Hubris abound.

This is a pretty bullshit reading of the comment you replied to, which was about the nature of "rights" as a social agreement rather than something natural.

People are allowed to have different values and opinions. Hubris is believing western morality is self evidently superior to everything else that exists.

What made Western Europe diverge from places like Russia or Saudi Arabia?

Individuality seems to have been invented and embraced by European and American intelligentsia.

But we also can’t underestimate the impact of: 1) abundant energy sources—initially wood and then coal that could power machinery. 2) a scientific tradition with engineering applications in mind. 3) the Black Plague that let people just drop their scythes and move to the city to become tradesmen and earn a better living. 4) the Common Law tradition placing property rights and the right to contract on near-sacred grounds. 5) Access to abundant fishing off the coast of what became North America.

I don't think there's any one thing we can point to explain the rise of West, it's a confluence of factors that I'm very grateful happened before I was born

This created an intense competition where the best ideas would survive.

As trade grew so did the exchange of ideas in Europe. Different regimes had different views on intellectuals. Famously, Da Vinci and Voltaire had multiple patrons through their lives.

Claiming they are best because they survive is survivorship bias.

No, it’s not. Only measuring survivors is survivorship bias.

Not really. It’s saying increases competitive pressure results in a more-competitive output. That’s almost by definition true. Products of competition tend to be fitter than not. If ten fish of a rainbow of colors are introduced to an environment and only the red ones survive, they are fitter. If one looks at the surviving fish and concludes only red fish were introduced to the environment, that is survivorship bias.

The Black Death increased labour’s bargaining power right before the Industrial Revolution. It’s a lucky set of quirks that gave Enlightenment-era ideas fertile soil to land on.

“Right before” was hyperbole. The population, and in particular, labor effects, were nevertheless persistent. Western labor was anomalously expensive.

Just admit you were completely wrong and move on. It's fine, I'm wrong a lot too.

Because the thesis holds [1][2]. It’s far from a controversial theory in medieval and developmental economics.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=EUoCBAAAQBAJ&oi=...

[2] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C51&q=Bla...

Come on, that's hilariously wrong, and no attempt to walk it back makes it less funny.

Of course, I'm just a bit on edge because I'm writing this post right after the 30 years war has started.

University level international relations courses generally start on the 30years war, I feel it is appropriate for that to be considered "the rough start" of "honest to god modernity" yeah

Joseph Henrich says it’s the medieval church’s prohibition on cousin marriage, which dissolved the strong kinship bonds that dominate the rest of the world. He has a book on the subject called The WEIRDest People In The World which is good.

That's an odd claim to make so casually. This is something people can and have argued about for thousands of years, in both directions. One direction is: How can we have values in a world without god(s)? (See: Epicureanism, Kantian ethics, or any other system of secular morality). But the other, equally fair direction is: How can we have values in a world with god(s)? (See: The Euthyphro dilemma and broader problem of evil, the Epicurean paradox, or more recent historical and anthropological analyses of how religions and their institutions are formed and operate.)

I suppose you can play bad-faith semantic games with "inalienable", "right", or "inherent" as words here, but the long and short of it is that this isn't a settled issue. There are good arguments not only that religion is not needed as a foundation for rights, but that religion has not (historically) and cannot (philosophically) provide this foundation.

For example, what’s Kantian ethics?

> It states that an action can only be moral if (i) it is motivated by a sense of duty and (ii) its maxim may be rationally willed a universal, objective law.

If I autopsy a dead body, am I going to find any evidence of those things in there? Can you empirically prove the categorical imperative?

Moreover, “secular morality” in practice is typically just the moral philosophy of the dominant religion with the supernatural elements removed. My dad isn’t a believer, but thinks choosing not to have children is immoral. Why? Maybe it’s because his parents were devout Muslims and having children is an important obligation in Islam. Similarly, it’s amusing to observe how many professed atheists really just believe in the Christian social gospel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Gospel) without Jesus.

I’m not saying that’s bad. But you have to understand how deeply intertwined even seemingly secular western thought is with Christianity, and doesn’t easily translate to other parts of the world.

Sure, they're a few centimeters to the right of the evidence of consciousness, just below the evidence of the Pythagorean theorem.

This sounds glib but isn't. What counts as 'evidence' and how much of it is needed for 'proof' are themselves hotly debated. Empiricism is no more a given than morality.

And now you’re in woo social studies land. Once you leave the land of empiricism you might as well be arguing about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.