parlor question: history edition

[queenlua]

Here’s a fun one: what are the ten most important moments/events in world history?

Don’t click the “read more” if you want to think about it for yourself first; I share some reasonable answers below.



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The boy & I discussed it for a while at a cafe a while back. Our list looked roughly like so:

1. The *results* of WWI (e.g., setting the stage for Germany to get plunged into a debt crisis and eventually go world-a-warring again)
2. Constantinople & its associated Christianity
3. Norman conquest of England
4. The Middle East kicking ass while everyone else was in the dark ages, thus preserving a lot of famous Greek/Roman/etc writing
5. World War II
6. Either American Revolution of French Revolution, whichever one you want to mark as “enlightenment/democracy begins here”
7. Mongolia conquering all that stuff or something??? (We felt like we should have some eastern history in here but, uh, are kind of underinformed on the topic)
8. Renaissance
9. Creation of Israel OR the whole partitioning-up-the-middle-east thing that happened during colonialism etc
10. Discovery (“discovery”) of the New World

Really, I was grasping for an event that would reflect the importance of colonialism, because you really can’t understand a great many centuries of world history without it. Best I could come up with was, idk, “the middle passage” / “triangle trade routes” after the New World was a thing.

Anyway, after we made this list, we looked up some lists randos on the internet had made. Some good ones they had that we overlooked were: the Protestant Reformation, Jesus of Nazareth starting his religion, Muhammad starting his religion, and arguably the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Mainly we kicked ourselves for missing “the printing press.” Holy shit! Widespread literacy and cheap books gogogo! That one’s important!

I texted a friend the question, and she came up with an excellent and rather different list:

1. Partition of India and Pakistan
2. Whoever figured out cooking meat is awesome
3. Alexander the Great defeating Darius
4. Yalta Conference
5. Muhammad’s Hijra
6. Mao’s March
7 Americans beating the British at Yorktown
8. Vatican
9. Constantine converting to Christianity
10. Paris Conference after WWI

Someone else looked at both our lists and asked where the hell “the wheel” and “fire” are. Which, okay, fair.

It’s lots of fun to talk and think about, though :) I would be amused to see y’all share your own list(s) in the comments!

Comments

[amielleon]

I'm with "what about the fire and the wheel," because like, seriously what's the odds that the ten most important events in All Of Written Human History (~10k years) happened in the last thousand years (AND in the Western World ;P)?

Anyway, I have a thing for the importance of indirect causes, so I present a very different list:

1) Whenever we decided to burn shit to make energy on an industrial scale --> This has resulted in global warming, which will dramatically affect the course of human history for a few thousand years to come... if it doesn't kill us all. If it kills us all, that's a huge plus to its importance.
2) The development of irrigation in the Tiger/Euphrates valley --> This is the origin of farming techniques for Eurasia and North Africa, which enabled the creation of every single empire outside of the Americas and therefore everything those empires were able to achieve.
3) The development of germ theory --> This is the greatest difference between modern western medicine and every other spiritual understanding of medicine in the world, and it's largely responsible for the biggest population booms we've seen since the development of farming. Insofar as disease was the biggest killer in the densely-populated world until this point--with more people dying of the flu than battle wounds in WWI--the results of this breakthrough have saved an order of magnitude more lives than any single dictator has destroyed. (I guess this is sort of like Krad's "penicillin" answer except I think that the general theory was the biggest part.)
4) Columbus landing in America in 1492 --> I happen to agree with y'all on the importance of this one conventionally important moment. This brought two halves of Earth into contact with resultant profound upheavals on both sides.

idk if I can come up with the next 6 right away. Most things seem kind of petty in scale compared with the above. There are a lot of big modern events like WWI where we can say "this was the first time X happened and it really upped the ante in warfare" but I'm pretty sure that it's not the first time the ante has been upped and it's gonnna be far from the last.

Eta:
5) I'm gonna agree with Krad on the Cold War, but for the actual event I'd choose the disarmament treaty at its end. Without it, odds are in favor of accidental mutual annihilation that would probably snowball into the end of the human race due to environmental effects beyond the scale of the dinosaur extinction. (Though one might argue that the treaty was more likely than not to happen, but eh.)

6) The development of nuclear weapons, because I don't think said treaty will keep the peace forever and we're facing extinction every time we re-arm.

7) I'm gonna rip off myself and choose the development of rice terraces, which happened independently of middle eastern irritation and also powered the rise of many empires.

