1 Soul Bound
1.2 Taking Control
1.2.5 An Idiosyncratic Interlude
1.2.5.7 Sharpe Lecture: revolution (part two)
She left Bahrudin and David discussing a Rabbinic chaplain Bahrudin had known when serving under Lieutenant General Leakey, and thought back to the remainder of the lecture she’d been thinking about earlier.
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After Dr. Sharpe concluded his asides about persuasion and communication, he’d brought the lecture on Moses Coady back to his theme of revolution.
Sharpe: “Somewhat more complex than purely scientific revolutions are the revolutions in how we work and gain our daily food; they mix technological change with social and economic change. Again, most changes happen gradually; but on a few occasions in history, a change is so profound that the transition period it brings can overthrow whole nations.”
He brought up a slide with a colour key:
BLUE : Nomadic
Tribes of loosely related generalists follow the herds as the seasons turn, hunting and gathering what they need to eat or to construct tools and temporary shelter.
SOURCE OF POLITICAL POWER: none
GREEN : Agricultural
Farmers bound to the land and claiming ownership of it work to improve it over the years, planning ahead and bartering for tools made by specialised metalsmiths.
SOURCE OF POLITICAL POWER: military
YELLOW : Industrial
Mass educated workers arrive at synchronised times at standardised factories in order to mass produce goods that are bulk transported to centralised supermarkets where consumers dressed in off-the-rack clothes are influenced by the mass media to spend money which they must then earn back by yet more work.
SOURCE OF POLITICAL POWER: military, financial
RED : Informational
Decentralised knowledge-workers compete globally to tailor services and transient disposable products for individuals and small fragmented niche markets.
SOURCE OF POLITICAL POWER: military, financial, big data
Sharpe: “I said these changes happen on rare occasions, but that’s misleading. When you look closer at the process of how each replaced the previous one, it doesn’t happen simultaneously across the world. Instead what you see is the change starting at a single point, then spreading out like the wave caused by a stone dropped in the middle of a still pond.”
Sharpe: “That’s an approximation, of course. A mental model. A slightly more accurate way to think about it is biologically, like a bacterial infection spreading. If it were a uniform and motionless petri dish, you’d get the classic spreading wave, but if some areas are more receptive to the change, or are strongly connected to an existing remote infected area (such as when the industrial revolution spread from Britain to America), we see a more complex pattern.”
The screen behind Dr. Sharpe changed to show a picture of the earth, with the hemispheres unrolled and Iraq in the centre. The oceans were black, and land was initially blue. Some land and sea trade routes between cities were marked in faintly, using dotted white lines. At the bottom was a timeline, starting at the beginning of the Holocene epoch in 9500 BCE and continuing to 2030 CE. He set it going, at a rate of 1000 years every 5 seconds.
During the next minute, green appeared in Iraq in 9000 BCE then spread, displacing the blue, springing around the Mediterranean and down into Africa through Egypt. In about 2500 BCE she noticed it spreading to India then on to China, and independently it started spreading through the Americas from about 1500 BCE onwards.
By 1750 CE much of the world was green, with the blue areas being mainly in plains, deserts, tundras, archipelagos and tropical forests. A bit of yellow appeared in Britain and spread with the rapidity of fire across a square of magician’s flash paper. A second later the timeline reached 1950 CE and the green had been displaced across the ‘developed’ world. The blue had shrunk to a few places in Mongolia, the Kalahari, Lapland, the Amazon and the Arctic.
Then *BANG*.
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With a sound like an explosion from the speaker system, large parts of the map turned red, so fast it was impossible to follow the pattern of spread. Students rocked back in their seats, slightly stunned.
Sharpe: “Future Shock!”
Sharpe: “The waves of change I just showed you were first investigated by Heidi and Alvin Toffler. They came up with the term ‘future shock’ to describe the state of individuals and societies that find themselves unable to adapt: overloaded by information, disconnected from the safety of their previous certainties and stressed by fear of further changes.”
Sharpe: “Just as scientific revolutions met resistance, so too did economic ones. Just as scientific revolutions caused disruption, so too did economic ones. Institutions from corporate and government bureaucracies, right down to the structure and extent of the family unit, all needed to adapt, and some institutions are slower to adapt than others. When an institution is still in the process of adapting to one wave when they get hit by another, that’s when you get future shock. Not only are the changes too big; they are also too close together.”
