Tragedy and Hope Reading Group, Discussion I

Our reading this time was chapter I, Western Civilization in its World Setting; chapter 2, Western Civilization to 1914; and chapter 3, The Russian Empire to 1917. Please post in this thread only if you’ve read these chapters.

For next week, let’s read chapter 4, The Buffer Fringe. I’ll post the thread on Tuesday May 21.

If you want to join the reading group, details are at >>1706. You’re welcome to start at the beginning and resurrect old threads, or to skip ahead and join where the group is currently, whichever you prefer.

In the spirit of keeping the discussion anonymous, I’ll put my own thoughts in a separate post, which will go up between 10 and 1000 minutes after this one.

Lots of good stuff in this reading. The beginning is largely a fast summary of his thesis in Evolution of Civilizations, which I also really liked. It’s a good macro-orientation. I found this overall accurate and helpful, but I’m gonna comment on some relatively smaller points I disagreed with:

I’m not persuaded that Western Civilization’s periods of international conflict follow from the cycles between Age of Expansion and Age of Conflict that Quigley describes. It seems like his “ages of conflict” are marked by greater *class* conflict, as he says, but the intensity of *wars* conflicts seems totally decoupled to me. The Thirty Years’ War falls outside of his Ages of Conflict, and that by itself makes the category useless for analyzing international war.

It looks to me like Western Civilization is still in its third Age of Conflict. This isn’t surprising—even accepting Quigley’s early start of 1893, it’s still lasted less time than the other two. Mr. Burja’s “First World Government” argument (https://www.palladiummag.com/2024/03/01/the-first-world-government/) might suggest that we’ve passed through history’s briefest Universal Empire, but I’m not convinced—empire isn’t the same as mere hegemony. Throughout the 20th century and continuing through today, we’ve seen the gradual intensification of the hallmarks of the Age of Conflict—declining rate of expansion, class conflict, and irrationality.

I don’t think that “Soviet civilization” is as separate from Western civilization as Quigley presents it here. In different civilizational classifications, they tend to agree about where to draw most of the divisions, but there’s often disagreement about whether you class Russia and Latin America as part of the West or as separate civilizations.

It reminds me of Quigley’s parable of the quartz crystals, from the opening to Evolution:

> During the summer that I was twelve years old, I walked four or five times a week to fish from Hingham Bridge. The distance was about five miles, part of it along a high railroad embankment that had been ballasted with crushed quartz. In this ballast were hundreds of quartz crystals. Each day I stopped awhile to look for a perfect crystal. I found some excellent ones, but never one that could be called perfect. The books I consulted told me that a quartz crystal should be a hexagonal prism with a regular hexagonal pyramid at the end. The ones I found were invariably irregular in some way, with sides of varying sizes, frequently with several crystals jammed together so that, in seeking to share the same material, they mutually distorted each other's hexagonal regularity. … The fact that ninety-nine percent are distorted does not deter the scientist from forming in his mind an idealized picture of an undistorted crystal, or from stating, in books, that quartz crystals occur in that idealized form.”

The West and Russia are like two quartz crystals jammed together and somewhat overlapping. Between them they form about 1.3 different civilizations—they’re different to an extent that Europe and the U.S. are not different, but the West and Russia are far, far more similar to each other than they are to, say, Islamic civilization, which is also descended substantially from Classical civilization. Quigley is overestimating the difference in part because of the Cold War. At the time people really did expect the capitalism-communism division to persist for generations, if not centuries.

One of the important things I want to emphasize from chapter 3 is that Russia began industrialization under the tsars. In the popular imagination Stalin often gets credit for the whole thing, when in reality he successfully completed a program that had started well before his time.

>The production figure [for Russian iron] for 1900 was not exceeded during the next decade, but rose after 1909 to reach 4.6 million tons in 1913. This compared with 14.4 million tons in Germany, 31.5 million in the United States, or almost 9 million in the United Kingdom.
Seems like the UK is already falling behind industrially by the verge of WWI.

> No one could trust anyone else, because revolutionaries were in the police, and members of the police were in the highest ranks of the revolutionaries.
So I looked up Stolypin’s assassination and holy shit Quigley wasn’t exaggerating about this. Apparently the assassin, Bogrov, was an anarchist, then turned and became a police informant, then turned again and sought the blessing of the Socialist Revolutionary Party for his assassination plot in revenge for Stolypin’s policy of encouraging pogroms against Bogrov’s fellow Jews. The Socialists declined to put their stamp on it, and he apparently dropped the idea. The next year, his old anarchist comrades, who had discovered his role as an informant, threatened to kill him. “When Bogrov asked how he could prevent this and "rehabilitate" himself, they demanded that he assassinate a Tsarist official.” Weeks later Bogrov went to his police handlers and made up a *fake* assassination plot, which he claimed he was trying to thwart. The police gave him a pass to attend the official events so he could identify the (fictional) conspirators for arrest, which Bogrov used to approach and murder Stolypin. This is a level of flailing and betrayal that I’ve never seen outside of Coen brothers movies.

>>1769
>The West and Russia are like two quartz crystals jammed together and somewhat overlapping. Between them they form about 1.3 different civilizations—they’re different to an extent that Europe and the U.S. are not different, but the West and Russia are far, far more similar to each other than they are to, say, Islamic civilization, which is also descended substantially from Classical civilization.

