The Football of Time
 Why Globalization Isn't Working
 - Volume II in the Millennium Orienteering Trilogy -
116 pages, available online from *Amazon.com
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        How was this set of ideas developed? After sketching out the main outlines of a market-oriented worksharing program (Timesizing) in the mid-1970s, Phil Hyde wanted to check that what he was coming up with was in line with the long-term social evolution actually works. He already had a simple methodology: ask the obvious question and accept the obvious answer and then ask the next obvious question, etc. So Phil looked up "social science" in the dictionary (American Heritage) and found this list: sociology, psychology, anthropology, economics, political science and history.
        The order seemed kind of random, so the next obvious question was, Can these social sciences be arranged in any kind of logical, linear order, roughly parallel to human evolution? From a linguistic viewpoint, anthropology contains the Greek root meaning "human" (anthropo-), so it would be a good candidate for the beginning of the parade, right at the boundary between humans and the rest of the animals. Also, people usually say that the main difference between humans and animals is the invention of language.
        So the next obvious question was: Do the other social sciences in the list coincide with some great invention in human evolution? Well, there's a book by Noah Kramer called "History Begins at Sumer" - because Sumer invented writing around 3200 B.C. Well, language was developing all the way along from over a million years ago to less than 100,000 years ago, and writing definitely comes after spoken language, so in arranging the social sciences in some kind of evolutionary order, history definitely comes after anthropology.
        But that still leaves a pretty big gap between 100,000 years ago and 3200 B.C. Is there anything in that gap? Well, many social scientists talk about the agricultural revolution and date it around 12,000 years ago, or 10,000 B.C. And one of the great early sociologists, Lewis Mumford, was always writing books about the city, like his books, "The City," and "The City in History." Go back far enough and the "city" just looks like a big town. Back further than that and the town just looks like a big village. Further than that and we're looking at camp or settlement. The basic thing seems to be the fixed location, and what made that possible was ... agriculture. So if sociology is focused on big fixed settlements made possible by the agricultural revolution, maybe in arranging the social sciences in evolutionary order, sociology can fill the gap between anthropology and history. So we have:
    language (1m - 100,000 BP) - anthropology
    agriculture (12,000 BP) - sociology
    writing (5200 BP = 3200 BC) - history
        But spoken language and writing (written language) both involve language. Does agriculture also involve language somehow? One thing you need for agriculture is timing. When to harvest is usually easy, but when to plant can be tricky. We know that American Indians had practical names for the months, such as the planting moon, the harvest moon, the and the hunting moon - maybe the people of the ancient Near East who later developed writing and earlier developed agriculture had the same kind of month names. The list of month names was linear and repeated and reinforced every year. These names could easily have doubled as the first numbers and served as the basis of a counting system and a calendar. (And one other quick fix: history and geography together were called "social studies" in elementary school, and linguistically, geography contains the Greek root, -graph, for "writing," so let's include geography this time too.) So we would have:
    language (1m - 100,000 BP) - anthropology
    agricultural calendar (12,000 BP) - sociology
    writing (5200 BP = 3200 BC) - history/geography
        That just leaves psychology, economics and political science to be accounted for. Economics seems more complicated and recent than politics, and psychology seems more complicated and recent than economics, so we're probably looking at the following order for them: political science, economics, psychology,
and the following order for the whole series: anthropology, sociology, history/geography, political science, economics, psychology
        But what great inventions coincide with each of these three? The obvious answers are: democracy, money, and Freud. But each of these answers has a problem. Democracy developed and died out several times before it stuck and lots of countries claim it but only have one choice on their "democratic" ballot; money was invented at least as early as writing; and Freud is a person, not an invention. We need better answers, but let's use our present answers as clues.
