Worlds of Convenience

Thursday

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Three Worlds, Three Civilizations

In August of this year I spoke at the Icarus Interstellar Starship Congress 2017. One of the themes of the congress was “The Moon as a Stepping Stone to the Stars” so I attempted to speak directly to this theme with a presentation titled, “The Role of Lunar Civilization in Interstellar Buildout.” The intention was to bring together the possible development of the moon as part of the infrastructure of spacefaring civilization within our solar system with the role that the moon could play in the further buildout of spacefaring civilization toward an interstellar spacefaring capacity.

Most of our spacefaring infrastructure at present is in low Earth orbit.

In preparing my presentation I worked through a lot of ideas related to this theme, and even though Icarus Interstellar was very generous with the time they gave me to speak, I couldn’t develop all of the ideas that I had been working on. One of these ideas was that of the moon and Mars as worlds of convenience. By this I mean that the moon and Mars are small, rocky worlds that might be useful to human beings because of their constitution and their proximity to Earth.

Any agriculture on the moon will of necessity be confined to artificial conditions.

The moon, as the closest large celestial body to Earth, is a “world of convenience”: It is an island in space within easy reach of Earth, and might well play a role in terrestrial civilization not unlike the role of the Azores or the Canary Islands played in the history of western civilization, which, as it began to explore farther afield down the coast of Africa and into the Atlantic (and eventually to the new world), made use of the facilities offered by these island chains. Whether as a supply depot, a source of materials from mining operations, a place for R&R for crews, or as a hub of scientific activity, the moon could be a crucial component of spacefaring infrastructure in the solar system, and, as such, could serve to facilitate the growth and development of spacefaring civilization.

Because Mars is a bit more like Earth than the moon, conditions on Mars may be less artificial than on the moon.

Mars is also a world of convenience. While farther from Earth than the moon, it is still within our present technology to get to Mars — i.e., it is within the technological capability of a rudimentary spacefaring capacity to travel to a neighboring planet within the same planetary system — and Mars is more like Earth than is the moon. Mars has an atmosphere (albeit thin), because it has an atmosphere its temperatures are moderated, its day is similar to the terrestrial day, and its gravity is closer to that of Earth’s gravity than is the gravity on the moon. Mars, then, is close enough to Earth to be settled by human beings, and the conditions are friendlier to human beings than the closer and more convenient moon. These factors make Mars a potentially important center for the exploration of the outer solar system.

The further buildout of our spacefaring infrastructure will probably include both space-based assets and planetary assets, but it is on planets that we will feel at home.

We can easily imagine a future for humanity within our own solar system in which mature civilizations are found not only on Earth but also on the moon and Mars. Since the moon and Mars are both “worlds of convenience” for us — places unlike the Earth, but not so unlike the Earth that we could not make use of them in the buildout of human civilization as a spacefaring civilization — we would expect them to naturally be part of human plans for the future of the solar system. Because we are biological beings emergent from a biosphere associated with the surface of Earth (a condition I call planetary endemism), we are likely to favor other planetary surfaces even as human civilization expands into space; it is on planetary surfaces that we will feel familiar and comfortable as a legacy of our evolutionary psychology.

Our planetary endemism predisposes us to favor planetary surfaces for human habitation.

These three inhabited worlds — Earth, the moon, and Mars — would each have a human civilization, but also a distinctive civilization different from the others, and each would stand in distinctive relationships to the other two. Earth and the moon are always going to be tightly bound, perhaps even bound by the same central project, because of their proximity. Mars will be a bit distant, but more Earth-like, and so more likely to give rise to an Earth-like civilization, but a civilization that will be built under selection pressures distinct from those on Earth. The moon will never have an Earth-like civilization because it will almost certainly never have an atmosphere, and it will never have a greater gravitational field, so Lunar civilization will depart from terrestrial civilization even while being tightly-coupled to Earth due to its proximity.

The moon will always be an ‘offshore balancer’ for Earth, but conditions on the moon are so different from those of Earth that any Lunar civilization would diverge from terrestrial civilization.

