The present state of human ingenuity, applied to the creation and use of physical objects, and to the organisation of human society in a manner that leverages it, is remarkable.
However, this is not exactly a compliment, given the context of continuing strife, with immense suffering inflicted upon communities that span the gamut from simple to advanced societies.
The following is an attempt to understand the context that drove some seminal transformations in the past, at the dawn of the civilisation we now live in, one that makes such conflict inevitable. Furthermore, it points towards the organisation of the means of applied technology in a manner that minimises, by design, the critical inbuilt tensions.
Introduction
The term civilisation is generally understood to be derived from the gathering of people into town dwellings. The need to settle down in a single place grew, once the practice of agriculture, involving regular planting and tending to crops in specific fields, supplanted the practice of hunting animals and collecting wild forest produce for food. In practice today, there are almost no examples of hunter-gatherers who tend towards the construction of fixed dwelling places.
In turn, urbanisation has imposed the development of a variation of social skills that are not found dominant in other species on earth, lending an additional tinge of a concept, commonly termed culture, to the understanding of civilisation.
Probably due to changes in global climate conditions, humans are learned (thanks to multidisciplinary studies based on art, language and archaeology, a span of skills that drive from culture) to have, in the past, repeatedly undergone major shifts in the location of centres of dwelling.
Building and rebuilding large communities, and their attendant cultures, has brought about an explosion of technological awareness, accompanied by a seminal transformation in the medium of exchange for objects and information.
At the same time, the extensive consumption of materials, stretching both production and transformation, has reached a level where the pattern of global climate change, and with it the ability of the soil to nurture vegetation, including those useful to humans, either directly or as a resource for animal husbandry, endangers the survival of a majority of living species.
Our present awareness of early human migrations indicates the movement of Steppes people from Northern Asia through Central and southern Asia, and into Europe that has a special significance. Apart from its cultural aspects, it is generally accepted to have been accompanied by two technological innovations that influence, arguably even dictate, the evolution of modern civilisation.
One was the use of draught animals for haulage of heavy loads, consisting of both personal possessions and food reserves, and the second, the use of wheels to transform the load carriers. They were formerly sleds, very similar to the kind still used in arctic snow covered lands, but now became carriages.
The latter was destined to be a very seminal transformation, leading to a host of accompanying inventions. Among these was the development of wheeled weapons carriers, that had a major impact as force multipliers in the battles that inevitably accompanied the struggle for growing populations to occupy the most strategically valuable territories. Inevitably, it seems, because the cultural aspect of our current civilisation does not necessarily include the ability to settle matters amicably.
About two and a half millennia ago, the dependence on these force multipliers brought about another significant development. This is known, because one leader, of the Roman civilisation, documented his activities extensively. Julius Caesar mentioned in his records that he needed to lay down paved roads
in advance of taking his armies to advantageous battlefields, so that he could move ready to use heavy weapons into place quickly and tactically. He may or may not have been the first military leader to do this, but at least we know about it, thanks to his practice of documentation. We therefore learn the original purpose of the innovation of paved, high load bearing, lasting roads.
As a military and trading empire, Rome was very influential across large parts of Europe, Asia and northern Africa. It is possible that this influenced the continued spread of the concept of building paved roads, although the military purpose, to ease the movement of heavy artillery, almost certainly became secondary.
Other than military, the development of mechanical techniques of working materials, apart from other material handling activities like mining, continued as it had for thousands of years before the dawn of the Roman Empire, in many different parts of the world. Astounding artistic and scientific works of great complexity and detail are found in archaeological sites of extreme antiquity. They demonstrate that human ingenuity and ability can take other directions from the way present society is organised.
We know, therefore, apart from agricultural pastimes, and the working of woods and metals necessary to multiply the effort put into tilling and harvesting, impressive works of great precision were also created in many different societies and regions around the world. Both goods and techniques were inevitably shared between different groups of civilisations.
Producing such items were, however, the work of what today is called, perhaps with an implicit attitude of disparagement, a cottage industry. In fact, there was no other kind of industry, until much more recently, roughly three hundred years back.
We call this recent period the industrial age, and it is characterised by the establishment of very large centralised production facilities, using techniques that have enabled such activities to produce on a far larger scale than those accustomed to the earlier cottage industry could even imagine. This is practical, because of the innovation of building huge networks of load bearing durable roads.
We now have the spread of high manufacture value goods at extremely affordable costs, which in turn have brought about a completely new kind of civilisation. It is important to note that the expense of building and maintaining such roads are almost never borne by the persons and organisations profiting from the trade in those goods.
Some towns, (‘industrial townships’) have been built simply to support the activities of a single factory, bringing raw materials from a great distance, using the town mainly to house the large numbers of people working in these facilities, and also to provide ancillary services to ensure the factory can keep running for long periods of time without needing to be shut down for overhaul and maintenance.
This creates another dependency, the organisation of many groups of people working together in one place to manage the affairs of large production. So much so, that a different group of sets of people also need to congregate, in order to manage the sustainability of the groups that directly manage the people and machines or infrastructure that actually produce real goods.
