One of the unexamined conventions of the mosaic, nation-state metageography is the fixed orientation of the map with the north at the top. This is mostly an artifact of the invention of the magnetic compass that points to the north of the Earth’s magnetosphere. Consequently, most maps in use by European sea captains were oriented to the North to comport with the compass. (Early Chinese compasses were designed to point South—merely a matter of looking down the other end of the needle.)
In pure logic, compasses aside, other map orientations are possible. At various times, maps oriented in all directions have been used to depict our world. But prior to the Age of Exploration, most maps were oriented with the East at the top because the sun rises in the east.
Consider the so-called T and O flat earth map as drawn by the Christian cartographers of the Middle Ages. This was the standard European map of the world until the sixteenth century. The representation it embodies is clearly a schematic social abstraction, rather than a report of geographic reality measured “to scale.”
In the “T and O” map, there is seldom anything you would recognize as geographic detail, only lines in a stylized T-form, symbolic of the cross, meant to signify water bodies separating the continents, with Asia (the East) on the top, Africa (the South) on the bottom right, and Europe (the North) on the bottom left. No territorial jurisdictions are indicated. At the point where the crossbar of the “T” intersects its leg, at the very center of the map, is Jerusalem. In reality, a landlocked city, Jerusalem’s placement at the intersection of three bodies of water is not a realistic geographic detail but a symbolic representation of the city as the spiritual focus of Christendom. Surrounding the map is a large circle (thus the “O”), representing the circumfluent ocean that was thought to surround the flat Earth.
Antique Sino-centric maps feature China as the “Middle Kingdom” in representations that could be mistaken for schematic depictions of magnified amoebas. Europe is condensed in foreshortened form in the upper northwest margin. Many of the Chinese maps also show the typical flat Earth representation of territories surrounded by an ocean crowding the borders of the map.
Metageographic conventions other than our own are almost invariably obscure and difficult to interpret. For example, ancient Roman maps of Italy, as preserved in medieval copies, contain geographic representations but are practically unintelligible to a modern eye, as they are oriented with the East at the top. Old Islamic maps divide the world is in a counterintuitive way into two spheres—dar al-Islam (House of Islam) and dar al-harb (House of War). Many early Arab cartographers oriented their maps with the South at the top.
Time and the Imagination
Measurement of time is another variable of the collective imagination. Although time is not experienced as a physical dimension (notwithstanding Einstein’s theory of relativity, in which time is an aspect of the universe whose measurement depends on the observer), our sense of time, too, is parsed according to a conventional framework for thinking about the world.
It seems second nature to think of an hour divided into equal minutes that are in turn composed of sixty equal seconds, with twenty-four hours in the day and seven days in a week. However, measuring time that way is an arbitrary and relatively recent convention. Standardized hours were an essential innovation to make way for the time clock and the factory system. As G. J. Whitrow documents in Time in History: Views of Time from Prehistory to the Present Day, the concept of the hour as a unit of standard duration (initially called the “equinox hour”) was introduced in the late Middle Ages. Before the invention of the mechanical clock to mark off seconds and minutes, hours were of unequal length—a practice that dated to the ancient Egyptians.
Other societies, and even Western societies in the past, have had completely different conventions of time.17 The Chinese divided the whole day into twelve parts rather than twenty-four.18 “The modern practice of numbering the days of the month consecutively from the first to the last,” as Whitrow reports, “came to the West from Syria and Egypt in the second half of the sixth century.”19
The Mayans, who had an elaborate calendar but no clocks, measured the passing of time with a system of numeration based on months with twenty days, each of which had a distinct name. They counted both a 13-month, 260-day cycle (Sacred Year) and a solar year of 365 days “composed of 18 months of 20 days each and five intercalary days.”
The combination of the sacred year and the solar year was a larger cycle of 18,980 days—“the least common multiple of 260 and 365.” Mayans also parsed time into another division—the katun, comprising twenty years of 360 days. The Mayans believed that the world had been created and destroyed repeatedly. They kept a “Long Count” calendar of the days from the most recent starting point of the creation of the world, corresponding to August 10, 3113 BC, on our calendar.20 This gained a lot of attention in 2012 when the Long Count calendar supposedly expired, suggesting to some excitable people that the world would come to an end. It didn’t.
We measure the start of a new day at midnight. But for much of history, the day began at dawn. Or at noon, which was the easiest time to measure before clocks. The medieval Islamic day began at sunset.
