The Modernity Machine

The case for a 13th century birth rather than 16th century

The Contraptions Book club January chat discussion of City of Fortune by Roger Crowley is now vigorously underway and will continue for the next week. The February pick is Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires by David Chaffetz.

Ever since I read Barbara Tuchman’s book about the Black Death, A Distant Mirror, in 2020 (my notes here), I’ve been enamored of the idea that modernity began not in the 16th century, with the Age of Exploration, as in conventional accounts, but in the 13th (which was also an age of exploration¹). Apparently I’m not alone in thinking this. Sachin Benny referred me to a book, Before European Hegemony: The World System AD 1250-1350: that makes one possible argument for this case, based on the rise of cities and urban culture. This is compatible with, but narrower than, the case I want to make. Sachin, incidentally, just published a great little book, Thinking About Leaving, which I blurbed, that you should check out.

This 300-year rewind isn’t a trivial act of revisionism. Moving the birth of modernity this way locates it temporally in the Islamic and Mongol phases of globalization, rather than the Western phase, and constructs it primarily in political and socio-economic terms rather than philosophical, artistic, scientific, or technological terms. It identifies modernity with the rise of a particular cognitive mode that appeared globally and independently at multiple loci, driven by a few shared causes like the Black Death and the Mongol expansion. It reframes the European experience of 1400- as a specifically European experience of modernization, rather than a prototype for a global one that spread mimetically through a pre-modern world. It reframes the scientific and technological revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries as largely decoupled leaps that irrupted into already modern societies (and minds) worldwide, rather than acting as modernizing forces that simultaneously Europeanized (or westernized) the societies and minds they acted on. And finally, it reframes the philosophical-cultural strand of the European experience — comprising the (artistic) Renaissance and (philosophical) Enlightenment, which predated the scientific-technological strand, but came after the global birth of modernity — as a making of the specifically European mind, which did not in fact go global at all, and has remained restricted to the West.

Westernization vs. Modernization

In the model I want to lay out, non-Western populations globally became technologically modern through the effects of scientific and technological revolutions acting on a landscape of regional early modernities that took shape 1200-1400. The science-technology strand, being far more weakly attached (if at all) to the European historical experience (and to a lesser extent, the Islamic historical experience), acting alone without the presumed force of the philosophical-cultural strand acting in concert, arguably increased philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic distances rather than decreasing them, driving a long 400-year divergence of early modernities rather than a convergence of pre-modernities into a western mode of being.

This might feel like a very contrarian point, but it feels increasingly compelling to me. One strong point in favor of this conclusion is that the religious map of the Old World, ie not counting the Americas and Australia, has remained largely unchanged since 1200 (the last significant change being the replacement of Buddhism by Islam in Central Asia, which was mostly complete by 1200). The geographic contours of religion, understood as a complex assemblage of philosophy, culture, and aesthetics, have only marginally shifted since 1200. Almost the entirety of the shaping of religious “market shares” through evangelism or war was complete by then.

An interesting data point is that Christianity in India, after centuries of evangelism by European denominations, still features a significant pre-modern fraction (Syriac, at 18%) that does not derive from the European experience of Christianity. Europe did not even succeed in fully westernizing non-Western Christians, let alone displacing other religions. Science and technology, on the other hand, are approaching 100% penetration.

In other words, philosophical/cultural/aesthetic “westernization” over the centuries has been largely cosmetic, restricted to suits and ties. Science and technology, on the other hand, have sunk deep everywhere (in the process losing any path-dependent memories from early Europe and Islam), creating a diversity of technologically modern, but only cosmetically westernized civilizational regions.

This last point feels increasingly subjectively true to me as I grow older. Though I write and (mostly) think and speak in English, and have been thoroughly steeped in a Western lifestyle and traditions of thought for at least half my life, there is a sense in which, though I feel like a “technologically modern” person, I don’t feel like one in the Western mould. There is something uniquely and inalterably Indian about my specific way of being technologically modern (a way that can be traced to the 13th century saint Madhvacharya).² A way that neither Indian reactionaries who might reject my “Westernized” ways, nor Western reactionaries who might find me too alien, can change, anymore than I myself can. The enculturation of technologically modern minds worldwide does not, in fact, recapitulate “westernization” unless the mind is in fact “western” by heritage. I suspect even third or fourth generation non-European immigrants in the West, cannot “westernize” except through sufficiently transformative intermarriage.

