{"id":64214,"date":"2023-11-30T01:00:02","date_gmt":"2023-11-30T06:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=64214"},"modified":"2023-11-29T09:46:28","modified_gmt":"2023-11-29T14:46:28","slug":"qotd-information-velocity-in-the-english-civil-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2023\/11\/30\/qotd-information-velocity-in-the-english-civil-war\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: “Information velocity” in the English Civil War"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Information velocity had increased exponentially by the 1630s, such that the English Civil War was, in a fundamental way, a propaganda<\/em> war, an intellectual<\/em> war.<\/p>\n

Some of the battles of the Wars of the Roses were bigger than some of the Civil War’s battles \u2013 an estimated 50,000 men fought at Towton, in 1461 \u2013 but the Civil War was inconceivably harder and nastier than the Wars of the Roses, because the Civil War was an ideological<\/em> war. The Wars of the Roses could’ve ended, at least theoretically, at any time \u2013 get the king and five dukes in a room, hammer out a compromise, and simply order everyone in each lord’s affinity to lay down his weapons. The Civil War could only end when everyone, in every army, was persuaded<\/em> to lay down his arms.<\/p>\n

Thus the winners had to negotiate with the people, directly. The Putney Debates<\/a> didn’t involve everyone in the realm, but they were representative, truly representative<\/em>, of everyone who mattered. Though no one explicitly made an appeal to competence<\/em> alone, it was \u2013 and is, and must be \u2013 fundamental to representative government. Guys like Gerrard Winstanley<\/a> had some interesting ideas, but they were fundamentally impractical, and Winstanley was not popularly viewed as a competent leader. Oliver Cromwell, on the other hand, was competence personified \u2013 the Protectorate became Cromwell’s military dictatorship largely because the People, as literally<\/em> represented by the New Model Army, wanted it so … and, thanks to much faster information velocity, could make their wishes known.<\/p>\n

Severian, “Inertia and Incompetence”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2020-12-25.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Information velocity had increased exponentially by the 1630s, such that the English Civil War was, in a fundamental way, a propaganda war, an intellectual war. Some of the battles of the Wars of the Roses were bigger than some of the Civil War’s battles \u2013 an estimated 50,000 men fought at Towton, in 1461 \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,84,7,41],"tags":[650,570,622,1414,1462,929],"class_list":["post-64214","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-government","category-history","category-quotations","tag-civilwar","tag-england","tag-ideology","tag-olivercromwell","tag-severian","tag-waroftheroses"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-gHI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64214","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64214"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64214\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":86006,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64214\/revisions\/86006"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64214"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64214"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64214"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}