"The Football of Time" is a small printing for preview purposes of Vol.II in the "Millennium Orienteering Trilogy." It serves as one of two backgrounders for Vol.III, Timesizing, Not Downsizing.
Jared Diamond's Germs, Guns, and Steel is the appetizer for this theory. His subtext is debunking racism. His unexpressed punchline is here on this page.
"The Football of Time" linearizes the major social sciences and uses them as categories or stages of human evolution, stages that are gradually foreshortening as human population increases and humans become more adaptible. The book makes the point that the most severe problem across long-term social evolution is the inability to adequately share and spread around value, such as valuable inventions, ideas or skills, and the long-term tendency for the most valued possession or measure of each era is to gravitate, concentrate, collect, coagulate and congeal such value among a privileged few. Why is this a problem, when we're constantly subjected to subliminal messages that our own era's primary value-measure is money and that it is Good to concentrate money without limit in the topmost income brackets "because we need large investments"? The answer is all in the relative scales. It is possible (and it regularly occurs) for the concentrated portion of a given value-measure to get so enormously huge, and the population that "owns" it so small, relative to the spread-around portion and relative to the large population that experiences only the thinly spread portion, that further concentration (usually inevitable) becomes self-destructive and suicidal. For example, the superwealth of the aristocrats triggered the French Revolution and got them all killed. The superwealth of the monks triggered the envy of Henry VIII and got them all thrown out on the street. The supercivilization of the Sumerians triggered the envy of the hordes of Semitic bandits in the badlands and got the Sumerians conquered, looted, upstaged and superceded by the Babylonians and Assyrians, née Akkadians.
(So the most important challenge of each era is to develop a mechanism that centrifuges this highly concentrated value-dimension and spreads it out across the entire local, then regional, then global population. Now that humans are aware of this process, they can speed it up by consciously repeatedly designing and implementing the next great centrifuge mechanism in the series.)
The second-most severe problem is related to the first. The spread of these automatic value-centrifuge mechanisms is not uniform and is in fact stuck at a number of frontiers. Thus, the world is not just different geographic zones. It is different time zones or timeframes. Not in the sense of 9 am in Boston and 6 am in San Francisco, but in the sense of 2008 AD in Cambridge, Massachusetts and 1866 AD in post-Katrina New Orleans, 2013 AD in Canada, 2020 AD in the Netherlands and 12,000 BC among the mudmen in New Guinea. More to the point, Americans in general and the Bush regime in particular assume that Iraq and Afghanistan are in the same time frame as themselves, but they are centuries earlier because they have not gone through the accelerated social evolution that Europeans and Americans have gone through. Even more complicating is that the Bush regime is only in the 2008 timeframe relative to its weapons technology. In terms of its economic and political ideas, its expressed desire for the permanent dominance of one political party and of one nation places it in the pre-economic, pre-political era of empire, the Geographic/Historical Era right after humans first developed writing. So individual nations, and individual people, can be in several different timeframes at once.
The trouble here is that almost no one in the world today is aware of these vitally important evolutionary time differences. And there are several entrenched reasons for this: (1) political correctness including the hairtrigger charges of racism and sexism; (2) the general irresponsible inability to accept death, including the taboo on suicide; (3) the U.S. Declaration of Independence, which begins, "All men are created equal" - notice the self-restraint that American women have exercised for the last few generations in raising charges of sexism due to this now-archaic wording; (4) we now need to overcome our blindspots fast to save our biosphere = our habitat = ourselves, and stop committing unwitting but accelerating species suicide, and our paradigms and paradigm shifts are determined by our series of chief sharing technologies in an extension of the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis that post-modernists are now updating, - it's hard to operate on our own retinas, to redesign our own socio-economy from within, but linguists offer tools....
But not even all men are created equal. They may be equal before the law in some countries, but it is the design of the law that makes them so. The only "creation" here is the accident of birth - for some people - in those particular countries. And even this articulation perhaps implies a questionable pre-birth existence.
So if we translate "all men are created equal" into updated form and get "all humans are born equal," even this is not true without some such qualification as "before the law," because, look around you, unless you are in the power elite and shielded by a gated community awash in money, you can see plenty of evidence of entrenched differences of wealth and poverty, and if you're born into wealth, you're "more equal" and if you're born into poverty you're "less equal." Even with "equal before the law," were the many on deathrow in America equal to OJ Simpson in getting out of a murder wrap? This is inequality in terms of the most obvious and superficial variable, material possessions. But these differences go much much further and deeper than that. If you're born into the USA, you're "more equal" and if you're born into a tribe in the upper Amazon you're much much "less equal." The main difference here is in sharing technology (see list of eras and sharing technologies below). A hunting and gathering tribe is dependent primarily on the sharing technology of basic human language relative to animal signalling. That's five sharing technologies and social-science eras before the one that's framing our general Euro-American creativity today, namely the sophisticated quantification techniques of our Economic Era.