The energy needed by such townships and the factories they serve are on a far larger scale than anything employed in our earlier history. To facilitate this transformation, the simple barter of one kind of good for another has been substituted by the use of money as a standard medium of exchange.
Almost simultaneously with this development of highly concentrated manufacturing centres, money itself has been given an intrinsic trading value. However, perhaps an unexpected consequence, the trading of money has come to dominate almost all aspects of modern civilisation. This is largely possible because of another kind of abstraction, the legal structure of limited liability, that insulates businesses operators personally from the consequences of errors, of any scale.
The per capita energy and material consumption seen in modern industrial civilisation has come at a salutary cost, impacting the ambient temperature and albedo of the entire planet, a climate crisis. A crisis for our own species, that is, as the changes we have wrought have already brought about, and continue to bring, extinctions of an unknown number of other life forms.
The above discussion makes it clear that it is
1. the industrial choice of physical concentration of very large manufacturing facilities, and
2. the energy consumption concentrated in those resultant small spaces, and
3. the fact that decisions governing the first two factors are made on the basis of the trading of money itself, is importantly responsible for this crisis.
In summary, the vast network of roads around the world, covering, to a very significant fraction, the land that is anyhow usable by humans with little effort, has a history, drawn first from migration and then, from a need to violently conquer and occupy the destination.
Both these material needs have been replaced in modern times with the conceptual imperative of money trading. This is being discussed separately in this forum, and is, in fact, the subject of a huge body of writings elsewhere, proposing alternative approaches to the organisation of human society, that form the background to many of the discussions here in the Maidan.
The pattern of developing skills to modify, alter and transform different materials has become cloistered, with massive consolidated production centres, themselves needing considerable networks of high load bearing roads to facilitate material movement.
It is inevitable that a significant part of the industrial activity has gone into the building of road vehicles, almost all of which are completely dependent upon the use of wheels. The other alternatives are movement of goods by air and by sea, but to access these specialised modes still needs movement by road.
In the very recent past, effectively only about 35 years, the radical introduction of hugely accessible digital global communications has brought in a sea change. The methodology is based on solid state electronics, particularly humongously large scale integrated circuitry. The term large scale in this context is diametrically opposite to its earlier usage in this text, since it actually defines miniaturisation.
Very large investments are needed for factories that produce such devices, and they lead the industrial world in minimising the need for humans to directly contribute to such manufactures. They do consume very large amounts of energy, however, hence also contribute to the climate change impacting factors discussed already.
It is very crucial to recall in discussing the pattern of social development that dominates modern human civilisation, that the concentration of power has moved from the material to the conceptual. In fact, to the imaginary.
For this reason, and because the rate of technological change has itself advanced, the rate of obsolescence, which in turn dictates the spread of the debris of very recently transformed infrastructure, has stepped up.
The concentration of economic power that has significantly replaced material power also tends to imbue a sense that it is real, and this very likely explains the sense of importance given to both discussions around it, and the impact it has on the politics of human social environments.
However, in the opinion of this observer, such discussions do not take fundamentally take into account, sufficiently, the actual innovations that dictated and preceded the concept of capital formation, that in turn, given the shift towards placing the whole edifice upon an illusion, now lie at the root of modern social disharmony.
A way forward: the hyperlocal
This author has separately discussed a simple mechanical design that lends itself to the construction of land vehicles, collectively named Chalopede. This class of vehicle, characteristically, does not require well paved roads in order to move smoothly and efficiently. It is a branching away from the most important methodology used to enable modern civilisation, without contradicting or opposing any aspect of this characteristic development, other than an absolute dependence upon heavy load bearing paved roads.
The manufacture of vehicles that use this design has the potential to create a new kind of market environment: the high-end ‘hyperlocal industrial’ style, that was, centuries earlier, mainly the preserve of a low end, small farmer/agricultural/cottage industry enterprise. It can be considered as the first step in building such an alternative to the current high investment, large size, industrial production model, that is echoed in modern agriculture by a combination of directly owned and administered giant farm plus the privately owned but centrally administered contract farm.
As explained in the preceding paragraphs, the dominance of the Very Large Model in both industry and agriculture plays to the tune of the very dominant conceptual wealth paradigm, one that distorts the playing field, to concentrate effective power (either democratic or totalitarian) in the hands of the actual controllers of paper money.
In contrast, the hyperlocal industry uses relatively low, garage or shed sized, manufacturing facilities, potentially driven by locally generated usable energy, with locally sourced materials, to create produce that serves the needs of a local market. Such local markets can thrive without the need to trade in money itself.
Chalopedes are only one such class of products that can very easily provide economic sustenance to such businesses, located everywhere, perhaps within a few kilometres of each other. Individual chalopede designs might vary from location to location, depending on geography-centric terrain demands. Since they don’t depend on paved roads, they don’t need centralised service providers, who typically possess or access the heavy duty machinery needed for road construction.
