Politics on the Pale Blue Dot
Carl Sagan’s Dream is Within Our Reach
With
Vulnerability of the tough guys
The 20th century got sidetracked (https://ken-tingey.medium.com/20th-century-hatred-its-causes-and-it-s-cures-1a727f8c5d66). The 21st century is on the precipice. To put it succinctly, it has been dumbed down.
Modernity itself wasn’t off to a very good start in the first place. Much of what we know of public affairs is assumed to have started with European colonization, which was thought to be an effort at bringing civilization to the heathens. As was known somewhat, but as reinforced by recent scholarship, civilization, the foundations of public peace and discourse have long been in the making. In fact, the European version of the same was merely a shadow of a shadow of a shadow (Vernant, 1996).
The Greeks had some ideas. They had an oral tradition that included stories of tyrants. They did not like tyrants.
…when an assembly was called, the veteran warriors formed a circle, and they were all at an equal distance from the center. In Homer there is a tendency to ensure that each person could and should enter the circle in turn, place himself en mesoi. Once there, the herald gave him the scepter, which was much less the symbol of a power than the symbol of the community. It was the ambassadors who ordinarily had the scepter and who were placed under the protection of a common law. By taking hold of the scepter, which gave the person the opportunity to speak the warrior spoke not of his personal affairs, but obligatorily of ta koina, the common affairs of the group…
It was the law, then, that had the basileia; the law was king. There was no longer any personal, individual sovereignty; it was the community that was, in a certain sense, completely invested with the responsibility for a sovereign decision (Vernant, 1996, 172–173).
They had systematically gotten rid of the very idea of a tyrant, but the land was still a deciding factor, as was the circle. The concept was embedded in singular local control as with families:
The same type of cratos [power] in the king, in the father of a family, and in the free man in his relations with his slaves. Domination had a universal value, independent of the person who assumed it. At home a man was a despotēs in relation to his children, his wife, and his slaves, as well as the Barbarians, should it fall to him to rule over them (Vernant, 1996, 167).
There were so many examples the Greeks could have called on had they known of them. The same can be said for medieval European leaders, who leaned heavily on what Greek scholarship could come to them by means of Muslim scholars who had preserved the material which had otherwise been destroyed by the Romans.
Options for governance beyond despotic control of the land and all that occurs within certain borders. Arnold Toynbee (1934–1961) was probably the most prominent documenter of past successes at development and civil living.
As seen below, he documents about thirty civilizations through recorded history. The first and most prominent is that of Sumer, dating back almost six thousand years. This is the first major, urban civilization for which there is substantial documentation. They invented the first known, substantial written language and they left vast stores of information, only a small part of which has been translated and absorbed in any meaningful way.
Spengler reinforced the work of Toynbee 1931–19(). Others include Fernand Braudel (1987/1993), Karl Polanyi (Polanyi, 1044/1957/2001; Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson, 1957), and Max Weber (1896/2013). There is a whole raft of scholars in the study of Sumer itself and the Uruk phenomenon (Algaze, 1993, 2013; Algaze et al., 1989; Kramer, 1963; Liverani, 1998/2006; Frangipane, 2009; Liverani, 1998/2006; Adams & Nissen, 1972; Petrie, 2014; Stein, 2001), which is a stunning example of longstanding peaceful coexistence and prosperity in a country with limited need for physical borders (Kramer, 1988), at least for the first long periods of development and expansion from the fourth to the third millennium BCE.
There is much more to our peaceful heritage than sticks and stones and autocrats and men with whips, clubs, and manacles. As Toynbee documents, of the roughly thirty civilizations that have existed, political plurality (the green segments above) has been the norm. This is to say that in a defined geographical area, power and authority have been shared or modified or partitioned on something other than possession of the land and domination over activities thereon. Braudel discusses this, the geographical aspects of civilizations:
Civilizations, vast or otherwise, can always be located on a map. An essential part of their character depends on the constraints or advantages of their geographical situation.
This, of course, will have been affected for centuries or even millennia by human effort… Every landscape bears the traces of this continuous and cumulative labour, generation after generation contributing to the whole…
To discuss civilization is to discuss space, land and its contours, climate, vegetation, animal species and natural or other advantages. It is also to discuss what humanity has made of three basic conditions: agriculture, stock-breeding, food, shelter, clothing, communications, industry and so on.
The stage on which humanity’s endless dramas are played out partly determines their storyline and explains their nature. The cast will alter, but the set remains broadly the same (Braudel, 1989/1993, 9–10).
What such factors for long-term success and viability of nations were and what they can be are matters of discussion herein. Even where brute force and forceable control and domination have existed, they haven’t lasted for long. It turns out that people do not like being put upon.
