A Map Of Mankind (Part 2)
In any process of interaction, there must — by definition — be a common basis for that interaction. How, exactly, do we as individuals interact with each other?
This is an absurdly simple answer: We communicate. Every single peaceful interaction — from the prosaic to the profound — requires communication to happen. In fact, the only interaction possible without communication of some sort is brute violence, the thing that society exists to avoid.
Communication, eternal non-interaction, or violence — those are the three choices.
Society is communication when all mystical notions are stripped away. Lines of communication.
Think on your daily life. Imagine yourself unable to communicate. No conversation, no information gathered or passed along, no trading or sharing of anything.
Daily life becomes literally impossible in such a nightmarish hypothetical.
Eons ago, for some unknown, wonderful reason, two groups of primitive folk met and decided not to fight. Instead, they attempted to figure each other out. They sat down and communicated. How they did this is unknown and probably unknowable. It also doesn’t matter — body language, grunting and pointing, symbols drawn in the dirt. All of those or none. No matter. What matters is that it worked. The two groups not only refrained from conflict, they probably traded. That first message was no doubt something of this nature:
"We need meat. We got lots of berries. You come from rocky place. No bushes there. You give meat, we give berries."
In that transformative, world changing unrecorded moment, civilization was born. The market came to pass. The division of labor reared its head. No longer did all needs and wants have to be provided via direct individual labor. No longer did a shortage in one area mean the hard cold fact of doing without. No longer did desire and need mean the dangerous and tragic necessity of violence.
The map of mankind that is society began to be sketched. Lightly and crudely at first, with a tentative hand. The cartographers of the proto-map had no idea if this map would prove trustworthy in the future. The trade partner of today might be the raider of tomorrow. That they tried nevertheless is something we modern humans owe them thanks for. It was an insightful and prescient risk that makes modern venture capitalists look like scared kids with Topps cards in the schoolyard. To those first map makers, taking a chance on this society racket was risking literally everything: the safety and security of their tribe. To them, those small family clusters were the entire world.
The risk paid off, though — paid off so spectacularly that it’s no exaggeration to say that all of modern civilization is just a dividend. For the first cartographers, the main payoff was the effect that communication had on their small insular little worlds. They found those worlds expanding and growing in complexity. With communication came a host of new relationships, new ways of existing with others who had — up until then — been scary strangers. No longer was it a choice between avoiding and fighting. Now there was the possibility of peaceful interaction and — even better — possible gain.
I’m simplifying this to make a point, of course. There was probably no single moment where two groups sat down and initiated society. The more realistic idea is that such things happened repeatedly, again and again, until suddenly some critical mass was reached and humanity found itself with a surprisingly large amount of chattering neighbors.
Things really got interesting when spoken language began to be codified and used over wide areas. Though mutable, spoken language holds its shape far better than body language and symbolic gesturing. Written language came along much later, and decreased the mutation even more.
The big problem — and it’s a problem that exists to this day — was that language was a geographic/territorial phenomenon. Beyond a certain area the map changed, became written in unknown symbols. This fact slowed the progress of a Greater Society considerably. The logical and near universal ordering of society — family, community, tribe, etc. — broke down along geographical boundaries because of this. Instead of an accepted and universal map, the human race was stuck with a collection of regional maps. Only the happy fact that a great many people enjoyed learning and using those other languages made this merely a setback rather than a disaster.
When talk turns to the most influential of human inventions, only rarely is language — written or spoken — mentioned along with such things as fire, the wheel, agriculture, etc. I personally think this is because language — though no less an invented tool than the aforementioned — is such a basic function that it seems a biological effect. Speech is indeed a biological effect, but language itself (and it’s beautiful daughter writing) is a technological artifact through and through.
Using those first proto-maps the human race took the idea of society and ran with it. Society increased quickly and well, the complexity of the communication tools increasing along with the numbers of human minds manipulating them.
The map expanded, became lush with detail. Technology sang and shifted paradigms: radio and cinema and television and telephones. Geographies shrank as the map found new symbols to denote electron warped time space.
And then, one day, the kids found the map and decided to hack it.
NEXT: You Are Here (I)