8) The development of computers. Much of historical power has been about harnessing unskilled physical labor via technology: hence guns over bows, machines over looms. Computers basically allow for the harnessing of unskilled intellectual labor (actual paraphrased quote from a medical school director: "computers can diagnose people; we need our human doctors to provide empathy") and I think they have and will continue to dramatically shape the nature of power in the future.

So far my list looks like "nature is powerful and individual accomplishments are fleeting" lol. Very Chinese American nihilist mathematician. I think a lot of stuff we learn in high school is overrated from a global perspective bc it's about the origins of our fledgling empire (which has been #1 in power for a fleeting 100 years) filtered through our own biases and mythologies. I saw an African tribal mask that basically commented on the importance of free speech in a democracy. The world is very big and very old and I think we give the supposed sources of our current culture undue attention.

(Not to bash on you, though I guess I kinda am.

/hacker answer to icebreaker)

[queenlua]

admittedly, one problem i had when we were talking over the "fire" thing was, i'm actually not sure if that's a Singular Event that happened once and then changed civilization forever, or if multiple subpopulations of humans figured it out independently at different times, which makes it less of an event and more a... idk... a progression?

in defense of a bias towards a bias toward recent history, though, i think there's a decent argument that we're in a bit of an exponential age in terms of how human societies are formed, shaped, etc. like, we did basic-bitch hunter gathering for a long time, and basic-bitch agriculture for a long time, and those aren't insignificant periods but they're also hard to pick individual events out of, beyond like, "agriculture happened," which is just one thing.

irrigation is a solid pick.

something like "industrial revolution" had occurred to us, but we discarded it from our list since it seemed like a natural outgrowth / outcome of the scientific progress we made in the enlightenment/renaissance/whatever. i had not considered the global warming slant, though, which i think bolsters its importance.

i think we all already had germ theory / etc? the only difference is picking an actual event to be representative of "germ theory got gud" (penicillin or one of the early holyshit vaccines) or whether you just call "germ theory got gud" an event in and of itself

re: computers: i asked a friend this question this weekend and he picked shannon's formalization of entropy, arguing that it gave people who'd previously been fumbling around an actual target to shoot for in terms of "how compactly can we store information," and arguably kicked off the whole infotech boom, foundation of modern computing, blah blah. i liked it for its "concrete event representing the larger trend"-ness

i... didn't think of your answers as "bashing" on me until you claimed yourself they were bashing on me xp

[amielleon]

lol well usually isn't "pfft your list is full of modern western events, forget those" kind of taken as bashy? I don't mean it as an attack or anything but I'm led to believe it sounds haughty and pretentious.

It's true that there's a serious question of how broad a swath of events you can claim, and how many implicated events contribute to the value of your pick. Like, the Renaissance is a long-ass period of time covering all of Europe, and is certainly a high value pick if you can lay claim to every innovation to come of it. Honestly, given how everything leads a little bit into everything else, you might say that a lot of what this exercise tells you is how people conceptualize cause and effect/discreteness/etc.

For example, I think I went for paradigm shifts: this event reshaped how people lived, this event reshaped power, etc., whereas Krad was like "this one emblematic thing happened and a zillion people died/lived." Well, I guess she did openly declare that she interpreted it as a window-of-effect thing.

I think there's also something to be said for having an eye on wide vs local impact. For example, Yorktown is a big deal to an American, but a farmgirl in Mongolia probably gives no fucks about that particular development and feels very little downstream effect. How do you rate a local event with profound consequences for that area and some shockwaves (eg. Shiite/Sunni split, India/Pakistan split) vs something with a wider effect that doesn't feel as big (eg. ... I don't really know actually; I think most things that affect the whole world tend to do something big to the human race).

... Or I guess it's somewhat mathematician of me to go "woah just 10 events? we must be talking about fire and the wheel then" and promptly zoom to that level ignoring everything else in the way.

[queenlua]

it didn't sound like "pfft" / haughty / etc until you threw the last bit in; took it from "here's my ideas and why i think they're legit" to "and my answers are better i am true hacker" in tone :p ((i read your actual intent, though, ofc.))

i think the argument over how cause&effect + discreteness + etc works is definitely one of the most interesting bits of the exercise.

[amielleon]

I actually only added the last bit in an attempt to defuse it with self-awareness or something, but I think I have problems with punching myself in the face when it comes to stuff like that.

[queenlua]

no worries; tone on the internet is weird in most circumstances etc etc :)