Even when would-be autocrats are clever or strong or rich or mischievous enough to suborn others, history has shown that the others will eventually respond in kind. Even poor servants of tyrants hold soft power. Even the most powerful must at some point stop to eat. They must sleep. They must take out time for living. That makes them vulnerable. As indicated by Braudel:
So far, the argument has presupposed peaceful relations between civilizations, each free to make its own choice. But violence has often been the rule. Always tragic, it has often proved ultimately pointless. Successes like the Romanization of Gaul and of much of Western Europe can be explained only by the length of time the process took — and, despite what is often alleged — by the primitive level from which Rome’s vassals began, by their admiration for their conquerors, and in fact by their acquiescence in their own fate, but such successes were rare: They are the exceptions that prove the rule.
When contact was violent, in fact, failure was more frequent than success. ‘Colonialism’ may have triumphed in the past: But today it is an obvious fiasco. And colonialism, typically, is the submergence of one civilization by another. The conquered always submit to the stronger; but their submission is merely provisional when civilizations clash…
[As in Brazil] …the vanquished surrendered — but preserved themselves too (Braudel, 1989/1993, 32–33).
This ability to change the dialog, to preserve something of culture and identity in response to the power of those who would dominate, has grown immensely in the era of pervasive networks. Castells declared this in 1996 to great effect in all aspects of public, private, organizational, and individual life (Castells, 1996). Castells’ trilogy has graced the coffee tables of the Silicon Valley elite, likely not read by many of them.
The message? Power to the people. At least, people on the digital network, who can use the available technology to self-organize and to carve out space for themselves that would tilt the balance between conceptual and physical space. Location under such conditions would become ‘a’ factor, ceasing to be ‘the’ factor. ‘The’ factor would be access to and participation in the network and its derivations.
Castells failed to factor in the power of the technocratic class in the age of networking, with the result of lawless domination by emerging gatekeepers of the network. Geopolitical command-and-control was thus supplanted by the same, only technology-driven. As developed by them — promoting an untrammeled kind of power grab — it constitutes an existential threat to virtually all elites in the existing system.
To be clear, if there was ever a time that they realized Castells’ mistake, it is clear that they had no problem with the oversight. How did they react when they learned that their social media creations were good at selling lies, but not effective at supporting knowledge and knowledge advocates? They doubled down and made it worse, as described by Zuboff in her work on surveillance capitalism (2019). The effects extend far beyond commerce.
Then they forced machine-based computation into mainstream dialogs with no justification (Tingey, 2025). Did people stop thinking, creating a need for more ideas? No. They didn’t even address the idea. Were they sorry that their creations had not bridged the gap between human knowledge and the needs and desires of the people? No. They have never acknowledged their failure. Well, it is better to say that they have never acknowledged that they even cared. I can say from my thirty years of pressing the issue in commerce and in research, they have never tried.
This leaves the populace and their supporters and advocates with a combination of a Hobson’s choice, where there really is no choice to be had and a Sophie’s choice, where all alternatives are bad. Do they want to subservient to geopolitical overlords or to technological ones?
Geopolitical presumptions
This isn’t what you hear in contemporary international relations. What you do hear in the press, in academia, and on social media:
“Geopolitics is everything.”
This is considered as received wisdom. They like to say it, even amid obvious pushbacks by the technocratic billionaire elite. Still, consideration of geopolitics as a force to be reckoned with merits our attention.
The best citation in supporting pervasive geopolitics as a dominant reality is that of Thucydides, who documented that the Greek cities of Sparta and Athens fought — because somehow, they needed to? Furthermore, other competing cities or states or other twin jurisdictions similarly now need to fight each other (Thucydides, 1998).
The rationale continues that any other perception as to the affairs of people is naïve at best. It is certainly considered to be a provincial, or even a witless perception. The preferred opinion is represented by the famous bromide by Mao Zedong, “political power is derived from the barrel of a gun” (Mao, 1927/1972).
This is itself ironic. I had the honor of studying Mao’s revolution in China from Chalmers Johnson, a primary expert on the subject. As taught by the professor, Mao in fact won the hearts and minds of the Chinese people under wrought conditions before and during the Japanese occupation of World War. He did it by establishing a system to help them with the basics, how to feed themselves, care for their health needs, and protect themselves (Heilmann and Perry, 2011; Esherick, 2022). The rest took care of itself after the war, a national triumph (Johnson, 1992).
The power of the provender
This continues to be widely misunderstood. In the West, the cry continues, “Why and how did we lose China?” Earlier, as a young undergraduate student, I sat in Political Science 101 as my professor chanted the phrase, laced with missionary zeal as to how the country slipped away to the ‘godless lot’ from the more ‘righteous’ Kuomintang — under the most nefarious conditions (Van Slyke, 1967). As documented by Chalmers Johnson, who got his information from the official Japanese annals of the war after the war, Mao helped China “stand up” by supporting its people in their effort to individually and collectively “stand up” (Mao, 1949).
