Richard Melson | Meta Intelligence

Poetry and Tweaking Our Understanding

Consider the poem “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold. In the last stanza, Arnold describes a world that remains very familiar to us, even over 150 years later. The “ignorant armies” of the final line describe today’s warfare just as aptly as the conflicts of his time.

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”

We can tweak our understanding using poetic tools. In a later poem by Rilke, he begins with an invocation to god before abandoning religious overtones, despairing at the root of modern restlessness.

After the summer’s yield, Lord, it is time
to let your shadow lengthen on the sundials
and in the pastures let the rough winds fly.

As for the final fruits, coax them to roundness.
Direct on them two days of warmer light
to hale them golden toward their term, and harry
the last few drops of sweetness through the wine.

Whoever’s homeless now, will build no shelter;
who lives alone will live indefinitely so,
waking up to read a little, draft long letters,
and, along the city’s avenues,
fitfully wander, when the wild leaves loosen.
Rainer Maria Rilke, “Day in Autumn” (translated by Mary Kinzie)

The first stanza of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’” shares the same tone as Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”. The overall intuition of these authors was that the world is coming unstuck and unravelling, leaving the individual metaphorically homeless.

Come gather ’round, people, wherever you roam
And admit that the waters around you have grown
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth saving
And you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times, they are a-changin’

Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide, the chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon, for the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times, they are a-changin’

Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway, don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin’
Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times, they are a-changin’

Come mothers and fathers throughout the land
And don’t criticize what you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times, they are a-changin’

The line, it is drawn, the curse, it is cast
The slow one now will later be fast
As the present now will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times, they are a-changin’
Bob Dylan, “The Times They Are A-Changin’”

Rilke’s metaphorical homelessness is also reflected in Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”, which he expands with “with no direction home.” Rilke wrote about creeping homelessness, where there may or may not be an actual physical home. French philosopher Simone Weil echoes this in her L’Enracinement, prélude à une déclaration des devoirs envers l’être humain (English: The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind). There is a need for roots, and in our current world, these roots are often unattainable.

The movie Triumph of the Spirit depicts the life of Salamo Arouch, a Greek-Israeli boxer who survives Auschwitz by fighting in exchange for rations and protection for his family. His German “handler” Rauscher loses his mind and is shown in drunken maudlin hysteria, realizing that the war is lost, stumbling around killing people while reciting Rilke’s poem.

See also: Is Poetry Sometimes Informative in a Special Way? (which also discusses Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach”)

Poly-Awareness and the Year 1900

On the way to the year 1900, we encounter the comment, “In 1890 the stock exchanges of London, Paris, Berlin and New York controlled the economic progress of the whole world.” This marriage of geography and the financial world is very striking, culminating with:

The year 1900 was a wonderful one, when men were proud to be middle-class, and to be Europeans. The fate of the whole world was decided around green baize-covered tables in London, Paris or Berlin. Rubber trees from the Amazons were shipped to Malaya, the vast coal seams of the Upper Hwang-Ho were being exploited at the expense of the wretched labourers, and in the north of the Upper Vaal a mining city sprang up in a few short weeks. Mobilized by steam, the planet’s riches were being shifted ‘from one side of the world to the other’, to quote Le Bateau Ivre, on orders flashed by telegraph in two or three minutes. Decisions reached by boards of directors in London, Paris or Berlin affected the lives of millions of human beings who did not suspect that their right to happiness depended on quotations scribbled on blackboards in three noisy exchanges built like temples, in which raged the battles of unbridled financial ambition. Not a single detail escaped the notice of Europe’s financial capitals: they fixed the price of a tram ticket in Rio de Janeiro, and the working hours of a coolie in Hong Kong. So much power had never before been concentrated in so few hands within so small an area of the globe. It was the age of triumph of the European middle classes.
Charles Morazé, The Triumph of the Middle Classes: A Political and Social History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, Anchor Books, 1968, page ix.

Morazé adds the following sentence, “The Europe of 1900 knew nothing of the world catastrophes which were to come.” At the core of this is the rise of modern science and technology. Max Planck published the first paper that gave us quantum mechanics. David Hilbert, at the 1900 Paris conference of the International Congress of Mathematicians, presented a collection of 23 problems (later known as Hilbert’s problems). Mathematicians, including Grigori Perelman (famous for his contributions to Riemannian geometry), are still attempting to solve these problems.

Henry Adams, attending the Exposition Universelle (1900), observed the dynamo and wrote the chapter “The Dynamo and the Virgin” in his book The Education of Henry Adams. He thinks of the dynamos as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the Cross.

Remember that in the world of 1900, in the background to all of this, we have the Boxer Rebellion in China, part of the Chinese century of humiliation (which angers them to this day).

The quest for meta-intelligent understanding (i.e., poly-awareness) involves comparing then and now and how they are connected.

Poly-Awareness, Checks & Commercial History

In an era moving towards electronic payment systems and replacing physical currency, it can be educational to look back at checks and how we arrived here. As Winston Churchill observed, “The longer you can look back, the farther you can look forward.”

In looking at history, it is just as important to study commercial practices as well as government leaders and military conquests.

