In that great Science Fiction series Foundation, Hari Seldon uses the "Science" of "Psychohistory" to predict the future. The book opens at a time when a great civilization is ending. Foundation is the story about an attempt to set the seeds for a renewal. Written 60 years ago, it seemed impossible that we could have such a "Science" and that our own civilization may be showing signs of its end.
I now think that both are now possible.
Of course, foretelling the future in detail is impossible. But just as you can use Newtonian math to predict where a shell will land from a gun, so I think with Fractals we can now predict the shape of what will come.
You don't believe me? Here 2 examples.
This graphic shows what we think happened with the Big Bang. At first Chaos and then order.
All matter in the universe largely settles into this kind of order. This is the natural ordered shape of complex systems. The universe is full of these shapes. They are never exactly the same but like a snowflake, they are all similar.
Inside a Galaxy, we cannot see the shape. Our night sky appears chaotic to us because we are too close to see the fractal. But with a telescope we can see them. Now we have the tools to look so far into space that we can see its beginning. And what do we find there? Galaxies.
On the ground, we experience Hurricanes as Chaos. Every Hurricane on the ground is different from every other one. When you are in a hurricane, you cannot get the perspective to see the fractal.
But from space, all Hurricanes look mainly like this. Because this is what a complex system always looks like in Fractal Form. Again, no hurricane is exactly like another but all share the same order.
Also we know how to predict a hurricane. We know what the drivers are that set them in motion. We now can track them. We cannot know exactly when they will land or not. But we are close. 50 years ago, none of this was possible. We did not have the tools.
I think we can use this idea of Fractals and of perspective and tools to see our history. Both in the past and we can now see the next possible future. Maybe we can be Hari Seldon?
To see beyond the Chaos, we need a better perspective. We are going to use Time. With enough time we will see the pattern. When we see the pattern, we can see the drivers that shape it.
We can also predict what the pattern will be. For all complex systems share the same pattern as we see above.
This now may look familiar. It is the curve, and hence set of normative relationships governed by math, that nature uses to stack all complex systems. It is the math behind the structure of a galaxy, a hurricane, a sunflower seed pod and of all development.
If humans are to reach their potential as a species, our pattern will have this shape. It will have a curve that will bend in on itself.
If we go on one straight line, we are not going to make it. We are set for a return to an earlier phase. Not the same but a phase that shares many of the elements of an earlier part of how we lived.
Here is a linear view of this curve.
3 million years of human development. Like all development, it is non linear. It accelerates.
You will see that if we make the transition to the next phase, we will have turned the corner and returned, but on an outer path to many of the attributes of the founding aspects of human nature and society. In the next slide in the series I will add more detail that I hope will make this more clear.
I have picked the dates with care.
3,000 BC is the culmination of all the forces that created agriculture and a world view of man dominating nature and each other. It is the time when the early two kingdoms of Egypt combined and the first agricultural empire began. Of course the lead up to this may have taken 10,000 years. But from that date the Hunter Gatherer world was doomed. Land took over from social capital as the store of wealth and the lever of power.
I picked 1776 because this was the culmination of all the forces that came out of the Big Bang that was the Reformation. This was the declaration of a new society that did not have a king and that was based on individualism rather than class. It was also designed to separate religion out from the state.It was when Money took over from land as the store of wealth and lever of power. It was when the machine arrived.
I picked 1985 as a compromise. The web was invented in 1991 and Chaos Theory was first promulgated in 1985. The date is of course wrong. Someone in the future will be able to pick a decisive date where, like the founding of the Egyptian Empire or America, the networked world decisively defeats the machine world. But I think it is a nice date to start as both the web and Chaos theory are key elements in what will shape the society to come. For the web is our new metaphor and Chaos Theory is the Newtonian gift tnat has the power to enable us to use math to understand what is going on. And wealth? My bet is that Social Capital will become the store of wealth again and the lever of power.
So how do these changes in society come about? What are the features that have to come together to shift one stable system into chaos and then reorder it? They must exist for they exist for all other complex systems.
Here are I think the key elements.
The most important, I keep to the left. It is how we get our food.
How we get our food seems to be the activity that shapes our relationships to everyone and to everything.
This perspective affects and interacts with the elements on the right. These settle into a stable system. In the interim there are huge conflicts as one system dies and the new comes to power.
In this post I am going to talk about the first 2 shifts. I will talk about our shift in the following post.
Hunter Gatherer to Agriculture
If you are a Hunter Gatherer, the key to your life is mobility and the ability to read the natural world. You are integrated into your food supply. This governs everything. You are an integrated person connected to your inner self, to your tribe, to the land, to the animals, to the plants, even to the inanimate. You are also connected to time - to your ancestors and to you children to come. You are connected to the night sky and to the universe.
You are part of everything but you own nothing.
