Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.
Mark Twin
Your days are short here; this is the last of your springs. And now in the serenity and quiet of this lovely place, touch the depths of truth, feel the hem of Heaven. You will go away with old, good friends. And don’t forget when you leave why you came.
Adlai Stevenson II
Joshua Raymond’s Heaven
Joshua Raymond had beaten cancer twice, first on his skin and later his prostrate. His cousin Johnny had not been so lucky, he died at ten from leukemia, They had been close and he even went to Johnny funeral, he remembered sitting near the casket and just looking at his playmate. He looked so peaceful, and yet different, he could not say why, but he just looked different. He had seen him later in dreams, always saying he was okay, his mother had explained everything to him, but there was only so much a ten year old could understand. He thought of Johnny from time to time, especially when he had his cancer diagnoses. But he had overcome them and at eighty one was feeling well, except he could not sleep well at night, thus he took long afternoon naps. He would sit looking out a window at the streets below his apartment and think of things, like his old dogs and the old Siamese cat he use to have. He thought of his younger days and the so many that had now passed on. One New Year’s Day he been over at his son’s house and decided to take a nap before dinner. When the family sent his little grandchild out to wake him the young boy returned to the kitchen and said that grandpap would no wake up. Joshua Raymond now belonged to the ages.
Joshua had laid down and just as he fell asleep, he saw a young man standing over him, the guy said his name was Paul and he told Joshua to come with him. When Joshua got up he looked back as saw himself laying on the couch, looking much as Johnny did in the casket. He watched his grandson come out and try to wake him and heard the commotion and tears that followed. Paul told him all would be fine and led him out of the house to a grand limousine parked in front. Paul opened the door and Joshua got in, and they rode up a silver stairway into the clouds. Paul said he was taking him straight to the Great Hall and everything would be explained to him there.
They soon pulled in front a great gate, it looked like a silver gate encrusted with pearls, and a majestic looking woman motioned them in. Soon he saw the Great Hall, it looked like Hampton Court in England, which he had visited many years ago, or some other grand building of those times. He noticed two people, an older man and a young woman, sitting on a bench outside of the hall, they looked sorrowful and concerned. Then they pulled up to the grand doors. The doors were golden and a great relief of angles and trees and other fantastic creatures were engraved into them. Paul escorted them through the opening doors and there to greet him were family and friends that had all died before him. Johnny came running up and told him he had taken a long time to get here, Joshua just laughed at that. Johnny and Paul took him around the Great Hall, which seemed endless, to the grand libraries and lecture halls, then to the many stages and other places were those there gathered. Every book that had ever been written was in the libraries, in the lecture halls you could hear debates and lectures from all the great thinkers of all time. The greats of screen and stage all performed in the theaters along with all of the great singers and musicians. You could walk along and speak with Winston Churchill, Nelson Madelia, or Aristotle or even St. Paul. You could befriend Henry VIII or George Washington,, one could see and speak with the great people of history and those who lived their lives in the eternal land of obscurity. He saw people who he did not think would have made it here, but he was told Heaven was much bigger than anyone thought and Hell was much smaller.
After many reunions and seeking out some he had always wanted to talk to, his parents pulled him aside and told him they were taking him to the place he was to abide in, but he could return to the Hall anytime he pleased. They walked out of the Hall and along a path into the great forest that surrounded the place. Joshua noticed he did not get winded or tired and could walk at the pace he had when he was a young man. They talked about so much as they walked, about his childhood and all of the great and not so great times that had passed between them. They then walked up a small hill and there Joshua saw a place he had known and lived for many years, his grandfather’s house. The two story house with the giant covered porch in front loomed over the horizon, not in the old city he had visited as a child, but as his father said, the old pasture the old couple had grown up in the West Virginia. There on the porch , was the giant swing that he remembered and there sat grandad and grandma sitting the the old rockers that he remembered playing in as a child. But his grandparents, Alfred and Gertrude Raymond did not look like the old couple he had known, but like the old pictures they had of each other that sat upon the mantle of the giant fireplace in the living room. As they came near he heard his grandfather call out.
“Calvin, bring up Elenore and young Josh,” the old guy yelled, ” been awhile since you’all been around, come set a spell.”
“Be right there , dad, ” Alfred retuned, ” Josh just got here, and me and Elenore been visiting with Sue and Frank.”
Joshua rushed up the stairs and sat in the big swing as he parents took their seats on two of the various chairs that were around. His grandmother always kept a lot of chairs on the porch, so she did to have to turn anyone away. They sat and talked for what seemed like hours, about all kinds of things. Joshua just felt so happy, happier that he had ever felt. See he had been struggling with depression for many years, and hid it very well. many times he would be overcome with feelings of sadness, remorse, and regret, regret was the hardest to deal with, and he could function very well though all of those times. He had dealt with the black cloud of depression from the time he was twelve, when the nightmares and terrors of the the dream world began. He was the perfect example of the old saying, that the biggest lie in America was, “I’m fine.” (or good, no problem, doing OK) He had spent his life living as a functioning depressant, and did it very well. He never felt part of life, it was liking watching a long TV show that he was part of but not. At times he felt he was in the ocean, just few yards from the beach. Everyone was on the beach, but he could not reach them, as every time he tried the waves pulled him back. But that was not the worse time, the worse was when he felt he had entered a long, black canyon. It was a long dark road as the canyon had one thousand foot black granite walls and the path was only two or three yards wide. Sharpe rocks were all around and one could easily stumble, causing wounds that never really healed. You could not turn back, and it seemed to go on forever, into eternity. He would stumbled in that canyon sometimes for weeks, once it was close to three months. He could feel himself slipping into that dreaded path, but he could not avoid it, but that was inside him. Outside whether in the water or in the canyon, he functioned well in society, nobody ever knew his pain.
He actually liked being alone, he was not a people person. he had been married, his family manipulated him into a marriage with one woman they felt was good for him. They had a long marriage as he just never tried to end things, but many times wish he would, but it was loveless and after a while became sexless. They had two kids, who he loved dearly, but he came to find his wife annoying and basically tolerated her for years. About twenty years ago she was killed in an auto accident, she was playing a game on her phone while driving and got distracted by it and ran into a bridge abutment. He had seen her earlier, but she was with her friends and they said little, there was just nothing between them anymore. He had a few relationships with some women he knew in high school and one from college, but they were never serious as all of them saw no point in marriage anymore. The the women were now in Heaven and Joshua did meet them and spoke for a while, just reliving old times.
He spent a long time on the porch with his grandparents, just sitting and visiting. Paul returned and told him he was going to take him to his place in Heaven. They walked down the hill, but not back to the Great Hall, but into the forest that surround his grandparents house. His grandfather told him to come back and visit and Joshua said he would do just that. He walked with Paul for what seemed to be thirty or forty minutes unit the came to a clearing in the trees. There he saw something that took him back to his childhood days when he visited his aunt outside of Pittsburgh. There in the clearing was a small water fall, lapping over a small cave, only about a foot high, into a pond that just wandered back into the trees. There he saw an old tree, felled over, just like the one he use to sit on when he came to this place as a child, it even had the partial stump next to it. He sat down and put his back on the tree and remembered the hours he spent in that place as a child. They were some of the happiest times of his life, just sitting there alone in the forest, listening to the water fall and watching the days go by. Paul told him to look at the stump and think of a book, and Joshua did just that. Suddenly the book appeared, and when he picked it up, a notebook appeared next to it.
“Now open the book, and think of something you would want opt write down” Paul whispered.
Joshua did that, and whatever he thought appeared in the notebook, Paul continued, “If you want to read a book, or journal, or article, just think of it, it will appear on the stump, it can even give you computer stuff. Whenever you wish to write down or remember, just think of it and the notebook will record it. It has unlimited pages and will take you to any note you ever write, just by thinking of it.”
“So anything I wish to read, I just have to think of it and it will appear, and notes will as well?” Joshua asked in amazement and excitement.
Then the bushes rustled, and out popped his two old dogs and his old cat. The dogs, Calvin and Zion, were your typical mutts, but they were not the old sick ones he long ago had parted with, but they were young again, just as he was. His old Siamese cat, Brandy, walked up to his and stretched out on the tree just behind him, the dogs curled up around his feet. Paul left and Joshua picked up a book and began reading as the dogs would chase after leaves and curl up by his side. The cat would dash around a bit, and then just curled up on the tree. Paul explained he could stay here as long as he wanted, and could leave anytime to visit anywhere, and all would be here whenever he returned.
For a long while, he lost track of time, Joshua read his book and took notes. After finishing one book, he got another, a history of Anglo-Saxon England, which he read for a while then played with the dogs and the cat cat for a while. He was alone and loving it, soon he just laid back and watched the trees sway and the leaves swirl. He listened to waterfall bubble and swish down into the pond and laid there feeling more happy than he ever had been, this was Heaven to him. as he sat in the grass, he heard footsteps and voices coming towards him. He was not afraid, but curious, then two figures came into the clearing. There was two two men, one was a tall Native American the other a man who stood no higher that a person’s knee. The man introduced himself, he was Kanati, a Cherokee, he said he was their first chief and the small man was one of the Nunne’hi, small Native American spirits much like a fairy.
“So you have come to sit and live in this spot, I call it galosgv amoy, because of the little waterfall, you can call it what you wish,” Kanati said.
Joshua smiled and responded, “Don’t really got a name, maybe I could use yours, or what is your word for home?”
Kanati laughed , “Ownvsv, yes, that would be good for you.”
Joshua thought a minute then smiled, “Got an idea, just came to, I call it Pretannik Thwait, old Celt name, means homestead clearing, that works.”
Kanati agreed and Joshua made a sign with the name on it, and placed it on a tree, They spoke for a while, he told Joshua the tales of the Cherokee and how he hunted to forest when it was only Cherokee who lived in them. Or at least it seemed that way, he loved to walk in the forest for days, just him and his little spirit friend. He told how a group of white men came from the sea, in boats with dragon heads and many colored sails. How he marveled at their blond hair and blue eyes, they were warriors, but tired of war. They also loved to wander the forest too, and soon became part of the Cherokee nation, but that was after Kanati left for this land. Joshua had no idea how long he stayed but they talked and became friends. Soon Kanati said he was moving on, as he loved to just wander and walk in the woods. Joshua told him he was welcome back anytime, and Kankati said he would return. No time was set, it was a moot point, time was no longer a thing anyone even thought of in this place.
Later as he was sitting there another person came by, the old frontiersman and America’s first celebrity, Davy Crockett. Like Kanati, Crockett also loved to wander though the wood for long periods, just looking for what one could see. Joshua hailed to old woodsman and they sat around and just talked. Davy told all of his old tales, and spent a long time telling of his falling out with Andrew Jackson.
Davy looked off and began, “It all came down to the plantations and money being made from them. You know till old Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin, the west, or at least what we called the west, was a place for small farmers ,and the land speculators that preyed on them. Not too many went into the deep South, it was too hot and the land was hard to farm. At first, old Oglethorpe in Georgia told them to keep the plantations out, but they did not listen, the plantation people, they was a real greedy bunch. forced out the little guys in Georgia. But after the cotton gin and the boom in cotton, they got like a train coming down the tracks. Cotton made them move into the deep South and keep moving west as the cotton was hard on the land. The plantations with their slaves forced the Indians out, and played hell with anyone who got in their way. I went to Texas hoping to find a spot where I could be alone, but ended up at the Alamo. Was a great fight though, old Santa Anna would been better off just surrounding us and going after Houston, but he was determined to wipe all of us out. Cost him the end.”
Joshua and Crocket relived many more tales and spoke long about how they loved being alone. Then like Kanati, Crockett left and went back to wandering, it just what he does. Said he would be back, sometime. Joshua spent his time in the clearing, or wandering the forest, with visits to his grandparents and the Great Hall, whenever he was moved to do such. He lost track of how many books he read, and loved to hear lectures and songs at the Great Hall. he met many other people from history, some famous, but most, like him had lived in the eternal community of obscurity. He heard Caruso and John Lennon sing, laughed at Jackie Gleason and George Carlin, and was enthralled by lectures by Albert Einstein and Thomas More. He even visited the two people he saw sitting on the bench outside of the Great Hall. He learned their names, Edward and Michelle Clark, they had been serial killers and had repented and were given the chance to come into the Great Hall. But they did not feel they should so they just sat outside and wondered why they had been forgiven. Joshua’s dad said it was because they could not believe that forgiveness was what power and glory was.
Joshua even visited the home of He Who Is in the great celestial palace on top of the great mountain overlooking all of Heaven, and was awestruck by the place. He saw George Washington sitting in the main throne room, given a place of honor because he had done what almost no human had, walked away from absolute power. He spoke with a very friendly old guy, who looked like an old medieval English king. They spoke for a long time, and Joshua asked which king he was.
“I am who I am,” was his reply.
Joshua expressed surprise and was going to say he did not look like God, but God said he had no form and looked like whatever one though he should. He met angles and went to Sorcerer’s City and marveled at the sights there. He visited the magic realms of both the witches and wizards and found the great River of Time. But mostly he just stayed in his clearing and read and played with the dogs and the cat. He was at home, and he loved his home, better than any one he had in life. Then one day he heard a familiar voice.
“Dad?” a young man queried.
Joshua looked up and straight into his son’s face. he exclaimed, “Daniel, how did you get here, I mean you were young.”
Daniel smiled and responded, “Well when you died I was, but I lived to be eighty nine.”
The two of them laughed, and hugged, and had a great reunion. Daniel took Joshua back to meet all the new people who had come to this place, so much time had passed. But time was a moot point. Here it had no meaning. It just passed, and n0obodyu cared or bothered to keep track of it.
The more powerful the person you meet, the more surprising it is to find out they’re just making it up, just like the rest of us.” Sam Conniff Allende
The Lizard Planet Bacho and its moons
This is the tale of Donna Wilson, an Earth person who rode with a Federation force that policed the outer rim and fought the Lizard Pirates. It was given to me because of our friendship and she told me to never tell where she was. So her is her tale.
It is said that there are ten rules in the interstellar space of the Milky Way, and the first six is not to piss off the Allyonians, the other four refer to the first six. A long time ago the lizard people did just that, their twelve planet confederation under the Emperor Calitine had tried to conquer all the galaxy in the days first days that they and the Allyonians achieved interstellar travel. They had conquered several of the dog and dolphin people’s planets when they ran into the Allyonians at the Battle of Ruith Dearc, located at the confluence of what the Earth people call the Scutum-Crux and Sagittarius spirals of the Milky Way. The lizard army was decimated and the Allyonians went on the destroy eleven of the twelve lizard planets, sending the populations back into a stone age existence. Only on the lizard planet Bacho, with it two large moons, did any semblance of advance technology survive. The lizard people there gave up the dream of empire and created what would be called a Pirate kingdom of raiders and soldiers looking to fight and prove themselves as warriors against any foe they could find. Like the Vikings of Earth, they raided and caused some havoc, usually in the outer rim, and were more of a pest than a problem.
The Bachoians had been raiding in the out rim of the galaxy, with little success and carefully avoiding the Allyonians, but they now seemed focused on the ape planet Ruith Dearc . The Allyonians ignored their usual combat forays, in which up to three Bachoians warriors would land on a planet and challenge those they considered worthy of fighting, but now it was different. It looked as if they were sending a force that intend to occupy the planet, maybe their old dream of empire had been revived. To see if this was true, the Allyonians did not send a formal army, but one of its unofficial forces. These were bands of former or soldiers taking a break from formal service that roamed about seeking adventure or doing minor research or military objectives. The most famous of these was the one called El Lobo y la Morsa, retired Allyonian commander C. David Kingston and his second in command Jonathan Nicks. To look in to this situation, one that the Allyonians regarded as piracy, they sent out another one of these groups, led by Allyonian Alyson Jernigan and her second in command, Dog person Katherine Simmons.
Traveling with the two was the dolphin person, Fern Lony, she was the navigator as the dolphin people were renown as the best navigators in the galaxy. Her large eyes and long fingers she could read the stars either by sight or by chart. She had been serving with Alyson for many years and like Alyson was not ready to retire from flying through space. She had been with Alyson since she had earned to rank of captain almost twenty years ago. Alyson had even commanded a starship, and held to rank of Commander, the highest rank one held outside of the Staff Council of the Imperial Allyonian Guard. Staff Council was a largely bureaucratic part of the guard that usually one moved to before retiring. Here one actually worked with the Emperor and performed a lot of ceremonial jobs with the Guard. Like Kingston, Alyson was not interested in that and wanted to keep flying, so she became want the Allyonians called a Brigand, an independent officer who was still part of the Guard, but no longer under the Guard. Brigands did research missions on planets, performed small military projects, and sometimes moved goods and people quietly across the galaxy, without going through all the official channels. When Alyson became a Brigand, Fern jumped at the chance to go with her, also not wishing to retire back to her planet and, as the dolphin people said, swim with the currents for the rest of time.
Katherine Simmons was a caption in the Canine Space Force, the interstellar arm of the dog people’s military. Dog people usually ran in single sex packs from the time they were ten, but Katherine was a lone wolf. In the matriarchal world of the dog people a small minority (about 10%) of the females, and an even smaller proportion (under 2%, in fact it is almost unheard of) of the males, did not join a pack and tended to roam alone for all of their lives. Katherine jumped at the chance to get out away from all civilization and just roam around on her own. She liked Alyson, and could put up with Fern, dog people are fun loving and usually have a hard tie with the uptight and very formal dolphin people. What was unusual about this group was it was rounded out with two humans, Wimoweh Sterling and Donna Wilson.
No humans, or as they were know in the Federation, sapiens, planet had achieved interstellar flight and were usually regarded as a lower species by the other groups. In the past sapiens that had been taken into space were either assigned to the Torberg, the great interstellar zoo, used in experiments, to train Allyonian soldiers, or made pets by the dog people and Allyonians. As it was now obvious the sapiens were getting close to interstellar flight, these practices were slowly going extinct, except for the Torborg, which still kept many sapiens on display. Wimy, as she was known as, and Donna had been made members of the Alien Affiliate Force, (the AAF) and under Alyson’s command when she decided to go out on her own, so she just took them with her. Wimy came from the planet Tara, the Allyonians called it Crunmullach, the more advanced sapien planet until a nuclear war pushed them back into a less technical age. Donna was from Earth, the Allyonians called it Gormuaine. They basically is did the grunt work on all the mission that Alyson accepted.
Alyson gathered her little band in the dining hall of the great space station, the Queen Freida III, one of the great dog queens, that was only a few light years from the planet Earth. She smiled as she surveyed her band, and proclaimed their next project.
“So we get to do some fighting,” she began, ” seems the lizard pirates on Bacho are planning something more than their usual displays of macho aggrandizement. Admiral Melton informed me it looks as if they are going to try and occupy the sapien planet Ruith Dearc, not far from me and Katherine’s homes on Aird and Gorm. Way out in the outer rim, a place me and Katherine know very well. As I believe you do as well, Fern.”
Fern looked up and smiled, “Yes I do, my home planet of Visage is not far from there. Most likely would be their next target if they are successful,”
“We got any restrictions?” Asked Katherine.
“No,” Alyson laughed, “we are to go there, determine if they are trying to occupy the planet and if they are, we are to take, as they say, appropriate action. I can even call on a Starship if I wish to.”
The three laughed, and expressed the hope that the lizard people were goin on the offensive as they all wished to do a little fighting. Especially Alyson, as all Allyoninas loved to fight, many of the Earth people in the AAF compared them to either the Spartans or the Apaches when it came to fighting. When Allyonian children turn six they are taken to the wilderness of their home planet and taught to live off the land, by the time they are eight, it said they are lethal, and by ten they are invincible. When they turn twelve, they are taken to a Great Alter where they have to slip by many other Allyoninas and steal a weapon from the alter and slip away without being caught. Their technology and weaponry make them the most dominate force in the galaxy, only their Honor Code, which they would die before violating, keeps them for making all other creatures slaves in the galaxy. As for Wimy and Donna, they knew better than to not go along with what the others said. Both looked forward to the project, but not with as much yearning for a battle.
The trip to the outer rim was non eventful. They had made it many times, Alyson was doing research on travel outside of the galaxy, where the wormholes did not extend very far. Space beyond the galaxy was different, like the cold when one went below zero, it just different. There was a stillness outside off the galaxy that was noticeable and at times unnerving. But they did discover there were solar systems and planets outside of all galaxies that moved around just like the galaxies did. But that was of no importance now, they had a bigger and more important object. Under the honor code of the Allyonians dominating another planet was not permitted. While they headed up the Federation of the Planets that governed the galaxy, they did not rule the galaxy. There were five groups of intelligent creatures, the lizard people, the dolphin people, the dog people, the sapiens, and the cat people, or the Allyonians. When the Allyoninas achieved interstellar flight they had united all twelve of their planets into one empire and all called themselves, Allyonians, from first of the group to achieve interstellar flight. They were under the Allyonian Emperor and the great Counsel of Allyon. In the dog and dolphin planets, they were autonomous and under a grand counsel that regulated interstellar matters. The lizard planets were different, in the beginning the fist planet to achieve interstellar flight, Dimetron, conquered the other lizard planets then tried to bring the entire galaxy under their rule. They were defeated by the Allyonians and Dimetron was destroyed, with its population totally exterminated. Of the other eleven planets, ten were hit hard enough that their populations were rendered to a stone age existence, only Bacho, far out on the outer rim, did not face total destruction. They had been doing their warrior thing for a while, but now it seemed they intended to restore the old Dimetron Empire.
Katherine slipped the craft unnoticed past some of the lizard patrols and stationed them above the Bacho system. The clocking device camouflaged them from the lizard space ships, crafts that looked like a snake with wings. The snakehead front looked out place when compared to the sleek body and the wings looked like lizard feet, nothing like the cylindric shaped Allyonian craft. Dog crafts looked like a cigar shaped vassal while the dolphin crafts resembled a saucer. Katherine preferred the Allyonian craft as it was more manurable of any thing she had ever flown. Alyson called Wimy and Donna over in front to a large consol. As they looked down on Bacho and its two large moons, they were given their orders.
“Sargent Sterling,” Alyson began addressing Wimy in a formal tone, “you take your probe and go down to the planet, get yourself into the palace and see what these creatures are up to, keep me informed of anything. Sargent Wilson, you get your probe and check out the moons, look for a starship, It will be a big triangular ship, with the bridge located at the back on top of the engines. That is their classic design, but keep an eye out for any large craft. We got some intelligence that they were building a large craft near one of their moons, so see if you can confirm this.”
Alyson turned to Fern and Katherine and told them to go to the sapien planet of Ruith Dearc and see if the lizard people had established a base there. If they had she she informed them that they could get a few recruits from their home planets to assist in dislodging the pirates from the planet. Katherine and Fern quickly used their camouflage devices to disguise themselves as humans and left in a shuttle. Wimy and Donna sat down at the consul and put on the helmets that were hooked just above their seats. they placed their hands in the control bars and lunched the probes.
The probes were small, oblong cylinders that allowed one to explore a place with out going there physically. Inside the helmets one’s brain was connected to the probe and one could see, hear or taste anything on a planet without actually being on the planet. With the control bars one could feel whatever one touched or sensed as well. Another feature of the small device was it allowed one to project a hologram of oneself, which they would not do on this mission. They were ingenuous devices that had a cloaking device that made the invisible, perfect for studying nature and spying. It also was the safest way to observe and report, and the two women were experts at handling them. Wimy zoomed done to the planet and quickly located the main headquarter of the lizard people. Meanwhile Donna began circling the two moons looking for nay suspicious craft or base.
On Ruith Dearc Katherine and Fern quietly mingled with the population and collected very disturbing news. The lizard people had landed there and set up a base in a far northern part of the largest continent. High on a mountain they had constructed a rather formidable defensive position that could be quickly converted to a launching pad for and offensive action. The sapiens were in a bronze age state and their weapons would be useless against the lizards. So far they had only been raiding, hoping to cower the population by fear, but instead the sapiens here were only more determined to oppose them. Both Fern and Katherine found that admirable. The raids by the lizards were increasing in frequency and cruelty as they looked to crush any opposition. While doing this they were ambushed by a lizard patrol. They were in a group of about twenty sapiens when the lizards descended upon them, and the lizards quickly killed the ten guard and moved on the take care of the rest. Katherine would have none of this, she boldly rushed the lizards, attacking the leader, who at first laughed at the female. He stopped laughing when she extend the claws that were at the ends of each of her fingers and drove them deep into his neck. He screamed in pain as Fern whipped out her weapon, a rapid fire laser, and took out at least six with in a few minutes. Katherine finished the leader off the remaining sapiens took a care of the three or four lizards that survived the duo’s attack.
In the melee, the camo devices had been turned off and their identities were reveled. The sapiens were particularly impressed by Katherine’s use of her tail, with its sharp claw on the end, in battle. One of the most classic moves in hand to hand fighting in the canine world is wrapping ones tail around the opponents throat and ripping the neck with a swirling motion of the tail. It is how she had killed the leader, and the sapiens asked them to stay and help expel the lizards. Katherine said they would help, but had to leave at present to get some reinforcements. She told them to get the word out to do nothing until she return, the sapiens agreed and the pair returned to the craft. They told Alyson what had happened, she was a little jealous that they had had battle. They quickly sent messages to their home planets to get some back up, they would get ten warriors from each, enough to reduce the fort. Alyson told Katherine she and Fern would lead the group on the planet and she and the two sapiens on board would take care of any lizard reinforcements.
While Fern and Katherine were on the planet, Donna and Wimy had made discoveries as well. Donna found the new Lizard starship, named Dimetron after the old empire. It was a large craft in the shape of an isosceles triangle. The bridge sat just over the engines in the rea ands was a large black rectangular box structure that did not look as if it belonged their. The lizards had grown so arrogant they made little attempts to hide the craft and were now in the process of manning it. Donna learned that the top lizard admiral, Dour Gartung, a male who had long championed the return of the old lizard empire was in charge and would be leading the invasion. Wimy had infiltrated the headquarters of the lizards and listened to their plans. Gartung went over the planned invasion an carefully detailed each and every regiments objectives. He emphasized that the lizard science had advance in every way since the old empire’s fall, close to one thousand years ago, that he believed they were superior to all of the forces that could be arrayed against them. He smugly said the sapien planet was just a dry run, they would shrike the dolphin then the dog planets next. he believed the Allyonians would moat likely just surrender out of awe and fear of the new lizard superiority. He ended the meeting with a toast to the new lizard ascendancy and the victory that he assured all would soon be at hand. The lizard king just sat and smiled in approval over all the words that were stated. None believed that anything stood in their way, after all their scientist had been working and advancing knowledge for one thousand years. Sadly, they forgot the Allyonians had done the same.
The group gathered in the ir craft and Alyson excitingly told them wat was next, and the part each of them was to play. For Katherine and Fern, they would lead the thirty warriors back to Ruith Dearc and take out the lizard base. Alyson said that this act of piracy, which such attempts of conquest were called by the Federation, would not be tolerated. They would meet their sapien allies at a predetermined location and attack the base in force. A small Allyonian ship would provide the artillery they would need and the volunteers, ten form each planet, would lead the sapiens in the attack on the base. After it was reduced, any lizard survivors would be turned over the the sapiens for whatever punishment they deemed sufficient. Alyson would take Wimy and Donna and confront the starship, with an Allyonian starship discreetly behind the lizard ship. They split up and moved to their positions either on the planet or directly in the path of the lizard craft.
On the planet Katherine addressed her volunteers and the sapien warriors. She stood on a hill in front of the assembled body resplendent in her blue uniform that bore the gold braids of a captain, her rank in the Canine Space force before she became a brigand. Fern stood next to her in the gray skin tight uniform of the Dolphin Space Force, proudly wearing her captain braid. The plan was simple, they had learned from the sapiens that the lizards kept their ammunition supplies in a cave under their base, which was accessible by an underground spring. Since the dolphin people had the ability to swim underwater for long periods without coming up for air, Fern would lead her ten compatriots from an entrance of the spring into the cave and destroy the supplies. Katherine directed the pilot of the Allyonian ship to hit the heavy defenses of the base while she led the dog people to one of the towers guarding the entrance of the base. Her friend Captain Jarmid, an Allyonian lieutenant, would lead the Allyoninas against the other tower, The sapiens would rush the gate and Katherine felt that they could overrun the forces and quickly take the entire base. Fern’s group quickly moved through the water to the cave where the supplies were, not only the ammunition, but most of the food supplies of the lizards were there. They quickly and silently took out the guard and set three explosives to destroy the cave. Just as they emerged back at the starting point the explosives went off, and the Allyonian ship hit the heavy defenses of the base, rendering all useless. Katherine and the captain moved against the towers in a vicious and brutal attack the overcame the lizards with a devastating blow. The sapiens rushed the gate and swarmed into the base cleaning up any opposition to the attack. After it was over, only seven lizards survived, one was the base commander. He demanded to be taken into custody, but Katherine laughed at him and said that pirates got no such justice. She turned them over to the sapiens who beheaded all the survivors.
After it was over the sapiens asked Katherine if the group would stay, she replied, ” No, but one day when you figure out how to fly among the stars, our people and your people will meet again.”
“That will be a glorious day,” proclaimed the leader of the sapiens as Katherine and Fern lead their group away.
During the attack Allyson placed the Callech directly in front of the lizard starship. She could see both the Admiral and the lizard King standing on the bridge at the rear of the ship. She hailed the ship on the screen of communication device and looked into the eyes of her enemies.
“According top the laws of the Federation, what you are engaging in, congest, is an act of piracy, I demand you turn around and cease this insanity,” She announced to the smug dismissal of both of the lizard leaders.
“Piracy?” the lizard king replied in a dismissive tone, “no, we are claiming out right to rule this galaxy. We were the first to achieve interstellar flight, so it is our right. Besides, you Allyonians already conquered and enslaved the galaxy, we are setting it free.”
Then Admiral Gartung injected, “So you really think your tiny fighter craft can stop our great starship, it is the most powerful one in the galaxy, and we are invincible.”
Alyson smiled and then defiantly answered, “Well, my forces have already reduced your base, and it is not me you should worry about, it the Allyonian Flagship just behind you.”
Just then the Allyonian Flagship, Allyon, decloaked reveling the leading starship in the Federation fleet. It was white with its large rectangular body coming to a round point in front where the bridge was. Just under the bridge was two wings parallel to the two large wings in the rear, both looking like of a eagle closing in on its prey. Along the sides were the emblems of Allyon, the Canine planets and Dolphin planets. It was commanded by Admiral Meville, a long time friend of Allyson. He had served with her husband for years and they all had grown up on Aird, the Allyonian planet in the outer rim. both his and her son had participated in the attack led by Katherine. Again Alyson demanded the surrender of the starship. Admiral Gartung responded by firing on both the Allyonian crafts.