The presence of worlds of convenience within our solar system does not mean that we must or will forgo other opportunities for the development of spacefaring civilization. Just as Icarus Interstellar holds that there is no one way to the stars, so too there is no one buildout for the infrastructure of a spacefaring civilization. One of the themes of my presentation as delivered was the different possibilities for infrastructure buildout within the solar system, how these different infrastructures could interact, and how they would figure in future human projects like interstellar missions. Thus the three worlds and the three civilizations of Earth, the moon, and Mars may be joined by distinctive civilizations based on artificial habitats or on settlements based on asteroids or the more distant moons of the outer planets. But Earth, the moon, and Mars are likely to remain tightly-coupled in ongoing relationships of cooperation, competition, and conflict because of their status as worlds of convenience.

The worlds of convenience within our solar system may be joined by artificial habitats.

The possibility of multiple human civilizations within our solar system presents the possibility of what I call “distributed development” (cf. Mass Extinction in the West Asian Cluster and Emergent Complexity in Multi-Planetary Ecosystems). In the earliest history of human civilization distributed development could only extend as far as the technologies of transportation allowed. With transportation and communication limited to walking, shipping, horses, or chariots, the civilizations of west Asia could participate in mutual ideal diffusion, but the other centers of civilization at this time — in China, India, Peru, Mexico, and elsewhere — lay beyond the scope of easy communication by these means of transportation and communication. As the technologies of transportation and communication became more sophisticated, idea diffusion is now planetary, and this planetary-scale idea diffusion is converging upon a planetary civilization.

An interplanetary internet would facilitate idea diffusion between the worlds of our solar system.

Today, our planetary civilization has instantaneous communication and rapid transportation between any and all parts of the planet, and planetary scale idea diffusion is the rule. We enjoy this planetary scale idea diffusion because our technologies of communication and transportation — jets, high speed trains, fiber optic cables, the internet, satellites, and so on — allow for it. So fast forward to a solar system of three planetary civilizations — i.e., three distinct and independent civilizations, though coupled by relationships of trade and communication — and with an interplanetary network of communication and transportation that allows for idea diffusion on an interplanetary scale. The pattern of distributed development among multiple civilizations that characterized the west Asian cluster of civilization could be iterated at an interplanetary scale, driving these civilizations forward as they borrow from each other, and no one civilization must make every breakthrough in order for the others to enjoy the benefits of innovation.

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The Seriation of Western Civilization

Thursday

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At least four times in the history of our planet, civilization has independently emerged, and we possess a fairly detailed archaeological record of a complete series in each of these four cases of the development from the most rudimentary settled agriculturalism up to a fully developed and articulated agrarian-ecclesiastical civilization. This is by no means an exhaustive account of terrestrial civilization. Civilization, like life itself, is a branching bush that, once started, repeatedly bifurcates and diverges in unprecedented ways from its root stock. There are other forms of civilization, and probably other instances of independent origin. I suspect, for example, that in the Western hemisphere that a complete and independent seriation of civilization occurred at least twice, and perhaps more than twice.

Göbekli Tepe

Today I will not consider the phenomenon of civilization taken whole, but I will rather consider the seriation of Western civilization in isolation. As a westerner myself (well, sort of a westerner, as my people are all Scandinavian, and Scandinavian civilization, i.e., Viking Civilization, was subsumed under an expanding Western Civilization), I am understandably most interested in Western Civilization, but Western Civilization should also be interesting to anyone who studies civilization as such, due to its many unique features. I have commented elsewhere that it is today considered in bad taste to compare civilizations; nevertheless, I must run the risk of doing so in order to freely and openly discuss the features that differentiate western civilization from other civilizations — and also those features that mirror other civilizations. What makes Western Civilization unique are those unprecedented historical mutations that did not occur in other civilizations — viz. the Age of Discovery, the scientific revolution, and the industrial revolution — and which we then compare with other civilizations as a baseline for reference.

