Late Night Musings (on Genghis Kahn)
Feed Your Mind: the Making of the Modern World
I spend a lot of time thinking about innovation and advancements that lead to very large-scale change. One of the most interesting books that I read in this regard is a history book, published a few years ago, entitled Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. The book will probably be considered a revisionist history account of Genghis Kahn away from the brutal warrior and toward a military strategist who encouraged a number of best practices that we associate today with modern living including elements of rule of law and religious freedom.
What I found most interesting in the book was the exploration of the amount of change due to spread of technological innovations and practices that were attributable to Khan and his reign including the use of paper money, propaganda (used to reduce fighting), and rhyming verse to remember relayed military strategies. Utterly fascinating was that Genghis Kahn himself was illiterate, yet he employed scribes throughout the empire and deployed their work effectively. And finally the sheer reach of Kahn’s influence when his progeny ruled from China to India to Russia into modern day Western Europe seems shocking.
When thinking about long-term trends, investments, and the future, I try to think of it from the standpoint of what things will have a long-term transformative effect on how we live our lives. What inventions of today will endure the way that paper money has (and shifted the ability to buy and sell things, and displace coinage for the most part)? What practices will cause regime change of powerful entities in the way that media propaganda played a role in transforming political action. And finally what characteristics enabled Kahn, an illiterate son of a widow, to conquer and rule over most of the great empires of medieval period?
Oh yeah, a bit disturbing, in light of the current swine flu pandemic, is the fact that Kahn’s forces were not defeated so much by another army as they were by diseases that affected both men and horses as they traveled south and encountered unfamiliar pathogens.