This means, ironically, that people I consider as authentic representatives of cultures worldwide are culturally distinguishable modernists rather than traditionalists.

Traditionalists worldwide, and reactionaries in particular, want to unwind approximately 700 years of the making of their own minds, to recover historical versions of themselves who are both pre-modern, and largely decoupled from the rest of the planet, genetically and memetically. It is no accident that all traditionalists seem to want to rewind to roughly 1100 or so. That is roughly when, by their reckoning, everything started going to hell in an unending orgy of global cultural entanglement, miscegnation, secularization, and technological transformation. Islam is a convenient motif for the global transformation, since it was often the proximal cause due to its geographically central origins, but is not ultimate cause. One bit of evidence: Islamists themselves, of course, want to rewind to the First Caliphate. They are no more attached to the modernity they midwifed into existence than traditionalists from other cultures.

Desiderata for a Modernity Origin Myth

A particular case for a “birth of modernity” moment, of course, is an act of normative historiographic construction rather than empiricism, so to make the case, not only must we re-interpret facts (with salience rescoped and different patterns of emphasis), we must make a case for a different understanding of modernity. In other words, what we are setting out to do here is to craft an alternative origin myth for the birth of modernity, which is what any account of it must necessarily be, including the contemporary one that dates it to the 16th century.

The case I want to make is one based on an idea of psychological modernity, in the same sense that physical anthropologists make a case for anatomical modernity. Sometime between 1200 and 1400, psychologically modern humans emerged (not counting a possible earlier leap to unicameral minds that Julian Jaynes argued for). And we know this not just from the ways humans began to think through that period (as evidenced in their writings worldwide), but from the ways they began to organize politically, socially, culturally, and religiously, worldwide, and in parallel.

I’ll make this more precise in a moment, but here is an quick-and-dirty informal test: Do you think you could talk to people from a given era as rough cognitive peers, despite all differences in state of knowledge, technological capability, philosophical orientation, and aesthetic attitudes? Or would you end up talking to them like children, to be humored in their Santa Claus type mental models of reality? Let’s call this the Santa Claus test.

In applying the test to two contemporary cities of the 13th centuries, Venice and Constantinople, I conclude that while Venice was psychologically modern, Constantinople of the same era was not. Reading about them, I feel like I could comfortably talk to Venetians, but would have trouble talking to Byzantines in any adult way.

And while I could make up time-travel thought experiments to make the point, a better way is to trace the evolution of the relationship between the two cities themselves. Venice went from being an insecure upstart looking up to an idealized and idolized Constantinople as the glorious pinnacle of civilization, to looking down at it as a cringe and pathetic childlike backwater. Venice didn’t just come to overtake Constantinople militarily, economically, and politically. It outgrew it psychologically, in the sense that a child might outgrow a parent trapped in the mindset of their youth. By the late 13th century, it was no longer a worthy mimetic target the way it had once been. And when it did become modern, it did so in an Islamic mould, as Istanbul.

You see similar patterns throughout the world. In the other history I know well, Indian, we find Muhammad bin Tughlaq (1325-1351), the 18th ruler of the Delhi Sultanate, arguably the first psychologically modern ruler of India. He was a psychotic nut job in many ways, cruel and capricious, but included in his “madness” was establishing precocious patterns of modernity in South Asia. In many ways he resembled Trump, with reactionary and regressive tendencies. But in other ways he was something like a visionary humanities scholar of his time coming up with (and fumbling) bold and precocious visions. A specific parallel — he launched an ill-conceived fiat token currency, centuries before the idea caught on globally. That project resembles Trump’s incoherent “made in America” crypto revolution that apparently kicks off with minting his own shitcoin, and which makes at least some of us crypto-positive types shudder. With friends like these, who needs enemies, etc.

The Tughlaq reign happened in a milieu that was modernizing fast generally. The Sufi and Bhakti movements (which included the aforementioned Madhvacharya with whom the programming of my mind recognizably begins), like the corresponding run-up to the Protestant reformation in Europe, were rapidly shedding all remaining vestiges of Axial Age religiosity, and developing early schematic modes for pluralist (if not always peaceful) co-existence with radically different religions.

I suspect we’d find similar patterns in China in the wake of Genghis Khan’s conquests, and in the Turkish Middle East after the fall of the Seljuks. But let’s get back to Europe, since I don’t have room to do a global version of this argument.