This after 150 years of beating down by outside forces, notably the British. The point obviously there was not just to suborn the Chinese people, but to eradicate their culture for all intents and purposes. There were the ‘three m’s’, merchants, missionaries, and the military. Owen Lattimore said it best. Even in the most remote villages of Central Asia, the people quickly learned that the fine words by the missionaries and the merchants would soon be followed up by guns (1962). People from all over the world wanted and temporarily got a piece of China — to the exclusion of the Chinese themselves in some cases. Mao was announcing the failure and the end to all of that.
The other side of the interwar Chinese political equation, the Kuomintang, had been more than happy to accept billions of dollars of aid from the United States, but they were elitist and rapacious in their treatment of the people. As it turns out, people can tell the difference. Lacking the indigenous base of support that Mao’s forces enjoyed, they were wholly dependent on foreign money, particularly from the United States (Phillips, 1991, 251).
This is not to condone policies later deployed under Mao that put coercion before science and practice. We levy particular criticism for ignoring and disrespecting knowledge and expertise — and experts — in our book, “Dual Control or Certain Derailment.”
This is a key element in our library on enhanced legitimacy of nations, which can be found here:
The so-called Great Game peaked in the 20th century — but in fact, it had already failed. With the British in the lead, colonial powers, most of them European, had tried to take over land and with it sovereign powers of nations large and small. They had carved out neo-Europes that were susceptible to the racial politics involved and the botany of Northern Europe (Crosby, 2004; Hobsbawm, 1987).
Most of the world rejected the message before the 19th century played out, most famously China and India — where cruelty and tragedy reached unspeakable levels (Davis, 2017). True, it took another half-century for Gandhi and the Indians to finalize the blow there, but the viability of the plan was long gone by then (Hobsbawm, 1994).
Aftershocks continue, most particularly in the Middle East, where the British tried to play the trick one more time by commandeering the oil market in tandem with the Americans and a fresh set of client monarchs. The end of the road for the colonists and a reversing of the tide. By mistake, the British had enriched someone else (Wilson, 1928/1954). At the same time, lateral, international affairs dilute the unipolar foundation of national politics and law. Location began to matter a little less (Hobsbawm, 1999).
Location is just one kind of space
The idea that location alone needs to be the primary arbiter of political power under contemporary conditions is thoroughly wrong. Nutrition is not local in typical cases, as food and drink can be procured from various locations around the world. Work arrangements benefit from pervasive network access. Costly urban living arrangements are not necessary where networking and other means of spanning physical borders.
Socially, a high degree of ethnic and social integration has developed around the world, but not without attendant challenges. This being said, it is important to note that location is quite often important. As indicated by Miller (1973, 65), location is the only kind of space that doesn’t need explanation. Even infants can pick up on the concept very early in life. Every other kind of space — conceptual or abstract space — must be learned about. Many of them are arcane and highly specialized. Most people will not know about some of the most critical, important ones.
All aspects of natural and human lifestyle, society, and governance have to do with location. This is also a distinguishing feature between physical space and conceptual/abstract space. Truth and philosophy are not subject to location in principle, though in specific instances and under certain circumstances, location can be determinative.
Process characteristics and outcomes are not entirely divorced from place, as local conditions have much to do with our wellbeing, considering the productivity of land, characteristics and conditions of climate, and lifestyle choice. Much can be gained, however, by defining truths and conditions in forms that could apply under a variety of conditions — in many parts of the world and independent of venues or regimes.
We have published a book that may help to clarify this concept, the importance of conceptual understanding and planning. As seen below, it is “King Corruption vs. the Conceptual Heartland: Society(n), the European Acquis Communautaire, and a Sound Conceptual Environment”. Success in governance and operational success depends on successful understanding and navigation of all relevant kinds of space that relate to their areas of organizational responsibility and commitment.
The acquis communautaire of the European Commission is a wonderful and instructive foundation for development of the kinds of conceptual space and policy frameworks faced in electronic governance systems, whether public or private. The thirty-five chapters covered in the EU acquis can be found below.
Imagine the power of the EU state that could deliver the full functionality of the acquis to their people, all 80,000 pages, data-driven and in process form. This would allow them to move forward to mastery of all the conceptual and abstract space categories in an instant, in applicable contexts, considering location-related factors along with all others. Among other things, such functionality could allow citizens in one country to benefit from advancement around the world, including those with critical legal and scientific merit.