As this was goin on, Wimy and Danna were standing at attention behind Alyson. Alyson stood their resplendent in her purple uniform of the Allyonian Guard. Her shoulder glistened with the braids of a Commander, her rank in the Guard and her chest sparkled with the medals she had earned, two given to her by the Emperor himself. The two sapien girls stood behind, Alyson had ordered them to be in formal uniform, so they stood in the green uniforms of the AAF, with their ranks emblazoned on their shoulders, both were sergeants in that force. Wimy remember her first meeting with Alyson, she was nineteen and graduating from the technological academy in Southland on Tara. Her grandfather had been a warrior in the Southland army and her father was a diplomat in the government. But the opposed the latest war moves of the state and had been arrested and charged with treason. In the fashion of the admiastation in power, all of their family members were declared enemies of the state. She had ran to Tresland, the nation north of Southland, and was hiding in the forest when Alyson found her. With Southland forces closing in, Alyson offered her a deal, go with her and be free, or stay and face the police. Wimy left.
Only two years younger than Wymi, Donna had a different story, she had come from an abusive family and her unlace and mother had sold her off to a stranger in Los Angles to be a sex slave. Her blond hair and blue eyes with her pasty white skin made. in stark contrast to Wimy’s cold black skin and braided black hair, her a prime look for the trade. She ran away and in the course of dodging her mother and others, ran into Katherine, who was doing research on Earth for a large university. Katherine liked her and took her in, and before she knew it, she was in the AAF, and loving it. She styed with Katherine when she teamed up with Alyson ten years ago and over time she and Wimy had fallen in love. they watched with pride as the rays from the lizard ship hit the force fields of the opposing crafts, it had the effect of a flashlight beam hitting the side of truck. Alyson smiled and pressed the ships laser weapon, taking out the bridge, as the starship took out the rest of the craft. The lizard attempt to reestablish their empire was over, they could still do their little warrior thing, but it was made very clear, that was all they could do.
Later on the deck of the Starship the little group celebrated their recent project, it had been a glorious adventure. As they stood on the rail of the deck, one of Katherine’s friends stopped by to congratulate her. After they had been speaking for a while, Katherine’s friend asked. “So, have you ever slept with your Allyonian friend”
Katherine laughed and responded, “Despite a lot of effort, no.”
Fern, standing close, looked at Donna and Wimy and muttered, “See, I told you they are not only bisexual, but very promiscuous. The canines have no word for monogamy, but have twenty words for promiscuous, and eighteen of them are complimentary, fact they also have five words that loosely translate to slut, four of them are complimentary.”
Katherine faked a snarl at Fern and asked, “So how many terms do you dolphins have for jerk?”
Fern did not hesitate, “Just one, and it a honor to be called that.”
The whole group laughed at that and Alyson commented on how much love was filling the area. Then Katherine asked where they were going next, and Alyson pointed to the large window above the deck and said, “Somewhere out there.”
Katherine responded and all agreed, “That is the best place of all.”
The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘This is mine’, and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
David Henry Thoreau
Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.
Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.
Lao Tzu
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Now I see the secret of making the best person, it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
Walt Whitman
Minimalists search for happiness not through things, but through life itself; thus, it’s up to you to determine what is necessary and what is superfluous to your life.
Joshua Fields Millburn
There was once a time and day where the consumer society as we know it today, did not exist. That so-called quieter and simpler time when we, as a species, lived in harmony with nature and lived simple, uncomplicated lives. Could that have been on the great Serengeti as we first emerged a species, most likely no. That was a life of almost constant movement, with a wary eye out for sabretooths, lions, cave bears, and other predators who hunted us as we foraged for food. Many calls were made for a simpler life, a collective life, such as Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, which in actually may have been a criticism of the court of Henry VIII. The idea of a paradise or simple life few in the face of the fact for almost the entirety of human history, life, for the large majority, was never easy, filled with hard work, and very often short. Thomas Hobbs in his poem, Leviathan in 1651 describes the pre-civilized humans as living:
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them withall. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short.
Leviathan, Thomas Hobbs
Rousseau in contrast, disagrees with Hobbs and says that civilization is responsible for selfish interests and community evil. Rousseau imagines how the earth would be full of compassion and peace if it were not for civilization. He argued it was civilization and private property that caused the inequities and corruption of the genuinely good and peaceful soul of the primitive sapiens. Hobbs believed in the Augustine doctrine of the total corruption of the human soul in original sin, Rousseau did not. He proclaimed the idea of the Tabula Rosa (Blank Slate) and argued that evil was a by product of socialization. The truth laid some where in between.
Between 70,000 and 13,000 years ago the sapiens underwent the Cognitive Revolution. Their brains evolved to give them the ability to possess a flexible language, communicate about third parties, and produce collective fictions. It allowed the sapiens to construct myths, many of which would imbed themselves into a society despite irrevocable truth to the contrary. This enabled them to form the societies we know of today, it also allowed them to become the dominant species on the planet. Then 10,000 years ago, according to scientist and historians, sapiens domesticated sheep and wheat and thus began the Agricultural Revolution, where the sapiens went from foragers to farmers. It was proclaimed as a triumph of sapien intelligence, progress fueled by brain power. “As Soon as this happened, they cheerfully abandoned the grueling, dangerous, and often spartan life of the hunter-gathers, settling down to enjoy the pleasant, satiated life of farmers.” (Yuval Noah Harrari. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: Harper Collins Publishers. 2015. 79) Problem was, this is a total lie, maybe one of our first myths, the life of the farmer was harder, with a worse diet, and imposed on the former forgers a life of population explosions and pampered elites. Some evidence suggests the story of Adam and Eve in the Bible is an allegory to this event. It created the urban poor and the many hardships of a sedentary life. Urban living is not the panacea that was promised, and many most likely pushed back on it, as seen in the anti-urban themes of the Old Testament of the Bible. One could imagine people toiling in the felids and looking back in nostalgia for the old days of the forager.
For the former forger, he and she worked harder and got a worse diet in return. “The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.” (Ibid.) In effect the domesticated plants were the ones who trained the people. The groups once confined to a small area in the Middle East now spread over the globe along with the growing human civilization. The work that went into farming would have seemed to be a curse, much like the one placed on Adam in the Biblical story in Genesis. The story of the fall could be an allegory of the sapiens going from the forger existence to the that of farmers. the wheat gave them more food, but that was eaten by a bigger population, and it did not give them any security, as now they had lands and cities to defend. Because of the demands of farming, sapiens moved first into villages, that became city states, then conquering empires. The empires fell and were replaced, and in Europe, Rome became the greatest of them all, then fell. The sapiens took a step back in the Middle Ages, but as the early modern period dawned the great nation states of the present slowly grew and evolved. This all came from the trap laid by the Agricultural Revolution.
The trap was set in small stages, and with each stage did bring some improvements, a luxury that made life a bit easier. It kept them from going back when things got tough, the trap had snapped and the sapiens were stuck. “One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and spawn new obligations. Once people get use to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it.” (Ibid. 87) Harari explains:
The story of the luxury trap carries with it an important lesson. Humanity’s search for an easier life released immense forces of change that transformed the world in ways nobody envisioned or wanted. Nobody plotted the Agricultural Revolution or sought human dependence on cereal cultivation. A series of trivial decisions aimed at mostly filling a few stomachs and gaining a little security had the cumulative effect of forcing ancient foragers to spend their days carrying water buckets under a scorching sun.
(Ibid. 88)
From that time about 10,000 years ago to around 1760, humans lived in much the same way. Trade networks grew and progress was made, but the way people made things changed very little. To built and equip cites craftsman worked by hand, many times with tools that would have been familiar to those in ancient days. What tools were made by hand, but material changed from stone, to bronze, to iron them steel, but the shapes and functions remained much the same. Military weapons also changed little before the introduction of gunpower in China during the Tang dynasty in the 9th century. Written record of it appear in the Song dynasty in the 11th century with written formulas for gunpower appearing in Roger Bacon’s Opus Majus in1267 and treatise by Hassan al-Rammah in 1280, most likely gotten from the Moguls as they raided into Europe and the Near East.
Tools, weapons, and all things for the house or farm were made by hand, and usually by a skilled craftsman in a shop or home. In this time a the concept of the Great Chain of Being dominated the mind of those living in medieval times. It was simple, God knew just wat a society need to function so he placed people, by birth, in those crafts and jobs. From king to street sweeper, one did the job his father, or family performed. The only institution that was exempt was the Church, which is why one going into the Church was said to have a calling. Merchants, craftsman, and workers labored by hand in small villages and shops all over Europe. The establishment in the large cities, like London, Paris, or Rome were bigger, but similar in scope and organization as those in the small towns and villages. With the coming of the Renaissance, trade grew, especially through the Italian states who guided trade with Asia through the Ottoman Empire. Such long distance trade brought the double entry book keeping methods and capitalistic type practices to Europe. The Age of Exploration by Portugal and Spain came about as the Iberians looked to find an alternate rout to the eat cutting out the middlemen in the Mediterranean. Other trade centers existed, such has the wool trade in London and textile trade in Antwerp. Products made in this trade were all done by hand, and done in tiny cottage industry in the homes of many of those who produced them.
Only the nobility engaged in ostentatious displays of wealth, to show their power and prestige, but for the vast majority of people, one only owned what one need and could afford. Many in the peasant class made such things themselves by hand, and if they could a few extras to sell at market. In Renaissance times many nations had Sumptuary laws (sumptuarie leges) passed to regulate consumption, to enforce the social hierarchy. These laws assigned the clothing and material to be worn by each social class and outlined the type and amount of furniture, food, and apparel that each class could acquire. For example in Tudor England, the Tudors inspected the wool and linins brought to London and chose first which cloths they wished to have be made into clothes for them. One did not dare wear even the color that the king or queen preferred for themselves. It prevented commoners from imitating the nobility, and later, as the merchant class grew, limited the conspicuous consumption of the bourgeoise. Innovations in the British textile industry in the eighteenth century would change this drastically.
Great Britain in the mid eighteenth century controlled a vast global trade empire and was the leading commerce nation in the world. British textile industry in the period developed a new spinning system, one that would replace the old way of doing everything. It was the Mechanized Spinning System and the development of Mechanized Textile Production that ignited the the great Industrial Revolution of the modern period. It was doen in an effort to make the producing of cloth easier and faster, not to ignite a new revolution in how things were produced. The Industrial Revolution, also coming from a network of people making small decisions in an effort to improve profits and make more cloth, replaced hand made things with ones made by a machine. It replaced the old cottage industry with factories, and created the new urban poor that would in turn create the many socialistic movements of the nineteenth and twentieth century. Like the Agricultural Revolution, the Industrial Revolution promised to make life better, and once again the luxury trap caught the sapiens in its firm grip. Was the Industrial Revolution inevitable? One cannot say, it was not planned, none of the great revolutions are. “It is an iron rule of history that what looks inevitable in hindsight was far from obvious at the time.” (Ibid. 239) Geography, economic forces, and biology can place restraints on movements, but there is ample room for surprises which are not bound by deterministic laws. History is a level two chaotic system, one that reacts to predictions made about it and thus can never be accurately predicted. (Level on systems do not react to predictions and can be better predicted, like weather systems) Revolutions are unpredictable , and there has never been one that was predicted. Only the effects can be studied to gain an insight to the fact that the possibilities in the future are beyond imagination.
In response to the Industrial Revolution in the final decades of the nineteenth century the patterns of American consumption changed. “A complex series of factors marked this change, beginning, of course, with the rise of industrial production.” (Timothy D. Taylor. The Sounds of Capitalism: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2012. 11) In the preindustrial world, where things were made by hand, there was limits on production and society placed limits of consumption. Limits were also placed by the wealth of individuals, the poor could not afford much, and so had little. In the days of foraging, one only kept what one could carry from place to place, after the Agricultural Revolution, some had places to keep stuff, but limits were placed by economy and social dictates. The only ostentatious displays of wealth were done by the elites and great cities, and these were done to show their power and prestige. For the vast majority of people, thrift was not only a policy of reason, but of necessity.
This can be seen in the culture of America in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, where thrift was the rule. Benjamin Franklin was the high priest of this new secular faith that was believed to shape one’s lot in life and fortune. He preached that thrift was part of economic freedom, social abundance, and achieved by working productively, consuming wisely, saving proportionally, and giving generously. The proverb, “waste no, want not,” was the rule of life. The proverb had been used from 1772 and may have originated in the 1500s as the saying, “Willful waste makes woeful want.” The first written citation of the proverb comes in the Thorne Smith 1932 book, Topper Takes a Trip, the second in a series of a man named Cosmo Topper who is haunted by the ghost of George and Marion Kerby and their dog. It would be the basis of a later movies and a TV series. (three movies in the thirties starring Cary Grant and the TV series starring Leo G. Carroll 1953-1956) America as the nineteenth century closed was a nation that bought little, used credit only for large purchases, (usually of land, houses , or for business) and were basically a cash and carry society. This culture worked great in the preindustrial society, but that soon changed.
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution mass production became the new normal. Instead of limited to what a small group of people could produce in a cottage industry, the factories could produce goods in the thousands. Mass production demanded mass consumption so the factory could survive, the luxury trap had sprung on the sapiens again. “Old American ideals of thrift and self-sacrifice ceased to serve an economy that increasingly demanded spending as American workers were transformed into consumers.” (Ibid. 12) As Norman Ware said in 1935, “As modern industry is geared to mass production, time out for mass consumption becomes as much a necessity as time in for production.” (Norman J. Ware. Labor in Modern Industrial Society. Boston: D. C. Heath. 1935. 101) Taylor says of this transformation:
The growth of consumption in this period was aided by changes in American spending habits: the practice of credit rose, and the use of the installment plan accelerated greatly. Settings of consumption increased the allure of purchased goods, as new department stores became increasingly like churches, temples of consumption. Goods were designed to me more attractive to consumers. And movies helped promote the ideal of lavish lifestyles.
(Taylor. 12)
Herbert Hoover used his positions in government to legitimate the “bureaucratic language of consumption,” introducing terms like mass leisure, mass consumption and mass service, and thus shaped the American mind about consumption. In 1925 he urged advertisers to create desire in people to consume and thus bring prosperity to America. It was argued that mass production and the higher wages and more leisure time that accompanied it, would produce more buying that would increase profits and even end the idea of classes in America. The message was clear, advertisers were told their job was not just to sell products, but promoting consumption, was now their mission in furthering of western civilization. Consumers were told, that by not buying they may offend others and not play their part in the new American society. Consumption became part of the American Way, along with, of course, truth and justice. In 1929, this new religion would face its greatest problem and crisis, the Depression. It was overcame through use of the radio.
Americans listen to close to one billion hours of radio in the thirties, and few of them were filled with discussions of the problems of the time. Many in the government and society discouraged such, asking that a light mood be shown. Comedy shows ruled the airways and many just put their heads in the sand as the crisis moved on, and these comedies increased radio sales and gave advertisers more time to sell their products. It was also discovered that movies and the actors in the movies, like many in the American celebrity culture, ( such as athletes, entertainers, and authors) could also sell stuff. Americans did not want to give up what they had in the twenties, but if they could not afford such, they could dream about acquiring such things again. It was felt but many that advertising could preserve American capitalism from the evils of the Soviet style socialism. After the Second World War, the importance of consumption became a civic duty in the ongoing battle with Soviet communism. using psychology advertisers pushed more products on the American consumer, who was told it was his or her duty to buy stuff. Stark contrast were shown between the average American store, with shelves stuffed with merchandise and the bare shelves of the Soviet Union. Consumption had became as important a weapon in the Cold War as the missiles that were aimed at both belligerents. “Affectively, these example are quite straightforward, but in their exhortative directness, they help make clear the combining of military and industrial interest were coupled with the increasing pressure on Americans to conceptualize consumption as an important and patriotic duty during the Cold War.” (Ibid. 107) Advertisers found that music was one of the most influential things in the psychology of selling, and as America moved into the post war period, the music and advertising industries grew closer. They also used celebrities, athletes , and even political figures in the ads to move Americans to buy more stuff.
In the 1960s the Counterculture of the baby boom generation rose up in opposition to the consumerism of the the period. Music was in the rock and roll era and it combined with the Civil Rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War movement, which included the Nuclear disarmament movement, to challenge the ideas of mass consumption and speak of a return to nature. Return to nature has been a cry of many pushing back against the move to consumerism, even before the industrial age. Bolton Hall (1854-1938) championed the Back-to-the -Land movement, that called for people to return to small farms, raise their own food and become a local, self sufficient community. David Henry Thoreau (1817-1862) also spoke of the return to nature in his book, Walden Pond. These were calls for people to return to a simpler life, mainly rural, to regain the peace and tranquilly of a basically imagined, mythical earlier period. The Baby Boom generation, those born between 1946 and 1964, would be the vanguard of this new cultural movement that began with the assassination of John Kennedy. They held to the words that Thoreau concluded his book Walden with, “If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away.” The sixties dawned with an outburst of idealism and a commitment to right all the wrongs that existed, it ended with the disillusionment and despair of the late seventies.
The counterculture of the sixties was an antiestablishment movement that grew out of the Civil Rights movement and other social movements, some that had long histories, that combined with the idealism and triumphalism that existed in the United States after the Second World War. These were set out by John Kennedy and who proclaimed his inaugural address that, “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.” He also went on to call on Americans “Now the trumpet summons us again–not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need–not as a call to battle, though embattled we are– but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, “rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation”–a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself.” He summed up the spirit that prevailed in the early sixties in the conclusion of his inaugural speech:
In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility–I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it–and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country.
My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
He later added to this spirit when announcing his goal of landing a man on the moon, justifying the expense and effort, saying that,
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon…We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.
With that spirit embraced by the baby boomers, infused with the sixties counter culture, questioned everything about the world, including the consumer culture that had bee inherited by them from their parents, called the Greatest Generation, after they came of age in the late fifties. The post war baby boom made their numbers almost overwhelming, and the affluence of the fifties gave them a very different view of things than their Depression Era parents. The counterculture first embraced the Civil Rights movement and then came to oppose the Vietnam War, and later all wars, and was infused with a antiestablishment pushback on the conformity that had exited in the fifties. This was reflected in their music. politics, and social mores, but the ongoing Vietnam War and the political scandals of the seventies, combined with an economic downturn eroded the idealism of the sixties and brought on a general disillusionment with society by the late seventies. Along the way advertisers found the baby boom market could be very profitable if one appealed to the counter culture, which they did, and in many ways co-opted. The music business slowly merge with the advertisers and became very profitable, as was expressed in Part I of my blogs, How We Came to be:
The seeking of the hip and cool was a new idea in advertising. The criticism of capitalism as unfair, was moved to countercultures criticism of inauthenticity. In this time, capitalism offered not only a way to achieve self fulfillment by engaging it, but to liberate oneself from it. From what had earlier been seen as oppressive in its earlier stages. Consumerism not only offers, through music, emotional bribes and emotional rewards. Using music brands could find authenticity, the new consumers were looking for, though music. In this the advertising industry was not only changed by the counterculture, but shaped the counterculture as well.
“Rather than capitalism being simply reactive or appropriative, it was, in this particular historical moment, proactive, attempting to make the consumption of goods more palatable by adapting youth music and other hip and cool aspects of youth culture in order to sell good.” (Taylor. 148) This is what Thomas Frank in his writings has called the “conquest of cool.” this process became unstoppable by 1967, and the attempts to market to the baby boomers only intensified through the 1970s. Consumption not only was palliative, it offered emotional bribes and rewards to those who indulged. In the end, the couther culture that challenged the consumer culture was not only co-opted by the consumer culture, it became shaped by it was well. The revolution was now a T-Shirt. “In the 1980s, a new wave of consumption ideologies heightened most Americans’ already strong consumption practices, newly invigorated by Ronald Reagan’s sacralization of consumption in this era,” creating a feeling that consumption was not only a leisure activity, but a means of self-definition and self-creation.
Consumption was not only driven by political ideology, but technology as well. The Universal Product Code, UPC or bar code, allowed the tracking of products with great accuracy, along with the improvements in audience measuring gave advertisers unprecedented access to the buying habits of Americans. This came along as more advertisement was directed specifically towards different race, ethic and class groups, with more sophisticated means than had been used in the past. It gave advertisers a tool that could home in on their target markets with more accuracy and predictability that in any period in the past. Television had been one of the biggest forces in this culture and the role of MTV ushered in a new fast paced visual language that now became part of the consumer culture’s advertising campaigns. It introduced the concept of ads as a little story, in a quick fast paced commercial that appealed to the youth of America. MTV contributed to the aestheticization of advertising and furthered the indoctrination the consumer culture to the American public. It was also the time when the music industry became corporatized and part of the constant indoctrination of consumerism to the public. In the sixties, at the height of the counter culture, musicians distained commercials as selling out to the establishment. By the late eighties, the music and advertising industries were so tied together, that “Selling out is no longer an issue, some in the industry are saying it’s no longer possible.” (Ibid. 228)
The consumer culture was a direct, if unintended, result of the Industrial Revolution and the mass production of the factories and machines. Just as the dog was domesticated some 23,000 years ago, possibly in Siberia, (the Bonn-Oberkassel dog that dates from 14,200 years ago is considered one of the first ones) from a now extinct wolf population, the Industrial Revolution came in steps and networks that gave rise to unintended consequences. In the 2018 movie, Alpha, one sees the most likely way dogs were domesticated, but it was not done by one tribe or person who taught all others. It was done by many people in many different places and times in an action that came together to domesticate the only large carnivore that the sapiens ever manage to achieve. The domestication of the dog not only gave them protection, but helped keep their camps clean, which was essential when the sapiens entered into the Agricultural Revolution. The Industrial Revolution occurred much the same way, nobody set out to mechanize the production of goods, it just came about through the efforts of many just looking to make things better. Like the earlier Agricultural Revolution, it gave the sapiens luxuries, and thus the luxury trap would be sprung many times. The consumer cultural came from the Industrial Revolution as the producers need to sell more goods to keep their business going, they had to convince the people they need the goods and needed a lot of them.
In the preindustrial world, the only displays of ostentatious wealth was done by the nobility, and that was to show their legitimacy and power. Westminster Abby is an example of this, when the King or Queen of Great Britain is crowed they sit on the throne in front of the tomb of Edward the Confessor, who reigned almost one thousand years ago, and is surrounded by the tombs of many of Britain’s Kings and Queens along with many powerful political, social and cultural leaders. When the President of the United States is inaugurated, its done in the front of the Capital Building in Washington D.C., surrounded by almost all of the American governing elite. Both are done to project the power and the legitimacy of the person being inaugurated or crowned. This was done to prove to all the power of the state and the nobles or elites who ran it.
Goods in this period were made by hand and their was a limit at what could be produced by one person or family. This system worked very well in the preindustrial period as the market was also limited by law and economic forces. With the dawn of the early modern period, a rising merchant class expanded the market, but it was mainly limited to the upper classes of people, as the poor in the rural areas could not afford the new goods from many far away lands. This changed with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, as the factories produced more good than the old economy could absorb. In 1890, Karl Benz produced 2,000 cars, 30 came from an order by Austro-Hungarian Consul Emil Jellinek, who demanded they be named after his daughter Mercedes. Then Henry Ford adopted the assembly line for his Model T car, he was able to produce 8,729 cars in 1906. This would be too many cars for the old market of the very wealthy to handle the market had to expand. Ford had to convince, as others in the early Industrial Revolution did, the public to buy their goods on a much more massive scale than ever before. They turned to advertisers to this, and in doing so created the consumer culture of today. It was not the aim of those people to do this, it was a by product of the mass production that the new factories provided. Mass production needs mass consumption to work, and the advertising industry was given the task to create the consumption for the new economy.
There as been pushback against the consumer culture almost from the time of its inception. In fact, the human race has been pushing back against many of the revolution that have pushed them into new ages. In the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes 7:10 it is written, “Do not say, “Why is it that the former days were better than these? For it is not from wisdom that you ask about this.” This is a warning about nostalgia. Nostalgia is a word coined by medical student Johannes Hofer (1669-1752) to describe the anxieties of Swiss mercenaries fighting in France. It comes for the Greek nostos, meaning homecoming and algos meaning pain, he used it to describe what he called the mal du pays, or homesickness. It was later used to describe homesickness by Sir Joseph Banks in his journal on Capitan Cook first voyage in 3 September 1770, to describe the sailors who “were now pretty far gone with the longing for home which the Physicians have gone so far as to esteem a disease under the name of Nostalgia.” As changes in lifestyles come about, sapiens tend to look back on older times with a sense of wonder and feelings they were simpler and better. Often ignoring or forgetting the many problems of those times, which is what the author of Ecclesiastes was trying to say.
Also when the luxury trap is sprung, many problems of the new age are reveled, but the sapiens cannot, or will not , return to an earlier time, as what was once a luxury, is now seen as an essential. The social media and its technologies that create it were suppose to unite all in one big community, but it left us more divided and polarized than ever. The stuff that was suppose to make up happy and content, has left us full of anxiety and fears. It also gave the advertisers the ultimate tool for studying the consumer, a detailed look into whatever the consumer was looking not buy. It cost the giant social media kingpins almost nothing to collect, making them billionaires in record time. The iron law of the luxury trap has, once again, imprisoned the sapiens in a new world. But some do push back, one of which is the new minimalist movement. It is a modern take on an ancient idea, to live simply. In Matthew (6:25-34) Jesus tells his followers:
Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Let I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Jesus is telling the people of the first century that life is more than material things, and worry never really helps anything. He says that one should place you life in God’s hands and it wall will work out. It is seen in the Indian sramana, which refers to one who exerts themselves for religious purposes and lives a life of ascetic austerity. It is first mentioned in the Brihadoranyaka Upanish in the sith century BC. It a movement that led to the practice of yoga. People who have preached living a simple life include, Jesus of Natherus, Benedict of Nivrsia, Francis of Assisi, Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, Albert Schweitzer, and Mahatma Gandhi. Leaders of religions, like Jesus , Muhammad, Buddha, Confucius, as well as the Laozi and Zarathustra religions, all called for disciples to live the simple life. In Greece, Diogenes, a major figure in the Cynicism philosophy, proclaimed the simple life was necessary for virtue and lived in wine Jar. Epicurus, founder of Epicurean philosophy, also championed the simple life as the correct path to contentment and happiness. Most of these movements are influenced by the Mediterranean culture and Abrahamic ethics. Many others over the years have also urged people to give up the idea that bigger and more was better and live a simple life. Jean-Jacques Rousseau strongly praised the simple way of life in many of his writings, he especially pointed it out in two books: Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (1750) and Discourse on Inequality (1754). Many harked back to a time before civilization, before farming, when sapiens roamed the Serengeti as forgers, in the days before the Agricultural Revolution. Yet it goes back to the luxury trap, people get use to things, and soon find them indispensable. That is why we do not go back, but still in the mist of nostalgia, look back. To that simple day and time, before all the changes, no matter what they were.
As our present consumer culture rages on, again a few intrepid souls speak out and ask us to reduce the stuff we have, it is minimalism, which once again asks that we become more self sufficient, and value what we have over what we want. In his book, The Minimalist Mindset, Danny Dover, using the image of Plato’s cave, explains that, “In the world you and I live in most poisoners are not imprisoned by tangible chains, but instead by objects of their own choosing,” (Danny Dover. The Minimalist Mindset. Intriguing Ideas Press. 2017. 5) Dover argues that ideas are simply thoughts one can implement and act on thereby making them a habit and changing one’s mindset, from a prisoner of the consumer culture to one living the simple, or minimalist, life. Leo Barbata, author of the blog Zen Habits, urges readers to find simplicity and meaningfulness, in an effort to clear out clutter and focus on what is important which will allow one to find happiness. He argues that, “Simplicity boils down to two steps: Identify the essential. Eliminate the rest.” The idea is to reduce consumption, which should reduce debt and allow one to concentrate on the things that are important in life, and not one’s stuff. As Joshua Beker states in his book, The More of Less, “Not only are my possession not bringing happiness into my life, even worse, they are actually distracting me from things that do!” (Joshua Beker. The More of Less: Fining the Life You Want Under Everything You Own. Colorado Springs, Colorado: WaterBrook Press. 2016. 4)
In Dave Bruno’s 100 things challenge, one is to make a list of all their possessions and destroy donate down until you only have 100 things. In his book, The 100 Thing Challenge, he says about the consumer culture, “The 100 Thing Challenge, which my book describes, was one of several responses to the unsettled feeling I developed after years of a life filled with stuff instead of contentment – after arriving at a reasonable version of the American dream and still grouping for more. I felt I might be chasing after what was not mine to have, and could never get anyway. It occurred to me I felt less like myself and more like someone I should not be.” (Dave Bruno. The 100 Thing Challenge: How I Got Rid of Almost Everything, Remade My Life, and Regained My Soul. New York: Harper Collins. 2010. xiii) He said his book was in response to he American consumer culture and its emphasis on more. It is written in the vein of the philosopher Vernon Howard who said, “You have succeeded in life when all you really want is only what you really need.” Some even extend this idea to technology, even to the point of the old Luddite ideal. (Luddites comes form a movement in the late nineteenth century where textile workers destroyed machines to protest the new technology believing it would replace them, it is thought to have gotten its name from the textile worker Ned Ludd of Anstey near Leicester) It is a movement that believes that less is more.
Joshua Fields Milburn and Ryan Nicodemus, The Minimalist, are two of the most most prominent and famous of the minimalist preachers. Tony Norman, of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, says of them, “I am not a Minimalist, but I would love to be one. Hosts Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus are gradually converting me to the view that the less material things one possesses, the better. These guys are funny, dogma-free exemplars of a less-is-more lifestyle that actually sounds sane as they explain it. It impacts me more and more every week.” (Tony Norman. “Better Living Through Podcast Listening.” Pittsburgh Post Gazette. March 31, 2017) Norman said that researching minimalism had bee invigorating against the dispirited political scene in 2017. Kyle Chayka of the The Cut says of them:
The Minimalists have found a rabid following among Americans exhausted by their own consumerism and stricken by a sense of lost agency. Problems with stuff — having too much of something or too little of another — abound, and the audience for an anti-materialist message is wide. Among Millburn and Nicodemus’s fans are millennials with no hope of buying real estate, much less retiring, without stringent saving tactics, as well as families who need to downsize because of lost jobs or divorce. Even for the wealthy, corporate jobs are uninspiring and McMansions tacky. We’re encouraged to build our identities on consumption, but lately capitalism seems less satisfying than ever, and not just for proto-socialists.
