The Solution Isn’t 5G (or 10G now), It Is 5D
Taking the G20 to a new level of relevance via “some kind of forum”
With Miroslaw Manicki
Recognizing cycles of time
We are stuck in a three-dimensional rut. We don’t need more Internet bandwidth per se. OK, maybe many do, but our current point is that even a full bandwidth buildout will not resolve our main dilemma:
There seems to be commitment to and interest in every conceivable avenue for improvement except the one that matters: Healing and empowering human institutions. How is this to be done? By mastering time.
Time is repetitive. There is a flow to time, to changing phenomena, but it is jerky, as least our perception of its effects. Where we are considering fast transformations, of which there are many examples, or slow ones, as in natural modification of minerals, everything is characterized by flux — as in “all things flow” or, better, “the flux of things” (Whitehead, 1929/1978, 208).
Time may take you places. Think of the butterfly; it knows no political boundaries as we understand them. It is not that political borders are a bad thing, but they should not be definitive as to all things. They should not intervene as to natural outcomes — and meritorious social commitments. If context can be preserved, important and dependable outcomes can come to be expected, as outlined by Alfred North Whitehead.
Importance depends on endurance. Endurance is the retention through time of an achievement of value. What endures is identity of pattern, self-inherited. Endurance requires the favorable environment. The whole of science revolves round this question of enduring organisms (Whitehead, 1925, 194).
There is not chaos in this, nor is there mystery — at least not after we have applied ourselves to understanding. There is repetition; this presents itself in patterns. As can be seen in the carnival rides below, time after time conditions come around and around, as in the seasons brought on by planetary rotations and other repeating motions, our experiences become familiar to us in their repitition. It is as in the progression of days we experience — we can learn to live them better in the process. Or we may not, it is up to us. There is no stopping the repetition, though, and the reuse, the exhaustion and the replenishment.
The challenge is in taking advantage of the ride. Rather than become bored with the tedium, we are best served to observe outcomes each time around and work to improve conditions and possibly enjoy the ride as we go. This applies to everything. The complexity of it all demands that we come up with means of remembering it all — individually and among ourselves so that we do not forget, so that we can pass along the knowledge and how, when, and where to make use of it. In current times, appropriate use of technology can be of great assistance to help us do this.
Global leadership of people by people
This isn’t the message we are hearing from the top or from anywhere else. From G20 missives on down to county-wide newsletters and personal blogs, the airwaves are ‘a-twitter’ with commentary on artificial approaches to thought and action.
Why do they keep saying this? We are right here. Don’t they know that we are listening? What need would be filled by having machines make our decisions for us? Is it that we cannot make decisions on our own?
Author Tingey has experience in this matter. As a research professor at an American research university, in conjunction with that university’s biotechnology institute, he invited IBM’s scientific leadership group on campus for several days of consultation and negotiation over potential collaboration. In the university’s presidential suite, IBM scientists were in the throes of describing benefits of what has been widely referred to as personalized medicine. There was discussion about the use of genomics data for diagnostic and clinical purposes.
One of the senior geneticists at the university, now a campus chancellor at another university, caught the attention of the presenter and asked a question that effectively stopped everything in its tracks. He pointed out that his daughter had recently been harmed in a medical procedure because of a perfunctory fault of a supporting information system. He asked the presenter how computers could be relied on to engage on such high order functions as was being discussed if they are so inaccurate and prone to faults with respect to trivial tasks.
The presenter paused for a few seconds, then carried on as if the question had not been asked.
All of this begs the question — more to the point, it ignores the question — of why artificiality is desired or why it might be potentially needed. Is there some kind of falloff of cognition among humans? Another question comes to mind. Is there a gap between what people know and what computers can mimic to the point of supporting its application when needed? How does artificiality help in either case?
For example, in a recent article about the new onslaught of artificial intelligence chat tools the problem is handled obliquely while some of AI’s real risks are mentioned:
But [artificial intelligence tools are] only as good as the material they have to work with. These platforms extrapolate from the huge corpus of text that has been uploaded to the internet over the past few decades. Given what humanity has actually been writing about in those years, this input data can trigger troubling output (Gordon, 2023).