You can't have property. You have to be able to move. Property is a unknowable idea. So wealth has to be social capital. It is the collective wisdom and the collective ability of the tribe that keeps the food on the table and the kids fed. So the hierarchy cannot be about gender. It is about wisdom. In a non literate society, the knowledge is in the heads and in the stories of the people. There will be fields of knowledge that are in the realm of men and in the realm of women. Both are essential to the health and survival of the whole. Much of this knowledge is based on deep knowledge of how nature works. All the interactions are acutely observed. So the full majesty of nature is appreciated. So there can be no one God. Gods are immanent and everywhere
You live in your hunting grounds but you also live in the night sky. You are a Glocal person. You live in bands of about 35 with about 8 adult men and 8 adult women. The rest are children. You don't tend to breed from this pool. Periodically, you have big meetups with larger groups of allies and neighbors or you raid you enemies for women. So long as the larger breeding pool is about 500, you are OK genetically.
Your key technology is fire. This is what set you apart from the others. You can cook and so eat anything. You can make hard points and so you can kill anything.
So what changed all of this? What happened to throw off this 3 million year system?
What happened was a huge shift in Information Technology and a huge environmental event. Yes IT - bigger than the web. Bigger than the printing press. Bigger than writing.
Complex language itself seems to have emerged.How do we know this?
About 40,000 BC, something weird happened, Until then all tool development had been very slow. Then it takes off. Very complex weapons appear. So does pottery. So does early metallurgy. So does art. Art of the highest order. What was this? More and more we think that that structured speech happened. Monkeys, apes and dogs vocalize. We surely did as well. But the new pace of development and the issue behind art - self awareness and a sense of time - suggests that complex language emerged.
Until then man was just one of the species. Now he could go anywhere and use his culture to protect him. Now there was no animal that he could not hunt.
And what was the huge environmental issue opened the door for man to go to the furthest reaches of the planet. It was the end of the Ice Age. The pathways to the hidden parts of the world opened and the rise in temperature accelerated life everywhere.
So why the end of this Hunter gatherer life? All this was good news. The current theory is that we were so good at hunting now, that we killed off most of the easy to kill game. We overdid it. Our success drove a population explosion. Our success meant that we had spread everywhere and that we killed off our food - the large game animals. Sound familiar?
As with all system collapses, this must have been sudden. At some point, like the Cod, there was lots and then none. We had to find a new way of getting our food. The new of course came from the part of Hunter Gatherer that had the low status - the gathering.
There must have been a tough period for the men. Women's power must have risen as the food supply from gathering became more important than hunting. The Gathers then went on to invent horticulture. Women rose to the top of the hierarchy.
But then the men fought back - literally. A response was the domestication of some animals be men and the advent of agriculture where a few could live off the toil of the many.
With this was the beginning of the idea of property. Also the idea that man must be in charge. For if the herd was everything, he had to now if his son was his. To know that, his wife had to be his too. Some men also could see that it was easier to raid gardens and call themselves Kings. So one world died and another began.
In the new system agriculture was the key food source. Land was the key. Property - land, herds, slaves, women, sons - was therefore vital as an idea. Everyone was tied to the land in a strict hierarchy. Agriculture demanded great control. Someone had to control the land and the system. So there was both a King and later a God.
In the early years, the God and the KIng were usually the same. With a kingdom or an empire to run, a new revolution in Information Technology occurred. The written word. Originally text was used to run government. A government based on land and on the Big Man whose word was law. A later development of this was a shift to a God based on a Book. As the Gods died, so the King became the One God's anointed agent. In Europe, the Pope became the prime agent.
All the rules of the controlled system were written down. The text was the authority. Questioning the text was fatal. Observation was banned. Man separated from Nature. His beliefs replaced his eyes and his brain.
So how then did this system die?
Again a huge natural event and a breakthrough in IT.
The Black Death not only killed about 25% of the people in Western Europe but meant that people would no longer be tied to the land. It also shook people's confidence in God's agents on Earth.
The texts did not work. They had no answers. Nor could God's anointed agents help. Wealth shifted from the land to people who had skills. In Western Europe, agriculture had to shift to a system based on cash. Later this would be a system based on capital.
Money and wages began to replace fealty. Skill began to replace birth. More questions arose. Old wisdom that had lain asleep for a thousand years in monasteries was looked at with fresh eyes. Observation started to replace the Text. A huge new idea emerged, that man could talk direct to God. Some started to look once again at Nature with new tools. The world of the texts was seen to be wrong.
The Printing Press meant that all this ferment about new ideas that contradicted the old ways exploded. The old system could not keep the lid on.
Money and its "church" finance, was the new power. The new Empires ultimately went to the two nations that created finance, England and America.
Now money and a new way of farming and a new energy system were about to take humanity on a rocket launch similar to when the emergence of speech took Cro Magnon to Homo Sapiens.
Surely worth a post on its own?
My next post..
