"What's Going On?"

Ok, I'd like to see a show of hands. . . how many of you think you really know "what's going on"?

One, two... Oh my... I don't see too many hands up.

I think it's time we admitted it: nobody has any idea "what's going on." On the other hand, I think that we might take a stab at discovering some of the more basic aspects of our situation.

First off, let me describe the results of a little "straw poll." I recently started asking people "What are the stable things in your life? What's the ground you stand on?" The results were slightly strange, but not too surprising.

People in late middle age and older (this is all very approximate and unscientific) would generally list a number of things: family, job, government, and so forth.

Middle-aged people had similar—but shorter—lists.

Young adults had very short lists—usually just "family and friends."

Most teens and younger seemed to think that it was a nonsense question, like "why do you suppose the moon is chartreuse?"

It seems to me to break down like this: older people have a number of things that seem firm and constant to them. Younger people have less, and many children have nothing.

I don't know if this is simply "the way it's always been" or if it's a product of our times; I suspect it's a little of the former and a lot of the latter.

From my point of view (I was born in 1958) two things are stable: my family and friends, and that the world/culture/society operates on a principle of continuous, accelerating and undirected change. Put another way, I know what to expect from my family and friends, I expect everything else to be chaos.

I find that many people feel that most of the world is chaos. I suspect that this is not good...

All of us search for stability throughout our lives; we find it in different ways. For some the only way to feel secure is to go off into the woods and have almost no contact with other humans. Others are only secure in a crowd. I look for stability by trying to understand things—chiefly things like where is the human race now, how did it get here, and why is it so unstable?

Drawing on my rather eclectic education (I guess I'm a generalist—I know just enough to be dangerous in a heckuvalot of subjects) and my equally eclectic experiences, I come to the following explanation of "what's going on."

Somethingerother started the universe.

A number of billions of years later humans showed up on Planet Earth. Due to the way Somethingerother organized the universe, humans evolved into roughly their current state. A lot of other animals also evolved into roughly their current states, and so did all kinds of life.

While humans were evolving, they basically hung around together in various kinds of family groups. If the times were good, a few family groups might band together. If you examine animals that hang around in groups, you find that they have fairly good communications. In fact, groups with very good communications are better at surviving as groups. If you're reading this, you must realize that humans are really good at communicating.

We also have these things on the ends of our arms. . . Hands take a really big brain to control. The better the hands, the bigger the brain. Communicating takes a bit of brain-power as well.

So, we have these big—brained humans with good hands and good language wandering around in fairly small, fairly arrogant groups. (Arrogance counts in the animal world.) Some hard times come along—Ice Ages and competition from similar species and such like—and these humans become omnivorous and start getting really good at "what if... ." While I can only think of one good example of the survival value of inventiveness—us—it's such an outstanding example that you must take it into account.

With their big brains and their good hands, some of the individuals in these groups begin to get ideas. New ideas are evaluated on a very simple level: if the idea works, the group that implements it survives.

A few of the more abstract characteristics of the universe start to get noticed and wondered about; things like "Somethingerother must've started all of this," and "Hey, people die!" and things of that nature.

Now, for most of their history, humans have been wandering around in groups being opportunistic about surviving and being knocked off by various and sundry. It's not unusual to die before the age of 12 months, and incredible if you live to be forty. Somebody figures out that if you herd you don't have to hunt, and a few bands have it easier. A few bands develop a partnership with some of the other animals, like dogs, and they have it easier.

Some of the various personality differences which determine the group's structure get recognized, and the social organization gets set in concrete.

A type of person who's good at explaining the more abstract features of the universe emerges. (The explanations are probably wrong, but they're better than anyone else can come up with.) The group now has Religion/Science, in other words, philosophy. Not a lot of use, really, but it does let you deal with things you don't understand as if you have some control over them.

A few thousand years ago a couple of the brighter types invented two things that go hand-in-glove: writing and agriculture.

Whammo!

What the heck, they seemed like good ideas at the time . . .

All of a sudden, life gets a lot easier if you stay in one spot. The group can settle down and take it easy for much of the year. Actually, the group grows food for part of the year and makes things to make food-growing easier for the other part of the year. Some individuals get so good at making tools that that's almost the only thing they do—artisans emerge. Between needing new kinds of tools and having the time to daydream, technology gets a real boost.

The group is probably in better shape physically, too. With better technology and better health, defending the group's turf becomes a piece of cake. More food leads to more farmers and better technology, which leads to more food all of which leads to larger and larger communities. All of which simply says that much larger groups than evolution has prepared humans for become a reality. Very quickly—say, less than ten generations. Peanuts, duration—wise.