…In the ten years following 1850, the world production of gold was ten times greater than in the ten preceding years. As is well known, the French had always preferred metal currency, and welcomed the gold with a special enthusiasm; the state struck an impressive quantity of coins, striking five hundred million in 1845, for the world’s gold found its way more readily to France where it fetched the highest price. The circulation of gold increased in other European countries also, and the banks of issue, in particular, filed their vaults. In this gold rush the English were more cautious after their long acquaintance with problems of values, and the upheaval in the gold market brought hardly any changes in the prices of the metal there. It is true England also minted new coins, but took advantage of it chiefly to establish her banking system more firmly. The influx of gold, which was exclusively Australian, had at first little effect on the prices of goods, but it developed credit with a paper currency. The minting of this money increased England’s metallic circulation by almost fifty percent, but the use of the banknote and especially of the cheque increased by a far higher proportion. The use of the cheque became so widespread in England that shopkeepers and farmers adopted it as the only possible way of doing business although it was almost unknown on the continent. Cheques were often used for amounts of less than two pounds. Even if he had an income of only fifty pounds a year, the Englishman immediately opened a bank account. In 1885, payments in metal currency represented only one per cent of the London Bank payments and six per cent of those in Manchester.

The Act of 1826 granted complete freedom of issue, except in an area of twenty-six miles around London, where the privilege of the Bank was absolute. There was a good deal of argument about the exact meaning of this privilege; for example the question arose as to whether provincial banks could open an office in London, the main centre of business, without losing their rights of issue.

When it was ruled that they could not, many banks nevertheless settled in London and forfeited their privilege of printing. Only the Scottish banks put up a firmer resistance to this extension of the privileges of the Bank of England. On the other hand, the right of issue was losing much of its significance, since the remarkable development of payment by cheque meant that there was less resort to the note. Settlements between the great deposit banks were made neither in metal nor in notes, but were transacted in the accounts of a clearing house, which dealt with transactions amounting to several hundreds of thousands of pounds every year.

The London and Westminster Bank, one of the most important of the English private deposit banks, soon became a model for every bank in Europe, for it had a reserve capital of less than three million pounds, and held approximately twenty-two million in deposits. Such influential private banks, established as joint stock companies, had to resort to the Bank of England only rarely, so the latter did not need to be unduly anxious about its insignificant gold reserves which were barely one-third of those held by the Banque de France. The privilege of issuing paper money, a relic of the royal right of minting money, was therefore bypassed to all intents and purposes by the gradual improvement of English banking procedure. At the same time the Bank of England enjoyed a monopoly of issue which it was in process of acquiring without the intervention of the state, since the development of banking led all the provincial banks to settle in London, near the clearing house. It was a masterpiece of liberalism to coordinate the free activity of the English economy in the capital without any pressure from the political power. In this way financial centralization was achieved purely by private initiative once the need for it had become apparent.

French banking evolved on very different lines. In order to meet the credit crisis, the provisional government had recommended the establishment of departmental banks and of trade credit societies when it was reforming the Banque de France. Most of these establishments, whose capital was to be provided partly by the state and the departments, were stillborn, while others lingered on for a month or two before wasting away. On the other hand, the Comptoir d’Escompte de la Seine became a private concern, and flourished under the name of the Comptoir National d’Escompte de Paris. The Banque du Département du Nord, which became the Crédit du Nord, was equally fortunate, as were several trade banks, particularly that of the Entrepreneurs de Travaux Publics. The unusual feature about the composition of the Comptoir National d’Escompte was that the Council of State had allowed it to set up as a joint stock company. Within a few years the Crédit Mobilier, the Crédit Industriel et Commercial, the Société Générale, the Société des Dépôtes et Comptes Courants, and other companies were established to benefit from this new way of accumulating capital.

Not all these new banks were as prudent as their English counterparts by any means and this point is worth dwelling on. After 1848 the Banque de France had the monopoly of issuing notes for the whole of France, because the local issuing banks created by Napoleon I and Louis-Philippe had been absorbed by the Banque de France, whose notes were the only ones in circulation. It was the state which had made this decision and had settled the problem of monetary unity by authoritarian measures. A few bankers, under the Second Empire, protested against the right of monopoly exercised by the Banque de France, which had been imposed on the whole of the country by the state. Very little use was made of payment by cheque, and compensation was meagre. The wide circulation of metal currency was a sign of a restricted paper currency, but this meant that credit was scarce and was based entirely on the Banque de France. The latter, taking no risks, consequently piled up in its coffers considerable reserves of precious metals, proud of the fact that it could now maintain a steady discount rate more easily than England. It also gained great satisfaction from being the gold-controller of Europe. Whenever a sudden drastic rise in the English bank rate sent businessmen, and even the Bank of England itself, as we have seen, hastening to Paris in search of precious metals, it was to the Banque de France that they turned. Although it was attacked by those who accused it of stifling credit, on the other hand it was defended by those who found its caution reassuring. It was a difference of opinion which further enlivened the quarrel between the Pereires and the Rothschilds.

As we know, Jewish bankers played a vital part in the building of the railways. Pereire, a railway enthusiast, and Rothschild, the largest holder of free capital in France, had at first been prepared to undertake the great task in complete agreement. Rothschild, content with holding the Nord and the English connections, was one of the directors whose word carried most weight in the Banque de France, while the Pereire brothers, their heads still full of Saint-Simonist projects, were interested in vast plans covering Austria, Spain and the Mediterranean. They financed the great development of the economy of the south although even so they were obliged to open a credit institution, the well-known Crédit Mobilier. But because they could not use it for the issue of paper notes, and had tied up the funds entrusted to them too quickly, the Pereires embarked on a struggle to deprive the Bank of its privilege of issue. They believed that the mere right of minting money would enable them to possess the wide credit necessary for the bold financial policy on which they were launching out. It so happened that when Savoy was annexed to France, the Banque de Chambéry brought its banknotes and its privileges within French frontiers. The Pereires and their friends seized the shares of this bank and tried to turn its notes into rivals of those of the central bank. The Banque de France then asserted its rights, Chambéry lost its rights of issue, and soon afterwards the Crédit Mobilier went into liquidation.