        Where did democracy arise and survive? It originated in ancient Greece (Athens) but died out. It arose in the Roman Republic but died out. The teaching of Jesus offered a choice but within 100 years, the Jewish Christians split completely from the Pharisaic Jews, leaving people again with just one choice. However, 200 years later within the Christian movement, something happened that did provide a continuing choice: St. Anthony of Thebes rejected society, went to live alone in the desert of Egypt, and thereby started the monastic movement, thus splitting the Christian professionals into rejecters and accepters of society, alias monks and priests, alias monastics and clerics. They had different lifestyles and eventually different literary traditions, but they never split completely or killed one side off because they were "brothers in Christ" (though they often came close). This forced them to talk things out instead of fighting things out or just distancing from each other. That in turn forced them to develop the political arts of negotiation, compromise, courtesy, diplomacy, and rhetoric. Thus choice survived and with it, greater flexibility, whose minimal prerequisite is two options. When this extends into lifestyle and literature, we get two "parties" and ... bipartisanship. Confirmation? When the papacy split between Rome and Avignon, sure enough, one was a priest and the other was a monk. This key split was repeatedly transformed and de-religionized - Catholics vs. Protestants, High vs. Low Anglicans, Cavaliers vs. Roundheads, Monarchists vs. Parliamentarians, Englishmen vs. Americans, States-Righters vs. Federalists, Democratic Republicans vs. Whigs, Democrats vs. Republicans. This choice of only two is getting kind of confining for Americans, but more articulate democracy has developed outside the USA, such as multipartisan representation (eg: Canada, 33m population) and direct referendumization (eg: Switzerland, 9m population). The key development seems to be negotiation, which contains the Latin word for veto, deny or disagree (nego), so the key advance of the Political Era seems to be the ability to communicate disagreement without taking it personally. This allowed people to discuss the pros and cons of different courses of action, and come up with behavior that was better thought out and practical. Ironically, it allowed people with the same religion to calmly disagree on courses of action AND people of conflicting religions to calmly agree on the same course of action. It's separation of religion and politics, church and state, is crucial, parallel to personal and impersonal. So what to put in our chart? Seems to depend on our mood. Bipartisanship? Negotiation? Shared partial disagreement? How about "parleying"? It includes all the others and it forms the basis of "parliament." And it suggests the simpler origins of this development. And it highlights the francophone boost to this development, for example, in the framing of the Magna Carta by the Norman barons in Britain.
        Next, what does money stand for? Maybe, cost-benefit analysis. Eighty years before the commonly hailed "father of economics," Adam Smith, an earlier innovator had this to say:
The Method that I take...is not yet very usual; for instead of using only comparative and superlative Words, and intellectual Arguments, I have taken the course (as a Specimen of the Political Arithmetick I have long aimed at) to express my self in Terms of Number, Weight, or Measure; to use only Arguments of Sense, and to consider only such Causes, as have visible Foundations in Nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable Minds, Opinions, Appetites, and Passions of particular Men, to the Consideration of others: Really professing my self...unable to speak satisfactorily upon those Grounds (if they may be call'd Grounds)....
        This earlier innovator was Sir William Petty, physician to Cromwell's army in Ireland, and his book title, "The Political Arithmetick," from whose preface these words are taken, is a good simple definition of economics, whose essence Petty defines above. It may also be seen to be the essence of science. Note that Petty clearly distinguishes it from politics. The economist says, "Forget your religion and politics, your inflammatory rhetoric and dramatizations - what's your bottom line; maybe we can agree." What Petty discovered was that quantifying problems would make easier the agreement of all parties on their solution, regardless of religious or political differences. Thus economics is the sharing of partial agreement, however short-term or narrowly interested, using the method of quantification.
        Freud was not just a person but an innovator. He invented psychoanalysis. The key goal was enabling people to function in society on an ongoing basis. That meant making sure people had some sort of internal equilibrium. But there's a larger science of balance called ecology. It's not a social science but it's so wholistic and comprehensive that it can serve as a bridge between the social sciences and the natural sciences. And it involves programming for automatic homeostasis, just like the body's physiology. No political interference, no interference based on the current economic theology. Just an automatically self-levelling playing field based on an automatically self-centrifuging concentration of valuel.
        So putting all this together, we get:
    language - anthropology,
    agricultural calendar - sociology,
    writing - geographese/history,
    parleying - political science,
    quantification - economics
    programmed self-balance - psychology/ecology
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.

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