Democrazy
The perils of unsanity in politics and public affairs.
With Miroslaw Manicki
Democracy, broadly considered, involves several activities. One is in the assignation of power, the standard being to do so by the citizenry in question. Not discussed so often is the scope of power in question — does it involve everything that happens within a geographic space or are there conceptual space questions, including matters of expertise and perhaps social norms? This has to do with what is political and what is not. This essay is directed at some such questions.
As can be seen in Figure 1: Examples of geographic and conceptual space, the international milieu and national borders, apart from the need for nations to define and defend their borders as a means of defining the extent of the state and prove protections for its people, there are many questions of conceptual space that need to be sorted out to meet the needs of people aware of alternatives and opportunities. This question of understanding and navigating conceptual space is indeed a challenge for our age.
Other questions include how long specific powers are to be applied and how it is later transferred. Important, such questions are outside the range of this essay.
About a hundred years ago, a young, feisty Polish nobleman, an engineer and veteran of the Russian Army, wrote a book whose message should resonate loudly in our ears, long after the fact. His name was Alfred Korzybski. The book was called “Manhood of Humanity.”
You may be acquainted with some of Korzybski’s famous quotes, such as, “the map is not the territory” or “the picture is not the person.” “Sally(1) is not the same as Sally(2)” [the same person, but at different times, is not really the same person] is another approach to his method. He introduced a bevy of concepts to help us all to communicate better and to stop thinking and talking past each other. This can be seen in Figure 2: Examples of mismatches.
Mr. Korzybski, a Polish count, had been an intelligence officer in the throes of the First World War, witnessing untold depravation. He had seen the worst of the worst. How is it that he went from that to full-on efforts to correct the problem?
The answer to this can at least be found due to a serendipitous opportunity for Count Korzybski, seen in Figure 3. Toward the end of his military service, he was commissioned to travel from Russia to Canada to oversee preparation and shipment of military supplies to be sent to the Tsar’s army for the war. As an engineer, he was particularly suited to such work. Once he sent the munitions on their way to Russia, he resigned his commission and emigrated to the United States.
He married an American woman who was a well-placed portraitist. She and her sister were very supportive of Korzybski and encouraged him to write and to publish his ideas. Thus, he was able to reflect and to document and expand on his ideas because he found peace for himself.
As to the message, he described a concept called semantic response, which he inserts into his writings as “s.r.”. The point is that intent and interpretation represent such different phenomena that it is virtually impossible for meaningful communication to take place without some means of clarifying each. As a result, there can be misunderstanding at best, provocation in many cases. This makes agreement and collaboration difficult, even under conditions of good will. Absent that, it can be virtually impossible to achieve desirable outcomes under political conditions.
This is the travesty, the inevitable source of tragedy and chaos. Even under the best of circumstances, there will be consequences. When full-on semantic crashes occur, as they often do, as exemplified by the Figure 4: Three dimension rendered illustration of two colliding cars, representative of the inevitable crash of meaning and concepts, failure due to negative s.r. below, all kinds of mayhem occur.
How is it that conditions as described by Korzybski can be so bad? This is to say, is it not simply some aspect of human nature that they would be? The analogy of the crashing cars can lead to some source of comfort. Social media as it stands can be seen as analogous to a demolition derby as seen below in Figure 5: Demolition derby mêlée in process. This is purposive crashing for entertainment if not sport. People do not live this way. Traffic for the most part is orderly, safe, and predictable.
Korzybski describes the modern situation with regard to prospects for peace and prosperity in direct ways. Humans represent great risks to all of nature in this regard.
There are other facts which must be kept constantly in mind. One of them is that, in the world in which we live, there are natural laws of inorganic as well as organic phenomena. Another of the facts is, as before said … the human class of life has the peculiar capacity of establishing the social laws and customs which regulate and influence its destinies, which help or hinder the processes of production upon which the lives and happiness of mankind essentially and fundamentally depend.
It must not be lost sight of in this connection that the human class of life is a part and a product of nature, and that, therefore, there must be fundamental laws which are natural for this class of life. A stone obeys the natural laws of stones, a liquid conforms to the natural law of liquids; a plan, to the natural laws of plants; an animal, to the natural laws of animals, it follows inevitably that there must be natural laws for humans.
But here the problem becomes more complicated, for the stone, the plant and the animal do not possess the intellectual power to create and initiate and so must blindly obey the laws that are natural for them; they are not free to determine their own destinies. Not so with man; man has the capacity and he can, through ignorance or neglect or mar-intent, deviate from, or misinterpret, the natural laws for the human class of life. Just therein lies the secret and the sources of human chaos and woe — a fact of such tremendous importance that it cannot be overemphasized, and it seems impossible to evade it longer. To discover the nature of Man and the laws of that nature, marks the summit of human enterprises. For to solve this problem is to open the way to everything which can be of importance to humanity — to human welfare and happiness (Korzybski, 1920/1950, 43).