This incident occasioned a great quarrel between theorists for or against privilege; it was above all a demonstration of the solidity of the rights the Bank had acquired, while no-one doubted the right of the state to confirm its privileges any longer. This situation was all the more paradoxical since the state was in the hands of Napoleon III who was a firm supporter of the Pereires and the Crédit Mobilier. The underlying cause of this paradox lay in French scepticism about cheques, for the development of bank money lagged more than half a century behind England. It was to be chiefly the work of Henri Germain, founder of the Crédit Lyonnais. His patron of 1863 was mainly anxious to attract large deposits by guaranteeing them against theft and fire so that he insisted on the effective help the Bank could give industrialists and merchants by insuring their cash service itself. By making wise use of these deposits and by a cautious policy, the Crédit Lyonnais was able to open branches in Paris and Marseilles, so that it was soon as powerful as the Crédit Industriel et Commercial and then outstripped it. It even surpassed the Comptoir d’Escompte, and soon the Crédit Lyonnais became the leading French deposit bank. From 1860 it was the major bank to introduce cheques.

But there is little reason for surprise in the difficulties encountered by the cheque between 1860 and 1870.

The Banque de France was regarded as the most reliable of all issuing authorities, and French specie reserves as the most powerful stock of gold in the world; between notes and gold as the two methods of payment, there was very little room for the cheque. It is difficult to believe that France’s reserves could not have kept the deposit banks generously supplied, perhaps as much as, and even more than, the English reserves. But it kept a good part of its cash-balance in gold, which held up the full development of French credit institutions until the closing years of the nineteenth century.

In England there was security and in France hesitation, but in Germany there was an irresistible wave of enthusiasm which led to the rapid growth of credit institutions from 1840. There were a great many note-issuing banks in the Germany of the confederation, because each prince had his own currency. Hamburg had one of the soundest banks of issue, whose marc banco was esteemed throughout Europe and served as a standard for the whole of Germany. Nuremberg still had its old seventeenth-century bank and its florin, while a large number of private establishments were also manufacturing notes with a restricted circulation. In this scheme of things the Bank of Prussia held a pre-eminent position which was strengthened by the place Prussia had assumed in the Zollverein, but it still could not contest the superiority of Hamburg. In short, the legal position of the German banks was similar to that of the English, in that there was plurality of issue.

Bank money, and banknotes, increased in competition with each other, and the future of the four great and famous banks which were to dominate the destiny of capitalist Germany after 1880 had already begun to take shape.

The Dresner Bank was connected with the progress of the iron industry in the Rhineland, and particularly of Essen and Krupps. The Deutsche Bank operated in the countries of central Europe. The Darmstädter Bank and the Disconto Gesellschaft carved out a place for themselves; indeed bills on the latter increased from six to forty million marks between 1855 and 1862.
Charles Morazé, The Triumph of the Middle Classes: A Political and Social History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century, Anchor Books, 1968, pages 291-297.

Notice that in the discussion above, events are never monocausal. They are always part of a swirling tornado of change. If you become accustomed to this, the way the world works and the way the world changes will become more accessible to you.

For example, “The use of the cheque became so widespread in England that shopkeepers and farmers adopted it as the only possible way of doing business although it was almost unknown on the continent. Cheques were often used for amounts of less than two pounds.”

Also notice, “…soon the Crédit Lyonnais became the leading French deposit bank. From 1860 it was the major bank to introduce cheques.”

This is an example of poly-awareness, the core of meta-intelligence.

[Max Weber, in his book General Economic History, points out that the words “cheque” and “exchequer” derive from the same root.]

History of Global Antagonisms: China

The famous Yale historian, Paul Kennedy, is well-known for two major works, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism: 1860–1914. The former starts with a very powerful line:

“Rome fell. Scarsdale will fall.”

This gives us the theme of anxiety over national destiny and trajectory, which currently preoccupies the American mind.

In the second book, this antagonism question involves real and imaginary threats, and all of these anxieties and antagonisms are related. The masterpiece series, Downton Abbey, depicts a scene that takes place in the garden, where the Lord announces that they are at war with Germany, and his audience is perplexed, thinking, “How can we be at war? Germany is our biggest trading partner.” This teaches us that wars and the antagonisms that precede them are not solely based on rational factors like trade volumes.

Let us turn our attention to China. We are all aware, however vaguely, of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. In the recent PBS television series, American Masters, the episode “Tyrus” (season 31, episode 7, aired September 8, 2017) has the artist Tyrus Wong recounting the story of his father, with whom he immigrated to California in 1920 at the age of 9. It is hard for us to believe that, as people of Chinese descent, they were forbidden from owning property outside of Chinatown. He describes his struggle with the hassles of overt racism. He did not gain his American citizenship until 1946, after the act was repealed. He came to fame with Disney’s Bambi, where he was the film’s lead artist.

This anti-China xenophobia was just as virulent in Europe, going back to the 19th century. Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II popularized the phrase “yellow peril” to demonize the Chinese and encourage the European empires to invade, conquer and colonize China. Another instance of this sentiment in its European guise was the writing of Theodor Fontane. His classic novel, Effi Briest, can be thematically compared to other novels on 19th-century marriage from a female perspective, such as Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, which are also adultery tragedies. In the novel, there are discussions of people from all ethnicities crowding into German cities and towns.

