The idea of civilization is that it's peaceful and fair but in practice it only means there are systems in place that pay lip service to peaceful and fair. What actual civilization will eventually be is reciprocity - no one left behind, as already actually attained by ancient civilizations, and what we have now will be called something derogatory, as deserved.
Since my last comment on the bad-application of the term 'nomadism' for hunter-gatherers (especially in Australia) where I mention scale as a factor in the misapplication...
—I've been thinking more about __scale__ as a informing condition (as opposed to a definitional stance) on these bounds.
"We can distinguish between tightly-coupled civilizational ecosystems and loosely-coupled civilizational ecosystems."
To which, I suggest, we can add "widely-coupled" as an orthogonal axis of description.
Consider a continent, like Australia, as a un-dense 'city'.
In which a period of >35, 000 years forms a population equivalent to a major city. Even if we think of it as thinly-connecting cultural processing power (crudely think of it). Millennia of stability (even if here is a continual drying out and increasing desert like conditions) process and survive it did.
Where the 'streets' cross the continent, with ceremony scattered but binding, languages are spoken by outsiders, and people share an address on the same highway in ceremony and responsibilities, but orthogonal to local roads, and their more profane home ranges and feuds. The highways of cross-insurance exchanges and high church "songlines" crisscross the growing deserts, but even so, on this large continental scale, information flows, song=country is 'traded' more than goods that cities hoard and measure and trade. Cities facilitate material complexification (ecology into economy), and it might be best to see this city-defined civilisation as a gastrulation of a more widely spaced 'civilization' (that we have no term for except the 'world') of which cities are an outcome, a "meta-civiilsing process" which cities materialize… allowing economy to arise out of the social learning created social capital of Homo species whose first population could only expand by living in many more landscapes and niches than even Africa provided.
The country is an outgrowth of the city, and the city is a consolidating intensity of the shared wilderness experience of Homo sapiens.
Originarily we shared meals as we traded words, but traded song before we exchanged goods. Economics begins in not so much in ecology but in boasting about once place in the world of one's means. And getting served.
We have trouble seeing the city outside of the city. That civilization predates the city, or at least the notion of the barbarian does. Those outside the discourse of our success, i.e. the "wildly-uncoupled" pole of the suggested orthogonal dimension in contrast to "widely coupled"
This is a really interesting idea. Do you have anything in mind to distinguish loosely-coupled social formations from widely-coupled social formations? I can think of ways, but I wonder if you had a particular criterion in mind.
Also, widely-coupled social formations imply their complement, narrowly-coupled social formations, and here I think the intuition behind the term of clearer.
Cutting the epic poetry out of it... if we take the idea of a city being a certain population, and take away the geographic intensity, and then swap that spatially-based population with temporal populations, we will have a city in time, i.e. a problem solving machine of lower intensity, with high attrition of ideas, methods. It would require more units of memory per solution, to get anything like how benefits accrue economically and culturally, in invention and innovation, in cities, as well as keep the memory alive.
This "widely-coupled" exchange of social learning, would require a certain stability to make up for the lack of geographic intensity of a city. Much of the 'energy' of the communications would have to be taken up in maintaining the stability of the entire system (this is why I think memory if a good measure of 'civilizations/cultures/worlds' as it subsumes energy & time & geographic intensities. Australia, I put it forward, would provide an example of this given its general 'isolation', with Tasmania as a further isolation. (Some Jared Diamond here, plus others)
It would be interesting to hit up AI to see if these analogies have been mapped in anthropology, I know I have re-iterated but extended some argument from there, with "a continent as a city through time' being the addition. (Anthropologist might not have moved on to look at meta-population ideas of ecology yet, given as they are to the hero's journey of a graduate student in the wilds of some barbarian tribe to which they then suffer Stockholm syndrome.)(Henrich's WEIRD critique is a start of course... I am not well read up on anthropology outside of the local politics of Australia). Sociology of course is still stuck in the city of our stratified societies.
Big history is big.
might do that AI search later today, after AI maps that social learning to which this idea of the "continent as city" analogy is an outcome,
The idea of civilization is that it's peaceful and fair but in practice it only means there are systems in place that pay lip service to peaceful and fair. What actual civilization will eventually be is reciprocity - no one left behind, as already actually attained by ancient civilizations, and what we have now will be called something derogatory, as deserved.
