Post #4043216

2026-07-23 18:16 UTC

I’m coming back to Tom Murphy, the astrophysicist who doomed himself into being a primitivist who celebrates babies dying because there are too many people and high infant mortality makes us love the survivors even more. Here he is, helpfully illustrating my point in my post above: “I lean toward the conclusion that modernity was inevitable. My position is reasonably strengthened by the observation that we are, in fact, where we are.” https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2023/09/was-modernity-inevitable/ In other words, human society produced an outcome, which means that outcome was inevitable, and to prove it was inevitable, Murphy can point to the facts that a) the outcome exists and b) things happened in the past before the present. Murphy bolsters his argument by invoking “game theory” without actually explain in what he means by this or engaging in any actual game theory (he is, after all, an astrophysicist and not a game theorist). This is a common trope in this sort of STEM approach to human society—an invocation of a sort of naive, “folk” game theory, in which one can imagine a plausible set of interactions that might lead to one outcome prevailing over another. A Just So story about states and industrial capitalism inevitably and inexorably emerging and dominating all alternatives.

Replies (1)

@HeavenlyPossum@kolektiva.social 2026-07-23 18:27

I’ve spent much of my life diving into history, and most of the last decade exploring what we might call Deep History, an exploration of human society that treats the last few thousand years as just one small part of the human experience. Deep History teaches us that human societies are incredibly diverse, to the point that virtually every permutation has been tried somewhere by someone. There have been murderously violent societies and societies with virtually no violence at all. There have been egalitarian societies and rigidly hierarchical societies. There have been peaceful, egalitarian farmers and murderously authoritarian foragers. There have been stateless cities and hunter-gatherers with slaves and kings. There have been expansionist farmers and farmers who lived in the same spot their ancestors did 10,000 years earlier. And while every human society adapts in response to its material circumstances, there is no mechanical process that automatically and inevitably produces any particular outcome (none of which are permanent anyway). Human society does not mechanically emerge from circumstances like the result of a math problem. It is the outcome of deliberate decisions, but also random chance, and also emergent behavior. States dominate the world now, but it wasn’t obvious that would be the case until only a few centuries ago; Murphy’s teleological approach papers over all of the defeats, collapses, and near-misses that could have taken history in very different directions.

Open ##4043215