This is the question: Why would such a “huge corpus of text…” lie seemingly unused — certainly unleveraged, uncollated, and inactivated in the first place? Is the human race only capable of generating thought and not of using it? Is our existence the equivalent of a giant forest of potential, but not realized, noise generated from various sources of knowledge and nonsense that fall quietly into an abyss of useless nothingness?
If there is a problem, wouldn’t that be it? AI proponents shrug that question off as if flicking off flies from their shoulders. We know this to be true personally in various interactions over decades. Ignoring the need to heal the breach among people, they dream of their artificial singularity, when their machines take over. With each failure, the AI plan is kicked down the road, but described as imminent with increasing braggadocio, using a more menacing apocalyptic tone with each postponement.
Are we ready for the world that would result from machine-based governance? Is it necessary for us to give up on interpreting and extending the “corpus” and thus turning the task to a phalanx of “WALL-Es”, who would thus take on increasing authority and weightiness, dulling our senses and our intellects in the process, and those of our important leading institutions of knowledge, authority, and action?
Communities of practice and conceptual space
For that matter, who is to say that the really good, knowledge-driven material is even available on the Internet — at least in truly actionable, credible, and useful forms? Isn’t that to be found in the brains and represented by the capacities and skills of the dedicated scientists, practitioners, and generalists that have searched out truths, tested and refined their understandings of them, and sacrificed greatly to speak and act authoritatively with regard to the realities of nature and the manifest needs of us all? You can’t “google that up” and neither can the machines.
The populist lie is that there are no such people, that all lives have become politicized and motivations are suspect wherever you look. According to this conception, fueled by social media frenzies, all are motivated by zero sum incentives, by subterfuge, and by meanness. From this perspective, all the research paraphernelia — the measurement equipment, the methods, the books, the lectures — all of these are mere weapons. No one really knows something; they are just trying to trick you into thinking they do.
While there are more than a few pretenders and charlatans in academia and in science-oriented enterprises, there are indeed millions of dedicated scientists and scholars that stick to learned truths, who follow the data, who are rooted in method, and who have filtered out myriads of distractions to come to understand processes in their chosen fields of study.
Such people participate in and are known among communities of practice based on decades of mutual observation and collaboration. Using various combinations of symbols and numerical relationships, they define and refine what they know, they attend conferences together where they present and consider their findings, they collaborate and compete, they know and are known. They develop a world among themselves that is mediated by languages and commitments and understandings are unknowable and undecipherable by outsiders. Indeed, this is one of the characteristics of a valid community of practice. The real knowledge doesn’t translate in readily sharable phrases for the general public to understand.
For example, do you understand the famous “E=MC(2)”? Sure, you probably kind of do. It is energy equals matter times the square of the speed of light. Are you still with us? It won’t take too many more lines of actual description to leave all but the most intrepid physicists, shall we say, in the dark.
Does this mean that they do not know? Does this mean that their esoteric, complicated knowledge does not exist, is not of value, or that has nothing to do with the general good simply because everyone is not capable of or does not choose to understand it? There may have been a time when all things could or should be known by all — perhaps in a hunter-gatherer culture — but the need to extend out beyond anyone’s singular understanding and comprehension has long gone beyond the board.
The parents of a recent Nobel Prize recipient, Kip Thorne, both PhDs in their own right, said this of their son’s high school mathematics paper — the mother understood up to page three, the father understood up to page five, but neither made it even close to page nine, the climax and summation of the work. Of course, that was before their son even entered Cal Tech and went on to be a leader in his field, in advanced understanding of gravity.
Knowledge of process straight from the source
Do we want the watered-down versions of such knowledge? No — never. Those are never correct — the metaphors that seem to be the most evocative and persuasive to lay people are likely the most dangerous. Never to be forgotten, nature is not persuaded, nor is it adaptive, to apparently eloquent metaphors and examples used to try to explain complex conditions to lay people. Attempts at ignoring or even forcing nature will backfire every time.