The scope of global living
International relations theory runs the risk of groundlessness. There are many narratives, but substance is often lacking. The Thucydides conundrum mentioned earlier is an example of this. History can serve, but interpretation of this can descend into storyland as well.
Can international affairs assume scientific roots? There are discussions about a balance between anarchy and order, neither considered ideal in the extreme. John Ruggie, who I also had the honor of studying under, addresses this question directly.
Science finding #1 — Location recedes in physics
Of the four forces, gravity is the weakest. However, it cannot be ignored.
Ultimately, the weak forces win the day.
Certainly, as emphasized resoundingly by Carl Sagan years ago, we are on the same planet, which accounts for a lot. He wrote in 1994 about a parting photograph of the Earth from the Voyager spacecraft as it was leaving the reach of the Solar System (Sagan, 1994). Here is that picture, a testament to the smallness of our existence within the vastness of Outer Space. The pale blue dot can be seen about two-thirds of the way down on the lighter band to the right.
He describes that dot in light of our history for what it has been and our future for what it needs to be. This has much to do with the fungibility of truth on the surface of that dot. There have to be more generalizations, particularly socially, than we have given credit to.
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
Dr. Sagan educated us all. We want this from our physicists. This surely accounts for the myriad of Einstein quotes that we encounter, assuredly many of them fanciful. Furthermore, many fly in the face of the man’s obvious personal foibles (Robinson, 2018).
One thing that can be deduced from conventional physics of the large and of the small is that there is more to location than we can know. Geopolitics is rooted in the earth, in the ground. It is the ground that roots us in space, but the permanence of it is an illusion as we streak through spaces relative to other spacial forms of matter.
With power and force, will can be imposed through coercion and violence. This is the point of firearms and other weapons. Local activities can have deadly consequences. Coupled with means of incarceration and physical constraints, any kind of law or rule can be imposed. Electronic networks now limit this as do communications and media nets. These limit and weaken geopolitical sources of power.
Science finding #2 — Knowledge is general
Apart from local conditions, knowledge is general, not special in nature. Scientific findings hold across the board where a broader understanding of a fixed set of phenomena can be achieved. For the most part we are in the same boat.
Substantial activity has been carried out to hold governments and regional authorities responsible for international standards of practice in medicine during war (Erakat, 2013). This is to protect people from bad behavior. Similarly, there is much concern about protect people’s right to salient practices that originate outside their national borders. This is central to the mission of the International Intellectual Property Organization and related to the concept of Fair, Reasonable, and Nondiscriminatory (FRAND) access to important technology (https://w.wiki/EccA).
This is to maximize the knowledge, to extend its effects to where they are needed. FRAND and detailed, easily followed processes are particularly important in areas representing fundamental human needs. Urban living and modern requirements extend needs to areas that were not needed in ancient times of nomadic living. For example, when people were on the move, infectious diseases were virtually nonexistent. Infectious organisms that grow up in and around humans and human waste never can grow and fester (Cohen and Crane-Kramer, 2012).
The primary scientific efforts of Albert Einstein underscore the message. In 1905, as an unknown, but talented patent office clerk, he published five papers within the year — known as his annus mirabilis, or miracle year. One of those papers covered what he called the special theory of relativity. This introduced the famous E=MC(2) construct (Einstein, 1905).
The idea was limited, though. It was localized, only applicable to a narrow context. How could this be generalized? It took him another twelve years, thirty-four additional publications, and a good deal of mathematical study to take that step, in the process dealing with the definition of gravity itself (Einstein, 1917).
The work opened the door to relatively everywhere, just as we can assert that knowledge knows no locational limits.
Science finding #3— Knowledge is process
Lately, science practice has been an individualist thing. To become a scientist was to become a specialist, to commandeer certain tools and methods in a laboratory in the study of one thing, often an isolated thing. Isolation was a natural aspect of the models used and the incentive system of science.
Most methods were statistical, and most statistics were based on the general linear model. The point was to determine the chances of something happening on its own. Rather, it was to consider whether it wouldn’t happen on its own. If you could establish that something wouldn’t happen on its own and then it did happen under certain conditions — more typically a certain condition — then you could surmise that there was some relationship between the other thing happening and the one you are focused on.
A process throws this on its head. A process looks at a whole string of things happening and trying to associate them. Given that a string of things happening represents choices at each level, you are really looking at a tree of likely outcomes. Once you pass one branch, you pass to the next, which may represent several branches at that level, like a branching tree or other plant.
The question isn’t an existential pig in a poke of untethered reactions, but an evaluation of limited options as they present themselves in each step of the process. The point here was made in a scientific discussion I once had with colleagues in the study of the metamorphosis of a virus, in this case, a deadly virus to sheep. Called the Bluetongue virus, this virus attacks sheep by means of insect bites, extending into the bloodstream and, by attaching to the wall of the vein or artery, into the tissue.