Çatal Hüyük

To spell out a bit of my conceptual framework explicitly, a cluster (as I use the term) is a geographical region comprising several closely related civilizations that have been the result of idea diffusion from a common source (or originating more-or-less simultaneously). This is a synchronic conception. A cluster contains several series. A series is a sequence of civilizations in time, related through descent with modification, more or less laid end to end, and inhabiting more or less the same geographical region or geographical trajectory. Civilizations in a common series are related by inheritance. This is a diachronic conception. Civilizations in a cluster are synchronically related to each other; civilizations in a series are diachronically related to each other. Thus from the West Asian Cluster there emerges the series that becomes western civilization as it projects itself along a continual western trajectory out of Mesopotamia and the Levant.

A very comfortable-looking reconstruction of an interior at Çatal Hüyük, which gives the appearance of civilized life.

Civilizational series admit of what archaeologists call seriation. In so saying I am using the term more comprehensively that is usual. Seriation has been defined as:

A relative dating technique in which artifacts or features are organized into a sequence according to changes over time in their attributes or frequency of appearance. The technique shows how these items have changed over time and it is a way to establish chronology. Archaeological material, such as assemblages of pottery or the grave goods deposited with burials is arranged into chronological order. The types that make up the assemblages to be ordered in this way must be from the same archaeological tradition and from a single region or locality. Once the variations in a particular object have been classified by typology, it can often be shown that they fall into a developmental series, sometimes in a single line, sometimes in branching lines more as in a family tree. The order produced is theoretically chronological, but needs archaeological assessment. Outside evidence, such as dating of two or more stages in the development, may be needed to determine which is the first and which the last member of the series.

Kipfer, Barbara Ann, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Archaeology, New York: Springer, 2000, p. 505

It is atypical to apply seriation to an entire civilization, and in fact it could be said that I am misusing the term, as the definition above cites “artifacts or features,” and a civilization is neither an artifact or a feature in the usual senses of these terms, but includes both of them and more and better besides. The power of seriation is that once you have an understanding of a developmental sequence, you can “connect the dots” when a people have moved location, identifying when a particular developmental stage terminates at one location and then picks up again at another location. Such a developmental trajectory moving ever westward characterizes the origins and development of western civilization.

Ritual figurine from Çatal Hüyük; the area excavated to date includes a large number of structures believed to be shrines or temples, demonstrating a robust ideological infrastructure.

In my post on The Philosophical Basis of Islamic State I noted that I called the many civilizations having their origins in Mesopotamia and the Levant the West Asian Cluster. Western civilization has its earliest origins in the West Asian Cluster, and in the earliest years of the rudimentary civilization that emerged here we find a network of family resemblances that overlap and intersect (to borrow a Wittgensteinian phrase). The earliest known site in the West Asian Cluster that has clear evidence of large scale social cooperation, and therefore can be considered a distant ancestor to civilization — proto-civilization, if you will — is Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Anatolia. Thought to be a ritual center predating even settled agriculture (specifically, Prepottery Neolithic A, or PPNA), the site has impressive megalithic architecture. Let us take this as the point of origin for civilization in the West Asian Cluster — it is our best scientific knowledge as of the present for the origins of our civilization.

Several hundred miles west of Göbekli Tepe is Çatal Hüyük, a famous Neolithic site often identified as the first urban settlement on our planet. (According to Google Maps it takes 138 hours to walk the 670 km from one site to the other. If one could walk 8 hours per day, it would take 17 days to make the journey. If you walked fast, you might make a round trip in one moon.) Çatal Hüyük has been extensively studied, though not fully excavated, and while the life of the people would have been extremely rudimentary by the measures of what we call civilization today, it nevertheless possesses all the essential elements of civilization: an urban settlement supported by agricultural suburbs, with division of labor, art and religion, and trade with neighboring peoples.

The next famous site on this westward trajectory is that of Pločnik in present-day Serbia. The settlement (perhaps town) of Pločnik represents what is called the First Temperate Neolithic. In other words, the techniques of farming in Mesopotamia and the Levant that characterized the agricultural revolution as it was first realized in this cluster were adapted for use in a temperate climate, and this both demanded and inspired further technological innovations. Pločnik may be the first site at which extractive metallurgy was practiced with the production of copper and bronze implements and decorative items.