Readers who have a problem with this, the idea of exceptional people, of experts in particular, need to get out more. Have you never witnessed a performance by a true artist? Have you never been carried away in this manner? Have you never had a great teacher or professor with mastery of a subject or of a skill? There are many of these in thousands of variations.
Consider the implications of that Pixar movie WALL-E and the conditioned culture it describes. The people in question had fallen into a pampered culture that was passive to every sense. All aspects of their lives had been trivialized and commoditized. They had become lounging, inert consumers. The people could not even walk. They were entirely conditioned by machines, systems, and infantile choices.
Is such a future in any way desirable? Why are the AI people in a rush to invalidate and deaden our collective cognitive capacities in ways that would lead to such an outcome?
Obviously, there is a problematic pairing between commercial gain and a deadening of our collective brain. That, too, could be seen in the Pixar movie. We can already see much too much of that. Just imagine a combination of AI-machine-driven media blitzes sponsored by Big Pharma, populist media, and the ‘sugar-salt-fat’ anti-nutritionist cabal (Moss, 2013).
It is interesting that proponents of artificial intelligence refer to the work of Alan Turing as the father of their work. In so doing, they cite a paper he wrote in 1950, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” (Cooper & Levinson, 2013).
More fundamental that this was something he wrote earlier when he was very young. He presented in 1936 then published in 1937 “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem” in England in roughly the same time as a similar publication by a Princeton professor of mathematics, Alonzo Church, who subsequently became his doctoral advisor at Princeton. The articles described something called the Church-Turing thesis.
The point was made via mathematics, which is complex. Treading lightly in its interpretation, as cautioned above, it can be said that computing functions might be useful to support human purposes if they are recursive, which is to say repetitive, when the results of one iteration through the function, or algorithm, can be used in subsequent cases. This is reflected in the movements of a Turing Machine as seen below, which though simple is capable of all conceivable computing algorithms.
Such repetition can result in a form of reflection. What is ‘learned’ in one pass can be used to inform a subsequent pass, and on and on. This can support of a form of trial and error, or a means of improvement.
Such looping through experiences was taken to improve understanding of how people learn. It was taken to support prior considerations by Alfred North Whitehead and others as to the importance and ever-present existence of processes, which are the means by which such looping phenomena express themselves. This is an important aspect of dimensional human understanding. By coming to understand what happens with each iteration of the function or algorithm, you come to understand the process. With understanding of the process, you come to understand possible if not likely futures.
Understanding of processes that can be self-referential expands our understanding of phenomena through time. Without this, we can understand things in three dimensions, the famous height and width and depth. By extending this through an active process, we add the fourth dimension of time. We can understand the likely movements and changes through time, to the extent of the process itself. When such processes can then be used to loop back to the beginning, we can seen a reversal of time, to an extent that the past can be better understood and its implications can be married to future expectations.
5D living
In this, we go from three-dimensional living to five-dimensional existence. The process in this case has historically come to be known as a tree, representing branches of potentiality in the realization of new phenomena, of rebirth, along established pathways (Wolkstein, 1983, 140–146).
Of course, we do this all of the time, but it is typically considered only implicitly. Our collective existence is really a hit-and-miss proposition with respect to process and policy. We are awash in noise, but it is virtually impossible to recognize signal. There is very little evidence of process in all of this. That corpus of knowledge forms that was referred to earlier, the foundation for machine-based cognition of sorts, is a formless, featureless mass that has become a problem in and of itself. The corpus of knowledge has effectively become a corpse.
There was an enlightening discussion of free speech and its implications recently on public radio. The producer was Radiolab. (Abumrad and Longoria, 2023). They provided a riveting history of the conversion of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes to the idea of a “marketplace of ideas”. While celebrating his inclusion of this notion in a dissenting opinion made a century ago, Radiolab personnel consider the relative impossibility of a viable marketplace of ideas in our times.
Jad Abumrad: But the problem with the marketplace of ideas is that it expresses an ideal that is so much more powerful and beautiful than the reality.