I use the term attack because the virus’ effect on the sheep once it uses the sheep’s living tissue to replicate itself is to kill the animal. The sheep are left with a bloated tongue protruding from their mouths, a ghastly end to life.
One of the biologists in the meeting said that there wasn’t any interest in the infinite ways the virus might attach to the vascular wall in the first place, only in the one that happened in a particular case. Another participant, a specialist in manufacturing processes, said, “I don’t know how many ways to attach there are, but I guarantee that they are not infinite”. He then surmised that there might be a kind of hook involved, there might be an adhesive, or there might be a chemical reaction or attachment. There might be an electrical event. He said that it will not be an exotic, unknowable thing.
The biologist was open-mouthed in his reaction. Basically, he said that the interaction had rocked his world. He was going to have to rethink how biology is studied.
If viable, such a way of thinking about process results in a much more tangible, useful kind of science than we have known in the past. Science is bad at context, especially in the real world. Use of statistics alone makes it hard to position findings in real cases. In the laboratory, there might be an effect with just a few variables, but there may be dozens, hundreds, more. To understand the smaller collection of options they present themselves does a lot to make the work useful in practice.
This isn’t to say that traditional statistically centered findings are not useful, but it is important to position them in the tree of possibilities presented by nature. The challenge to stochastic, or statistical science does raise the stakes in scientific studies generally, making the generalist function more central to effective outcomes and providing experts and practitioners a means of participating in the process. It isn’t just that an effect is sound, but whether and how it is valid in a certain set of conditions that can only be known in the context of conceptual and abstract space as well as physical space and conditions.
Obviously, there can be local factors in processes of all kinds. The point is that the representation can and should be universal. This is the point of my management text, “Methods-based Management”, which introduces key universal concepts — the Five Concepts, context targeting, and semantic pull (Tingey, 2009/2018).
Prior approaches to management have not looked at processes in concrete ways. There has been no substantive path from conception to application of knowledge.
Science finding #4 — Civilization is a living system
Alfred North Whitehead was a leading mathematician and physicist when he elected to concentrate on processes as a principal aspect of nature and worthy of study and application. His action came with criticism; one of these being that any consideration of process in science was metaphysical, not subject to statistical evaluation.
He took this as a challenge to statistical evaluation, not to scientific considerations of process and of integrated research of living and non-living systems.
Processes, including living systems features, could call on computational and navigational operations at various living systems levels represented in the model. The “push me, pull you” aspect of the message is that any process could conceivably activate or be activated by another, at whatever living system level. This would be subject to tree design by the author, but it reflects realities in the world of nature, where living systems and other phenomena are constantly interacting with each other.
As seen in the Figure above, the same kinds of process-related functions apply to living systems at all levels. These also reflect natural realities. As a doctoral student in information systems twenty-five years ago, I purposefully sought out the company of biologists. As I learned from them, most of their study was of information systems in biological settings.
Since such systems function with great consistency and reliability, my message to my information processing student peers was that this was a way of understanding how “real” information processing is carried — a purposive criticism of how digital information processing systems function. In my analysis and experience, enterprise system functionality falls far short of the mark with respect to needs. This has not been resolved in the market nor in practice in the least.
The following Figure provides summary information as to information processing requirements at each living system level. The major aspects of this approach include processes the support matter-energy interactions and the information processing subsystems.
The Figure below provides more detail of living systems process requirements at each living systems level. These are principally graphical representations of each feature of the model. This is an expanded model, principally made up of additions we have introduced into the model.
The following Figure demonstrates integrated processes for living systems and non-living processes. Processes can be designed to support both. Such an approach can provide far more detailed compliance with natural models and can minimize the challenges felt by people as they try to support natural processes and requirements.
There is no good reason that scientists, practitioners, caregivers, and people charged with supporting health, wellbeing, and other complex, data-driven processes shouldn’t have models and tools to bridge the gap between people and the technologies they use for personal, community, or professional use.
Science finding #5 — Civilization is and always has been civil
There is another train of thought beside geopolitics, or realpolitik, one that was personified by the Slavic people of old. It can give us some perspective as to Sagan’s message. We need to be better at getting along. The point is, after the battle, when exhaustion consumes the parties, every soldier needs to eat, then sleep. This is when real and lasting power takes over.
Civilization is not a new thing. Here is a chart showing the major civilizations of the world according to Toynbee (1934/1961) and Spengler (1918/1922). As can be seen, many of them have lasted for a good, long time. As considered by Toynbee in particular, pluralistic political systems have been more prevalent than singular, or autocratic ones.
