The Modernity Machine II
A book club update.
We’re now 6 months into our book club. It’s easily the most fun I’m having this year. The 6 books we’ve read so far are:
January: City of Fortune by Roger Crowley.
February: Raiders, Rulers, and Traders: The Horse and the Rise of Empires by David Chaffetz.
March: Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition by Frances A. Yates.
April: Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography by Robert Irwin.
May: The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe by Elizabeth S. Eisenstein.
June: Monkey King: Journey to the West
You can find links to the books, chat threads, and a Google Form that earns you free subscription month credits for every month you read a book, on the book club page. I’m about to dole out the first tranche of the reward months.
July is a good month to jump in. It’s a side-quest month, where book clubbers can pick their own read within the theme, so you can choose your entry point. I have supplied a list of side quest suggestions (scroll to the bottom of the page), but you can find your own.
The picks for the rest of the year have already been posted. There’s a loose study focus theme to the book club. I outlined the initial version of the theme in The Modernity Machine (Jan 26), and this is an update to the thesis, 6 books in.
The theme is early pre-modernity. Looking for the emerging contours of what we now think of as modernity in books about, or from, roughly 1200 to 1600.
When we started out, I decided to use my curatorial BDFL privileges not just to make my picks, but also strongly urge a particular strongly colored reading perspective, based on a couple of ideas. I’m handing out free subscription months as a reward mainly to bribe people into adopting my perspective:
World as machine: In keeping with theme of this newsletter, we’re adopting a mechanistic, engineering perspective. We’re trying to do our reading with an eye to reverse engineering how the world works (and how it came to work that way) in a machinic rather than humanist idiom. So we deliberately go looking for machine metaphors, decenterings of the human, centerings of non-human things, and so forth. For example, I picked the February read because it centers horses rather than humans in telling the story of steppe nomads.
Horizontal history: History is generally told vertically in time, following course of streams of human identity — individuals, clans, tribes, dynasties, kingdoms, ethnicities, races. We’re deliberately trying to go horizontal instead, which is why we’re going geographically global but time-boxing our reading to a few centuries.
This has generally been a successful perspective, though not always easy to apply. The focal temporal band of 400 years was a little broader than I wanted, but it turns out that’s really about the shortest period within which a world machine can come into being and get turned on to power the planet. You really can’t make sense of important things that happened by around 1600 without going back at least to 1200.
Something similar is unfolding today. The modernity machine that was installed worldwide between 1200-1600 (the founding of various royal charter trading companies is a good bookend development) is reaching an End of Life state, and is about ready to be entirely decommissioned. The postmodernity machine that has been built over the last 400 years (1600-2000) is finally ready to be switched on.
The 1600 boundary ±50 years is when the completed modernity machine got powered on worldwide for the first time, and the postmodernity machine started to be envisioned and sketched out. In general, ~1600 feels like a good cutting point for a machinic and horizontal history perspective. A version 1.0 of the machine stabilizing, and a version 2.0 entering development.
Other perspectives will not lead to the same periodization cuts.
Fukuyama, focused on the evolution of political order from a philosophy-of-history lens, chose to make the cut in the 19th century (specifically, the Battle of Jena, ~1813).
If you’re focused on literal technology, the 1890s are perhaps the best cut point, since it separates the artisan era from the scaled-engineering and interchangeable-parts era.
If you’re focused on art and culture, the romanticism movement of the late 18th century is perhaps the right cut point.
Call it a technical conceit, but I think thinking in terms of world machines that combine the political, cultural, and technological within a single machinic paradigm, is in some ways the best perspective. It leads to the most elegant periodization of history. I’m trying to develop a systematic argument for the “succession of world machines” view of history based on information flow bottlenecks, intra-epoch vs. inter-epoch causal flows, and so on.
If you want to carve up historical reality at the joints, the points at which particular world machines get turned on properly for the first time, with all the key pieces in place, is a pretty good class of candidate points. The machines themselves take about 400 years to assemble for whatever phenomenological reasons, but they “turning on” seems to take no more than a generation. We just turned on the postmodernity machine in the last decade, even though it’s been under construction for 400 years.
The machine that got “turned on” around 1600-1630 (and is ready to be turned off now) had a lot of moving parts. The matured print revolution. The scientific sensibility. Legalistic (rather than vibe-based) religious pluralism. The final eclipse of the steppe nomad. The first full-ish mapping of the world, with all major sailing routes established. The Americas established as a space for modernity to work itself out. A pathway (a pretty dark one) for Africa to get integrated into the world machine properly for the first time.
Equally importantly, lots of old moving parts were set aside firmly, for good. A medieval machine, which had come together ~800-1200, got turned off and mothballed.