Latif Nasser: Well, so what’s interesting is that Holmes’ argument — it’s a functional argument. It’s in the barter — right? — in the marketplace that the truth will rise to the top. This will function as a way to sift out the good ideas and the truth. So it’s actually a measurable thing. Like, we have marketplaces of ideas. Like, Twitter is a marketplace of ideas — right? — where things get, you know…
Jad Abumrad: Shouted down and shamed and…
Latif Nasser: …Shouted down and shamed, or spread and celebrated. And the amazing thing about Twitter is that you can see that happen. There’s real data there about retweets and likes and whatever else that you could actually use it to test Holmes’ idea. Like, does the truth — do the good ideas, actually rise to the top?
Sinan Aral: That’s exactly right. I mean, as we started to see fake news on Twitter and on Facebook, we realized we had the data to study this kind of question.
Abumbrad and Longoria reference a study in which every Twitter conversation that had existed since its beginning was mapped. Their study brought unexpected and entirely unwanted results. They were shocked with the results.
Sinan Aral: How many minutes does it take the truth or falsity to get to 100 users or 1,000 users or 10,000 users or 100,000 users?
Latif Nasser: And Sinan says that when they analyzed and compared the breadth and the depth and the speed of growth of all those different tree diagrams, what he got was…
Sinan Aral: The scariest result that I’ve ever uncovered since I’ve been a scientist…
Latif Nasser: …The trees of lies spread further, wider and faster than the truth trees.
Sinan Aral: It took the truth approximately six times as long as falsity to reach 1,500 people. So falsehood was just blitzing through the Twittersphere. You know, we’re in a state now where the truth is just getting trounced by falsehood at every turn.
How then do you revive the “corpse” represented by the corpus of all of those high-volume, highly-public misanthropic takedowns — and the corpus of Internet-based content that underscores ? As we dissect problems with the conception of a marketplace of ideas — we need to point out the critical nature of conceptual space and conceptual borders.
Indeed, place, part of the marketplace concept itself, is a problem. In the consideration of dimensions and other factors, place is only one of them. Place, however, is the sine-qua-non of conventional politics, an artifact of the modern Westphalian world. This is also the subtheme of earlier colonization. Conquest brought control the land and everything on it — including the people on it. Conquerors controlled everything — that was the very idea. If that was ever a good idea, it certainly isn’t one now. Before we can consider the marketplace, we need to come to grips with place.
Putting time and conceptual space before place
This was a new thing when the Greeks thought it up. The old thing was a very different framework, a more differentiated phenomenon.
There are two factors here. First is the idea of equality, which was clearly instituted by the Greeks — a signal advance in the concept of humane governance. As stated by Jean-Pierre Vernant:
Community, publicness, the equality of citizens … how was the connection made? Compared to what we know about Assur, Babylon, or Egypt, the Greeks’ invention is extraordinary; it is indeed astonishing, even strange, for a group to say, “We are forming a group of equals. This means we are going to regulate … common affairs, together, by coming to a common decision (Vernant, 1996/2000, 170).
This was wonderful. It was amazing. Public affairs have benefitted to a great extent from the innovation and bravery of the Greeks. There was civilization, order, and prosperity before this, but the main concept in Sumer, for example, was that the system was to serve the needs of the elite, but in ways that allowed for some personal freedoms and initiatives. Such an environment was held to support peace generally, which was in the interest of the elites.
In the case of Sumer and its major cities of Uruk and Ur, peace persisted for more than a millennium from the beginning of written records, which were developed there along with many other civilizational firsts. There are signs of peace in the region before the existence of written records, as well.
Now, however, we need to come to understand that what the Greeks took away as well as what they gave in the process when they established the demos. Common decisionmaking is beneficial — but is it appropriate in all things? Such a notion demonstrates little regard for knowledge-based questions — particularly those that cross physical borders.
As supported by written records as well as archeological evidence, much of the growth and success of Sumer between the 4th millennium BCE and the 2nd millennium BCE was stimulated by leadership from Uruk, one of the key city-states to the south. There is evidence of Uruk’s influence throughout Sumer.