The following network chart is based on the table above. It shows the key cultures underlying world civilizations as documented by Toynbee. Using social network analysis, the three colored triangles show the highest levels of betweenness centrality, meaning that they are the most integrated and influential of the cultures in question. Interestingly, the yellow Syriac culture is the most central to world civilization and order, followed by the green Islamic node and then the red Western node.
This is likely news to many. We grew up in a world perspective established in an Atlantic-centered time. Many of our history books, for example, declare if they do not imply that civilization was born out of European enlightenment, when concepts of plurality and consent were in essence invented. Everything before was “traditional”, which translates to poor, unprotected, simple, and rudimentary.
This does not correspond with what has been learned through investigation and scholarship, culminating with astonishing findings. Many ancient cultures demonstrate complex social and political characteristics. They supported large populations for long time periods — over a thousand years in some cases — demonstrating a kind of stability and persistent prosperity that can teach us a great deal.
Science finding #5 — Cities are and have always been havens of civility
The Sumero-Accadian civilization that undergirds the Syriac culture is the best and the most comprehensively documented urban system in world history. As those people invented writing and put that ability to good use, much is known about their development, governance patterns, and living arrangements.
Uruk, the greatest of the Sumerian cities, was a wonder in every conceivable way. At its peak, it housed about 50,000 people, like most of the Sumerian city-states (Adams, 1966, 69). In its heyday of hundreds of years — extending even to thousands of years, it served as the central organizing point of a network of cities and towns that extended throughout and beyond the Euphrates-Tigris watershed.
As can be seen below, Uruk was a large and complex city.
The Uruk civilization grew, mostly along the banks of upstream rivers. The Uruk civilization brought knowhow and agricultural products to client cities in return for anything and everything that would complement what Uruk itself could call on. The Figure below shows a network representation of the key Uruk city-states, enclaves, outposts, and stations.
The Figure below provides some guidance as to the key institutional relationships that existed in Uruk. Several communities were represented in public labor, or corvee labor activity for the temples of palaces. The people were expected to provide labor based on the needs of temple and palace program needs. As a rule of thumb, this amounted to about a third of their available work time.
With their additional or extra time, the people were allowed to grow produce and other foodstuffs for themselves, to engage in trade and merchandising, and to learn trade and craft activities. They could also rest or engage in other personal or group activities.
Uruk mastered the challenge of providing public finance and infrastructure while encouraging independence and commercial initiative. Items such as those seen in the subsequent Figure were central aspects of the Uruk culture. They were used for weights and measures, for transport, and for standards setting and adjudicating. As is understood in published records, this was supplemented with highly specialized guidance on carrying out key aspects of the Uruk civilization.
Such artifacts can provide concrete examples of everyday processes and of lifestyle requirements.
Science finding #6— Civilization is purposefully knowledge-based
According to the Mesopotamian record, early-stage governance conditions were more advanced than later versions. Peace was more evident and more lasting. Borders were less prominent and engagement with outsiders was more instructive and effective.
Uruk needed the network, and it brought opportunities for development and prosperity to the cities and villages along the way. First was the primary revolution. In Sumerian literature, this was nicely described by an interaction between two elites, Enki and Inanna. In the story, Inanna represented the interests of Uruk. She knew that Enki had a collection of instructive items called the ‘me’ [pronounced ‘may’] that invested knowledge and capacity in their holders (Wolkstein and Kramer, 1983). In one translation, almost a hundred of these are identified (Kramer, 1988, 115–117).
Inanna said she wanted them to build up Uruk. She visited Enki in his home in the city of Eridu, the oldest of the Sumerian cities. They had dinner. She convinced him to give about 100 of the me’s to her to help her build up Uruk as a city. Once she left on her boat with the devices, he changed his mind and sent soldiers to recover them. After many failed attempts along the way, they gave up. Then Enki relented and is reported to have said:
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 (Wolkstein and Kramer, 1983, 27).
Let’s say that this is literature and nothing more. If so, it is very good literature. The subjects that come up are interesting and instructive. Expertise at the core of civilization-building is not something you hear from modernist sources. Typically, expertise is considered a commercial thing solely, to be structured to reward certain commercial supporters in outsized ways. Here we see expertise as associated with culture-building where in modernity we see finger-pointing.
As to geopolitics, he says “The people of Uruk are allies of the people of Eridu” toward the end. So much for the Thucydides presumption that rival cities or states must be at odds with one another. The first few millennia of Sumerian development saw little of that.