The European Modernity Machine

I want to return to the European story as the reference case, if not the prototype, because the emergence of modernity is easiest to map out there. Here, I’d argue that the pivotal event was Philip IV’s decisive strike against the Templars in 1307, followed by the relocation of the (French-pwned) papacy to Avignon in 1309. The run-up to this event, and the aftermath, effectively created the European edition of what I want to call the modernity machine, which emerged in roughly similar forms worldwide, through the next couple of centuries.

The main elements of the modernity machine (European edition) are:

1. A secularly shifting balance-of-power configuration of political actors governed by negotiated contractual relationships that systematically favored previously weaker parties, rather than theological axioms

2. The beginnings of what we’d call a technocracy in the form of the culture of medieval knights (the rung below the Baronial class which negotiated the Magna Carta) as well as the clergy.

3. The beginnings of secular pluralism, in the wake of the Crusades, which prefigured the modern patterns of religious co-existence that would get fully worked out and realized via events like the Reformation (and comparable events worldwide) and the Peace of Westphalia.

4. The beginnings of accountability to individuals, via mechanisms besides popular insurrections and revolts, most clearly visible in the rise of free cities as a category of geographic organization distinct from agrarian estates or royal courts.

All this started about 300 years before most people assume it did.

This scheme is roughly similar to, and compatible with, the one Francis Fukuyama sketched out in The Origins of Political Order.

It is hard to wrap your mind around the fact that the temporal distance between 1300 and 1700 is longer than that between 1700 and 2025 (400 vs. 350 years). In 1300, while there is some science-ing in the modern empirical, experimental sense going on, especially in the Islamic world, there are no true scientists. Not even pre-scientists in the Leonardo Da Vinci or Giordano Bruno mould. There are no secular philosophers in the sense prototyped by Spinoza. Philosophy at this time would have meant Thomas Aquinas.

In technology, metallurgy for armor, and horse-breeding technology are improving, but even the earliest industrial technologies, such as the seed-drill, are in the future. And though the dominance of heavy cavalry and associated weaponry is notable and visibly different from Roman era technology, it is important to note that the essential unit — the heavy cavalry knight — dates back to the Persian cataphracts of antiquity. The gap, even in horse-breeding and metallurgy, is a matter of incremental advances and geographic diffusion of horse technology and metallurgical capabilities, not qualitative leaps. The seeds of industrial technology are just beginning to get planted in Europe, in the form of the arrival of gunpowder, so did not play much of a role in the early stage.

This then, is the milieu in which the modernity machine took shape in Europe. But arguably, every element required for the modern mind to emerge was in place. By 1400, there were lots of ordinary people all over the world (ie not just rare geniuses) you and I would consider modern, and be able to hold up a conversation with, modulo language. We wouldn’t have to either talk past each other, or adopt a parent-child mode of indulgence of pre-modern modes of thought.

Now, why is this important? It’s important because it suggests that the modern mind had to already be in place before particular political, philosophical, artistic, scientific, or technological leaps were even possible to conceive.

For example, I just watched a short documentary series on the Stuarts (17th century) arguing that the “modernity” was inaugurated in England during the reign of James II, the last Stuart king, in the wake of the Great Fire of London. From what I know of English history, this strikes me as wrong. I’d date the birth of English modernity to the decisive role of longbow archers in the Battle of Crécy in 1346. The Stuart era featured an important event (political unification of Britain) but not the birth of English modernity.

Now this admittedly sounds like just another nerdy opinion on a specific case, but there’s an informal but systematic theoretical apparatus you can apply to arrive at such judgments, based on the idea of a societal machine constructed out of six prototypical relationships.

The Six Relationships of Modernity

Let’s begin sketching out the contours of the modernity machine by tracing the evolution of six relationships among four classes to which I’ll give default modern names: the monarch, the oligarchy (upper nobility with large land-holdings of sufficient size to be politically consequential), the technocracy (including the knightly and priestly classes, overlapped in cases like the Templars), and workers (the peasantry).

Each of these relationships experienced a pivotal event between 1200-1400, which set it on a secular course to a different homeostatic equilibrium than the one that prevailed before 1200.