Vinča-Pločnik Culture, Late Mesolithic (5th mill. BC). (Photo Credits: Carlos Mesa) Double-Headed figure, Cayonu, Turkey.

If you look at the relationship of Çatal Hüyük and Pločnik on a map, you will see that the path takes you through Thrace and present-day Bulgaria. When I noticed this, I did some research to find out about Neolithic archaeology in Bulgaria, and, sure enough, there were remains of the right age located almost exactly between Çatal Hüyük and Pločnik, so that one can literally see in the archaeological remains of material culture the trajectory of peoples as they emerged from subtropical climate of Mesopotamia and passed through Anatolia on their way north and west.

As settled agriculture gained a foothold in the Balkan Peninsula, the region was a quiet backwater for thousands of years as spectacular civilizations still known for the monumental architecture rose and fell in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Anatolia. Little of note seemed to be happening as a result of the humble farming communities of the First Temperate Neolithic in the Balkans, until a new kind of civilization took shape in Greece. The Greeks, never shy to own their accomplishments, knew that they had created a new kind of civilization very different from the Persians on their border, whom they repeatedly and heroically resisted.

The Acropolis and the Parthenon represent a different approach to monumental architecture than that of Egypt, Anatolia, or Mesopotamia.

The cultural heritage of Greece, and especially the art, architecture, philosophy, and literature of Athens and Attica was projected back into West Asia by the conquests of Alexander the Great, but Alexander died young, and while the impress of Greek civilization can still be detected in West Asia where Alexander’s troops marched all the way to India, the tradition of Greek civilization was taken in another direction once again farther West, when Roman power emerged as the dominant political regime in the Mediterranean Basin. When Alexander’s unsustainable empire was divided after his death, Greece proper, with all its rich cultural traditions, was conquered by the Romans, who had a great enthusiasm for Greek civilization. It became a fashion among wealthy collectors to seek out the finest examples of Corinthian pottery, in a way that is precisely parallel to the tastes of antiquarians in our own time.

Roman farmers didn’t get much glory, but they made the empire possible. Moreover, they made what followed the empire possible also.

The Roman Empire represents the greatest spatial expansion and the longest temporal duration of the civilizations directly derived from the West Asian Cluster, with the possible exception of Islamic civilization, but in each of these cases there is a question as to what constitutes “direct” derivation from the West Asian source. Only with the collapse of Roman power in the west and the admixture of elements from the West Asia Cluster with indigenous European cultures do we see the emergence of a distinctly western civilization. Rather than ex oriente lux, a light from the east illuminating western barbarism, we have in occidente lux, the ancient light of eastern civilization given new life as it enters into Europe. And by this time in history, the original five clusters of civilization had repeatedly bifurcated and had begotten a range of mixed civilizations that were to confront western civilization as it began its relentless global expansion.

When Roman power collapsed in the west, the empire divided and civilization bifurcated. In the east, the empire became more Greek in character, and Byzantine civilization emerged. In the west, those traditions transmitted from Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Greece, and the Roman Mediterranean once again migrated further west and in so doing found themselves in the midst of the inhospitable barbarism of Western Europe. For all Europe’s early productivity of what archaeologists call “cultures” (and which I would call proto-civilizations, if not civilization simpliciter), Europe did not make the breakthrough to civilization proper, but had to wait for the examples of the West Asian Cluster to show it the way to civilization by way of idea diffusion (which I would now, following Cadell Last, prefer to call idea flow).

In the farthest western peninsula of Eurasia Western Civilization finally took on its definitive and distinctive form as a new civilization arose and became what we now call medieval Europe. But this was not the end. At the farthest western edge of this western peninsula of Eurasia, on an island jutting into the Atlantic, the industrial revolution began in the final quarter of the eighteen century, and this was to inaugurate an entirely new kind of civilization — industrial-technological civilization — that is even today consolidating its planetary expansion. This industrialized civilization leapt over the Atlantic Ocean and found in North America especially fertile soil in which to grow, and so Western Civilization continued in its westward migration. Now that industrial-technological civilization has expanded on a planetary scale, civilization has nowhere to go but upward and outward. When this happens, another novel form of civilization will take shape.