And so, we come to a problem: with out agriculture, breeding like bunnies is a necessity for survival. Even with agriculture, the more family you've got the better your family survives. But with agriculture you survive really well, so you develop really large populations. Before, if times were so good that your population got bigger than could hang together in harmony, the disharmonious segment simply left. But agriculture keeps you in one spot. A big population is a dense population. If you've evolved to leave when friction develops, you've got a problem. . .

Your social system—your government—is set up to keep the friction within the group from becoming a group-destructive problem. But your leaders can't be everywhere at once.

Enter writing. Writing allowed humans to solve the friction problem, because writing let government be come effective. Law can be viable with writing; the government can govern from a distance.

So, a few thousand years ago civilization got started. Along with bureaucracy.

Bureaucracy is pretty interesting: a whole group of people develop whose contribution to survival is abstract. They don't grow food, they don't hunt. Artisans are like that, too. They contribute to the general survival by making tools—directly useful tools like pots, and indirectly useful tools, like figurines and paintings. But bureaucrats are even more abstract. They simply keep your government working. This is absolutely necessary, because your government's job is keeping friction minimal. It is what keeps you and your neighbors from slaughtering each other, since your instinctive inclination is to do that or leave—and few want to be the ones to leave.

Writing does some other things for these humans: they now can write down what works and what doesn't, and remember these things for long periods of time. Even if the storyteller dies before she can pass on all of her knowledge. Plus, a good library is a million times better than a room full of storytellers—if you can read. At any rate, as long as someone in the group can read, then it will never be necessary to reinvent the wheel. (More about writing and technology in a minute.)

So, government and bureaucracy. Since bureaucrats aren't direct producers, and are an absolute necessity, the group has to find a way to support 'em. Like, taxes. When the group is small, the government's small, and direct taxation works pretty well. But the group doesn't stay small for long; when you get to city-state size it gets hard to pay your white collar workers in chickens. It's a whole lot easier to invent money.

There is a saying among computer—system's hackers, "Yet another level of indirection." Money is an abstract way to feed an abstract worker, and since it's so much easier to carry coins than cows money caught on with the general population fairly quickly.

Money has some other advantages; collecting taxes gets much easier. If you're bright, you can figure out how to collect a hell of a lot of money. If one gold disk is worth two sheep, but is only one one-thousandth of the size of a single sheep, you can put 4,000 sheep's worth of gold disks in the space two sheep take up! And it's better than having 4,000 sheep, a herd that size takes a lot of upkeep. Gold just sits there, it doesn't have any maintenance costs. Except for guards. And taxes. . .

Life has gotten pretty abstract just with bureaucracy and money, but let's not forget those artisans that were mentioned a while back.

Writing was a real boon to artisans, eventually. Writing down "how it's done" not only guarantees that "it" will keep getting done, it also means that you can build on what's been done previously. And money is another boon to an artisan: he can hoard it for lean times. Chickens are much more expensive and difficult to hoard.

An interesting side note to all of this civilizing is that civilizations seem to have a funny property: they collapse. We'll dig into that one in a while.

For now, we have three basic groups: direct providers—herders and farmers; indirect providers—artisans, merchants and innkeepers; really indirect providers—bureaucrats, scribes, goldguarders (police) and landguarders (soldiers). Add to this the more-original bureaucrats who control the local religion (the local prince probably doesn't like 'em very much, but they're hard to get rid of since they can explain a lot of things that he can't. A few princes even opt for the "if you can't beat 'em join 'em" solution...) and life has gotten fairly confusing.

It's still not too confusing; shake it all down and what falls out is a system. It's pretty much the same system, no matter who's running it, and it shares something with every other system you can think of: systems like to reach a stable state. Whoever said "Nature abhors a vacuum" should've added that Nature abhors an imbalance. Which brings us (indirectly) back to the artisans.

"I know engineers," quoth Dr. McCoy, "they love to change things." The artisans making pots and arrowheads are the original engineers. Because it was very good for those nomadic bands from way—back—when to implement ideas that made surviving easier, a whole crew of humans developed who derive intense satisfaction from having such ideas. (These are the people that gave us the hoe, the spear-thrower, the Veg-a-matic, and the TOW missile.)

