Chapter 2
RANKS, REVOLUTIONS, AND PAIDEIAS
(c) 1991, 1993 by David G. Hays
(c) 1995 by Janet Hays
2.1. THE FOUR AGES
2.2. REVOLUTIONS
2.3. FOUR RANKS
2.A. Appendix: Processes and Tech Evol Contents of Thought
Each rank has a master concept, a _paradigm_, that
fixes the structure and limits of reality. Only a few
major varieties have existed in and beyond rank 2; we
call these paideias.
2.1. THE FOUR AGES
In Section 1.1.4, I told you how William L. Benzon, then a
graduate student at SUNY Buffalo, generalized Walter Wiora's
concept of four ages of music into a scheme for culture history.
Informatics, I said, went through ages of
Rank 1. Speech
Rank 2. Writing
Rank 3. Calculation
Rank 4. Computation
And perhaps I should tell you how we got that list. The 1st,
2nd, and 4th entries were given to me by Charles F. Hockett, a
linguist and generalist, before I met Benzon. He called
computation the third information-processing revolution. Since I
already felt that computation was a revolutionary art, I liked
his placing it in this grand context. When we began talking in
detail about the four ranks, we saw clearly that Hockett had
missed something (if the theory of informatic rank is to be taken
seriously, it may not be permitted such a large gap). But what
had Hockett missed?
It occurred to me that he had missed the Renaissance, when
life and art changed enormously and science began. Students in
our seminar suggested the printing press. Well, it is certainly
true that the availability of written material to many people
made a fundamental change in all of life, but that is really a
matter of diffusing the kind of thinking that goes with writing
(rank 2) to a large part of the population. The printing press
does not lead to a new kind of thinking. So we poked around. I
got out James R. Newman's anthology _The World of Mathematics_
( CALCBIBL* ) and found that arithmetic came to the western world
at roughly the right time:
"by the end of the thirteenth century the Arabic
arithmetic had been fairly introduced into Europe ..."
(p. 18, from a selection called "The Nature of Mathe-
matics" by Philip E. B. Jourdain)
Before that time, arithmetic might be done with counters on a
board, with tricky methods by specialists, or by creative insight
(no kidding). What Europe got from the Arabs, who had it from
India, was a routine way of dealing with numerical problems--
calculation. Science needs calculation as you need your bones.
So we had a list with four entries, as required. ( COGNBIBL* )
For a fresh example, and one from technology, take the task
of moving a load on land:
Rank 1. Human carriers
Rank 2. Animals carrying packs or pulling carts
Rank 3. Steam railways
Rank 4. Jet aircraft
The wheel has been found by archeologists in Mesopotamia at sites
dated between 3500 and 3000 BC, during the long, slow development
of writing, but carts frightened both people and horses in rural
England around 1700 ( CART* ). The steam locomotive developed
early in the nineteenth century. Jet aircraft appeared late in
World War II and were made safe for commercial use some years
after the war ended; without computers, both the design and the
regular operation of jets would be inordinately difficult.
2.2. REVOLUTIONS
2.2.1. Growth Curves. Rapid but not instant ... 2_2_1*
2.2.2. Paradigm Change. Passage to a new reality. 2_2_2*
Long periods of stability have been separated by shorter
periods of rapid change, in technology and simultaneously in
many other aspects of life. Although the change is rapid,
it is not instantaneous. During a period of cultural
growth, a moment comes when the earlier sense of reality
collapses and a new sense, a new paradigm, crystallizes.
The change from rank to rank, in the evolutionary view that
Benzon and I have taken for some years, is as big as the change
in biological evolution from fish to reptiles, or from amphibians
to mammals. Recently two biologists, Niles Eldredge and Stephen
J. Gould have argued that big biological changes occur in rela-
tively short intervals ( PUNC* ). Everything is stable for a
long time, and then a new major kind of life appears, perhaps in
a rapid sequence of small changes, but in a brief moment as com-
pared with the long, stable times. They call their theory
"punctuated equilibrium". And it seems that cultural (including
technological) evolution is like that (cf. Mokyr, pp. 290-292
BIBLNOTE* ). The short intervals of change deserve to be called
revolutions.
2.2.1. Growth Curves
But change is not instantaneous. Paleontology, the branch
of biology that studies the history of life, is hampered by the
loss of many examples. Only a few living creatures become
fossils after they die; most dissolve forever into the universal
muck. Whole species can be lost this way. Archeology and
history face similar problems, but the time scale is different
and the losses are less disastrous. We can rely somewhat more on
our knowledge of our own species's past than on our knowledge of
the transition from reptiles to amphibians, for example. In the
history of technology we have enough material to show us many of
the small steps from rank to rank, and can estimate how much time
a revolution takes.
We should not imagine that the change is like this:
____________Rank 2________________
|
|
|
|
_________Rank 1_______________|
with time from left to right.
Instead, let us think of rankshift as occurring like this:
.....Rank 2......
......
....
...
..
.
.
..
...
....
.....
.....Rank 1.....
Rome wasn't built in a day. The trite saying reminds us that all
growth takes time. ( Rostow* looked at industrial development
this way.)
We can go through the most significant aspects of the
rankshift from Eden to Athens (R1 to R2) quickly, and it is worth
our time to get a more concrete description.
Agriculture began, very slowly, 10,000 years ago, in the
region around the eastern end of the Mediterranean. The basic
crops were grains. (Agriculture also started in America, in
China, and in sub-Saharan Africa, at somewhat different times and
with various crops.) We are on the left-hand end of the curve,
rising very slowly.
==========
On the origins of agriculture, I have accumulated a good many
citations and taken extensive notes. For samples, consult
AGRIBIBL* .
