Commerce – Mercantalisation

Posted on by wanderer

What the eight countries that where not fully dominated by the European powers show, is that western powers where obsessed by commerce, or in a formal nomenclature, opening markets. Not in vain this period is know as mercantilism. Even the administrations that more or less escaped direct colonial control were forced to commerce with them, or serve as territories that could be open to the trade routes that crossed them. In all instances, sooner or later, the European powers got their way in and forced the rest of the planet to adopt progressively more European structures, laws, teaching, infrastructure, ways of organizing the territory, their internal affairs, the military, the government, and so on and so forth, culminating in the present day organization of virtually all nations and states on the planet. Even as simple things as having a national flag, a national hymn, is something no nation can escape. Only Nepal has avoided having a square or rectangular flag. The New Zealanders were not allowed to have a Laser Kiwi flag by their own politicians.

Hand in hand of administrative structures, is the administrative terminology. All the nations now talk the same “language”, that of GDP (gross domestic product), unemployment, literacy rate, life expectancy, income per capita, legal system, courts, jails, human rights, commerce treaties, sanitation, health system, infrastructure, mapping, etc.

Many of the areas of life have been completely dominated by Western world practices, organizations, solutions and ways of thinking. This has been accomplished both by forcing the others to adopt these, or by simply efficiency of the scientific and industrial methods that emerged out of the Copernican Revolution initiated by the age of discoveries.

Let us center in one thing that opened the way for all the other administrations to piggyback on this “westernization” and get implanted all over the World. That is the one that started it all, the commerce, or seen in other ways, the exchange markets, the wanting what one does not have and having the means to gain it, be it forcibly, amicably, or in unequal exchange.

As the age of colonization illustrates, there are many ways to go about commencing, but what is common is that curiosity and desire for materials that one community feels it is missing, and the capacity to communicate with the ones that have them. On top of this triad of curiosity, desire, and communication, the European nations imposed European market ways global scales by abusing the superior power of knowledge, technical means, political shabbiness, technology and in some cases sheer luck to overpower the rivals, to the point of annihilation as it happened with the Banda and many native peoples of the Americas. Commerce gone awry results in abuse and, in the worst case, in extinction of the other party to keep access to their material resources. European mentality got to be imposed into a planetary scale, but that was not because of any superior wisdom, but just because of something that we share as humans and make now “humanity” as a global concept, that capacity to have basic communication. Then Europeans exploited it to new levels, to travel, commerce, conquer and ultimately, colonise. Colonisation is no more than the total control of the resources of the land and its peoples.

Lest’s reinforce the idea that commerce was the driver of it all. It was not exploration, it was not even the desire to have more places in the map (although it might play a role, as we will see later), it wasn’t neither the proselytism of many religions and ideologies, it was just the ever increasing complexity that commerce allowed. When peoples where forcibly connected to exchange goods, that made all the other events happen.

Dismantling the Age of Exploration

Let’s first destroy the myth of exploration. What started the globalism movement is the so called “age of discovery” which has already been presented. However, that age of discovery really didn’t discover that much by itself. There was not a sustained desire to “discover”. The places and peoples that were made known to the Europeans was just a secondary outcome of the main motivation, that of the commerce.

That lack of exploratory desire can easily be seen by the desire of Columbus to reach India by a western route, not to see what laid beyond the known waters of the Atlantic. Similarly the Portuguese fueled their exploration of the route to circumnavigate Africa thanks to the commerce of gold and slaves that they encountered when they arrived to Dakar and further beyond, to the Guinean gulf. These preliminary network and exchange routes allowed them to gain the confidence, skills, and interest to do the attempt to Asia. Without that the Portuguese interest to go further south in the almost 100 years that took them to reach Asia would have been lost.

The fact that exploration was not high in the agenda can be easily exemplified by the fact that the Portuguese never “explored” the interior of Africa even though they circumnavigated it for centuries. Hawaii was never “discovered” by the Spaniards, or if they saw it, they never set a foot there, although it was just in the center of their trans pacific galleons voyages from Acapulco to Manila and back. Similarly, Australia’s east was not explored until the end of the XVIII c. although it was jut a bit off from the spice islands. Same, as we have seen, the Bugis never went beyond the areas of western Australia where they could harvest sea cucumber.

