Prometheus Rising (12 page)

primate habit
(defending head-space)? Will these theories still be

believed in 2011? In 2593?

6. Get into a discussion of philosophy with an educated

Marxist, an intelligent Moslem and a Japanese businessman at

the first opportunity.

7. Buy some ZOOM or LIFT (two names for the same caffeine-

high stimulant) at a Health Food Store. (This gives a close

approximation of the effects of illegal cocaine.) When you are

Zooming or Lifted and your mind is racing, find a victim and explain

the universe to him or her, until they are able to escape you.

What you experience in this "speed rap" is what the head of

the compulsive Rationalist is
always
like. This is the verbal

circuit gone wild and totally oblivious to information coming in

on any other circuit. It explains why most people cannot stand

Rationalists. "Speed" drugs evidently trigger neuro-transmitters

characteristic of the verbal centers of the left cortex.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE TIME-BINDING

DIALECTIC:

ACCELERATION &

DECELERATION

In the dialectic between nature and the socially constructed world,

the human organism is transformed. In this dialectic man produces

reality and thereby produces himself.

— Berger and Luckman,
The Social Construction of Reality

105

The first and second circuits are Evolutionary Stable Strategies.

They have worked, in more or less the same form, not just for

primates but for other mammals, and for many other species,

over vast aeons of time.

The third, semantic circuit is an Evolutionary Unstable Strategy.

It could very accurately be called
revolutionary
rather than

evolutionary.

The first two-circuits are based on
negative feedback,
in the

biological sense. They maintain
hotneostasis —
that is, they

return, over and over, to the same ecological-ethological balances.

The function of negative feedback is to return to such a

steady state.

The time-binding semantic circuit is not based on such

steady-state positive feedback. It is a mechanism of what cyberneticists

and biologists called
positive feedback.
It does not

return to a steady state, but constantly seeks a new equilibrium at

a higher energy level. (Negative feedback returns to a fixed

point, like a thermostat. Positive feedback seeks a moving goal,

like a guided missile.)

The first two circuits maintain that which is (more or less)

constant in human affairs. They are totally
cyclical,
and relate

directly to the cycles found in history by Vico, Hegel and similar

philosophers.

The third circuit has always been hemmed-in and heavily

sanctioned with rules, laws, prohibitions, taboos, etc. because it

breaks up such cycles. It leads, if unleashed, to an upwardhurtling

spiral.

In societies where .the third, semantic circuit has been partially

unleashed—it has never been totally freed in any society—the

upward spiral immediately appears. This used to be known as

"progress," before that word became unfashionable.

The upward spiral (whether we call it "progress" or not) is

characteristic of what Karl Popper calls Open Societies. These

are secular, humanistic societies—cultures
relatively
free of

taboo and dogmatism.

Such freedom, up to and including the present, is only
relative,

because many taboos are unconscious and pass themselves

off as "common sense" or "common decency," etc. Whoever

challenges them is by definition a "heretic," by definition a

"traitor," or by definition "an irresponsible nut."

707

IO8 Prometheus Rising

(Rationalists, who dominate in
relatively
Open Societies, also

have their own taboos, as we shall see.)

It was historian Henry Adams who first conceived the idea

that there might be a mathematical expression describing the rate

of change of human societies.

Under the influence of Newton's physics, Adams suggested—

and he was very tentative about this: a fact to be remembered by

those who ridicule his "naivete"—that the utilization of energy

might move forward as the inverse square of
time
just as

Newton's gravity functions as the inverse square
of distance.

Accepting the anthropology of his day, Adams assumed

humanity in its present form was about 90,000 plus years old. He

then reckoned that it took most of that time to arrive at Galileo,

the scientific method, the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution,

and the great leap forward in energy utilization characteristic

of the "modern" age, or the Open Society.

Since 300 is the inverse square of 90,000, Adams assumed

that the next great leap was happening while he was writing,

around 1900—300 years after Galileo. Looking about him, he

decided this next jump to higher energy was occurring in the

researches of the Curies, :who had discovered radioactivity. As

many commentators have noted, it is impossible to read Adams

on this subject without feeling that he is very accurately forecasting

the Atomic Age.

Adams went further, with the exhilaration of a great idea.

Since 17 plus is the inverse square of 300, he predicted that the

next great evolutionary stage would begin in 1917 plus. And,

since the inverse square of 17 is 4 plus, he predicted the next step

in around 1922. By then, he said, we should have infinite energy

at our disposal. It didn't quite work out that way.

Nevertheless, Henry Adams was on the right track. His math

was just over-simplified.

Also "on the right track" was Henry's brother, Brooks, who

was also looking for "laws" in history. Brooks observed a pattern

which may or may not be
entirely
true but is as approximately

true as the similar generalizations of Vico, Hegel, Marx and

Toynbee. Every civilization, Brooks Adams proposed, goes

through four stages:

Prometheus Rising 109

1.The
monopolization of knowledge
by priests. E.g., the

Egyptian priests kept written language a secret among themselves,

as did the May an priests.