Korzybski described in his time what was a vexing problem. It was a communication mismatch that was based in the spoken and written language. That was the crux of the matter — speaking and listening, writing and reading. There could be said that communication through art and symbolism was also in effect.
The problem was not resolved by the time of his death in 1950. In his 1933 publication of Science and Sanity, he admitted to defeat. His problem wasn’t that he and his collaborators had failed to convince cultural, scholarly, and political leadership to identify semantic problems and correct the situation. His problem was that he and the others had not identified a solution in the first place.
Between the two languages [mathematics and linguistics] there exists as yet a large unbridged structural gap. The bridging of this gap is the problem of the workers of the future (Korzybski, 1933/1995, 69).
We declare that a solution exists. To understand this, please refer to “King Corruption vs The Conceptual Heartland: Society(n), the EU Acquis Communautaire, and a Sound Conceptual Border Environment” (Tingey, Manicki, et al., 2018) and the rest of our work.
Korzybski’s work suffered from another shortcoming, one that he did not recognize. Mankind had grown up. Time-binding had taken place. Korzybski did not know about this because the fact had been forgotten, the specific artifacts of this achievement in particular. Figure 6: Restored ziggurat of ancient Iraq gives some idea of the scale of development of Sumer’s many city-states.
The glories of Sumer were diluted by thousands of years of decline, where subsequent cultures, ratably inching to the north, tried to take on as much as they could of the original, including the use of the symbol system, the writing system for their own languages. Inching forward, new civilizations, none of them so civil as the original, grew up in Babylon and Assur in particular. The earlier civilization had grown out of the very old city Eridu to the south and centered in Uruk and Ur, with Nippur as an important cultural and religious center.
This is not surprising, since the breadth and sophistication of early Mesopotamian civilization was not so well-known then as it is now. Not only did they organize themselves in complex and sophisticated ways to both support basic human needs and expand on wealth and luxury, but they did so by leveraging semantics and mathematics in surprising and conclusive ways. They invented semantics by means of their evolving and effective cuneiform writing system, which first was established to support measures and counts for storage and trade. This expanded to descriptive and later literary capacity.
World collections hold approximately 550,000 objects, and the CDLI has catalogued some 334,000 of them. Forty percent of these texts are written in Sumerian, of which 2/3 were produced during the Ur III period, which refers to a dynasty of the end of the 22nd, and the whole of the 21st centuries BC. Chiarcos et al. (2018, 2438).
For perspective, this was approximately the time the Biblical patriarch Abraham left Ur and travelled north to Anatolia, then to the Levant, the area of Canaan.
Vestiges of what had been in Southern Mesopotamia have existed in all cultures to some degree, particularly evident in those near the “two rivers” of the Tigris and Euphrates, the Nile, and the Indus river systems. Secondarily, there is evidence of early spread from there of writing systems and some elements of trade to China and South America. Much can be found in the Hebrew Bible. With discovery of the cuneiform records from older times, some unknown aspects of the Bible have come alive.
Fortunately for us, the people wrote on clay that ultimately became stone, through their efforts to dry the clay in the sun and by baking it. Fires along the way actually helped to preserve the documents. As can be seen in Figure 7: Clay tablets with cuneiform writing the documents present themselves in many sizes and shapes. Some are found intact, others needed to be pieced together or compared to other copies or versions of similar material.
In our time, tens of thousands of these documents are available. The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus (Oracc) library at the University of Pennsylvania (http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/) is an example of the scope of the source material and the extent of existing research in myriads of subject areas. The Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI) at the University of California, Los Angeles (https://cdli.ucla.edu/) is another one of these.
We find unexpected content and unprecedented emphasis on certain functions within the literature, in the history and in the old stories. There are many Biblical analogs, interesting in how they predate the others and lend additional insights. Most particularly for our purposes here, we see an unusual emphasis based on contemporary standards, on record-keeping rigor and detailed guidance through skill-based activities using tangible artifacts. Figure 8: Breakdown of texts from Ur III period represents 18% of found texts and demonstrates progress in the understanding of Sumerian documents, particularly administrative documents. Much needs to be done, as can be seen.
Emphasis on administrative content is indicative of a commitment to process over prerogative. It is important to note that the Sumerian approach was to emphasize guidance in administrative affairs before the fact. One of the most memorable items of Sumerian literature is a social encounter by Enki and Inanna, where the second individual, a woman, was able to talk her older relative out of about a hundred devices, call the me (pronounced ‘may’) that could be used to guide their holders through all kinds of actions and responsibilities — governance, religion, art, science, (Wolkstein & Kramer, 1983, 12–27). After the transfer was completed — he had had second thoughts and tried to stop the process — Enki blessed Inanna and her city of Uruk with the power that they had been given:
In the name of my power! In the name of my holy shrine!