These examples and motivations illustrate how exploration was an aforethought of the desire to establish commercial ventures in far away lands. If these could not be commercially viable, i.e. the motivation was not high and the affordability not good enough, then the venture was not pursued.

Dismantling Settler Colonialism

The seeking of material exchanges is further highlighted by the dynamics of the control of the land and of the colonization. Similarly as many lands where not explored, they also where not settled or colonized by the European forces. A good case at hand is the Spaniards. Although they claimed possession of most of the American continent, they never really set forth to control even the first islands where Columbus landed, that is, the Bahamas. Even now, many of the lands of the Americas bear Spanish names, like Guadalupe, a big island in the smaller Antilles. Is not that the spaniards lost its control in a war, is just that they did not even care to keep the possession or minimally defend Guadalupe against other powers. Guadalupe simply was not of interest to them once the initial resources where extinguished these resources where no more than the peoples themselves. Once they where enslaved or forced to work until almost extinction then their interest on the islands was no more.

Fun enough the spaniards where always looking for gold and “el dorado” in the americas. And they never found it, but the big areas of present day Brazil, that later the Portuguese took, had several “el dorados” over the land, just not in the form of a civilization that had already harvest the gold. The gold was in the beds of rivers where the humans that lived around had no interest on it, it had been accumulating by millennia of natural water erosion and sedimentation of the dense metal in the rive beds. Therefore, the spaniards had the tons of gold they where seeking just laying under their foot. Presently, the states of Minas Gerai (general mines, or mines abound in portuguese) and Diamantina (Diamond land), in central-east Brazil, show the gold and diamonds that the Spanish monarchy had under their initial jurisdiction. Similarly in California and Oregon, where the Spanish monarchy had nominal control for almost 300 years, and later the Mexican Empire. But neither mined any river bed, until the US took over.

The spaniards just focusing on either commercing or exploiting the peoples that already exploited the goods they where interested in. We have seen this also in the papuan axe makers, only few groups did the axes, while the rest commerced with them. In the case of the spaniards they first did some exchange, like with Tidore, but soon enough they abused their superiority brought about by their knowledge, technology and the devastating effects that the illnesses that they carried had on most of the local population. The control of the territory through the control of existing administrations can be seen if you check a map of the Spanish empire in the Americas. Their dominions mostly are concentrated in the areas where most of the population lived before their arrival, that is, the Andean region and Mesoamerica. They also had firm control only on the biggest islands of the Caribbean: Cuba, Puerto Rico and Hispaniola. But even Hispaniola western part was eventually controlled by the french, and the fourth biggest island, Jamaica, fell on the hands of the British by 1650. By that point these islands and all of the smaller ones where almost depopulated by the original Tainos, the first people that Columbus’ expedition met. There was not much interest by the spaniards in maintaining a land with no people, that is, no easy means to extract resources, be it by commerce or by force.

Going back to Papua, off shore of Australia and also close to the Maluku spice islands, the interior of Papua and part of its coast was not thoughtfully explored and mapped until 1930, and just because the invention of the aeroplane made it easier the access to these lands. The peoples there had little to commerce with or to exploit at the beginning. Therefore, papuans were left to their own means until the industrialized world sought new resources that where never explored before in an industrial scale, like coal, oil, steel, gas, tin, copper, saltpeter… That way many of the lands of the planet that did not have large administrative centers where left to their own means until the beginning of the XX c. where they where thoughtfully explored, not in search of filling the gaps in our knowledge, but to look for these mineral deposits.

Then, at the end of the XX c. and beginning of the XXI c. the lands that where still almost untouched where reached to exploit a new brand of resources, that of the agrarian production. Nowadays, big areas of pristine forests are falling each second to the hands of humans that want to expand their wealth by the simple exploitation of the production of the soil. The biggest responsible for this new phase of “exploration” of unmapped lands are palm oil, soya and cattle. These commercial products finally are putting a dent into the big tropical jungles that where left mostly untouched by this growing network of connectivity and exploitation. The mighty Amazon jungle is a shadow of itself, with almost half of its surface converted to agrarian land, the same is happening to the formerly lush islands of Borneo, Sumatra and our beloved Papua. And the Congo basing is rapidly joining the club.