“…But all the people who live in the little shipping and trading towns along the coast are immigrants from far away, who care little about the Kashubian hinterland because there’s nothing there for them, their concerns are elsewhere. What concerns them is where their trade is, and since they trade with the whole world and are in communication with the whole world, you find people among them from all corners of the globe. Which goes for Kessin too, backwater though it is.”

“But this is delightful, Geert. You keep calling it a backwater, but now, if you haven’t been exaggerating, I find that it’s a completely new world. All sorts of exotic things. Isn’t that right? That’s what you meant, isn’t it?”

He nodded.

“A whole world, I say, with perhaps a Negro or a Turk, or perhaps even a Chinaman.”

“A Chinaman too. What a good guess. We may still have one, we certainly did have; he’s dead now, buried in a little plot with a railing round it next to the churchyard. If you’re not afraid I’ll show you his grave sometime. It’s in the dunes with just some marram grass round it and a little immortelle here and there, and the sound of the sea all the time. It’s very beautiful and very eerie.”

“Yes, eerie — I would like to know more about it. Or maybe rather not, I invariably start imagining things and then I have dreams, and I don’t want to see a Chinaman approaching my bed tonight when I hope I’ll be sleeping soundly.”

“Well, he won’t.”

“Well, he won’t. Listen to that. How odd it sounds, as if it were somehow possible. You’re trying to make Kessin interesting for me, but you’re rather overdoing it. Are there many foreigners like that in Kessin?”

“A great many. The whole town consists of foreigners like that, people whose parents or grandparents lived somewhere else altogether.”

“How very peculiar. Tell me more, please. But nothing sinister. A Chinaman, I think, is always a bit sinister.”
Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest, Penguin Books, translated from the German by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers, 1967, page 33.

Notice the quote, “…I don’t want to see a Chinaman approaching my bed tonight when I hope I’ll be sleeping soundly.” This character echoes similar sentiments several more times above.

This “othering” of the Chinese in the novel continues:

Innstetten laughed. “We’re seventy miles further north than Hohen-Cremmen here and you have to wait a while for the first polar bear. I think you’re feeling the strain of the long journey, what with the St. Privat panorama and the story of the Chinaman and everything?”

“You didn’t tell me any story.”

“No, I just referred to him. But the mere mention of a Chinaman is a story in itself…”
Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest, Penguin Books, translated from the German by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers, 1967, page 35.

“What was it all about?”

“Oh, some nonsense: an old ship’s captain with a granddaughter or a niece who disappeared one fine day, and then a Chinaman, who may have been her lover, and in the hallway there was a little shark and a crocodile, both suspended on strings and always in motion. Makes a marvellous story, but not now. There are all kinds of other things flitting through my mind.”
Theodor Fontane, Effi Briest, Penguin Books, translated from the German by Hugh Rorrison and Helen Chambers, 1967, page 177.

All of this global antagonism-watching and paranoia is disconcertingly related to our current situation. Donald Trump and the Republicans are essentially entrepreneurs of hatred. As is widely misattributed to Mark Twain, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”

Being at Home in the World/Universe

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty provided an introduction to the problem of being at home when he wrote:

“The world is not what I think, but what I live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that I am in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible. ‘There is a world’, or rather: “There is the world’; I can never completely account for this ever-reiterated assertion in my life.”
Joseph J. Kockelmans (Editor), Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation, Anchor Books Edition, 1967, page 369.

Remy C. Kwant, in his essay “Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology”, commented:

For, according to him, the original lies buried in a dimension of darkness in such a way that it cannot be brought to light. Our existence is interwoven with the world, is a dialogue with the world. This dialogue reaches its most profound point there where the first and most original meaning arises, a meaning that is pre-conscious and pre-personal. Whatever is in our consciousness, whatever comes to light, becomes lucid, originates also in this darkness. As we have seen, man is able to obtain a measure of knowledge regarding this dark depth. He is able to divine something about the mysterious dialogue between the body-subject and the world. However, according to Merleau-Ponty, an absolute illumination of the phenomenal field is in principle impossible. All man can do is to erect some pointers in a darkness which resists full illumination.
Joseph J. Kockelmans (Editor), Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Its Interpretation, Anchor Books Edition, 1967, page 390-391.

We sense that the interaction between ourselves and the world at every level may not be explainable. Therefore, we seek emotional or psychological shelter. The three levels of shelter are:

hearth and home
a sense of belonging
gods

Think of the song, “A House Is Not a Home”, sung by Dionne Warwick. “A chair is still a chair / Even though there’s no one sitting there … But a room is not a house
/ And a house is not a home” depicts the human longing for shelter via hearth and home. The French philosopher Bruno Latour referred to this as a “parliament of things.”

Consider “Gimme Shelter” by The Rolling Stones, as well as the novel (and later film) The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. Both of these cover the deep issue of shelter.

Heidegger’s essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” (German: Bauen Wohnen Denken) states:

In what follows we shall try to think about dwelling and building. This thinking about building does not presume to discover architectural ideas, let alone to give rules for building. This venture in thought does not view building as an art or as a technique of construction; rather it traces building back into that domain to which everything that is belongs. We ask:

What is it to dwell?

How does building belong to dwelling?

