[yyyk]

In the political context of 17th century China (and many premodern polities), it's much preferable to blame a scapegoat official for putting a factory in the wrong place than to blame divine intervention.

The former means the government executes a couple of people. The latter meant to most people that the government has lost 'the Mandate of Heaven' and is ready to be overthrown. That's extremely bad news to the government.

[vulcan01]

Alternatively, the story about a comet strike may have been invented/popularized by the next (the Qing) dynasty to further legitimize their power. It's not preferable to the Ming to blame divine intervention, but it would be preferable to the Qing.

[fragmede]

Given the transportation options at the time, is that really the wrong place for such a factory? Clearly the factory exploding was bad, but without trains or trucks to move large amounts of processed material around, wouldn't in the middle of the city, dangerous as it was, be the best place to have the resources from which to be able to mount a defense from outside invaders?

It would be different with trains/cars, but before then?

[laurent123456]

What a twisted logic they had back then. City got destroyed because of an incompetent government? That's fine, we can keep trusting them. City got destroyed by a meteorite? No way we can ever trust them again, they've lost the Mandate of Heaven!

In practice I would assume though that people weren't much different than today, and the Mandate of Heaven trick would only work if the government doesn't appear to be too incompetent.

[roywiggins]

Obviously, things have changed a bit, but we aren't that much better at judging what leaders are actually responsible for. The global economy is so big that in most circumstances it could be modeled as a purely natural force that can be at best managed, like weather, but American presidents can lose reelection as if they are personally responsible for economic performance. There's not that much evidence that a president, who has been in power for maybe a couple of years, could have more than a marginal impact on the trajectory of the economy in most circumstances. But we act like they do.

[yyyk]

That's because your causation is very different from many past peoples. They viewed reality as very affected by divine forces and the 'natural' event as divine intervention (directly or indirectly).

City got destroyed by a meteorite? You view this as an accident. They think 'better remove whatever made the Heavens upset before we are smote again and again with meteorites or worse'.

Now, since the government controlled just about everything in theory (few limits on power), the government is held responsible. People start spreading the notion that perhaps the government needs to be altered to people more pleasing to Heaven, and from there we get civil wars, rebellions, etc. Which can lead to more disasters (badly maintained dams for example, because the civil war takes too many resources away from maintenance) and so on. It's a cycle of instability every ancient government wanted to avoid.

[brezelgoring]

The Mandate of Heaven is not that weird, we place similar levels of trust on Market Forces and such things, we're not so different.

[int_19h]

To be fair, the Mandate of Heaven was often judged in practice based on (somewhat) preventable disasters. E.g. in case of famine, it was supposed to be the duty of the government to maintain sufficient supplies in good times to remedy it. So the connection between bad governance and loss of the Mandate was generally more direct than in this example.

[laurent123456]

Ok my comment was semi ironic and didn't think anyone would care much about it. I did acknowledge that things probably aren't that different today.

[throwaway0a5e]

>What a twisted logic they had back then. City got destroyed because of an incompetent government? That's fine, we can keep trusting them

Back then?

For how many years now have democrats been promising to be the savior of inner city minorities? And when are republicans going to get around to getting the government out of people's business?

Humans have changed very little over time.