The process of accessing the previously disconnected lands came hand in hand with orchastration or simply destruction when their lifestyle or lands where in conflict with the aims of the westerners. That happened often and repeatedly in history, with the clear example with the eradication of many Native Americans in what is now the US and the marginalization of the rest to small reserves in undesired lands.

But one can go further back to see this process of taking over lands to be used as a new resource. All around the planet, with the onset of agriculture in each of the different regions of the world, it has been observed that the diversity of Y chromosomes, these carried by men only, was lost by about 90% in a short period of time. That means that of all the male linages that existed on the planet at that time only about one in ten remained, while the rest died out. On the other hand, the diversity of X chromosomes, carried by men and women, remained mostly the same. This happened more or less simultaneously in Eurasia, coinciding with the agriculture there, while in the Americas it happened few thousands of years later, as the onset of agriculture was later and in two different areas, Mesoamerica and the Andres. In Africa it happened later still, by 5000 bc

Cumulative Bayesian skyline plots of Y chromosome (left) and mtDNA diversity by world regions (right). The red dashed lines highlight the horizons of 10 kya and 50 kya. Credit to Karmin et al 2015 under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International).

There are different theories on why this dramatic loss of genetic diversity could had happened, like the grab os lands, active warfare and taking on wives from other bands as slaves, or simply the creation of a male elite that could maintain harems and overbreed the rest of the males over time. However it was, certain linages dominated the genetic landscape and that coincides with the emergence of the big agricultural cultures and later civilizations of the Neolithic. At the same time many hunter-gatherer societies where no longer to be found in many of the lands controlled by the agriculturalists. That points to an ancient clash of cultures, where the ones that where integrated to the agricultural and husbandry networks survived and dominated, while the others where wiped by their neighbors who had adopted a lifestyle different enough from them. Nowadays the world is in danger of repeating the same history in the current global scale, but we will address that, its consequences and possible actions, in another chapter.

The only areas that so far escape a big exploitation are the desserts, Arctic tundra, and the bottom and surface of the oceans. There almost nobody lives, and the affordability of the resources is too high and the cost of the resources there does not compensate it so far in most of the cases.

Dismantling Proselytism

The fact that ideology or religion comes by the hands of commerce should not be of a big surprise, exchange is stablished better with these entities that are similar to the known ones, where more channels of trust can be build. Therefore, the societies that had structures more similar to the known ones for the European world (cities, states, nobility…) where easier to be assimilated to the system.

In the case of proselytism, another area of contact with other peoples and of imposing a common understanding, it also mostly by the hands of commerce. A good example of this connection between commerce and religion spread is the islamization of parts of the Malai peninsula, Indonesian archipelago and Mindanao island from the XVI c. Islam did not spread to these areas at the hands of an invading army or imposed by a ruler. No, the adoption of islam was by the hands of the Muslim dealers that arrived to these shores. The spread of Islam was initially driven by the trade links with the distant lands to their west, especially the species that we have seen. Commercial ventures usually where done or mediated by the local king, or orang kaya. Arab and Indian traders of muslim faith would do better deals with fellow faith followers, therefore the kings and rich peoples had a great incentive to convert, at least nominally, to Islam. That’s how the local rulers become Sultans and sultanates, which exist to this day, like in Brunei. Then the faith would actively or passively percolate to their submits and fellow neighboring lands to integrate them into the commercial network reaching the Spice Islands and their rulers becoming sultans. However, often islam went just as far as the commercial networks. In Halmahera, the big island neighboring the small Tidore and Ternate, even until the XX century the people were believers of their ancestral faiths based on animism and Hinduism. These inland peoples were loosely connected to the commercial networks, therefore there was no strong imperative for religious conversion. Furthermore, many of the Indonesian islands to the east of the spice islands, papua included, and much of the highlands of the bigger islands never converted to Islam, leaving Christian missionaries to proselitise them by the XX century.