I

We attain to dwelling, so it seems, only by means of building. The latter, building, has the former, dwelling, as its goal. Still, not every building is a dwelling. Bridges and hangars, stadiums and power stations are buildings but not dwellings; railway stations and highways, dams and market halls are built, but they are not dwelling places. Even so, these buildings are in the domain of our dwelling. That domain extends over these buildings and yet is not limited to the dwelling place. The truck driver is at home on the highway, but he does not have his shelter there; the working woman is at home in the spinning mill, but does not have her dwelling place there; the chief engineer is at home in the power station, but he does not dwell there. These buildings house man. He inhabits them and yet does not dwell in them, when to dwell means merely that we take shelter in them. In today’s housing shortage even this much is reassuring and to the good; residential buildings do indeed provide shelter; today’s houses may even be well planned, easy to keep, attractively cheap, open to air, light, and sun, but—do the houses in themselves hold any guarantee that dwelling occurs in them? Yet those buildings that are not dwelling places remain in turn determined by dwelling insofar as they serve man’s dwelling. Thus dwelling would in any case be the end that presides over all building. Dwelling and building are related as end and means. However, as long as this is all we have in mind, we take dwelling and building as two separate activities, an idea that has something correct in it. Yet at the same time by the means-end schema we block our view of the essential relations. For building is not merely a means and a way toward dwelling—to build is in itself already to dwell. Who tells us this? Who gives us a standard at all by which we can take the measure of the nature of dwelling and building?
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, (translated by Albert Hofstadter), Harper & Row, 1975, pages 145-146.

Stuart Kauffman comes at this from a different angle:

Who are we? Where did we come from? Why are we here? Did Neanderthal, Homo habilis, or Homo erectus ask? Around which fire in the past 3 million years of hominid evolution did these questions first arise? Who knows.

Somewhere along our path, paradise has been lost, lost to the Western mind, and in the spreading world civilization, lost to our collective mind. John Milton must have been the last superb poet of Western civilization who could have sought to justify the ways of God to man in those early years foreshadowing the modern era. Paradise has been lost, not to sin, but to science. Once, a scant few centuries ago, we of the West believed ourselves the chosen of God, made in his image, keeping his word in a creation wrought by his love for us. Now, only 400 years later, we find ourselves on a tiny planet, on the edge of a humdrum galaxy among billions like it scattered across vast megaparsecs, around the curvature of space-time back to the Big Bang. We are but accidents, we’re told. Purpose and value are ours alone to make. Without Satan and God, the universe now appears the neutral home of matter, dark and light, and is utterly indifferent. We bustle, but are no longer at home in the ancient sense.
Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press, 1995, page 4.

Kauffman comes to grips with this problem with the final line above. He continues:

In this new view of life, organisms are not merely tinkered-together contraptions, bricolage, in Jacob’s phrase. Evolution is not merely “chance caught on the wing,” in Monod’s evocative image. The history of life captures the natural order, on which selection is privileged to act. If this idea is true, many features of organisms are not merely historical accidents, but also reflections of the profound order that evolution has further molded. If true, we are at home in the universe in ways not imagined since Darwin stood natural theology on is head with his blind watchmaker.
Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity, Oxford University Press, 1995, pages 25-26.

Kauffman wants to complete the Darwinian revolution by adding self-organization and complexity to natural selection. In his vision, this will begin to produce a holistic picture of who we are. This will perhaps allow us to feel “We are all at home in the universe, poised to sanctify by our best, brief, only stay.” [page 30.]

Zooming out from this, we can see a meta-intelligent sense in which science believes it can convert mysteries into problems using math. In contrast to this, philosophers believe the opposite, that the problems are becoming more mysterious.

Looking Back to Look Forward

Winston Churchill said, “The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”

The brilliant baseball player and coach Satchel Paige seems to disagree with Churchill when he said, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”

Marc Bloch, in The Historian’s Craft (French: Apologie pour l’histoire), wrote that history is obviously a backward-looking discipline, but warns against the obsession with origins.

Edward Bellamy’s utopian time travel novel, Looking Backward: 2000–1887, is another example of this thought. His protagonist has a prophetic dream in 1888 of the United States in the year 2000. The book critiques the 19th-century U.S. through the lens of the future.

Alain Badiou looks back from the Neolithic period to today, describing it as a “time of crisis.”

…everybody thinks there is a crisis. Is philosophy capable of seizing hold of this crisis, while maintaining its fundamental aims? That is obviously my position I certainly recognize that humanity is in crisis, which I take to be the final spasm of the whole Neolithic period, the period of classes, of private property, of the power of the state, of technology, and so on. This started in Egypt and China six or seven thousand years ago and now this ends up in what is after all a very difficult situation to control. It is the outcome of everything that this gigantic period has swept along with it. This includes the status of truths, which today are perhaps a bit domesticated by an uncontrollable situation of predation and destruction.

After all, technology is tributary to science; everything is supposed to be mediated by information, even aesthetics; love has become calculable because you can calculate scientifically the person who best matches with you. All this indeed is at the origin of a gigantic crisis in philosophy. My own position is that we can be in a position of active resistance to what is happening, while holding onto the original categories of philosophy. A form of resistance that nevertheless consists in dramatically changing into something else. We should not hope to reform the world such as it is: I think this is completely impossible. Of course, one can try to do the best one can, but little by little everyone recognizes that the world we live in is catastrophic. And that is certainly true. It is catastrophic because it is the end—and here we should think big—of several millennia. It is not just the end of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it is the end of the world of social classes, of inequalities, of state power, of the subservience to science and technology, of private property colonizing everything, of senseless and criminal wars.
Alain Badiou, Badiou by Badiou, translated by Bruno Bosteels, Stanford University Press, 2022, pages 26-27.

Badiou argues that the world has always been threatened by catastrophe and philosophy is its reaction.

