Apologies for the necro-post, but FD requested that I take up a (slightly) related discussion in the Islam forum in this thread. So here goes...

FD's thesis:

freediver wrote on Jan 28^th, 2015 at 8:02am:


After prodding him for evidence FD referred back to this thread, and specifically Morris's social development scale posted in the OP.

Firstly, the caliphate most definitely does register - Morris bases his measures of western social development according to the energy consumption of the most productive "cores" of the western world at the time. During most of the period 700-1300, the western "core" was dominated by the islamic near east around Egypt and Syria/Iraq. The figure he arrived at was a per-capita energy consumption peak of around 25-26 thousand kcal/cap/day, which was actually the greatest energy consumption the western world had seen besides the Roman peak of around 30 thousand kcal/cap/day.

A couple of points to be made about this: Roman consumption started from an already very high base - for example Ancient Greek energy consumption had already peaked at around 20-25 kcal/cap/day by the 4th century BCE. Roman society had a definite advantage in leveraging off these already high consumption rates. Morris's scale illustrates this - where the consumption rise that the Romans rode on was in full swing long before the Roman empire emerged. The graph clearly shows that this rise was the most dramatic in the west up to that time. Rome also had the advantage of controlling the entire Mediterranean basin, an obviously massive hub for trading.

The islamic world in contrast literally started from scratch in the nomadic and resource barren arabic peninsula. But even more significantly is to understand the legacy that the Islamic conquerers were left with in the areas they expanded into. This is documented in Morris's social development timeline - where the west faced a catastrophic consumption decline in the centuries between Rome's peak and the rise of Islam. This period of migration, invasion, plagues and general social unrest is well documented elsewhere, but suffice to say, whereas the Romans expanded at a time when the conquered areas were increasing energy consumption, the muslims expanded into areas that were in catastrophic decline. For example one of the earliest significant conquest for the muslims was the once great and prosperous city of Jerusalem - which was a shell of its former self as a result of being decimated by the long war between Byzantium and Persia. In many areas the Islamic empire had to literally start from scratch - as they did with the city of Baghdad, which rapidly became one of the largest cities of the world - if not the largest - as well as a major cultural hub. Indeed the social and educational advances seen in the Islamic Empire cannot be overstated - literacy rates were the highest the world had ever seen, and life expectancy rose from around 25-30 during Roman and Christian Europe, to over 35 under Islam's rule (thats all people, muslim and non-muslim).

This is what FD describes as a society that "does not even register. For all the potential, it produced almost nothing. It froze societies in time". 

This is FD's civilization that, in his words, "does not even register" and "produced almost nothing"

economic centre's of the western world, based on energy output:

700 CE: Egypt (NE Africa), Syria-Iraq (SW Asia)
800 CE: Egypt (NE Africa), Syria-Iraq (SW Asia)
900 CE: Egypt (NE Africa), Spain (SW Europe)

(source: http://www.ianmorris.org/docs/social-development.pdf)

Peak output during this time was around 25-26 thousand kcal/cap/day second only to the peak of the Roman Empire of arounc 30 thousand kcal/cap/day. The same civilization that increased the life expectancy as well as literacy rates to unprecedented levels.

I repeat, this is the civiliziation that FD claims "does not even register" and "produced almost nothing"

freediver wrote on Feb 1^st, 2015 at 4:29pm:


According to Morris's social development scale, the lowest point in about 1000 years was reached around the 6th and 7th centuries - ie the century or two immediately before Islam emerged. This chaotic period is well documented as the period of Roman decline and Germanic and slavic migrations. It was also the time the Persians and the Eastern Romans were tearing much of eastern civilization apart. The effect it had can easily be seen by Morris's 'organization' rating - where it plunged from 4.23 in 500 AD to 1.17 in 600 AD. This is populations being ravaged and cities being devastated by mass migrations, plague and war. This is the legacy the Islamic empire was left with - as opposed to the rapidly rising economic inertia that the Romans were left with.

