Of all the content I’ve consumed in my life, 99.999% of it was produced after the Industrial Revolution.
Of all the humans who ever existed on Earth, ~95% of them lived before the Industrial Revolution.
I’ve thought about this a lot this year in my reading. The disparity indicates we moderns think humans knew little of value despite their mass existence over time. And its true they can’t inform us much of anything with regards our modern technology, but they had plenty worthwhile to say about the most important technologies that existed before we came to view only machines, as tech.
With this in mind I’ve completed my next read for #bookstr - The Spirit of the Law by Charles Montesquieu.
We are born into this world as fish in water, swimming in a sea of laws and regulations which we don’t understand the first things about other than, they apply and there are consequences if we don’t follow them. We’re never taught why they exist, or how they came to be.
And that’s what this book does a great job of doing. Ok, it’s 270 years old, so it’s not going to explain MANY things, but it covers a 2000+ year history of different societies and the laws they had, and seeks to understand why they had them.
It’s very interesting. He traces where power was diffuse through different branches (church, state, local etc.), the actual nature of “servitude” in the Middle Ages, how different peoples adopted different principles, how rulers successfully maintained order, how laws evolved, and importantly, how systems evolved.
He’s very much a “Statist”, but not in the sense we understand it today. He’s describing how order was kept across different peoples of different natures in different times and places. The intention of laws. The “spirit”. Not arbitrary governance for the sake of power, but how good and bad laws come to be and how we should understand them in historical context.
I won’t say it’s fascinating because at times its very dry and meanders through things which just aren’t interesting.
But it’s worthwhile. To understand the waters in which we swim. To understand the Chesterton’s Fence principles of why modern law is so fucked after so much was changed that really should not have been.
I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone other than nerds though. But if you really want to understand how “the system” came to be, the evolutions which laid the foundations for liberalism and communism and socialism and managerialism and everything in between, there are good foundations in here worth understanding.
View quoted note →