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The Genealogy of Ideas

Sunday

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Previously I discussed idea diffusion in Civilization and Idea Diffusion, but even as I posted that short contribution, I realized the inadequacy of it. A suitably detailed treatment of idea diffusion and its place in the history of human experience would run to volumes. What we need is perhaps, rather than the traditional history of ideas, is a genealogy of ideas. “Genealogy” in this sense comes from Nietzsche’s use of the term and his implementation of the idea, but it is Foucault who brought this kind of Nietzschean genealogy to maturity.

In his essay “Nietsche, Genealogy, History,” (collected in the volume Language, Counter-Memory, Practice) Foucault wrote:

Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary. It operates on a field of entangled and confused parchments, on documents that have been scratched over and recopied many times…

Genealogy… requires patience and a knowledge of details and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material. It’s “cyclopean monuments” are constructed from “discreet and apparently insignificant truths and according to a rigorous method”; they cannot be the product of “large and well-meaning errors.” In short, genealogy demands relentless erudition. Genealogy does not oppose itself to history as the lofty and profound gaze of the philosopher might compare to the molelike perspective of the scholar; on the contrary, it rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for “origins.”

Michel Foucault, Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” pp. 139-140

These are obviously the principles and practices by which Foucault pursued his scholarly research. And this is exactly what we need for the mind: instead of a history of ideas, as that discipline has been practiced, we need a genealogy of ideas that is as gray and patient and meticulous as the research that Foucault imagines (and which he in fact pursued) in reference to more familiar topics of history.

Equally obviously, I cannot do anything to even approach this in the space of a blog post, except to point out the need for such an approach, and to observe the relationship that a genealogy of ideas would have to the idea of idea diffusion as an historical process. A genealogy of ideas would trace, in detail, the paths of idea diffusion, if there are any such paths in a given case. Ideas diffuse over both time and space. The diffusion leaves a trace along the path those ideas have taken. In time, ideas experience descent with modification, and in space ideas experience adaptive radiation. These processes are not isolated from each other, but rather occur concurrently.

Foucault emphasized the meticulousness and detail required by genealogy, and we need to bring these scholarly habits to the genealogy of ideas. Because it is so difficult to deal with ideas with precision — it requires an unfamiliar effort of thought to do so — ideas have more often been given vague and ambiguous treatment that has caused them to be held in low repute. But if we can bring rigorous habits of mind to the genealogy of ideas, we could contribute to restoring ideas to their proper dignity.

For example, idea diffusion can occur on many different levels. We must pay careful attention to how we count our ideas, and how we place each idea within a hierarchy of ideas, so as not to conflate ideas of different orders of magnitude. Idea diffusion can take place on many different levels because any given particular falls under many different ideas.

How many squares are there on a chess board? It depends upon how we count them, and how we count them will depend upon how narrowly we have defined “square” in this context. Moreover, some definitions will admit of more than one answer because of the vagueness they incorporate, while some definitions will be more precise, and precisely because they are more precise they will exclude instances that are included under broader, less restrictive definitions. On a chess board there are, of course, the individually colored squares, and there are 64 of these. But the chess board taken on the whole is also a square. If we count both the individual squares and the whole, there are 65 squares. But there are also squares made up of 4, 9, 16, and so forth individual colored squares. There is no right or wrong answer here; it is only a matter of setting up a convention upon which we can agree. And once we have agreed upon a rigorously defined convention, we are prepared to treat the question of the number of squares on a chess board with precision.

This may seem like a silly exercise, but it is very much to the point. Without rigorous definitions, we will never be capable of thinking precisely about ideas. And given that few people ever make the time or take the effort to formulate rigorous definitions of ideas (except for mathematicians), it follows that ideas are usually not conceived with the requisite precision.

