Quote Originally Posted by Sasaki Kojiro View Post
Hmm, well I read some of it. But this is my main problem with the book. He pushes everything into the pattern he wants. I find his description of the forces of history to be absurd. On the whole the book seems very shoddy



Duchesne does have a huge chip on his shoulder. But I just finished his book "The Uniqueness of Western Civilization". In the first part of it he gives a detailed critique of many of the books Morris relies on. They are quite bad. I found his analysis of the different techniques this group of historians (which seems to include Morris) uses to twist things the way they want to be very revealing. The rest of his (D's) book is pretty good to.

By the way, did you see this bit from the Duchesne review?



That about sums up Morris.

Another telling bit quoted in that review is the part where after he is forced to acknowledge that Newton's book was great he hurries to mention the Salem witch trials and how Newton got into numerology. He is very agenda driven.

Anyway. Not to trash your taste or anything...

I am not clear at all on your objections to the book.

I assume you are questioning his data sources, no? Or is it something else?

Is it the whole concept that history can be used as a tool to evaluate what came before and use it to figure out what is likely in the future?

I took most of his quips with a grain of salt. None seemed exactly mean spirited. His point of view in most regards seemed like mainstream academia.

Citing Newton as a closet alchemist should be nothing new or earth shaking to anyone fimilier with him, nor dose it undo his works.

Some of his main points were; that lazy, frightened, and greedy people are those driving social development, that people in large groups are pretty much the same, and that the great and the foolish only serve to speed up or slow down events in development.

I think that most of us could agree with at least two out of the three without coming to blows. I will leave it open as to which two any one wishes to choose.

I was much more interested in the concept of using history to predict than I was with any one set of data points.

I certainly don’t believe that this is the end all be all of the world but I did think it contained some valid ideas and analysis, from the data he chose to use.

The ending is a bit strained. It dose not leave much room for alternatives but maybe some of us will live to see if he got it right.

I merely think that these ideas are worth considering and perhaps someone else could do a better job with different data sets, if that is what you mean.