But about 8,000 years ago agriculture began to spread across
Europe at the rate of 1 kilometer per year, and went all the way
to Scandinavia by 5,000 years ago. According to Ammerman and
Cavalli-Sforza ( AGSPREAD* ), now supported by Sokal, what
happened was that the agriculturalists experienced faster popula-
tion growth than the neighboring foragers. Farmers at the
boundary were more likely to find room for their crops over in
the foragers' territory. Some intermarriage occurred, but just
how much--and how much genocide--is not yet quite clear.
The Urban Revolution began in Mesopotamia, about 7000 years
ago. V. Gordon Childe put the pattern together and gave it a
name. Several technological inventions were made:
"The two millenia immediately preceding 3000 B.C. ...
[i.e., from 7000 to 5000 years ago] artificial irriga-
tion using canals and ditches; the plough; the harness-
ing of animal motive power; the sailing boat; wheeled
vehicles; orchard-husbandry; fermentation; the produc-
tion and use of copper; bricks; the arch; glazing; the
seal; and--in the earliest stages of the revolution--a
solar calendar, writing, numeral notation, and bronze."
( MMH* p. 227)
By 5000 years ago, there were cities in the Mesopotamian plains,
with a new kind of life. For Childe's list of new traits, see
MMH* ; for some other sources see MESOBIBL* .
Meanwhile, writing began with cuneiform--roughly 5000 years
ago--and developed through several steps. About 3000 years ago,
the Greeks adopted the alphabet from their neighbors, converting
some of the characters that had been used to represent consonants
and using them for vowels.
Between 3500 and 2000 years ago, the Hebrews transformed
religion. Earlier gods and spirits were not distinguished from
the natural mountains, rocks, or thunderbolts with which they
were identified, and they were gods of places or of tribes. The
God of Moses (who lived about 3300 years ago) was more abstract,
not to be represented in pictures or worshipped in idols. And
this God was the lord of the universe, not a tribal god
( IKHNATON* ). Thus we may properly say that the invention of
writing led in due course to the spiritualization of religion--
although a detailed argument would take a long time to construct
(Logan, Innis in WRITBIBL* ). A much later contribution of the
Hebrews was, of course, that of Jesus. (More on early writing in
Chapter 4.)
The Urban Revolution, the perfection of writing, and the
spiritualization of religion are on the steepest part of the
growth curve from rank 1 to rank 2--from 7000 to 3000 years ago.
In the 5th century BC, Athens had its Golden Age: sculp-
ture, architecture, drama, and government were great. They had
obtained most of the achievements in technology that preceded
them, and added their own. We still perform their plays and
imitate their columns and facades--but it is more important that
we still hold more or less the same concept of rationality.
Socrates (470?-399 BC), Plato (427-347 BC), and Aristotle (384-
-322 BC) discovered cognition. Put in the usual terms, they
invented philosophy. Put the Golden Age of Greece on the growth
curve just at the point where it stops rising and goes level.
Braidwood (1952; see MESOBIBL* ) sees this whole curve as a
single phenomenon. Foragers settle down as farmers and gradually
add town life, markets, and organized religion. (I rely on
Redfield 1953 for this summary, p. x, n2; see Po12BIBL* .)
About antiquity, especially Greece, but omitting writing
until Chapter 4, consult GREEBIBL* or
Oleson* for bibliography.
Just before the technology of rank 2 was made obsolete by
the Industrial Revolution, Denis Diderot surveyed it in an
illustrated encyclopedia (1751-1772).
The growth curve from rank 1 to rank 2, with some periods of
major events:
.....Rank 2......
...G..
...M
U..
UU
U
U
UU
AUU
aAAA
aaaaa
.....Rank 1...aa
| | | | | | | | |
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
Thousand years ago
a: Agriculture begins
A: Agriculure spreads
U: Urban Revolution
M: Moses
G: Golden Age of Greece
I will summarize the major events of the rankshift from 2 to
3 in an appendix to Chapter 4 ( 4_A_R23* ), but one is enough for
now. And of course even this first and simplest rankshift is an
enormous phenomenon. The creators of rank 2 civilization made
something out of nothing, and for that reason they deserve the
highest admiration. Yet at its best, rank 2 was unable to think
of reasons for giving up slavery, ending warfare, or admitting
that the powerless had any rights at all. As I write, the issue
of political correctness arouses strong feelings in many persons,
and with it the question of whether to teach the writings of
"Dead White European Males" in preference to the writings of
others. The ancient Hebrews and Greeks were the first who might,
by the broadest definition, be called DWEMs. They introduced the
concepts of spirit and of rational analysis, and no one else did.
Subsequent rankshifts were made by persons who were adept in
these concepts; we may well suppose that the later rankshifts
_required_ those concepts. If that be true, then those particu-
lar DWEMs were unique and essential. But they were not perfect,
they were not of a nature superior to ours. If we give them the
respect and attention they deserve, but no more, we should have
room in our curricula to recognize other contributors, and in our
lives to make our own contributions.
2.2.2. Paradigm Change
Thomas S. Kuhn gave the word "paradigm" a new meaning in the
history of science, and a vogue; the word is now used by everyone
in Kuhn's sense. But perhaps not exactly his sense. What he
wrote, in _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ (1962), was:
"... a set of recurrent and quasi-standard illustrations
of various theories in their conceptual, observational,
and instrumental applications." (p. 43)
Scientists of a given period and discipline do not write down
their paradigm. They are not fully aware of it. They have to
use illustrations, examples, to get their underlying ideas
across. Neither the teacher nor the student can speak clearly of
the paradigm, but after good training the student follows the
same paradigm as the teacher.
See PRDGMBIBL* .