The chalopede is a practical illustration of how deconstruction of some seemingly intrinsic aspects of society, the current state of human existence, that seem so natural as to be taken for granted, are in fact the root of a series of intractable and interlocking problems.
Much like pulling on a loose end of yarn unravels a sweater, a return to first principles can clear a haze of illusion, one that makes it so difficult to resolve the issues that lead to disempowerment, which in turn creates resentment and conflict.
Importantly, this solution is inclusive. It leverages the power of thought applied to the treatment of material objects, the manipulation of which is a basic hallmark of the development of civilised humankind.
Another core hallmark is the motivation to life as a social being, without which civilisation itself has no foundation. In order to fulfill this imperative, it is necessary to be able to move around freely. To do so at the cost of the current state of the planet on which we live, and upon which we depend to carry on living in our present state of evolution, is almost a guarantee of a dissonance so fundamental as to disturb our ability to function as a society, and therefore as a civilisation.
Just as transportation overland is a doable solution, other kinds of transportation designs, applicable to water and air, may also be possible.
Water For instance, using a design of sailing raft based on archaeological findings, a working model was used to sail a crew of scientists across the Pacific, sailing westwards from the coastline of the southern American continent. During the course of the voyage, a centreboard, that had been assumed to be a superfluous addition, was found to be an essential part of the design, enabling the vessel to sail both more steadily and faster. The undersea relationship of the centerboard interacting with ocean water synergised with the action of the simple flat sail interacting with the air.
Thanks to the inputs developed during the early years of the industrial age, current designs of ships sail with highly minimised regard to the natural flows of air and water. While this may seem to be a triumph of design and construction, acoustic listening studies, conducted across a wide spectrum, have shown that the hugely increased level of undersea sounds, directly attributed to such vessels, have disrupted the sonic environment of multiple ocean species, such as the blue whale.
Air The design of very early aircraft was based on observations of the natural flying action of multiple bird species. However, such actions could not be duplicated or even mimicked with the known mechanical engineering of that era, on the one hand, and on the other, even the observations fell far short of the actual micromotion techniques used by the multiple working parts (wings, tail feathers, feet etc) of different birds.Today’s micromanagement of multiple working parts, both motive power and motor control, is at a different level. Just for example, a quadcopter was built and sent to Mars, as a drone observer. Such incredibly high revolutions as it uses are irrelevant to Earth flight, partly because they aren’t needed, and partly because they demand far more extreme precision technology than is needed for routine commercially viable aircraft.
A bird, however, depending on its needs, uses a combination of powered and soaring flight, to deliver either efficiency, or high speed but stable travel. Nearly all these actions utilise individual movements of feathers in combination with movements of the wings. Even the movement of wings can be segmented, so that the wingtips, for instance, may independently facilitate slow or fast flight.
It is, of course, not just transportation that can be the target of hyperlocal manufacturing businesses. There is actually hardly any limit to the range of goods that might be made either better, or at least as well, in a hyperlocal business, as the present hugely centralised models.
More than simply goods, it is also the web of services around manufacturing, services and residing that can transform to hyperlocal. In fact, as described by E. F. Schumacher, “development does not start with goods; it starts with people and their education, organization, and discipline. Without these three, all resources remain latent, untapped, potential”.
This is possible, and in fact is already being demonstrated, because of the development of durable smart communication infrastructures, both of devices and of networking, that have diminished the need to be physically present at the very large infrastructural resource centres that were a stipulation just a few decades back.
To summarise, the transformation to hyperlocal is perfectly in consonance with the state of the present technological society.
Governance
Inevitably, the question of governance at the national level emerges. As long as the present model of communities organising themselves into nations continues, the play of efficiency of governance and the need for maintenance of law and order, the underpinning of civil society, will remain.
This is partly due to the practical difficulty of reconciling ethnic, religious and territorial history with the social need for neighbourliness, when artificial borders are drawn to serve administrative needs. The twentieth century explorer, Thor Heyerdahl noted, “Borders: I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people.”
He designed and led the expedition across the Pacific, using a hitherto lost sailing raft design, referenced in the paragraphs above, in the discussion on sea-going vessel designs.
However, with a reduction by design in the dependence upon very large communities of people, the pressures that bring about a need to be concerned about the difficulty of maintaining law and order also decreases. In this context, Schumacher also pointed out that “wisdom demands a new orientation of science and technology toward the organic, the gentle, the elegant and beautiful.” One need hardly add that this sentence is written in a book entitled Small Is Beautiful.
Among them, the present abstraction, a deliberate diversion of reliance to an edifice that is wholly imaginary, based on the illusion that it is money itself that carries value, enabling it to be traded at both volumes and values many times higher than the real produce of land, the technological constructs that humans are and will constantly evolve, and our artistic and creative abstracts, is arguably the greatest psychological dissonance that drives sociological (and political) discontent.
The purpose, therefore, of seeking to reconfigure and shrink human community units in a very practical manner, is to restore the primacy to which we afford our real human output. With this the aim, and with a practical methodology to drive a path to achieving it, setting it as a goal to minimise the current inevitable chaos, becomes meaningful.