Global Geometry
When Thomas Friedman says that the world is flat, it puts one in mind of an alluvial floodplain, so flat and silty that it poses no obstacle to the relentless spread of water, again and again, redistributing the chemical wealth for those inclined to take risks. And indeed, the major civilisations of the world have lived, died, spawned, suffered and spread by the dangerous wealth of the floodplains.
Globalisation, as Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and others have pointed out, is a phenomenon that has its roots in the human past of about 60 millennia ago. Humans spread. They move and bring culture, community, commerce and conflict. Where a dominant group meets one less dominant, the less dominant group learns more. This ensures that civilisations endure cycles of boom and bust; except that larger ones tend to go bust more slowly. The corollary to that is that when they do go bust, they tend to go bust with a boom.
For Atlantis, our small city-state whose insignium of the Lion of the Sea has spread to places like Venezia and Londinium, globalisation reared its head at least 700 years ago. Yet we treat the phenomenon as if it is ultra-modern, a thing of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in this age of humanity.
There is a kind of secret that the Masons knew and which is also hidden behind the warning on the gateway to Plato's Academy. That warning reads, "Let no man enter here who knows no geometry."
That secret is this. The world is not really flat; neither is it really round. It is not an oblate spheroid as the geographers have it, nor an odd polyhedron as the geometers and cartographers require. It is a lump of rock, physically. But memetically, in terms of the ideas that drive the world of humanity, it is a furious and irregular tempest that is subject to no laws that humans have yet been able to discern.
As Qoheleth says in the book known as Ecclesiastes, "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but time and chance happen to them all." The marketplace of ideas is not dominated by the swift or the strong, or even the durable or diffuse; it is an agora where millions cry out and not all is understood, and even when anything is understood, it is sometimes understood too late.
Blake wrote about a 'fearful symmetry'. This is true to life. The symmetrical, the neatly-ordered ideas of MBA school and the human sciences of politics, economics and sociology — these are dangerous because they are not entirely true, but true enough to lead to disaster.
It is like a stack of bricks, each one placed slightly out of true; each is almost exactly in place, but not quite. That stack will eventually fall as the centre of its gravity is displaced further and further away from the centre of the foundation. Eventually, it will hang over nothing; as it says in the book of Job, "He hangeth the world over nothingness." What an image! What an idea!
I just wonder how true a description it is.
Globalisation, as Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and others have pointed out, is a phenomenon that has its roots in the human past of about 60 millennia ago. Humans spread. They move and bring culture, community, commerce and conflict. Where a dominant group meets one less dominant, the less dominant group learns more. This ensures that civilisations endure cycles of boom and bust; except that larger ones tend to go bust more slowly. The corollary to that is that when they do go bust, they tend to go bust with a boom.
For Atlantis, our small city-state whose insignium of the Lion of the Sea has spread to places like Venezia and Londinium, globalisation reared its head at least 700 years ago. Yet we treat the phenomenon as if it is ultra-modern, a thing of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in this age of humanity.
There is a kind of secret that the Masons knew and which is also hidden behind the warning on the gateway to Plato's Academy. That warning reads, "Let no man enter here who knows no geometry."
That secret is this. The world is not really flat; neither is it really round. It is not an oblate spheroid as the geographers have it, nor an odd polyhedron as the geometers and cartographers require. It is a lump of rock, physically. But memetically, in terms of the ideas that drive the world of humanity, it is a furious and irregular tempest that is subject to no laws that humans have yet been able to discern.
As Qoheleth says in the book known as Ecclesiastes, "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but time and chance happen to them all." The marketplace of ideas is not dominated by the swift or the strong, or even the durable or diffuse; it is an agora where millions cry out and not all is understood, and even when anything is understood, it is sometimes understood too late.
Blake wrote about a 'fearful symmetry'. This is true to life. The symmetrical, the neatly-ordered ideas of MBA school and the human sciences of politics, economics and sociology — these are dangerous because they are not entirely true, but true enough to lead to disaster.
It is like a stack of bricks, each one placed slightly out of true; each is almost exactly in place, but not quite. That stack will eventually fall as the centre of its gravity is displaced further and further away from the centre of the foundation. Eventually, it will hang over nothing; as it says in the book of Job, "He hangeth the world over nothingness." What an image! What an idea!
I just wonder how true a description it is.
Labels: Blake, Ecclesiastes, Geometry, Globalism, Humanities, Ideas, Job
etched with acid at 12:32:00 pm
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