Let us recall that Socrates and Plato were people who already intervened at the end of the Greek city. They too found themselves in a world threatened by catastrophe: they did not live in a stable and established world at all. That ends with Alexander the Great, who brings order to all this in the form of an imperial creation, and finally with the Romans and their monster of a state the likes of which had never been seen before. The Greek city and Greek democracy thus ended in the imperialism of ancient Rome. Thus, we may also find inspiration in Plato in this last regard. Plato is the first complete philosopher, but he already lives in a time of crisis. Of course, Athens was very famous and celebrated, but at the same time it was already corrupted and fragile. During Plato’s own lifetime, not to mention Aristotle, Macedonian imperialism is already present. Aristotle was Alexander the Great’s first tutor; he was a prototype of the corrupted and, moreover, the inventor of academic philosophy!

Similarly, if we take the greatest philosophers—Plato, Descartes, Hegel—we again find the same type of figure. Hegel is obviously the philosopher caught up in the French Revolution and its fundamental transformations; Descartes, for his part, is caught up in the emergence of modern science. All these philosophers are caught up in considerable shakeups of their time, in the fact that an old society is on the verge of dying and the question of what is going to appear that is new. We too find ourselves in the same situation: we must continue along these lines, by taking inspiration from what those philosophers did. Thus, they considered that the moment had come to work on a renewed systematicity of philosophy, because the conditions had changed. So, based on the conditions as they existed, it was time to propose an innovative way out of the existing constraints, an individual and collective liberation. From this point of view, we can find inspiration in the great classical philosophical tradition: we need not reject it, nor claim that all this is finished and find solace in an insurmountable nihilism, nor adopt the Heideggerian critique of metaphysics going back all the way to Plato. All this is pointless, and finally becomes incorporated into the disorder of the world. On the contrary, we must hold onto the fact that philosophy has always been particularly useful, possible, and necessary in situations of grave crisis for the collective, and from there pursue the work of our great predecessors.
Alain Badiou, Badiou by Badiou, translated by Bruno Bosteels, Stanford University Press, 2022, pages 29-30.

Contrast “What was the Neolithic world that led to the unleashing of technology?” (Badiou, Badiou by Badiou, page 25) and “Yesterday don’t matter if it’s gone.” (The Rolling Stones, “Ruby Tuesday”). Perhaps we can conclude that wisdom is knowing when the past is useful in understanding the future.

Newspapers and the “Manufacture of Consent”

When we think about newspapers, various associations come to mind. Examples include Jeff Bezos purchasing The Washington Post or William Randolph Hearst inspiring Citizen Kane. Newspapers have, to some extent, devolved into a vehicle for propaganda, as described in Walter Lippmann’s Public Opinion.

Lippmann is famously quoted for advocating the “manufacture of consent.”

Max Weber describes the economic function of newspapers:

The newspaper as an institution came into the service of commerce at an astonishingly late date.

The newspaper, as an institution, is not a product of capitalism. It brought together in the first place political news and then mainly all sorts of curiosities from the world at large. The advertisement, however, made its way into the newspaper very late. It was never entirely absent but originally it related to family announcements, while the advertisement as a notice by the merchant, directed toward finding a market, first becomes an established phenomenon at the end of the 18th century—in the journal which for a century was the first in the world, the “Times.” Official price bulletins did not become general until the 19th century; originally all the exchanges were closed clubs, as they have remained in America virtually down to the present. Hence in the 18th century, business depended on the organized exchange of letters. Rational trading between regions was impossible without secure transmission of letters. This was accomplished partly by the merchant guilds and in part by butchers, wheelwrights, etc. The final stage in the rationalization of transmission of letters was brought about by the post, which collected letters and in connection therewith made tariff agreements with commercial houses. In Germany, the family of Thurn and Taxis, who held the postal concession, made notable advances in the rationalization of communication by letter. Yet the volume of correspondence is in the beginning surprisingly small. In 1633, a million letters were posted in all England while today a place of 4,000 population will equal the number.
Max Weber, General Economic History, Collier Books, 1966 (Third Printing), page 220.

Herbert Hunt provides a useful overview of the newspaper as a political tool in his introduction to Honoré de Balzac’s Lost Illusions (French: Illusions perdues).

The first half of the nineteenth century witnessed the rapid rise to power of the periodical press. Journalism had been active — though dangerous to those engaged in it — during the Revolutionary period. Napoleon had kept the press under his thumb, as Giroudeau points out on page 235. The ‘freedom’ of the press was one of the most controversial issues both under the Restoration and the July Monarchy. Under Louis XVIII and Charles X the struggle between those who, like the Li b erals and Bonapartists, wanted to keep the Revolutionary principles and gains intact, and the Conservatives of various hues, especially the ‘Ultras’, who wanted to put the political clock back, was an affair of major importance; likewise, under Louis-Philippe, the conflict between the spirit of stagnation and the parties in favour of ‘movement’. Balzac’s contention is that the majority of journalists under these three monarchs, instead of recognizing that they were called to a serious, even sacred mission, turned the Press into an instrument for self-advancement, prostituted principles to intrigue and used journalism merely as a means of acquiring money, position and power. He is reluctant to admit that there were great, responsible press organs, like Le Journal des Débats, Le Conservateur, Le Constitutionnel and, from 1824, Le Globe, which stood firm on principle; he is above all aware of the vogue which the petits journaux enjoyed after the fall of Napoleon, and of the role they played as political privateers.