Situated about 50 miles northwest of ancient Ur, the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk is the home of a number of “firsts” in the country’s archaeological story, the oldest examples of monumental stone architecture (made of imported limestone), the earliest cylinder seals, and the oldest examples of writing (a pictographic script that was the ancestor of later cuneiform) — all dating to the fourth millennium BCE. In addition, Uru was the hometown of mythic heroes including Gilgamesh, who, tradition said, built its mighty walls that measured six miles in length…
Founded in the fifth late millennium BCE, Uruk became [Sumer’s] most important urban center during the next millennium exerting political and economic influence that reached through Mesopotamia…
Abandoned in the seventh century [B]CE, Uruk had a lifespan of 5,000 years. Its oldest layers lie virtually unexplored, submerged deep in the mud of the alluvial plain from which its life once sprouted (Bertman, 2003, 36–37).
There were two significant differences between Uruk as urban leader in Mesopotamia and the typical Greek community substantially later as previously described. Firstly, there was a notable emphasis on conceptual space in Uruk and in Mesopotamia, dating to very early in the development of that area. In “Enki and the World Order: Organization of the Earth and Its Cultural Processes”, Enki self-reports in self-aggrandizing way the establishment of the conditions for prosperity in the region and environs of Sumer. Although only references to the me as he used them in the process are included, the work describes many varied and detailed acts on Enki’s part to initiate all aspects of civilized living.
My ancestor, the king of all the lands,
gathered together all the me’s, placed the me’s in my hand…
To the [great] prince who came forth in his [land],
The Anunnaki pay due homage:
“Lord who rides the great me’s, the pure me’s,
who has charge of the universe, the widespread,
who received the lofty ‘sun-disk’ in Eridu, the pure place, the mo[st prec]ious place:…
Filled with enduring light, dispensing from sunrise to sunset the me’s to (?) the people,
Your me’s are lofty me’s, unreachable…
[in Ur] [he] has directed your perfect me’s…” (Kramer, 1963, 175–177).
It is interesting to consider what it might mean to “ride the great me’s”, it is quite clear that they were his instrument to carry out these tasks. There is an interesting interaction between him and Inanna where she complains at this point of having been overlooked, in spite of the fact that Enki had called her “The Lady, the queen of all the great me’s”.
Then all by her[self], having abandoned the royal scepter,
The woman, … , the maid Inanna having abandoned the royal scepter
Inanna, to [her father] Enki,
Ente[rs] the house, (and) [humb]ly weeping, utters a plaint (?):
“The Anunnaki, the great gods — their fate
Enlil placed firmly in your [hand],
Me, the woman, [wh]y did you treat differently?
I, the holy Inanna, — where are [my prerogat]ives? (Kramer, 1963, 182–183).
She then recounts grants of power to many other women. She repeats her question about prerogatives.
Then Enki responds by listing items. There are many. They have to do with adornment, with cloth and weaving, to “the crook, staff, and wand of shepherdship”, to answers to battles, etc. He said in reference to her, “You have destroyed the indestructible, you have made perish the imperishable… You whose admirers do not grow weary to look at” (Kramer, 1963–183).
Making use of the knowledge tools
Later, there was considerable consternation among family members over the lack of use of such tools by Enki after a climate catastrophe, a great flood that destroyed much of what had been established in Sumer. Interestingly, it is likely such an event occurred in and around the period known as the end of the Younger Dryas period when there was a pronounced warming trend. This involved rising temperatures about 12,000 years ago which could have precipitated flooding and warmer conditions as we experience in the current Holocene Period (Rasmussen, et al., 2005).
According to the family members, there were tools available to teach people particular skills, to provide guidance as to how to best carry them out. Enlil had granted them to Enki with Anu’s approval so that he could improve conditions. These had been used by Enki to build up Eridu, the first of the Sumerian cities. According to some records, Eridu had originally been built on reed mats. Modern archaeologists have identified eighteen levels of building materials under the main temple of the city.
Family members were upset with Enki for not making the me, the knowledge artifacts, available for reconstruction after the flood — for use in Eridu or elsewhere.