1. Monarch-Oligarchy: The Magna Carta (1215) is the best known reconstruction of the idea of a monarch from an individual with divine rights to a regular human, but there are comparable events elsewhere, such as in the decisive reining in of the hereditary Doge model in Venice, making it a precocious modern republic. It would take a few centuries of ascendant monarchism and declining feudalism, and the English Civil War in the 17th century, to truly lock in the new relationship, but it was established in its essential form by the mid-13th.

2. Monarch-Technocracy: Philip IV’s move against the Templars, who had steadily gained power through the Crusades as a monastic order protecting pilgrims, but had begun to grown independently powerful and wealthy by 1300, was the defining moment for two reasons. First, it acknowledged that political power could arise from codified knowledge (of military or theological varieties) as much as from land. Second, it established that this form of essentially technocratic knowledge was portable, allowing the knightly class to easily pivot from being tenants/clients of feudal agrarian estates to high-ranking court officials. So though the specific event weakened the knightly class, it established the pattern of highly flexible and mercenary technocratic loyalties. This would reach a peak of power in the wake of the Black Death, in the form of the mercenary companies, such as John Hawkwood’s White Company, and the Italian condotierri (mercenary generals). It is worth noting that this relationship evolved faster and further in the Islamic world.³

3. Monarch-Workers: There is no single event that can serve as a motif for the secular shift in this relationship, but a few interesting candidates include the Assize of Arms of 1252, requiring all English yeomen to become proficient with the longbow. This law, an ordinance amending an 1181 (ie pre-Magna Carta) Assize extended military preparedness requirements downwards from the knightly class to the working class, thereby acknowledging the importance of the knowledge capital of ordinary people. The longbow, notably, is a simpler weapon than the knightly crossbow. The Robin Hood and Swiss William Tell legends date to this era (though Tell was a crossbowman). A lesser-known candidate event: the War of Chioggia between Venice and Genoa (1378) similarly forced the general population to learn technical sailing skills.

4. Oligarchy-Technocracy: This too is a transition with no single clear marker, but perhaps the most important element was the growing challenge to the institution of primogeniture from the clergy (which was increasingly staffed by resentful younger sons acting through religious laws to constrain the power of their elder brothers). Through the financialized economy of indulgences, the clergy began to exercise a growing influence on oligarchic society — they made increasingly restrictive religious rules to govern the behaviors of the laity, and manufactured an economy of exceptions to ease them. The later story of how corruption relating to indulgences triggered the Reformation is well known, but what is fascinating is the length of the trajectory building up to it, and how strongly it constrained the oligarchic classes. Criticism of corruption in the clergy goes back at least to John Wycliffe (1330-1384), predating the Gutenberg Press (1450s) by a century, and Martin Luther’s 95 theses (1517) by nearly two centuries. I just learned that one of the earliest uses of the printing press was in fact the mass production of standardized fill-in-the-blank indulgences, which were bought in bulk by the nobility. So the Gutenberg press accelerated religious corruption before it played a role in religious reformation (a bit like how the introduction of textile machinery initially strengthened rather than weakened slavery in America, by driving up demand for cotton). This relationship is also important in that it significantly empowered women. One argument I’ve heard is that women began gaining property rights in part because childless widows could be persuaded to leave their land holdings to the church. More broadly, technocratic work was accessible to women. Nunneries rose along with monasteries for men.

5. Oligarchy-Workers: I haven’t thought this one through because relationships here are particularly varied and messy, but the defining moment here is clearly the Black Death, which suddenly gave newly scarce labor extraordinary bargaining power, leading to the terminal decline of anything resembling serfdom in Western Europe (though we find it persisted longer the further east you go towards Russia). The rise of cities is an important factor here, because even without being bonded to agrarian estates, the working class needed somewhere else to exit to. And something to do there that was not farming. Cities provided this outlet (urbanization played a similar role in Islamization in India⁴). Even more importantly, since urban economies were more cash-based, they turned the working class into a financial asset owning class that would eventually exercise considerable collective financial power, by financing debt for the upper classes. This is where stock markets begin. You find this trajectory in a particularly accelerated form in the history of Venice, which had no land-based agrarian estates to begin with, at least in the early era, and where even the poor could buy shares in voyages thanks to the emerging commercial technologies. So even though the Venetian shipping sector was a terrible work environment (many of the oarsmen in particular were galley slaves from Slavic regions), workers had a particularly strong position in relation to oligarchs and Doges.