(Kyle Chaka. “The Minimalist Want You to Be Happy With Less, And in a Country With Many Struggle The ‘ve Found a Hugh Audience.” The CutNew York Magazine. )
The pair have authored four books, Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life (2011, 2016), Everything That Remains (2014), Essentials (collection of essays 2015), and Love People, Use Things (to be published in 2021) and are the leading spokespeople for the movement. In their message they say people must get comfortable with boredom, be able to walk away from anything. and preach that success, does not exist. They begin their book, Minimalism with, “Conformity is the drug with many people self medicate.” (Joshua Fields Milburn and Ryan Nicodemus. Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life. Asymmetrical Press. 2011.2016. 1) They argue that society places extreme pressure on individuals to conform to the consumer edicts of the materialistic society. It is the message of the Rolling Stones 1965 hit, I Can’t Get No Satisfaction, as the Stones proclaim they are told what they can and cannot be by a guy on the radio or TV. Fields and Nicodemus argue that the pressure is internal, and only influenced by external factors. They state, “Happiness comes from within, from inside yourself, from living a meaningful life.” ((Ibid. 2) They define minimalism as, a tool to rid yourself of life’s excess in favor of focusing on what’s important—so you can find happiness, fulfillment, and freedom. they have five values, (Health, Relationships, Passions, Growth and Contribution) that allow one to live the meaningful life. By going though these five values they argue one can build a meaningful life that is not depend on stuff or prestige. They state:
Happiness, as far as we are concerned, is achieved internally through living a meaningful life, a life that is filled with passion and freedom, a life in which we can grow and contribute to others in meaningful ways. These are the bedrocks of happiness. Not stuff.
(Ibid. 26)
They are not without their critics, however. Stephanie Land of the New York Times says of the movement, “And that’s the other class element lurking behind minimalism’s façade. In a new documentary about the movement, “bad” consumption is portrayed by masses of people swarming into big box stores on Black Friday, rushing over one another for the best deals. They are, we’re led to understand, slaves to material goods, whereas the people who stay away from mass consumption are independent thinkers, free to enjoy the higher planes of life.” (Stephanie Land. “The Class Politics of Decluttering.” New York Times. July 18.2016) She accuses them of being a well off middle class elites telling those who can not afford to do with less, that they are bad for doing such. She goes on to say of the poor, “Those aren’t wealthy people who have a house full of expensive items they don’t need. Those are people teetering on or even below the poverty level, desperate for comfort in their homes. To point to them as a reason to start an anti-consumerism movement is just another form of social shaming. Those aren’t the people who would benefit from a minimalist life. They can’t afford to do with less.” (Ibid) Jillian Steinbauer, another critic, argues that, “The Minimalists, who were mostly white men, believed that by removing any trace of their own hands, they could create and operate within a realm of nonpersonal neutrality—a fantasy that often ended up as a whitewashing of their influences.” (Jillian Steinbauer. “The Hollow Politics of Minimalism.” TNR. April 1, 2020) Margaret Wente sums up much of the critics with:
There’s nothing new about the search for simplicity, of course. It was always on the list of virtues, ever since Greek poets rhapsodized about the idylls of the nymphs and shepherds. But consumerism has its virtues, too – and they are much greater.
According to economic historian Deirdre McCloskey, the rise of middle-class consumerism is one of the most significant (and underrated) turning points in the history of civilization. Her book Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World argues that the modern world began around 1800, when values shifted in England and northern Europe. Entrepreneurship and wealth accumulation among ordinary people became celebrated, not despised. The embrace of bourgeois values – industry, commerce, social mobility, innovation – unleashed the greatest creation of material wealth the world has ever known. Real income per person soared, Ms. McCloskey writes, from $3 a day (where it had sat since ancient times) to the $125 a day that much of the world now enjoys.
This explosion of wealth introduced a new age of abundance, not just for kings and princes but for everyone. Prosperity brought much more than material goods. As Ms. McCloskey writes, “Give the middle class dignity and liberty for the first time in human history and here’s what you get: the steam engine, the automatic textile loom, the assembly line, the symphony orchestra, the railway, the corporation, abolitionism, the steam printing press, cheap paper, wide literacy, cheap steel, cheap plate glass, the modern university, the modern newspaper, clean water, reinforced concrete, the women’s movement, the electric light, the elevator, the automobile, petroleum, vacations in Yellowstone, plastics, half a million new English-language books a year, hybrid corn, penicillin, the airplane, clean urban air, civil rights, open-heart surgery, and the computer.”
(Margaret Wente. “Consumerism is Good For the Soul.” The Globe and Mail. December 12, 2012)
The question is, will this movement of minimalism overtake the consumer culture, or will it, as the counterculture of the sixties, be co-opted by the consumer culture. Can this millennium movement do what the baby boomer could not, push back on the materialistic consumer culture, or will it end up on a T-shirt as well. In 1987, Nike bought the rights to the Beatle song Revolution, for 250,000 dollars paid to EMI, and another 250,000 dollars going to SBK Entertainment World for the copyright. Nike announced this was the first time that a Beatles song would be used in a commercial, and it was the hallmark of a 7 t o10 million dollar ad campaign. “Nonetheless, there was an outcry over the commercial, which was seen by many as desecrating not just the Beatles and the song, but the 1960s revolutionary spirit the song articulated.” (Taylor. 200)Paul McCartney said the use of the song was something the Beatles just never did, and they had tuned down many such offers in the past. Yet by 1988, Michael Jackson, Eric Clapton, Linda Ronstadt and Bo Jovi all were making commercials. By the year 2000, the advertising and music industries had basically combined and songs were routinely used in commercials, many times while still on the charts. What was once called selling out the man, had become the status quo.
Are the minimalist just another affluent millennial movement, or is a real thing? Are the a rebirth of the Baby Boomer’s Countercultural, or just a pale imitation? Will the same fate of the counterculture of the sixties await the minimalist, or will they be the one movement that finally will prevail over the modern consumer culture. When faced with the counter culture of the sixties, the consumer culture adapted and absorbed the counterculture. But was this done by some evil conspiracy led by an villainous group, no. It was the result of the luxury trap and the the Industrial Revolution, in a game that is as old as the sapiens. today a computer in your hand, called the iPhone, is considered essential, but in the late 1700s Great Britain ran its world empire with a communication system that could take weeks for messages and results to go from London to where ever and back. it ran it well, the technology revolution that produced the iPhone began with underseas cable and telegraph, which came about to improve communication. The answers to the above questions are both unknown and maybe unknowable. It might, or it may one day be just another T-shirt slogan kids buy online.
The Industrial Revolution invented and introduced mass production, with all the benefits and problems associated with the new technology and ways of production. It created a booming economy and the misery of the urban poor. It allowed the sapiens to walk on the moon and drive a robot across the plains of Mars. The problems created by it also gave rise to the socialists movements that sought to address the problems of the urban poor by with political solutions or violent revolution. It created both the booming American economy and Stalin’s camps. The luxury trap of the Industrial Revolution is mass production, which produced the good that drove the economy and allowed the great progress that the Industrial Revolution promised and many times delivered. But mass production demands mass consumption, or the economy does not work. If a factory produces 10,000 products , it must sell them, and advertising is the way to do this. Planned obsolesce, the rise of the advertising, and the consumer culture of the modern world is not the result of an evil cabal of capitalists meeting in secret in some undisclosed location, it is the logical end of the mass production. So will the minimalist make a dent in the consumer culture or will it absorb this millennial movement just as it did the baby boomers’ one. The sapiens did not solve all the problems of the Agricultural Revolution after 10,000 years, so most likely not, then another revolution may be in the future. In Jurassic Park III, when John Hammond tells Malcom they correct all the old mistakes that were made in the park, Malcom responds “No, you’re making all new ones.” Are we making all new ones now? The modern world of sapiens have not come to grips with the mass production and mass consumption of the Industrial Revolution, wonder what the luxury trap is for the new Artificial Intelligence Revolution that is one the horizon.
The richest people in the world look for and build networks; everyone else looks for work.
Robert Kiyosaki
Right now, with social networks and other tools on the Internet, all of these 500 million people have a way to say what they’re thinking and have their voice be heard.
Mark Zuckerberg
When you’re young, you look at television and think, there’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.
Steve Jobs
The Internet is literally a network of networks.
Vint Cerf
Everything you want in life is a relationship away.”
― Idowu Koyenikan,
Networking is not about just connecting people. It’s about connecting people with people, people with ideas, and people with opportunities.”
Michele Jennae
Giving connects two people, the giver and the receiver, and this connection gives birth to a new sense of belonging.
Deepak Chopra
Networking is an essential part of building wealth
Armstrong Williams
Niall Ferguson. The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook. London: Penguin Books. 2017.
Valerie Hansen. The Year 1000:When Explores Connected the World and Globalization Began. New York: Scribner. 2020.
In his book, The Square and the Tower, Niall Ferguson begins with this paragraph:
We live in a networked world, or so we are constantly told. The word, “network,” which was scarcely used before the late nineteenth century, is now overused as both a verb and a noun. To the ambitious young insider, it is always worth going to the next party, no matter how late it is, for the sake of networking. Sleep may be appealing, but the fear of missing out is appalling. To the disgruntled old outsider, on the other hand, the word network has a different connotation. The suspicion grows that the world is controlled by a powerful and exclusive networks: the bankers, the Establishment, the System, the Jews, the Freemasons, the Illuminate. Nearly all that is written in this vein is rubbish. Yet it seems unlikely that conspiracy theories would be so persistent if such networks did not exist at all.
(Ferguson. xix)
Ferguson goes on to argue that the biggest changes in history are made by thinly documented and informally organized groups. History then is the uneven ebb and flow of the long epochs in which hierarchical structures dominated human existence and the rarer period of dynamic time’s when networks, because of changes in technology, ruled the day. In the usual times of hierarchical power one is only as powerful as one’s position in the social structure, or class, in a vertical sense. But in the period of networks, one can be more powerful with one’s positions in several organizations in a more vertical sense. For example in the horizontal structure one is limited to the power of one’s position in the structure and is assigned power and prestige only from the position one holds in that structure. In a vertical periods, one can enhance a position by holding more powerful or prestigious positions in other horizontal groups, thus enhance one’s position in the original group. For example, an professor may be in a low position at a university, but his membership in other academic groups may make him more powerful than those who, despite their long tenure, do not have the prestige of that the other groups confer on one.
For the professor that gains in this, he or she will credit their networking to the gaining of a higher position. They urge this colleges to do the same, and believe that networking gives all an equal opportunity to advance and brakes the old chains of hierarchy. On the other hand, the older professors will chalk up the new persons jump to some conspiracy of a shadow group that may be planning some radical change in the administration. Yet in the long run, the new professor may gain prestige, but little power. He or she may be interviewed by various news and social media organizations. who ask for their opinions on many subjects, but because of the university’s hierarchy, have no input on schedules, raises, or the selection of students. It is the choice between power and influence that is made in the choice between joining a hierarchy or a vertical network. To see what one’s position is in a hierarchy, look at who one reports to, the more one reports to, the lower one is in a hierarchy. On e finds that all are members of both, hierarchies and vertical networks, which intermingle in our social and professional lives. One may be a huge fan of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and may even be the third generation of such, that make one part of a network, and maybe an important part of the network. Yet on draft day, only the Steeler hierarchy, the Rooney family and the staff, make decisions for the the team. But, at times, the fans can influence the decisions, but those times are not easy to document.
The documentation of such events is usually provide by the hierarchical powers and thus gives mainly their take of the subject. In 1553, King Edward VI attempted to change his father’s will in an effort to get a male heir to the throne of England. His sister Mary, leading the only successful revolt in Tudor times, upheld her father’s will. She did it by using the network of English Catholics that wanted to reverse Henry VIII’s Reformation and was joined by a network of English Protestants who sought to uphold the act of Parliament Henry had used to confirm his will. Both had failed in the past, the Pilgrimage of Grace and Ketts Rebellion, to overturn a decision of the hierarchy. In Tudor history, the actions of the monarchs are well recorded, but the actions of many of the networks are hidden from sight. One has to, as with all actions of networks, dig much deeper into archives, letters, journal, and other personal documents of many people to ascertain the actions of a network. Ferguson attempts to tell the story of networks, which he considers more important than that of the hierarchies historians have focused on, by examine tow eras. These would be the invention of the printing press in the late fifteenth century, the effects last until the end of the eighteenth century, and the period from the late 1970s and the technological revolution of Silicon Valley. This essay will also examine the year 1000, when a, “Trade among different regions increased in the year 1000 because a surplus in agriculture led to population growth and allowed some of the populace to stop farming full-time to produce goods for markets, and to become merchants.” ( Hanson. 9) This created a network in a time before communication was instant.
Networks have been part of sapien life since we evolved on the Serengeti. When you talk of the philosopher schools of ancient Greece or the Biblical prophets and their followers, they are all networks. It hard to find their history, it easier to find the history of kings and generals. Historians and chroniclers tend to look at the actions, while philosophers look at the writings. History is a combination of all, the myths, the philosophies, the actions and the people behind all of them. To find the history of a king, one only needs to look at the written chronicles and tales told of them, to fine the network, one must look at all the letters, dairies, and writings of many people involved in any event. Take for example the period one thousand years ago, the year 1000, right in the middle of what is called the Middle Ages.
Medieval times were not the dark, dismal era of legend. One might use the sentence by Thomas Hobbs in his 1651 poem, Leviathan, (The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil. 1651) “And the life of a man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish and short.” to describe the period. In their book, The Devil’s Historians, Amy Kaufman and Paul Sturtevant say of this time:
Popular culture sends a lot of mixed messages about the Middle Ages. Some books, movies, and video games represent it as an era of heroic knights and epic battles, while others portray the medieval past as a dark, dangerous time when anyone who stepped out of line would be burned as a witch. Despite these dramatic differences, there are a few things contemporary people consider “common knowledge ” about the Middle Ages: that the medieval lives were nasty, brutish, and short; that this part of the past was a white, Christian man’s world; and that medieval people were so religious and superstitious that they would throw their neighbors on the pyre for using her broom a little too often,
The problem is, common knowledge is wrong.
(Amy S. Kaufman and Paul B. Sturtevant. The Devil’s Historians: How Modern Extremists Abuse the Medieval Past. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press. 2020. 9)
Instead of a dark and dearly place with carts rolling through the village calling for the dead (an thing that would only happen during the plague years), in a land of nothing but small villages and castled manors, was a vibrant cosmopolitan place with ties to people across the globe. Cities like Rome, London, Constanipole, and Quanzhou (in China) one could find myrrh and frankincense from Arabia, sandalwood from Java and India, Chinese glazed pottery, whose high technology produced a glossy high-fired pottery that was imitated by many. Through Venice came the products of east and Africa, and trade routs that covered the globe. “The year 1000 marked the start of globalization. This is when trade routs took shape all around the world that allowed goods, technologies, religions, and people to leave home and go somewhere new. The resulting changes were so profound that they affected ordinary people, too.” (Hansen. 2) There was a fundamental change in the world as trade goods, people, and religions moved along the new routs. The demand for slaves in Constantinople, Bagdad, Cairo and other cities brought on the movement of millions of people from Africa, Eastern Europe. and East Asia hundreds of years before the transatlantic slave trade.
Around the year 1000, many rulers converted to new religions, in an effort to enhance their power and prestige, and their subjects were converted as well. To supply the new markets, many people left traditional jobs to produce the goods that the new markets demanded. Merchants gained an advantage from the new trades, and many local business suffered, causing the first anti-globalization riots and movements in many cities. Unlike the period after 1492, the technologies of the people were very similar, and in many cases the same, so no one region was able to dominate as the Europeans did in the latter period. Areas with many natural resources became wealthy, and areas with few resources sold the one thing many had an abundance of, their people. Rich urban areas traded for slaves from the poor regions, these were mainly from West and East Africa, Central Asia, and Northern and Eastern Europe. “So many slaves came from Eastern Europe that our word ‘slave’ is derived from ‘Slav'” (Ibid. 6) Hansen says of the time:
This book explains who developed the networks in the world’s major regions and how those networks became interlaced. As people living in different regions established contact with each other around the year 1000, they set the stage for the next phase of globalization in the 1500s when the Europeans reshaped exiting networks to suit their own interest. But the Europeans didn’t invent globalization. they changed and augmented what was already there. If globalization hadn’t begun, Europeans wouldn’t have been able to penetrate so many regions so quickly.
(Ibid. 5. For a complete and detailed look at how this happened see Hansen’s book, The Year 1000)
While history books look to the great explorers from 1492 on to explain the Age of Discovery, (or Age of Exploration, Contact, or Contact Period) lasting from the fifteenth century to the sixteenth century and saw the foundation of the European Colonial empires (Portugal, Spain, France and Great Britain) , they look mainly at the nations and explorers of the time. The foundation of this period was laid in the year 1000 and the creation of the trade networks that ran from Europe to Africa, Arabia, and the Far East. The Portuguese went south around Africa, and the Spanish sent Columbus west to find a way around the Ottoman Empire and connect with the markets of the Far East. The people of the time were looking to circumvent existing trade routs and cut out the middle man who were profiting from the trade. They knew the Earth was round, just bigger than they thought, and wanted more profit for themselves. Building on existing trade networks, they created new ones, that benefited them more and cutting out the Ottomans and the City State of Venice.
Those who are left out of new networks, such as the Venetians, tend to see conspiracies the reason they no longer hold a lofty position. One of the most enduring of the modern period concerns a group of men whose goal was the victory of virtue and wisdom over stupidity and malice. A group determined to make the most important discoveries in all the scientific fields and teach their members to be noble and great. It was to protect them from all persecution and oppression in the world and make their fate one of greatness as they defeated all forms of despotism in the world. Founded in Germany 1 May of 1776, by Bavarian Adam Weishaupt, (1748-1830) the group called itself the Bund der Perfektiblisten or the League of the Perfectibles, it better known as the Illuminatenorden, the Order of Illuminati. He found the Freemasons too expensive and not open to his ideas, so he created his own society based on Freemasonry, but with his own ideas, at the University of Ingolstadt were he was a professor of canon law and practical philosophy. The goals of the group was to oppose superstition, obscurantism, (The deliberate presenting information in an imprecise abstruse manner that limited further understanding and inquiry; There are two historical and intellectual denotations of Obscurantism: (1) the deliberate restriction of knowledge—opposition to disseminating knowledge; and (2) deliberate obscurity—a recondite literary or artistic style, characterized by deliberate vagueness) religious influence in public life and abuses of state power. Weishaupt declared, “My goal is to give reason the upper hand.” According to its General Statues (1781) it was to educate by rewarding virtue. It was to operate as a secret society with its members adopting code names (usually of ancient Greek or Roman organ) with three ranks of membership: Novice, Minerval, and Illuminated Minerval. The lower ranks received only the vaguest insights of the order’s goals and methods. Ferguson describes the group , “Elaborate initiation rites were devised – among them an oath of secrecy, violations of which would be punished with the most gruesome death. Each isolated cell of initiates reported to a superior, whose real identity they did not know.” (Ferguson. 3-4)
First centered only in the university, it was a tiny group that grew over the next few years attracting nobles like Charles, price of Hesse -Cassel, Ernest II, duke of Saxe-Coburg-Altenburg, nobles like Franz Friedrich von Ditfurth and clergyman Carl Theodore van Dalberg and intellectuals such as Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Johann Gottfried Herder, Fredrich Heinrich Jacobi, Joachim Christoph Bode, and Swiss educationist Johann Joachim Pestalozzi. In April of 1778 it adopted Illuminate as it official name. Some have found an influence of Illuminism in Wolfgang Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. (1791) Friedrich Schiller based his republican character of Posa in his play Don Carlos (1787) on a lending member of the group. “Yet in 1784, the Bavarian government issued the first of three edicts that effectively banned the Illuminati, condemning the mas ‘traitorous and hostile to religion.'” (Ibid. 4) Charles Theodore, (1724-1799) the Elector of Bavaria was encouraged by the Catholic Church to proclaim these edicts (1784, 1785, 1787, and a further one in 1790) The Illuminate founder went into exile in Gotha and for all practical purposes, the group ceased to function by 1787, but their infamy long outlived them. It was claimed that they were behind to French Revolution, and many revolutions that have occurred since.
In 1797 the Scottish physicist John Robison claimed in his book, Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religious and Governments of Europe, carried on in the Secret Meetings of the Free Masons, Illuminati and Reading Societies, claimed that over the last fifty years, hiding behind the pretext of enlightening the world through philosophy, these groups have been engaged in a nefarious plot to eliminate all the states and religions in the world. This effort, according the Robison, resulted in the French Revolution. Echoing this claim was former Jesuit Augustin de Barruel in his 1797 book, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, where he claimed the Jacobins, (The Society of the Friends of the Constitution (French: Société des amis de la Constitution), renamed the Society of the Jacobins, Friends of Freedom and Equality (Société des Jacobins, amis de la liberté et de l’égalité) after 1792 and commonly known as the Jacobin Club (Club des Jacobins) or simply the Jacobins whose motto was “Live free or die, was the most influential political club leading up to and during the French Revolution (1798) and was at its ascendancy during the Reign of Terror (1793-1794)) Edmund Burke championed these claims and they came to the Untied States and were adopted by Timothy Dwight, President of Yale. Dwight whose 1776 valedictory address at Yale proclaimed that Americans were a new people who pocessed the same religion, manners, interest , language and essential forms and principals of government was one of the most influential intellectuals of the time. His poem The Conquest of Canaan, is considered the first American epic poem and his 1793 sermon to the General Association of Connecticut entitled a “Discourse on the Genuineness and Authenticity of the New Testament” which when printed the next year became an important tract defending the orthodox faith against Deists and other skeptics. This made the Illuminati one of the main Ur-conspirators that Richard Hofstadter argued was the “paranoid style” of American politics were they one proclaiming these conspiracies’ were fighting against a “vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character.” (Ibid. 5)
The Illuminati myth persist to the modern day, with the Illuminatus trilogy of the 1970s by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, Umberto Eco’s novel Foucault’s Pendulum (1988), the film Laura Croft: Tomb Raider, (2001) and Dan Brown’ s book, Angles and Demons (2000). It has also been claimed that Presidents John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Barack Obama, were members of this group. They have been also linked to the Rothchild’s, the Round Table, the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, and financer George Soros. In a 2011 survey half of the American population, 51%, believe that a secret group is actually controlling or trying to control the media and the world. These beliefs are mirrored by similar ones around the globe as many see dark conspiracies behind terrorist attacks, financial downturns, or some or any or other event. The TV show X-Files (1993-2018) was predicated on the idea that aliens have gotten control over a small group of high officials in the world’s governments and they control all events, including who wins the Super Bowl, in preparation for the eventual alien invasion.
Ferguson argues that these conspiracy theories, such as the Illuminati whose reputation far exceed their actual importance, makes finding the history of networks a problem. With so much conspiracy theories abounding, it hard for a professional historian to be taken seriously in writing about the history of a network. He concludes his first chapter with this:
This book attempts to find a middle way between mainstream historiography, which has tend to understate the role of networks, and the conspiracy theorist, who habitually exaggerate their role. It proposes a new historical narrative, in which major changes – dating back to the age of Discovery and the Reformation, if not earlier – can be understood, in essence. as disruptive challenges posed to established hierarchies by networks, it also challenges the confident assumptions some commentators make today that there is something inherently begin in network disruption of hierarchical order. And it considers the experience of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to identify ways in which the revolutionary energies transmitted by networks can be contained.
(Ibid. 9)
In his book The Pentagons’ New Map, Barnett describes this as horizonal waves and vertical shocks, Thus the disruptions of the networks are the vertical shocks that disrupt the horizonal waves of the hierarchies. He describes these events as the “meteor that separates the dinosaurs from the mammals.” (Thomas Barnett. The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century. New York: G. P, Putnam’s Sons. 2004. 259) Networks are everywhere, and sometimes they are just a small meteorite streaking across a black sky, but other times they are a twelve mile wide asteroid that brings on an extinction event.
Networks seems as if they are everywhere in the modern era, from television, computers, political, terrorists, financial, to social, networks seem to dominate the news and the world. Networks were blamed for the global financial crisis of 2008 and the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The social networks, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google, played a prominent role in this election, along with the news networks at Fox and CNN. Trump used these networks to attack the elite networks of the Clinton campaign, a network he once was part of. Had he lost he may have revived his old “Trump Network,” set up to advertise products he endorse, and launch his own Trump TV as a television network. Along with this, Vladimir Putin and Russian Intelligence used the information collected from WikiLeaks to launch a campaign against the former Secretary of State, whom he personally disliked. Fear of foreign interference in American politics comes from the beginnings of the Republic. It was behind the requirement that a President be a natural born citizen and the Emoluments Clause in the Constitution that prohibits an American citizen from accepting a foreign title. Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams all expressed fears of foreign interference in American elections from the founding of the Republic in 1790.
Networks seemed to have taken over and some call our time the Age of Networks. Some believe that this is a great boon to the individual citizen, other fear it allows the giant tech corporations to erode national sovereignty and place all under some collectivist world government. “The most alarming prospect of all is that a single global network will ultimately render Homo Sapiens redundant and then extinct.” (Ferguson. 13) Ferguson goes on:
In Homo Deus, (Yuval Harari. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. New York: Harper Collins. 2015) Yuval Harari argues that the age of large-scale “mass cooperation networks” based on written language, money, culture and ideology – products of carbon-based human neutral networks – is giving way to a new era of silicon-based computer networks based on algorithms. In that network, we shall quickly find ourselves about as important to the algorithms as animals currently are to us. Disconnection from the network will come to mean death for the individual, as the network will be maintaining our health around the clock. But connection will ultimately mean extinction for the species. “The yardsticks that we ourselves have enshrined will condemn us to join the mammoths and Chinese river dolphins in oblivion.” (Harari. 344, 395) On the basis of the human past, these would seem to be our just desserts.
(Ferguson. 13-14)
While Harari may be engaging in a dystopic view of the future, Ferguson believes that history can still teach about the future as well as the present. He argues that people underestimate the networks and many doubt history can be useful in an age of rapid technological innovation. People have limited knowledge of networks and overlook the key role they play in nature and in our own evolutionary past. Because of this, and the erroneous belief history can not teach one anything, the importance of networks in the past has been underestimated. The networks of today are much more vast and complex than at any time in history, and the flow of information far exceeds that of any previous time period. To get any understanding of them , one must look at the smaller, slower ones of the past, which we may find we much more powerful and important than we have come to believe.
In the natural world we are surrounded by networks, from ant colonies to circulatory systems. River deltas are networks, and some problems can only be solved by network analysis. The spread of disease can be explained by networks, the lines the infections travel on from one to another. “In prehistory, Homo sapiens evolved as a cooperative ape, with a unique ability to network – to communicate and to act collectively – that set us apart from all other animals.” (Ibid. 16) Evolutional biologist Joseph Henrich says the agility to teach and share through socializing and to act with a collective brain set us up as the dominate species on the planet. Robin Dunbar argues that the more developed neocortex gave the sapiens the ability to work in groups of 150 and larger, instead of the 50 that chimpanzees are able to act in. Sociologist Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler state that the brain of the sapiens seems to have been built for social networks. The ancestors of the sapiens were obligated to become social forgers and became interdependent on each other for food, shelter , and warmth. From this came the spoken language as well as other advanced brain capacity and structure, most likely arising from ape-like practices of grooming. the sapiens art, dance, and ritual may have also have arisen from these practices. Historians William H. McNeill and J. E. McNeill argue that the first world wide web was invented around 12,000 years ago as sapiens were born to network. Ferguson states:
Social networks, then ,are the structures that human beings naturally form, beginning with knowledge itself and the various forms of representation we use to communicate it, as well of course as the family trees to which we all necessarily belong, even if only some of us possess detailed genealogical knowledge.
(Ibid. 17)
Our patterns of settlement, migration and miscegenation that has caused us as a species to cross the entire planet, as well as the many cults and crazes with occasionally produce. Social networks come in all sizes and shapes, some are secretive, others open to all. Some spring up spontaneously while others are meticulously planned and structured. From the invention of written language, new technologies have felicitated our innate, ancient, maybe even prehistoric, urge to network. Yet despite this, for most of recorded history, hierarchies dominated networks in all their scope and scale. Sapiens mainly organized with power concentrated at the top in the hands of a chief, king, lord, emperor, or strongman. Meanwhile, the vast majority of people, usually poor and with very little or no power, called peasants, were stuck in small and tiny clusters called the family, usually housed in a slightly larger place called a village. These villages were most likely isolated with little or no contact with the larger world. Sapiens, at least the majority of them, were living this way as little as a hundred years ago. In these communities the key role in keeping all linked together is played by a “diffusion-central ” individual, commonly known as the gossip. The oppressiveness of such societies did, at times, have some individuals retreat into complete isolation and live as hermits beyond the pale of civilization, or at least out in the woods. “From the Lone Ranger to the High Palins Drifter, such insular individuals have been recurrent heroes of Western cinema” (Ibid. 18) Such as the old mountain men of legend, this individualism on the part of a sapien is rare and is a social animal who tends to shun the outlier, as the outlier shuns the society. The question then is why if sapiens are such social animals, have such vertically structured and rigidly institutionalized hierarchies dominated society.
Hierarchy comes from the Greek word, hierarchia, which literary translated is the rule of the high priest. It was first used to describe the heavenly order of angles and a stratified order of spiritual or temporal governance. By the sixteenth century the word network was used to describe a mesh of interlaced thread. Shakespeare used the words net and web metaphorically, as in Iago’s plot against Othello as a “net that shall enmesh them all.” In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scientist used the word to describe networks in nature such as spider webs and the circulatory system. In the nineteenth century geographers and engineers used the term to describe waterways and railways, and writers began to use it for characterizing relations between people. In 1889, the word hierarchy was used more than the word network in any writings. It was only in the twentieth century that the word network began to have more use, first to describe electrical and transportation systems, then telephone and television systems, and finally computer and online social networks. It was not until 1980 was it used as a verb to describe purposive, career-orienting socializing.
Hierarchies are a vertically structured organization with a centralized and top-down command, control and communication. The evolved from family based clans and tribes and became more complicated and stratified over the centuries. They have a formalized division and ranking of labor which were tightly regulated by urban polities reliant on commerce and agriculture. Mainly monarchial, they were assisted by centrally run cults known as churches with armies and bureaucracies within the state. They also contained guilds that operated to control access to skilled occupations and with some autonomous corporations that sought to exploit the economies of scope and scale by internalizing market transactions. There were academic corporations usually called universities and supersized transnational states called empires, such as the Holy Roman Empire in Europe. Ferguson says of hierarchies, “The crucial incentive that favored hierarchical order was that it made the exercise of power more efficient: centralizing control in the hands of the ‘big man’ eliminated or at least reduced time-consuming arguments about what to do, which might at any time escalate into internecine conflicts.” (Ibid. 21) Philosopher Benoit Dubreuil argues the delegating of judicial and penal power, to punish those who transgressed, to one individual or elite was an optional solution for primarily agricultural societies whose requirement of the majority of the people was that they shut up and work the farms. Peter Turchin emphasized the role of warfare arguing that the changes in military technology was a key to the spreading of hierarchical states. Absolutism provided these communities with a source of social cohesion and allowed the state to keep order. Order was the most important thing for societies, as chaos was seen as being of the devil or some malignant evil force. The creation of the Great Chain of Being was the result of the hierarchical state. The Great Chain of Being is a hierarchal structure, which the medieval Catholic Church belied was ordained from God, in which all matter was ranked from God to the dirt under the feet of the people. (This idea of a great chain of being can be traced to Plato’s division of the world into the Forms, which are full beings, and sensible things, which are imitations of the Forms and are both being and not being. Aristotle’s teleology recognized a perfect being, and he also arranges all animals by a single natural scale according to the degree of perfection of their souls. The idea of the great chain of being was fully developed in Neoplatonism and in the Middle Ages.” (Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy, p. 289 (2004)) Under such an idea, it was thought that order could be maintained and chaos avoided, as all were placed in a society by birth in the station that the society need to run efficiently and effectively.