But then for 3 centuries at least, the islamic world became the economic centres of the western world - significantly increasing all components of Morris's social development scale. They also increased literacy and life expectancy rates to unprecedented levels - a point FD continues to ignore.

So, in summary, the world according to FD: the greatest empire on earth emerges, massively lifts economic prosperity to the greatest ever levels, then collapses and sees a correspondingly catastrophic crash in economic activity. The next great civilization that emerges is left with this shipwreck of a legacy, yet still manages to increase prosperity to the highest levels after the Romans, while also creating the best literacy and life expectancy rates the world has ever seen (including the Roman rates). And that, according to FD, is a civilization that  "does not even register" and "produced almost nothing".

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You mean that tiny blip on the bottom of the gap in social development between the Roman Empire and the Industrial Revolution? To me it says that the west had descended so low that something so backwards was able to take over. It nearly managed to freeze western development in time.

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Gandalf, if our society managed to lift social development slightly, to a level significantly lower than what it was 1000 years ago, despite all the knowledge and technology still being available (plus a bit more), would an objective analysis conclude that ours is the greatest of all time, or a failure by historical standards?

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My bad:

polite_gandalf wrote on Jan 25^th, 2015 at 10:41pm:


polite_gandalf wrote on Jan 26^th, 2015 at 12:27am:


It was already crap compared to what was around 800 years earlier.

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How much did it lift it by Gandalf? It cleaned nothing up. It prevented a recovery. It still does this today in the middle east. The Islamic "golden age" was a lost opportunity, human development squandered by interfering religious zealots. even at it's peak the Caliphate was still an unusually low point in human development.

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The Roman Empire is not. The Song Dynasty is not. The Industrial Revolution is not. The Caliphate is. It barely registers. It is a hole in the history of civilisation.

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Of course, if your aim is to destroy the context so it is not immediately obvious that for all it's greatness, the Caliphate remained a gap in the history of human development, and that both contemporary Chinese society and previous western society was far more advanced. The Caliphate could neither learn from what had happened previously or what was happening in China. It could only blame others for it's backwardness, as you do now.

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It could have stood on the shoulders of giants. It chose not to. This is a feeble excuse.

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Relative to what? It remained a hole in the history of human development. You have to set the bar extremely low to make this claim. Both the contemporary Song Dynasty and the Roman Empire improved at a greater rate. It had all been done before. The Caliphate could not even copy past and present civilisation. Islam brought stagnation. It still does today.

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Whatever it did that was different was a failure.

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Both the contemporary Song Dynasty and the previous Roman empire achieved far more - in different locations. The Caliphate actually came to control much of the old Roman empire, so even this feeble excuse fails. Not achieving everything that came after is understandable. Not even getting to the level that came previously in time at the same location, and that separately existed at the same time in China, puts the Caliphate pretty low down the list. Morris' analysis shows a long history of empires and civilisations that took human development further than anything in history. The Caliphate was an exceptionally low point in the history of human development.

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Morris looked at a whole host of measures of human development, all of which showed consistent trends.

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Of course Gandalf - he drew conclusions about Rome from Roman shipwrecks.

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It controlled all of Spain and parts of France, as well as the North African coast. Muslim slavers came to destroy most of the Italian coastline. There was not a pot of gold or an oil well sitting in Rome that the Muslims failed to stumble upon. Everything that made Rome and the Song Dynasty so much greater was there for the Muslims to copy, if only they could get over their pig headed delusions that the infidel has nothing for them and that Muslims must be superior. If they put as much effort into lifting humanity as they put into keeping down the infidel, they could have done something great. Instead they squandered the opportunity and put a brake on human development.

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It does not even register as "one of the great". It was a low point in the history of human development. It bucked the trend and showed that a massive empire could actually stall human development. There are many empires used by Morris that rose from the ashes and/or fringes of previous empires to build something better. The Caliphate was no different in where it came from. What sets it apart is where it went - nowhere. It is the feeblest of excuses. It is the sort of excuse mongering that has kept the middle east in a backwards state ever since.

