Me day! me day!
Not as in ‘meee’ day, but as in ‘may’ day, with all important implications
With Miroslaw Manicki
We are in trouble.
It isn’t that there aren’t answers. It is that we have no system in place to arrive at them — to find them, to use them, to depend on them. Instead we have the “blinking cursors of death”. Facing nothing more than such blinking cursors on their computer screens or mobile devices, people can comment on anything in virtually any conversation and can make beautiful, full color, fully dressed-up arguments that are total gibberish, absolutely wrong, misleading, and dangerous.
This has served as a path to fame, wealth, and power to many. They use the blinking cursors of death to pull in other threads of media influence. We are largely powerless to counter these developments based on the political and legal models we have come to rely upon.
Our political systems are designed to ringfence territories and give elected representatives unbridled power over science and art within such boundaries without regard to their knowledge or their concern for the intricacies and challenges brought on by nature. This is the Greek model, which was designed to be civilized, but went only part of the way.
We need leaders that are not only good, but that are smart. Of course, no one can be ‘smart’ at everything — pointed out wryly by Will Rogers, who said that we are all ignorant, but just on different subjects. The leaders that we need need be more like conductors of civilization’s orchestras, enablers and sponsors of networks of people that are knowledge about and committed to knowledge in its many manifestations. These networks of experts and specialists need to be held to account based on outcomes and various kinds of competition and validation, but we need them and their knowledge and commitment in order to keep on track as individuals as well as societies and nations.
There is nothing new about this. We understand from extensive research and study of pre-Biblical writings of from Mesopotamia that long before Greeks, the Sumerians were obsessed with bringing knowledge together with authority in meeting the needs of the people and achieving long-term stability. as seen in the following Sumerian artifact, leadership in those times was more than a matter of territorial control. Things needed to be done right; there were processes to be followed.
As an aside, the above image may not be totally understood, but it doesn’t look trivial or primitive. It has unifying elements, especially at the top. The tree is of critical importance, given the literature on this as representation of the tree of life, or the tree of spirit wisdom. As we will discuss, the handbags that appear are of great significance. It was sculpted in relief. Do you suppose it was the first draft?
Samuel Noah Kramer, who lived from 1897 to 1990, was the first to widely document the dynamics of Sumerian life, governance in particular. He published “Inanna and Enki: The Transfer of the Arts of Civilization from Eridu to Erech” in which the me (pronounced ‘may’) were described, over a hundred of them. As per Kramer (The Sumerians, 1963, 116) “these items consist of various institutions, priestly offices, ritualistic paraphernalia, mental and emotional attitudes, as well as sundry beliefs and dogmas”.
All of this was certainly on the minds of the ancients. These weren’t vague concepts or ideas, but the me were physical items that provided capacity to whoever held them. Once he realized what he had done in giving them away, Enki tried six times to get them back from Inanna, who had taken them by boat from Eridu to the south to Erech (Uruk) to the north. They were not wholly good, nor desirable per se, but part of a picture of a civilizational whole that was highly desirable to Inanna and to her people.
Here are some of the declarations of what they provided to the people of Erech/Uruk once they had arrived:
65–72. “You have brought with you the craft of the carpenter, you have brought with you the craft of the coppersmith, you have brought with you the craft of the scribe, you have brought with you the craft of the smith, you have brought with you the craft of the leather-worker, you have brought with you the craft of the fuller, you have brought with you the craft of the builder, you have brought with you the craft of the reed-worker.”
73–81. “You have brought with you wisdom, you have brought with you attentiveness, you have brought with you holy purification rites, you have brought with you the shepherd’s hut, you have brought with you piling up glowing charcoals, you have brought with you the sheepfold, you have brought with you respect, you have brought with you awe, you have brought with you reverent silence.”
82–88. “You have brought with you the bitter-toothed (?) ……, you have brought with you the kindling of fire, you have brought with you the extinguishing of fire, you have brought with you hard work, you have brought with you ……, you have brought with you the assembled family, you have brought with you descendants.”
89–94. “You have brought with you strife, you have brought with you triumph, you have brought with you counselling, you have brought with you comforting, you have brought with you judging, you have brought with you decision-making.”
95. “You have brought with you the establishing of plans…” Inana [sic.] and Enki, Segment I. https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/etcsl.cgi?text=t.1.3.1#
Kramer and others exhaustively documented obsessions of ancient Sumerians, perspectives that were shared in other advanced early civilizations by other scholars in Africa, India, China, and elsewhere. They were overcome with commitments with regard to recording things, studying things, and predicting things. Knowledge elements — knowledge tools — such as documented in Sumer were common and critical. The Northern European notion of enlightenment draws on their experience of having suffered a dark age that didn’t exist elsewhere. Cultures and societies had been popping out the Mesopotamia alone for thousands of years before Rome burned and destroyed everything in its wake in the west.
The Greek experiment did not look at much of this. Their idea was to lay claim to space, then regularly elect representatives to control internal developments so that no one could dominate. As to knowledge, it didn’t really enter into the equation. On the periphery of civilized life in their time, the Greeks did not incorporate knowledge or expertise into their model. It certainly did not exist in the growth of their Roman outpost, which proved great but not good. They were certainly not friendly to the flow of knowledge, as they punished Greek philosophers with death who came to the city if they shared their thoughts with any but members of the Senate.
So, we live in a world where lies fly through space and time uninhibited around the world while the truth, the details of the truth, the useful truth, has no venue and enjoys no vehicle.
The Greek model cannot work over time. A natural fact cannot be true on one spot on the earth and false on another — unless the very points of geography, climate or cosmology themselves represent significant differences. To say that a matter of science is true in one regime but false in another is insane, yet it is the prevalent presumption in conventional politics. Imagine that. A screenplay based on such a notion might find itself at risk of astonishing unbelievability in Hollywood unless it was viewed as dystopian.
Given this fatal flaw, our flying ships of state are in dangerous states of flight. We need to activate and empower all of the networks and a rapidly as we can. Technology cannot be used solely to seed lies around the world. In fact, democracy — even the Greek kind — is not only not compromised by this, it is dependent on it.
The fact is, political governance is entirely too difficult and fraught. It ought to be more ceremonial and celebratory, leaving the complicated, tough, interrelated, and difficult-to-understand questions to the people who best understand them and who can solve them before they reach Pandora’s box stages.
This must be done before the planes crash. The dark ages of the past are enough already.