Let the me you have taken with you remain in the holy shrine of your city.
Let the high priest spend his days at the holy shrine in song.
Let the citizens of your city prosper.
Let the children of Uruk rejoice.
The people of Uruk are allies of the people of Eridu.
Let the city of Uruk be restored to its great place (Ibid., 27).
Very little was left to chance in such matters. They assiduously avoided ambiguity; they do not seem to have suffered a rolling semantic crisis as we now experience.
They worked very hard to consider and to constantly managed the conditions of peace, prosperity, and harmony. They assured to the degree possible that necessities would be available while also allowing for commercial activity and private accumulation of luxuries and extras.
Questions of war and peace are not strictly modern concerns. They were present in early Sumer as per the records, but only critically so in the later, northern cities and city states. As can be seen in the following Figure, issues of peace and ware have deep roots. The Standard of Ur, a large painted box found in the Royal Cemetery in the city of Ur, connotes important aspects of public life in 2600 BCE. See Figure 9: The Standard of Ur.
This comes late in the Sumerian history, in the Early Ur Dynastic period, where there was more military commitment than had been the case originally. One side of the box was the peace side, seen below in Figure 10: Standard of Ur, 26th century BC, “Peace” panel. Of course, this is what we want, do we not? It shows physical work in the bottom panel, husbandry and trade in the middle, and craftsmanship on the top. This is how people thrive. This is how sustenance is supported and value is created.
The other side of the box is the war side as seen on Figure 11: Standard of Ur, 26th century BC, “War” panel. Of course, this isn’t what we want, right? Perhaps it is the ultimate ‘necessary evil.’ The bottom demonstrates transport issues, foot soldiers and other fighters are shown in the middle, and leadership is demonstrated in the top.
Then there was the dark age.
Three generations ago the existence of the Sumerians was unknown to the scientific world; today their history can be written and their art illustrated more fully than that of many ancient peoples. It is the history and the art of a race which died out nearly four thousand years ago, whose very name had been forgotten before the beginning of our era… (Woolley, 1928/1995, 183).
Much was lost in terms of order. There was language development, including a myriad of approaches to written and spoken communications. The understanding of semantics, carried out on a level such as in Sumer, was certainly lost. It is not that there wasn’t innovation. The Greeks, for example, were inventive in their ideas about power and how it could be more effectively distributed, even, perhaps better than in Sumer itself.
It was the Greeks, after all, who discovered not only democracy but also politics, the art of reaching decisions by public discussion and then of obeying those decisions as a necessary condition of civilized social existence… The Greeks, and only the Greeks, discovered democracy in that sense (Finley, M. in Vernant, 1996, 164).
Korzybski’s main point in 1920 was that mankind, as he collectively called the people of his time, should grow up. Problematically, collectively, the people in his time, in the early 20th century, did not act like it. He said that people acted as though they were unsane, a condition that he distinguished from insanity.
His complaint calls to mind the Cheshire Cat problem from Alice in Wonderland. The problem is that although math can provide great precision, it does not convey context or meaning. The Cheshire Cat may smile, but if you take away the cat, the smile is still there. Apart from being creepy, such a situation is also not helpful.
So, you can see that there is an answer, but any question it might deal with is unknown. This impacts on democracy in several ways. This is a problem, of course. Without this, the Korzybski problem presents itself, to be sure. For one thing, without grounding the concept at all, a semantic storm is inevitable. This has morphed into a competition of sorts.
We do not declare that the people of the world are insane. For one thing, there is a process for considering such things, and certain professional qualifications are needed. We are not psychologists; we do not propose to be able to do this. For that matter, it is questionable as to whether insanity can clinically be declared at all when applied to groups, large or small. The DSM — 5 Manual certainly does not allow for that.
We can, however, state conclusively that the world and its various institutions have reached a state of unsanity. Better said, we note that Mr. Korzybski did about a century ago and we haven’t noted any substantive change in the matter since then:
As always in human affairs, in contrast to those of animals, the issues are circular. Our rulers, who rule our symbols, and so rule a symbolic class of life, impose their own infantilism on our institutions, educational methods, and doctrines. This leads to nervous maladjustment of the incoming generations which, being born into, are forced to develop under the un-natural (for man) semantic conditions imposed on them. In turn, they produce leaders afflicted with the old animalistic limitations. The vicious circle is completed; it results in a general state of human un-sanity, reflected again in our institutions. And so it goes, on and on. Korzybski, 1933/1995, 40.