6. Technocracy-Workers: This is perhaps the most interesting of the six relationships, since it would grow to be the most important one, and even in the 13th century prefigured modern patterns of manager-worker relations of the sort portrayed in modern workplace comedies like The Office. The Battle of Crécy (1346) is perhaps the landmark event here, when English longbow archers prevailed over the knight-dominated French army. Another element of this transition is the rising power of guild-organized urban workers, within an overall sumptuary economy based on status. Unlike the oligarchy, which gradually ceded power to the knightly technocracy (the “Professional Managerial Class” is far older than James Burnham would have you believe), the worker class arguably gained power at its expense. A good-deal of law-making agency appears to have shifted from the clergy to the guilds during this period (which had a religious character too, often featuring patron saints), giving the working class growing independence from the managerial control of the technocratic (priestly-knightly class). Though this would peak far later, in the 19th century, and get reversed in fully modern times due to the rise of an industrial technocracy, the historical pattern of knights on horses trampling rioting peasants and burning down villages during peasant rebellions would gradually disappear. On a narrow military front, this is also the era of the rise of a growing infantry advantage over heavy cavalry through a mix of technical and tactical advances. Eventually the infantry dominance exceeded that of the Roman era, through the diffusion of musket-power (muskets in the hands of infantry vastly amplified the longbow-over-knight type asymmetry).

The European Modernity Machine (EMM?) can be understood as the restructuring of these six basic relationships, and through this restructuring, a reshaping of each of the four kinds of minds in relation to each other and to their shared circumstances. Like a set of lapping discs, the four kinds of minds smoothed each other out, and began to work together in recognizably modern ways.

Animating the Configuration

One way to understand the pattern of evolved relationships is that in every case, the previously weaker party gained significant and persistent new agency. Power shifted noisily but steadily downwards in the four-layer hierarchy.

This secular trend is obscured by short-term reversals all over the story. In many of the pivotal events I’ve cited, the weaker party in fact lost ground (such as the Templars vs. Philip IV). But the longer-term secular trend favored the weaker party, and the pivotal events are pivotal precisely because they mark a growing awareness of a threat from below, followed by a reactionary attempt to restore an older order from above. In most well-executed cases, such reactionary moves yielded a temporary reversal favoring power over years and even decades on occasion, but ultimately the trajectory regressed to its secular tendency over centuries.

Imagine this machine, taking shape starting around 1250, being wound up like a clockwork toy, and being allowed to run for 700 years, and you get what we currently living generations recognize as our modernity. In terms of a technological metaphor, the machine was shifting steadily from one equilibrium point to another in a surprisingly controlled rather than revolutionary way.

Philosophy, art, science, and technology were to some degree merely fuel for this machine that had been set in motion, and generated by it, rather than constitutive forces determining its fundamental character. I’m perhaps overstating the argument for effect, but not by as much as you might think.

If you run this machine for 700 years, you get various end-game states connected surprisingly smoothly to opening positions:

1. Monarchies have all but disappeared. Even in the case of de facto modern monarchs like Putin or Xi, or Trump if he gets his way, the above-the-law power of monarchial figures is a pale shadow of what it was before 1200.

2. Oligarchies have evolved from large-scale landholders with serfs and client technocrats (knights and priests) on their lands to modern monopoly capitalism employing educated classes from universities. Though we commonly make use of hyperbole along the lines of “user-generated content is sharecropping on oligarchic feudal platforms,” what we have today is a pale shadow of the way it used to be, where peasants could be physically whipped and even executed by lords, and even knights and priests could be beaten into submission with crippling debt.

3. The technocracy has evolved radically. Technical knowledge based on science has replaced military and theological knowledge as the source of power, but the distance is not as large as you might think. In modern technocratic power, the distinction between hard-edged scientific knowledge and softer ideological paradigm knowledge is blurry. We have “alt facts,” and arguments about whether knowledge about climate and vaccines is “science” or “religion” precisely because the fundamental social structure of knowledge as held by technocracies has not changed at all. Institutionally and organizationally, we are as much in an age of appeal-to-ecclesiastical-authority as ever. The nature of the “indulgences” economy may have evolved from being based on religious sins to being based on bullshit-priced “carbon credits” and “land acknowledgements” but it is still an economy of indulgences. The so-called virtue-signaling economy is at least 800 years old at this point.