The petits journaux were so-called because they were produced in smaller format than the important dailies or weeklies, which were more or less grave, staid and ponderous. They proliferated in Paris once the fall of the Empire had given a relative, though still precarious liberty to the Press — precarious because it was constantly threatened by the increasingly reactionary governments of the time. The politicians of the Right found it difficult to keep the newspapers under control even by such means as stamp-duty, caution-money, fines, suspensions and suppressions, the object of these being mainly to put obstacles in the way of would-be founders of hostile periodicals. The ‘little papers’, short-lived as they often proved to be, were much given to journalistic sharp-shooting. They preferred satire, personal attack, sarcasm and scandal-mongering to serious argument or the affirmation of ideals. They were mostly Opposition journals and were a constant thorn in the flesh of the Government. Balzac’s aim was to expose their addiction to ‘graft’, intrigue, blackmail and the misuse of the feuilleton, namely the bottom portion of the first page or other pages generally reserved for critical articles and frequently devoted to the malicious task of slashing literary reputations. Andoche Finot — the prototype of such later newspaper magnates as Émile de Girardin and Armand Dutacq, pioneers in 1836 in the founding of cheap dailies which relied on advertisement and serialized novels as a chief source of income — acquires a large share in a big daily and hands on to the equally unprincipled Lousteau the editorship of the ‘little paper’ he already owns. Balzac probably had Le Figaro chiefly in mind, a periodical which was constantly going bankrupt or being suppressed but kept popping up again under different editors. Hector Merlin’s royalist Drapeau Blanc, edited by Martainville, really existed, having been founded in 1819; so did Le Réveil. Other examples of ‘little papers’ before 1830 were Le Nain Jaume (Bonapartist), Le Diable Boiteux and Le Corsaire (both Li b eral), Le Voleur, La Mode, La Silhouette, and, under Louis-Philippe, not only the phoenix-like Figaro, but also La Caricature, Le Charivari (ancestor of our English Punch), and once more Le Corsaire: a few among many. Louis-Philippe and his Cabinets were easy prey for these stinging gad-flies whose unremitting satire and innuendo remind one of the present-day Canard Enchaîné.

It is an amusing thought that, in the late twenties and early thirties, Balzac had himself been a contributor to these disreputable rags and sometimes had a hand in the running of them; for instance he had helped Philipon to found La Caricature. Throughout his career he contributed many novels in serial form to the more important newspapers, notably those founded by Girardin and Dutacq — La Presse and Le Siècle. But by the time he was writing A Great Man in Embryo he had left the petits journaux far behind him. He himself tried his luck as a newspaper-proprietor and editor: he bought La Chronique de Paris in 1836 and founded La Revue Parisienne in 1840. Both of these ventures failed. We can well imagine therefore what a large amount of bile was accumulating inside him. On the whole, reviews of his works appearing in periodicals had been hostile if not harsh. He suffered much from the disparagement of editors and critics such as Sainte-Beuve and Jules Janin respectively. He was always quarrelling with Émile de Girardin. And so he took his revenge. He had already made a preliminary attack on the periodical press in The Skin. And he followed up his attack of 1839 with his Monograph of the Paris Press (1842).
Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, translated and introduced by Herbert Hunt, Penguin Books, 1971, pages xiv-xvi.

Balzac’s novel is very concerned with all aspects of journalism. For example, chapter 17 is titled “How a news-sheet is edited” and chapter 18 is a symposium on newspapers. Chapter 18 quotes a German guest who states, “I thank god there are no newspapers in my country.” (page 312). Another participant states, “In corporate crimes no one is implicated.” “A newspaper can behave in the most atrocious manner and no one on the staff considers that his own hands are soiled.” (page 314).

‘The influence and power of newspapers are only just dawning,’ said Finot. ‘Journalism is in its infancy; it will grow up. In ten years from now, everything will be subject to publicity. Thought will enlighten the world…’
Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, Penguin Books, 1971, page 313.

‘Newspapers are an evil,’ said Claude Vignon. ‘An evil which could be utilized, but the Government wants to fight it. There’ll be a conflict. Who will go under? That’s the question.’
Honoré de Balzac, Lost Illusions, Penguin Books, 1971, page 313.

We should heed Vignon’s warning. Nazi Germany’s three main newspapers confirm this danger.

Price Revolutions and Their Historical Impact

In 1996, leading economic historian, David Hackett Fischer, published The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. If you ponder the subtitle, you may grasp the work’s ambition.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has been arguing with Fischer for many years that, in making the transition from business to historical cycles, Fischer’s position is problematic.

There are, of course, detailed histories of prices, such as Thomas Tooke’s A History of Prices and of the State of the Circulation during the Years 1793–1856 (6 volumes, 1838–1857).

In the first four volumes he treats (a) of the prices of corn, and the circumstances affecting prices; (b) the prices of produce other than corn; and (c) the state of the circulation. The two final volumes, written with William Newmarch, deal with railways, free trade, banking in Europe and the effects of new discoveries of gold.
Wikipedia (links added)

Tooke-type price histories are one thing, but what about Fischer’s price revolutions? Max Weber (who predates Fischer by almost a century) seems to endorse this concept. In Weber’s General Economic History (German: Wirtschaftsgeschichte), he writes:

The great price revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries provided a powerful lever for the specifically capitalistic tendencies of seeking profit through cheapening production and lowering the price. This revolution is rightly ascribed to the continuous inflow of precious metals, in consequence of the great overseas discoveries. It lasted from the thirties of the 16th century down to the time of the Thirty Years’ War, but affected different branches of economic life in quite different ways. In the case of agricultural products an almost universal rise in price set in, making it possible for them to go over to production for the market. It was quite otherwise with the course of prices for industrial products. By and large these remained stable or rose in price relatively little, thus really falling, in comparison with the agricultural products. This relative decline was made possible only through a shift in technology and economics, and exerted a pressure in the direction of increasing profit by repeated cheapening of production. Thus the development did not follow the order that capitalism set in first and the decline in prices followed, but the reverse; first the prices fell relatively and then came capitalism.
Max Weber, General Economic History, Collier Books (3rd printing), 1966, pages 230-231.

