In 1821, Japan was a feudal isolationist polity.
In 1921, Japan was an industrial Western-style empire.
In 2021, Japan is a post-industrial, democratic, liberalish nation-state.
What got Japan to break out of its isolation? The United States threatened to burn down its capitol.
What got Japan to abandon its empire? The United States actually did burn down its capitol. B-29s dropped firebombs on defenseless cities full of women, children and the elderly. 100,000 civilians were killed in Tokyo alone.
This isn't a criticism of the United States. Between Nazi Germany, the Japanese Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States, the United States was the closest thing there was to "the good guys".
My great grandfather served on the US Merchant Marine. His job was to operate ships carrying weapons and equipment from the United States to Europe while dodging U-boats. After Germany surrendered, he wanted to drop punitive atomic bombs on German cities.
I understand his perspective. He was a Jew.
The Advance of Modern Civilization
"It took centuries for science to dawn over the Muggle world, it only happened slowly, but the stronger science got, the further that sort of hatred retreated." Harry's voice was quiet, now. "I don't know exactly why it worked that way, but that's how it happened historically. As though there's something in science like the shine of the Patronus Charm, driving back all sorts of darkness and madness, not right away, but it seems to follow wherever science goes."
―Chapter 47 of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezar Yudkowsky
Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres claims that the advance of science reduced hatred. We had science in 1945. But did we really have less hatred then in, say, 1845?
Yes. Yes we did. Slavery was legal in the United States in 1845. It ended because the industrial capacity of the Union crushed the plantation-based economy of the Confederacy. Just like the industrial capacity of the United States and manpower of the Soviet Union crushed their enemies in World War II.
Are you noticing the pattern yet? Modern industrial societies produce so much of everything they outcompete slave-based societies[1] based around raw materials.
The Enlightenment, that was what it was called in the Muggle world. It has something to do with seeking the truth, I think... with being able to change your mind from what you grew up believing... with thinking logically, realizing that there's no reason to hate someone because their skin is a different color, just like there's no reason to hate Hermione Granger... or maybe there's something to it that even I don't understand. But the Enlightenment is something that you and I belong to now, both of us. Fixing Slytherin House is just one of the things we have to do.
―Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres in Chapter 47 of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezar Yudkowsky
Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres believes hatred decreased because Enlightenment ideals encouraged us to change our minds. I claim hatred decreased because the material bounty of technological advancement increased the competitive advantage of cooperation compared to violence.
Is there a way to test this? To do so we'd need to examine a nation where Enlightenment ideals came before industrialization or a nation where industrialization came before Enlightenment ideals. History provides us with both.
- Meiji Japan industrialized without subscribing to Enlightenment ideals.
- The United States was founded with Enlightenment ideals before it industrialized.
What happened?
- The United States exterminated the Native Americans. The United States' universalist ideals took hold after it industrialized, not before. It had people in concentration camps all the way up to 1945.
- Meiji Japan comitted atrocity after atrocity even after it industrialized, all the way up to 1945.
- Meiji Japan abolished the samurai class.
- The United States abolished slavery (eventually).
The ultimate strategic objectives for Japan's and the United States' East Asian conquests were identical. They both wanted buffer states against the Soviet Union and access to raw materials. If Japan and the United States had such similar interests then why did the United States build up its conquests while Japan enslaved them? Japan did industrialize Korea and Manchuria. The United States did a better job because it had 5× the industrial capacity of the Japanese Empire at the Japanese Empire's peak. The United States had so much wheat it shipped the surplus to starving occupied Japan for free. Japanese cuisine is dominated by rice. The United States shipped so much wheat to Japan it basically created a national dish. Ramen noodles are popular in Japan today because they needed a way to eat all that wheat.
It's hard to hate other people for hogging all the wheat when there is too much wheat to go around. We have so much corn we ferment it into ethanol so we can burn it[2].
Subjugating other people requires coordination. The more of value we produce, the less it's worthwhile to spend that coordination extracting tiny bits of material value from other people. It you want to bring hatred to modern lows and equality to modern highs, it's not enough just to industrialize a little. You have to industrialize a nation so much its people can't be bothered to oppress others because they have better things to do with their time. Hatred has decreased because we live in the golden age of all golden ages.
Nobody has ever fought a war over the oxygen in the air because there's plenty of oxygen to go around. We fight over things that are scarce and valuable. Historically, most wars have been fought over land and people. If you win you get to force your subjects to collect raw materials from the land. Sometimes these raw materials are mineral resources. Historically, most slaves have been forced to cultivate food.
It's hard to comprehend how important food staples used to be. In Edo Japan, wealth was measured in koku (石). One koku is (in theory) enough rice to feed one man for one year. The amount of koku a daimyo controlled was basically how many people he owned because a region's food staple production determined its carrying capacity and the human population grew until it hit carrying capacity. In other words, we bred until we were on the edge of starving to death. Most wars have ultimately been fought over land because land determines food production and food production was a matter of life and death.
My grandfather, who grew up in Taiwan before the green revolution, was too poor to afford rice. He ate sweet potatoes instead.
The green revolution of the 1950s and the 1960s increased food production faster than our population growth. On the Chinese version of TikTok[1] there's a video of a guy eating a bowl of white rice with a spoonful of soy sauce. The comments are all of people feeling sorry for him. We have so much food these days that eating nothing but rice makes you surprisingly poor even by Chinese standards.
World War II ended in 1945—right before the green revolution. There has been no direct war between major world powers between then and now. I don't think this is a coincidence. Wars are usually about land and land is usually about food production and food production skyrocketed in the decades after World War II. (Birth control became widely adopted around the same time too.)
We still have small wars. We fight over oil and ideologies. But cars and capitalism aren't as important as food production. Fighting wars over food is stupid when food is cheap. Less fighting over food means less fighting overall. Countries being at peace with each other set the conditions for us to build more complex, interdependent trade networks. I think the idea that we're all human beings, regardless of our race, religion, sex and country of origin gained increasing power because cooperation is a winning strategy when there is enough to go around.
I predict that if per capita food production returns to the levels of
19141776[2] then so will humankind's ethics.抖音 came first. Technically, TikTok is the American version of 抖音. ↩︎
Edit: See comment by Kaj_Sotala. ↩︎