Christianity did a similar thing on its own in Northern Europe. When the relationships between the waring bands after the fall of the Western Roman Empire subsided, there was room to establish regular commerce with peoples outside of the formal roman empire. With the commercial networks the Cristian faith came, it took centuries to take hold but eventually much of Scandinavia converted to Christianity. However, less commercially integrated peoples, like the Samis who where neighbors to the Scandinavian peoples, kept their religion until the XIX c

Similarly, the pious spaniards in the americas never went about to evangelize much of the areas that where not under their commercial networks. Many of the forested areas of the Yucatan peninsula and south America where never actively proselytized under the Spanish monarchy, nor where the southern lands of south America, from Tierra del Fuego to Patagonia. These areas where never integrated into dominion or commercial networks until the XX c by the modern American states.

Returning to the specie islands, the preponderance of comenrce over proselitism is sadly ilustrated again by the going tragic legacy of the Banda genocide and extermination. The VOC governor, prior to the extermination asked, repetedly, to their superiors back in Europe to allow him to fight against the locals because “God is with us, and do not draw a conclusion from the preceding failures, because there, in the Indies, something grand can be accomplished” (p47, original in Dutch), grand in the sense of wealth. His religious inclinations where completely oriented to mercantile domination (species monopoly) at the price of the razing of a uniquely distinct population.

Non proselitist religions like Buddhism did have periods of sending missionaries and mass conversion of their population when king Astoga converted to the religion, even sending their own children to Sri Lanka, where Buddhism still traces its roots to that period.

To ilustrate all the avobe cases, a depressing case of a single natural product exposing peoples, —who where until then outside commercial networks– to the cruelty of global markets is natural rubber, or borracha as it is called in Brazil. Until the late 19th century, the Amazon region remained largely uncolonised, but that changed dramatically with the industrial demand for rubber. Natural rubber proved essential for the production of vehicle tyres and the insulation of electric and telegraphic cables—including submarine communication wires, and inspiring Bibendum, Michelin‘s white tyres pile mascot. The Amazon basin was the only region where Hevea brasiliensis, the rubber tree, grew in the wild. Rubber extraction involved “tapping” or cutting into the bark of scattered trees and collecting the latex in small containers, which had to be emptied and processed frequently. However, attempts to plant rubber trees in monoculture plantations failed in the Amazon, as the trees were susceptible to a deadly fungal infection when grown in large monocultures. This biological limitation made wild harvesting the only viable option in the region.

The rubber boom triggered an influx of uncontrolled commercial operators into the Amazon, eager to exploit this monopoly. The most “economical” method of production relied on systematic violence: indigenous populations were enslaved, tortured, mutilated, and forced to traverse the forest, collecting latex from distant trees, with the lives of family at stake.

Men, women, and children were confined in them for days, weeks, and often months. ... Whole families ... were imprisoned—fathers, mothers, and children, and many cases were reported of parents dying thus, either from starvation or from wounds caused by flogging, while their offspring were attached alongside them to watch in misery themselves the dying agonies of their parents. Roger Casement, 1910

They are inhumanly whipped until their bones are exposed and large, raw wounds cover them. They are given no medical treatment, but are left to die, eaten by worms, when they are fed to the chieftains' dogs. They are castrated and mutilated, and their ears, fingers, arms, and legs are cut off. They are tortured with fire and water, and tied up and crucified upside down.Walter Hardenburg, 1912

The trade generated such enormous profits that remote cities like Manaus and Belém boasted European-style opera houses and other symbols of opulence. Yet, this wealth was built on a foundation of brutality—an open secret ignored by the companies, missionaries, and urban populations. Things only began to change when Walter Hardenburg, an US engineer, and Roger Casement, an Irish diplomat and revolutionary, exposed the atrocities to the international community. These reports—fictionalised in the novel El sueño del celta—coincided with another turning point: rubber tree seeds had been successfully smuggled out of the Amazon and cultivated in British and Dutch colonies in Southeast Asia. The fungal pathogen did not survive the voyage, allowing for large-scale monocultures that drastically lowered production costs. This shift, coupled with global outrage, forced an end to the Amazon rubber monopoly and slightly improved conditions for the surviving indigenous communities.

Similarly to what the British did with ending the nutmeg monopoly, they planted the rubber tree in Malaysia and enforced a policy of prosecution of the abusers of indigenous peoples. As we will see also with slavery, the humanitarian side of it was accompanied by the changing commercial winds, a pattern that we will see repeatedly, and which highlights how much our current world is shaped by the networks, tentacles and shadows of commerce.

