"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. The "football" refers to Buckminster Fuller's concept of the most advanced human team in each age. It begs the questions: In each age of history, who's "carrying the ball" and "running" with it? Who has fumbled 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 pathway of social evolution, and it is only at our increasingly great 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."
We've developed this idea in this book, but the idea itself has been around for some time. A somewhat naive and simplified version of it is presented by René Grousset in his 1970 book, The Empire of the Steppes - a History of Central Asia. Grousset writes, "By the second half of the Middle Ages almost the whole of Europe, Western Asia, Iran, the Indies, and China had attained the same stage of material civilization. Yet one important area escaped this process - the whole wide belt stretching across...the steppe zone [which] remained a preserve of barbarism - not, be it understood, in the sense that the people living there were inferior as human beings to the rest of mankind, but because local conditions perpetuated a way of life which elsewhere had long since passed away. The survival of these pastoral peoples into an era when the rest of Asia had arrived at an advanced agricultural stage...involved a sort of time shift between neighboring peoples. Men of the second millennium B.C. coexisted with those of the twelfth century A.D."
Talking about the differences in terms of millennia and centuries is uninformative, and talking about them in terms of barbarism vs. civilization is limited, simplistic, and judgemental sounding. It completely omits earlier stages such as that represented by the Mudmen of New Guinea, and it can't handle substages like the contrast between the colonists in New England and New France in the late 1700s. We need a minimally controversial way of describing the stages in our own long social evolution in the West, and "The Football of Time" offers one. To describe our own critical path through long-term human and social evolution, we need to answer: What are the best divisions of history and social evolution? We propose six divisions or ages, based on the list of social sciences - a list that is already familiar to everyone. It occurs to us that each social science can be associated with a great collective invention, such as language, agriculture or writing. Each great invention offers new type of sharing - it makes people and their accomplishments more accessible to one another so that each age builds on all previous ages. At the same time, each age has its own unique value system of cumulatively increasing tolerance, flexibility and adaptibility, and its own favorite vocabulary or power dialect. The world today is not so much a matter of different geographic zones as different time frames, with various populations rooted in every previous stage of human evolution. Often they are rooted in a combination of stages, because making combination easy is the fact that every word and every concept in every language finds its "home address" in one of these six stages of human evolution (for our own species morale and Will To Continue, we call evolution "progress" or "advance" as if there's a net improvement, though things can easily slip backward as the Bush regime demonstrates, and though there is a balancing phenomenon along the lines of two steps forward, one step backward; so what is improving, though very unevenly? optionality, variability, continuability; and optionality brings with it power and control, and rising expectations):
- c. 1 million BC: Anthropological Age - language = the elaboration of signalling between migrating bands = the age of rites & chiefdoms (or tribes), focus on yearly migrations of game animals and fruiting of plants
- c. 12000 BC: Sociological Age - agriculture facilitated by counting and calendar myths, made possible fixed societies = the age of cults & kingdoms (monarchies), focus on the seasons and the twelve moons each year, such as planting moon, harvest moon and hunting moon
- c. 3200 BC (Sumer): Geographic/Historical Age - writing (Greek: graphè), reading, rereading (Latin: religio) = the age of religion & empire, focus on the seven lights ("planets") wandering among the fixed stars, each with its own finger and number and day making up a ceremonial week - start: Sun day, one: Moon day, two: Tiu's (Mercury) day & Woden's (Mars) day (order reversed in French etc.), three: Thor's (Jupiter/ZeusPater) day, four: Friyya (Venus) day, five: Saturn day; progress from pictograms to syllabaries to alphabets including runic and tree alphabets
- c. 260 AD (Anthony of Thebes): Political-Science Age - dual literary traditions (clerical & monastic), yielding bipartisanship = the age of party & constituency (with conservative & liberal elites) & philosophy, verbalizing instead of weaponizing grievances, sharing leadership selection and partial disagreement via negotiation and political skills such as courtesy and diplomacy, focus on key days in the life of model individual: Christ's birthday (Xmas), baptism, crucifixion (Good Friday), resurrection (Easter Sunday), pentecost, ascension day; and other individuals: saints' days; and and individual: birth, marriage, death
- c. 1690 AD (Wm. Petty's 'Political Arithmetick'): Economic Age - quantification of problems, designing for a balance of grievances and powers, sharing partial agreement via unemotional numbers, "mathematics as a second language" = the age of ideology (philosophy hidden in the statistics being gathered) & market (audience), focus on hours of work and their sporadic reduction as the key gauge of progress (temporarily out of fashion among atavistic English-speaking investors and economists)
- [not yet begun]: Ecological Age - programming for wholistic, very long-term natural balance and sustainability, e.g., automatic full employment via timesizing and a proliferation of parallel and serial programs to automatically optimize ecologies and align economies = the age of psychology & timeframe (very long vs. long, mid, short & immediate), focus on the minutes and seconds saved by automation and robotization, and on the centuries of pollution saved by better energy sources and processes
Each age represents a step forward in the "technologies" of human sharing, agreement-building, construction&cooperation, variability&versatility and survivability&security. Each has a definite period of years during which it was prevalent. Each successive period of years is getting shorter. To summarize, the six ages present an accountable definition of "progress."
The book illustrates the acceleration of progress in the progressive shortening of the ages from first to sixth, and represents progress from the viewpoint of contemporary western humanity, justified by current attempts on the part of the eastern humanity to catch up. The simplistic obsession of western humanity with "globalization," however, is criticized for ignoring the fact that the main thing in the world today is not different geographic zones but different time zones relative to the different ages of human history and prehistory. Every previous age is still represented by at least one population somewhere in the world. The gung-ho globalizers have little or no handle on this or on the fact that some populations have a mixed address, for example, advanced weaponry combined with primitive social institutions.
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, Timesizing.com, PO Box 622, Cambridge-B, Mass. 02140, USA.
