Tree

There is a green hill far away, outside a city older than Methuselah. There is a tree there, and that too is older than Methuselah. Indeed, both stood there before Methuselah was born, and stand there still long after he has gone.

The city was built on another tree, one of knowledge that broke a race; the remaining tree offers eternal life, and is despised. Five times a day, the horn of the deep sounds, and five times a day, it receives no answer there.

I stand outside the old walls of the crumbling city. I wish I had known it before it was built, and the mighty men raised high its walls. I wish I had been there to see the dawn of the age of men. And I am glad I was not.

Educational Pressure

In Atlantis, coeval with the complaint about immigration and demographics, comes forth also a barrage of complaints about the education system. But they are facets of the same jewel — if you want an independent city-state, you will end up in the same place.

(Here I shall just interject that there are now only three such states in the real world, and one of them is full of the men and women of religious orders.)

What do I mean?

Well, if you want economic self-sufficiency, you need a huge piece of land with natural resources. But no such piece can accommodate populations as dense as 7500 people/sq km or higher. So 'independent' city-states are politically independent and practically (i.e. economically in the main) interdependent. That is, they need to trade in order to sustain their independent highly-dense population.

This again means that you need to make people economically useful quickly. Hence, mass education at compressed time and resource rates. There is really not much choice unless you wish to spend more money (positively or in terms of marginal costs to the system).

Enter the armchair analysts of Atlantis. They say, "Make the class sizes smaller and all will be well; we need a better teacher:student ratio!"

Well, that simply means you spend more per class and have more classes. More classes = more classrooms and less open space, even if the classrooms are smaller. Labs, lecture theaters, research spaces of all kinds, art rooms — all these will need to be re-planned, if not rebuilt. The total cost of making all classes smaller is too high unless the remaining people decide to work a lot harder for less pay.

Simple, no?

Not quite. More armchair analysis later, and it is spoken, "Then our value system is horrible and people should work less hard for more pay!"

This, from the intelligentsia. The solution is really simple: all these people should just emigrate to a bigger country, not a city-state. Some place like Finland is good; it's 75% forest and has the cheapest electricity in Europe simply because it has four nuclear reactors and some uranium mines. Also more fresh water per capita than anyone can drink.

Population Pressure

Down in Atlantis, there is supposedly an unhealthy trend of people getting married later and having fewer children, and then having to import adult immigrants to make up the numbers. But what is so wrong with that?

The thing is that all city-states are not self-sufficient. They need economic inputs. To pay for this, they need economic outputs. Hence they need high productivity per human unit. This means more adults, and more productive adults, per square kilometre.

Hence, like Monaco, population may top out at 15,000 per sq km (now it's only 7,500 per sq km in Atlantis). It will have, like Monaco, perhaps a 'native' population of only 20%. But that's okay, because many of the immigrants may choose to naturalize, or just spend a lot of money here and go off into the sunset.

This will leave Atlantis a staid old folks' home coupled with frenetic cultural activity (if you include, like Monaco, casinos and le Grand Prix). It is the only sustainable fate of the modern independent city-state. If you want more, you either have to surrender some more of your independence (oh come on, there isn't a truly independent state nowadays anymore), or you have to go conquer somebody larger (yeah, as if that's a real option).

There, I've said it. And I'm a fourth-generation Atlantean.

They Who Live In Cities

Cities are contradictions in themselves. A city brings thoughts together, it aggregates and transmits and disperses ideas. But a city also breeds close-quarters interaction, where difference becomes more important if one is not to lose one's identity. The polis then requires laws, regulations, social niceties — the polis must become a civis, the Greek democracy must become a Roman republic.

Cities militate against the rights of man. As one famous saying goes, free will ends where the reach of a hand meets the skin of a face. Free will and free expression are bound at the very least by the free will and expression of others. In a city, that physical landscape within which the metaphysical landscape moves, it means people are less free — they keep coming too close to each other.