2. The
monopolization of military power
by conquerors who

made themselves States or governments. E.g., "a French bastard"

(Tom Paine's description of William the Conqueror) lands on the

shore of England with a superior technology—warriors on horse

versus native warriors on foot—and he becomes King. His relatives

and sycophants become Lords-of-the-land.

3. The
monopolization of the land
by these land-Lords. The

extraction of tribute ("rent") from those who live on the land.

4. The
monopolization of the issue of currency
by National

Banks. The extraction of tribute ("interest") for each piece of

currency put into circulation.

Most civilizations seem to have gone through at least three of

these stages, not always consecutively. Some have passed

through all four.

Brooks Adams also noted that
centralized capital
(the accumulation

of wealth in the hands of a few inter-related families)

seems to have been moving steadily West throughout recorded

history. The first major accumulations are to be found in Sumer;

the center of money-power then shifted to Egypt, to Greece, to

the Italian peninsula, to various parts of Germany, and then to

London. At the time Brooks Adams was writing (c. 1900) he saw

the balance teetering between London and New York, and he

predicted that the decline of the English Empire would shift the

balance to New York within the first half of the 20th Century. He

seems to have been right. Brooks Adams had
no theory
as to why

this Westward movement of wealth had been going on for 6000

years. He merely observed the pattern.

The shift is still continuing, in the opinion of many. For

instance, Carl Oglesby in
The Cowboy vs. Yankee War,
sees

American politics since 1950 dominated by a struggle between

"old Yankee wealth" (the New York-Boston axis, which

replaced London after 1900) and "new Cowboy wealth" (Texas-

California oil-and-aerospace billionaires). As of 1997, it looks

like the Cowboys are winning; which is what one would expect

if there were a real "law" behind Adams' East-West migration of

capital.

no Prometheus Rising

One night in 1919, Count Alfred Korzybski awoke from a

vivid dream, tears of joy streaming down his face, with a vivid

sense that the passing of signals from generation to generation—

the third circuit time-binding function—was what distinguished

us from the other primates.

Korzybski originally suggested that time-binding could be

defined mathematically. He dropped this idea later—his math

was as inadequate as Henry Adam's—but it is worth looking at

for a moment, to retrace the steps by which the actual Law of

Acceleration was discovered.

What Korzybski assumed at first was that if all the inventions,

discoveries, etc. of some hypothetical first generation of humans

could be represented by
P
, and the rate by which the second

generation could surpass this by
R
, then, mathematically, the

sum total of inventions, discoveries etc. at the end of the second

generation would be
PR
. Quite true, algebraically. Then, after a

third generation, the stockpile would be
PRR
. And after four

generations,
PRRR.

Generalized, this becomes
PRt,
where (
t
) is the number of

generations from whatever generation you have picked as your

base-line.

The curve of
PRt
, if you put it on graph paper, ascends more

rapidly with each generation. Korzybski was looking straight at

what Alvin Toffler later called "Future Shock" and was trying to

write a mathematical formula for it.

Many variables in economic-technological history do, in fact,

fit Korzybski's
PRt
function; but others do not. The math, again,

was too simple; and
everything does not change at the same rate.

Nonetheless, Korzybski, like Henry Adams, was groping toward

the truth: acceleration is real, and it is intimately connected with

time-binding,
the passing of signals between generations.

What underlies the accelerations noted by Henry Adams and

Korzybski is nowadays known as the selection of
negentropy
out

of
stochastic processes.
Our understanding of this is chiefly due

to almost-simultaneous discoveries (1946-48) by quantum physicist

Erwin Schrodinger, mathematician Norbert Weiner and an

electronics-communication expert at Bell Laboratories, Claude

Shannon.

Prometheus Rising in

A stochastic process is a random series, but it is a special kind

of random series. In a stochastic process, some agent or agency

is making selections—picking out of the randomness a pattern

that is not random.

A pattern that its not random
is known mathematically as

information.

Information can also be defined as organization, or as coherence.

Gregory Bateson has defined information as "differences that

make a difference."

Information—coherence—"differences that make a difference"

—Korzybski's
Time-Binding—
these are all aspects of the

unpredictable.
If you know something already, or can predict it

easily on the basis of what you do know, it is not information for

you. Conversely, if you don't know something, or can't predict

it, it is information.

The dynamism of evolution, we repeat, is the selection of

information, coherence, out of a random series of events. The

emergence of information can be illustrated crudely by the

following three poemlets:

Roses are red

Violets are blue

Sugar is sweet

And so are you

Unless the reader has lived in relative isolation from American-

English folk-culture, this poem had very little information

for him. You could guess what was coming every step of the

way. But consider by contrast:

Roses are red

Ink is black

Do me a favor

Go sit on a tack

This crude jest (of grade school origin) has more information