The Hopi Indians have “often been cited,” according to Whitrow, as a people “whose language contains no words, grammatical forms, constructions, or expression that referred to time or any of its aspects.”21 Interestingly, Old English, as spoken before the Norman Conquest, “contained no distinct words for the future tense.”22
The conversion of sun time into standardized time zones has become part of the modern metageographic (or if you prefer, “metatemporal”) framework. As difficult as it now is to imagine, as late as the fifteenth century, it wasn’t just the hours that were not standardized; there was no general agreement within nearby areas on what year it was. You could travel fifty miles and find yourself in another year. R. L. Poole illustrates: “If we suppose a traveler set out from Venice on March 1, 1245, the first day of the Venetian year, he would find himself in 1244 when he reached Florence; and if after a short stay he went on to Pisa, the year 1246 would already have begun there. Continuing his journey westward he would find himself again in 1245 when he entered Provence and on arriving in France before Easter (April 16) he would be once more in 1244.”23 It takes an act of imagination to conceive of time and space as they were ordered in the metageographies of the past. You probably could not keep time if someone handed you an Islamic astrolabe from the Middle Ages, any more than you could find your way to Jerusalem using a medieval, flat earth “T and O” map.
Seeing maps informed by anachronistic metageographies underscores the fact that there have been many transitions when an existing metageography gave way to a new framework that better reflected the facts and values associated with a new imagination of the world. Now that we are traveling the well-worn path that leads to the breakdown and renewal of civilization, we can expect an upheaval in metageography to accompany the coming upheaval in the world system. Peter Taylor argues that the predominant mosaic nation state metageography has already been undermined: “the fundamental spatial framework of our thinking is being dismantled. In other words, the demise of embedded statism has arrived.”24
As suggested above, Taylor says that the starting point for the erosion of the mosaic metageography of states was “the impact of the photographs of the Earth from space where, as one of the astronauts exclaimed, a world without boundaries is on display.”25 Taylor concludes, however, that while it is “relatively easy to discern the demise of the old metageography, . . . Identifying the new replacement is a very different type of argument.”26
The Non-Euclidian Geometry of Economic Space in the Twenty-First Century
Not the least reason that the next metageography is difficult to imagine is that the economy has outgrown three dimensional Cartesian mapping. The incorporation of increasing amounts of digital information in the production process raises the map of economic space beyond three dimensions. As we
try to describe this new world in mathematical terms, we will see that it is often a high-dimensional chaos. To live successfully in the new economy of the twenty-first century, we need to learn to better understand and predict its high-dimensional chaotic dynamics.
When novelist William Gibson coined “cyberspace” in his 1984 book, Neuromancer, he set the stage for understanding that information technology created “a world within a world.” Here is the initial passage that famously christened “cyberspace”: “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.”27 Gibson’s coining of the term “cyberspace” reflected “a critical foresight,” claimed analyst Alex Monroe Ingersoll, “in relation to the melding of virtual and physical spaces that are programmed to map data circulation and information flows.”28
Hence the puzzle inherent in the reimagining of the world. The “spaces of flows” as importantly represented in cyberspace do not obey the laws of Euclidean geometry. This presents a mathematical challenge to the imagination. As mathematicians Edward J. Wegman and Jeffrey L. Sofka put it, “The analysis of high-dimensional data offers a great challenge to the analyst because the human intuition about the geometry of high dimensions fails.”29
Still to come is the metageographical mapping of the “spaces of flows,” the “consensual hallucinations” that compose cyberspace. Indeed, disentangling the many strands of influence that will shape the institutional reset post–Breaking Point, takes us beyond the reach of simple inference. It is easy enough to see, in a general sense, that big government is dysfunctional, lumbered with debts, and seemingly incapable of adjusting to new megapolitical realities. This disconnect implies that change is coming. But exactly when the Breaking Point will come and what will follow are less evident.
The Decline of the West?
Oswald Spengler foresaw a century ago “the going down of the West,” “another decline entirely comparable to it (the decline of Classical civilization) in course and duration, which will occupy the first centuries of the coming millennium but is heralded already and sensible in and around us today—the decline of the West.”30 You don’t have time to read both volumes of The Decline of the West by German historian Oswald Spengler. But sometimes—like now—it is good to know a little history.
That is why I have excerpted a crucial passage below. Read it carefully and you’ll see that the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that struck down limits on corporate campaign contributions may have changed little after all:
One can make use of the constitutional rights only when one has money. That a franchise should work even approximately as the idealist supposes it to work presumes the absence of any organized leadership operating on the electors (in its interest) to the extent that its available money permits. As soon as such leadership does appear, the vote ceases to possess anything more than the significance of a censure applied by the multitude to the individual organizations, over whose structure it possesses in the end not the slightest positive influence. So also with the ideal thesis of Western constitutions, the fundamental right of the mass to choose its own representatives—it remains pure theory, for in actuality every developed organization recruits itself. Finally, the feeling emerges that the universal franchise contains no effective rights at all, not even that of choosing between parties. For the powerful figures that have grown up on their soil control, through money, all the intellectual machinery of speech and script, and are able, on the one hand, to guide the individual’s opinions as they please above the parties, and, on the other, through their patronage, influence, and legislation, to create a firm body of whole-hearted supporters (the “Caucus”) which excludes the rest and induces in it a vote-apathy which at the last it cannot shake off even for the great crises.31
Almost a century ago, Spengler had a premonition of a situation where 10 percent of the Democratic Party’s Super Delegates—the unelected “dignitaries” who help chose the party’s presidential nominee—are registered lobbyists.