Since my last comment on the bad-application of the term 'nomadism' for hunter-gatherers (especially in Australia) where I mention scale as a factor in the misapplication...
https://geopolicraticus.substack.com/p/the-upper-bound-of-hunter-gatherers/comment/114615870
—I've been thinking more about __scale__ as a informing condition (as opposed to a definitional stance) on these bounds.
"We can distinguish between tightly-coupled civilizational ecosystems and loosely-coupled civilizational ecosystems."
To which, I suggest, we can add "widely-coupled" as an orthogonal axis of description.
Consider a continent, like Australia, as a un-dense 'city'.
In which a period of >35, 000 years forms a population equivalent to a major city. Even if we think of it as thinly-connecting cultural processing power (crudely think of it). Millennia of stability (even if here is a continual drying out and increasing desert like conditions) process and survive it did.
Where the 'streets' cross the continent, with ceremony scattered but binding, languages are spoken by outsiders, and people share an address on the same highway in ceremony and responsibilities, but orthogonal to local roads, and their more profane home ranges and feuds. The highways of cross-insurance exchanges and high church "songlines" crisscross the growing deserts, but even so, on this large continental scale, information flows, song=country is 'traded' more than goods that cities hoard and measure and trade. Cities facilitate material complexification (ecology into economy), and it might be best to see this city-defined civilisation as a gastrulation of a more widely spaced 'civilization' (that we have no term for except the 'world') of which cities are an outcome, a "meta-civiilsing process" which cities materialize… allowing economy to arise out of the social learning created social capital of Homo species whose first population could only expand by living in many more landscapes and niches than even Africa provided.
The country is an outgrowth of the city, and the city is a consolidating intensity of the shared wilderness experience of Homo sapiens.
Originarily we shared meals as we traded words, but traded song before we exchanged goods. Economics begins in not so much in ecology but in boasting about once place in the world of one's means. And getting served.
We have trouble seeing the city outside of the city. That civilization predates the city, or at least the notion of the barbarian does. Those outside the discourse of our success, i.e. the "wildly-uncoupled" pole of the suggested orthogonal dimension in contrast to "widely coupled"
See also https://songlines.nma.gov.au/tjanpi
This is a really interesting idea. Do you have anything in mind to distinguish loosely-coupled social formations from widely-coupled social formations? I can think of ways, but I wonder if you had a particular criterion in mind.
Also, widely-coupled social formations imply their complement, narrowly-coupled social formations, and here I think the intuition behind the term of clearer.
Cutting the epic poetry out of it... if we take the idea of a city being a certain population, and take away the geographic intensity, and then swap that spatially-based population with temporal populations, we will have a city in time, i.e. a problem solving machine of lower intensity, with high attrition of ideas, methods. It would require more units of memory per solution, to get anything like how benefits accrue economically and culturally, in invention and innovation, in cities, as well as keep the memory alive.
This "widely-coupled" exchange of social learning, would require a certain stability to make up for the lack of geographic intensity of a city. Much of the 'energy' of the communications would have to be taken up in maintaining the stability of the entire system (this is why I think memory if a good measure of 'civilizations/cultures/worlds' as it subsumes energy & time & geographic intensities. Australia, I put it forward, would provide an example of this given its general 'isolation', with Tasmania as a further isolation. (Some Jared Diamond here, plus others)
It would be interesting to hit up AI to see if these analogies have been mapped in anthropology, I know I have re-iterated but extended some argument from there, with "a continent as a city through time' being the addition. (Anthropologist might not have moved on to look at meta-population ideas of ecology yet, given as they are to the hero's journey of a graduate student in the wilds of some barbarian tribe to which they then suffer Stockholm syndrome.)(Henrich's WEIRD critique is a start of course... I am not well read up on anthropology outside of the local politics of Australia). Sociology of course is still stuck in the city of our stratified societies.
Big history is big.
might do that AI search later today, after AI maps that social learning to which this idea of the "continent as city" analogy is an outcome,
an empire is a conscious world-building example of a meta-population, a civilisation is a an unconscious worlding example of a meta-population
Nicely and succinctly put.