A scientist, then, is the living embodiment of a paradigm
that determines what he or she will accept as a problem, as a
solution. Not all scientists have the same paradigm, writes
Kuhn. Paradigms are too specific to serve so widely. Each
scientist embodies a paradigm in consequence of long experience,
partly in formal education and partly in laboratory practise. No
two have quite the same experience, so no two need have exactly
the same paradigm. Since they are not aware of their paradigms,
they cannot compare them as they would compare their theories.
You can criticize another person's theory, because if it is not
explicit enough to examine closely it is not a theory at all.
But you can have, typically you do have, a paradigm that is not
explicit at all.
Anthropologists had been after the same idea. Ruth Benedict
wrote a book called _Patterns of Culture_, and a pattern of
culture is probably the same kind of thing as a paradigm. But
Kuhn and not Benedict put the concept and a word into our common
language.
The idea of themata in science put forward by Holton is in
the same vein (and see the discussion by Merton). See PRDGMBIBL*
You can see that technology could have patterns or paradigms
just as much as science does. Farmers learn as scientists do,
and accept certain problems and solutions while rejecting others.
A farmer puts up a scarecrow, but does nothing to frighten away
airplanes even after one crashes in a neighbor's field and
destroys a crop. Bridge builders accept and reject problems and
solutions; would a contemporary engineer accept the job of
building a bridge from New York to London?
Now I want to go a little further, because I need a concept
at a higher level. Take an American child in the late 20th
century; put the child through good public schools and a good
college; now offer the young person training in alchemy or
psychology. Few will accept the first; many will accept the
second. Why? Isn't psychology just as undisciplined a field of
study as alchemy was at its peak? Psychology pays fairly well
and offers a good many jobs, but that is not the point. Even if
you establish a Foundation for the Advancement of Alchemy and
offer lifetime fellowships, you will get few takers. Something
in the educated modern mind rebels against alchemy (for example,
the idea that material substances such as lead strive to become
perfect), and it seems appropriate to call that something a
paradigm.
Alchemy and psychology have paradigms; now we encounter a
paradigm that accepts and rejects the paradigms of alchemy and
psychology as Kuhn's paradigms accept and reject problems and
solutions. We will call this new something a _higher-order_
paradigm.
Each rank has its higher-order paradigm. In China, at
certain times and among certain groups, there was a rank 2
civilization that grew up almost independently of the west. Its
higher-order paradigm was not identical with the European higher-
order paradigm of rank 2, but we can safely assume that both
China and Europe would reject rank 1 paradigms for serious
matters. A little further on in this chapter, I will show you
Raoul Naroll's list of _paideias_, China and the West being two
of them. What was in his mind when he made it, I think, was that
each paideia had its unique higher-order paradigm.
You should be asking, about now, where on the growth curve
the new higher-order paradigm appears. The finished version
seems to appear on the shoulder, the top of the slope when the
revolution is coming to an end. According to that view, a new
higher-order paradigm formed in Greece during its Golden Age.
But it seems to me that higher-order patterns must change a
little at a time. Agriculture needs a different higher-order
pattern from hunting and gathering. We can watch little-by-
little changes going on all around us today, once we know what to
look for.
2.3. FOUR RANKS
2.3.1. Knowledge. Lore, practice, engineering,
systemics ... 2_3_1*
2.3.2. Materials. An example ... 2_3_2*
2.3.3. Paideias. Civilizations of Rank 2 and
Beyond ... 2_3_3*
2.3.4. Antiquity, Renaissance, Industry, and Today.
Creolization of cultures in contact ... 2_3_4*
The means and quality of knowing change from rank to rank,
and the range of materials changes likewise. Looking across
civilizations and ranks, we see that rankshift typically
comes when deeply different cultures meet.
2.3.1. Knowledge
I love tools, as you would expect of a writer on technology.
My computer monitor stopped working while I was writing the first
draft of Chapter 1, and I replaced it instantly because I cannot
write without it. But I love thought, and the cognitive tools of
thought, even more. The changes in technology from rank to rank
are wide and deep; they seem inexplicable without changes in
thinking.
For the kinds of thought that produce the technologies of
the four ranks, for what I called know-how, Benzon and I have
these names:
Rank 1 Lore
Rank 2 Practice
Rank 3 Engineering
Rank 4 Systemics
( Fig_2_1* shows some characteristics of lore, practice,
engineering, and systemics, rank by rank. The content of the
figure is speculative and a little more technical than the main
narrative.)
Let's look at the knowledge of each rank in turn.
Rank 1 begins with speech and is transcended in classical
antiquity. For the most part, rank 1 societies live by hunting
and gathering. They make tools and weapons, houses and clothing,
boats and ornaments. Almost nothing that they make has moving
parts. For weaving, tie threads side by side along a stick and
hang the stick from a tree. Pass another thread back and forth
to make a strip of cloth. The potter's wheel appears late; it
belongs on the growth curve toward rank 2. In the simplest
societies, each man knows all of the men's skills and each woman
knows all of the women's skills. In more complex societies of
rank 1, some crafts require special skills. The number of
specialties ranges up to 10 at most. Each specialty is passed
from parent to child, although in some places a specialist may
adopt and train someone else's child.
Lore is the knowledge of an apprentice, acquired largely by
imitation and practice with only a little talk about method. One
theory has it that the date of the origin of language can be
fixed by observing a change from
stone tools that the apprentice can learn to make by
imitation alone
to
more elegant tools that can be learned only by listening
to explanations along with imitation.
I won't vouch for the logic of this argument, but it is plausi-
ble. Still, it can not displace the fact that most of the know-
how in rank 1 is acquired by imitation; the talk is only to
polish the fine details of the skill. Lore is the oldest kind of
knowledge, and we need it today. What art can be mastered
without imitation? Kuhn argues that even science requires
imitative learning.