The borracha and other examples show that commercial, dominion, and ideological network often went hand in hand, and those that where not part of the commercial networks escaped much of the ideological and political influence. We are seeing that in the case of the Western mentality taking over the world, a link with commercial ventures, be them pacific or aggressive, is a common one. From these examples we can conclude that exploration, colonialism and proselytism are not substantially different than exchange networks —in terms of connectivity. The true real change over time is scale of these networks, with the Western dominions pushing the preexisting connectivity conditions to virtually global scales for the first time in human history. Not that the other themes analysed here did not produce equally or more severe damaging and horrendous outcomes for the peoples affected. What is important to notice is commerce, and maximising profit at the cost of the well-being of everybody else, as one of the main drivers of connectivity, and probably the basis for all the other ones in our current Western dominated world.

From here, we can going back to the current movement of connectivity that was driven by European powers globalisation. With the commerce and greed as a root, we can look at the main frameworks under which this global communication vertebrates. These tools, at times tainted, will be media and mechanisms available to create the concept of humanity, to communicate it to most of human beings, and to ask the question, what does humanity want?

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Revolutions, Scientific Revolutions

Posted on by wanderer

The peoples that embarked and supported the exploration of new trading and colonising routes soon discovered that the free-riding of the technological advantage could be easily perpetuated. Thanks to that, the ones that invested in better and faster understanding of the world, plus the technical innovations that that understanding and implementation represented, contributed to a further control of the world’s connectivity. From that on, there were no major barriers to a hyperconnected world. What they could not control by exchange, they would control by overpowering, as the conquest of Malacca, the Aztecs, the Incas demonstrates. If you kept on expanding your technological and resource allocation dominance over other peoples, your system would be the one to dominate, and that’s exactly what the Western nations did over a period of a few centuries.

New trading routes led to an excess of wealth that could be poured into more navigational sophistication, which in turn would make the trading networks more reliable and affordable, freeing more resources for further improvement. Part of these resources went to the birth of modern science, changing forever the way our understanding of the world was established.

To make a boat sail safely from port to port you would rely less and less on divinity and more on your instruments, navigational skills, the capacity to understand the sky, star positions, read the winds, proper sails, masts, ropes to withstand storms, carrying lemons to stop scurvy, social structures to govern a ship and stop mutinies, etc. Those powers that would put scientific knowledge to good use would have in their hands better control of the high seas and the peoples cruising them. Likewise, those who understood better the fabrication techniques could build better vessels, and equip them with better weapons. On the other hand, the faraway encounters would contribute to the scientific understanding of the world, like sea currents, Volta do mar, steady trade winds, or even catamaran technology from the Pacific and front crawl swimming techniques from North, South America, or South Africa.

In fact, Columbus’s error regarding the radius of the Earth (which he was convinced until he died) was due to the preliminary stages of scientific knowledge attempting to describe the world we lived in. In that case, he was mistaken, but the geographers’ community soon recognised the error and corrected it (or lent more credibility to other estimates circulating at the time). This iterative process helped to better understand the world that was opening up before them as they tried to cartograph the new routes faster than they were explored.

From these explorations and shocks to the perceived worldview, it is not difficult to imagine that the notion of an entire landmass the size of the Americas suddenly appearing on maps (over about 20 years) might have led to the acceptance of rethinking the entire Universe. If the Earth contained a whole part of itself that was unknown to the Old Scriptures, how much more knowledge might be out there—waiting to be found, explored, and understood—not through the lens of the Scriptures, but through the lens of something new? These cartographic shifts might easily have been the seeds for scientific enquiry—the seed of the Scientific Revolution.

