So what about us and our time?
It is one thing to comment from a Fractal perspective about Hunter Gatherers and the Medieval World. We know that their time ended. But we tend to assume that our time is endless. After all, are we not the pinnacle of the potential for Mankind? We surely are free of the dogma of the Middle Ages? We surely are so much more sophisticated than Hunter Gatherers?
Again a quick review. The big shift in Human Society happens when the primary food system changes.
This shift works with the levers on the right. The foundation of wealth and power and hence organization always changes. The primary source of energy changes. The main levers change. The world view changes and hence all relationships including our view of place, gender, God and nature itself. Whatever the change, the great amplifier is always a shift in the communication ability of humans. Speech, text, the press and soon the web all boost the new system.
The process of shift seems to occur because of over-reach and environmental change. Success leads to population growth that leads to limits that leads to a collapse or a weakening of the authority of the system.
With speech and a new tool set plus the end of the Ice Age, man over hunted the big game. Our success meant that our population grew too much to be able to be sustained by hunting. We had to find a new way of feeding ourselves. The answer was to domestic some plants and some animals. In the end of course we domesticated ourselves.
At the end of the Medieval world, our tenured system with low or no investment in agriculture other than the labor of peasants, could not keep up with the huge rise in the population delivered by the adoption of Agriculture. Endemic famine weakened the immune system, global trade opened up the vectors for a pandemic. The pandemic took western populations back 1,000 years.
In England, a minor player, in the power system of the old order, a series of events took place that set in motion the foundations of our own time - both its success and of course the seeds of our own hitting the limits.
Why did England break away so early and form the modern model?
Hard hit by the Black Death that meant that there were not enough peasants to farm. England also had a civil war that killed off most of the traditional aristocracy and the dynasty. The new rulers of England, the Tudors, were "New Men". In England, as in Europe, more than 50% of the land, wealth, was tied up in the Church. Henry's adoption of the New Religion, enabled him to take all of this land, sell it and give the land and cash to the New Men who supported the regime.
In England the protectors of the old system had ben replaced by new men who had a stake in the new. On the continent and in Asia that would not be the case for centuries and then only after great conflict.
England cashed out the old agriculture system and set in motion a new way of farming. A system that over time replaced nearly all the people with machines and capital. A system that had at its centre money and a financial system. In the rest of the world peasant and princes continued.
As a result, England started to "invest" in new techniques. The precursor of the Industrial Revolution was the Agricultural Revolution. Most important new breeds, new strains of crop and machinery could be developed because farming had become a business!
Capital and machines started to replace labor in the fields.
This drive a huge social revolution as people who had lived in rural communities were driven off the land to go to America or to London. Wages and jobs were invented. England's huge coal reserves took the new Nation to a higher level of productivity.
The reduction in the power of the Prince, lead to the idea of the Nation. A nation that was moving from the country to the city - a powerful trend. As powerful as the settling trend that ended our days of wandering as Hunter Gatherers. Over time, as more capital replaced people, this trend became global. We live today in an urban world.
Meanwhile we are all pounded with messages about the dogma.
A new communications system arose that supported this new capital based world. It was of course the mass media. Traditionally it was owned and controlled by those who had the capital essential for such an enterprise. It was like the pulpit of the Catholic Church in Medieval times. Impossible to compete with. It was and is also the mouthpiece of a new dogma. That the economy is everything and that our salvation is to have lots of money and material goods. That economic growth is not only good but essential. Like the pulpit - it was a one way system. At first it was the press. Later Radio and TV - all really the same but with greater amplification.
At first the mass media touted the idea of Citizenship and Nation. Both world wars relied on the mass media to galvanize the people in titanic national struggles.
Just as people became more urban, so they became less regional and more National. A product of this modern period was the emergence of the Nation State - purportedly based on the will of the people.
This was the platform, capital based food and its key lever finance, that enabled England to gain an Empire. For all of its opponents still lived in a food system of the peasant, the land and the prince. None had developed the financial capacity that came with breaking down the old institutions. With one exception, England's unruly child, America.
America was no place for a Prince. It was all about the New Men with no ties to the past. It's Protestant foundation where the saved could be seen in life by their worldly success accelerated the idea of money and finance's relative importance. Its vast spaces accelerated the use of "science" and equipment to farm.
Just as England benefited from having large coal reserves, America entered the 20th century as the place where the oil revolution began. America also was the Winner in Europe's 100 year civil war in the 20th century that destroyed its infrastructure and spent its wealth.
But it is oil that has transformed our world more than any other shift.
This is the result. An explosion in global population. Made possible by a capital based food system, by finance and by the most effective source of energy that we have ever know.
Time to take a step back. One of the features of fractals is that they scale. Whether you expand the scale or go deeper you still find the same shapes.
Even at this scale in the Mandelbrot Set, it is easy to see that the main Fractal repeats at all scales. It is a definition of "Truth" that if a pattern repeats like this it is Natural and hence True. You can expect it to repeat if the right environment is set up.
If we go back into history, we will find signs of this over population but on a smaller scale. Every time we find this, the same outcome occurs.
Globally it happened when Hunter Gatherers used their new skills to over hunt the land. It happened locally to Babylon that had also over reached itself using irrigation. It happened to Rome. It looks as if this happened to the Maya. It happened to the Europeans in the medieval period.
We seem to push to and then beyond the limits of each prevailing system.
The power institutions tend to become increasingly self serving. The Church sells Indulgences to pay for its Elite. The Mass Media of our time no longer is the servant of the state and citizen ship but of the financial elite.
So when Nature makes its move - the famine in France before the revolution, the famine in the Yucatan Peninsula, the Black Death, the Old Gods and the old Elite have no credibility.
Katrina is maybe the first sign that the Government of the US is impotent. The cracks in the financial system also weaken confidence. We are not so sure anymore. Just as the people in Europe were not so sure after the Black Death.
When we are weak and unsure, then Nature strikes.
We utterly depend on cheap oil. Every part of our food system depends on oil. Not just to grow food but to put it on our table. Most cities and communities now have only 3 days food supply!
Then Nature comes a long and gives us a push. For certain cheap oil, the energy that has enabled our population to explode, will not be there soon. Worse, conflict say in the Middle East, could stop us in our tracks. We could like the Black Death face global starvation in a period of 5 years.
There is simply no way that we can sustain a population of 7 billion plus with our current system because whether we want it or not, its base - cheap credit and a stable financial system and cheap and abundant fossil fuel - will not be there.
We are indeed at one of those moments in time of over-reach.
Our citizen leaders are now controlled by the dogma and by the elites that have the power. The agenda for the nation has become the market and no longer the state.
As people live their entire lives in cities divorced from nature, they also become disconnected from their own nature. As we become more alienated from nature we lose touch with human nature as well. We cease to observe and we instead rely on dogma. We think that we can cope with no family and no community. We think that money and the state will provide all we need. We are told that in the end, the market will provide.
The monolith of support for the state is splintered:
- Some still believe and hope that if we can borrow and but enough, we will find happiness (Indulgences?)
- Some act out. We take drugs, we abuse ourselves and we take advantage of others.
- Some reach back to the Book and the certainties of the earlier age. We look to our God to help us
- Others look forward and start to see a new way, a new way that is very different. We start to reconnect to our inner selves and to others and to nature. We are the new heretics!
It will not take much for us to lose confidence in our Gods and in their Agents. Their hold on power is a thread.
So what is to come?
Next post for that.