Being knowledge we don't know we know, lore is hard for some
to recognize. Zuboff* discusses the implicit skills of workers
in modern plants at great length; her point is the undercutting
of their skills by the introduction of computers. Gellner* also
writes of lore:
Modern society has many 'specialisms', but the few in
agricultural society are more sharply distinguished.
They are "fruits of lifelong, very prolonged and total-
ly dedicated training ..." (p. 26)
Two examples:
1842: Buddle writes that coal miners must begin work
in mines from before age 13. They have to get a feel
for the coal. HBC2 340
1780s: Operation of the mule can be learned in a few
months, but maintenance takes several years. And only
for those who grew up in the mill. Estimates by Harold
Catling. TIRv 30
Growing up in mine or mill, one becomes a miner or miller just as
one becomes a native speaker of English by growing up among
speakers of English. Possessing the lore of mill or mine, the
adult is no better able to teach it than the ordinary sapient can
teach a language.
Rank 2 in Europe begins on the growth curve described above
and is transcended on another that will include the Renaissance
and the Industrial Revolution. Rank 2 and all later ranks rely
on agriculture (and animal husbandry) for most food. Rank 2
makes and uses simple machines, sometimes driven by water wheels
or windmills, or turned by animals walking in circles around
capstans or on treadmills. These machines grind grain, hammer
iron, and eventually do many other tasks. As it happens,
agriculture did not get much help from simple machines. The
great bulk of a rank 2 population must therefore work on farms,
plowing, planting, and harvesting the crops.
Rank 2 produced many, many thinkers who looked at the work
being done around them and wrote manuals describing agriculture,
the making of machines, and other techniques. Chapter 1 mentions
a manual from China. In 1122, a German Benedictine monk named
Theophilus wrote _De diversis artibus_,
"a religiously motivated codification of all the skills
available for the embellishment of a church, from the
enameling of chalices and the painting of shrines to the
making of organ pipes and the casting of great bells for
the tower. ... the first flywheels ... a new and cheaper
way of making glass ...; the tinning of iron by immersion
..." ( MRTe* _, page 245.
And there are hundreds or thousands more manuals. These are
works that describe the best known way to do again what has been
done before. The knowledge gained by studying them is more
explicit than lore; call it practice.
Rank 3 begins with the long growth curve of 1300-1900, and
we are now watching its transcendance. Rank 3 built what and
where no one had built before: Machines with thousands or tens
of thousands of parts, performing all sorts of tasks on farms and
in homes and factories. Tall buildings and long bridges, from
the Arctic to the Tropics.
To make a new kind of thing by following established
practice does not succeed. Rank 3 was possible only because a
new kind of knowledge arose, a new kind of thinking. Certain
persons in rank 3 knew how to solve new problems. They published
books and founded educational institutions to transmit this
knowledge, and called their new system of thought engineering.
A craftsman works on a thing; as he makes it, he encounters
problems and solves them. An engineer works on an idea; as he
thinks about it, he foresees problems and solves them, then gives
his solutions to craftsmen to execute. His thinking has to be
more abstract.
Rank 4 is only now forming itself around and within us. The
computer is its most obvious emblem and tool. Some computers
have more parts than any machine of rank 3, millions or tens of
millions ( 486* ). But more importantly, the design of a new
computer is different from the design of a new bridge. For the
engineer, the river already exists and so does the traffic.
Persons and goods are moving in vehicles either by boat across
the river or by highway in a roundabout route that uses an
existing, smaller bridge than the new one will be. For the
computer designer, nothing is given except everything. From very
general knowledge of the universe, including us, and wide know-
ledge of how computers are made, the designer invents the problem
first and then the computing machine to solve it. We are trying
still to understand what such a person needs to know, and what
methods will be useful. We train electronic engineers, and
mathematicians, and computer programmers. A few of the best of
them then go beyond what they are taught to make innovations in
the art of computation. For the emerging kind of thought that we
expect to have wide application in the future, Benzon or I
suggested the name systemics.
Looking backward, we see that systemics will be of no use
without engineering, which needs practice to get jobs done, which
needs lore to fill in the innumerable details of working in the
material universe.
Looking forward, we see that lore is acquired so slowly that
a person in rank 1 can master only one rich art in a lifetime,
and the art cannot be so very rich at that. Manuals of practice
let the student learn faster, but are good only within
established limits; engineering reaches further, but the engineer
cannot begin without a stated requirement. We need systemics,
because we need people who can look around and perceive
requirements that have been invisible to us.
In an appendix, I have included a short statement that I
prepared for a course on cognition. You may want to concern
yourself with the way changes in cognition from rank to rank can
be correlated with changes in technology; or you may not. If you
read the appendix, be aware that its argument is speculative in
the utmost extreme. (Benzon and I have published a paper on
ranks of cognition; see COGNBIBL* ).
2.3.2. Four Ranks of Materials
We have seen some examples of change from rank to rank, but
with each example we have more ideas to apply and more background
to help us understand. Thinking about the materials used in the
four ranks will give us a chance to see how lore, practice,
engineering, and systemics generate technological change.
RANK 1. Materials are used as they are taken from nature,
with few exceptions. In this section, we ask only about changes
of substance. Spinning and weaving, cutting, and assembly of
parts are changes of form, not substance. The original great
exception, then, is cooking. Claude Levi-Strauss, a French
anthropologist, had good reason to call one of his books _The Raw
and the Cooked_ ( R&C* ), contrasting raw nature with culture.