In fact, it is interesting to reflect on that word, “revolution.” What does it stand for? It comes from the root “to revolve”, which means to spin around. Why—if an entire continent had been missed, and Jerusalem is not the centre of the Earth—could it not be that the Earth is not the centre of the Universe either? That kind of thought might have helped Copernicus push the heliocentric idea: that the model best suited to describe the Universe is not a geocentric one, with the Earth at the centre, but one with the Sun at the centre of the known cosmos. Copernicus was not the first to propose that idea; the Pythagoreans had already supposed the Earth might move, and Aristarchus of Samos proposed a heliocentric model in the 3rd century BCE. Seleucus of Seleucia said something along the same lines in the 2nd century BCE. About 600 years later, in the 5th century, Martianus Capella, from Roman Carthage, proposed that Mercury and Venus spun around the Sun. At about the same time, Aryabhata in Patna, India, proposed that the Earth spins and that the planets orbit the Sun. In the 12th century, Ibn Rushd (Averroes) and Nur ad-Din al-Bitruji of the Cordoba Caliphate were also critical of the geocentric model and proposed alternatives. Their views spread into European intellectual spheres. However, none of these theories gained much traction at the time they were proposed. One can say that the mindset of the people of those generations was not particularly open to such a shift in worldview, nor was it needed for any practical purpose.

To be open to other worldviews becomes more likely if a sweeping 30% extra landmass is literally put on the map. The same world that the Scriptures plus Classical Philosophy were so certain they understood. Even though the Catholic Church did not pay much attention to the fact that the world was different than said, surely minds would become more open—even if obtuse. Moreover, those same conceptualisations ended up making navigation more precise. And the required navigational observations and technical means (star and planet positions, astrolabes, compasses, telescopes, clocks…) helped to question the worldview in a more rigorous way—with the newly discovered facts holding more face value than old beliefs. In short, cosmological views came to serve a practical purpose.

Therefore, the landscape was set. After Europeans became aware of a New Continent, Copernicus was able to push his idea (initially as a short leaflet in 1514), and later publish, after his death, his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium. His heliocentric model was not the one we know today. Copernicus’s model was not that innovative, nor significantly simpler than the Ptolemaic one, because he still needed the use of epicycles (small circumferences around the circular orbit of the planets) to accurately describe the rotation of the planets around the Sun. It would be Kepler—about 70 years later—who, after throwing out his own Mysterium theory of planetary movement because Tycho Brahe’s observations did not match, solved the motion of objects in the Solar System with simple elliptical orbits and delivered us pretty much the view that we now have.

Even after the heliocentric vision of the World was presented, the conviction of perfectly circular orbits was not abandoned, here a drawing trying to explain the elliptic orbit of the moon (Luna) around the Earth (T) with three epicycles. Calculations according to Schöner’s Tabulae resolutae and Reinhold’s Prutenicae Tabulae in lecture notes from 1569

The difference with all the previous scholars—after Copernicus’s posthumous publication—proposing that the Earth was not static, was that the public at the time was much more accepting of the revolution of the Earth thought. A thought that would be revolutionary!

Revolution, at the time, had the meaning that Copernicus used in his title: simply the spinning around of the celestial bodies—how they revolved around the Sun. Revolved, revoluted, revolution. It was a physical description, like that of the revolutions or cycles of an engine, or as one famous revolutions podcaster puts it, “coming full circle”, just to come back to the beginning. Revolution did have, on rare occasions, the meaning of change prior to Copernicus’s work. However, the acceptance of heliocentric theory by the public of the time. It was so disruptive to the mindset of the age, overturning millennia of knowledge and worldview—so Earth-shattering (pun intended)—that the first main word of the work itself, revolutionibus, was adapted less than a century later to mean the overthrow of a political system (the Glorious Revolution in Britain). When transferring the physical meaning to the political one, revolution meant “a circular process under which an old system of values is restored to its original position, with England’s supposed ‘ancient constitution’ being reasserted, rather than formed anew”. At that point the use of the word was far form the meaning that it has now, as a radical new direction, or changing of course of what was before. Soon after, however, the word gained the modern concept of revolution, as used for the French one, which probably someone has heard about. Now revolution is more widely understood as the shattering of a previous political, social, technological—or otherwise—system, and the establishment of a new one: the Glorious Revolution, French Revolution, Industrial Revolution, Agrarian Revolution, Sexual Revolution…

It could be that the people at the time—after the Earth had been kicked aside, given rotation, put in orbit around the Sun, and the stars made still—experienced a mental shift so profound that it allowed for a reshuffling of many pre-existing mentalities. Maybe it can be compared to the shattering effect, almost a rite of passage, that many children in the Western world experience when they realise that Santa Claus is not a real being, but a construct created by society to make them believe that the bringer of presents is this exotic figure from faraway lands, and not their parents or families. For the child, it is already a big impact—and if you experienced that, you probably remember the moment, even if it was decades ago. Then imagine if instead of just one child at a time, it were an entire society realising, more or less simultaneously (within a generation), that the reality they had so strongly believed to be true, no longer was. That is what the so-called Copernican Revolution brought to European thought in the 16th century: a collective, mind-shattering effect. We, as humans, have been toying with these moments ever since. But more about that later.