Enki did not act, but Inanna eventually did. The issue was amply documented in Sumerian literature. In “Enmerkar and Ensuhkesdanna”, there was coverage of an effort to induce Inanna, a member of the leading family in Sumerian tradition, to concentrate her efforts on Uruk in Sumer and its development, leaving the city of Arrata to the east, to which she had been assigned (Wolkstein, 1983, 154). She agreed; it was consequential that Uruk was also the city of Anu, the father of them all and the most powerful, although he resided elsewhere.
She then famously visited Enki, an older relative, in his city of Eridu. She convinced him to give about a hundred such tools to her for application in her new city, Uruk. Receiving these was considered a very big development, an important aspect of building up of the city of Uruk, a task that she had eagerly taken on.
A point can be taken that this is all a matter of myth. Perhaps some of it is. Uruk itself is not a myth. It presents an impressive record of enlightenment and development in southern Mesopotamia from the fourth millennium onward (Kramer, 1988). The extent of the culture and the reality and dimensionality of the city and its environs are readily verifiable as are corroborative artifacts and written records. Uruk was a powerful influence in the world’s first significant complex urban environment. What was on their minds in this critical time and place is important to know.
We have organized the eighty decipherable me from the accounts of Kramer according to nine key categories as seen below.
The number of life process me’s compared to all of the other me categories is notable. These represent almost half of the whole. Other particularly important categories including sacred, collaboration, craft, and authority skills or processes. These demonstrate strong preference for life skills, for social stability, and for fulfillment. As mentioned earlier, military and policing questions were not in the forefront, as protection is only represented via four me.
The morning after his encounter with Inanna, Enki had second thoughts about having done so. He made several efforts to recover the me from her, but reconsidered, proving her with considerable encouragement in their use in Uruk. Finally, he 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 are allies.
Let the city of Uruk be restored to its great place (Kramer, 1983, 27).
This can be contrasted with an unsupportable notion that neighboring states must “go to war,” as in Sparta and Athens as commented on by Thucydides (1998). On the basis of earlier Sumerian experience and other examples of cooperation among peoples, we call the wisdom of this into question. Gebhard Selz (2000) identifies many alternate means of dispute resolution “before the Old Babylonian period”. This brings us to substantive differences between Sumerian and Greek perspectives on needful conditions for development of city-states.
Secondly, physical border relations in early Mesopotamia were less fixed and were grounded in social and economic realities and relationships more than political fiat. There were many conceptual borders, as could be seen in the nature and breadth of the me.
The view of a nation as a specific and bounded geopolitical entity is a historically created condition originating in 17th century Europe, concerned with the division of landscape in ich identity as absolute, boundaries were fixed, and legal restrictions were enforced. It must be made clear that the ancient Mesopotamian kingdoms and empires did not function in this way. the natural boundaries offered by the rivers, mountains, and deserts of the land were not absolute, but zones of great interaction throughout the millennia. Throughout history, trade caravans military expeditions, and countless numbers of migrants crossed over these boundaries from neighboring lands, each of which had an influence on Mesopotamian society and culture in its on manner.
Archeologists view ideas of territoriality and boundaries as a convenient fiction used to map out and analyze polities, built upon an abstraction of landscape. In examining ancient Mesopotamia, the notion of “territory” and the state has been presented in different ways, and there exists no definitive consensus about how one can describe ancient Mesopotamian “states” like that of Uruk. Some claim they were organized as territorial entities under public authorities, encompassing many communities in its boundaries with a centralized government, drafted armies, collective labor, and taxation. Others take a broader perspective, maintaining that states can be identified as autonomous political units by their legal systems or by the extent that they use coercion to enforce power over their population. These two perspectives assume that states have more or less known limits, where people believe there is a bounded territory representing the state’s jurisdiction and control, and that states have an organizational quality remaining consistent through time.