As may be, these artisans keep inventing new things, which everybody wants since they make life easier. This keeps the system changing, but nobody minds much because even the most radical new invention can be absorbed over time. Nothing is putting too big a strain on the system. (Of course this is a strained sort of system to begin with, what with everybody's nagging feeling that they should either be killing people or leaving. Not to worry, we'll get to things like war and football when we talk about falling civilizations.)

Eventually, people with large amounts of money and good ideas for new techniques begin to have some problems no-one's had before. Superficially they're having very different sorts of problems; e.g. how do we keep track of all this money versus how big should we make the cross-piece. But the same invention solves both kinds of problems. The invention is mathematics, especially arithmetic and geometry.

Whammo again. All of a sudden humans have got everything from low-interest loans to the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Mathematics allows you to become very good at making abstract models of things. It has a side-effect, it becomes clear that you can have ideas about ideas. We get two levels of abstraction for the price of one.

It also lets technology go nuts. A whole lot of things that were very difficult to do by complete trial-and-error get lots easier when you add cipherin'. Technology proliferates, with a corresponding proliferation in information (don't forget that all of those artisans are writing like crazy). It's starting to get difficult to get a complete picture of "what's going on."

Now, if we shake it all down again something new falls out of the system, the leisure class. Having a leisure class divides your population into two types of people: people who sit around having good ideas all day—like Socrates, and people like Throckmorton the farmers who works like a sonuvagun all day and really resents people like Socrates.

If your civilization is doing well, your military is probably doing nothings or make-work. You're very reluctant to disband or dismantle your military, though. Past experience probably shows that your military is one of the major reasons your civilization is doing well.

Back when the social system was set in concrete, people with a certain flair for governing were selected as leaders. By the time your civilization has a make-work military and a leisure class, these sorts of persons (or worse, their offspring) have probably begun to feel like they own your civilization.

(Now, let's see. We've got bureaucracy, money, arithmetic, proliferating technology, tremendous amounts of new information... um. . . bureaucrats—no, I mentioned them—er. . . the leisure class . . . it's starting to get confusing.)

Take a growing population. Add Socrates and Throckmorton. Stir in some pheromones to promote a general feeling that everyone should be running or killing someone. Combine with a few concepts like "Divine Right." Add a dash of idle Military, and a pinch of capricious Nature. Finish the mix with a lot of confusion about what's really in the mix. Shake well, and simmer over low heat for a few decades or so...

I told you we'd get to collapsing civilizations.

There are a couple of kinds of defunct civilization: failed and collapsed.

Failed civilizations are generally nipped in the bud by some disaster.

Collapsed civilizations are the interesting ones. They share a number of features. Just before they collapse they tend to be relatively large. They have well developed leisure and poverty classes. Their bureaucracies are disproportionately large, and so are the taxes imposed on the working class. Their governments are usually graft-ridden and unresponsive to the governed. Such civilizations tend to feel unwarrantedly secure about their world position. The society of a soon-to-collapse civilization is generally factioned, fragmented and filled with frictions. ('Friction' equals 'the government is not doing its job.') The military is usually professional, not a militia, and is usually off somewhere fighting some little Orwellian action which is being propagandized as patriotic, back home. Citizens find it difficult to get straight information, partly because various groups are hiding it, partly because everybody is pushing his own version of "what's going on," and mostly because there is so much going on that no-one really has the complete picture, anyway. The citizenry tends to be escapist, since they don't know what else to do. You end up with things like the Circus Maximus, and a heavy emphasis on sex. Eventually almost everything gets treated as entertainment. In short, it's chaos.

Does any of this sound familiar?

Back to the straw-poll—answer the question for yourself. Does a lot of what's going on in the world seem "off the wall"? What really stable things can you find in your life; what can you absolutely count on? How much of this world-civilization seems to be chaos to you?

I'll bet your list of stable things is short. I'll bet that relative to your list of unstable things it's very short. (If this is not the case, please write to me. You may be the only person in the world with a handle on "what's going on.")

You could, of course, write it off as doomsaying and cynicism. In fact you'd be right on both counts; my friends often tell me "You're the most pessimistic, cynical bugger we've ever met!" Sure it's doomsaying, but can you just write it off? I hope so, but I doubt it.

Robert Anson Heinlein, the Science Fiction author, often quotes a curse which he claims is ancient oriental wisdom: "May you live in interesting times." The upshot is that if your times are historically interesting they're probably no fun to live in.

We live in interesting times. That is "what's going on." If we are all willing to take a look at our situation, we might be able to change it.

Or, we could all go watch the Circus Max. . . era.. World Series.

. . . Kevin Kinnell . . .

© Copyright 1987
Institute for domestic Tranquility