In fact, the public that was more open to these ideas was also in the midst of another revolutionary movement, which at the time was called a protest, for lack of a better word: Protestantism. If the world, the solar system, the Universe, the Cosmos, was not as the Church claimed—with extra continents unaccounted for, the Earth in motion, and stars being other suns, perhaps with other Earths—then the Church became open to protest and reform. And if protest and reform were possible, then the acceptance of truly exotic ideas—like the Earth revolving—became easier in a society already undergoing profound transitions. In fact, different solar system models were readily adopted by Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler, Danish and German astronomers sponsored by Protestant-friendly kings. Meanwhile, Latin astronomers such as Galileo Galilei and Giordano Bruno had major conflicts with the Catholic Church in Northern Italy—Galileo famously tried, Bruno burned at the stake. Bruno’s seven-year trial and sentence to be burned alive was not specifically for his belief that the stars in the sky were other distant suns orbited by other planets, but also because of his rejection of most Catholic doctrines.

The difference between Copernicus in the 16th century and all those who proposed alternative cosmological systems before might be that society was more open to new ideas because of empirical slaps in the face—steadily, repeatedly, forcefully. First, sailors and their investors realised that direct observations could actually shift reality—such as the discovery of a continent, accurate measurement of latitudes and longitudes, and the real size of the Earth’s circumference. Second, astronomers and their sponsors (who were often astrologers for European courts—better predictions meant better horoscopes; the zodiac pays for your smartphone, if you think about it) found that when your health or the outcome of a war depends on the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter, and your astronomer looks through a telescope and tells you that these planets have rings and moons orbiting them, you might predict better when to wage your next war. Third, traders could more precisely calculate profits or invest in new products—like new dyes and pigments (e.g. scarlet), or learning how to plant species such as pepper, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, coconuts, sugar cane, among others, across the world. Actual measurements began to overturn established doctrines one after another; these facts reinforced the critiques of the old system and laid the foundation for an alternative system of establishing knowledge. The Scientific Revolution went hand in hand with the development of better instruments and measurements that define the modern world we experience today.

It was equally important that these new ideas travelled and multiplied faster than ever before. On one hand, naval interconnectivity regularly reached all continents and the major inhabited landmasses of the planet. From there, peoples—willingly or unwillingly—became part of a shared system of exchange, a process that continues today, where nearly every human being is regularly connected to the rest of the world in one form or another. Our present hyperconnected world is extending the reach and frequency of connection to ever more remote places. On the other hand, the printing press allowed for the multiplication of ideas at a rate faster than authorities could suppress them. Even if the works of figures like Copernicus or Bruno were censored, confiscated, destroyed, or burned, it was much more likely that one copy would escape, be read, and be copied again. Before the printing press, Protestant ideas—like those of the Hussites in the 15th century—did not spread far beyond their place of origin (e.g. Bohemia). Later, Prague—with its famous astronomical clock—would host Brahe and Kepler. On the other end of the chain, at the point of reception, Spanish missionaries actively protected indigenous languages (while simultaneously suppressing their cultures) in regions such as Mesoamerica, the Andes, and the Philippines, to prevent indigenous peoples from being exposed to “dangerous” Protestant, Enlightenment, or revolutionary ideas. To this day, these regions preserve some of their linguistic diversity and remain heavily Catholic, with the Philippines being the only nation (alongside the Vatican) that does not permit divorce.

Our hyperconnected and idea-copying world is the one that gave birth to the concept of humanity—a “humanity” that can now begin to ask itself what it wants to do, now that we have the means to communicate with one another, and the resources (or energy levels) to invest a fraction of that energy in specific goals. But before asking that question, we first need to understand the mechanisms by which a hyperconnected people is able to pose it: which networks are activated, in which language communication occurs, with whom that exchange is implemented, and what actions can—or cannot—be taken. What is the agency?