However, ancient Mesopotamia as composed of many fragmented (and often overlapping) cultural, linguistic, or ethnic spheres. In this sense, theirs were porous, permeable, and flexible. Moreover, they were selectively identified and defended by certain groups, depending on their historical context…
The Uruk expansion occurred during the fifth millennium BCE, as northern sites made contact with the south… The spread of urbanization was the most important process that took place during this period, marking the transition from subsistence farming to the emergence of cities in southern Mesopotamia. Following the model set by Uruk, other cities from this period were defined by factors including the emergence of a bureaucracy with a centralized governing body, social stratification in the form of a military, religious, or political elite; increasing levels of craft and economic specialization; and the emergence of full-time professionals. Furthermore, many cities can be identified by the monumental structures and temples built in the urban landscape, indicating the emergence of organized religion (Charles River Editors, 2016, 28–29).
Conflict resolution for the ages
It is true that there were wars in Sumer, resulting mostly from intrusions from the north, but these did not surface until after thousands of years of relative peace in the south among the original city-states. As robust and prolific sources of wealth and prosperity generally, they were hardly targets for the very neighboring people they were constantly enriching. In the earlier times as just described, a level of development and innovation resulted that was characterized by continuity with minimal warfare (Selz, 2000).
Before the urban revolution comparatively poor and illiterate communities had made an impressive series of contributions to man’s progress. The two millennia immediately preceding 3000 BC[E] had witnessed discoveries in applied science that directly or indirectly affected the prosperity of millions of men and demonstrably furthered the biological welfare of our species by facilitating its multiplication. We have mentioned the following applications of science: Artificial irrigation using canals and ditches; the plow; the harnessing of animal motive-power; the sailboat; wheeled vehicles; orchard-husbandry; fermentation; the production and use of copper; bricks; the arch; glazing; the seal; and — in the earliest days of the revolution — a solar calendar, writing, numeral notation, and bronze.
The two thousand years after the revolution — say from 2600 to 600 BC[E] — produced few contributions of … comparable importance to human progress (Childe, 1936/1951, 180).
Childe then mentions four innovations in the subsequent period — decimal notation, iron smelting, alphabetic script, and urban aqueducts (Ibid.).
Childe indicates that such successes to 3000 BCE led to large, healthy populations, most wealth being constituted in the great organizations, the temples and privately wealthy members of the “ruling class”. One innovation not mentioned by Childe was the introduction of two thousand years of relative peace. Conceivably, that was possible to a degree because of the obvious fixation on conceptual space and of the need to carry out tasks of various kinds according to standards and conditions that are unique to them, to the contexts to which they apply.
That resources under the control of the great organizations in the long period of peace were dedicated to the needs of the people in times of drought or emergency provided a ballast function for society generally. Apart from arrangements to secure trade routes by force, military activities were minimal until after the two thousand years of innovation prior to 3000 BCE as described by Childe.
They [later city-states] accordingly attempted to expedite and regularize deliveries by force; armies followed the routes opened up by merchant caravans. Eventually attempts were made to annex the sources of supplies and to conquer the exporting countries. As the rulers of Sumerian cities had aimed at giving a political form to the geographical unity of Babylonia by subjugating neighboring cities, so they sought to extend their domains by annexing geographically distinct regions essential to the stability of their economy they came thus to embark upon a course of imperialist conquest. The Empire founded by Sargon of Agade about 2500 BC[E] is the first recorded realization of this endeavor (Childe, 1936/1951, 184).
We hold that deterioration of Sumerian conditions can largely be attributed to lack of fecundity, of productivity, of the land, which was reported as being played out, but also from a failure to recognize and support aspects of conceptual space, which though critical to continued civilization, require some level of abstraction to understand and appreciate.
Not to be naive in any regard, the records show that Sumer was highly competitive during the two thousand years of peace. The culture involved pressures to perform — not to survive, mind you, but to achieve. That was a key. There was competition between the city-states and the members of the ruling family and their acolytes, the kings and the other elites. The success of early Sumer was grounded in the validity of the city-state model, which has served mankind ever since at an important level.