4. Finally, the working class, despite the perennial gloom of socialists, is the only class to have made steady, secular gains at the expense of the other three, and computing technology has steadily driven the advantage further. All politics today is working-class politics. If you used ChatGPT today to answer a question you might previously have consulted a technocratic expert for, congrats, you’re continuing a story that began with yeomen practicing with the longbow in the 1250s. That oligarchs own the data centers, or that technocrats created much of the data that trained the AI models, should not obscure the fact that the big winners are the working class.

This then, is the picture of the emergence of modernity we see repeated worldwide, with minor differences. A scheme of 6 basic relationships being launched on a trajectory of secular change over 700 years. A trajectory that is surprisingly smooth and unbroken, despite the effect of calamitous events and noisy confounding factors.

This is why, when we look back to at least some minds from the 1200s, not only can we recognize ourselves in the mirror, we can recognize our world in the mirror.

2025 in a 1300 mirror

This longue durée view of the evolution of modernity allows us to view contemporary events in a particular historical light. Adopting Barbara Tuchman’s distant-mirror methodology, what are some correspondences we can draw?

Again, though there are half-a-dozen parallel stories to be told here, I’m going to focus on one — the American story in 2025 onwards, analogized to the Western European story 1200-1400.

1. First off, I think we’re at the beginning of a new long arc. If 1200-1900 was the arc from early modernity to modernity, the arc from roughly 1960 on is going to be a similarly long one from modernity to post-modernity. Given technological acceleration, it might take 350 years instead of 700 for the wound-up clockwork machine to wind down, but it won’t happen in 5, 10, 30, or 100 years. The world has accelerated, but not by that much. And there are rate-limiters in how fast new sorts of mind, harboring a new consciousness can diffuse.

2. This means that just as we currently view “modernity” as being visibly born in the 17th century but really born in the 13th, I suspect future generations, in say the year 3000, will view “postmodernity” as having been visibly born in say 2500, but really being born right now. And just as I have characterized what happened in 1200-1400 as the birth of psychologically modern humans, I suspect what we’re seeing the beginnings of what will eventually be recognized as sociologically modern humans, who can associate with each other in ways far more complex and technically sophisticated than we can imagine. To them, we’ll look like primitives, but recognizable ones, with our “social media”, “follows”, “likes”, “AI friends”, and “crypto” trading. We won’t look entirely like children.

3. Trump’s shock-and-awe action against DEI programs feels something like Philip IV’s move against the Templars. But as in that case, it’s a temporary reactionary reversal of a longer-term trend that is pointed steadfastly in the opposite direction. Most of the secular gains in social justice made by the arc from 90s era “PC” to 2010s “Wokism” are not going to get reversed that easily or at all. There is far more historical momentum behind this trend than people realize, whatever the fates of current champions.

4. The much debated ongoing Fall of Woke feels uncannily like the corruption-driven collapse of the 13th century technocracy, with its economy of priestly indulgences and unaccountable patterns of warfare (arbitrary knightly warfare then, social justice warfare today). The parallels are uncanny. The self-appointed religious authorities of today similarly went from catalyzing reasonable and popular shifts in consciousness to capturing institutions and political careerism within a generation. The mission of protecting the weak and vulnerable (in the case of the Templars, protecting pilgrims to the Holy Land) got derailed and transformed into a program to capture the assets of weakened incumbent powers. The Fourth Crusade getting diverted to sack Constantinople (1202-1204) is a good motif for what happened to Woke. The story of the Templars took 200 years to unfold (1118-1307). The story of Woke unfolded in 35 years (counting from Crenshaw’s 1989 intersectionality paper). As in the case of 1202 Constantinople — an obsolete city in thrall to a regressive monarchy desperately in need of a refresh — the institutions that were targeted for capture and extraction by a derailed moral mission mostly deserved it. But that doesn’t alter the fact that the moral mission derailed in ways that are hard to condone.

5. Reactionary tendencies are at a peak now, as they were through much of the birth of modernity, 1200-1400. Many events during that period could be interpreted as attempts by incumbent powers to restore patterns of societal organization from early medieval era or antiquity. Then as now, these tendencies scored several notable victories and temporary reversals, to the point that the traditionally recounted history reads like a glorious record of temporary reversals of “decline.” But the overall direction is unmistakeable: Modernity continued to win. The six core relationships continued to shift in the same general direction. Absolute monarchies enjoying the presumption of divine authority steadily lost ground to contracted relationships with other classes. Oligarchies lost ground to technocracies and working classes. Technocracies lost ground to working classes.