And so humans may only enjoy the fullest extent of their rights when they are alone, separate from the logical demands of each other human. No man is an island, wrote Donne — but the hidden message in that meditation is obvious: nobody is free, and in a city, one is free least of all.

Cities

Cities are unsustainable. They are too dense; think of the thousands of people crammed into a single square kilometre. There are advantages, of course — you have a wider range of direct human interactions in a much smaller space, there are efficiencies to be gained. The disadvantages are legion — nobody is self-sufficient and co-dependency is a necessity.

Independent city-states, by which we mean a state whose physical limits are essentially the city limits, are all republics of some sort. There is insufficient grist for the totalitarian mill, and the necessary dealings with outsiders must be delegated to a corps of expert representatives.

It is theoretically possible for such a state to be a theocracy, but in this era it is unlikely. Vatican City, where the Holy See is colocated, is the one odd example of the theoretical theocratic city-state in practice. It has few of the functions of the true state, and creates only temporary citizens.

It is also possible for such a state to be a plutocracy, designed only for wealth creation. But somebody must then defend that state from predators, and hence such states become protectorates, subordinate affiliates, or mercenary hotels. This is so with Monaco, defended by France and completely unsustainable as a truly independent state.

But there are far fewer independent city-states than there were in the past. The borders have merged and run together; the city-states of the Low Countries are now the twelve provinces of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and the city-states of the Italian peninsula are now the democratic Republic of Italy (minus San Marino and Vatican City). The ancient city-states of Greece are now the modern Hellenic Republic.

There is only one truly independent city-state left. It is unique. Years of brain-sapping 'national education', however, have kept most of its population politically unaware and historically naïve. This is changing, thanks to the rise of the Internet.

It is the Internet's abridgement of psychic geography that has done what history did not; the island at the tip of the Kra peninsula now finds itself not only a nexus for world trade, but a nexus of ideas. It must think about whether it will be a passive nexus, doomed to act as nothing but a transit port, or an active nexus, with something significant to contribute.

Perhaps its republican rulers should enrich the citizens' intellectual and cultural life. The wealth of the state is its defence, but the defence of the state is not its wealth. Similarly, education should free its citizens to be mercenaries elsewhere, building an abiding brand-name, just as the Swiss city-states did. The current situation is that half its education is conducted by mercenary educators.

And here, from my precarious little perch as citizen, I realise that I am seeing both too much and too little. Time for more thought and reflection.

London Bookshops (Redux)

The original post mentioning the Highbury incident is this one. However it wasn't the only odd incident I've had in London. You always get the sense that you are watched by those who would rather not be seen.

I'm sure this will be controversial to some, but I have never felt endangered in New York City, but I have often felt that London is dangerous. I think London is so much older that it can't help but be dangerous. It is a Great Old One among cities.

I know people from the tiny city-state of Singapore who are flabbergasted to find out that London, with its 1577 square kilometres of area, dwarfs the 707 square kilometres of the city-state by a factor of 2:1. Singaporeans think that London is 'just a city', not realising that the mega-cities of the world are huger in population than many nations. They also have far longer histories; Roman London was founded in AD 43, Singapore in AD 1819. Some will tell you that Singapore was actually founded far earlier, as the town of Temasek, in AD 1299. Well, by that token, London as a town must have existed from pre-Roman times, perhaps as far back as 1000 BC.

It is with that sense of history that one trawls through London bookshops, catching glimpses of the orthography (and steganography) of the ancients: Aleister Crowley rubbing fingers with Dylan Thomas, Lord Byron with Lord Tennyson... the list goes on. Just carefully lifting the covers of the old leather-bound enchiridia and other tomes is enough to reveal the layers of the hidden past which modern London just barely forms a surface film upon.

Singapore hasn't got that. New York is getting there; in some ways, it has already entered that era. Paris is probably a good candidate too. Beijing is an odd place. A lot more of the past has been destroyed there, and a selective sample retained.