The tracking-down of Sumer’s legacy may well begin with the socio-political institution commonly known as the city-state, which, in Sumer, developed out of the village and town in the second half of the fourth millennium BC[E] and was a flourishing institution throughout the third millennium. The city — with its free citizens and assembly, its nobles and priests, its clients and slaves, its ruling god and his vicar and representative on earth, the king, its farmers, craftsmen, and merchants, its temples, walls, and gates — is found all over the ancient world from the Indus to the western Mediterranean. Some of its specific features may vary from place to place, but by and large it bears a strong resemblance to its early Sumerian prototype, and it seems not unreasonable to conclude that not a few of its elements and counterparts go back to Sumerian roots. It may well be, of course, that the city would have come into being in the ancient world whether Sumer had existed or not. But this is not at all certain; in Egypt, for intance, the city-state never took root, and the same might have happened in other parts of the world (Kramer, 1963, 289).
It was not the peaceful model that was taken up by subsequent regimes and nascent empires, but that of Sargon, who…
…set a standard which his immediate successors, the kings of Ur and then of Babylon, after 1600 BC[E] the Egyptians, the Hittites, the Assyrians, the Lydians, the Medes, the Persians, and the Macedonians were fain to imitate.
Now these successive but short-lived empires undoubtedly contributed to human progress. While they lasted, they guaranteed over wide areas internal peace and security favorable to the accumulation of wealth. They ensured for the great industrial centers adequate supplies of raw materials. They spread abroad the economic advantages of the urban revolution and the advances in applied science that accompanied it…
But the instability of these empires discloses a contradiction within them: The persistence with which the subject peoples revolted is a measure of the benefits just recited, and perhaps of the latter’s value too… In reality an empire of the Sargon type probably did directly destroy more wealth than it indirectly created…
In a general way the empires thus established were mere tribute-collecting machines [that were] created by war, maintained by continual war, and eventually destroyed by war (Childe, 1936/1951, 184–185).
Norms for global, multilateral leadership that is peaceful and pervasive
Understanding context, then, is critical. Conceptual space is very important, but little understood in our day. To be leveraged, it must be supported and protected. We hold that this is a critical function of government. For that matter, it is not feasible for all countries to support all aspects of conceptual space. There are good reasons for some states to support and maintain productivity in areas of conceptual space and share the results by policy-driven or commercial means. This is an important aspect of multilateralism.
In contemporary times, typical policy discussions are the equivalent of swinging machetes through conceptual borders, slashing and destroying any semblance of community and mutual understanding.
Think of means of applying this to the G20 effort. Below can be seen the seven areas of priority under G20T20 India 2023 (https://t20ind.org/). These represent approaches for continuity, for collaboration among G20 member countries, and for prioritized outcomes as expressed by G20 and T20 India leadership this year. These reflect priorities with respect to prosperity, technology use, health, improved energy use, development finance, UN-sponsored sustainable development goals, and multilateral political and policy coordination. These have much to do with the climate challenge, although it is not included as a separate category.
We recommend a broad-based approach to these challenges as seen in the last column. Famously, one G7 Berlin commentary in 2022 proposed that global collaboration and innovation need be considered in novel ways. They use the term “some kind of forum”.
Finding the appropriate political “landing place” for these policy prescriptions is not immediately obvious. Apart from regional markets (such as the European Union which has been something of a governance first mover), there is a political failure in the sense that data flows don’t respect state sovereignty. But regulation is done by governments. That raises the question, what is the appropriate forum, or fora, to be addressing these issues? We intend to keep working … to explore the best way for national governments and other stakeholders to work in concert in some kind of forum to address substantively these and similar digital governance issues (Snower and Twomey, 2022, 9).
Time is the solution. Process is the means by which time can be put in a bottle. Conceptual space must come to be understood. Details of physical and conceptual phenomena need to be rigorously defined and refined by the specific people in question. The result must be in the form of actionable, digital-enabled means that can be organized and maintained by people in the context of appropriate communities of practice around the world. This is a means of learning from the past from creating, maintaining, and using a contemporary kind of me in all of the areas that are needed.
This involves people with various public and private affiliations, with a wide variety of incentives and roles. This cannot reliably exist without the unmitigated support of individual governments. Such are the kinds of forums that are needed.
References
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