Two other exceptions, which may derive from cooking, are the
preparation of leather and the firing of pottery. Untanned
leather stinks and rots; tanning, you might say, cooks the
leather. Unfired pottery is fragile and softens in water. These
treatments are simple and obvious.
Another rank 1 exception is work with ores to obtain metals.
Some metals, such as gold and copper, occur free in nature but
mixed with rock. Heat a rock containing gold in a hot fire, and
some of the gold flows out. Is this a change of substance?
Other exceptions arise. Dyes are leached out of plant or
other matter. Sometimes poisonous parts of plants are made safe
to eat by boiling in water and squeezing, as certain native
Brazilians do with manioc.
So a rank 1 society has vegetable and animal fibers, wood,
stone, clay, shells, feathers, bones, and perhaps copper and gold
to work with. Societies of this rank use water and fire to
prepare food and sometimes other materials.
RANK 2. Don't expect too much here. The most significant
change for most societies of rank 2 is commerce. Trading in
materials across wide areas greatly increases the diversity
available to each society. Bleaching and dyeing are improved,
but not greatly. Leather is surely better prepared. And the
smelting of metals becomes common. First bronze, made by
alloying copper with tin to harden it. Then iron, which occurs
as oxide and has to be reduced by heating very hot with
charcoal--the carbon wants oxygen more than the iron does, and
takes it away. Iron was made by 3000 BC in small amounts (Maddin
in GREEBIBL* ). Mining of coal began, but the main fuel for iron
smelting in rank 2 England was still wood (charcoal) (Nef in
InRvBIBL* ). Paper was produced in small quantities. Petroleum
was extracted in very small quantities. The glazing of pottery
seems to fall in rank 2.
A most useful new material used in rank 2 societies was bird
manure, which can be collected on certain desert islands remote
from Europe. It contains phosphates and serves well as a
fertilizer. In 1900, caliche--a mineral found in Chile--was the
only material known to provide nitrogen for crops.
To produce food, fabrics, leather, and metals in moderately
large quantities, as rank 2 societies have had to do, they needed
more than artisans trained by apprenticeship. They needed
manuals of practice. The arts they applied were more complicat-
ed, the contingencies more demanding.
RANK 3. Engineering may not have introduced many new
materials, or many important transformations of materials. The
effect of engineering was to increase the abundance of the
familiar ones.
The steam engine made possible mining for coal on a large
scale (Church, Jevons in InRvBIBL* ). Machine production of
thread and cloth made it possible for many people to own more
garments. Production of sulfuric acid increased, bleaches could
be made cheaply in large quantity. The railroads needed iron;
new processes came into use and iron became a cheap commodity.
The ability to plan products and facilities, which is what I
mean by engineering, delivers the goods in volume. But the world
of materials is not so much changed since rank 1.
RANK 4. Argue with me if you will, since I am not as sure
as I would like to be about the analysis that I am about to
present. It seems to me that although the major phenomena of
19th century Europe belong to rank 3, some rank 4 events took
place. Notably, the development of an organic chemical industry
in Germany (Clow in IR2BIBL* ). The aniline dyes were a new
class of substances. After them, in several countries, came
celluloid, bakelite, rayon, nylon, and polyethylene--and man-made
ammonia, for fertilizer and military explosives, first produced
in Germany in 1913. The growth curve reaches far into the 20th
century, but seems to be connected all the way back to the first
German inventions. We have, at last, a group of non-natural
products.
We also have a host of processes that transform substances
by impregnating them with chemicals: no-rot wood, no-iron
cotton, no-stain carpets, and so on. And other transformations
such as ceramics that can serve as stove tops; ferrous metals
that do not rust (easily); artificial diamonds; and on and on.
Systemics, looking at the world in a broad way and
asking, "What is both useful and possible?", comes up with
surprises when it is supported by enough science.
2.3.3. Paideias: Civilizations of Rank 2 and Beyond
Let my old friend, the anthropologist Raoul Naroll, explain
his own concept:
"By a paideia I mean an intellectually influential higher
civilization. ... one with a written literature which has
been extensively translated into another script and whose
moral or scientific ideas have been advocated by writers in
another script (i.e., belonging to another civilization)."
( MILDET* p. xxxi]
Naroll sought out all the paideias in the history of the world,
and found nine, displayed on the next screen.
Naroll's Paideias
Name Script Period
1. Mesopotamian Cuneiform 2500-600 BC
2. Egyptian Hieroglyphic 3000-600 BC
3. Hebrew Hebrew alphabet 900-600 BC
4. Islamic Arabic alphabet AD 600-present
5. Greco-Roman Greek alphabet 600 BC-AD 450
6. Western Latin alphabet AD 450-present
7. Russian Cyrillic alphabet AD 1350-present
8. Hindu Devanagari script 300 BC-present
9. Chinese Logographic script 600 BC-present
[Names and scripts from MILDET* pages xxxiii-xxxv; dates from
page 29.]
Notice carefully that these are not governments. Each
paideia may contain several governments at the same time, and
many governments in succession. Egypt went through a long series
of dynasties, and wars to determine who would found the next
dynasty. China has had many governments, some established by
invaders who, as is often remarked, were assimilated to the
Chinese civilization. In Mesopotamia there were Sumer, Akkad,
Babylonia, and Chaldea--and more. India was not unified until
the British came. Greece was a turmoil of small governments, and
Rome conquered them--adopting their civilization. Look at Europe
in modern times.