Yet one problem persisted in regard to absolute rule and the hierarchal form of governing, corruption. “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men,” so said John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, 1st Baron of Acton (1834-1902) in a letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton in 1887. He used an idea that many other writers had expressed in other words. No matter how talented, intelligence, caring, or noble, the temptations of imperial absolute governance toward corruption is irresistible by sapiens. The more democratic a state is, the more power is diffused among many hands, the more sustained economic development has been over time. This type of a state is better able to cope with the complexities of larger populations and technological advances. It also keeps the state from crashing if the head is incapacitated by illness or assassination, things that can bring the hierarchical state toppling down. Yet in practice, except for occasional regulation and taxation, many of the old hierarchical states left considerable amounts of power to the market, especially in cases were the elites benefited from such arrangements. In this the relationship between the market and the state is much like the typical medieval town, like Siena in Tuscany, were the Tower, representing the state, stands next to the marketplace and its shadow cast a large cloud over the area. This shows how the government defines the legal framework of the market, and how the market and bureaucracies form ideal types of information networks, just as the clans and fiefdoms do. In contrast, informal networks, transactions occur not by administrative command, but through networks of individuals engaging in actions that are reciprocal and mutually supportive.
To find the origin of the study of networks, one must journey to the city of Konigsberg in East Prussia. (now Kalingrad, Kalingrad Oblast, Russia) home of Immanuel Kant and the city’s famous seven bridges. The seven bridges crossed the Pregel River and connected the two river banks to the two islands in the middle of the river. Natives of the city said one could not cross all seven bridges without crossing one bridge twice. Swiss mathematician Leonhand Euler, studied this phenome and in 1735 invented network theory as he formally demonstrated why one could not walk across all seven bridges with out re-crossing one of them. In the nineteenth century scientist applied this theory to cartography, electrical circuits and organic compounds. The idea of social networks may have occurred to political thinks like John Stuart Mill, Auguste Comte, and Alexis de Tocqueville, as they looked at associational life in different societies. None, however, formalized their insights, but the study of social networks can be traced to Johannes Delitsch in his 1900 study of the matrix of friendships he found in his classes of fifty three boys in 1880-1881. He identified a close relationship between social affinities and academic ranking, which in that time was used in classroom seating. In a similar type study Austrian born (but anti Freudian) Jacob Moreno did a study of “delinquent ” girls in a reformatory in Hudson, New York. In his study, Who Shall Survive, (1933) {J. L. Morreno. Nervous and Mental Disease Monograph Series no.58. “Who Shall Survive: A New Approach to the Problem of Human Interrelations.” Nervous and Mental Publishing Co. 1934} In this study he argued the surge in the number of runaway girls in 1932 was explicable in terms of the position of the girls in the schools’ social networks. Eugene Garfield, in the 1960s, devised a similar graphical technique to see the history of scientific fields by creating a historiography of citations. He basically showed that scientist often citied those who agreed with them in studies, proving the old adage that “birds of a feather flock together.” It made the word “Homophily, ” the tendency of people to be drawn to those similar to them, the first law of the social network. Everett Rogers and Dilip Bhowmik were the first sociologist who suggested that homophily may be a disadvantage as it tended to narrow the range of one’s friends. It is also an urge that tend to produce self segregation, mainly between races in social groups. Twentieth century scholars and mathematicians have shown which individual are important in a network is defined as centrality. Three most important measure of importance in a network is the degree of centrality, between centrality , and closeness centrality. Degree centrality is the number of edges radiating out from a specific node, the sociability or the number of relationships one has to the others. Between centrality is the extent that information flows through a particular node, as information needs to find the quickest rout networks often rely on a key individual to transmit such information. Closeness centrality is average number of “steps” it takes for one node to reach out all the other nodes in the network. Those with a high degree of betweenness or closeness centrality act as hubs in the networks.
Important advances in the understanding of networks came in the mid-twentieth century in the understanding of a network’s aggregative properties, which are usually invisible to each individual node. R. Duncan Luce and Albert Perry of MIT examined how the use of “clustering ” coefficients could be used to measure how much of a group of nodes are connected. A clique was seen as the extreme case in which all the nodes of a network were connected. “Technically, the clustering coefficient is the proportion of social triads which are fully connected, meaning that each member of any trio is connected to the other two.” (Ferguson. 28) In 1967, Stanley Milgram showed how these were important in a famous experiment by sending out letters to a random group of people in Wichita, Kansas and Omaha, Nebraska asking them to forward the letter directly to the finale recipient, the wife of a Harvard divinity student and a stockbroker in Boston, if the knew the person, or send it to someone they believed would know the individual. This was only to be done if the person was known to them on a first name bases and then they were directed to send a postcard to Milligram informing his the transaction was complete. According to Milligram forty-four of the 160 letters from Nebraska got thorough, although, more recent studies suggest it was only twenty one. From this he calculated the number of intermediaries to complete the task was five, an amount anticipated by the Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy, (1887-1938) who in his 1929 story “Lancezemek (Chains) had the character bet that he could link himself to anyone on Earth through five people. Karinthy, who also wrote an early look at Artificial Intelligence in his book ,Voyage to Faremido, (1916) and the battle of the sexes in his bock, Capilliaria, (1921), was the first to propose the idea of the six degrees of separation, or one could be connected to any person through six or less people. This concept was also argued by political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool and mathematician Manfred Kochen. The premise is that a network connects two nodes via five intermediaries with six edges. The phrase “six degrees of separation” is not coined until John Guare’s play in 1990, ( inspired by the real life con man David Hampton who in the 1980s convinced many people he was the son of Sidney Poitier) but the idea had a long pre-history. “Recent research suggest the number is now closer to five than six, which suggests that technological change since the 1970s has been less transformative than is commonly supposed.” (Ibid.29)
While many think of their networks as a relatively small cluster of family and friends, this six degrees concept explained by Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter as the “strength of weak ties.” If all ties were strong homophilic ones the world would be a fragmented place, but those ties to ones we call acquaintances is the key to the concept. These weak ties are the connections that bridge to clusters one would otherwise not be connected to at all. He discovered that strong ties were more important to the poor and suggested that these tightly knit world perpetuated poverty in many regions. Duncan Watts and Steven Strogatz showed that the addition of just a few edges to a node would dramatically increase the closeness of all nodes without increasing the overall clustering coefficient. It also explained many economic transactions that were more a simple supply and demand, but the result of information flowing through these weak ties creating a larger network. In this business networks created social capital that encouraged innovation and creative ideas though those weak ties. In a version of Metcalfe’s law (named after Ethernet inventor Robert Metcalfe, in which the value of a telecommunication network was proportional to the square of the number of connected communicating devises) the more nodes in a network, the more valuable the neatwork is the nodes. Thus ideas, like a disease, can be spread though a social network. Emotions and behaviors can also be spread through a social network, but their are limits. Ferguson says, “Imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, even when it is unconscious.” (Ibid. 33)
The structure of the network is then just as important as the idea looking to be transferred. The nodes not only play the part of hubs or brokers, but of gatekeepers, in deciding one what information or idea is passed on to the entre network. The idea that reflects well on the person is the one that will be passed on, and thus an idea needs two or more sources to move through the network. The complex cultural contagion, unlike a simple virus, must first attain a critical mass of early adoptees who posses a high degree of centrality, or large number of influential friends. Duncan Watts said the key to assessing the probability of a contagion like cascade depends not on the stimulus itself but the structure of the network it hits. Ferguson states the this is why for every idea that goes viral, countless others fizzle out in obscurity, because they began with the wrong node, cluster, or network.
Social networks posses more nodes with very large number of edges and more with very few numbers of edges, following a Pareto-like distribution. (named for Vilfredo Pareto, (1848-1923) an Italian civil engineer, economist, sociologist, political scientist and philosopher. He popularized the use of the term elite in social analysis, and came up with the 80/20 rule which said that 20% of the population controlled 80% of the wealth. He argued that in a nation the ruling class would emerge and enrich itself at the expense of the poor. His view of the world is as follows: “At the bottom of the Wealth curve, he wrote, Men and Women starve and children die young. In the broad middle of the curve all is turmoil and motion: people rising and falling, climbing by talent or luck and falling by alcoholism, tuberculosis and other kinds of unfitness. At the very top sit the elite of the elite, who control wealth and power for a time – until they are unseated through revolution or upheaval by a new aristocratic class. There is no progress in human history. Democracy is a fraud. Human nature is primitive, emotional, unyielding. The smarter, abler, stronger, and shrewder take the lion’s share. The weak starve, lest society become degenerate: One can, Pareto wrote, ‘compare the social body to the human body, which will promptly perish if prevented from eliminating toxins.’ Inflammatory stuff – and it burned Pareto’s reputation.” Mandelbrot, Benoit (2006). “The Mystery of Cotton”. The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0465043576. )
Sociologist Robert K. Merton called this the “Matthew effect,” after the words in St. Matthew (Matthew 25:28) that proclaimed from one with abundance will be given more and those that have nothing more will be taken. In effect those with more success will have that success bring more success. Large networks expand on this principal, that the nodes will gain more new edges in proportion to what they already had. This is “preferential attachment,” coming from physicist Albert-Lazlo Barabasi and Reka Albert who were the first to suggest that real world networks followed a power law distribution, or be scale free. As the network evolves , a few nodes become hubs and will gain many more edges than other nodes. Barbassi said that a hierarchy of nodes keeps the network intact, with one heavily connected node followed by several less connected ones, trialed by many smaller nodes. There is no central node in the middle controlling and monitoring every link like a spider in a web. There is no single node who if knocked out breaks the web, a scale-free network was a web without a spider.
A random network each node in the network has approximately the same number of links, resembling the American highway system, with each city having approximately the same amount of highways connecting it to the system. A network can be highly centralized and not scale-free, an example of this is the network of relationships in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, where his stepfather Claudius had the highest degree of centrality. A network can be highly deterministic and non-random or modular, broken up into a number of sperate clusters with a few bridging edges. It could also be heterogenous, which each node differing greatly in terms of centrality, much like the scale-free networks of online communities. They can be hierarchal and modular, like the complex systems that regulate metabolism and put certain systems under others. This shows one that a hierarchy is not the opposite of a network, but a special kind of network.
An idealized chart of a hierarchy would be like an upside down picture of a tress root system. Beginning at the top, one first adds a certain number of subordinate nodes, than to each node add some that are subordinate to that particular node. The nodes are always in a descending order and never connect laterally. Each node is connect to one above, there are no cycles or paths that lead back to a node. Only one path goes from a node up, and the one on top has the highest betweenness and closeness centrality. The entire system is based on maximizing the top nodes ability to access and control information. Few hierarchies ever came close to total contrail of information, Stalin’s Soviet Union may have been the closest, thus they are usually only partially hierarchical, more like the cooperative hierarchies of the natural world. “It may be helpful, nevertheless, to think of the pure hierarchy as in some sense “anti-random,” in that the promiscuous connectivity associated with networks – above all, clustering – is prohibited.” (Ibid. 39)
A network is never frozen in time, and large complex systems with “emergent properties,” or having novel structures, patterns, and properties that manifest themselves in “phase transitions” that are not predictable. A seemly random network can, with astounding speed, quickly develop into a hierarchy. History has shown to road between the revolutionary crowd and the totalitarian state is very short. In France, the French Revolution began in 1789, and in 1800, Napoleon took power, the transition was quicker in Russia, with the Revolution overthrowing Nicholas II in March of 1917, and Lenin taking power in October of the same year. On the other hand, a hierarchy can also dissolve with astounding speed and quickness. A example of this would be the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European empire after 1989. With just a few edges added to a node can radically reduce the separation between the other nodes. It does not take much to destroy the hierarchy’s near monopoly on communication. Ferguson puts it this way:
This helps to explain why emperors and kings throughout history have fretted about conpirasiecs. Cabals, camarillas, cells, cliques, coteries: all such terms have sinister connotations in the context of a monarchial court. Hierarchs have long been uneasily aware that fraternizing amongst subordinates can to the prelude to a palace coup.
(Ibid. 40)
The most important challenge for a historian is consider how networks interact with each other. Political scientist John Padgett proposed that this interaction results in innovation and invention and has three forms. These forms are transportation, refunctionality, and catalysis. Networks especially a resilient social one, will resist change to production rules and communication protocols, but when its network and patterns are transposed from one context to another and refunctioned is where innovation and invention tends to occur. Networks act as an agent for transmitting ideas, but can be the source of ideas as well. While some networks will resist change, when two diverse networks have a point of contact, this is where one finds novelty. Networks can meet and fuse amicably, but they may attack each other was well. The outcome in these cases depends on the strength and resilience of the networks involved. Attacks on social networks are usually directed by or encouraged by a hierarchical entity. The 2016 election and the Russian interference is a recent and prime example of such attacks. It also illustrates the fundamental differences between networks and hierarchies. Networks are relatively decentralized and are able to adapt and evolve and thus are more creative than a hierarchy. This is why networks have historically been the source of more innovations than hierarchies. While they are more adaptive, they are not strategic and may have trouble directing a move towards a common objective. The Second World War needed a hierarchy to achieve victory, a central overall command to direct forces against the Axis. Plus they can spread bad ideas just as easily and quickly as good ones. It can cause mass burning of witches or a craving of photographing cats on the internet. In the United States, Amy Zegart commented that the nation was simultaneously the most powerful and most vulnerable in the cyber war theater.
Ferguson states, “The reality is that we find it very hard indeed to fathom the implications of the growth of networks in out own time.” (Ibid. 44) It might have been stated by Christopher Wallace (The Notorious B.I.G.) best in 1997 when he said, “Never get high on your own supply.” In 2016, the network gurus of the social network, Facebook, Twitter, Google, were all in the court of Hillary Clinton. They were a reliable source of campaign funds and now even policy advice. Al Gore had been the Tech candidate, even said he invented the internet. Barack Obama brought he White House into the social media age by opening accounts of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other platforms as early as 2009. Many in his campaign credited their presence on the social media platforms as one the reasons they had won in 2008. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram were the darlings of the Democrat party, who had supported them for their beginnings in the 90s, and the entire internet all the back to the dense funding from Kennedy and Johnson that lead to the birth of the internet. But despite the presence of right wing groups and other radical parties on the internet from the days of the chat room, none expected the thing that had been created to make the entire world one great community would be used to elect Donald Trump. The atmosphere changed in November of 2016.
And so very swiftly, sediment swelled that the chief culprits in this electoral surprise were the big American tech platforms themselves. Their breezy confidence about connecting the world, their hubris about the power of engineering, their dazzling sophisticated thinking machines: all seemly had opened the door for bad actors to come in, exploiting networks like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and really, the whole internet, driving a divided America even further apart.
(Margaret O’Mara. The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. New York: Penguin Books. 2019. 403)
For the social networks every article that extolled some positive, like the Arab Spring, came a negative, such as the empowering of dangerous Islamic terrorist group like ISIS. The were so certain of themselves, they never thought their beloved network would ever be used for anything but good things. Yet the man who invented the bow and arrow may have been surprised when his neighbor used it against him as well. A better example is Alfred Noble, (1831-1900) who took Asccenio Sobero’s (1812-1888) invention of nitroglycerin and discovered that by adding silica to it he produced the more stable dynamite. He intended it to be used for civilian construction, but it soon was used for military purposes. His brother Ludwig printed an obituary to him by mistake in 1888 titled “Le marchant de la mort est mort” (the merchant of death is dead) which condemned Noble for inventing military explosives. Noble was horrified by this and to give himself a better legacy left much of his vast estate to the creation of the Noble Peace Prize. The law of unintended circumstances was also very apparent in the history of the internet and the social media networks. Created from the desire of the American military to survive nuclear attack, they morphed into the giant network whose creators believed they were creating the great world wide community that would lead to peace, freedom, and prosperity for all living on Earth. (For a complete look into the history of the internet and social networks see: Margaret O’Mara. The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America) Ferguson says of the network, built to protect and enhance society, that the fundamental threat to America, does not come from the outside, “It is the evolution of the network itself.” (Ibid. 44) Many futurologist see the established hierarchies and corporations doing very well in the future. Francis Fukuyama believes that hierarchies must prevail as they may be the only way to run a low trust society. British political operative Dominic Cummings believes the future state must act like the human immune system or ant colony, as a network “with emergent properties and the capacity for self-organization, without plans or central coordination, relaying instead on probabilistic experimentation, reinforcing success and discarding failure, achieving resilience partly through redundancy.” (Ibid. 45) Both may be underestimating the old hierarchies and the vulnerabilities of networks in the face of new power structures with capabilities even greater than the totalitarian states of the twentieth century. Then again, in the afterwards of the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe entered into a feudal state of hundreds of tiny hierarchies and networks until the rise of nation states in the 1500s, maybe we could do that again.
Using his theories on networks Ferguson takes another look at the history of the Illuminati. Founder Adam Weishaupt was the orphaned son of a law professor at the University of Ingolstadt. Under the tutelage of baron Johann Adam Ickstatt he was able to follow in the footsteps of his father. Under Icksttt’s influnce he came under the spell of the radical philosophies of the more radical writers of the French Enlightenment, especially Claude Adrien Helvetius (De l’esprit, 1758) and Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (Le Systeme de la nature, 1770) Their atheist tendencies excited the man whose boyhood had been under the Jesuits, an experience he did not enjoy. Thus his organization had to be secret, as such views were dangerous in the conservative nation of Bavaria. He modeled the Illuminati on the Jesuits (who had been dissolved by Pope Clement XIV in 1773) and envisioned an organization in which all kept journals reviewed by superior and would supply a library, healthcare and insurance. Had they stuck with this design, they would now be forgotten, but the key to their legend was when their infiltration the German Masonic lodges. The Masons, founded by medieval stoneworkers, were at the time a rapidly growing network, which began in Scotland and England, and at the time was rapidly spreading throughout Germany. At the time there was mounting dissatisfaction with the moves of many Masonic lodges, as many felt they were betraying their original intent and moving from the mythical origins of the Knight’s Templar. In 1772 Adolph Franz Friedrich Ludwig, Baraon von Knigge, joined and found the Illuminati a much more exclusive group and more to his liking. A much better connect man who understood the minds of many aristocratic Freemasons, he was able to transform the tiny group into a much more extensive organization. He made the rapidly growing orgazation much more elaborate and more hierarchal.
In this he created an network that craved elaborate hierarchical structures while condemning existing hierarchies. It was an organization that believed that in the original natural state man had been free and happy, with the division into classes, private property, personal ambition and the formation of states came later causing the miseries of the present time. “Mankind had ceased to be ‘one great family, a single empire’ because of the ‘desire of men to differentiate themselves from one another.'” (Ibid. 51) They believed the Enlightenment ideas, spread by secret societies would overcome this and lead to the extinction of princes, violence as the world became a paradise inhabited by rationally thinking people.
They also had an ambivalent relationship with Christianity. Many appeared to be deist, and at times portrayed Jesus Christ as a liberator of all mankind whose doctrine of reason paramount goal was the introduction of freedom and equality without revolution. A recent example of this may be the writings of Jose Porfirio Miranda who argues:
Jose Porfirio Miranda asserts in his book, Marx and the Bible, that the Church of Marx’s time was not the true Church, that the real God was an active God, who intervened in history to administer justice, (he describes Jesus as the historical event God sent to right the wrongs of society) not the ethereal figure of the mainline Church of Marx’s day. Marx, Miranda says, looked for God in Western civilization, and did not find him, He was not there, He could not abide in the capitalist West with its legions of injustices. He will only be in a just world, and when man achieves that, the dead will rise and the Kingdom of God will exist on earth.
(Jose Porfirio Miranda, trans. by John Eagleson, Marx and the Bible: A Critique of the Philosophy of Oppression, Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books 1974. 293-297)
Ferguson argues that the Illuminati saw this more as a pious fraud, and their ultimate goal was the founding a pseudo-religious World Religion based on the ideas of the Enlightenment. On these ideas the organization foundered, as many accused Weishaupt of being under the spell of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other more radical thinkers of the time. As the order was banned in Bavaria, Weishaupt resigned and in April of 1785 it is believed that Count Johann Martine zu Stolberg-Rossia dissolved the entire organization. It is clear that the Illuminati had been liquidated two years before the French Revolution they would later be accused of starting and sustaining. However, “For defenders of mainstream Freemasonry and opponents of the French Revolution, however, there was strong incentives to exaggerate the scale and malignancy of the Illuminati.” (Ibid. 53) The ideas of the French Revolution did not come from a sinister outside force, but from the salons of Paris and moved out to the many radical thinkers in Europe. There was at the time an international network connecting all the philosophers in Europe and North America, through book sharing and correspondence. While secret societies and Masonic lodges had a part, the most important part of the network came from publishing houses and libraries. The Illuminati was not an omnipotent conspiracy, sustained for two centuries, but merely a reveling footnote in the history of the Enlightenment. Because of their challenge to the prevailing authorities, secrecy made sense, but that secrecy allowed the authorities to exaggerate the revolutionary threat posed by the Illuminati and other secret societies.
Here lies the difficulty in writing the history of many networks, as they have no one great archive of material. The historian must relay on many memoirs and documents, many confiscated or written by foes of the network under study. “The Illuminati did not cause the French Revolution, much less Napoleon’s rise- though they certainly benefited from it. (all but Weishaupt were pardoned and some, most notably Dalberg, became very powerful)” (Ibid. 55) The did not continue to plot to form some world government, then or now, but were an integral part of the the complex process that took Europe from Enlightenment, to Revolution, to Empire. It was a process that an intellectual network played a decisive role.
Hierarchies have dominated history from the earliest days of human existence. When sapiens lived on the Serengeti, nature imposed a hierarchy on the species. The strongest and smartest of the group was the leader, the rest were followers. The alpha male, like in ape groups, was the one who ruled, most likely through physical force. Tribes would be ruled by the consensus of the tribal elders, with no one leader, in an almost oligarchical sense. In America , many native tribes, like the Iroquois, had peace and war chiefs, whose were called upon to lead in certain times. As the human groups grew larger and more complex the tribes moved from cooperative hierarchies to a more stratified social system. As early agricultural communities had to defend themselves from raiders and keep the production and distribution of food, the society would soon stratify into leaders, warriors, priest and laborers. With this soon emerged the one who could marshal enough resources to consolidate enough power to take the top position and become the ruler, the god-king. “Hierarchy has many benefits, in economics as well as governance.” (Ibid. 60) It made for a secure and orderly kingdom, and to enhance and consolidate power, the ruler would identify with the gods and make themselves divinely ordained. A problem did quickly emerge as the ruling and priestly élite would divert a large share of resources to themselves and their cronies. The society set up social networks that firmly subordinated all to the prerogatives of the hierarchy. It became a world were innovation was discouraged and deviants were put to death. Information did not flow in any direction but down, from the top to the bottom. The elites were to rule and the masses were to shut up and work the farm. (or to use a sports example, shut up and dribble) There were experiments with more distributive political structures, such as the Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic, but these did not last long. “The core lesson of classical political theory was that power should be hierarchically structured and that power naturally became concentrated in fewer hands the larger a political unit became.” (Ibid. 62)
Ferguson argues that the Roman Empire’s hierarchy was destroyed by migration, religion, and contagion, which were not planned or foreseen, but spread virally through the empire causing the empire to crumble. German tribes overwhelmed the Romans in Western Europe, causing the society to crash and epidemics ravage the empire. The religions that crumbled the empire were Christianity and Islam, both founded by charismatic leaders and spread in a network like viral wave. In the east, after disrupting Roman rule Christianity created theocratic hierarchies in both Byzantium (Constantinople) and Bagdad. In the West, the Roman papacy imposed a hierarchical and stratified ecclesiastical system over the church, but the political system was more like a network, with a fractional geometry of states, some large, some small, with most being hereditary monarchies, some aristocracies, and a handful of city states run by oligarchies. In Asia, China sought to gain stability though a single monolithic empire with a culture (Confucianism) centered on filial piety (xiao). Regional and local power was checked by an imperial bureaucracy and no law was seen as valid unless made by the emperor. Unlike the West. the bureaucracy was recruited and ranked based on merit and competence with civil service test given to achieve promotions. In both systems the principal obstacle to a stable state was the persistence of familial, clan, or tribal networks. This struggle often lead to civil wars, or dynastic wars, and the common belief was that order was not possible unless it was achieved under an absolute authority. The total lack of communication between Europe and China was the primary obstacle in medieval times to creating a single world wide network.
From 950 to 1250 there is a period of warming called the Medieval Warming Period (or Climate Optimum or Anomaly) in which temperatures in Europe was warm enough that grapes grew in England and the Vikings were able to set up colonies in Greenland. During this period some of the warmest temperatures were set in the Northern Hemisphere, and then, maybe caused by a volcanic eruption, it came to an end in 1250. The cooling, or Little Ice Age (1300-1830) resulted in the Great Famine (1315-1317) when the crops of Europe were devastated by heavy rain and cattle disease. (which killed almost 80% of livestock). The cooling may have doomed the Viking settlements in Greenland, but may have given Columbus a storm free season to cross the Atlantic in 1492. In the vain of Morton Salt’s motto, “when it rains it pours,” came the one event that struck the entire Eurasian continent, devastating and depopulating the entire land mass.
It stuck first in Asia and Africa, between 1346 and 1353, then it headed into Europe, from 1347 to 1351. Carried by fleas on rats, the bacteria Yersinia pestis, was at the root of the pandemic called the Black Death (or Pestilence, Great Mortality, or the Plague) Since the trade routs in the East were sparse and had few ties it took four years to transverse the land to Europe. Here with tightly packed cities, and a window tax that had caused many to board up windows creating many dark corners in houses, it would kill half the population of the land. Labor shortages, especially in England, gave the peasantry the first real wage gains since the hay day of the Roman Empire. This was not the case in China, where were the hierarchical dominance of the emperor restricted travel and contacts between cities. In the West, no monolithic empire emerged after the collapse of Rome. English merchants were able to form self-governing corporations, ones that one day colonized North America, as the king power was nowhere near that of the Chinese emperor. In Asia, the the networks that matted the most were those of family and the clan. The West was more individualistic the and forms of associations and brotherhoods came to matter more. It lead to the rise of families like the Medici and the introduction of capitalism in the West. It gave birth to the “Renaissance man,” part politician, part patriarch, part intellectual aesthete.
Not as famous as the Medici, Benedetto Cotrugli gives the example of the evolution of networks in Europe during the Renaissance. His book, Book of the Art of Trade (1458) gives us a window to the life of a Mediterranean merchant of the Renaissance. While some compare it to Donald Trump’s Art of the Deal, (1987) Cotrugli was not like Trump. He warned merchants to avoid politics, as he saw them as occupying a perilous area. He was a highly educated humanist who was the embodiment of the classical commoner-citizen of the ancient Roman or Greek cultures as rediscovered by the Renaissance society. “In many ways, The Art of Trade was Cotrugli’s attempt to not just raise the standard of business education but also to elevate the standing of business itself.” (Ibid. 68) His book was the earliest to describe the double-entry-book-keeping system almost thirty years before Luca Paciol , a close friend of Leonardo da Vinci, and his famous treatise, De computis et scripturis. (1494) Cotrugli does more than just offer a textbook on accounting, but an exhortation for all merchants to follow and become Renaissance businessmen. It also gives the modern reader a window to the vanished worlds of the Renaissance.
Cotrugli gives a passionate defense of businessmen against charges of greed, avarice, and usury, a charge many leveled at them during the period. He said he was astonished that many theologians condemned a practice that was useful and easy to conduct human affairs. He was carful, as usury was illegal, to define usurers as those who did not extend credit if the borrower could not pay at the end of the debt period. He promoted rigorous accounting procedures and urged the business man to diversify to manage and reduce risk. He did so imagine a merchant entering into many partnerships with several businessmen in many cities across the Europe. He proclaimed that, “A merchant should be the most universal of men and one that has to do, more than his fellows, with different types of men and social classes.” (Ibid. 70) His book can be read as a manifesto calling for a new society of networked polymaths.
As Europe achieved advances in both cultural and economic development it began to diverge from the rest of the world by the end of the fifteenth century. The decisive event that prefigured a world domination by Europe was not the Italian Renaissance, but the age of Iberian Exploration. The Iberian Peninsula had been dominated by the Moors, who invaded the peninsula in 711. Their progress north into France was stopped in 732 by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours. In 722 at the Battle of Covadonga, the Christin ruler, Pelagius stopped the Moors from completely taking the peninsula, in what beginning the Reconquista, which would last until 1492. On June 24, 1126 the Burgundian knight Henry, Count of Portugal (of the house of Capetian) won the Battle of Salo Mamede and united the counties of Portugal and Coimbra in what is seen as the founding of the nation of Portugal. His son Afonso Henrique, became king of Portugal in 1139 and gained affirmation of his tile in the 1179 Manifesto Probatum of Pope Alexander III. But as a nation, they had a problem.
The Portuguese drove the Moors out of the southern part of their kingdom in 1299 and moved their capital to Lisbon in 1255. A treaty with England, Treaty of Windsor (which is still in effect) gave the international prestige in 1386. But stuck on the end of the Iberian peninsula, to gain trade with the East, they had to go through the City of Venice and the Ottoman Empire, paying duties and taxes to each. To solve this problem, Dom Henrique of Portugal, Duke of Visew (Prince Henry the Navigator, 1394-1460) began to gather information and maps and started the Portuguese move south around Africa. He was looking for the source of the West African Gold and Slave trade and the legendary kingdom of Prester John (a mythical Christian kingdom that was said to exit in either the far East or Africa). Under his direction the Portuguese invented the caravel, a ship more seaworthy than those used in the Mediterranean. His sailors perfected the Vota do Mar (turn or return from the sea) a maneuver essential for Atlantic sailing. They also discovered and mapped the Trade Winds and other oceanic wind patterns later used in transatlantic sailing. Slowly the Portuguese moved south along the African coast, in 1443, Gil Eanes got to Cape Bojadas, by 1441, Nuno Tristao and Anto Goncalves got to Cape Blanco. By 1443 the Portuguese found their way to the Bay of Arguin, and in 1448 Dinis Dias sailed to the mouth of the Senegal River. While places like Tunis and Algeria were devested by the new found Portuguese routs, Portugal was enrich by their trade in gold and slaves along the coast. In 1452 they produced the first gold cruzadocan, a gold coin that would be used for hundreds of years. Alvis Cadamosto sailed to the Cape Verde Islands and by 1462 the Portuguese were in Sierra Leone. They had also conquered the Canary Islands as well. In 1490, Bartolomeu Dias proved Africa could be circumvented by sailing to the Cape of Good Hope and in 1498, Vasco da Gama became the first European to sailed into the Indian Ocean by sailing around Africa. These were the beginning of a network of new oceanic trade routs that would transform the world trade market from a patchwork of regional markets into a single global market. “Although royally sponsored, the explorer were them selves a social network, sharing knowledge of shipbuilding, navigation, geography, and warfare.” (Ibid. 71) By August of 1517, Portuguese ships arrived of the coast of Guangdong, (Canton) the world was now connected by a oceanic network of trade. The Europeans sailed for religion, prestige, knowledge, and expansion, and made a global network that built the modern age.
