scientist would work. It is fun to speculate about might-have-beens, though! And it can be useful as a way to shake up fixed thinking about history.

Now, if somebody had invented a printing press with metallic type (not as easy as it sounds) and if the Romans had not defeated Carthage and unified the Mediterranean world—then I could see important innovations arising earlier and diffusing more quickly.

That could jump start something big, and you might have steam engines by the time of our Medieval Period...

[Sindri]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

I've come across the "Hellenistic or Roman steam age derailed by slave labor' argument, but I'm doubtful that it can be defended strongly. Labor supply and cost might have been part of the equation, sure, but from what I have read it seems that the engineers and artificers really weren’t close to a working steam engine that would actually be useful in industry. Some cool gadgets> Yes. But metallurgy, mining technology, and a whole host of other factors made an Alexandrian industrial look highly unlikely.
Not impossible, but unlikely.
Or maybe it only looks that way in retrospect? That’s the tricky part about history, ours and alternates. We cannot know. We have no way to reproduce the exact conditions of the past and test hypotheses against a control, as a scientist would work. It is fun to speculate about might-have-beens, though! And it can be useful as a way to shake up fixed thinking about history.

Now, if somebody had invented a printing press with metallic type (not as easy as it sounds) and if the Romans had not defeated Carthage and unified the Mediterranean world—then I could see important innovations arising earlier and diffusing more quickly.

That could jump start something big, and you might have steam engines by the time of our Medieval Period...

Yeah I don't agree with the derailed steam tech thing which means that I'm dubious about arguments that it is attached to. Of course PCs are bound to come up with some (Probably deadly.) use of even the most toy like of devices but they get in weird situations and have ludicrous budgets. At best for more general use I can see them being used as toys regularly for some purpose and very slowly improving over time.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by Sindri

Yeah I don't agree with the derailed steam tech thing which means that I'm dubious about arguments that it is attached to. Of course PCs are bound to come up with some (Probably deadly.) use of even the most toy like of devices but they get in weird situations and have ludicrous budgets. At best for more general use I can see them being used as toys regularly for some purpose and very slowly improving over time.

There's been some joking about inventing a Gutenberg type press with moveable type in my online Birthright game.

That actually wouldn't be unreasonble if a PC had the right skill set and adequate funds (17 or 18 INT would help). Or perhaps if the guy playing the duke poured a lot of money unto a project started by some clever artisan who was tired of carving wood blocks for printing.
The setting is basically Rennaisance/Late Medieval. Most of the basic elements needed for the press and type combo already exist, social and technological. But no one has put it all together or made the conceptual leap needed.Then the metallurgical and other technical difficulties would have to be overcome.

[Gadget]

Adding in magic makes it more "plausable" why invent chemical fertilizers and crop rotation when the god of agriculture can bless your crops to grow larger and healthier, why invent gun powder when the mages guild can enchant a fire rod for you, why make high quality steel when mithril or some other magic ore exists.

[Ji ji]

We often think that history of science simply couldn't be slower that as it has been.
Yet we can think of stirrup, a very simple device. Until something thought of it, it doesn't appear. And it could be discovered a lot of time before, yet it simply doesn't happen.
Gunpowder is a simple thing, yet passed centuries (or millennia) between its possible discovery and its actual discovery. And what of technology, without gunpowder? Would it be researched an advanced steel working? Without cannon, what of galleons and oceanic navigation? Without oceanic navigation, what of advanced mathematics? And so on.
Side by side, we can think of cultures that, in similar technological conditions, shows a much slower improvement rate. Until 1868, Japanese warriors and armourers doesn't care about spring mechanism and advanced locks for arquebuses, althought they possessed advanced metallurgy. Scientific method develops in western culture as an offspring of millennia of specific culture, from Greek philosopher through Latin and christian ones until Galileo. Moreover, modern (post-medioeval) scientific thought was made possible only considering a minute, precise time measurement; without interest for spring mechanism and clocks, nor precise physical laws nor mechanicist reductionst conception of nature would be possible. There are infinite factors that have to be taken on account.
On a more basical level, there are psycholinguistical ipothesis that stress the role of Greek and Latin languages, and of phonetic-vocalic alphabet, in construnction of rational-analitic thought of western culture. Following these theories, in a world with different languages and alphabets any technological improvement would be much, much slower.

It's likely that ultrafast science and technology development in human history is the exception; that is, it's likely that we followed the more improbable path, among the infinite possibilities of our history. Remove a single factor of our history and LT stand for a much longer period. Remove several factors (or a single essential factor) and the development of modern technology becomes impossible for an undefined amount of time. Very slow technological improvement could be the more normal way of development in human history, our actual experience being the almost incredible exception.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Gadget

Adding in magic makes it more "plausable" ...

And if devising new magical effects is hard intellectual work, as it is often portrayed, that creates an excuse for engineering being somewhat neglected.

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by Sindri

The thing is is that I want the doom of progress stage to be hit and I want progress to happen. Things just totally stalling is worse than things progressing too quickly. How long do you think an area can stay in TL1 once they have hit the progress of doom stage?

There's no strong reason to think you can't stall at any point for however long you like, before having another period of advance. Historically, well, it seems like all civilizations spent at least 2000 and up to 4000 years at TL1 and TL2 lasted between 1000 and 2000 years. Often, and especially for the TL3 to TL4 transition many of the historical cases change because somebody with a higher technology invades. I don't think 8 or 10,000 years to hit TL4 is ridiculous even in a culture making as much "continuous" progress as seems typical for human civilizations.

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by johndallman

And if devising new magical effects is hard intellectual work, as it is often portrayed, that creates an excuse for engineering being somewhat neglected.

Yeah, this one I do buy, if magical insights and innovations don't often bleed over into mundane technological insights and innovations.