Were Japan and China equal to America in the 1850s when the US Navy sailed up their rivers in their iron boats and blew away their wooden forts? Were the Aztecs and Incas equal to the Spanish when the conquistadors came on their horses and fired their harquebuses?
"The Football of Time" faces this issue - that theologians call the Scandal of Particularity in relation to the incarnation - by suggesting we already have a way of approaching and discussing this issue, a way we have not developed. It is not perfect. It does not cover all timeframe differences. It omits the finer distinctions that took place before the agricultural revolution, for example, such as the language differences between modern humans (CroMagnons) and Neanderthals that led to the dominance of the moderns. But it gives a rough way of grasping the main differences after the agricultural revolution when changes began happening on a thousand-year, then hundred-year timetable instead of taking tens and thousands of millenia.
We in the accidentally favored later timeframes now have to sweep aside the speech-gagging political correctnesses and hairtrigger sensitivities of our own and our less favored siblings - to be able at least to discuss these differences and how to mitigate them or live with them without mutual harm.
This is a centuries-old problem. Spain had three different religions, and Alfonzo X let each abide by their own laws as long as they did not conflict with the laws of Spain. Now Canada has allowed some Moslem communities to abide by Shariya law even when it does conflict with Canadian law, so they are going to reinvent the wheel and learn once again the hard way that this is unsustainable. Sustainable is to say, You want to constrain some people because of their gender? Go to a country where this is the law of the land. Why did you come here if that's your priority, for economic prosperity? But the prosperity here is dependent on constraining people equally regardless of sex - make up your mind: is your priority religion or prosperity? - you can't have both in this instance. Recall Jehovah's Witnesses (JWs) who think "Thou shalt not eat blood" bans transfusions. OK for them. Not OK for them in a country with advanced medicine to impose this on any of their children who need transfusions. This raises a key point that the advanced nations have not fully realized and decided upon. We have got to allow people to commit suicide. But not to take others with them. If you don't want a transfusion, fine. But if you'd prefer to have your children die rather than have a transfusion, go to a country where there are no transfusions, or start a country that has your JW laws.
Lao Tzu says, what you would destroy you must first build up. We have got to accept death in order to banish it. We have got to accept death in the form of suicide in order to stop the many many ways in which people are committing slow suicide and taking others with them, Geo.Bush Jr. & Co. for instance.
The "football" in "Football of Time" refers to Buckminster Fuller's concept of the most advanced human team in each era. It leads to such questions as: In each era throughout the past up to the present, who's "carrying the ball" and "running with it"? Who's "fumbled it" and why? Who's "intercepting"? The football metaphor hammers in the fact that the world is not primarily different geographic zones but different time zones or timeframes – people are strung out all down the backward path of social evolution. Often by choosing where you want to live in the world, you're choosing when you want to live, in terms of what historical or social-evolutionary period you surround yourself with. It is only at our peril that we keep dealing with all populations in the world today as if they are all in the same timeframe and "on the same page," and merely in different geographic locations.
We've developed this idea in this book (old book blurb) based on the way it actually occurred to Phil Hyde back in the early 1970s, but let's try the linguistic introduction this time....
Ever notice how truckdrivers and lawyers can say exactly the same thing in totally different words? There seem to be job dialects within English, and other modern languages. But what if some of them are more important than others? What if there's a pecking order, and at the top, power dialects? What if there are power dialects within English? And what if they have taken turns in center stage, succeeding one another across long-term human evolution and giving substance to the idea that we are advancing and progressing, and not just going round in circles with ever more technological toys, weapons of mass destruction, and heroic medical measures for extending low-quality life and worsening over-population and the stress on our hopefully not fragile (yeah, sure) biosphere?
But what would these dialects be? Is there a list somewhere? Could they provide a key to human history and prehistory and help our understanding of what's going on in this crazy world better than Toffler's three "waves," or Hegel's "thesis, antithesis, synthesis," or Newton's "action, reaction," or Maslow's hierarchy of being, or de Chardin's pneumenological scheme, etc.?
Our best candidate is the list of "social sciences" found in any dictionary. Here's the American Heritage Dictionary's list: sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, political science, and history (recall that history and geography were called "social studies" in elementary school).