Pre-gunpowder military technologies. Scribal cultures. An Eastern Mediterranean focused myopic European mindset. Chronologically nonsensical senses of history. The gentle sidelining of mythology and literalist religion as a load-bearing component of the machine. The effective obsolescence of the Silk Road. The reduction of the chivalric cultural modes of the medieval machine to camp (Don Quixote, published in 1605, is a good marker for the demise of that mode not just in Europe, but in Asia too).
On that last front, the comparable military culture of the early Islamic centuries had given way to something like a professionalized military culture based on the twin pillars of slave soldiers/generals and artillery based warfare. Though the full shift from honor-based combat to what we now understand as total war would take another 2 centuries to complete, by 1605 the gears had already decisively shifted worldwide, and the elites had shifted to the new modes of governance and warfare. The Thirty Years War in Europe is a well-known marker of the shift in the West, but you find signs all over the world.
A particular favorite of mine is the Battle of Talikota in India in 1565. Unlike the Battle of Panipat 40 years earlier (1526), which had brought the Mughals into India, and popularized their artillery based warfare (artillery had been sporadically used in the subcontinent before, but the Mughals were the first to introduce warfare that was doctrinally artillery-based), this battle featured artillery tactics on both sides. There was a confused blend of medieval pitched battle modes and the positioning and maneuvering modes catalyzed by artillery.
The battle is often mythologized as a Hindu-Muslim battle (between the Hindu Vijaynagara empire and a coalition of the fragmented remnants of the Muslim Bahamani empire, known as the Deccan Sultanates), but it both was and wasn’t. The Vijaynagara army featured two Muslim generals, skilled in artillery tactics — but they defected halfway through. Like the Thirty Years War, the overstory was large-scale religious dynamics, with a sense of a hangover from Crusade-style narratives, but the understory was one of cosmopolitan mercenary politicking and pursuit of largely non-religious competitive agendas.
This, by the way, is what I mean by “horizontal history.”
We often treat the Crusades as a culturally distinct era of religiously justified warfare that was unique to the Europe-Islam interface, but the Islam-Asia interface featured roughly very rhyming dynamics, just with a different balance of power. The centuries of encounters between the early Muslim invaders and the Rajputs of the Northwest had many similarities with the Crusades.
Similarly, we treat the 30 years war as creating the modern religious landscape of the West, in the wake of the Reformation, but rhyming things happened in Asia as well. The Battle of Talikota happened after the effects of the Sufi, Bhakti, and Sikh reform movements had begun to spread through the societal fabric, and reformers from Sankara to Chaitanya had done their work. By 1556, the printing press had already arrived in India (in Goa, with the Portuguese), and printing in Indian languages had already begun wherever European Christianity found a foothold.
There were differences (most, I’m now convinced, due to the delayed arrival and diffusion of print), but these didn’t matter as much as you might think.
This “everything everywhere, all at once” character of the arrival of the modernity machine is often underestimated. Sure, full diffusion (the “scale out” of the machine via connecting the islands with trade, military, and knowledge links) took another couple of centuries, but it is easy to underestimate the impact of just the initial wave of diffusion, and increased cosmopolitan connectivity among the elites of the world. The essential 20% of the modernity machine, which delivered 80% of the disruption and re-building of the societal fabric, was installed relatively quickly.
Europe did diverge from the rest of the world after 1600, a story about the postmodernity machine rather than the modernity machine, but a persuasive case can be made that that is a distinct story with very different dynamics.
Anyhow, this is turning out to be a fascinating journey for a committed dozen or so of us in the book club, and I hope more of you will join in. You don’t have to scramble to catch up with the readings we’ve already finished. This is something of a random-access book club, so you can join in now, and dive into the finished readings at your own pace as, when, and if you like.
To sneak a peek ahead, you’ll see that where the earlier reads explored the structural contours of the machine, as well as the “making of the modern mind” aspect, the remaining reads delve into the (firmly decentered) human stories more, as well as the beginnings of the “scale-out” story.
I’ll do another thesis update in December, and at that point, I think we’ll be have a pretty good portrait of the modernity machine going.
For decades I've wished history was taught at every level with a machinistic viewpoint, though I hadn't a word for it. Due to perceived time-scarcity, intellectual insecurity, and laziness I probably won't be reading any of the books. But I will read your updates/digests slowly and repeatedly. Longer and/or more frequent updates wouldn't bother me at all! I think you should write a "History of the World" book.
A mechanistic (or machinistic?) model of history is something that feels intuitive to my mind, so much so that I suspect that it is a kind of cognitive bias.