In 1502 the Portuguese produced the Cantino Map, the first modern map that accurately portrayed all the continents of the world except Australia and Antarctica. When the ships found the harbor of Guangdong, this innovative and dynamic network collided with an entrenched, institutionalized hierarchy. The Chinese emperor ruled from on high, they believed they held the mandate from Heaven. In 1419 the Yongle Emperor Zhu DI (1360-1424) the forth son of the Ming Dynasty founder Hougwu Emperor, said he he had taken to throne and the mandate to rule China and the yi (an ethic group living in China, Vietnam , and Thailand). From 1405 to 1433, the emperor had sent Admiral Zheng He (1371-1433 or 35) on seven voyages to Southeast Asia, India, Western Asia, and East Africa to extend China’s power in the world. His son, Hougxi Emperor (1424-1425), ended these voyages, but his son, Xuande Emporor (1426-1435) did send Zheng on one more voyage, but stopped them after that believing his father’s mandate had been meritorious and contrary to the rules of the Huang Ming Zuxun, (a document laid down by the Ming founder in 1373 that stipulated that the emperor must rule in a strict legalist government) stopped this enterprise. The stoppage was the preference of the imperial bureaucracy, who believed the founding documents prohibited foreign trade. One must wonder what might have been had Chinese ships rounded the African coast and sailed into Lisbon or even Rome. To the Chinese bureaucrats the Portuguese were Fo-kang-chi (a term coming from the Southeast Asian term ferengi, which had its roots in the Arabic term for the Franks of the Crusades) They Portuguese were seen as “people with filthy hearts” and were rumored to roast and eat children.
While to official line of the the government forbid trading with the Portuguese, the market they brought, along with the goods they had, was too rich and enticing for many to pass up. A large illicit blackmarked trade soon developed. To facilitate this illegal trade the Portuguese under Simao de Andrade disregarded Chinese customs and laws, he built a fort at Tunmen at the mouth of the Pearl River, which the Portuguese had reached in 1517. Underestimating the tributary system of the Chinese the Portuguese acted as if the owned the fort and the hub of their trade in Malacca.(their base in Malaysia) Malacca had been a tributary of the Ming dynasty and and their representatives exiled in Beijing told the Chinese the Portuguese were robbers and intent of stealing all the land. Tensions built up and in 1521 the Ming navy defeated the Portuguese in the Battle of Tunmen. The result was they forced the Portuguese our of Tunmen, but they were able to keep trading along the coast for several years. By 1557 they had established a colony at Macau, which they would hold until 1999. The ban on foreign trade was unenforceable and Leonel de Sousa and Simao d’Almeida proved to be better diplomats then the original Portuguese representative. The Chinese recognized that despite early victories, the Portuguese ships and canons were superiors, and soon found them the lesser evil compared to the East Asian pirates. the would ally in battles against the pirates and after 1601, the Dutch.
While the Portuguese moved east into Asia, the Spanish moved west and south. In 1492 Christopher Columbus, Sailed west looking for India, and thinking he was in India, claimed some islands for Ferdinand and Isabela Spain. They had sponsored his trip as part of the Reconquista, looking for a backdoor to the Ottoman Empire and their long goal of liberating Jerusalem from Islamic control. In Asia, the empires encountered by the Portuguese were able to withstand their incursion and only make limited concessions, the American native empires collapsed with amazing speed. The most important difference in the experiences of the Spanish and the Portuguese, was that the Asian populations had immunities to the diseases carried by the Portuguese, while the American natives did not. In Eurasia, the people had been raising very similar animals for thousand of years, since the Agriculture Revolution’ almost 10,000 years ago. They had adapted them to their ways and had been living with the gifts the animals gave back. Cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, horses, cats, and dogs had been part of life in Africa, Asia, and Europe for centuries, some, like dogs, predated the Agriculture Revolution and went back to forger days. From them the humans got companionship, transportation, food and labor. The Native Americans, who had no genetic immunity, built up in Europe and Asia for thousands of years, to the the new viruses and bacteria coming from the Europeans. The Europeans gave the Native Americans the gift the animals had given them centuries ago, they got measles, tuberculosis, smallpox, flu, pertussis, and Falciparum malaria. These farm animals did not exist from the Bering Sea to the Cape Horn, none of the benefits they gave came to the Americans, and neither did the diseases. (for a complete explanation of this see, Jared Diamond. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton. 1999. 195-214) “The importance of lethal microbes in human history is well illustrated by European’ conquest and depopulation of the New World. Far more Native Americans died in bed from European germs that on the battlefield from European guns and swords.” (Ibid. 210) In America, the European network and its biological ally, went up against a non-European hierarchy.
They first came in the guise of the Spanish Conquistadors, which was Spanish for he who conquers, the were remnants of the Spanish standing army that had been idled by lulls in the Italian Wars. Lead by aristocrats mainly from western and southern Spain, they were armed with swords, pikes, spears, cannons, and one of the first European rifles, the Arquebus. Using Old World tactics and horses they were a formidable military force who mainly looked to plunder and make themselves wealthy. “Yet the most striking characteristic of the conquistadors was their propensity to quarrel, often bloody, amongst themselves.” (Ferguson. 77) The one thing that doomed both the Aztecs and Incas, was not the strength of the Spanish forces, or their native allies, but the weakness of the native empires.
The Aztec Empire was founded in the year 1428 after a period of wars between several city states in the area. The Aztecs came from Northwestern Mexico and and in 1428 formed a triple alliance between the cities of Tenochtitlan, (which became the Aztec capital) Texcoco, and Tlacoxian. They first came from Aztlan, which translates as the “White Land, or the Land of the White herons, or Place of the White Herons, and were called Mexica, from which the name Mexico is derived. The founding myth says that the sun god Huitzilopochtli showed the Mexica where to built their city by using an image of an eagle sitting on a prickly pear cactus eating a snake. The rulers were called, Huey Tlatoani which means great ruler or great speaker. Moctezuma II (1466-1502, Aztec name, Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin[honored young man] the older was Motecuhzoma Xocoyotein Ilhuicuhzoma [old Motecuhzoma] as the Aztecs did not use numbers for kings) was the ninth titoani (king) of the Aztecs. He was described by many sources as being weak willed, superstitious, and indecisive. He basically did little or nothing as Herman Cortes, and his interpreter, Marina (La Malichia) a disgruntled daughter of an Aztec noble, moved across Mexico picking up thousands of native allies. With his allies and weapons, assisted by several outbreaks of small pox, Cortes conquered the Aztec Empire and delivered the riches to Spain.
Along the western coast of South America laid the Inca Empire. In legend The Inca people were a pastoral tribe in the Cusco area around the 12th century. Peruvian oral history tells an origin story of three caves. The center cave at Tampu T’uqu (Tambo Tocco) was named Qhapaq T’uqu (“principal niche”, also spelled Capac Tocco). The other caves were Maras T’uqu (Maras Tocco) and Sutiq T’uqu (Sutic Tocco). Four brothers and four sisters stepped out of the middle cave. They were: Ayar Manco, Ayar Cachi, Ayar Awqa (Ayar Auca) and Ayar Uchu; and Mama Ocllo, Mama Raua, Mama Huaco and Mama Qura (Mama Cora). Out of the side caves came the people who were to be the ancestors of all the Inca clans. Led by Ayar Manco, now called Manco Capco, along with a golden staff, they journeyed and conquered Cusco and founded the empire. When Francisco Pizzaro came to the kingdom in 1532, the sons of Sapa Inca Huayun Capac, Huascar and Atahualpa, were engaged in civil war over succession. The empire weakened by the war and out breaks of measles, smallpox, influenza, and typhus, which traveled faster than the army of Spain, had devastated the empire and led to Pizzaro’s victory. The combination of the civil war and the diseases sealed the fate of the empire, much more than did Spanish arms. “It was not the strength of the Spanish invaders that doomed the Inca empire, but the empire’s weaknesses.” (Ibid. 78) The Spanish began to intermarry with the natives and, like in many parts of the Americas, not only took over existing systems of rule, but fused themselves with indigenous societies.
This practice lead to a ranking system of people according to birth, or purity of blood, (limpieza de sangre) came from the expulsion of the Moors in Spain. It was how they determined who was a true Spaniard and who was not, mainly Moor or Jew. The casta classification system arose from this practice. The union of a Spanish man and an Indian woman produced a mestizo, with a black woman produced a mulatto, and others, from sixteen in early colonial days to over 100 by the nineteenth century. It was a system that was a sincere attempt to apply the contemporary theories of heredity on the people of the New World. It imposed a new kind of hierarchy on the New world, one of race, which in the nineteenth century would bring Social Darwinism and eugenics into play.
While the network of the discoverers and conquerors were transforming the early modern world, a new technology would user in a new age of religious and pollical disruption called the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, and the Enlightenment. Printing had been known in China long before the fifteenth century, but it was not as impactful as the machine made by German Johannes Gutenberg (1400-1466) in Mainz between 1446 and 1450. He was a goldsmith and inventor who had been working on polished metal mirrors (which was thought to capture holy light from relics) for an exhibition of relics of Charlemagne in Aachen in 1439. He took the screw press, which had been used in Roman times for wine and olive oil, and in medieval times to press patterns on cloth, and combined it with the paper press which came to Germany in fourteenth century. Using a movable under table to make switching easy, he used a lead based alloy to create letters, an alloy still used today in printing. He divided typesetting and printing into two steps and invented the hand mold and the matrix. The Latin alphabet helped as one only need about two dozen letters to print the codex, the book form that had become popular.
Since having several printers was more practical, because of the high cost of transportation, a rapidly diffused circle of skilled German printers sprang up around Mainz. In 1467, Ulrich Hahn had set up shop in Rome. Soon shops were in Barcelona, Modena, and Granada. By 1500 almost one fifth of Swiss, Dutch, Danish and German cities had printing presses. By 1545, England had fifteen establishments and the number of titles printed annually had risen to 119. Before this the Catholic Church basically controlled publishing across Europe with its army of monks handwriting books. Radicals like Roger Bacon, William of Ockham, and others would see their books disappear into the Roman Archives of the church. Ones deemed to be heretics by the Church, like Jan Hus of Prague were quietly burned and their ideas limited to small areas near where they lived. This would change when a monk named Martin Luther produced his Ninety Five Thesis to be debated in a letter to the Archbishop of Mainz on 31 October 1517. It is debated, and doubted, he nailed them to the All Saints Church in Wittenberg. By the time he was condemned a heretic by the Edict of Worms in 1521, his letter was circulating all over Germany. Also in 1521, in response to Luther’s attack on indulgences, King Henry VIII of England published his Assertio Septem Sacramentorum (The Defense of the Seven Sacraments) with maybe an assist by Sir Thomas More. Ferguson said of Luther, “Working with the artist Lucas Cranach and the goldsmith Christian Doring, Luther revolutionized not only Western Christianity but also communication itself.” (Ibid. 83) The printing press was essential to the Reformation, cities with many of them were more likely to be Protestant, and most of what was printed in Germany was in German, not the Latin of the old intellectual élite. “The printing press has justly been called ‘a decisive point of no return in human history'” (Ibid)
The Reformation unleashed a wave of religious revolt against the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. The medieval Catholic Church in Rome clamed to have the ultimate authority over both secular and spiritual realms in the West. The Christian Church split into east and wrest in 1054 over disputes of leadership, language, and jurisdiction, the split was intensified in 1204 when the forces of the Fourth Crusade sacked Constanipole. Since the Great Schism in 1054, the Roman Catholic Church was in many ways the dominate force in the West. It became extremely wealthy after the Second Lantern Council in 1139 required celibacy of priest, reaffirmed in 1563 by the Council of Trent. This allowed the Church to acquire lands and the taxes they generated. With its network of priest, bishops, cardinals, and monks it had influence in every nation and principality in Europe. Many church officials, such as Cardinal Wolsey in England, at times held high positions in the governments of many nations. The Pope claimed to have the power to appoint and remove rulers, and before the printing press he had a monopoly over publishing. Europe at the time was mostly illiterate, even several kings could not read and write, and the Church’s network of monks and clerics, who copied and wrote books and papers, had control over much of Europe’s intellectual debates as well. The Reformation first cased an uproar in reformed mined clergy and scholars, who had been uplifted by the Renaissance, and soon spread to the peasanty, first causing turmoil in German and then all of northwestern Europe. One of its leaders, Thomas Muntzer, (1489-1525) a radical preacher and leader of the Anabaptist Protestants, proclaimed that the goal of the revolt, called the German Peasants War, was that, “all things were to be held in common and distribution should be to each according to his need.” (Thomas Muntzer, Peter Matheson ed. The Collected Works of Thomas Muntzer. Edinburg, Scotland: T & T Childs. 1988. 437) A statement one day Karl Marx would echo with his, “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs,” in his Critique of the Gotha Program, in 1875.
The Protestant movement was strong enough to form the Schmalkaldic League in opposition to Holy Roma Emperor Charles V by 1531. Although Charles defeated the League, they were able to keep the movement going under the terms of the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. It was established under the principal, coined by Joachim Stephani in 1582, cuius regio, eius religia, (one was the religion of one’s ruler) in 1582. The peace would not hold long and erupt in the Thirty Years War turning Central Europe into a slaughterhouse from 1618 to 1648. Only after prolonged and bloody conflicts did the monarchies of Europe re-impose control over the new Protestant sects, but it was never as complete as it had been under the medieval Popes. No matter how hard the censorship of the church was, radical writers could always find a printer who would print and distribute their words. It was never able to return control in Scotland and the Dutch Republics, and only did for a short period in England, under Charles V’s aunt, Mary I, from 1553 to 1558. this was despite turning technologies and network strategies used by the Reformation against these nations. Paris may have been worth a mass to Henry IV. the first Bourbon king, but London or Edinburg never was to the Stuarts or the Tudors.
The Protestants in Northern Europe developed impressively resistant network structures that resisted even the determined and harsh efforts by Mary I and Cardinal Pole. The outline of this network is found in what may be one of the first national propagandist, John Foxe and his book, Act’s and Monuments (Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, Touching Matters of the Church , 1563) better known as Foxe’s’ Book of Martyrs. Close to 377 people wrote to or were mentioned in Foxe’s book are proof of a strong network of Protectants working in England during the reign of Mary I. Foxe also labeled Mary I as Bloody Mary, even though the executions by her, her brother Edward VI and her sister Elizabeth I did not add up to the number executed by her father Henry VIII. Centered on on number of key hubs, with the executions of fourteen of the twenty nodes, the network merely had other take over and continue. Foxe’s (who may have been one of the world’s first propagandist) book set the mythology of the Protestant cause in England that would blossom under Elizabeth I, and later overthrow Charles I. It gave English heroes, like the pious Edward VI and the innocent Lady Jane Grey, among many others. “Few things better symbolize the sixteenth century crisis of hierarchal order than the vain efforts of Henry VIII’s eldest daughter to undo the religious revolution her father had opportunistically embraced in order to divorce her mother.” (Ferguson. 84) An example is the execution of Lady Jane Grey, proclaimed Queen on the death of Edward VI and overthrown by Mary nine days later. Imprisoned after Mary took London, Jane debated and defeated Mary’s priest John Feckenham in a debate over the new religion. Then her execution, on February 17,1554, instead silencing her, made her a martyr to the cause as Jane’s letters, she was not the pious innocent of legend but may have been a forerunner of the modern revolutionary, were distributed all over Europe by the network Mary and the Catholic church was trying to defeat.
The world of 1517, when the Portuguese ships sailed into Guangdong and Luther nailed his these to the Church door, was one of hierarchies. The Zhenge emperor and the Inca Huayna Capac were just two member of this élite group of despots. It was a world where Ottoman Sultan Selim I (or Selim the Grim) conquered the Mamluk Sultanate (which was lead by those who once had been slaves) and ruled from the Arabian Peninsula to Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, Safavid Shah Ismail ruled over all of modern day Iran and Azerbaijan, southern Dagestan, Armenia, Khorasan, eastern Anatolia, and Mesopotamia, Charles V ruled over the Holy Roman Emperor, Aragon, Castile, and the Netherlands, Leo X was Pope, Francis I ruled France and Henry VIII ruled England, all absolute monarchs. claiming divine right. Hierarchy is a special kind of network, one in which the centrality of the ruling node is maximized. “The striking feature of this hierarchical world was how similar the exercise of power was in all these empires and kingdoms, despite the fact that connections between the European and non-European worlds was tenuous, if they existed at all. (Ibid. 86) The early modern monarchs held a kind of untrammeled personal power that in today’s world exist in only a handful of Central and East Asian states. They all, no matter where they ruled, acted in a similar fashion, taking pride in their martial and judicial prowess and patronizing the arts and literature.
From the early 1500s this world was attacked by revolutionary networks. The Europeans toppled, with assistance from pathogens, the empires of the Americans and disrupted the sovereignty of African and Asian ones. The Protestants then challenged an ecclesiastical hierarchy that traced its linage back to St Peter and Jesus Christ. “The consequences of the Reformation were at first felt in Europe, and they were terrible indeed.” (Ibid. 87) Religious wars would rook Europe from 1524 until 1648, as sects broke off first from the Catholic Church, then further divisions occurred amongst the Protestants. The most extreme case was that of the Anabaptist, who maintained that baptism was a conscious act that children were too young to participate in, a belief first proclaimed by Melchior Hoffman in Strasberg in 1530. In 1534 under the leadership of Jan Bockelson (John of Leiden) and Jan Matthys seized power in the city of Munster in Westphalia. They set up a radically egalitarian, iconoclastic, and theocratical regime based on biblical literalism. They burned all books except the Bible,. legalized polygamy, and proclaimed the “New Jerusalem” and prepared to wage war as they believed the Second Coming of Christ was imminent. All property was deemed to be held in common and good were doled out to all. Protestant and Catholic nobles united under Prince -Bishop Franz von Waldeck, who had been expelled by the rebels, and laid siege to the city, which fell 24 June 1535. All of the leaders were executed and their bodies displayed in cages hung in the steeple of St. Lambert’s Church, the bones were later removed, but the cages still hang in the steeple.
By 1648 the Reformation had caused many violent and shockingly cruel deaths in Europe, and a political revolution in England. One could argue that in their efforts to rebel against Mary I of England, John Knox and many of the English Protestant exiles (called the Marian Exiles) of her reign may have legitimatized revolution as well. The Counter Reformation kept the Protestants out of Southern Europe and the Spanish colonies in America, and in England it led to the king’s powers being checked by Parliament. The Reformation did lead to a large-scale reallocation of resources from religious to secular activity. The unintended consequence of the Reformation was the increasing secularization of Europe. While this was going on, the printing press lead top significant drop in the price of books, giving more people access the them. It is mirror of what happed to the price of personal computers between 1977 and 2004. While slower, the revolution caused by this information technology was more impactful on the economy in the 1600s than the computer was in the 2000s. “The best explanation for this difference is the role of printing in disseminating hitherto unavailable knowledge fundamental to the functioning of the modern economy.” (Ibid. 94) Europe’s cultural life also was effected, before Luther and the printing press, it was centered almost entirely around Rome. In the aftermath, it was centered around Paris with many sub hubs in clusters in Central Europe and Northern Italy. All roads no longer led to Rome.
In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Europe was hit with successive waves of network driven innovations of which the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment were the most important. In these waves the sharing of novel ideas within the networks spurred on advances in both philosophy and natural science. The movement of ideas in the network can be traced to the careers of individual scientist and their letters to their friends and fellow seekers. This mirrored the similar type of correspondence that flowed between the reformers of the Reformation. The difference is with the formation of institutions like the Royal Society, (The Royal Society of London for the Improving Natural Knowledge, was chartered by Charles II on 28 November 1660 and is the oldest society of its kind) the effort began to resemble a collective group endeavor. Its sole requirement was that all sharing of intelligence must be for the benefit of the society and all were allowed to shore, foreign and domestic. While the Royal Society was open to all, the Académie des sciences in Paris was originally the private property of the crown and when it first met in 22 December 1666, it met in secret. While the London group was at the hub of an international network of knowledge, including the Americas, the Paris group removed itself from the pan-European network that produced the Scientific Revolution.
It was not only ideas being traded at this time period, “The networks created by transatlantic trade and migration were by this time growing exponentially, as European merchants and settlers exploited rapidly falling transportation cost and the availability of effectively free land in North America, as well as cheap slave labor in West Africa.” (Ibid. 97) It created a network that was dynamic and responsive to the market and the market shifts. This was done by combining the network benefits with some element of hierarchical management. The British were the best at this, and it may be why they soon came to superseded all the other nations in the trade markets. The hubs of this network included London, Edinburgh, Kingston, New York, Cape Town, Basra, Bombay, and Calcutta. Slaves flowed with gold and goods along the network, as did ideas, such as emancipation.
The printed word fueled the Reformation, and the later Scientific Revolution, but it was the written word that fueled the Enlightenment. While many of the philopsers published a lot, it was their letters that showed their most important exchanges of ideas. These letters are the source one needs to reconstruct the Enlightenment network. While may think of the Enlightenment as a pan-European event, it was mainly centered in Paris and centered around Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arout 1694-1778), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Geneva, 1712-1778), and Jean-Baptist le Rond d’Alembert (Mathematician, 1717-1783). These were the ego-networks who were the major components of a wider network that contemporizes called a societe litteraire ou savante. (literary or learned society) It was a heavily aristocratic group that held a very critical view of the hierarchical society it existed in and ruled. “It was a republic of letters more than a republic of numbers, a network of essayist more than experimenters.” (Ibid. 102) It was also a network of salons, (a drawing room or reception room in a large house) or better a republic of salons. An important role was played by the salonnieres, the women who were the brokers in the homes that were the centers for social exchange and whose invitations were coveted by those who wished to join.
Each nation had its version of the Enlightenment, Scotland’s was centered in Edinburgh. As in Paris the new free-thinking society found its home amongst the established institutions of crown and church. Adam Smith was a university professor and David Hume was the Keeper of the Advocates Library. Typical of the movement was the reliance on aristocratic patronage for material support for their intellectual activities. “Like the French lumieres, the Scottish literati thought globally but acted nationally, to judge by the correspondence of ten eminent Scots, including Hume and Smith.” (Ibid. 104) Not only were they thinkers, but they were mobile, they may have been pioneering tourist of the time. For Americans like Benjamin Franklin, the had to spend time in Great Britain and France. While a leader of the American Enlightenment, he had no international correspondence until he traveled to Britain in 1763. For Franklin, he saw London as the capital of America, even if he resented the political restraints the British were placing on his nation.
“In the great political revolutions of the late eighteenth century, as in the earlier religious and cultural revolutions, the role of networks was vital.” (Ibid. 106) Books, pamphlets, letters, and written documents contained the arguments for radical political change and soon taxes on the press become the object of rebellious anger. They were writing themselves out of hereditary rule. The great revolutions of the time were products of the networks of wordsmiths, the best, as orators, could also rally the crowd to the cause. Yet these revolutions needed fighters as well as writers and a resilience that could withstand the reaction of hereditary forces to the challenges of the cause. A good example of this was the network that helped Paul Revere become an icon of the American Revolution. He and William Dawes, along with Dr. Samuel Prescott and others rode through the night to warn the colonist of the British advance. His fame may be attributed to the fact that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was able to use Revere’s name as it rhymed with hear. His network was one of the key brokers- or weak ties – between clusters that without them may have never coalesced into a revolutionary movement.
His relationship with Dr. Joseph Warren , in the increasingly hierarchal Massassachuestts society was vital to the cause of the rebelling colonist. They were an example of the crossing of the class divide, along artisans ands professional, that drove the revolution. One group they both belonged to, and many feel may have been the connection that brought on the Revolution was the Freemasons. Sydney Morse wrote in 1924 in his book, Freemasonry in the American Revolution, that the society brought the people together in secret to fight for democracy. This assertion has been debated but Ferguson argues that, “The evidence suggest that it was at least as important as secular political theories or religious doctrines in animating the men who made the revolution.” (Ibid. 110)
Freemasonry, with its Scot origins, gave the age of Reason a powerful mythology, an international organization, and rituals that bound the adherents together as metaphorical bothers. Built upon the medieval gild of stonemasons, they got new regulations in 1598 when the Scottish lodges adopted William Schaw’s, Principal Master of Work to the Crown, Schaw Statues, uniting the many guilds into one formal organization. In the mid seventeenth century the group again evolved when lodges in Kilwinning and Edinburgh admitted “speculative” or “accepted” members who were non practicing Masons. In 1723 Aberdonian James Anderson, in his book, the Constitution of the Free-MasonsContaining the History, Charges, Regulations, &c. of that most Ancient and Right Worshipful Fraternity, For the Use of the Lodges, used the Old Masonic manuscripts, called the Gothic Constitution, and the principals laid down by George Payne from the General Regulations in 1720 to give the group a grandiose prehistory and ushered in a new era. Anderson wrote the new constitution for the lodges in London and Westminster to standardized their practices and rituals, and were not meant for other lodges in Great Britain.
In the constitution he presents the story of Hiram Abiff, who was said to have been the architect of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem. He is murdered when the Temple is nearly done by three workers looking for secrets of the craft. The story laid the foundation of the legend of Hiram Abiff, King Solomon’s Master Builder, along with the pyramid style organizational model of Freemasonry. In his narrative Anderson details how the Supermen Architect of the Universe gave Adam the skills masonry, geometry and mechanical arts, who in turn gave them to his descendants and the Old Testament prophets. Proclaiming the chosen people of God as the good Masons with Moses as their Grand master. Hiram Abiff was called the most accomplished Mason on the earth. They developed, as all good networks do. as hierarchical element with lodges and degrees that soon extend all over the British Ilse. The most striking thing of the group was undemanding they were of those whom lodges approved for membership. They were required to be good, free-born men of mature and discreet age, no Bondmen (serf or slave), no immoral or scandalous men. no atheist or irreligious men, and no women. All were to be equal as brothers within the lodge but those of higher social rank usually held the most prestigious positions. The nobleman and the bourgeois mingled, and they suffered no punishment for participating in political rebellion. The Constitutions stipulated that a Mason should be peaceable and subject to the Civil power where he worked and not concerned with plots and conspiracies against the nation, but involvement in a rebellion was not a ground for expulsion.
The Masons were compatible with Deism and some lodges did admit Jews, but not all were good with the Enlightenment religious skepticism, which produced a split in 1751. The spit was between the Ancients, those who favored the 1738 constitution that obliged Masons to obey only Christian precepts, and the Moderns who preferred the 1723 edition that exhorted the Masons to conform to the religion of their homeland. In Massachusetts, the lodge was established in 1761 as the grand lodge of St. John, a Modern and the first masonic lodge in Boston, under a warrant from London. In 1781 the new Ancient grand lodge of St. Andrew was founded with its authority coming from Edinburgh, in the beginning they was acrimonious toward each other, but they merged in 1792. In the time of the Revolution, it appeared to have reflect the social and political divisions of the land as those excluded from St. Johns , who founded St. Andrews, were a hotbed of sedition, especially after John Warren became its master. His death on Bunker Hill was compared to the death of Hiram Abif in the days of Solomon. The lodge of St. Andrews was a collection of those who drove the Revolution in the Massachusetts region. This explained why many conspiracy theorist and writers of pulp fiction had long been attracted to the idea that Freemasonry was the covert network behind the American Revolutions. It may also explain the doubts many respectable historians have had about this idea. While there were many loyalist members of the lodges, it cannot be overlooked that a high concentration of its members were also leaders in the Revolution.
This would change with the advent of the Great Awakening (sometimes referred to as the Second Great Awakening 1790-1840) led by Protestant Evangelical ministers and was especially strong in the Northeast and Midwest. It called for more emotional involvement and personal commitment from the individual person and downplayed the need of ritual and ceremony. Calling for temperance, abolition, and woman’s rights it spread from the elite of New England to the lower classes of people in many areas of the nation. The abolition movement grew out of this as did the founding of many free black churches as African Americans were pushing back against the discrimination they faced in white churches. The first of these, growing out of the Free Africa Society (1787) was the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the first to be founded by African Americans in 1816 in Philadelphia. Another consequence of this was an outbreak of fierce anti-Masonism which led to a steep decline in Mason membership. It also led to the later deprecation of the Masonic role in the American Revolution, as it was no longer what early nineteenth century Americans wished to remember. Forgotten was that George Washington took his oath of office on the Bible of the St. John’s Masonic Lodge No. 1 of New York and Benjamin Franklin was a grand master of a lodge in Philadelphia. Many of the leaders of the Revolution and the early Republic would not have been so influential in the late colonial period had they not belonged to the Masons. “The scientific, philosophical and political revolutions of the eighteenth century were intertwined because the networks that transmitted them were intertwined.” (Ibid. 115) The American Founders tried to institutionalize an anti-hierarchical political order, despite the lessons of history they all knew too well. Alexander Hamilton laid out the dangers in the first Federalist Papers (1787) with the following:
An enlightened zeal for the energy and efficiency of government will be stigmatized as the offspring of a temper fond of despotic power and hostile to the principles of liberty. An over-scrupulous jealousy of danger to the rights of the people, which is more commonly the fault of the head than of the heart, will be represented as mere pretense and artifice, the stale bait for popularity at the expense of the public good. It will be forgotten, on the one hand, that jealousy is the usual concomitant of love, and that the noble enthusiasm of liberty is apt to be infected with a spirit of narrow and illiberal distrust. On the other hand, it will be equally forgotten that the vigor of government is essential to the security of liberty; that, in the contemplation of a sound and well-informed judgment, their interest can never be separated; and that a dangerous ambition more often lurks behind the specious mask of zeal for the rights of the people than under the forbidden appearance of zeal for the firmness and efficiency of government. History will teach us that the former has been found a much more certain road to the introduction of despotism than the latter, and that of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people; commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.
