I was speaking in the plural. As a civilization, we are more than capable of creating many computers with established qualities and creating new ones to very exacting specifications. I don’t believe there was ever a point in history where you could draw up a set of parameters for a culture you wanted, go to a group of knowledgeable experts, and watch as they built such a society with replicable precision.
You can do this for governments, of course- but notably, we haven’t lost any information here. We are still perfectly capable of writing constitutions, or even founding monarchies if there were a consensus to do so. The ‘regression’ that Zanker believes in is (assuming the most common NRx beliefs) a matter of convention, social fabrics, and shared values, and not a regression in our knowledge of political structures per se.
I don’t believe there was ever a point in history where you could draw up a set of parameters for a culture you wanted, go to a group of knowledgeable experts, and watch as they built such a society with replicable precision.
That’s not self-evident to me. There are legal and ethical barriers, but my guess is that given the same level of control that we have in, say, engineering, we could (or quickly could learn to) build societies with custom characteristics. Given the ability to select people, shape their laws and regulations, observe and intervene, I don’t see why you couldn’t produce a particular kind of a society.
Of course you can’t build any kind of society you wish just like you can’t build any kind of a computer you wish—you’re limited by laws of nature (and of sociology, etc.), by available resources, by your level of knowledge and skill, etc.
Shaping a society is a common desire (look at e.g. communists) and a common activity (of governments and politicians). Certainly it doesn’t have the precision and replicability of mass-producing machine screws, but I don’t see why you can’t describe it as a “technology”.
Human cultures are material objects that operate within physical law like anything else- so I agree that there’s no obvious reason to think that the domain is intractable. Given a long enough lever and a place to stand, you could run the necessary experiments and make some real progress. But a problem that can be solved in principle is not the same thing as a problem that has already been mastered- let alone mastered and then lost again.
One of the consequences of the more traditional sorts of technology is that it is a force towards consensus. There is no reasonable person who disagrees about the function of transistors or the narrow domains of physics on which transistor designs depend; once you use a few billion of the things reliably, it’s hard to dispute their basic functionality. But to my knowledge, there was never any historical period in which consensus about the mechanisms of culture appeared, from which we might have fallen ignominiously. Hobbes and Machiavelli still haven’t convinced everybody; Plato and Aristotle have been polarizing people about the nature of human society for millenia. Proponents of one culture or another never really had an elaborate set of assumptions that they could share with their rivals.
Let me point out that you continue to argue against ZankerH’s position that the social technology has regressed. That is not my position. My objection was to your claim that the whole concept of social technology is nonsense and that the word “technology” in this context is misleadiing. I said that social technology certainly exists and is usually called politics -- but I never said anything about regression or past golden ages.
I was speaking in the plural. As a civilization, we are more than capable of creating many computers with established qualities and creating new ones to very exacting specifications. I don’t believe there was ever a point in history where you could draw up a set of parameters for a culture you wanted, go to a group of knowledgeable experts, and watch as they built such a society with replicable precision.
You can do this for governments, of course- but notably, we haven’t lost any information here. We are still perfectly capable of writing constitutions, or even founding monarchies if there were a consensus to do so. The ‘regression’ that Zanker believes in is (assuming the most common NRx beliefs) a matter of convention, social fabrics, and shared values, and not a regression in our knowledge of political structures per se.
That’s not self-evident to me. There are legal and ethical barriers, but my guess is that given the same level of control that we have in, say, engineering, we could (or quickly could learn to) build societies with custom characteristics. Given the ability to select people, shape their laws and regulations, observe and intervene, I don’t see why you couldn’t produce a particular kind of a society.
Of course you can’t build any kind of society you wish just like you can’t build any kind of a computer you wish—you’re limited by laws of nature (and of sociology, etc.), by available resources, by your level of knowledge and skill, etc.
Shaping a society is a common desire (look at e.g. communists) and a common activity (of governments and politicians). Certainly it doesn’t have the precision and replicability of mass-producing machine screws, but I don’t see why you can’t describe it as a “technology”.
Human cultures are material objects that operate within physical law like anything else- so I agree that there’s no obvious reason to think that the domain is intractable. Given a long enough lever and a place to stand, you could run the necessary experiments and make some real progress. But a problem that can be solved in principle is not the same thing as a problem that has already been mastered- let alone mastered and then lost again.
One of the consequences of the more traditional sorts of technology is that it is a force towards consensus. There is no reasonable person who disagrees about the function of transistors or the narrow domains of physics on which transistor designs depend; once you use a few billion of the things reliably, it’s hard to dispute their basic functionality. But to my knowledge, there was never any historical period in which consensus about the mechanisms of culture appeared, from which we might have fallen ignominiously. Hobbes and Machiavelli still haven’t convinced everybody; Plato and Aristotle have been polarizing people about the nature of human society for millenia. Proponents of one culture or another never really had an elaborate set of assumptions that they could share with their rivals.
Let me point out that you continue to argue against ZankerH’s position that the social technology has regressed. That is not my position. My objection was to your claim that the whole concept of social technology is nonsense and that the word “technology” in this context is misleadiing. I said that social technology certainly exists and is usually called politics -- but I never said anything about regression or past golden ages.