Spengler’s insights also help anticipate the heartaches Donald Trump has caused the grandees of the Republican Party—by threatening to nullify the power of money exercised by special interests. Trump’s campaign sought to bypass the “organized leadership operating on the electors (in its interest)” that has managed to keep politics in the United States well-bounded by the permissible consensus of the establishment since World War II.
You have to judge for yourself to what extent Spengler’s foreboding bears on the terminal crisis of US hegemony. I certainly agree that the twenty-first century is a century of crisis. But I don’t fully share Spengler’s doom-laden perspective.
As illustrated through numerous examples in the discussion above, a major part of the social construct involves the imagination, the metageography of your worldview. I firmly believe that it is possible to combine insight with optimism about the future.
Change is inevitable, whether we embrace it or not. The tendency to shelter incumbent businesses and legacy institutions is a natural human inclination—a reflection of the spatiotemporal fix that informs the nesting instinct at a group level. Cleaving too tightly to the old may leave economies particularly vulnerable to disruptive change. I see the coming transition, creative destruction writ large, not as the end of civilization, but a transition leading to another, and perhaps freer and better, phase of postmodern capitalist civilization. Human ingenuity will always find a way through, whatever the circumstances.
Alternative Futures
So what comes next? I continue to believe that the future evolution of society will be informed by the characteristics of technology that establish the scale of production, as well as determine the balance of advantage between projecting and resisting power.
What should you expect as the next stage of capitalist development? Various connoisseurs of hegemony in the world system foresee several quite distinct potential outcomes from the collapse of US hegemony. The late Giovanni Arrighi outlined three of what might be termed “conventional” extrapolations from the patterns of the past:
1. Perhaps the most conventional forecast is for the return of Chinese hegemony, after a lapse of 600 years, organized according to Chinese values with a noncapitalist market economy.32
2. “As a reaction to increasing systemic chaos, it is possible,” in Arrighi’s words, “that over the next half-century or so such a world empire will actually be realized.”33 There is also the potential for the creation of a full-fledged world government. Arrighi guessed that the “substantive nature of this world empire” could be “saving the planet from ecological self-destruction.” (A special case of a full-fledged world government is an ecofascist world system, in which a type of “global apartheid,” as described by Peter Taylor, replaces capitalism.) Certainly, the celebration of the UN’s global goals initiative shows that, if nothing else, crony capitalists think big. The UN’s creepy and expensive “new universal agenda” for humanity amounts to a blueprint for a global Big Brother data surveillance state.
3. Another possibility would be, as Arrighi put it, “endless, worldwide chaos.”34
4. “Eco-Fascist World System.” This is a special case of full-fledged world government, which fulfills Arrighi’s hunch about the substantive nature of the projected “world empire.” Peter Taylor elaborates in projecting that an “impasse” following the collapse of America hegemony could result in what he describes as “Eco-Fascism.” Taylor writes: With no capital accumulation or inter-state system, this is the end of capitalism replaced by a postmodern global apartheid which we can call an eco-Fascist world system. . . . Delineating possible worlds from a disintegration transition is more difficult than for the outcome of a controlled transition. With less continuity
a greater leap of imagination is required. Hence, with eco-Fascism the politics of limits can be reduced to a simple strategy of “maintain what you can and ditch the rest”. The usual modernist alternatives to fascism have no simple projection to a postmodern world. As . . . redistribution of resources creates a future of shared poverty.35
I can’t say that that sounds promising.
5. The most appealing alternative, at least in my view, is that information technology has created a cyber realm that transcends territoriality. As outlined by Nuno Pessoa Barradas in Empire without Emperor, no single state could reach hegemony in this cyber realm. This means no given state would be able to lead in the emerging cycle of capital accumulation. The new hegemony will be, in a word, “hegemonless.” Furthermore, in cyberspace, even the construction of walls on national borders cannot conclusively halt the spread of information.
Barradas draws on The End of the Nation-State by Jean-Marie Guéhenno to propose that in the new world of information technology “no single state can attain hegemony, and hence the emerging systemic cycle of accumulation of capital will not be led by any given state. The new hegemony, which we will call ‘Empire without Emperor,’ is hegemonless . . . We thus arrive at the concept of the non-geographic core-periphery structure, that is superimposed to the traditional geographic one.”36 He concludes, “National borders have no influence in the spread of information” in cyberspace.
The United States Joins the “Third World”
An implication of the nonterritorial character of information technology is that it will assign a considerable fraction of the populations of the formerly core countries to peripheral roles. Instead of sorting prosperity by jurisdiction, the emerging system incorporates the new Third World periphery within the territory of the old core states. In that sense, it is not slander to consider the United States an increasingly Third World country. That is just what should be expected. It is a consequence of changing megapolitical conditions. At the same time, it underscores the anachronistic character of nation-states that foster a political imperative to redistribute income at a magnitude that no longer pays its way.
The Breaking Point Page 47