6. In the specific case of the West, an interesting analogy can be made between Islam in 1200-1400 and China today. Then, as now, the entire story can be told from the “Other” perspective. There is an Islamic story of the birth of modernity to be told that would closely parallel the one I’ve told about Europe in rough outline here. But in the Western story, that parallel story of modernity being born appears in a very different light — as the story of a demonic force taking shape beyond threatened borders. There are uncanny parallels between how America talks of China today, and how Europe talked about Islam in the wake of the Crusades. In both cases, there is reluctant acknowledgement that the demonized other (really, a parallel evolutionary story) had things to offer and teach. It is only recently that Western understanding of the Islamic legacy is beginning to recognize the original elements, beyond merely conveying Greek classics through time from the West to itself. I think we’ll see something similar in how we narrativize China’s role in shaping the birth of post-modernity. It will be tempting to reduce it to low-cost, uncreative “execution” of genius visions from an era of Western ascendancy, but this comforting narrative is already showing signs of severe strain (go catch up on the Deepseek discourse for a sampling).

7. Though the arc is new, the secular trends look like they’re pointed in the same direction — towards continued devolution and decentralization of power. Despite apparent (and mostly unsupported by empirical data) swings back towards hierarchy and centralization, we can expect that in the longer term, the secular trends will reassert themselves, leading to increased leverage of a further evolved technocracy over the oligarchic and monarchic layers, and of a postmodern working class over what remains of the technocracy.

8. In the 1300s, the seeds of what would become the Reformation took root (you can look around and try to spot the John Wycliffe of Wokism — so far I see no candidates). On the military technocracy side, knightly codes of chivalrous conduct, and the ideal of courtly love arising to mitigate what was effectively medieval rape culture (courtly love was a kind of #MeToo mechanism of its time) both gathered momentum in the 13th century. The Arthurian legends grew popular. Women and religious minorities steadily gained security and political agency over the 700 years, despite periods of backsliding and retreat. Secular increase in technocratic power was the biggest driver of this, and can be expected to remain so.

9. Quite a few people, including those on the Right (suffering a kind of victor’s paranoia perhaps), are calling the peak on Trumpism and its rhymes worldwide. But if the Philip IV vs. Templars story is any guide, these dynamics are simply not that quick to unfold. Even the contemporary rise and fall of Woke took 35 years to play out. Reactionary Right tendencies are only about a decade old. While the historical model does suggest that the monarchic-oligarchic reactionary ascendancy will eventually falter and reverse, there is no good reason to think it will happen in 4 years. A more plausible time-frame is 20-50 years. Not long enough for the Right to accomplish a full Retvrn to the Bronze Age, but long enough that navigating the return to secular historic trends will both take longer, and a lot more work than anyone realizes. Rebuilding the broken Progressive machine along new lines, after first cleansing it of accumulated corruption and bankrupt philosophies, is not a one-election-cycle task. It is a generational task.

10. The rise of AI is perhaps best understood as a working-class positive singularity, as centuries of accumulated technocratic knowledge, in one fell swoop, is gifted to the working classes. It might be compared to the introduction of longbows in our reference period. The models that have been open-sourced are already good enough to permanently weaken the technocratic class’s monopoly on knowledge capital. And inevitably, as hardware costs plummet in the next cycle, the “estate” of compute hardware required to run at least inference, and a good deal of fine-tuning class training, will be within reach of individual working class members. It would strain my finances, but I can already afford to buy enough hardware to run a personal state-of-the-art inference rig (in knowledge terms, I’m probably best described as a lapsed and fallen technocrat) and practice archery with it every Sunday. In 10 years, basically anyone will be able to do the same.

11. The impact of crypto is less mature, but is again empowering the working class disproportionately at the expense of the other three classes. The “ownership” economy has meaningfully shrunk from homes, cars, and retirement funds to a much smaller consequential unit, and one that is portable beyond national borders. Here we might make an analogy to the early use of the Gutenberg press to print indulgences (religious shitcoins?), with the actual print revolution yet to come.