With the establishment of wetlands cities with intensified needs, there were secondary revolutions that extended the culture and filled in the gaps. Childe described this in the case of Sumer as well as Egypt and the Indus Valley. They came from far…
…the cities of Sumer were in commercial relations with others on the Nile and the Indus. Commodities manufactured by the specialized industries of one urban center were traded to the bazaars of another. In several Mesopotamian cities stray seals, beads, and even pots have turned up that are not Sumerian in character, but are, on the other hand, common in contemporary cities in Sindh and Punjab. They afford conclusive proof of international trade linking the Tigris with the Indus 1200 miles away. They reveal a picture of caravans regularly crossing the rugged ranges and salt deserts that separate the two valleys, or of fleets of dhows sailing along the waterless coasts of the Arabian Sea between the revers’ mouths (Childe, 1951, 121).
…and from nearby. The main difference between ancient villages and ancient cities was consideration for agricultural surpluses. In short, the question is whether there was one and if so, how was it to be used. If such a surplus was to be consumed by the cultivators in question, that was the end of the story. Alternatively, the cultivators could use it to diversify by dedicating time and effort among themselves to do something else they could achieve several other personal or family goals.
There could be diversified commercial growing if land and other resources were available. There could be non-agricultural activity via craft making and sales. Perhaps participants could travel and trade. This would need at first to be limited, as surpluses can be a chimeric, temporary thing.
The public question was whether the surplus could be utilized at that level. As a modern aside, that was the very question facing the Russian Bolsheviks once they took over the country. Marx had provided no guidance as to how to build up an economy from scratch so that had to work though the basics. One economist, Bukharin, argued that they should use the agricultural surplus to build up agriculture and small manufacture. Another economist, Preobrazhenski, said that it should be used to build up big industry on a national level. The leader, Stalin, elected to follow Preobrazhenski approach, but far more extreme than had been recommended (Spulber, 1964).
Mesopotamia, Uruk in particular, elected to organize agriculture via temple and palace organizations and bank and use the surplus in several ways. The workers could use their own personal surplus in time in several ways — benefitting in principle from the concept of surplus, as well. The main crop was barley, some of which was converted for current consumption by the people. They had large daily allotments of beer, which was kind of like a mead — very beneficial for workers in a hot environment.
This was not a personalistic, monarchical, autocratic form of exploitation. The object was the buildup of society, as observed by Liverani.
There is an essential point of difference between the two reconstructions [social buildup vs. chiefdom]. In the view of gradual development from chiefdom to state, there would have been an increase in the deduction of surplus in the form of produce and an administrative regulation of it. That would mean a kind of taxation of the productive unit (family, clan, village, etc.), which is, in fact, not documented in the texts. In the view of radical transformation, proposed here, the extraction of surplus came to be in the form of a deduction of labor (corvée), which is exactly what the texts document…it is important to note here that in the new scheme the early state is not a chiefdom that acquired more power, but something entirely different, something innovative and incompatible with a chiefdom.
In a chiefdom the potential surplus derived from technological progress and increased production could be used, on the one hand to increase the consumption within the family, on the other hand to allow the chief forms of conspicuous consumption on which he could base his own prestige and that of his clan. As we will see later, such strategies prevailed in the periphery, outside the Mesopotamian alluvium. In contrast, in the early state the surplus was removed from consumption by its producers, and was destined for social purposes, such as works of agricultural infrastructure and defense, and the maintenance of specialists and administrators, who were not food producers. Moreover, the forms of conspicuous consumption did not have individual characteristics, but communal ones. They were expressed in temples, the images of complex and impersonal societies. They provided the basis for social cohesion and the sublimation of socio-economic disparity… (Liverani, 1998/2006, 21–22).
Lower-level skills were supported via the ‘soft power’ corvee volunteer system. This is how canals got dug, temples built, harvests brought in, sheep sheared, etc. What was particularly needed, a means of lifting Uruk above the other cities of Sumer, was support and cultivation of craft industries.
Real craftsmanship … was needed for work with metals, stone, wood, leather, and vegetal fibers, in order to make weapons, tools, personal ornaments, furniture, and other things. These crafts did not require a great concentration of manpower. It was enough to have a few people to smelt metals, while only one person was needed to carve seals or to make a piece of furniture. What was important was the availability of materials and of personal skills. Both these elements already existed in a pre-urban setting. The new centralized system led to much greater needs to be fulfilled, as well as a higher productivity and superior technology. Manual skills and technological knowledge were transmitted through apprenticeship, usually from father to son. The central agency thus only needed to bring the pre-existing craft traditions under its own control.
There were essentially two motives for the centralization of crafts. Administered trade brought a regular influx of raw materials, including from distant lands, and public commissions were prevalent, or even exclusive in the case of certain high value craftwork. The emergence of central agencies thus brought about a certain degree of centralization of craft activities. The administration provided craftsmen with the raw materials, and requested the production of certain goods. It paid the artisans as internal, full-time dependents of the administration itself, that is with permanent rations or with assignment of plots of land (Liverani, 1998/2006, 46).