(Alexander Hamilton Federalist No 1, 1787)
“That the American system worked so well astonished European visitors, not least those from France, where a republic created in 1792 had lasted precisely twelve years.” (Ferguson. 116) Alexis de Tocqueville took a long look at the American associational life and decentralized federal system and declared it the key to success of the American experiment. “Tocqueville saw America’s political associations as an indispensable counterweight to the danger if tyranny that was inherent in modern democracy – if only the tyranny of the majority.” (Ferguson. 117) Tocqueville described the early United States in terms of it being the first network polity. He says in Chapter XII of the nation:
In no country in the world has the principal of association been more successfully used, or more unsparingly applied to a multitude of different objects, than in America. Besides the permanent associations which are established by law under the names of townships, cities, and counties, a vast number of others are formed and maintained by the agency of private individuals.
The citizen of the United states is taught from his earliest infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life.; he looks upon social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he only claims its assistance when he is quite unable to shift without it. This habit may even be traced in the schools of the rising generation, where the children in their games are wont to submit to rules which they themselves established, and to punish misdemeanors which they themselves defined.
(Alexis de Tocqueville. Democracy in America. trans. by Henry Reeve. New York: Bantam Dell. 2000. 219-220)
Tocqueville argued it was the American habit of forming private associations that was the difference between them and the hierarchal lands of Europe. He said:
Those associations only which are formed in civil life, without reference to political objects, are here adverted to. The political associations which exist in the Untied states are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in the country. Americans of all ages, all conditions and all dispositions, constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds – religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive, or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainment, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to antipodes; and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it be proposed to advance some truth, or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Where ever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.
(Ibid. 628-629)
From these associations came the networks that have effected the history of the United States, from the Temperance Unions, the Abolition societies, Women’s’ suffrage unions, NAACP and BLM, associations formed networks which in turn pushed American history. It was question Tocqueville pondered, was this the reason that the revolution in America turned out so differently than the one at the hub of the Enlightenment, in France.
While the nineteenth century saw democracy undergo many panful spurts of grown and backlashes, Europe was a time of the restoration of the old monarchies and empires. “A large part of the fascination of this era in European history is precisely the precariousness of each new attempt to re-establish monarchial order. ” (Ferguson. 121) It was a time when the networked based revolutionary energies released by the printing press were corralled and contained by new structures of power. The promise of universal brotherhood and democracy that came from these ideas went unfulfilled. Yet the old hierarchical powers, were, like the new movements, types of networks. “As we have seen, most networks are hierarchical in some respects, if only because some nodes ae more central than others, while hierarchies are just special kinds of network, in which flows of information or resources are restricted to certain edges in order to maximize the centrality of the ruling node.” (Ibid. 122) In a hierarchical order, the network is simpler, which only a few hubs mattering and the principal of dividing to rule hold sway. In the nineteenth century, individual nations did not matter, only the relationships between Britain, Austria, Prussia, France and Russia, mattered. Yet the reassertion of hierarchical order did not end the intellectual, commercial, and political networks of the previous centuries, it was the old order was better at co-opting and controlling them. “The Industrial Revolution – in many ways the most transformative of all revolutions – could quite easily be likened to the other revolutions of the eighteenth century as it, too, was the product of a network of innovators, some scientifically trained, others tinkering autodidacts.” (Ibid. 122-123)
Edmund Burke realized long before anyone else the forces of the French Revolution would be much more violent and bloody than that of the American one. From the riot in faubourg Saint Antoine on 21 April 1789, to the grande peur, the Great Fear, what had been proclaimed as the Rights of Man, became one of the bloodiest epochs in French history since the 1572 St. Bartholomew’s Massacre. Instances like the Terror (1793–1794) the war against counterrevolutionaries in the Vendee (1793-17960 and the bloody slave revolt on Sant -Domingue (Haiti) the French Revolution’ descended into anarchy which led to tyranny, as classical political theory predicted and maintained. “In the name of a false utopia, sadists ran amok.” (Ibid. 125) This collapse led to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, who restored order to France and brought chaos to Europe. A workaholic who drive end the chaos of the Revolution and restored the monarchy with him as the new Emperor. “With his overweening self-belief Napoleon set out to run not only France but all of Europe as if it was one vast army that he could command – mastered by sheer force of will.” (Ibid. 127) He was the last of the enlightened absolutist, the French Fredrick the Great, and the first modern dictator. With the same technology of Fredrick, Napoleon did things faster and on a grander scale. Carl von Clausewitz argued his genius laid in his ability to concentrate his forces at the enemy’s center of gravity (the Scherpunkt)and defeat him in a decisive battle. (the Hauptschlacht) During the American Civil War, this idea would lead Robert E. Lee to invade the North and fight the Battles of Antietam and Gettysburg, seeking this decisive battle. Antoine-Henri de Jomini argued the key to Napoleon’s success was his ability to exploit the advantages of superior interior lines of operation (lignes d’operations) by applying the universal principals of warfare. Clausewitz believed Napoleon’s style was specific to his time and the popular nationalism released by the French Revolution. Leo Tolstoy would mock Napoleon in his book War and Peace, taunting him as to how he could send hundreds of thousands from France to Russia and throw an entire continent into turmoil. Napoleon did just that, but no matter how hard he tried, using Egyptian, Roman, and Hapsburg regalia, he could not achieve the one thing that hierarchical rule depends on, legitimacy.
In the late eighteenth century a group of historians at the University of Gottingham began a process that would revolutionize the historical field. The university, founded in 1734 by Gerlach Adolph von Münchhausen , was the original center of Geschichfswissenschaft, which saw the science of history as a methodically secure exploration and reconstruction of human history and its story critical analysis and interpretation of tradition, or sources of a research question asked by the historian. The historian conducts his or her research in many subdisciplines and is supported by historical auxiliary sciences. The historian divided history into periods or epochs, in a process called periodization. The school was the first to require lectures and publishing of works by professors and sough to write a universal history by combining the critical methods of Jean Mabillion with the philosophical methods of Voltaire and Edward Gibbon. They sought to create a scientific method for the study of history, but were responsible for the coining of the two fundamental groups of scientific racism. From Johan Fredrick Blumenbach and Christoph Meiners came the color terminology for race (Caucasian or white, Mongolian or yellow, Malayan or brown, Ethiopian or black, American or red) and from Johann Christoph Gatterer, August Ludwig von Schlozer, and Johann Gottfried Eichhom came the Biblical terminology for race. (Semitic or Asia, Hamitic or Africa, Japhetic or Europe)
Leopold van Ranke (1795-1886) built on these ideas and is considered the founder of modern sourced base historical study. He implemented the seminar teaching method in his classes and emphasized archival research and the analysis of historical documents. He set the standards for later historical writing by introducing reliance on primary sources, or empiricism, and put emphasis on narrative history and international politics. In 1871 he said this about historians:
The proverb tells us that poets are born. Not only in the arts, but even in some scholarly fields, young men develop into full bloom, or at least display their originality. Musicians and mathematicians have the expectation of attaining eminence in early years. But a historian must be old, not only because of the immeasurable extent of his field of study, but because of the insight into the historical process which a long life confers, especially under changing conditions. It would hardly be bearable for him to have only a short span of experience. For his personal development requires that great events complete their course before his eyes, that others collapse, that new forms be attempted.
In an 1833 essay Great Powers of Europe and his 1836 essay Dialogue on Politics, Ranke claimed that every state is given a special moral character from God and individuals should strive to best fulfill the “idea” of their state. In these essays were many of his contemporaries saw the revolutionary energies released from the German Reformation and French Revolution as inexorable, Ranke claimed that he new order that was arising from the end of Napoleon was going to check the universal tendency towards dissolution. He argued that this order, based on what he called a pentarchy of five great powers (Austria, Britain, France, Prussia, and Russia) was emerging during the eighteenth century but had been interrupted by Napoleon’s attempt to master Europe. Now he was defeated ,the process could come to fruition and true harmony could reign over Europe. This new and stable balance of power, that emerged out of the Congress of Vienna, has been seen as the creator of the peace that would last, almost uninterrupted, from 1815 to 1914. In a balancing act, the idea was that the powers kept anyone from dominating the continent, and preserved the peace and the freedoms of all the nations of Europe. It was a walk on a tightrope, but it did hold until the advent of the Frist World War. Above all was the agreement that any bid of one nation for hegemony had to be resisted and a general war should be avoided. It avoided in the nineteenth century what could not be achieved in either the eighteenth (Seven Years War) or the twentieth (the two World Wars), a century in which no world war occurred.
The international order in this period was a hierarchical system with five hubs playing the dominate roles. While the five hubs would quarrel, and some conflicts did occur, they were not as destructive as Waterloo or the Marne. “Even the biggest war of the nineteenth century- the Crimean War (1853-1856), which pitted Britain and France against Russia – was an order of magnitude smaller that the Napoleonic Wars.” (Ibid. 133) The powers between 1814 and 1907 conferred with each other more than fought with seven congresses and nineteen conferences between the powers. Diplomacy, with a few small wars, were the rule of the day, the exact opposite of the pre-1815 period. To explain the First World War, one must see why this ceased to be.
The restoration of order in Europe after Napoleon need more that the new hierarchy of the five powers, it also had to re-legitimize the monarchy to maintain the status quo. Under the pre-Napoleonic system many of the royal houses were linked in a genealogical network of families. To revive that one family played a primary part, that was the Coburg of Germany. It had almost been pushed to extinction when Napoleon ended the Holy Roma Empire (famously called by Voltaire as neither holy, nor Roman, or and empire) and created the Confederation of the Rhine. The sons of the Dowager Duchess Augusta played a careful game between France and Russia and were rewarded in 1807 when, under Russian pressure, the duchy was restored to her son Ernest. By1864 the Saxe-Coburg family were linked to almost all the nations of Europe, and on top was Queen Victoria of England. when Nicholas II visited England in 1893, the family reunion was more of an international summit. The Czar later married Victoria’s granddaughter, Alix of Hesse, with her son George as Prince of Wales, her grandson Williy, Kaiser (Wilhelm II) of Germany, and now her granddaughter on the throne of Russia, the Coburgs were linked to all of Europe.
Another family rose up about the same time as the Coburg family began their path to royal dominance, the Rothschilds. Between 1810 and 1836 the five sons of Mayer Rothschild rose from the Jewish ghetto of Frankfort to the top of European finance and had unequalled power in the international financial arena. “So extraordinary did this achievement seem to contemporaries that they often sought to explain it in mystical terms.” (Ibid.138) It was said that Nathan Rothschild held a mysterious “Hebrew talisman” that allowed him to become the leviathan of European money markets. The family kept the business as a strictly family partnership, Rothschilds only married Rothschilds, and a single joint concern with affiliates in Frankfort, London, Vienna, Naples, and Paris. Combined this with their friends in many high positions in government, gave them unprecedented influence in any market. With their own communication system, better than any postal service, and an extensive intelligence gathering system, gave the man overwhelming advantage over all other competitors. While they had powerful friends, they also had powerful enemies, many spreading rumors and tales of the family that later would be part and parcel of many conspiracy theories. “The extend kinship group that was the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha might give the new order the legitimacy of royal genealogy. But it was the upstart House of Rothschild – with its new networks of credit and information – that underwrote European monarchism. (Ibid. 144)
To gain an insight into he early years of the Industrial Revolution, one only needs to look at the business records of Nathan Rothschild between 1799 and 1811, the year he formally established the firm of N. M. Rothschild in London. Here one sees how he carefully cultivated the three areas of profit in the expanding textile industry, dyeing, raw materials and manufacturing. He traveled across England and was able to take advantage of the new spinning and weaving technologies in Northern England and Scotland as an intermediator between the many small companies. He could not only offer low prices but reasonable credit as well and he expanded his business beyond just exporting goods for his father’s firm. During Napoleon’s prohibition of trade between Britain and the continent, he resorted to smuggling to make a profit. “Like the intellectual and political revolutions of the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution was the product of networks.” (Ibid. 146) Nathan Rothschild network was just one of these, providing credit that fueled the new revolution, there was also technical networks which allowed innovations and as well as capital networks to provide the funding of the new Industrial Revolutions.
Industrial Revolution Spread
In the near east about 10,000 BC the sapiens underwent the Agricultural, or Neolithic, Revolution as they went from foraging bands of hunter gathers to farmers. Over these years things were built by hand, by craftsman who either preformed the work themselves of supervised a small group of people doing the work. From the Agricultural Revolution humans began to settle in first small villages, then lager cities going on the city states, to states and finally by the early modern period, nation states. As this occurred the political structure of the humans went from tribal chief, to god king, with democracy beginning in the Greek city states, to empires and finally the modern states emerging in the sixteenth century. During the entire period, manufacturing was done by hand, and techniques had changed very little from the days on the Fertile Crescent to the eighteenth century. The spinning and weaving of cloth was a process done by hand in many homes of people and done usually by families in a piecemeal type of arrangement. This would change in Great Britain in late seventeen hundreds as technology for spinning and weaving moved the work from homes to mills. At first animals, usually donkeys were used to power the new technology, but soon water and steam power took over, with invention of machine tools and the mechanized factory system the textile industry became the first to enter into the Industrial Revolutions. Great Britain in the early 1700s controlled a massive trade empire with colonies in North America, the Caribbean, and India, suppling the raw material for the new industry. (The Triangle Trade rout from Africa, to America, to England) The first mention of Industrial Revolution came on 6 July 1799 in a letter from Luis Guillaume Otto proclaiming that France would join the push to industrialize. With John Cockerill’s opening a factory in Belgium in 1807, much of the technology that Britain had tried to keep for itself, moved to Europe. The Industrial Revolution changed the way people worked, and soon led to dramatic rise in population, and began the urbanization of many or the world’s people. It also concentrated a large number of poor in manufacturing cites that would cause problems that led to the many socialist movements of the nineteenth century.
In all of the networks of the industrialization period, families, kinship, and shred religion played a part, and would also be a major factor when the new technologies moved across the Atlantic to the new United States. These hubs, many not directly connected, combined to produce the many innovations and new technologies that were the hallmarks of industrialization. One great question of the period was why the economic revolution, that produced many revolution in Europe in the mid 1800s, did not in Great Britain at the time. In Britain, the political structure convinced many in the lower classes that they, as British, had a patriotic stake in the existing social class. The British élite, especially Queen Victoria and her consort Prince Albert, adapted with considerable skill to changing conditions and were more liberal in their political inclinations than many on the continent. Plus many of the new financial élite, like the Rothschilds, were much more politically flexible than many of their critics believed. An example of this was the network of abolitionist in Britain that sought and gained the abolition of the slave trade. Beginning outside of Parliament mainly among religious minorities, mainly the Quakers, it moved to the House of Commons in 12 May 1789 with William Wilberforce giving his seminal speech, “On the Horrors of the Slave Trade.” By 1833 Parliament received over 1,5 million signatures on the petition to abolish trade altogether. This was an authentic network based phenomenon, that unlike the one in America or France, never threated to push nation into rebellion, civil war, or revolution. The difference is that the slaves owned by the British in the West Indies were far from London, unlike in America were Africans lived in all the states, and the planter élite in the West Indies, unlike those in Haiti, did not have veto power over any legislation. Parliament may have dragged it s feet in 1790, but by 1807 abolished the slave trade and in 1833 emancipated nearly 800,000 slaves in British processions. In 1835 the government agreed to paying compensation to the slave owners, that was only paid off in 2015. One question that may be asked is whether this could be accomplished if the British still controlled North America and the millions of slaves in the American South. The British hierarchy, unlike those in France, knew when to bend whit the wind, or in the words of a song, knew when to fold them and knew when to run.
By the late nineteenth century monarchy was the predominate governing method in Europe. The only monarchy that was restored that did not last was the French, here the Bourbons tried to return the ancien regime completely and were overthrown. The Bourbons had come to power when former Protestant noble Henry of Navarre, who proclaimed that “Paris was worth a mass,” in 1589, and end in 1848 with the overthrow of Lois -Phillipe. Talleyrand said of them, “They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing,” As for the rest of Europe, monarchy was the way of the world. The monarchs at the time of Victoria’s death in 1901 were, Guangxa of China, Mutsuhito of Japan, Abdul Hamid II of the Ottomans, Franz Joseph I of Austria Hungary, Leopold II of Belgium, Christian IX of Denmark, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany , Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, Oscar II of Norway, Carlos I of Portugal, Carol II of Romania, Czar Nicholas II of Russia (the Romanovs would celebrate 300 years on the throne in 1913) Alfonso XIII of Spain, and Edward VII of Great Britain. T show how interrelated they were this is a list of those who inherited hemophilia from Victoria:
#
Name
Death
Relation to Queen Victoria
1
Prince Friedrich of Hesse and by Rhine
29-May-1873
grandson
2
Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany
28-Mar-1884
son
3
Prince Heinrich Friedrich of Prussia
26-Feb-1904
great grandson
4
Tsarevich Alexei of Russia
17-Jul-1918
great-grandson
5
Lord Leopold Mountbatten
23-Apr-1922
grandson
6
Prince Rupert of Teck
15-Apr-1928
great grandson
7
Infante Gonzalo of Spain
13-Aug-1934
great grandson
8
Alfonso, Prince of Asturias
6-Sep-1938
great grandson
9
Prince Waldemar of Prussia
2-May-1945
great grandson
Princes who inherited hemophilia from Victoria, all except Tsarevich Alexis, who was executed by the /soviets, died from complications of the genetic disease.
By 1900 eleven Western empires controlled 58% of all the earths’ surface, 57% of the world’s population and 74% of the economy. Even the United states, a nation born from a rebellion against a colonial power had acquired colonies overseas, proclaiming it as a part of its Manifest Destiny. Great Britain controlled the largest empire in history ruling over 11 million square miles of land and 375 million people, with just over 120,000 square miles and 45.6 million people within the British Isles. In 1821, the Caledonian Mercury wrote of the British Empire, “On her dominions the sun never sets; before his evening rays leave the spires of Quebec, his morning beams have shone three hours on Port Jackson, and while sinking from the waters of Lake Superior, his eye opens upon the Mouth of the Ganges.” It was maybe true in 1821, it certainly was true in 1900. The British did this with surprising few soldiers and governors, with only a tiny fraction of the population involved with protecting or governing the empire. “How was the largest empire in world history simultaneously – in the derogatory phrase coined by the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle in 1862 – a night-watchman state?” (Ibid. 152)
To best capture the early twentieth century British imperialism one only needs to read the works of John Buchan, (1875-1940) 1st Baron of Tweedsmuir and the fifteenth Governor General of Canada (1935-1940). Author of over 1000 works, both fiction and nonfiction, he wrote his autobiography in 1940, Memory, Hold the Door (Pilgrim’s Way in America) and is best known for his man on the run thriller, The Thirty Nine Steps. (1915) in which the protagonist, Richard Hanney is typical of the main characters of the genre, an ordinary man who places the interest of the nation over his own safety. It would be made into a movie with the tile 39 Steps, first by Alfred Hitchcock in 1935, then by Ralph Moore in 1959, and finally by Don Sharp in 1978. In his book, Buchan divides his characters into a hierarchy of racial types, “with bright but macular Scotsmen on top, rugged South Africans next, insufficiently military Americans next, sexually suspect Germans in the middle, Jews beneath Germans, and more or less everyone else at the bottom.” (Ibid. 155) Yet always in Buchan’s fiction the real protagonist is not an individual, but a network, like his secret society Black Stone, noble bands of imperial gentlemen engaged in counter espionage. Buchan himself rose through the imperial hierarchy, rising academically, socially, professionally, and politically (not as high as he had wished) through the network he belonged to, the “Kindergarten,” or “Round Table.,” The first group, the Kindergarten, was formed by Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner, (1854-1925) in South Africa looking for a South African Union and closer ties to Britain. It evolved over time to the Round Table, to a group looking to form an imperial federation in the British Empire to format closer ties between all the colonies and Britain, it later became the Commonwealth of Nations of the British Empire. This is another historical network who, thanks to the writings of Georgetown historian, Carroll Quigley, became notorious, as he claimed the goal of the association was to unite the entire world, or English world, under Britain in a federation. This was not the case, the Round Table basically got what it wanted with the founding of the British Commonwealth in the Balfour Declaration in 1926.
To run the British Empire, London used existing structures of local power, absorbing them into the colonial system. In a system invented by Fredrick Lugard in West Africa, the British delegated all local power to existing elites and kept control over the essentials of central authority, mainly the money. It could not have survived long relying on just hierarchy, the forces of revolution in the world, like the ones ignited by Karl Marx, thrived as new technologies in transportation and communication spread the ideas further and faster then ever, but it also gave the powers that be better control. The tendency for centralized control, enhanced by the new technology, was not obvious immediately to the world. The telegraph and the railroads played decisive roles in the centralization of control, with the critical breakthrough coming with the durable underseas cable. In the American Revolution, it took six weeks for orders and news to go from Philadelphia or Boston to London, the Battle of New Orleans in 1814 was fought after the peace agreements were signed, but in this period a message from Bombay could reach London in minutes. The telegraph had annihilated distance, and also allowed distant annihilation.
The global system of undersea cables was in private hands, not government. This due to the efforts of John Plender, (1815-1896) He was a cotton trader who hated having to wait on news from across the Atlantic, so he invested undersea cable companies, and after several failures laid the first cable underneath the Atlantic under the Anglo-American Telegraph Co. Ltd in 1866. The British government nationalized their domestic telegraph lines in 1868, but not the international ones. Plender reacted by expanding his cables under the Eastern Telegraph Company and by the time of his death controlled on third of international cable traffic. By 1910, the American company Wester Electric controlled all transatlantic traffic and Eastern Telegraph controlled the rest of the world. The British Empire was run in a similar fashion with a light touch of central authority and that led to its scale and durability. The empire was not a grand hierarchy under Queen Victoria or Edward VII, but a network of gentlemen running things under the name of the United Kingdom.
But in the economic field the late nineteenth century, the tendency towards concentration was obvious in the many new companies that highlighted what was to be called the Gilded Age. Andrew Carnegie, (1835-1919) the Scottish immigrant who became an American colossus in steel, said in his essay, The Law of Competition:
The price which society pays for the law of competition, like the price it pays for cheap comforts and luxuries, is also great; but the advantages of this law are also greater still, for it is to this law that we owe our wonderful material development, which brings improved conditions in its train. But, whether the law be benign or not, we must say of it, as we say in change in the conditions of men to which we have referred: It is here; we cannot evade it; no substitutes for it have been found; and while the law may sometimes be hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of a few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race. Objections to the foundations upon which society is based are not in order, because the condition of the race is better with these than it has been with any others which have been tried. Of the effect of any new substitutes we cannot be sure. The Socialist or Anarchist who seeks to overturn present conditions is to be regarded as attacking the foundation upon which civilization itself rests, for civilization took its start from the day that the capable, industrious workman said to his incompetent and lazy fellow, “if thou dost not sow, thou shalt not reap”, and thus ended primitive Communism by separating the drones from the bees. One who studies this subject will soon be brought face to face with the conclusion that upon the sacredness of property civilization itself depends – the right of the laborer to his hundred dollars in the savings bank, and equally the right of the millionaire to his millions. To those who propose to substitute Communism for this intense Individualism the answer, therefore, is: The race has tried that. All progress from that barbarous day to the present time has resulted from its displacement. Not evil, but good, has come to the race from the accumulation of wealth by those who have the ability and energy that produce it.
(Andrew Carnegie, “Wealth,” North American Review 148 (June, 1889), 653–665)
Here he is expounding on hat is Social Darwinism, an idea of Herbert Spenser that applies the Darwinian laws of natural selection to society. It would also spawn the Eugenics movement. Carnegie’s company Carnegie Steel, would later be merged, at his death, into the U.S. Steel Company as the concentration of capital in the period even extend to news as it was dominated by Reuters, Havas, and Wolff’s Telgraphisches Bureau. Even the academic world was falling under the concertation spell, with German schools, who in many ways resembled the rigid hierarchy of the Prussian army, dominated the fields of science and education. This era of concentrated wealth and centralization was given the name Gilded age in Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner’s book, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today in 1873.
While the British elite were relatively open and invested in banks and railways and even married their sons to Jews or Americans, the German grafted their new modern economy to the old pre-industrial social structure. The German Junker class still dominated the upper class, and the further east one went, the further back in time one seemed to go. German communities outside the Reich resembled the tiny towns of the tales of the Brothers Grimm, and in the Austrian Gail Valley, social structure had not changed sine the sixteenth century. The old network of nobles, Honoratioren, came under attacks from new national political parties and growing bureaucracies at the national, regional, and local level. Sociologist Max Weber understood the advance as a rationalization of the political process and the demystification of the world, but worried that demagogues could take political advantage of an increasingly denuded traditionally network.
While Europe extend its industrial and political networks across the world the Easter powers , such as the Ottoman and Qing, worried about how far they should go in imitation. The Qing still operated with kinship networks were the choosing of imperial officers was done by competitive exam insulating them from any loyalty other than that to the emperor. Qing China was a hierarchical network where a man’s career was judged by his prestige, power, mobility, and security. The nightmare was of a network driven rebellion, that occasionally arose in the provinces. Many saw the specter of the “White Lotus Society,” (Bailianjiao, Wade-Giles, Pai-lien) a group of Buddism that worshipped the Wusheng Laomn (Unborn Venerable Mother) who was said would unite all people in one great family at the millennium. It was a combination of Buddhism and Manichaeism and called for strict vegetarianism and allowed for the free interaction of men and women. Its writings also had a prediction of the Maitrey or Mettieyya, a future Buddha. A secret society that traced its roots back to the Buddhist monk, Huiyuan (334-416) who led the Douglin Temple of Mount Luskan and had studied Zhuangzi, Laozi, and Confucius, he founded the Mahayana sect and preached of the Pure Land Buddha. He wrote a paper called, On Why Monks Do Not Bow Down to Kings, where he argued for the complete independence of Buddhist monk at court while saying their beliefs would still make them a good subject.
The Chinese elite looked upon all unorthodoxy as either the White Lotus, or heretical (xiejiano) or Christianity (tianzhujiao) and condemned or banned it. The emperor used a panic over a fear of “soul stealers,” with all from beggars to imperial officials being accused of such, to reassert his control over the bureaucracy and yet it reveled the weaknesses in the system. It was strong enough to rule China, but not strong enough to resist the incursions of the Europeans. While the Europe of the nineteenth century enjoyed a rather peaceful period, China was racked with civil wars between 1850 and 1865 that decimating the population. Cities were destroyed, massacres of civilians and prisoners was the norm, and epidemics and famine followed the heels of the battles. The rebellions arose first in marginal groups but quickly spread to substantial parts ofhte heartland. External influences fed the revolts and then acted to defeat the insurgents. All of his led to an enormous exodus of Chinese people, mainly to North America, which spawned a populist revolt in the United States.
In 1851 the Qing dynasty was beset by two major rebellions, the Nian in the north (1851-1868) and the Taiping in the south, (1851-1864) while fighting and losing the Opium Wars (1st- 1839-1842; 2nd 1856-1860). The Opium Wars were fought with the British over the opium trade that the Qing dynasty wished to end and the aftermath were what the Chinese called the unequal treaties, The Treaty of Nanking in 1842 (China ceded Hing Kong to the British and allowed open trade in other ports) and the Treaty of Tientsin and the Convention of Peking (1860) where the Kowloon Peninsula and Stonecutter Island were made part of Hong Kong and Outer Mongolia was ceded to the Russian Empire. To compensate for this the Qing dynasty laid on heavy taxes, that combined with famine and corruption caused much unrest in China. this action caused many Chinese to dessert their lands and made banditry common along with the formation of secret societies established for self defense. In the south anti-Qing sentiment was strong in the Hakka (subgroup of the Han Chinese) community. There, under a man who had failed the official bureaucratic exam for times, Hong Xiuquan (1815-1864) founded the God Worshipping Society (Bai Shandi Hui) which combined the teaching of the Bible with Chinese folk religion. He claimed once one had been converted one became a son or daughter of God and a sibling of Jesus Christ. He proclaimed himself as the second eldest brother of Christ and his brother, Feng Yusahn (1815-1852) as the third eldest bother of Christ. Leading a 10,000 man strong army he swept to Nanjing and installed himself as the Heavenly King, his brother was called the South King, in what was called the Taiping Rebellion.
Meanwhile in the Zhang Lexing, referred to by the Qing officials as a band of bandits, who called himself the Lord of the Alliance and Great Han prince with the Heavenly Mandate. They grew expotantally after a series of flood on the Yellow River in 1851 and 1855, and the government’s failure to provide aid to affected areas, mainly because of the devastations of the Opium Wars. Blaming the Europeans and Qing incompetency they rallied under the slogan, “kill the rich and aid they poor,” they had early success against the Qing forces who were busy with other rebellions and the the massive one in the south. They even allied with the Tiaping Rebellion, but only in words, and Lexing received the title of “Commander of the Northern Expedition,” but no real cooperation ever came about. Backed by European weaponry the rebellion were crushed, but in the defeating of the rebellions, the collapse of the Qing dynasty was assured. Without the interference of the Europeans, especially the British, the rebellions would never achieved the successes they did, and the interference and the battle to defeat the rebellions would doom the Qing dynasty as well.
In the time between 1840 and 1940 almost 150 million people living in Europe and China engaged in a mass immigration fueled by revolutions, wars, and other calamites which coincided with a step decline in transportation cost. The more famous was the 55 to 58 million Europeans that moved to the United States, whose southern European and Irish backgrounds and Catholic religious practices caused many in the United States to work to stop the flow of immigrants. The less famous one was the 48 to 52 million Chinese and Indians to south-east Asia and Australia, along with 48 to 52 millions of Russians moving to Siberia, Manchuria and Central Asia. “One of historical puzzle is why there was not a larger flow of Chinese to the United States.” (Ibid. 173) They could have formed a cluster much like the Italian and Irish did on the east coast in America. The answer is political, as a populist backlash against Chinese immigration kept the Chinese from becoming a larger force in California. The leader of this effort was Denis Kearney, (1847-1907) an Irish Catholic immigrant from Oakmont County Cork. The Irish had been subjected to some of the worst bigotry ntho east by Americans who saw them as a danger to society, after leaving Ireland and the Potato Famine and British oppressions. They were mainly Catholics, which caused much of the backlash to them in the Protestant America of the early 1800s. Kearney was called a demagogue of extraordinary power, who unleashed his fury on Chinese immigrants in San Francisco who he claimed were from a despotic government and not able to live in a democratic society, would lie in court, evade taxes, and had insufficient intelligence to function in a self governing society. He founded the Workingman’s Party of California and in 1877 won 11 seats in the state house and 17 in the state assembly and pushed through a rewrite of the California constitution that took voting rights away from the Chinese and gave a commission control of the California railroad system to prevent them from using what he called “cheap collie labor.” He was famous for ending all his speeches with the phrase, “And whatever happens, the Chinese must go” (a conscious inspiration from Roman senator Cato the Elder’s fame for ending all speeches with ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam – “Furthermore, I consider that Carthage must be destroyed) (Andrew Gyory. Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press. 19898. 111) This was despite boom that occupied the immigration of the Chinese and their work on the transcontinental railroad and the intense hatred of the Irish Kearney must have faced in the eastern United States. “The lesson of this episode is very clear. Just as global networks of communication and transportation had made mass migrations of the late nineteenth century possible, so political networks of populism and nativism sprang to life to resist them. (Ferguson. 175)
Globalization became a reality through the efforts of the European empires, especially the British, in the late nineteenth century. Yet the networks created, especially those of immigration, had unforeseen effects on indigenous populations. “We give the generic name ‘populism’ to the backlash against free trade, free migration, and international capital that was such a striking feature of American and British politics.” (Ibid. 177) In the 1870s, the Chinese were resented on the West coast while the Irish were resented on the East coast, German and French populations directed their hatred against the Jews, as did the Russians, and the United States by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While being tagged as both sub human and in control of a vast conspiracy that was the master of global finance or power. This movement was fueled by the financial crisis of 1873 and by 1890, it basically died out. By then the ideas of protectionism, immigration restrictions, and anti-Semitism had became the foundations of the Democrats in America and the Conservatives in Germany. By the early 1900s the tide had turned and the populist gave way to the progressives, who were more in line with the thinking of Karl Marx and his disciples. The rise of the political left was more disquieting to the worlds’ elites than the populist had been, especially the radical utopian sects of Marx, the anarchists and nationalist who threated the integrity of the empires themselves.