Notice the last sentence above, Weber explicitly describes price revolutions exactly as Fischer argues.

In the history books we read, the emphasis is always on colorful personalities, inventions and other more theatrical events. This obviously omits the idea of phenomena like price revolutions. We cannot explain history merely by these personalities; we need to zoom out and view the larger picture.

Why Is Technological History So Misleading?

We are conditioned to think of technological history in a very binary way. For thousands of years before motorized transportation, we think of horses and wind-powered ships. We also sense that if we brought great historical minds from before the industrial revolution to a modern city, most likely they would be stunned by the technology surrounding them. Think of a world of medical science before anesthesia and germ theory.

Let’s modify this binary view of human history. David F. Noble gives us a more accurate view:

Augustine, the chief author of Christian orthodoxy, wrote in The City of God, “there have been discovered and perfected, by the natural genius of man, innumerable arts and skills which minister not only to the necessities of life but also to human enjoyment.” Augustine recognized the “astonishing achievements” that had taken place in cloth-making, navigation, architecture, agriculture, ceramics, medicine, weaponry and fortification, animal husbandry, and food preparation; in mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy; as well as in language, writing, music, theater, painting, and sculpture. But he emphasized again that “in saying this, of course, I am thinking only of the nature of the human mind as a glory of this mortal life, not of faith and the way of truth that leads to eternal life… And, remember, all these favors taken together are but the fragmentary solace allowed us in a life condemned to misery.”⁵

⁵ St. Augustine, The City of God (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1958), pp. 526, 527.
David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention, Penguin Books, 1999 (originally 1997), pages 11-12.

Note that Augustine wrote The City of God in 426 AD, meaning that even 1600 years ago, they had already made colossal advances. The prejudice that we have, given our scientific training, is utterly misleading. Rather than being blinded by Biblical explanations of how the world came to be, Augustine lauded these scientific advancements. We think of Thomas Edison and the lightbulb, rather than, “Let there be light.”

There are various levels of empirical and artisanal knowledge. In cooking, we rarely worry about molecules that make up ingredients. All these daily life pillars Augustine lists cannot be overlooked, even as we unlock the submicroscopic world of quantum mechanics.

The Interconnectedness of Everything and How It Should Influence Our Thinking

Max Weber, considered to be the father of modern sociology alongside Émile Durkheim, wrote a classic of economic history, General Economic History (German: Wirtschaftsgeschichte).

Weber concludes chapter 25 (“Free Wholesale Trade”) with:

The railway is the most revolutionary instrumentality known to history, for economic life in general and not merely for commerce, but the railway was dependent on the age of iron; and it also like so many other things, was the plaything of princely and courtier interests.
Max Weber, General Economic History, Collier Books, Third Printing, 1966, page 221.

Zooming out you may intuit that these narrow gauge explanations are inadequate but much better than nothing. We are faced with the problem of connecting railroads and the Iron Age to larger transformations from which these railroads were born.

Your high school history book might mention Abraham Darby III; to quote Wikipedia:

He built the largest cast iron structure of his era: the first cast-iron bridge ever built, as a crossing over the Severn near Coalbrookdale. The bridge made it possible for the village of Ironbridge to grow up around it, with the area being subsequently named Ironbridge Gorge.

He was the third of four men of the same name, all English ironmasters, from several generations of a Quaker family that played a pivotal role in the Industrial Revolution. Without James Watt, there would be no steam engine; without which, there would be no railroad. Watt in turn improved upon the Newcomen atmospheric engine, while consulting other scientists.

Despite the brilliance of Watt’s engine, however, without the financial backing of Matthew Boulton, it might have been a failure.

If you read Watt and Boulton’s correspondence, Watt is always thinking locally, whereas Boulton is already talking about selling the invention globally. This is the ecosystem in which Weber’s economic observations reside.

Weber leads up to the point of the importance of railroads by discussing the evolution of land transport.

Land transport also remained as before. The post produced no change; it merely forwarded letters and small packages, but did not concern itself with large scale production, which was decisive for economic life.

Only the roads underwent an extraordinary improvement, through the construction of turnpikes. In this the French government under Sully took the lead, while England leased the roads to private enterprisers who collected tolls for their use. The building of the turnpikes wrought a revolution in commercial life comparable to no other before the appearance of the railways. There is no comparison between the present density of road traffic and that of this period. In 1793, 70,000 horses went through the little town of Lüneburg while as late as 1846 only 40,000 were used in freight transport in all Germany. The costs of land carriage amounted to ten or twenty times the freight on the railways at a later time, and were three to four times as high as the charges for inland shipping at the same period. A half billion ton-kilometers was the highest figure for transportation for the movement on land in Germany, while in 1913, 67 billions were carried on the railroads.
Max Weber, General Economic History, Collier Books, Third Printing, 1966, page 221.

Weber also connects railroads with the atmosphere of speculation:

Such speculation underwent an enormous expansion with the building of railroads; these provided the paper which first unchained the speculative urge. Under the head of goods, grains, and a few colonial products available in large volume, and then other goods, were drawn into the circle of exchange speculation during the 19th century.
Max Weber, General Economic History, Collier Books, Third Printing, 1966, page 219-220.

Everything is connected to everything else, and without realizing this truth and sensing the underlying transformations, you cannot get a clear signal from history.