The effects of this development — the enthusiasm, freedom, and the opportunity, were electric. These spread throughout the region. Normally, in the formation of center-periphery relations, a form of dependency develops. High value activities in the center typically tend to intensify and grow. This creates increasing demand for raw materials from the periphery, which get caught up in menial labor under unpleasant conditions, with little opportunity for advancement. In essence under such conditions, a colonial arrangement emerges, often with need for coercion and force as the center makes increasing, untenable demands of the periphery.
The cultural framework in the case of Mesopotamia was more settled and more egalitarian. Just as Uruk did not establish a chiefdom structure in the first place, Uruk saw itself as a model for all the cities and towns, which established similar frameworks for public-private activity, shared agricultural and other public work activity, and similar social expectations.
In the new cities not only abstract agreements in economic structure and underlying science, but also identity in the forms of artificial products, like amulets, seals, and letters, demonstrate how many of the vital elements of civilization had been borrowed from the primary centers on the Nile, the Euphrates, and the Indus. The second revolution was obviously propagated by diffusion; the urban economy in the secondary centers was inspired or imposed by the primary foci. And it is easy to show that the process was inevitable (Childe, 1951, 136).
It isn’t a contemporary developmental policy to make sure that entrepreneurs on the periphery have sufficient profit prospects over the long term. This is one of our most serious problems in international development and program longevity.
The civilizations of the alluvial plains were dependent on the importation from abroad of raw materials; part of their surplus wealth had to be expended upon obtaining the requisite imports. But the coveted materials seldom lay in an uninhabited wilderness. And so communities within whose territories the materials lay could claim a share in the surplus. They must, indeed, be persuaded to produce more of their metal, timber spices, or precious stones than was required for domestic consumption to barter to Egyptians, Sumerians, and Indians, or at least to lend their services to the latter as guides, porters, and laborers (Childe, 1951, 136).
Stability is possible, but not without considering the needs of all the participants in social and economic affairs.
New opportunities of livelihood were thus opened up to the possessors of industrial materials. But to profit by these opportunities specialization was necessary. The surplus wealth of the alluvial plain was available to support families inhabiting metalliferous mountains if those families were withdrawn from food production to mine and transport ore. In practice, of course, local food production was not arrested, but the new wealth was employed to support a new population that on the old economy would have been superfluous and condemned to starvation or emigration. The new role of purveyor of raw material meant both an increase in population and also class divisions (Childe, 1951, 136–137).
Science finding #7— Balanced development stands the test of time
By now, there is no mystery. Science can be applied to global affairs. In an environment of equanimity, the harshness, the inhumanity of realpolitik can be relegated to history.
The Mesopotamian case is … interesting … in that the intervals between its phases of efflorescence and stagnation depart from the expected trajectory of “ancient” economies… The first departure pertains to the length of the initial … growth phase, which lasted for the better part of the fourth millennium in the southern Mesopotamian case but was much shorter in other areas of southwest Asia… The second departure pertains to what happened after the initial growth spurt came to a halt. In [the north] the initial efflorescence eventually led to a long period of stagnation marked by the disintegration of the indigenous urban tradition … for a millennium or so. This was not the case … in southern Mesopotamia, where … retrenchment gave way to another fast-paced phase of … [g]rowth barely two centuries or so after the end of the Uruk efflorescence. This may be inferred from the expansion of Uruk and [Lagash] … by the first quarter of the third millennium … by the contemporary emergence of multiple new smaller urban sites across the alluvium … and by the vigorous resumption of the flow of trade and growth of specialization that are implied by the many highly crafted sumptuary goods ... (Algaze, 88, 1988).
So, by my count, this adds up to about two millennia of growth and mostly stability in Southern Mesopotamia from the establishment of the Uruk civilization close to the beginning of the fourth millennium BCE. This is truly remarkable, a testament to possibilities for human organization and social stability. This, we can see, is an outgrowth of cooperative efforts under known circumstances. As can be seen from the literature we have just reviewed, flexibility in proving for basic needs is a part of the solution, as is leadership from the center in supporting certain specialized activities.
Organization for the agricultural surplus and carefully making use of it is also key. Mutual respect for participants in the geographic center as well as the periphery is important. Allowing for ample profit throughout the system is also needed for long-term success. Balancing specialization with local food production provides profit opportunities over time while supporting life requirements in times of drought and famine.
Let’s let this be what the blue dot is all about.
After this investigation, it is useful to consider, among other things, the cost of extreme geopolitical policy. Global GDP is currently approximately $106 trillion. Five percent of that is $5.3 trillion. That makes for very expensive borders. Perhaps we can learn not to need them, at least not so much.
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