What if these social sciences are each parallelled by a great invention in human evolution, inventions that linearize them into rough chronological order something like this: anthrop - language itself, soc - agriculture, geog/hist - writing, polisci - parleying (as in "parliament," including negotiation, veto, diplomacy, rhetoric, compromise, courtesy...), econ/psych - quantification? And what if these great collective inventions cue the power dialects that have rolled across human tongues with slow acceleration over the two or whatever million years in the evolution of genus homo:
language - anthropologese,
agricultural calendar - sociologese,
writing - geographese/historese,
parleying - politicese,
quantification - economese/psychologese
Notice the one common thing-that-is-being-shared here throughout is change-motivating feedback ... or in Darwin's terms, adaptation-motivating feedback.
Naturally, they just congealed into "social sciences" in the last 100 years or so. But, to take the first example, the focus of anthropology is humanity itself and its major distinctive feature, language. So those who spoke "anthropologese" across the hundreds of thousands of years between our emergence as genus homo and our development of agriculture may well be regarded as those with heightened language skills - those such as wise women who could make up words and tell stories round the hearth. The respect in which they were held was so great that there were plenty of survivals into later eras, like the blind poet Homer among the early Greeks and the AngloSaxon bards with their "word hoards," and even today's generally sidelined poets, playwrights, script-writers, speech-writers, novelists, lyricists and librettists, with their one remaining hold on power, the 30-second TV-spot scripters.
But what are these inventions that give focus to the social sciences and their sequence of power dialects? What do they have in common? What if this series of great collective inventions traces the critical achievements in human evolution and progress because they have all been systems for sharing, for allowing us to be more available to one another in harmonious ways? What if they're like the major upgrades in our social software? What if they are all centrifuge mechanisms that spread around the concentrations of advantage or power that develop over time in every culture, society or civilization and gradually become so huge that they destroy their host culture or doom it to the sidelines. How? By bogging down whole-system feedback and strangling the free exchange and fine-tuning of ideas and resources - such as money, once it was invented. Therefore, what if our major social software over the very long term always focuses on one general problem, the over-concentration of power, and always functions as a centrifuge of that power, and advantage, and value? If so, all the major upgrades - we count five so far - have been some kind of centrifuge mechanism, each one an improvement on the previous. And what if this repeatedly upgrading social software, this better and better centrifugation of power, has been the major source of our unique human versatility and power?
The unlimited concentration of money is the most obvious example. Rich people pamper and coddle themselves. They slooowly, graaadually get all the little "money sprinklers" in the economy turned from "spray" to "stream" and pointed up to themselves (like the easing of Glass-Steagall on them and the toughening of the bankruptcy act on everyone else), and slooowly and unnoticeably they insulate and isolate themselves more and more - yet they still have all the important decision-making power. The wealthy don't want anything to change (except maybe a little bit more in their own favor). Basically they want everything to stay the way it is, because the way it is favors them sooo much. But over time and without much awareness of the cumulative results, they keep making myriads of little adjustments in their own favor, their holdings get unimaginably astronomically large, for example, Bill Gates, formerly a regular nerdy guy, is now hovering around $50-60,000,000,000, and Warren Buffett around $42B, etc. And they were already spending all they cared to before the last billion arrived - if they were even aware of its arrival. Thus the value in the system consolidates and coagulates at the "top," its overall dynamism in terms of the velocity of circulation of the currency slows down, and the whole system gets kind of arthritic, meaning less and less flexible and adaptive - and less competitive and sustainable and survivable. Finally, like a big old tree, it blows down in a storm. So, what if the populations that have done best in the storms posed by environmental pressures over the centuries have been the societies at each point that have been furthest into the next great invention in human evolution, per our list above: language, agriculture/counting, writing, negotiation/diplomacy, quantification?
The social sciences themselves constitute a collective invention that provides the key to what has really been going on in human evolution at the most general levels. So what's been going on? We believe that we've been coming up with a series of better and better sharing systems that allow us to be more available to one another in positive, constructive ways and cooperate more easily, and that prevent the astronomical concentration of resources and breakdown of whole-system feedback that accompanies the self-insulation and -isolation of the wealthy. We believe that this is the way the world works in the very long term.