In the west, the area from the North Pole to the southern
edge of the Sahara, from the Atlantic to the Urals, the sequence
of ranks runs from Egypt and Mesopotamia ( MESOBIBL* ), through
the Hebrews and Greeks, to the Romans. With the fall of Rome,
Europe declined to a sort of rank 1 life; only isolated remnants
of rank 2 thought continued. In Byzantium and around it, rank 2
life went on. With the little Renaissance, around AD 1000, rank
2 returned to Europe. Then the big Renaissance started the
growth curve to rank 3. I prefer to set the beginning of Western
civilization with the Renaissance, later than Naroll put it; my
choice corresponds to Kroeber's in his Roster* .
Islamic civilization stands at rank 2, deriving from the
Byzantine version of Greco-Roman thought.
(References: ISLMBIBL* .)
Russian civilization, which I would call Muscovite if I
were allowed to give it a name (because it is centered on Moscow
as the Roman Empire was centered on Rome), was at rank 2 until
recently. Several czars brought ideas from the West, and the
Soviet Union began quite early to import ideas from as far as
America.
The Hindu and Chinese civilizations developed from
independent origins of agriculture. They rose to rank 2 in their
own distinct ways, and to high rank 2. I have been told that I
do not understand them well enough to place them correctly, that
they reached rank 3, and that my idea of calculation as the
pivotal cognitive phenomenon is mistaken Western prejudice.
Perhaps. (See CHINABIBL* INDIABIBL* .)
Of this much I am sure: The rapid passage of the West from
rank 1 around AD 900 to rank 3 by 1800 owed much to borrowing.
Both technology and mathematics flowed into Europe from Islam,
India, and China. A number of routes were open. They may have
been slow as trade routes, but as channels for ideas they worked
much faster than new invention could have worked.
Some of the paideias produced prophets and philosophers
whose names we know:
Confucius in China, 551-479 BC approximately;
Buddha in India, 563-483 BC approximately;
the Greek philosophers that we have noted;
Moses of uncertain date and
Jesus, 4 BC-AD 29 approximately, among the Hebrews;
Muhammad, AD 570-632.
Of course there were many other prodigious contributors to the
growth of thought in each civilization.
A question that often arose in my mind over the years was,
what filled the parts of the Earth that did not belong to one or
another of the civilizations? By 10,000 years ago, the Earth was
full of people, still living from plants and animals that they
found growing in nature. By 2000 years ago, Eurasia and Africa
had almost filled with farmers. In the Arctic, in mountains, in
deserts, and in tropical forest there were still hunters and
gatherers; in Australia and the Americas, there was not yet
agriculture--or only a little. By AD 1500, when Europe began to
explore the rest of the world, there were civilizations at or
near rank 2 in part of America; but societies and governments of
rank 2 and rank 3 did not by any means cover the Earth.
The answer to my question was simple enough: There was a
little of everything in the areas that were not up to rank 2 yet.
There were areas where families lived as independent political
units, and areas of agriculture organized into independent
villages, chiefdoms, kingdoms, and small states. The trouble is,
there were so very many independent units, and each of them so
very small. We have names for between 4000 and 10,000 languages,
but we can reasonably surmise that at least as many more have
vanished without a trace. If we had a list of all the political
units of chiefdom size or larger, gathered from every available
source, we would still know that very many more had flourished
and disappeared before anyone could write down their names.
For a map of the Earth in the year 1500: Hewes*
If I could, I would draw material for this book from all of
Naroll's nine paideias, and from preliterate cultures as well, in
proportion to their technological richness. But until recently
American scholarship did not give as much attention to eight of
the paideias as to its own, and I am a product of American
culture. Even now, of course, America does not draw on all
cultures fully. But there are further difficulties. Archeologi-
cal work in China has lagged. The soil and climate of India do
not preserve the remains of older cities and farms as well as the
dry climate of Iraq and Egypt, or the cold climate of the north.
We will hear more of rankshifts in the West than of those else-
where, by necessity and not by choice.
Figure 2.2 ( Fig_2_2* ) shows a few major events from each
paideia in chronological order.
2.3.4. Antiquity, Renaissance, Industry, and Today
Ancient history is generally told as the story of the birth
of civilization. That is to say, the events from the origins of
agriculture and government in the Nile Valley and Mesopotamia to
the fall of Rome are treated as the growth curve from rank 1 to
rank 2. We should tell the stories of ancient China and India,
of the Andean people, of the Mayas, and of the Valley of Mexico
people in the same way.
General references for prehistory: ARCHBIBL*
On Greece and Rome: GREEBIBL*
On the Maya and the Aztecs: MaAzBIBL* .
In each of these ancient civilizations, technology
surpassed the standard of the hunter-gatherers. A greater
proportion of the population practiced a greater variety of
technical specialties, producing more kinds of things of better
quality. But I am sure that in Greece and Rome, and I am fairly
sure that in the other early civilizations, the making of things
was not respected as much as it is among us today. (The peak may
have passed, the 19th century may have respected technological
success more than we do.)
In other words, the higher-order paradigms of the Greeks,
the Romans, and the rest excluded technology from the purest
reality.
I give you an example. The Romans built a few water mills,
and continued to grind almost all of their grain by hand. Why?
If you ask the historians, they explain that the Romans had too
many workers and not enough work. That "explanation" does not
sound to me like a real explanation. The historians who use it
have never heard of higher-order paradigms. They want a
practical reason for the failure to exploit and develop
labor-saving devices. Now, it may well be true that certain
Roman rulers said to certain Roman innovators, "I don't want your
mill, I want more work for the unemployed who only become trouble
makers if they are unoccupied for too long." But a ruler who had
a taste for machines would not say that, even though it were
true.
We today go on building labor-saving machines, even though
they tend, at one and the same time, to produce
> a surplus of uneducated persons without work
> a shortage of educated persons to use the new machines
If we were practical, we would not do that. Lately I read that
the USA lags Europe in retail-sales automation, perhaps for the
practical reason that we have plenty of persons who will work for
minimum wage as retail sellers. I predict that we will go ahead
with automation and increasing technological unemployment,
because we are machine-minded. And I am convinced that the
Ancients were not, although they could have been.
