The dominant ISRs (Inter Subjective Realities) that societies have used to organize their efforts have changed during human history.
The simple story goes like this:
1) Hunter-Gatherers did not need any special cooperation technology separate from the other apes. They roamed in bands of 50 people or whatever, most if not all of the tribe was blood related, and they knew everyone personally. The cooperated with their band and warred with strangers.
2) Farmers needed a more sophisticated cooperation strategy. Tilling a field is only a worthwhile investment if you can be sure the neighboring tribe won't come and steal your land. The empathetic attitude humans had towards their fellow tribe was expanded using religion. Now, it wasn't just evil to kill your actual brother but also all members of your greater tribe. You can clearly see the mechanisms of how this works in the Old Testament. The "tribes" of Israel see themselves as a bigger family. They still view humans outside of their group as enemies.
2b) The rise of evangelical religions such as Christianity and Islam deserves a note. It makes sense that they would out compete religions that only consider in members. Ultimately, societies compete with one another. Expanding the reach of the ISR that underpins your society makes you safer. The more farms that exist yours and the border of your society creates a buffer of security as well as maximizing the number of trading partners available to you. It also creates larger societies that bring with them economies of scale that allow for specialists.
3) Those specialists eventually created mechanisms for creating vast wealth. Historians call this transformation the industrial revolution. The ISR that rises with the industrial revolution is the nation state. Nation states have a few distinct advantages over religions. For one, they explicitly define via law both the requirements and benefits of being part of the group. Taxes are more scientific than tithes. Rights are more tangible than a heavenly reward. Nations also can agree to cooperate with other nations, something that religions rarely do. Economies in the simplest terms need transportation, logistics/communication, and energy. At this time in history, nations provided these via the building of roads, a telephone network, and the mining plus distribution of fossil fuels via national electric grids.
4) Currently, money is overtaking nations as the dominant ISR on the planet. By money, I'm not referring to any one currency, but instead a kind of global fungible capital. Banks still use currencies printed by nation states, but they swap them back and forth effortlessly. In my lifetime, I have gained the ability to go to almost any foreign country, pull out my bank card, and withdrawal cash in whatever currency the situation demands. Some nation states try to stem the flow of global capital but they have little success. Time will tell if nation-less currencies (Bitcoin, etc) become usable and popular. Money has the same advantages that nation states have over religion, to an even greater extent. Why limit my trading opportunities to humans that live in my country? Any human that can cooperate with humanity as a whole has a competitive advantage over one that only does business locally. This blog will in the future consider some of the effects of money's takeover as the dominant ISR such as globalization, international shipping logistics, and intellectual property rights. In the information age global shipping is the transportation of choice (perhaps replaced by autonomous), the global internet is the dominant communication tool, and perhaps renewables will replace national electric grids.
I don't have a strong opinion on whether new ISRs allow for new means of production or whether new means of production create the need for ISRs. It is most likely a chicken and egg scenario or more accurately a hermeneutic relationship in which they are constantly reinforcing, morphing, and spurring one another on. No ISR is static. Like a language, they all slowly drift and warp as the humans using and being used by them change their dimensions. That is exactly what this blog is about. I am trying to understand how global capitalism is currently changing, and what perhaps it might morph into.
Sunday, October 20, 2019
Friday, October 11, 2019
Inter-subjective Reality
What allows humans to cooperate in groups larger than kin groups is fiction. Trying to understand the mechanism of these stories and how people adopt, reinforce, and spread them is useful to understanding the motivations of the individuals that form these cooperative groups. Cooperative fictions are what social scientists call inter-subjective. They are not observable phenomenon but instead exist between the space of human observation. They have no utility to a single ape. It is only because a group of animals agrees on them that they exist at all. Think of language. The word that symbolizes any object (or action for that matter) is quite arbitrary. Its usefulness comes from all group members agreeing that sound "banana" represents the long yellow fruit.
We swim in a medium of overlapping inter-subjective realities constantly. They are the most powerful forces that shape human behavior. It is precisely because they are so interwoven into human consciousness that most of us don't even notice them in day to day life. Its goes beyond what languages a human speaks, to what nation they think they are from, local gender norms, to a "Christmas" song in a local shop, to a street sign with a clear meaning to a driver that would be chicken scratch to some hypothetical alien anthropologist observing human activity. These inter-subjective realities can compete with each other (think the difference of opinion currently about the sovereignty of Hong Kong) or reinforce each other (the laws of the United States are written in English, enforced by police granted a monopoly on violence, and paid for by taxes all as part of a bigger system.)