Alfred Milner (1854-1925) came to South Africa in 1897, and tried to be the redeemer of imperial Britain. His Round Table, or Kindergarten , was given a sinister reputation by his enemies in Cape Town. They were a group of academically inclined civil servants who did resort to force to meet their objectives. He wished to move enough white Britons to South Africa to outnumber and dominate the Boers and give the blacks a just governance and good treatment, which meant subjugation. He wished to place all of southern Africa under the Union Jack and believed the British were a superior race because of the insular position in Europe and the mastery of the seas the navy had achieved. He called himself a nationalist and an imperialists and wished to set up separate communities of British, mainly English, settlements throughout the world. He decried the intermixing that had gone on and called for the British to stay pure and thus rule an empire of friendly English states. His comrades in South Africa wished the blacks would die out as the American Indians were seemly doing by this time in North America. His efforts basically set up the apartheid rule that came to south Africa later in the century. he also brought Cecil Rhodes, maybe he most ruthless capitalist to South Africa, a man who drew no distinction between the good of the nation and his business. Milner’s vison was an imperial fantasy that did not prevent the rise of Louis Botha and Jan Smuts ending Milner’s dream of a African Canada or Australia. This is the example of networks in history, as the loser is usually credited with more power and success than the winner, the opposite of what usually happens. In history, success is usually the main theme of historical writings, mostly done by the winner, the unsuccessful network attract the attention that the successful ones avoid.
Milner and his network were a product of Oxford, and envisioned a muscular, martial, imperial, and heterosexual world, while the counterparts at Cambridge look for the opposite. The Cambridge network, called the “Apostles” was effete. pacifist, liberal , and homosexual, the rivalry would dominate British politics in the period leading up to and just after the Frist World War. The Cambridge “Conversazione Society,” founded in 1820, was intellectually exclusive and members were chosen on the basis of philosophical aptitude. It pocessed a sense of superiority that alienated the group from all established orders. The Apostles, as they called themselves, had around 255 members between 1820 and 1914, and was so exclusive that some years saw no new members selected at all. The group prided itself in intense Hellenistic relationships between members of different generations and former members, like Bertrand Russell an A.N Whitehead regularly attend meetings. Their politics in the nineteenth century was not much different than their Oxford counterparts, both were members of the Tory party. Their anti-imperialism was not evident before 1900, but as a secret society they had along been accused of radicalism. After 1900, under the influence of the philosopher G. E. Moore, (1873-1958) a subversive spirt grew. Moore, along with Bertrand Russell , Ludwig Wittenstien, and Gottlob Ferge founed analytic philosophy and led the field away from idealism and more to commons sense methods in solving philosophic questions. His main work was Prinipia Ethica in 1903 which early on was considered path breaking but in recent times his contribution to other fields had been more durable.
Moore was not political, and encouraged his disciples to look on politics with distain. He looked at private virtues and argued for sensibility, personal relations, the liberation of the emotions, the creative instincts, and ruthless honesty about one’s own character. Many of these can be seen in E. M. Forester’s book, Howard’s End (London: Edward Arnold. 1910) with the phrase , “only connect,” was a new categorical imperative. The younger generation of the group took everything more personally and later Forester would proclaim if he had to chose between betraying a friend or the state, he would betray the state. In 1938 Keyes would repudiate the group for their repudiating personal liability and customary morals, and traditionally wisdom. He like many in the society had grown tired of all the drama of the society by 1914. All of the networks of the time were disrupted by the Frist World War.
Milner and his group had revealed the limits of British imperial expansion, while the Apostles projected a loss of all sympathy to the very idea of empire. Yet despite all of this in 1914 the British went to war in response to the growing economic power and political ambition of the German Reich. The final victory by Britain was in many ways due to the unity of all of its empire, along with the joining of American power. “A general European war broke out in 1914 for the simple reason that the order established in Vienna in 1815 broke down.” (Ibid. 193) It is not a question of who was at fault, but why this breakdown occurred after a century of success. By the early 1900s, what had been five powers was now five empires, operating with old hierarchies of hereditary rule and new networks of globalization. They made few demands on the market economies and many felt, optimistically, that the rulers would not do anything to disrupt this ongoing trade and peace. they would be proven wrong as the web of secret treaties and the lack of diplomacy would drag the five empires into one of the most devastating and useless conflicts of human history, The First World War. On the eve of the conflict, July of 1914, French socialist leader Jean Jauries said, “In this moment when we are threatened with murder and savagery the only chance for the maintenance of peace and the salvation of civilization is for the working class gather all the strength of its numerous brothers and that all the proletarians, French, English, German, Italian, Russian and we ourselves ask of these thousands of men to unite so that the unanimous beat of their hearts should thrust back this horrible nightmare” The bond between the workers of the world proved weaker than the nationalistic ones as Jauries was assassinated by Raul Villian on 31 July 1914, the war started the next day. “The triumph of hierarchy over networks was symbolized by the complete failure of the Second International of socialist parties to prevent the Frist World War.” (Ibid. 197)
Germany had only a few ways they could have defeated the British empire, who cut off all undersea cable forcing them to send all messages overseas through British offices. Frist was decisively defeating the allied armies (Russia, France and Britain) on land, secondly, totally disrupting their seas trade with submarine attacks, and finally, fermenting revolutions in the colonies each pocessed. they came close in all three, even calling a jihadi against the British empire in the Near East, and successfully fermenting one in Russia that overthrew the Czar and finally brought Lenin to power and the Soviet Union into existance.
A stained glass window once pictured the Pied Pier of Hamelin, (German Rattenfanger von Hameln) dressed in multicolored clothes (pied) leading the rats from the city to the River Weser. The window was made around the year 1300 and it and the church it was in was destroyed in 1660. The window may have been created to mark a tragic event in the history of the town as the town chronicle in 1384 recorded an entry that said it was 100 years since the children disappeared. The rats were added to the tale in 1559, and some believe it may be a representation of the plague, but many dispute that assertation. The tale is that the rats overwhelmed the city and for a fee the piper said he could get rid of them, which he did by playing a tune and marching them into the Weser River. Afterward the people refused to pay, so the piper, then dressed in green, played his pipe when the people were at church, on St John and Paul Day, and all the children, except for three, (a lame boy who could not keep up, a blind child who could not see where they were going and a deaf child who could not hear the piper) who told the town what had happened. The piper may have led the children to Koppetberg Hill and then to another country, or to a cave in Koppenberg Mountain, or even to Transylvania, or into the river like the rats. Other theories tell of a natural causes, disease or starvation, or immigration, which may have been forced because of the financial conditions or over population of the town. The story had been retold by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, the Brothers Grimm ,and Robert Browning. Ferguson uses the tale to describe the early years of the twentieth century in the following:
The twentieth century was also a time of plagues – and of pipers. As is well known, the final phase of the Frist World War coincided with a global pandemic, as a lethal version of the influenza swept the world, killing tens of millions of people, particularly the young,. It was not the only plague of the years between 1917 and 1923. A mutant strain of Marxism developed by the Russian Bolsheviks also swept across the Eurasian land mass. New and extreme forms of nationalism produced virulent fascist movements in nearly every European country. So contagious were these ideologies that even fortunate Englishmen in the sequestered courts of Cambridge could be infected. There was an economic plague, too: the plague of hyperinflation, which wrought havoc not only in Germany but also in Austria, Poland, and Russia. In the face of these plagues, people turned to pied pipers: men who offered charismatic leadership and drastic solutions. Like the people of medieval Hamelin, however, those who empowered such pipers paid with the lives of their children.
(Ibid. 201)
The international order that had kept the peace for almost a century had broken down. Britain failed to be the balancer between the empires, and thus the French and Russians went to war with the Germans and Austro-Hungarians over the assassination of of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in the recently, and seemingly trivial, Habsburg territory of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The event was a total accident, as the Archduke’s car had made a wrong turn and the original group, including Gavrilo Princip, were leaving to go home assuming they had failed. Then the car suddenly turned right in from of Princip, who took advantage of this and shot and killed the Archduke, who was in favor of allowing more autonomy for the Bosnians. The violation of the Belgium’s neutrality by Germany, in it famous von Schlieffen Plan, (drawn up by Field Marshall Alfred von Schlieffen between 1905 to1906) which called for a the German army to circle through Belgium and achieve a double envelopment of French and British forces to achieve a decisive and quick victory in a Napoleonic move, brought the British into the war. The war quickly became global and the resources of British, and later the United States, effectively wore the German army down and led to its defeat. Faced with the overwhelming odds, the Germans decided to unleash an idelaogocial virus into the other empires to destabilize them and give the Germans a chance at victory.
The German call for jihad did not work in the Middle East, but British sponsoring of Arab nationalism did work to undermine Germany’s ally, the Ottoman Empire. While sending Lenin to Russia did work to undermine the Russian empire, in the end the spreading Bolshevism undermined both the Austrians and the Germans. “To understand why the first of these initiatives failed while the second succeeded and the third backfired, we need to remember that network structures are as important as viruses in determining the speed and extent of a contagion.” (Ibid. 203) Kaiser Wilhelm II imagined the Ottomans were leading a grand alliance of Islamic people who on their order would unite and drive out the Britain and France. he underestimated both the Ottoman power and the British intelligence in the area. The Ottomans did not have much influence except within their kingdom, and the British offered an effective counter move to the German ploy. The “pan Islamism ” that Wilhelm and other Germans imaged was nothing more than a mirage. The British move to get the Arabs to defect from the Ottomans however, succeeded very well. Yet in the end, it was not an exchange from Ottoman rule for British dominance the Arabs sought, but independence from all foreign rule.
The German plots for subterfuge were basically failures. From a plot to send arms to Hindu nationalist or a German paid invasion from Siam, to sending 25,000 Russian rifles to Ireland after the Easter Rising, to their totally botched attempt to get Mexico to invade the United States. (The Zimmerman telegraph sent on 17 January 1917 from Staatssekretar Arthur Zimmerman from the German foreign office to Heinrich von Ekart, the German ambassador to México proposing an alliance with Mexico promising return of lands lost in the Mexican War. [Texas, Arizonian and New Mexico] It was easily intercepted by British intelligence who controlled the underseas cables.) “Yet one German plot that worked proved to be so successful that it very nearly revolutionized the whole world.” ((Ibid. 213) It was the one that sent Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin from Switzerland to Russia in the wake of the February Revolution of 1917 that had overthrown Czar Nicholas II and ended 300 years of Romanov rule. While the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky hesitated and stayed in the war, Lenin and his associates, who at first had little support, organized and proselytize until they achieved victory in November of 1917. Many accounts underrate the that this was a German finced operation and it was facilitated by the incompetence of the Russian government. The Bolsheviks were able to, with astounding sped, turn defeat into victory and overthrow the new government in the October Revolution by the end of November. The Bolsheviks had little support from the Russian peasantry and the Cossacks which explains the quick decent into civil war by 1918.
Lenin and the Bolsheviks quickly turned their revolutionary network into a hierarchy that was harsher and more cruel that the old Czarist government. The Bolshevik virus topped the Russian Empire, but also infected Germany as well, with red flags being hosted in Budapest, Munich, and Hamburg. It was also seen in Glasgow and faraway Seattle as well as Buenos Aires. Lenin dreamed of a Soviet Union of both Europe and Asia, while Trotsky spoke of revolution’ in London and Paris. The Party grew greatly after 1917 and Lenin used the growth to assume the role of Robespierre, using dictatorial powers to in his words, “save the revolution.” Nicholas and his family were shot in the cellar of their jail in Yekaterinburg and within days 428 more Socialist Revolutionaries were executed in Yaroslavl. To ensure peasants turned over their grain, Lenin ordered executions of what he called “kulaks,” suppose rapacious capitalist peasants, or anyone who opposed him. Lenin asked ,”How can you make a revolution without firing squads? If we can’t shoot a White Guard saboteur, what sort of a great revolution is it? Nothing but talk and a bowl of mush.” His measures got worse after a Socialist Revolutionary named Fanny Kaplan tried to assassinate him on 30 August, 1918. “At the heart of the new tyranny was the ‘All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, – the Cheke for short.” (Ibid. 217) Under Felix Dzerhinsky this new police force was set up to execute anyone opposed to the Revolution, to destroy any opposition to the new Soviet state. Over the years it would change names and leaders, but it mission remained the same, the last apparition of it was the KGB, and Vladimir Putin was a central part of the group. Between 1918 and 1920, over 300,000 executions were carried out and at a place such as the monastery of Kholmogory, a remote and inaccessible fortress, the kontsentratsionnye lageri (the rehabilitation of unreliable elements) were lodged along the White Sea in 1920 gave birth the gulag.
From the French Revolution to those of the twentieth century we see the search for utopian societies and perfection. Lenin is typical of this search, no other ideas were welcome as he pocessed the perfect ideal for the perfect society. Any opposition therefore was illegitimate and dangerous, the perfect had to be obtained at any cost. In his collection of essays, Sometimes an Art, Bernard Bailyn warns of the dangers of the pursuit of perfection. He argues that the pursuit came out of the Renaissance and had led to many troubles and was behind many of the actions undertaken by Europeans as well as given birth to the revolutions that came from the Reformation to the present day. He says of the pursuit:
The search for perfection, generated in Europe’s vortex, when played out in a spiritual amplitudes of the West, was the source not of monstrous tyrannies but of spiritual and moral strivings. It did not become the “recipe for bloodshed” that Berlin so feared because everywhere it lacked the ultimate power to coerce. Utopianism, secular or religious, became a “road to inhumanity” when it is enforced by a monopoly of power – ultimate, unconstrained power in whatever form it might appear: the repressive power of the Soviet state, the annihilatory power of the Nazi regime, the mind-blinding power of Maoist gangs, the suffocating power of Islamic fundamentalism, each of which emerged through distinctive historical circumstances, to seek by violence what could not be achieved by persuasion.”
(Bernard Bailyn. Sometimes an Art: Nine Essays on History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 2013. 259-260)
Onto this new hierarchy created by Lenin came one Iosif Vissrionovich Dzhugashvili, better know as Joseph Stalin. (1878-1953) he would rule the Soviet hierarchy from the time of Lenin’s death in 1924 until his death in 1953. He was a product of the clandestine revolutionary network, as was Lenin, but he mastered the hubs and connecting parts of the Soviet hierarchy, created by Lenin, to the extent that the members of the hierarchy refused to believe they could get along without him. Seeing conspiracies everywhere, Stalin eliminated all opposition, real and imaginary, including Leon Trotsky, whom he had assassinated in Mexico City in 1940. Stalin was especially harsh toward many of his old Bolshevik comrades and used show trials and clandestine arrests to imprison execute any person even suspected of the most minor of offences. “Taking into account the six or seven million Soviet citizens who were sent into exile, the share of some kind of penal servitude under Stalin approached 15 per cent.” (Ferguson 219) Stalin’s Terror, at its high point, private insecurity was public welfare. He turned the Soviet Union into a vast prison camp with himself as the commander. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, (1918-2008) a Russian writer and philosopher, whom Stalin had imprisoned in the camp system for being captured by Nazi soldiers, wrote the history of the vast prison system, and argued that Lenin created the system and Stalin only amplified it, in his monumental work, The Gulag Archipelago. (1973) Stalin power came from three elements, total control of the party bureaucracy, total control of the means of communication, (using the Kremlin’s phone lines as the central hub) and total control of the secret police, who also lived in fear of Stalin. “No Oriental despot had wielded such complete personal power over an empire, because no previous hierarchy had been able to make participation in unofficial networks – even suspected participation – so terrifyingly dangerous.” (Ibid 220)
Like the communist, fascism was also the product of a network, especially in Germany, where 96% of the votes for fascism were made by German speaking people. In the wake of the Treaty of Versailles, the ensuing hyperinflation caused many to drift away from center left or right parties to the extremes of pollical movements. In 1930 the Nazi Party membership grew to seven times it number in 1928, it would have 8 million members in 1945, in the aftermath of the Second World War. “Contrary to the old claims that it was the party of the countryside, or of the north, or the middle class, the NSDAP attracted support right across Germany and right across the social spectrum.” (Ibid. 222) The Nazi Party covered the electoral spectrum in a way that had not been seen before or since. One could say that between 1930 and 1933, Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party went viral. Many compared the rise to a religious movement, some even speculating that the party was replacing the church. The Nazi Party was not literally religious, its institutional seedbed was the existing network of seculars associative life in Germany, the denser the associative life was the faster the party grew. Like the church and the Bolsheviks before, the Nazi Party, with Hitler a frim believer in the Fuhrerprinzip (the leadership principle) the party became more hierarchal as it grew larger. Yet it did not approach the central control of the Soviet system, it was a more chaotic style of governing, with old and new competing against each other for power. “Historians have sometimes represented the system as one of ‘polycratic chaos,’ whereby ambiguous orders and overlapping jurisdictions gave rise to a ‘cumulative radicalization,’ as rival individuals and agencies competed to carry out what they took to be the Fuhrer’s wishes. The result was a mixture of inefficiency, egregious corruption and escalating violence against all groups deemed to lie outside the ‘ethic community’ – the Volksgemeinshcaft – especially the Jews.” (Ibid. 224)
Anti-Semitism was an old idea, as anti-Jewish sediment can be traced to Manetho, who was an Egyptian priest who wrote a history of ancient Egypt. (Aegyptiaca) It was written in Greek and recorded the history of Egypt from Menes, the first ruler of Upper and Lower Egypt and founder of the first dynasty. His anti-Jewish sediment is shown in the works of Poseidonius, and Apollonius Molon, which has led many to believe the sediment is a reflection of Egyptian attitudes towards the Jews from the time of the Exodus. Adthurchides of Cnidus ridiculed what he called the absurdly of Jewish law and practices, saying they led to their easy defeat by Ptolemy Lugus in 320 BC when he sacked Jerusalem. The anti-Jewish edict of Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 167 led to the revolt of the Maccabees. The idea seemed to originate in Egypt and spread by the Greeks who cast the Jews as misanthropes and decried their tendency to separate them selves from the Greeks and Greek culture in many cities. The Greeks regarded any who did such as barbarians.
With the coming of Christianity the title of Christ killers was added to the long list of things the Jews were accused and despised. During the sixth century Ad, the Catholic Visigothic kingdom in Hispania passed laws forbidding Jews to marry Christians, practice circumcision, and observe Jewish holy days. The Visigothic kingdom and the Church kept this up through the seventh century, while in Islamic lands the Jews enjoyed a measure of relative freedom from oppression. In Europe anti-Semitism rose up in many instances during the Middle Ages and the Jews were expelled from many nations such a England (1290), France (1306), and Spain (1492). Anti-Semitic programs and actions were so common along the Eastern front in Europe that Jews ran from both the Russian and Austrian armies for protection from the German army. The accusations of controlling the world finances were common by the late nineteenth century, and racial theories about the Jews nefariousness and inferiority was prevalent on both sides of the Atlantic. Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not novel of new in Central Europe, but a common and prevalent view. “The novelty was the ruthlessness with which Hitler pursued his hatred of the Jews to the ultimate, bitter end of genocide.” (Ibid. 226) Despite the picturing the Jews as this all powerful conspiracy group in control of finance and political institutions, paradoxically, the Nazis were easily able to disempower and expropriate the German Jews with little opposition and the utmost of ease. One of Hitler’s greatest triumphs of propaganda is convincing the German people the Jews had the power to start a world war, while constantly confronting them with their weaknesses.
The Jews did paly an important role in the financial, academic, cooperate, industrial, and cultural life in pre-1933 Germany, but only a minimal role in German politics. They were assimilated in much of German life, yet they became the object of the most intense persecution of any group. Hitler subjected them to a network of hierarchical persecution from competing bureaucracies that overwhelmed the population. On 30 January 1938, in a speech before the Reichstag, Hitler made their fate very clear. They would either adapt to the new order, or perish. He proclaimed, “Today I will once more be a prophet. If the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe,” (Ibid. 321) “After all that had been written about the web of Jewish power, the only networks that really mattered were the ones that enabled emigration, and those were often family ties.” (Ibid. 232) The secret of the success of the totalitarian network was to delegitimize, paralyze, or kill outright any and all social networks outside of the hierarchical institutions of the party and state, and especially destroy any that aspired to independent political action.
One would think that the totalitarian regimes of the mid twentieth century would repulse any person living in a free society, but many in such societies were intrigued and drawn to them. Many in the British aristocracy were attracted to Hitler and favored appeasement over confrontation with the German dictator. In October of 1937, the Duke of Windsor (former Edward VIII) and his wife Wallis Simpson met with Hitler in an unofficial visit he hoped would increase his prestige at home and give Simpson the experience of a state visit. Phillip Kerr, the 11th Marquess of Lothian (1882-1940) was a a member of the Milner Kindergarten and a leader of the appeasement movement and said that Germany did not want war but equality in the world stage and that Hitler regarded communism, as Lothian did, as the biggest enemy of Western Civilization. He argued that if the communist tied to conquer Europe, as the Islamic forces under the Turks had, Germany would be a bulwark in the defense of freedom. Many of these people were located in networks at Oxford, and their views and influence waned with the coming of the Second World War, but the networks at Cambridge had even more grim fate as they were infiltrated by Stalin’s KGB.
“In the history of networks, few episodes are more instructive than that of the Cambridge Spies: the ‘Magnificent Five,’ as they were known to their controllers in Moscow Centre, or the ‘Homintern’ as they were wittily nicknamed by Maurice Bowra, the dean of Wadham, Oxford.” (Ibid. 236) This elite and exclusive network was thoroughly penetrated by Russian intelligence that for five decades they were the KGB’s most valuable asset betraying many Western agents to Stalin. The Cambridge Spy Ring, or the Cambridge Five, was a group of Apostles who had been favorable to Marxist-Leninist theory from the early thirties. They operated from the early thirties to the early fifties and had penetrated into some of the highest offices in the British government. They were Donald Maclean, Guy Burgess, Harold “Kim” Philby. Anthony Blount, and John Cairncross. Burgess was an activist from the early thirties that had organized strikes been involved in many protest. His dream was to organize a group of five people in the manner of anti-Nazi cells that were said to be operating in Germany. Under watch by Soviet agents Willi Munzenberg and Ernst Henri, who were recruiting many in the British academic élite for the KGB, it was their agent Arnold Deutsch who achieved Burgess’s dream beginning with Philby. He next recruited Burgess and the other three, had them renounce all forms of Marxism and seek positions in the British government. they all successfully achieved their goals and even got one disciple, Michael Straight to leave Britain and return to the United States were he ended up being a speechwriter for Franklin Roosevelt. These were men of principal who were disillusioned by the policy of appeasement and saw Stalin as a counter weight to Hitler and fascism. They contributed a staggering amount of intelligence to the Soviets during the Second World War, even the plans for the Normandy invasion. Their success was so complete that some in the Soviet intelligence felt they were a brilliant counter espionage group looking to deceive the Soviets. Yet in the pre-war time, British counter intelligence was epitomized by its lack of existence. That combined with the British sense that their élite would not participate in such things led to an almost ironclad protection of the ring. In the early fifties the ironclad protection fell apart and the ring slowly disintegrated with many fleeing the country, the last would be Cairncross in 1990. Despite many signs that should have exposed them earlier, they operated with impunity for many years, and many of their activities were covered up by the government even after they had been exposed. It cause a drop in the moral of British intelligence and created much distrust of the British by the United States of the British intelligence forces. None of the Cambridge Ring were ever convicted or tried and none ever served any prison time for their offences. A very different fate was meted out to any even suspected of the least little spying in Stalin’s Soviet Union.
The mid twentieth century was dominated by the most powerful and controlling hierarchies in the history of the sapiens. Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Third Reich, and Mo Zedong’s People’s Republic were the most centrally controlled states in history. The Second World War was a time of unprecedented mobilization of young man and societies in history. One hundred and ten million people were under arms during the war with huge proportions never returning home. The world’s population was reduced by 75 million or about 3% of the population of Earth. The armies were the biggest of the hierarchical organizations that ruled the planet, central planners dominated business and industry as well. Corporations or government programs, such as Roosevelt’s New Deal were the rule in the middle of the century. Even the nations were organized into a hierarchical structure in the form of the United Nations, denominated by the Soviet Union and the United States. It was a recreation of the old five power template that came out of Vienna at the end of the Napoleonic Era. “To the men who fought in the world war, it doubtless seemed natural to carry over into civilian life at least some of the modes of operation they learned while in uniform.” (Ibid. 255) The technology of the period also favored hierarchies, as phone systems were networks with a hub and spoke system easy to tap and control. “Like newsprint, cinema and television, radio was not a true network technology, because it generally involved one-way communication from a content provider to the listener.” (Ibis. 256) These technologies also lent themselves to social control in freer societies, and gave totalitarians access to much more control than ever previously possible. In free societies, radio was severely circumscribed by federal regulations and the economic needs of commercial interest.
While many in academia warned of totalitarian trends in America during the Cold War, that society was profoundly different from the Soviet Union. White Americans enjoyed a full range of political and civil rights, protected by the court system, yet for many black Americans these rights dido not exist. Since the end of Reconstruction African Americans lived under a code of laws called Jim Crow, after a mistral figure in American folksongs. The penal system was used to basically re-enslave black Americans in a strict segregated society. (for a complete description of how this was done and its effects see Douglas A. Blackmon. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans From the Civil War to World War II. New York: Anchor Books. 2008) Alexi de Tocqueville documented the rich associational life that exited in America in the nineteenth century, and this life allowed for networks to be imported and easily formed in the nation. This could also be exploited, as it was by many of the immigrants from Sothern Italy in the late nineteenth century, the network formed was the Mafia. Glamorized by the film and boom The Godfather, there was a network run by five families that controlled a vast criminal network. Fueled by profits from illegal liquor during Prohibition, the Mafia was a powerful network involved in both illegal and legal business and politics. The network rose out of the Sicilian culture and history. The word comes from the adjective mafiusu (swagger or bravado) and may have an Arab origin. It was given currency in an obscure 1865 play Imafiusi di la Vicaria (The Mafiosi of Vicaria). It was first used officially by Tuscan aristocrat Filippo Gualterio in 1867. Called a cartel of private protection forms by historian Diego Gambetta, it roe up after Sicily was integrated in to the Kingdom of Italy in 1851. Since the police were a small and ineffective force the landowners formed a network of private armies to enforce the law an protect their property. In the face of much anti-Italian and Catholic bigotry in America the organization was formed in the United states to protect Italian business and people. Its organization proved to be an efficient way to bring in illegal alcohol and run many criminal enterprises during Prohibition. The network was dismantled with the passage of the RICO (Racketeering and Corrupt Organization Act) in the 1970s and 1980s as the network made the fatal mistake of becoming the hierarchy portrayed in the movies.
In the face of Jim Crow and other discriminatory laws and practices, the Civil Rights movement began as a network of churches sand groups, like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. ( NAACP-1909) The deep institutional roots of the black churches, meeting every Sunday and renewing its mission, created networks whose momentum was impossible to stop. Martin Luther King would say of the movement, “The invitational periods at the mass meetings, when we asked for volunteers, were much like those invitational periods that occur every Sunday morning in Negro churches. By twenties, thirties and forties, people came forward to join out army.” (Ferguson. 262) The movement succeeded because of these deep institutional bonds despite the full force of both state, local and, at times, the federal government. Without similar bonds many other networks of protests failed during the same period. The mid century also saw the founding of one of the most successful social networks, Alcoholics Anonymous. Founded in Akron, Ohio in 1935 by William Wilson (Bill W) and Robert Smith (Dr. Bob) it offered a twelve step program to sobriety. The strength of the program was the therapeutic network that gave one support in regular meetings and gave addicts a chance to shore their stories. The many totalitarian states created scenarios that drove many to drink, or use other drugs. Trapped in hierarchical pyramids it seemed the only escape was through a drug, and thus what began as a wave of man-made idelaogocial plagues produced a pandemic of liver and lung malfunctions.
“The great, hierarchal ordered empires that waged the Cold War against each other left little space for networks to form amongst their citizens, unless their character was wholly unpolitical.” (Ibid. 267) The Cold War was not fought on a grand scale with missiles or large armies, but in the backwaters of jungles with each side supporting small armies far from the centers of control. The limits of the main combatants were exposed in these small conflicts caused political crisis in their domestic fronts. In the seventies and eighties saw a resurgence of networks and the breakdown of the hierarchies resulting in the disintegration of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European empire. The was also the time of the birth of internet, which like the printing press, caused a great disruption in the hierarchies, but may have been the result of their breakup and not the cause. With the looming nuclear winter usually seen as the reason the Cold War never became hot, one must also consider that the networks of alliances was more stable after 1945 than they had ever been before. Both superpowers were surrounded by networks of alliances that were stable, large and dense and combined both common defense with economic integration. The structure of all alliances were hierarchical, with the United States heading the West and the Soviet Union the East. While this guaranteed peace in the developed world, the Third World became the battleground of many armed conflicts as both the United States and the Soviet Union fought proxy wars in these arenas. To justify Soviet intervention the Brezhnev Doctrine was created stating that the threat to socialist rule in one nation threated socialist rule in all nations and thus it was the duty of the Soviet Union to intervene and defend socialism. It was frst outlined in an article in Pravda on 26 September 1968 in and article by Sergei Kovalev. ( Sovereignty and the International Obligations of Socialist Countries) It was reiterated by Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) at the 5th Congress of the Polish Workers Party o n13 November 1968, when the Soviet leader stated, “When forces that are hostile to socialism try to turn the development of some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes not only a problem of the country concerned, but a common problem and concern of all socialist countries.” This was in reaction to the Prague Spring and the reform movement in Czechoslovakia in and justifying the Soviet inversion in August of 1968 and the earlier invasion of Hungary in 1956. The doctrine was discarded in 1989 when Mikhail Gorbachev refused to authorize and invasion of Poland when the Solidarity movement was elected to power in that nation.