All ideas, and not just chess board squares, are to a greater or lesser extent subject to ambiguity, and therefore can only be treated with precision after we have made the appropriate effort to conceive them rigorously. Yesterday in Epistemological Warfare we remarked upon how all phases of the OODA loop (AKA the Boyd cycle) are theory-laden, therefore subject to interpretation, and therefore potentially ground for divergent observations, divergent orientations, divergent decisions, and divergent actions. This is partly a consequence of the ambiguity of the ideas employed in formulating the OODA loop. The more rigorously we can deal with each element of the cycle, the more we can minimize (though not eliminate) divergencies.

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Civilization and Idea Diffusion

Monday

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Food storage technology: independent origins or idea diffusion? There is actually an interesting philosophical problem buried in this question.

The study of the origins of human culture have long been debated in terms of independent origin vs. idea diffusion. Call it a dialectic of the discipline if you like. This is one of those perennial debates that will never be settled because they represent fundamentally distinct interpretations of culture based on distinct conceptions of the world, and the evidence available is too scanty to definitively settle any theoretical dispute over origins long since lost in the mists of time.

It has recently occurred to me, however, that if what I said in The Incommensurability of Civilizations (and again in Addendum on Incommensurable Civilizations) has any value whatever (on a charitable interpretation, if in no other way) then it has something to say about this dialectic of historiography.

In these earlier posts I argued that distinct civilizations and are not merely distinct in terms of the obvious litany of distinct histories, languages, cultures, traditions, dress, cuisine, and religions (all of which I have come to see as mere contingencies of history), but that distinct civilizations are based on distinct ideas and therefore the representatives of one civilization cannot even recognize the idea that lies at the foundation of a truly distinct civilization. (This is one source of genocide; if we could recognize another civilized people for what they are, we would probably be less likely to engineer their annihilation.)

If civilizations are based on distinct ideas, we obviously cannot appeal to idea diffusion as the source of the spread and growth of civilization, given that idea diffusion is the negation of the thesis that civilizations are based on distinct ideas. If we accept that distinct civilizations are based on distinct ideas of civilization, then we cannot also hold that these distinct civilizations are the result of idea diffusion. Contrariwise, if we hold that the distinct civilizations of the world are the result of idea diffusion, then we cannot also maintain that civilizations are based on fundamentally distinct ideas.

This is all very neat and tidy, and of course it is not as simple as this in fact. Civilizations involve ideas at many levels. One may well deny that there is a fundamental idea to a civilization and yet accept that there is a cluster of typical ideas that are associated with a given civilization, and vice versa. And even if one allows that there are truly distinct civilizations based on distinct ideas of civilization, there can still be a diffusion of civilization based on the ephemera and contingencies of civilization, even if the idea that lies at the basis of these ephemera and contingencies is not understood or is misunderstood.

Imagine (a thought experiment, if you will) that a nomadic hunter-gatherer happens upon a civilized society, and passes in wonderment through the streets of an urban conurbation, astonished at this way of life that is so different from what he knows. He sees potters at their wheels, he sees gardens, he sees social hierarchies, and he sees public edifices and public ceremonies in which the people jointly participate. Now say (since in a thought experiment we can say whatever we like, however unlikely) that said nomadic traveler returns to the happy hunting grounds of his people, and, finding them encamped in their tents, begins to unfold for them a tale of what he has seen, and these people then unanimously decide that they too will establish a settled civilization and henceforth give up their hunter-gatherer ways.

This new civilization established by a distinct people might mimic the potters and the gardens and the social hierarchies and the public edifices and the public ceremonies of the people who had preceded them in civilization, and yet this civilization might be animated by a very different fundamental idea. In such a scenario, the ideas of various civilized technologies, even, we might say, various aspects of civilization, are mimicked but are mimicked as technologies and as contingencies, and no effort is made to reproduce the fundamental idea that motivated the origins of the first civilization.

Under these conditions, is the second civilization the result of idea diffusion? Is the second civilization based on a unique and distinct idea of civilization?

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