He walked over to his podium to sip his water, giving the students a moment to recover and then continued.
Sharpe: “With that in mind, let’s talk about Moses Coady.”
Sharpe: “Coady was a teacher and a priest who lived in Cape Breton, a remote area on Canada’s Atlantic coast. It wasn’t adapting well to the wave of industrialisation - many were struck with a numbing pessimism as the young folk migrated from village fishing to working in the better paid steel mills and service jobs in the big cities.”
Sharpe: “Coady was a fiery compelling speaker and he thought big. He preached that the fishermen remained poor because they were being exploited by moneylenders, middlemen and a political system based upon patronage; he had a vision of them becoming the masters of their own destiny, educated enough to spot the dangers of poor deals and unified enough to avoid being played off against each other.”
Sharpe: “In 1928 he got his chance. The Canadian Department of Fisheries appointed Coady as the first director of a newly formed ‘Extension Department’, with a remit to help organise the fishermen and carry adult education to the people of the Maritime provinces. He couldn’t have wished for a better platform.”
Sharpe: “And it went well. Despite the onset of the Great Depression, the Antigonish Movement set up study clubs to enable individual workers to help and educate each other, and ran courses at local universities to teach leaders of co-operatives the skills they’d need to compete against other businesses and not get taken advantage of. Co-operative stores and fish packing factories sprang up across the Maritime provinces and the movement practically re-invented the idea of the credit union.”
Sharpe: “Yet it fizzled.” Nadine could hear the sadness in his voice.
Sharpe: “It had a big impact in the Maritime provinces of Canada, but only one aspect of Coady’s vision propagated beyond the reach of his own voice, beyond those who’d directly listened to him at mass meetings and been inspired by him: the economic aspect. In later years the influence of the Antigonish Movement could be seen in the Village Banking movement, with its focus upon localised peer-to-peer microfinance and reinvestment relying upon guarantees from other villagers rather than individual collateral, which generates peer pressure for the borrower to not get shunned, and for the lenders to mentor and train the borrower.”
Sharpe: “The deeper vision that Coady had, of gnarled fishermen carrying on their self-improving education and thus climbing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to end up singing grand opera and quoting Shakespeare to each other as they fished, and gaining parity with the wealthy industrialists of his time - that didn’t spread.”
Sharpe: “Why not? The idea of lifelong learning isn’t a bad one. Fifty years later it did take off: in Sweden, and from a source unconnected to and uninfluenced by the Antigonish.”
He gave the audience a long moment, forcing them to actually think for themselves about the puzzle, before continuing.
Sharpe: “The clue is in what the Tofflers discovered about how revolutions spread. If the technological and cultural preconditions are not in place, it slows the spread down. If the speed is too slow, if there are too many obstacles to the new idea being accepted that all need to be toppled at the same time, then it fizzles out like a fire that uses up fuel faster than it acquires unburned fuel by spreading.”
Sharpe: “You see a lot of these false starts over the course of history, in everything from new technologies to the creation of civil liberties. As Robert Heinlein put it: ‘ When railroading time comes, you can railroad - but not before.’ “
Sharpe: “The corollary is obvious. Once the pre-conditions for railroading have been met, it becomes inevitable that some person or people will invent the railroad. The lesson for you is that, if you want to take effective political actions to bring about a particular change, make sure the preconditions for people being receptive to that change have been all set up. Then all you need to do is light the touch paper, and stand well back.”
He finished the lecture by playing again the final second of his simulation. But this time he played it much slower, and added in extra waves in lighter shades of the colour showing the pre-conditions spreading out in advance of the revolutionary change. Behind the revolutionary wave front came a muddy colour indicating transition, followed by a deep pure green, blue or red, indicating that an area had finished dealing with the problems of transition and had now stabilised upon the next form of society.
The accompanying music was Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin'“ and the visuals stopped being shocking.
Instead, they were beautiful, a promise of better days.
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Had warfare now progressed from the age of industry to the age of information, with tailored killing solutions and transient disposable soldiers bidding globally on ‘jobs’? What a horrible thought. Better when you had people with a conscience in the loop who would be forced to look close up at the results if they pulled the trigger, with no handy ‘mute’ button to blot out inconvenient screams. If nothing else, it gave an advantage to the side with the just cause, because their soldiers would be more likely to fight wholeheartedly. Or perhaps not. She remembered what Bungo had said about the manipulation of people’s beliefs.