White, in _Medieval Religion and Technology_ ( MRTe* ) ,
argues that Europe then understood God as a clockmaker, thinking
of the Universe as a great Mechanism and every earthly mechanism
as a good thing inasmuch as it was done in the manner of God's
own work.
Braudel, in his economic history ( FBCC* 2:578), tells us
that in Florence, in a single century--the Quattrocento, or
1400s--people changed from disdain for earthly things and a hope
of paradise to an interest in their well-being here and now--not
without a hope of heaven, but in the belief that God wanted them
to have as much of a foretaste as they could get. And so they
invented "a new art of living" and, moreover, "new ways of
thinking". Florence produced Benvenuto Cellini, a system of
commerce that brought good things from as far away as they could
reach ... and a new beginning for science and technology.
Braudel gives credit to Sombart, who wrote on the history of
capitalism around 1900. "Sombart finds ... a new climate: praise
of money, recognition of the value of time, the need to live
thriftily--all good bourgeois principles in the first flush of
their youth." ( FBCC* 2:579; and see SCIBIBL* )
What happened? How can a higher-order paradigm change so
much in so little time? Historians always point to the renewed
availability of Greek and Roman writings, and to contact with
Islam and the Asian civilizations. Here I agree with them that
contact is important, but for reasons that I do not see in
history books. Some linguists believe that big changes in
language occur only when different languages come into contact;
their name for the process of mixing that then occurs is
"creolization"--Creole is a particular mixture of French with
African languages. And I think that higher-order paradigms
change most readily, and perhaps only, when cultures come into
contact. Indeed, the contact may be tenuous:
"But quite often ... the achievements of one society
stimulated people elsewhere to make different but
related inventions.
"Just the knowledge that Indians could spin fine cotton
yarns, weave delicate fabrics, and dye them with bright
and fast colors ..." stimulated work in Europe. (Pacey
1974, p. vii in BIBLNOTE* )
At the time of the rankshift from rank 1 to rank 2, many
rather advanced rank 1 cultures came into contact around the
eastern end of the Mediterranean ( Gordon* ). There were migra-
tions into the area from several places in Eurasia. But later,
Roman culture had absorbed what it could from the others, and
stood alone. There was at the time no other rank 2 culture for
it to mix with.
By the Renaissance, rank 2 cultures from several sources
had achieved contact with each other. Partly it was a matter of
getting out old manuscripts and translating them into the
language of the day, and partly it was a matter of bringing home
what the traders found at the ends of their long journeys. The
people of northern Europe were more interested in machines than
the older Mediterranean cultures had been.
"although the barbarian peoples derive no power from
eloquence and no illustrious rank from office, yet they
are by no means considered strangers to mechanical
inventiveness where nature comes to their assistance"
(Anonymous Roman, AD 370; see LSDC* )
In 1235, a sketch was made of a sawmill that correlated two
motions: The spin of the blade and the lengthwise movement of
the log. No machine like this is known from earlier date ( MRTe*
80). Machinery became elaborate where Germanic and Mediterranean
cultures were in contact.
So I think that the formation of the original Greco-Roman
higher-order patterns, and the formation of the later Western
patterns, took place under conditions of culture contact.
The Industrial Revolution, which began in the late 18th
century, was like the Roman Empire--a culmination, made in fairly
strict isolation. It happened in Great Britain, specifically in
England and Scotland, and overflowed onto the continent, Europe
and also America. At the end of World War I in 1918, Britain had
lost world leadership, both politically and technologically. By
perfecting its craftsmanship, with only a little application of
science, Britain had invented the industrial system. But it had
neglected science and education, and held firmly to a pattern of
governance that came from rank 2.
Meanwhile, in America, something different had happened.
Our ancestors here arrived from many places. They came from
several parts of Europe, all of them Western but having slightly
different versions of the Western higher-order paradigm. They
also came from Africa, and--by the middle of the 19th century--
from Asia. And some were descended from Americans who had been
here for thousands of years. America became a melting-pot quite
early in its modern history.
Furthermore, the dominant Westerners in America believed in
education. First for religious reasons--to read the Bible, and
to have learned preachers. Second for political reasons--so that
the voters would understand the issues of government. Not all
Americans held these values, and those who held them did not
believe that all Americans need be educated, but education did
spread. A national movement led to almost universal elementary
education in the 1830s and 1840s--universal for whites, that is.
The Morrill Act supported the creation of colleges for agricul-
ture and mechanics in the last quarter of the century--it gave
grants of land.
See EDUCBIBL* .
The contrast between Britain and America is sharp. Britain
did not want the working class to be educated, lest it become
dissatisfied with its place in the world. In fact, it seems to
me that Great Britain lost the 20th century around 1800 (1790-
1820). Mechanization of the textile industry frightened the
workers. The beginning of science frightened the religious.
Loss of the American colonies frightened the government. The
French Revolution frightened everyone. Science was radical
enough to be associated in the public mind with revolution.
Education of the people was considered to promote radicalism. So
Great Britain did not extend education at any level very widely.
See Argles, Russell in EDUCBIBL* .
Early in the 19th century, the USA stole the beginnings of
industrial technology from Britain, soliciting the illegal
emigration of expert craftsmen and smuggling plans and machines
that Britain protected with laws, as the USA today protects
nuclear technology and advanced computers (Harper, Jeremy in
XFERBIBL* ). By 1851, Britain was buying technology from the USA
(Rodgers, Rosenberg in XFERBIBL* ). By 1900, Kipling was asking
America to pick up the white man's burden because Britain could
no longer carry it.