These successive, repeated upgrades in our mechanisms to centrifuge power have spread our whole-system "nerve endings." They have repeatedly enhanced whole-system feedback and shortened the response time in given populations, making them more adaptive and competitive. The names and central topics of the major social sciences seem to be an invention of our collective subconcious to mark off these repeated upgrades and divide history into helpful stages or eras:
- Anthropology - language (hunting signals; sharing mental pictures, wants and fears, art and dance)
- Sociology - agricultural calendar (settlements based on domestication starting 13000 BP of plants = fixed societies based around granaries, 9000 BP of animals, for food, then power (plow and transport, and in the horse, mobility); sharing sun-demarcated daily and moon-demarcated monthly and tree-demarcated seasonal chores and rituals; counting moon phases); the difference between the Anthropological Era and the Sociological Era is also marked by the contrast between "uncivilized" or "savage" and "civilized," as shown, for example, in the "taming" of the American West and the whole mythology of the Oregon Trail; the contrast between "pagan" and "Christian" tends to reflect a wider contrast between the Anthropological and Political or even Economic Eras (this is Jared Diamond's first program, "Out of Eden")
- Geography/history - writing (reading, and rereading alias religion, which functions in human evolution as a literacy campaign, motivating people to learn to read: thereby sharing experience and 'facts' across generations from our ancestors to our descendents, from the dead to the unborn; compare David Lowenthal's 1985 book "The Past is a Foreign Country," and Jared Diamond's TV series in the second episode ("Conquest [of the Incas]") of which, as an aside, he mentions the development of writing and the printing press that enabled generals, for example, to pass along a repository of dirty tricks that they had been doing to one another across Eurasia for thousands of years, in particular, Cortez's story about his Aztec conquest, passed on to Incan conqueror Pizarro (copy in Salamanca University), whereas the Incas never received the Aztec writing system and didn't have any idea what a book was when confronted with one; Diamond does somewhat develop the game aspect referred to in our title, "The Football of Time" - the Europeans competed with germs from their four domesticated animals and thereby gained a devastating invisible ally; Diamond also refers to the weapons race in Europe throughout the Political Science Era - see next paragraph; but he does not develop it into tracing exactly our own evolution and the stages thereof, and therefore our ability to assign every population in the world to some point, or mixture of points, in our own evolutionary lineage)
- Political science - sharing partial disagreement for better orientation and feedback (parleys, negotiations; votes, initiatives).
When did the Political Era begin? The democracy of Athens and the republic of Rome decayed into dictatorships. The Judeo-Christians split completely with the Pharisaic Jews. But Christ gave Christianity enough of an integrating force to withstand the split in their leadership between the accepters and rejecters of society, the clerics and monastics, priests and monks, and in the tension between their diverging lifestyles and literary traditions, the political arts evolved to new heights: diplomacy, courtesy, neutrality, dedramatization, negotiation, compromise.... The split started in 291 AD when Anthony of Thebes "hit the desert" of Pispir to live alone ... and was followed by crowds of kindred spirits.
- Economics (and psychology) - sharing partial agreement for better orientation and feedback (quantification of problems; data, statistics).
When did the Economic Era begin? When Dr. William Petty, Cromwell's chief medical officer in Ireland, saw so much suffering there that he resolved to discount matters of opinion unless they were backed by arguments based on things that could be weighed and measured. In short, he replaced the lingering inflammatory rhetoric of politics (qualitative) with a new wave of neutrality and dedramatization, based on quantification and mathematics as a second language. The book he wrote as a result of empathy with the other side (the Irish) and frustration with his own side (the English) defines "economics" in its title, The Political Arithmetick (1690).
Given these five clues, what's next? Given these five power dialects that have taken turns bending the ear of rulers, what's the next vocabulary that will upstage these five and increase humanity's critical variable? The fifth one is definitely getting into a self-destructive stage with its new downsizing madness, in direct contradiction to its own lipservice to Growth. People sense that we need a new integrating principle, a new basis for common interest. We're betting on a new science that transcends the social sciences and integrates them back into the natural sciences. We think it's going to be:
- Ecology - sustainability (extended self-interest, programming for very long-term homeostasis;
designing for automatic repeated deconcentrations of power to maintain whole-system feedback
and of money to maintain system-wide production-consumption equilibrium)
One might assume that an explicit design process to program for sustainable homeostasis is unnecessary - "Oh, the market will take care of it." But this is to ignore how far technology has gone today with mechanization, automation and now robotization, and how things really work in terms of entire factory systems with no employees except someone to drive around and read the charts once a week and someone to deliver raw materials and remove finished products. The urgency of this design process is driven by the threat of blowing up the world on the puppetstrings of the weapons lobby, or poisoning it at the behest of the nuclear power industry, or flooding it by global warming in support of the automotive industry. Ideally, the sustainable homeostasis we design and program would include a new integrating principle on which to base a deeper and more flexible common interest.