Curiously, one of the early adopters of Copernicus’s thesis was Thomas Digges, who removed the need for the sphere of fixed stars. He proposed the existence of distant stars scattered throughout the Universe. This led him to raise the paradox of the dark sky: in an infinite Universe filled with stars, the sky should look like the surface of the Sun, because in every direction there should be at least one star. Since the sky is black, the Universe cannot be infinite. With that in mind, the Copernican Revolution—which displaced us from the centre of the Universe—is still not complete. It is geographical, but not temporal. Heliocentrism kicked the Earth and its peoples out of the centre of space, but the dark sky placed us in a special time—a time when we can still see the horizon of the visible Universe. Now we are in another special time—the time when humanity is conceptualised. The time to ask: what does humanity want?

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Science and Mountaineering

Posted on by wanderer

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I guess this has to be discussed because of how the current research methodology affects to many young scientist.

I would dare to say that one of the main reasons that many people enters research is because they want to discover something new.

Then I’ll compare that to climb a mountain, bur not just any mountain, but one that you don’t know how it is, where it is, or if exists at all!

Then how shall proceed someone that has only theoretical knowledge in mountaineering and has done a couple of treks in hills (a fresh graduate)?

Well that’s difficult. One would like to climb to climb the Everest, as the famous saying goes, because is there! But climbing the Everest is not easy, and worst, it has already been climbed…

So what the supervisors want you to do? well, get you  in shape so you can be a Sherpa to carry on helping them climb.

And what they want you to climb? certainly not something that is not known how it is, and even less something  you don’t know if exists at all.

What any sensitive person would do is make you climb something extensively surveyed, that has a clear path and peak (goal) and that might have been climbed already, but in a different way.

That’s sensitive, then many supervisor can be, well, not sensitive…

And then for the aspiring mountaineer that might seem dull and purposeless. What’s the reason to climb something known if there are many exiting mountains out there untouched?

Well the thing is both are right and both are wrong.

It is right to train
One one hand, First you shall be prepared, and the difficult part is that depends on the mountain it might take more or less effort to get on shape (skills), and you might need more or less people on shape and specialized roles to get there (teamwork).

Otherwise you will fail or get lost, which is a nice way of training too, but difficult to justify to a funding agency. 

Second lets be realistic, not everybody can climb a brand new mountain. Most of mountaineers keep climbing the same ones, maybe in slightly different ways and times. Still I know some that keep climbing unclimbed 6000ers :D.

Therefore  you shall not be frustrated if you never claim a new one, unless you REALLY want to climb an unclimbed one.

It’s right to try
So, on the other hand, first if someone is really motivated you shall not waste the energy, determination and motivation of these by doing dull hike or sherpa work. What one might lack on skills can be compensated by pure determination,  confidence, fearless and instincts that might be different for a young unweathered mountaineer.

Second, it’s good too let the determined try and encourage and help them instead of the opposite. It’s a nice bet that in the worst case might end in failure but in the best you might climb or discover that mountain! Since it’s a unknown one maybe even one inexperienced mountaineer can clam it, as the skills required might also be something original.

It’s worth the try, at least for some part of the time.

Creativity not encouraged
Unfortunately the way I see science now I would say that creativity is not encouraged, to be the least pessimistic. That limits the exploration capability.

Confidence
That’s what most seems to be about.
If you are confident that’s what will push you to struggle trough. If you are confident you can attempt the unknown. If you are confident and motivated  you will push against any hardship to find the way.

But what brings confidence? Well in this system it is the most dull of things, marks for fresh graduates, and number of publications for seniors. Hardly something to attempt crazy endeavors.

What shall bring confidence is skills and encouragement in breakthrough thinking.

Yeah, not all the time, not blind encouragement, but hell we are scientists, we shall find a better and more engaging way of exploring.

What is stopping the encouragement  then?
Many things, the ones that can be changed are the expectations of having a publishable outcome, and all the funding system and CV building. What hardly can be changed is the complexity and difficulty of pushing new frontiers and the need of highly skilled and specialized labour for that.

One way forward?
Since the world out there is so big, there shall be room to create a system that pushes the dreamers and explores to brand new fields, and the hardworkers and skilled to expand the old ones.

There is a wold out there, let’s be wise in how to climb it 😀