In my view, what happened was that an industrial revolution
based on science took place in America after the Industrial
Revolution based on craftsmanship took place in Britain. Ours
perhaps included some of the early part of the growth curve from
rank 3 to rank 4. Theirs was the last part of the growth curve
from rank 2 to rank 3. Ours continued rising far into the 20th
century; theirs turned flat by 1900, and we can argue for an
earlier date.
In the 1990s, we have gotten so far along that no higher-
order paradigm of a rank 3 kind is acceptable to those who have
recently completed a good education, but no pattern of a rank 4
kind is strong enough to rely on. We feel the effects in many
ways, and they are uncomfortable. Some among us would actually
accept a fellowship in alchemy, feeling that a rank 2 pattern is
no more obsolete than one of rank 3. Sorry, but there is nothing
I can write that will solve this problem. If you agree with my
analysis and feel less uncomfortable because you can now say what
is wrong, I am glad. But the rank 4 pattern will emerge, if at
all, from the spontaneous and unconscious workings of many minds,
and not from the writings of one thinker.
2.A. Appendix: Processes and Tech Evol Contents of Thought
In rank 1, thought is analogous to action, as observed in
small children in contemporary life ( Vygotskij* ):
I get on my tricycle.
I push the pedals.
I ride away.
Such self-describing, self-guiding thoughts belong to a self-
organizing system, and therefore constitute a medium in which
training can be more than mere imitation, and one in which
evolutionary improvements can occur. The beginnings of tool
making, plant growing, and group organizing must occur in this
way, without analytic guidance. Thought guides action, but
thought does not guide thought.
The abstractions of rank 1, expressed in metaphors and
proverbs, are as spontaneous as the concrete objects that emerge
by virtue of abstraction in the visual field.
On the growth curve to rank 2, at the level we call 1.5, the
transfer of knowledge from one material domain to another has
come to be substantial. The most important mechanism of transfer
from tool making to agriculture, from both to society, from
family to petty kingdom, can only be the mechanism of metaphors
and proverbs.
In rank 2, the processes of thought are analogous to first-
order relations over the concrete materials of action. Cognitive
theory provides several kinds of first-order relations, among
which each culture can make its own selection. The cultures that
reached this rank independently are those of the Hebrews, Greeks,
Hindus, and Chinese, and the West in the little renaissance. I
am not capable of identifying the cognitive relations chosen in
most of these, but for the Greeks I believe that the relation of
assignment was dominant, and in the later West the relation of
participation. (Assignment is the relation of the Aristotelean
"rational soul" to the animal, resulting in a sapient; participa-
tion is that between a thing and an event ("John runs" or "Mary
eats apples".) In consequence, the ontology of Greek thought was
that of ideal entities, whereas the West created an ontology of
real events.
In this and following ranks, the processes of thought at the
highest level remain just as spontaneous and undirectable as the
processes of rank 1. But from rank 2 forward a certain degree of
deliberateness emerges. By isolating thought from action, and by
designing a new mode of conversation--the Socratic dialogue--the
Greeks made the most of this capacity. But the assignment
relation offers little to simple technologies, and the ontology
of ideal entities even less. All in all, the Greeks separated
their philosophy from their technology--and then gave positive
value to the separation, disdaining the practical arts.
The Romans and others who continued the Hellenistic culture
were less disdainful of practical affairs, but they inherited the
relation and the ontology and could do little with them. Some
deliberate description, management, and improvement of mechanical
and agricultural arts occurred in antiquity, but so little and so
slowly as to make it clear that the processes of thought were not
well adapted to the purpose.
The originators of rank 2 culture in the West after AD 1000
had access to Germanic cultures of rank 1 or 1.5, as well as what
little of Hellenistic culture they had retained--or the larger
portion that they regained by way of Islam. That they chose
participation instead of assignment is interesting, but for me
almost entirely inexplicable. Perhaps there are explanations to
be found, in the grammars of the Greek and Germanic languages for
example, or perhaps not: Sometimes a road is taken at random.
And it is quite thinkable that not all of the West chose the same
relation, since the appearance and continuation of mysticism in
the same populations that carry scientific and technological
culture could be ascribed to differences as fundamental as this
one. Art and religion reached new heights along with machinery,
and may be further examples of diversity in processes of thought
within the larger culture.
As the Renaissance began, the West had achieved rank 2.5.
That is to say, the products of deliberate thought about one
matter were being applied wholesale to other matters through
metaphorical correspondences.
Rank 3 thought is at the level of second-order relations,
which means that Renaissance thinkers could operate deliberately
on relations among events; in language, intersentence connec-
tions. The one that had the greatest significance for the future
of the West was causality. Because the highest level of thought
processes cannot be controlled, the scientific revolution could
not explain its concept of causation adequately. But it could
operate in accordance with the principle, and build theories.
Science, as practiced through the late 19th century, used an
ontology of microscopic concrete entities: Molecules, atoms,
electrons. Causality in physics and chemistry was understood in
terms of contact between entities. Light was thought to be
carried as waves in a material ether.
The growth curve toward rank 4 can be seen in attempts to
transfer concepts metaphorically from astronomy to physics, from
the hard sciences to the human sciences, and so on.
But electromagnetic radiation proved not to belong to a
world of concrete entities and material ethers. The phenom-
ena were not only invisible but also ineffable. Reaching
the level of third-order relations, rank 4 thought became
capable of operating on causal structures. Relativistic
physics, quantum mechanics, metamathematics, and cybernetics
are major examples of intellectual structures of this rank.
The ontology required for such conceptual formulations is
perhaps that of fields; but I do not feel confident of my
own understanding here.
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