The United States also had a policy that drove its foreign affairs from the end of the Second Word War into the 1990s. America had been hostile to communism almost from its inception under Karl Marx, they had even sent troops into Russia in the closing days of the Frist World War to oppose the Russian Revolution. The Polar Bear Division, (AEF North Russia) landed in Archangels in September of 1918 while the AEF Siberia landed in Vladivostok also in 1918, they would stay until 1920. In the face of the Soviet Union in 1946 American diplomat George Kennan proposed the United States adopt a policy of containment toward the Soviets and their Easter European allies in 1946. This became the Truman Doctrine by 1947 which America said it would oppose all communist expansion in the worlds, a policy that would be in force for forty four years. This policy was driven by the Domino Theory, developed from the moves German made in the late thirties, which was described by President Dwight Eisenhower following the French defeat in Vietnam, he said, “Finally, you have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the “falling domino” principle. You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.” The theory would led the United States into Vietnam and other conflicts in a series of jungle wars from the fifties into the seventies. Using the tactic of British General Sir Walter Walker, the Americans sought to own the jungle and beat back the Soviet threat in a series of network wars over the period. Their efforts would prove disastrously unsuccessful in the jungles of Vietnam, just as the Soviet efforts would in Afghanistan.
By the 1970s the hierarchical system that had proved so effective in wagering total war was now proving a failure at handling a consumer society. “As a general principal, once the complexity of demands upon collective human systems… become larger than an individual human being … the hierarchy is not longer able to impose necessary correlation/coordination on individuals. Instead, interactions and mechanisms characteristic of networks in complex systems like the brain are necessary.” (Ibid. 281) The transfer to a network work was manifested in many ways during the 1970s. This came as many realized that prosperity would be greatly increased by international trade. The flexibility of networks were vastly more able to handle the intricacies of this world than any hierarchy was able to manage.
In the depths of the Cold War, many tried to come up with various ways to fight and survive a nuclear war. Science fiction delved into all of these with many tales of how all came to an end and how maybe some could survive, or not. With the hierarchical powers in crisis in the seventies, and the security state looking for technologies to enhance itself, a new technology was born, the internet and electronic networking, the Age of the Internet had dawned. (for a complete and detailed account of the birth of the internet and the computer age see: Margaret O’Mara. The Code :Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. New York: Penguin Books. 2019) In 1964 RAND researcher Paul Baran was given an assignment, come up with a communication system that would survive a Soviet nuclear attack. He had three options, one a centralized system with multiple spokes, a decentralized one with a number of weak ties or a distributed one in a form like a mesh or lattice. He chose number three and developed the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network or ARPANET, the first internet network. The network had been created and later improved not by some grand central planning committee, which was how these systems usually were, but by a combination of a spontaneous and organic fashion by a combination of academics and private companies. By 29 October 1969 the ARPANET was able to send a message from one computer to another from Stanford to the University of California. “The most important development, however, was the stipulation by Vinton (Vint) Cerf and Robert Kahn that the network of networks should have no control center and should not be optimized for any particular application of dorm of data packet.” (Ferguson. 300) The internet was not planned, it grew organically. From it evolved the World Wide Web, which also grew organically from the work of Tim Berners-Lee and his program called ENQUIRE. Berners-Lee developed the universal tools of HyperText Markup Language (HTML) and Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), which soon allowed the user friendly web browser of Mosaic and Netscape Navigator to proliferate.
“Perhaps the most striking feature of the United states in the 1970s was simply that such decentralized innovation was possible, despite all the economic, social and political troubles associated with the period.” (Ibid. 303) The workers of Silicon Valley, as it was named in 1971, had created a technological revolution that would transform the modern world in ways note of the time would have ever imagined. they imagined an utopian Garden of Eden in cyberspace, the great world wide community. What went ignored were the many malicious players who invaded games to commit virtual rape on the avatars, an undercurrent of left and right wing extremists who lurked in the shadows, along with the growing porn industry, and the real-world criminals who used the new technology to commit fraud as soon as money changed hands on the web. Like the Garden of Eden, this paradise had snakes living amongst the forest, as well as the ever increasing power of the federal government. “What had began as the Arpanet could not easily depart from the jurisdiction of its begetter: Uncle Sam himself.” (Ibid. 305)
In the consensus of the people in Washington in the seventies was that the Soviet economy might ultimately prevail over capitalism, with some predicting this occurring by 1989. Yet many who actually visited the Soviet Union had many doubts of this assertion. Shortages, absenteeism, and corruption were so prevalent that not even the mighty computer would be able to save the flawed system. While in the Soviet Union, this was greeted by black humor and fatalism, the situation in Eastern Europe was different. Networks in Eastern Europe were being formed to champion reform and the biggest of these was in Poland. Catholic, nationalist, and working class people joined to form Solidarity, which, since General Wojciech Jaruzelski was no Stalin, who first instituted martial law in 1981, but by 1989, the network returned to force elections and the end of the proxy Soviet rule. Revolutions are a network phenomena, and with the fall of Poland the other nations in Eastern Europe soon followed suit. The dominos that Eisenhower feared would fall toward Washington, instead fell towards Moscow, with the Soviet Union braking up by August of 1991. The process that went on between 1988 and 1991 saw, despite the predictions of Western authorities (who were totally caught by surprise), resulted Boris Yeltsin (1931-2007) becoming Russia’s first elected president after the Soviet fall on 25 December 1991. Much of the old hierarchical Russian government would be reinstated by Vladimir Putin who assumed power in 1999. Only the Chinese in Beijing were able to resist the dissolution of communism in the late eighties and early nineties.
This move was fueled by not only networks of political opposition but by television networks and the Western financial networks operating at the time. The financial networks had been boosted by computer technology and and the heavy borrowing from Western banks by the Eastern block nations. The banks had been exploiting the technology of Silicon Valley and created a rapidly growing network of international finance. The most important hub of this network was not a great capital, but the small ski resort in Switzerland, in the canton of Graubünden, called Davos. Here is where John Perry Barlow issued his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” (February 8, 1996 where he declared, “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.”) He was part of the World Economic Forum, founded in 1971 by Klaus Schwab, as an attempt to give an annual meeting of international business leaders, in his vison of a great corporation of stakeholders in a global society working together with government and the civil society. A network so powerful that Nelson Mandela credited it with be a major player in the ending Apartheid in /South Africa. He also credited it with his decision to not nationalize and socialize the industries of South Africa.
In the present, conspiracy theories say that the capitalist multinationals networked together to overthrow the liberation movements of the Third World. Davos figured heavily in those new tales, it was the making of money that turned many towards globalism. But others had new conspiracy theories as well, and one name figures in the many right wing theories of the new world order, George Soros. Soros was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1930 and survived the German occupation of the nation in World War II. In 1947 he attend the London School of Economics and later received a PhD from the University of London in economics. He developed his theory of Reflexivity of Economics inspired by his mentor and tutor, Karl Popper in 1957. Economics had operated under the general equilibrium theory that states markets tend to move toward an equilibrium and are not affected by prices. Soros proposed his Reflexivity theory that asserted that prices do in fact influence the fundamentals and that these newly influenced set of fundamentals then proceed to change expectations, thus influencing prices; the process continues in a self-reinforcing pattern. This causes the market to go into a period of disequilibrium, and the downward spiral of prices become self fulfilling prophecy that drags the market down, explaining the boom and bust cycles. Soros explained his theory in his 1987 book, The Alchemy of Finance. He created his hedge fund, Double Eagle in 1969 and came to prominence as the man who broke the Bank of England when he sold ten billion pounds sterling during the 1992 Black Wednesday UK currency crisis earning himself a one billion dollar profit. With his money he founded the Open Society Foundations which financially support civil society groups around the world, with a stated aim of advancing justice, education, public health and independent media. He is a progressive and uses this foundation to further his progressive ideas. The group’s name is inspired by Karl Popper’s 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies.
Soros achieved this against the background of the growing global financial markets which were expanding thanks to computers and deregulation. This expanding network threated any political enterprise that was predicated on hierarchical control. It fed into the growing pan Europe unity movement which like the idea of a universal working class fraternity had its roots in the nineteenth century. The European Economic Community had been created with the Treaty of Rome in 1957, in effort to lessen trade barriers and the first move to an international financial market. When the British joined the EEC the German banker Sigmund Warburg began pushing the idea of a single European monetary system. British opposition, led by Margarete Thatcher, was based on many who feared such a union would place them under German control, which they believed they had fought off in the recent war. This opposition end with John Major’s ascendancy to the Prime Ministership in late 1990. After a long battle, the European Union won, but many in Britain, still smarting over their believing they had loss of status blamed on man for this, George Soros. Soros was a member of a very powerful network, one that is a collection of hedge funds seeking to make money in similar ways. The loss by the UK Treasury was one to the financial network and the new financial realities that exited at the time. The Conservatives never recovered and the following election brought Tony Blair and his Labor Party, who abandoned their old adherence to a common ownership of production as a policy goal to win the election. ( One might say, paraphrasing Henry IV of France, London was worth some capitalism) The European Union showed their adherence to hierarchical structures by adopting a single currency in what was a age of exponential network growth. By 1999 the new jungle grew vaster and larger and less tolerant of antiquated pyramid builders. George Soros soon became the dark force, the modern Illuminati, behind many right wing conspiracy theories as the new century dawned.
“The defining event of this century’s first years was an attack on the financial and transport networks of the United States by an Islamist gang that is best understood as an anti-social network.” (Ibid. 333) Led by Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda group, they struck at the United States whom they considered the Great Satan of the World. Bi Laden was an adherent of Athari, a fundelemtalist Islamic group that first appeared in the eighth century and called for literal reading of the Koran and strict devotion to the Shirai Law of the Koran. These networks were the perfect target for the Islamic networks to attack, they represented the globalization and Western influences they movement most despised. To the Islamic networks these represented the American imperialism that they believed was a threat to their tur religion. They looked back in nostalgia to the caliphates and dynasties of the tenth to twelfth centuries, who at time ruled the Near East, north Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. They saw the Fatimid Caliphate (10th to 12th century) who declared there descent from Fatimah, the daughter of the Prophet Mohamad, the Ayyub dynasty of Saladin , and the Almohad Caliphate, the North African Berber empire that began in 1120 and followed a strict fundelemtalist approach to Islam as their models. They also claimed an adherence to the old Ottoman Empire and spoke of to return to the glory days of Muslim rule. They ignored much of reality ands clung to the myths of the empires, for example the Berbers ended the practice of dhimmi, which saw non-Muslims as a protected people and allowed to have many rights in Islamic lands. The persecutions of the Christians in Iberia led to many fleeing to the northern parts and also the foundations for the Spanish Reconquista.
The network behind 9/11 was a lose anti-social network whose member trained in Afghanistan but had little to do with each other once in America. To Americans, who reacted much as hierarchies do when hit by a network, this meant that intelligence was the most important thing in this new war. After victories in Afghanistan it was thought that the weakness of the anti-social network could be exploited and taken care of much like many criminal gangs had been earlier. What the forgot was that unlike the gangs, the terrorist were united by a common ideology that allowed the network to survive many blows. The United States ventured into Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussain, becoming involved in another Vietnam type conflict. To extract themselves from this, John Nagi, General David Petraeus and Greenall James Mattis developed the Army’s Counterinsurgency Field Manuel (FM-3-24) to counter the networks to counter the networks and allow the army to become flexible enough to respond to the new threats.
Bin Laden had hoped the attacks of 9/11 would have caused a chain reaction that would have crippled the financial systems in the West, it failed to do that. The financial system seemed more resilient that either the electrical grids or computer systems of the time, but that was an illusion. On 15 September 2008 Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and unleashed a crisis the almost matched the Wall street stock market crash of 1929. The Internet and globalization had created a dense hub in Lehman Brothers and it was critical to the entire financial global network. Macroeconomics had omitted network structures and nobody saw that the connections were so strong that a distress in one hub would lead to a cascading downward spiral in all the others. The actions of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, kept the system from total failure and a repeat of the the 1929 crash. It was the triumph of the hierarchy of government monetary policy, as the international network could not have survived on its own. The hierarchal state the was the winner was the administrative state whose origins were in the early seventies with the birth of new regulatory agencies created by Congress.
When the US Code of Federal Regulations was fist printed in 1936 it contained 2,620 pages, the last printing, 2019 contains 72,564 pages, most coming after 1950. The Magna Carta contains fewer than 4,000 words, the US Constitution contains 4,543 words and the Declaration of Independence has 1,458 words. The Bible contains 807,361 words, the Federal Registry contains over 11 million words. This decent into a hypertrophic bureaucratic state may be the price paid for the failures of the past and the inattention to detail. “However, a better explanation may be the fundamental deterioration of standards in both legislation and government that we see in nearly every democracy, regardless of their different twentieth century histories.” (Ibid. 348) Professional politicians are more concerned with spin than substance, the media screams for something, anything, be done after any calamity, and lobbyist ensure that the small print protects whomever they are paid by. “Complexity is not cheap, on the contrary, it is very expensive indeed. (Ibid. 349) The administrative state is the last or latest, iteration of political hierarchy, a system that creates rules and complexity that undermine stability and prosperity.
While the administrative state was on the rise, the intent and the networks of the internet were also undergoing a great transformation, called Web 2.0. The utopian dream of an open and free web would die under the weight of commercialization and very little regulation. In previous technological revolutions after a period of anarchy, commercialization occurred soon to be followed by regulation. In the internet revolution, commercialization occurred, but it came with very little regulation. Fighting off any regulation the giants of Apple and Microsoft created a duopoly in the entire computer industry. Along side of these giants soon came others, Amazon, originally a book seller in Seattle, eBay, first called Auction web in San Jose, and lastly Google, named for the number googol (1 x 10100 ) which came from the attempt to organized information of the web and set up in a garage in Menlo Park. (for a complete description of this see: Margaret O’Mara. The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. New York: Penguin Books. 2019) They found their gold mines in both products (Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple0 and advertising (Google). “The discrepancy between ideal and reality was even more marked in the case of the most successful social networking company to emerge from the third wave of innovation in the mid 2000s.” (Ferguson. 353)
In 2004 a Harvard student proclaimed his new undertaking was not to be a company or to make money, but a community that would share information and create a world community. The student had endured a scandal from an 3002 experience where he created a site called Facesmash where one could compare two individuals and vote on who was the hottest. Using the Harvard brand and seeing the potential of tagging people and news feeds and other such things, Mark Zuckerberg broke all the rules and created Facebook. Zuckerberg’s idea was to create a platform to make the world more open and connected. He did this by leveraging his Harvard ties and the people he met through that network as well as opening his app to noncollege people and those in foreign nations. He also realized the potential of tags and alerts as well as the New Feed and the potential for revenue from advertising that came with his new invention. The revenue from advertising was key for Zuckerberg and the people behind Twitter, Instagram, Google and other social network’s fortunes that far outstrip anything ever done in history. American consumer culture was born in the Industrial Revolution as mass production need mass consumption to survive. The need to sell their goods laid the foundation of the advertising industry that sold and convinced Americans of the need of mass consumption, and the advertisers paid vast sums of money for polls, surveys and other bit of knowledge that could tell them what people would buy. In the past such things cost those who produced them money for the people and analysis of such information, and the information was very valuable. (For a complete discussion of this see: Timothy D. Taylor. The Sounds of CAPITALISM: Advertising, Music, and the Conquest of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2012) Zuckerberg, through his Facebook clicks, had access to such information on a grander scale than anyone ever had in the past and it could be gathered and analyzed at almost no cost. This was true of all the new internet companies coming out of Silicon Valley in this time period. Combine this with the Apple iPhone and its explosion of usage, made Zuckerberg and his fellow tech titans into billionaires, and may one day make them trillionaires.
Zuckerberg and Facebook did not create social networks, they had been part of the sapien experience most likely predating the rise of the homo sapien. Social groups are a hallmark of all the great apes, and humans were not exception. What Zuckerberg did was create a platform that gave one access to the entire planet, and thus the greatest social network was now available for free to any person at any time in history, or prehistory. The techs of Silicon Valley and the Artificial Intelligence Revolution saw this as the way to bring the whole world into one great community, the utopian dream of the brother and sister hood of all sapiens was their dream. They had forged ahead with the idea that they were not IBM or AT&T, but new type of company, the one that would unite the world, like the old Pepsi commercial. For a while it looked as if they would achieve such as it seemed that integration of many had crossed over national boundaries and fueling a world community. Critics pointed out that now advertisers and other s could learn so much more about the habits and lives of families, friends and individuals. Others spoke about how communities seemed to be formed that excluded those who were not of like mind, and the network was looking like a feudal land of many tiny little communities and not one great one. The companies themselves, who began in the rejection of IBM and AT&T, soon became them, either great software duopolies (Microsoft and Apple) or social network monopiles, (Facebook and Twitter) while they celebrated the new connectiveness of the world, the founders became a new class of super wealthy elites. Instead of the old library and social clubs of the past that survived on taxes and donation, these new ones were much more enormous and grand moneymaking schemes for the few who control them. Jeff Bezos’ new grand bazar, is larger than any of the old marketplaces that had existed for all time.
In 2008 he proclaimed that Facebook was like a government, setting polices to its community. In 2017 he said his company’s role was to promote a meaningful community that filtered out “hate speech” and promoted safety and fostered civic engagement on a global level. That is the what they saw as the ideal theory, but the practice at times had lead people in a much different direction. In reality while expectations in the developing world were rising, they were falling in the developing world. This came from the falling inequality in the world, but with rising inequality in many important countries, namely the United States. The rapid growth of the global super network combined with technological change and global integration had caused a flatting of the world, but in America it caused society, in Charles Murry’s words, to come apart. By 2015 the 1% of society had more wealth then the entire bottom half combined. Since the turn of the century the top half have received close to 50% of all wealth, while the rest only received 1%. “Here is the ultimate hierarchy in the world today: a hierarchy of wealth and income shoed like a building with a very broad base and an enormously tall and thin steeple.” (Ibid. 360) In China and other developing nations the middle class ahs expanded thanks to the technological advances and global trade markets. This causes the expectations in these nations to rise, as they have seen a significant improvement in this lives in the last thirty years. Yet in many developing nations, such as the United States, the reverse has been true with stagnate wages and a lesser chance of economic improvement, causing a drop in expectations. This drop in expectations has resulted in America undergoing a political and social polarization and led to the upheavals beginning in 2016.
Facebook had created a world community that gossiped about much, in March of 2006, Twitter joined the network and the world of social media exploded with some believed the revolution, like the Arab Spring, might just be tweeted. While in Europe and the United States, the recession of 2008 eroded the legitimacy of the government, in the Middle East a new revolution exploded in December 2010. Pushed along by the new social technology, the misnamed Arab Spring saw revolutionary movements, much like had occurred in 1917, spread across the Arab world. From Tunisia, the protests then spread to five other countries: Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain, where either the ruler was deposed (Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Muammar Gaddafi, Hosni Mubarak, and Ali Abdullah Saleh) or major uprisings and social violence occurred including riots, civil wars, or insurgencies. Sustained street demonstrations took place in Morocco, Iraq, Algeria, Iranian Khuzestan, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, and Sudan. Minor protests took place in Djibouti, Mauritania, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara. A major slogan of the demonstrators in the Arab world is ash-shaʻb yurīd isqāṭ an-niẓām! (“the people want to bring down the regime”) Following a playbook set out by Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen in the journal Foreign Affairs, ( Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen. “The Digital Disruption.” Foreign Affairs. November/December 2010) argued that the connectiveness of the world’s people would overwhelm the state, the “interconnected estate,” as they called it would free themselves from the oppressions of totaliertian regimes. They called for the writing of a bill of human rights for the internet world. This thesis seemed to paly out in rebellions in many areas of the world from Moldova, the Philippines, Spain, and even the Xinjian province of China. Spanish philosopher, Manuel Castells, (The Rise of the Network Society. 1996) celebrated the new revolutionary power of the new network society, which is too large for the state to simply round up the usual suspects. Yet the internet, born from the security state, could and would in the end assert authority over the revolutionary networks, by using networks of their own.
These efforts were exposed, much has Daniel Ellsberg exposed the Vietnam War in the Pentagon Papers, by leaks and whistleblowers. Wikileaks, under Julian Assange and later leaks by Edward Snowden exposed the cooperation between Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft with the national security apparatus. These even occurred under the Presidency of Barak Obama, placing the executives of the social media and technology companies in a very precarious position. Divorce themselves from the government, as Apple CEO Tim Cook did in refusing to unlock Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik’s iPhone, or get closer and still proclaiming that they had a commitment to free expression and protecting privacy, as Google did. Yet it was soon made apparent that networks are much better at adapting than hierarchies. This is seen after the killing of Osama Bin Laden in May of 2011 ands the rise of ISIS in the Middle East.
ISIS was different from Al-Qaeda in four ways, first it was based on the claim of its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi that he re-established the Caliphate on 29 June 2014 and echoed the Ottoman call for jihad in the early phases of the First World War. The ultimate goal of the group was the apocalypse, fulfilling the prophesy of an Islamist Armageddon at Debiq. (a reference to a quote from the Prophet Mohammod in the hadith that the end times will come after a great battle between the army of Rome and Islam, a malahim, at Dabiq or al-Amaq when the Islamic forces vanquish the Romans) ISIS also practiced a ferocious literalism and was dedicated to returning the world to the seventh century legalism and bring on the apocalypse. It was an open source network system that promulgated its ideology through thousands of Twitter accounts as well as Facebook and YouTube. Finally it aspired to create an authentic, territorial state with in the boundaries of the Sykes-Picot agreement. Missteps by many allowed the group to expand its territory and allowed many more terrorist networks to be able to operate in the world. ISIS itself was defeated by coalition forces in March of 2019.
In the developed world many spend almost the their entire time online, with smartphones in Great Britain increasing form 52% to 81% of the adult population. In America by 2009 the average person had mobile phone contact in 195 days of the year, with emails on 72 days, instant messaging 55 days and 39 days on social networking websites. In 2012 Americans checked their phones 150 times a day and by 2016 were spending five hours a day on their phones. “No theory of the popular revolt that swept Europe and the United States in the years after 2008 is complete if it fails to include this astonishing transformation of the public sphere, which may be legitimately described as an all-out invasion of the private sphere.” (Ferguson. 381) Elias Canetti, (1905-1984) winner of the 1981 Noble Prize for Literature and a German language author born in Ruse Bulgaria and raised in Britain, wrote the book, Crowds and Power 1960 examining the reactions of peoples psychology in crowds, their need to belong and the urge in some to seize and consolidate power. Canetti argues that humans fear the touch of the unknown, need to see what is reaching out fort hem and be able to recognize and classify to avoid what is strange. Only in the crowd do humans lese this fear of touch, and the crowd creates the opposite in the denseness of the group that causes the person to lose his or her fear of touch. In the crowd all are equal with no distinctions made between any of the crowd, it is as if everything that is happening is happening to all the members of the group at the same time. (Elias Canetti. Crowds and Power. Translated by Carol Stewart. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 1960. 15-16) “This reversal of the fear of being touched belongs to the nature of the crowd. The feeling of relief is most striking where the density of the crowd is the greatest.” (Ibid.16) He divided crowds into two groups, open, which are spontaneous and gather to perform act, which is usually destructive and dissolve after aim is achieved. The other is closed, which is permanent and limited with boundaries that identify those within the crowd and those not in the crowd. They sacrifice spontaneity and organic growth for longevity and tends to evolve into institutions. He goes on to assert that crowds have a common goal or direction and have a sense of persecution, fighting a force seeking their destruction. If it seen as an outside force it reinforces the crowds sense of direction as it unites against the “other.” It more dangerous if it is seen as forces within, threating the crowds unity. This is the birthing arena of many conspiracy theories as members are accused of being spies or in the group in name only. Crowds, according to Canetti have a need to grow, insure equality of all in the crowd, loves density and need s direction. Renee DiResta, the technical research manger at the Stanford Internet Observatory, says of the crowd:
Homogeneity is key; within the crowd, everyone is equal. There is a sense of camaraderie; the distance between haves and have-nots is temporarily eliminated. To maintain the warm, positive feelings of fellowship and belonging, the crowd must continue to exist. If the crowd dissipates, the sense of distance between individuals returns and the fear of being touched returns. So, in order to stave off a return to the uncomfortable, socially stratified, drifting world of “real life”, the crowd is remarkably willing to accept any direction, any common goal, any common enemy, in order to keep growing.
(Renee DiResta. Crowds and Technology. September 15,2016. Ribbonfarm: Constructions in Magical Thinking)
Eric Hoffer. (1902-1983) book, The True Believer, authored in 1951 takes a look at the personalities and psychologies of the people within the crowd, or mass movements. He begins his book with the following’ “It is a truism that many who join a rising revolutionary movement are attracted by the prospect of sudden and spectacular change in the condition of life. A revolutionary movement is a conspicuous instrument of change.” (Eric Hoffer. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements. New York: Harper Brothers. 1951. 3) It was a book cited by both President Dwight Eisenhower and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. According to Hoffer all mass movements produce in adherents a willingness to die for the cause, proclivity to united action, breed fanaticism and enthusiasm, give rise to fervent hope, hatred and intolerance with adherents having blind faith in the movement and a single hearted allegiance to the cause or individual leading the movement. DiResta goes on:
The people who participate in mass movements share certain characteristics as individuals (micro), which are magnified and become hallmarks of the crowds they form (macro): paranoia, discontent, and a deep-seated, burning desire for change. Doctrinal soundness is paramount; mass movements indoctrinate, using coercion, persuasion, and propaganda. Facts cease to matter; the movement is the primary source of hope for the future, and any point that threatens that hope is ignored or actively rejected by its adherents.
Neither Crowds and Power, nor The True Believer identify new phenomena; they simply unpack ancient, ingrained behavior and presented its application across time and cultures. Taken together, the two books suggest that all crowds emerge as a combination of a fear of he unknown, and a need to believe. Together they make crowds a source of power to those who seek it.
Today’s crowds exhibit all the qualities described by Canetti, and the mindsets and circumstances described by Hoffer. They continue to function, as they always have, as forms of weaponized sacredness catalyzed by egregores .
What technology has done is transform them into even more complex and capable entities, increasing the speed with which they form, their ability to make an impact, extending their reach, and making them even better instruments for wielding power.
(DiResta)
She goes on to explain that new technology has transformed the old crowds and movements in the following manner:
To translate Canetti’s main observations to digital environments:
The crowd always wants to grow — and always can, unfettered by physical limitations
Within the crowd there is equality — but higher levels of deception, suspicion, and manipulation
The crowd loves density — and digital identities can be more closely packed
The crowd needs a direction — and clickbait makes directions cheap to manufacture
Translating Eric Hoffer’s ideas to digital environments is even simpler: the Internet is practically designed to enable the formation of self-serving patterns of “true belief.”
(Ibid)
Ferguson comments on this development:
Those who had pinned their hopes on the “wisdom” of crowds, fondly imaging a benign “crowd source” politics, were in for a rude awakening. “In the presence of social influence,” as two scholars of networks have observed, “people actions become dependent on one another, shattering the fundamental assumption behind the wisdom of crowds. When crowds follow their interdependence, they can be leverage to spread information to the masses, even it’s incorrect.”
(Ferguson. 381)
In 2016, the tech networks were solidly in the corner of Hilary Clinton. Sine the 1990s and her husband’s administration the tech industry had been solidly behind the Democrats, with Al Gore leading the way with his involvement in keeping the government reach into tech companies at a minimum. Not only did they offer campaign cash, but policy advice as well. In Congress the captains of the industry were treated with a “gee whiz” type approach from members who often gazed on them with amazement at their accomplishments. The Obama administration prided itself in being the first to have a Facebook page and a Twitter account, and many credited his election to his mastering the social network world. It was trumpeted as the same kind of moment as when Franklin Roosevelt mastered radio in the thirties or John Kennedy did TV in the sixties. The social network was their network, they were the kings, it was the pathway to the new utopian world, one of world connectiveness and progressiveness. the on 9 November 2016, Donald Trump, using the social networks against Clinton, got elected. “And so very swiftly, sentiment swelled that he chief culprit in this electoral surprise were the big American tech platforms themselves.” (O’Mara. 403) In the aftermath, “Those who had been present at the creation of the extraordinary creative explosion of the online era looked on in dismay at what all this freedom had wrought. ‘We were astoundingly naïve,: Mitch Kapor remarked regretfully as he looked out at the upended political landscape, ‘We couldn’t imagine what was now obvious: if people have bad motives and bad intensions they will use the internet to amplify them.” (Ibid. 404)
Trump’s election was not the only victory that unsettled the hierarchy of the period, Brexit was the other. “Brexit, in short was a victory for a network – and network science – over the hierarchy of the British establishment.” (Ferguson. 382) In America this unstructured network took down the Bush and Clinton dynasties that had dominated American politics since 1990. In 2016 Trump’s scale-free network, with its self-organization and viral marketing, had taken down the hierarchical network of the Clinton campaign. The creators ignored that right winged extremists, along with other fanatical groups, had been lurking on the web since its beginning. There in the dark shadows laid the other side of the network, the one that project the ideology of many far right and left groups along with religious extremists, and of course pornography, had been there all along, people just didn’t talk about them. While many can debate all the different things that went into the 2016 election, one this is clear, without the social network of the internet, Donald Trump would never have been President.
One wonders how can an urbanized, technologically advanced society avoid a disaster that could plunge it into a society of profound inequity and oppression. What win in the end, the hierarchy or the network? The nation state of modern times evolved out of the republics and monarchies of early modern Europe, what do these evolve into, or maybe unevolved. The hierarchical Roman Empire was succeeded by Feudal Europe, what might succeed the powers of America and China in our future? The printing press disrupted the early modern work and eventually lead to upheavals like the Thirty Years War and the French Revolution. With a century of restored hierarchy in the nineteenth century gave way to the First World War and the bloodshed and revolutions of the twentieth. Networks tend to produce anarchy and that produced violence, so maybe one needs a hierarchical world with legitimacy to achieve some peace, as Europe did after the Congress of Vienna. The tension between hierarchical orders and networks is as old as the human sapiens, and will outlast even out generation. The questions asked today would not surprise even the forgers on the Serengeti, it is a mistake to think the internet has changed humans that much. They struggled with who should led, a council of elders or one strong individual, we still do. Who knows what the future could bring, the four essays (How We Got Here , Parts I-IV) show how we got her, but where are we going? An old radio show asked who knew the evil lurking in the minds of men, the shadow knows, maybe he knows the future as well. Maybe in some distant, or near day, everything will fall apart, or unite. That is the question.
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