To understand what he refers to with respect to animals and people, it is important to come to understand the concept of “time-binding,” which is central to his way of looking at human progress.
In my Manhood of Humanity, I defined man functionally as a time-binder, a definition based on … observation that the human class of life differs from animals in the fact that, in the rough, each generation of humans, at least potentially, can start where the former generation left off — a definition which, in the language of this particular structure, is short, and corresponds to empirical facts. Korzybski, 1933/1995, 39.
There are social barriers to successful time-binding, as described by Korzybski and noted by many others. Nonetheless, as depicted in Figure 12: Human head radiates vivid light, the time-binding concept is central to our prospects.
There are also technical challenges that must be met with.
Obviously … with the overwhelming number of most diversified facts known to science, the question is no more to sketch a scientific program for the future, but to build a system which, at least in structure, is similar to the structure of the known facts from all branches of knowledge… (Korzybski, 1933/1995, 43).
… Many statements of scientists, when even accepted as reliable, still have to be translated into a special language in which structural issues are made quite obvious, divulging factors in semantic reaction. This is a very serious difficulty, particularly when many branches of knowledge are drawn upon, as each uses its own special language; so that such a unitary translation in terms of structure imposes a serious burden on the memory of the translator, and often little details escape attention in the implications of the translation, although they may be well known to the translator. As this is probably the chief difficulty, it is in this field that the main corrections will have to be made (Korzybski, 1933/1995, 43).
It can be ascertained from this that, lacking a means to deal with such complexity in real time, his efforts at that time were in vain. He was asking for more than the unaided human or groups of human could carry out. This is to say that without assistance, fulsome decisionmaking is impossible. Finally, with respect to Korzybski, he documented conditions the best he could; his mid-century view was not
Humanity is still in its childhood; we have “bound” so little time in the course of the centuries, which are so brief in the scheme of the universe. At the bottom of every human activity, historical fact or trend of civilization, there lies some doctrine or conception of so-called “truth”. Apples had fallen from trees for ages, but without any important results in the economy of humanity. The fact that a fallen apple hit Newton, led to the discovery of the theory of gravitation; this changed our whole world conception, our sciences and our activities; it powerfully stimulated the development of all the branches of natural and technological knowledge. Even in the event of the Newtonian laws being proved to be not quite correct, they have served a great purpose in enabling us to understand natural phenomena in a sufficiently approximate way to make it possible to build up modern technology and to develop our physical science to the point where it was necessary and possible to make a correction of the Newtonian laws.
A similar organic change in our conception of human life and its phenomena is involved in the foregoing definitions of the classes of life; they will replace basic errors with scientific truths of fundamental importance; they will form the basis for scientific development of a permanent civilization in place of the periodically convulsive so-called civilizations of the past and present. To know the cause of evil and error is to find the cure (Korzybski, 1920/1950, 25).
So where do we stand? There has been a good deal of attention focused on the question of democracy, what it means, and what implications can be drawn from the various alternatives. Contemporary politics and governance have come a long way from the time of the Greek hoplites. Similarly, there was a large gap between the Greeks, who were grasping for solutions and the institutions and norms of the Sumerians, who had lived and built a grand civilization thousands of years before them.
There is no nation in the world that does not benefit from activities, programs, and resources outside its borders. No government can take on everything. Apart from the requirement to meet needs in a complex, changing natural, cultural, and commercial environment, people of the world in all realms have diverse interests and complex demands.
References
Chiarcos, C., Page-Perron, E., Khait, I., Schenk, N., and Reckling, L. 2018. Towards a linked open data edition of Sumerian corpora. Eleventh Annual International Conference on Language, Resources, and Evaluation (LREC), May: 2437–2444.
Korzybski, A. 1920/1950. Manhood of humanity, 2nd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Institute of General Semantics.
Korzybski, A. 1994 (1933). Science and sanity: An introduction to non-aristotelian systems and general semantics. 5th edition. Brooklyn, New York: Institute of General Semantics.
Tingey, K. B., Manicki, M., Asllani, N., Tingey, L. 2018. King corruption vs the conceptual heartland: Society(n), the EU acquis communautaire, and a sound conceptual border environment. Logan, UT USA/Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland: CIMH Global, 2020 Program for Global Health. Available: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1725690861.
Vernant, J. P. 1996. The polis: Shared power, in J. Bottéro, C. Herrenschmidt, and J. P. Vernant, 1996, Ancestor of the West: Writing, reasoning, and religion on Mesopotamia, Elam, and Greece. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 164–175.
Wolkstein, D., and Kramer, S. N. 1983. Inanna: Queen of heaven and earth: Her stories and hymns from Sumer. New York: Harper & Row, Publishers.
Woolley, C. L. 1928/1995. The Sumerians. New York: Barnes & Noble.