Focusing on language for a moment can be useful to see just how different human story-telling is from other animals. Birds, for instance, also make sounds that have biological meaning. A certain birdsong can be interpreted by other birds as a mating call or a warning of danger. This is most certainly the origin of language in apes as well. However, humans don't just have words for sky and hunt. We also have "God", "Latino", "October" and a million other concepts that quite frankly we just fabricated. The trick is in getting other apes to not only also believe that it is October 11th, 2019 but to also then convince others of that same "reality". Using the date as an example helps illuminate the usefulness of these conventions. It doesn't matter much whether you call it October 11th or Day 237 or had a system based on colors, the seasons, or whatever. Once people all agree on some arbitrary designation that helps them coordinate their behavior in a way they simply couldn't without this little trick. Of course wild salmon return to same spot each year for mating but to my knowledge no naturalist has observed a species with a concept of "tomorrow" or "next year for Halloween".
A point worth stressing here is these inter-subjective realities change quite rapidly but the human that believe in them see them as iron clad. This is a feature for the system even if it lends a touch of myopia to any given human. [We will talk more about how ISRs coerce their members into compliance but that deserves its own post.] It helps an ISR spread if its devotees know with certainty that their God is the one true God or that this land is most definitely Blahblahland all the way from the ocean to the Great River. The Catholic Church owns land, art, and money. This seems normal to us even though the Catholic Church is just an idea. The religion that underpinned the society that build the Pyramids also was the owner of those structures. That religion has no current practicing members. Just as we can see our languages change over time with new slang, grammatical structure, and words leaving the lexicon its also possible to witness big changes in the dominant ISRs and make some guesses to the causes.
One last point is to stress that ISRs are not just some small trick of human evolution but are the dominant forces of our world. Nations, religions, and companies don't grow old and die like mere mortals. They hold all the wealth, command the biggest armies, develop the best technologies, and have almost all of the power.
We swim in a medium of overlapping inter-subjective realities constantly. They are the most powerful forces that shape human behavior. It is precisely because they are so interwoven into human consciousness that most of us don't even notice them in day to day life. Its goes beyond what languages a human speaks, to what nation they think they are from, local gender norms, to a "Christmas" song in a local shop, to a street sign with a clear meaning to a driver that would be chicken scratch to some hypothetical alien anthropologist observing human activity. These inter-subjective realities can compete with each other (think the difference of opinion currently about the sovereignty of Hong Kong) or reinforce each other (the laws of the United States are written in English, enforced by police granted a monopoly on violence, and paid for by taxes all as part of a bigger system.)
Focusing on language for a moment can be useful to see just how different human story-telling is from other animals. Birds, for instance, also make sounds that have biological meaning. A certain birdsong can be interpreted by other birds as a mating call or a warning of danger. This is most certainly the origin of language in apes as well. However, humans don't just have words for sky and hunt. We also have "God", "Latino", "October" and a million other concepts that quite frankly we just fabricated. The trick is in getting other apes to not only also believe that it is October 11th, 2019 but to also then convince others of that same "reality". Using the date as an example helps illuminate the usefulness of these conventions. It doesn't matter much whether you call it October 11th or Day 237 or had a system based on colors, the seasons, or whatever. Once people all agree on some arbitrary designation that helps them coordinate their behavior in a way they simply couldn't without this little trick. Of course wild salmon return to same spot each year for mating but to my knowledge no naturalist has observed a species with a concept of "tomorrow" or "next year for Halloween".
A point worth stressing here is these inter-subjective realities change quite rapidly but the human that believe in them see them as iron clad. This is a feature for the system even if it lends a touch of myopia to any given human. [We will talk more about how ISRs coerce their members into compliance but that deserves its own post.] It helps an ISR spread if its devotees know with certainty that their God is the one true God or that this land is most definitely Blahblahland all the way from the ocean to the Great River. The Catholic Church owns land, art, and money. This seems normal to us even though the Catholic Church is just an idea. The religion that underpinned the society that build the Pyramids also was the owner of those structures. That religion has no current practicing members. Just as we can see our languages change over time with new slang, grammatical structure, and words leaving the lexicon its also possible to witness big changes in the dominant ISRs and make some guesses to the causes.
One last point is to stress that ISRs are not just some small trick of human evolution but are the dominant forces of our world. Nations, religions, and companies don't grow old and die like mere mortals. They hold all the wealth, command the biggest armies, develop the best technologies, and have almost all of the power.