Coda: Science and Technology in 2400

If the historical pattern holds, the ongoing birth of the scaffolding of the postmodern world and the postmodern mind is merely a kind of preparation for modes of being and ways of life that are yet to be invented. That’s why the Permaweird feels weird. Our minds are increasingly ready for living as far out as say 2700 AD, but our world itself is going to transform itself to match much more slowly. At least some of us are frustrated citizens of a future that will only arrive after our lifetimes.

This future of course starts with shifting relationships of the sort that unfolded 1200-1900, but it also involves big secondary revolutions downstream.

This time around, the world is already globalized and highly divergent, so I don’t think local/regional cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic revolutions will be as significant. But arguably, once today’s emerging technologies get deeply embedded in the world, there will be events comparable to the scientific revolution of the 1600s-1700s, and the industrial revolution of the 1800s.

From the perspective of those future revolutions, whose contours we can only begin to guess at in our science fiction, the emerging technologies of today should be analogized to events like Genghis Khan’s rise in the 12th and 13th centuries or the proliferation of personal ranged weapons like longbows and muskets. While the technologies themselves are interesting enough, it’s their obvious capacity for triggering entirely new evolutionary arcs for humanity that are worth paying attention to. I don’t buy any of the apocalyptic or utopian visions being crafted around today’s technologies. What they’re doing is reshaping the evolutionary environment in ways that are going to reshape our minds, so we look at the world very differently. What’s interesting today is not anticipating and preparing against how the world is changing, but leaning into how we ourselves are changing. I don’t want to imagine the world of 2700. I want to look at today’s world with eyes from 2700.

And perhaps someday, people in 2700 might look back at at least some of us, and wonder at how it feels like looking at themselves in a distant mirror. And unlike us in relation to our 1300s forebears, they might even be able to actually talk to us, in the form of archived digital personae.

I, for one, look forward to my digital copy scoring a place in the Futurama style head-museum of 2700.

1. Though the Old World was known to itself in rudimentary outline in 1200, it actually took the Mongol invasions and the rise of Islam for this understanding to arrive at any sort of geographic accuracy. So this period was a kind of terrestrial Age of Exploration of the Eurasian-North African landmass, featuring the adventures of figures like Marco Polo and Ibn Batuta. By contrast, the geographic understanding of the Old World evidenced in the writings of Arrian in the Periplus (1st century AD) and the travels of Chinese monks was… terrible.

2. The reformist saint Madhvacharya (1238-1317) founded the sect of Hinduism my family belongs to. It could be loosely considered part of the reformist Bhakti movement, which had effects similar to the Reformation in Europe. Along with the Sufi movement (and Sikhism a couple of centuries later), it laid the foundations of modern South Asian patterns of life. Madhva marked one of the main starting points for “modern” Indian minds, all of which date to roughly that era. Though upper castes might trace a mythologized descent from Vedic times, actual lifestyles originated around 900-1400. For example, I am technically a Brahmin from the lineage of the quasi-mythological sage Kausika, who lived, if he did, perhaps around 1000 BC. This lineage, or gotra, still plays a role of some consequence (gotras do not inter-marry for example), but almost the entirety of how my family lives is shaped by Madhva traditions dating to the 13th century. Even I, living in 21st century America, do most of my cooking not just in Indian ways, but in a specifically and recognizably Madhva style. A way that I am mostly unaware of until I encounter alternative styles (“What? You put garlic in your rasam?”). Similarly, North Indian Kshatriyas, though they may claim mythological descent from the clans mentioned in the Mahabharata, in practice derive their lifestyles from medieval Rajput clans whose lifestyles were very strongly shaped by their encounter with Islam.

3. The light cavalry sipahi of the Ottoman empire transitioned to being a paid professional soldier earlier than in Europe, perhaps in part because it took a smaller estate to support a light cavalry soldier to begin with, compared to a heavy cavalry knight. And in the upper ranks, the so-called “slave” system of high-ranking military and court officials of Eastern European descent in Turkish courts (and earlier, Turkish descent in Arab courts) achieved a transition similar to what the Magna Carta achieved in England.

4. Urban artisanal groups often converted en masse to Islam in medieval India, without coercion, in part because their livelihood depended on the patronage of Muslim rulers. So did many lower castes working in technologies like leather tanning. The found both better economic prospects and security, and social dignity, within Islam. This is of course a narrative violation for Hindu nationalists who’d prefer to believe that Islam arrived in India entirely by the sword, and that all conversion was coerced.