The Civilization of Guns

A well-armed society is a polite society.

Back in 2007, a blogger named “the Munchkin Wrangler” wrote a wonderful, short essay explaining why the gun is civilization.  It’s only six paragraphs, and it’s also more interesting than what I’m writing, so if you have to choose between that or this, just follow the link.  So it’s not just that the well-armed society is a polite society, but that without arms there isn’t really “society” at all.

Munchin Wrangler’s focus is on individual interactions, though.  This post is about historic evidence supporting that thesis on a civilizational scale.  Specifically, it’s about Central Asian history.  The history of the Middle East, from the time of Cyrus the rise of Europe, can be summed up like this:

10.  City-folk build large, opulent cities.

20.  Nomadic barbarians invade, break stuff, pillage, hear the lamentations of women, etc.

30.  The nomads settle down in the newly-conquered territories.

40.  The nomads become city-folk.

50.  GOTO 10.

It happened over and over, like clockwork, every couple hundred years.  But then one day, it all changed.

Though the Kazakhs were a formidable military power, their dominance was undermined by several factors.  The settled centers in the north and south acquired new military technology in the form of muskets and cannons, thus canceling out the natural advantage of the pastoral nomads’ mobile cavalry forces.  The nomads occasionally acquired muskets too; but having no large settled urban centers or technology, they were unable to reproduce either firearms or gunpowder.

This developmental imbalance had very important consequences.  The nomadic khanates lost their military superiority over the armies of the settled centers.  Hence they lost an important source of revenue and material support in the form of the tributes, reparations and military resupply that they had exacted from their settled neighbors for centuries.

– The Palgrave Concise Historical Atlas of Central Asia, Rafis Abazov, Map 30.

See, the nice thing about a big city and strong, central government that patronizes the arts is that you get cool buildings, artwork, epic poetry, science, and so forth.  But the king who spends all his time on that will eventually decide he’d rather spend his time in lavish palaces than go on military campaign, because silk pillows in the harem are nicer than riding a horse all day and then sleeping in a tent.  So the barbarians got civilized, and in the process they got soft and weak.  The next wave of nomads still had their horses, their arrows, and most importantly their hardness.  That, plus it’s hard – if not impossible – to defend every border village, every remote town, from highly-mobile horse nomads who can move to attack the weak spots.  It’s not feasible for the imperial army to patrol every inch of the frontier all the time, and not feasible for dirt farmers to fight off determined raiders, so eventually the raiders win.

With the invention of guns, the empires finally had an advantage that the nomads couldn’t possibly overcome, and it stopped the cycle of conquest-conversion-decline.  Before that point, civilizations could exist, but they were always doomed as soon as the government lost its martial instincts.  With guns, the horse and arrow advantage disappears, those with foundries and technology can defend their property more easily, and the raiding finally stops (at least on the scale of massive armies sweeping across the Eurasian steppe).  Because there are guns, the artists, poets and architects are no longer a massive liability that will eventually kill your society.  Because there are guns, you can protect yourself from the men whose entire life is devoted to military skills that always proved so insuperably lethal for millennia past.