Well, without buying into the "discussion" about the West etc, I would make the following comment -

The next 30-40 years won't be anything like the last 30-40 years & the rest of this century will see movement on a massive scale!

In fact, what may normally have taken hundreds of years, quite likely may happen over the next 30-40 years AND what may have taken thousands of years, is likely to be compressed within the rest of this century!

Phemanderac wrote on Feb 2^nd, 2015 at 7:47am:


Well to be fair, I think thats the whole point Morris's book is making.

Morris doesn't deal at all with FD's 'the west is great because of its freedom and democracy' crap, but rather attributes economic prosperity primarily to the accidents of geography.

Its a point that astonishingly goes way over FD's head as he attempts to use the data in this book to "prove" that Islam "does not even register" and "achieved almost nothing".

It is completely absurd to draw conclusions about Islam's achievements or otherwise simply by drawing comparisons of the energy outputs between the economic centres of the islamic empire and the Roman empire. Its apples and oranges - the Roman Empire captured all the most lucrative economic bread-baskets of the western world at a time when their economic output was already high, and was developing rapidly. The Islamic empire a) didn't capture any of the western 'superpower' economic centres such as Rome or Constantinople, instead had to start from fresh - literally creating their own economic centres from scratch (Cairo, Baghdad), and b) what they did capture in the western world was at that time devastated both economically and organizationally by the catastrophic decline that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.

Not to mention that the "achievements" of an empire can't purely be judged by (scant - by Morris's own admission) evidence of mere energy output of its economic centres. The education, intellectual, cultural and lifestyle (the islamic empire raised life expectancy to highest ever rates - including Roman times) achievements of islam alone blow the stupid claim that it "achieved almost nothing" out of the water.

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I was hoping it would have been obvious from my argument that I was including the Republican period Gandalf. It was the same civilisation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire

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Far more pronounced is the crash that happened after Rome collapsed.

The rate of change looks slower than than the build-up beforehand, and it obviously does not go as deep either.

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If you hold it far enough away from your eyes to defeat the purpose of plotting it on a graph. Would you have us draw a straight line over the last 16000 years so as not to offend the ignorant sensibilities of Muslims who want to prattle on about how great the Caliphate was, and ignore all the variations as inconsequential blips?

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Not true. You are being mislead by the scale of the graph. If you drew the same graph up to the year zero, it would also show a very impressive and recent rise, at the end of what appears to be a long, relatively flat period.

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I said that the Caliphate came to conquer much of the old Roman Empire, and plenty more on top of that. The fact that it came from such backwardness reinforces my argument. It was the catastrophic destruction of civilisation that allowed something as backward as Islam to take over. Had it been a more modern, progressive model, it would have quickly regained what was lost. The Caliphate ended everything that was holding society back - the constant wars and migrations. But living standards remained well below what they were a millennia earlier, because Islam kept them there. We saw a microcosm of this in Afghanistan after the Russian invasion. A once relatively progressive society was destroyed. Islam took over. The Russian were not there any more. The society should have recovered. It did not, because of Islam. Many western Muslims talk about Afghanistan the same way you talk about the Caliphate. You are all polishing a turd.

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The collapse of most of the big empires was like that. They were eventually replaced by any even bigger one, even with a similar time scale. None of this sets the Caliphate apart. What sets the Caliphate apart is it's failures.

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Neither did any of the empires the came before. They became great. Nothing forced the Muslims to build these cities from scratch, other than their own delusions of superiority.

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The human development index shows quite clearly how poorly the Caliphate did when it comes to raising people's living standards. There is no need at all for a theory to explain why it did so poorly in order to demonstrate that it achieved very little. I have explained plenty of times where the causal theory comes from, and it is not in any way contradicted by Morris' work.

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One more time for Gandalf. Morris uses four independent measures of human development that show very similar trends over time.