Thursday, October 10, 2019
The Human Superpower
The next time you get a chance to look at some of our closest primate relatives such as chimps please notice their eyes, specifically their sclera. That is just the anatomical name for the whites of our eyes which are dark in other high primates. The theory I heard on this difference via an evolutionary biologist makes sense. When a human looks at something, the other humans in their presence notice what they are looking at. A chimp has an evolutionary advantage if it can notice a ripe piece of fruit without its compatriots also seeing it. Humans evolved to cooperate in a different way; I suspect if you or I ever met a person with dark sclera we would have an intrinsic deep seeded distrust of them. Whether or not you buy into the sclera explanation, its clear that humans cooperate with each other in ways that other mammals do not. What is perhaps more important than the style of our cooperation is the scope of it. The other social primates only cooperate with members of their band or tribe, with most of whom they are blood related. The human superpower that has granted so much biological success to the species is an ability to cooperate in massive numbers.
What allows us to cooperate in large groups is the ability to create and believe in fiction. I am not referring to a literary definition here but using the word to differentiate it from a lie. Chimps can lie. There have been experiments on their ability to deceive each other for a benefit. One I remember involved them using their call for "hey, watch out, a predatory bird is overhead" when they hadn't seen a threat. In reality, they saw a piece of food they wanted, used the call to get everyone to look up in fear, and used the opportunity to snag the treat. The rub is that the lies biologists witness intelligent social animals make all involve real world objects. Humans can create fictions that are entirely imaginary. Chimps can't tell a story about a burning bush or Washington cutting down a cherry tree. I used these examples of fictions intentionally, as religion and nation states are two clean examples of how humans "buy into" a fictional concept that allows them to cooperate with humans outside of kinship groups or small bands. A rural farm boy from Nebraska and an urban banker from New Jersey can both join the Army to fight together because they believe in a fiction called "America". Cooperating comes so naturally to us humans that we don't even see it as a superpower. Yet no other primate has ever summoned a force of one hundred. Cooperating in massive groups is what allows humans to dominate the planet and the telling and believing of fictions are the tools used to accomplish this super-organism status.
What allows us to cooperate in large groups is the ability to create and believe in fiction. I am not referring to a literary definition here but using the word to differentiate it from a lie. Chimps can lie. There have been experiments on their ability to deceive each other for a benefit. One I remember involved them using their call for "hey, watch out, a predatory bird is overhead" when they hadn't seen a threat. In reality, they saw a piece of food they wanted, used the call to get everyone to look up in fear, and used the opportunity to snag the treat. The rub is that the lies biologists witness intelligent social animals make all involve real world objects. Humans can create fictions that are entirely imaginary. Chimps can't tell a story about a burning bush or Washington cutting down a cherry tree. I used these examples of fictions intentionally, as religion and nation states are two clean examples of how humans "buy into" a fictional concept that allows them to cooperate with humans outside of kinship groups or small bands. A rural farm boy from Nebraska and an urban banker from New Jersey can both join the Army to fight together because they believe in a fiction called "America". Cooperating comes so naturally to us humans that we don't even see it as a superpower. Yet no other primate has ever summoned a force of one hundred. Cooperating in massive groups is what allows humans to dominate the planet and the telling and believing of fictions are the tools used to accomplish this super-organism status.
Introduction
I haven't written a blog in about a decade. This one isn't a diary of my life or a collection of random thoughts. It is meant to help me put into clear language the central research question I am working on. I am attempting to build up a bigger idea out of smaller ones since I'm not smart enough to hold it all in my head simultaneously.
I am interested in human cooperation, specifically ways human cooperate that other animals do not. A few disciplines of importance for this topic are evolutionary biology, economics, natural history, and anthropology among others. I'm not an expert in any of them and I have only read what I have read. No apologies there.
An early attempt at a one sentence explanation of my question: What cooperation technology will succeed money and how will it change what it means to be human?
The preliminary posts will be a discussion of the terms necessary for this topic and a review of human history from this viewpoint. I also plan to do some simple posts just outlining a key idea or economics concept that I need to understand how all these parts fit together. Eventually I plan to focus on the ways money is a useful cooperation technology compared to ones humans used in the past and also highlight some of its key flaws. Hopefully this will help push me along to having some predictions about how the ways we use money will continue to change and what kinds of complex coordination of human behavior will come next.
I am interested in human cooperation, specifically ways human cooperate that other animals do not. A few disciplines of importance for this topic are evolutionary biology, economics, natural history, and anthropology among others. I'm not an expert in any of them and I have only read what I have read. No apologies there.
An early attempt at a one sentence explanation of my question: What cooperation technology will succeed money and how will it change what it means to be human?
The preliminary posts will be a discussion of the terms necessary for this topic and a review of human history from this viewpoint. I also plan to do some simple posts just outlining a key idea or economics concept that I need to understand how all these parts fit together. Eventually I plan to focus on the ways money is a useful cooperation technology compared to ones humans used in the past and also highlight some of its key flaws. Hopefully this will help push me along to having some predictions about how the ways we use money will continue to change and what kinds of complex coordination of human behavior will come next.
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