I'm biased in the opposite direction. Poland sounds to me like the prototype for a hypothetically intermediate category. It was Catholic, also with clear-cut republican features while also ending up as an early modern slave society in a very similar style to Russia.

I thought these 3 chapters were very interesting.

He summarized the history of western economic development in the following sequence: Manorial, Commercial, Industrial, Financial, Monopoly, Pluralist. I wish he had expanded upon the Pluralist more, but it seems like its too early in the book to discuss in depth. But his classification seems to have aged quite well.

If one looks at the economic development since the time the book was written: we've had a resurgence in financial capitalism with the start of the buyout boom of the 80s. Not sure how one would classify an economy based on signing free trade deals to outsource manufacturing, but that also was an important trend. Lastly we also had a software boom that had some combination of financial, monopoly and industrial elements to it. Nonetheless, major parts of the economy seems to have persisten under the Pluralist Capitalism framework.

I independently had thought of the development of the American economy since the industrial revolution in a parallel framework. I thought of it as, before reading this book, Industrial/Entrepreneurial, Managerialization/Financialization that is beneficial, Managerialization/Financialization that is pathological. I'm curious to get to when he discusses the Pluralist economy more.

Parallel to his arguments on diffusion of developments to peripheries, it seems like different countries have different forms of capitalism. And the Chinese are at the Industrial & Financial capitalist stage. However, their capitalism is a little distinct in that it seems that its not purely profit maximizing. I wonder if two economies one with a majority Pluralist economy (US) and one with a majority Industrial economy (China) compete for economic/technological dominance, what will come out of that. It seems like unless the US can reform, China will gain the upper hand, because they are at an earlier stage of development in which they haven't lost their dynamism.

>>1774
> He summarized the history of western economic development in the following sequence: Manorial, Commercial, Industrial, Financial, Monopoly, Pluralist.
Of the industrial forms, it seems to me that the big difference is between the original entrepreneur-owner control structure, and the various other forms which came after. The progression he describes from control by bankers (“financial capitalism”) to control by managers (“monopoly capitalism”) to control by technocrats (“pluralist economy”) is all accurate, but for practical purposes the differences seem relatively small between these three later types. The important factor is that all of them place control in the hands of men who are far less familiar with the process of production, and far less attached to the success or failure of the enterprise, compared to the older entrepreneur-owner class. This is perhaps the biggest reason for the relative slowdown of technological progress since the 19th century, and on his model that slowdown is the fundamental driver of the 20th century Age of Conflict.

In recent decades it seems like the pluralist economy mostly dissolved when the technocrats failed to train any successors worth a damn, leading to a reassertion of monopoly capitalism under the control of managers, with the notable exception of the clique of new entrepreneur-owners carving out a niche in software, which has seen the world’s fastest technological progress as a result.

ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ ᴏɴᴇ

The idea of classifying civilizations into Ages reminds me of Ray Dalio's cycles. Clarifying the core of Western civilization was insightful. Periphery and core are interesting.

ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ ᴛᴡᴏ

> The birth of a powerful civilization at any or several of these points would be of primary significance in world history, since it would serve as a counterbalance to the expansion of Soviet Civilization on the land mass of Eurasia.
Quigley predicts the Sino-Soviet split.

Quigley predicts the demographic cycle, which I found shocking that he saw so far in advance.

Imagine some concept starts as a "wave" and diffuses outward to different regions. In an internet-driven world, this "wave diffusion pattern is different.

ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ ᴛʜʀᴇᴇ

The distinction between man as innately good and evil as simply its lack reminds me of many Christians and the common character in which they profess the goodness of man and the gentleness in which they treat others.

Yet I do not find goodness wholly convincing for I find certain traits in myself. I stepped on a girl's foot in Kindergarten for no reason other than the way she looked at me. It was an instinctive feeling in which I had to destroy her. No different from certain people I meet in society who I instinctively know are enemies. Alas, murder and battery bring down the full power of the state because violence is a threat to group cohesion, but this saves me from people who would wish me harm as well.

When the deer and wolf meet under the silent moon, do you think there's a moment of sadness before the inevitable fight? I first heard this from BAP, but the idea that some are naturally enemies and destined to fight makes sense.

We see mentions of a continuation of progress, a potential Christian idea of linear time as espoused by Thiel and like.

Nationalism is mentioned and the power of the groups it can create or split off from other groups. Human society is that of groups and how groups bind together and their feelings for one another.

Quigley laments for this World of Yesterday, shattered by the war and how the conceptions resulted from it even continue today. I look at Elon and I know he is not an evil man. But society now believes in bad men and good society. Since these conceptions still persist, I will get pushback even here for saying that Hitler was not uniquely bad. Wiesel writes that good men and bad men exist everywhere. Even in the depths of a concentration camp will you find guards that treat everyone equally and those who show favorites. How could Hitler and the people around him do such things if they did not truly believe in what they had to do for their people who had existed in a state of such deprivation after WWI? And if you read his speeches and think of that time, you too will become angry at the great injustices. And if you stand outside Dachau and look at the long gravel courtyard, you too will feel the pain that millions felt, shuttled off to ends for reasons by which they had no means in.

The order by which nationalism, industrialism, liberalism, and democracy arrive deserves more study.