So the key thing about the ecological age is not the design and implementation of an employment-balancing program such as Timesizing, but the design of a general template (such as Timesizing's five phase framework) and building on nature (esp. physiology) and on the design and implementation of homeostatic systems in hitech, surgery, dentistry, aircraft, space, heating/cooling - literally everywhere peripheral, turning at last to the design and implementation of self-balancing systems in the central, core, socio-economic per-person variables/dimensions, of which employment is merely the most accessible and strategically first, to be followed by income, wealth, credit, etc. The first challenge is the generality; the second challenge is to apply it to the much-distracted-from, glaringly INVISIBLY obvious central variables, and then to lock in, build on, and ratchet up from each homeostaticized-dimension plateau when it has raised expectations beyond what it can satisfy, and move on to the next variable/dimension in the strategic order.
Our design is a kind of social software that has designed-in, pre-cued upgrades to keep pace with the rising expectations that it itself engenders.
So each power dialect represents a step forward in the "technologies" of human sharing, agreement-building, construction&cooperation, variability&versatility, survivability&security. Each has a definite period of years during which it was prevalent. Each successive period of years is getting shorter that overall present a definition of "progress." Thus this book illustrates the acceleration of progress in the progressive shortening of the dialect periods from first to sixth.
Note that we're talking about "progress" from the viewpoint of contemporary western humanity, justified by the fact that we need it most since we're doing by far the most non-renewable resource consumption and far more than our per-capita share of global pollution - and there may be some elements in current apparent attempts of eastern humanity to catch up to us that are not just us pushing stuff on them. Indeed, we criticize the simplistic obsession of western humanity with "globalization" for ignoring the fact that the world today is not primarily different geographic zones but different time zones based on the periods of dominance of the five (so far) different power dialects of human history and prehistory. Every previous dialect period is still represented by at least one population somewhere in the world and this represents valuable species-level diversity, any part of which could turn out to be critically valuable for our species survival at some point.
Gung-ho globalizers have little or no handle on this long-term aspect, or on the fact that due to their naivete, some human populations, such as the Saudis, have a dangerously confused time-address, for example, advanced weaponry overlaid on primitive social institutions such as the use of maiming as a standard punishment. Then there are the Israelis, modern in every way except they've gone back to a political design with an established religion (characteristic of the first two periods of the Political Era, monasticism and feudalism, now past). And then there are the Americans, for decades fearfully, constantly meddling with these two anachronisms, Saudis and Israelis, due to their location over or close to non-renewable resources and whose once-touted political design with separation of church and state now seems itself vulnerable to backsliding toward an established religion.
The Shrinking of the Eras = The Acceleration of Change (aka Progress?)
Whether the anthropological age with human language in place started 1 million years ago or 500,000, or only started with the CroMagnon "moderns" around 250,000 years ago, it was still a matter of hundreds of thousands of years.
The sociological age starting with the agricultural revolution and the development of the agricultural calendar started 12,000 years ago and held sway till the development of writing around 5200 years ago, so it lasted 6800 years.
The geographic-historic age started with the dawn of contemporary records in Sumer 5200 years ago and held sway till the political age started 1700 years ago (291 AD), thus lasting 3500 years.
The political-science age started with the split of the Christian professionals into accepters (priests) and rejecters (monks) of society when Anthony of Thebes hit the desert of Pispir to seek solitude c.291 AD and it continued till Sir William Petty's "Political Arithmetick" was published in 1690, so it lasted 1400 years. Note that there were also monklike communities such as Qumran (Dead Sea Scrolls) prior to 290 but these did not survive.
The economic age started with the "Political Arithmetick" and seems to be continuing to hold off the ecological age to this day, so it's been going for roughly 300 years.
This gives us ages of the following length:
250,000; 6800; 3500; 1400; 300&counting
Rounding, we get:
240,000; 6400, 3200, 1600, 300&counting (to 800?).
Notice the telescoping or acceleration effect.
If the rough halving of durations continues, the economic age will drag on for another 500 years, but human pressure on the ecosphere will probably force it to happen much faster - if "forcing" spurs advance rather than reversal.
The Football of Time - Volume II in the Millennium Orienteering Trilogy (116 pages) is available for US$22 including shipping to US destinations (extra for foreign) from Phil Hyde at:
Timesizing.com, PO Box 622, Cambridge-B, Mass. 02140, USA.
