The cultural ideal, privileges and industrial-scale evils

Posted on by wanderer

Through my studies of cultural loss, I came across a powerful concept from political sciences, the political ends. This is proposed by Morton Gorden within a process of conflict resolution as the “process by which a government sets limits on what enters the political process”(Gorden 1972:vii).

In an evolutionary perspective, governments come after politics, politics comes after public, and public comes after culture. Since my objective is to focus on humans and humanity, for now, I want to abstract that basic schema beyond governments, to a dynamic that captures most of human behaviour.

For that, I reinterpret the first step of the process “goals”, or “political goals” as pursuing a specific “cultural ideal”. In other words, political goals are culturally generated representations of desired final states.

In that framing, I claim that we can see the political process as the path towards the fulfilment of representations of cultural ideals. Even without a government or collective decision-making, as long as there is an individual who wants to freely express its cultural ideal in a social environment, that can be seen as “politics”.

Simply put, every action to pursue a specific cultural end defines politics.

Goals in a political system reflect patterns in culture. The setting of specific goals represent a choice of objectives from a larger range of possibilities residing within the accessible cultural landscape.

Evolutionarely, my argument is that a cultural ideal, while abstractly shared by a “public”, resides in each of the individuals of that public. While growing up in a public a.k.a. a society, we slowly form a diffuse, ever-changing idea of a cultural ideal.

This sequence: cultural ideal formation – action – politics – ends , is not exclusive to humans, or humanity for that matter.

Let us trace possible evolutionary roots for the pursuit of a “cultural ideal”.

Remember Lekker, the vervet monkey who took over as alpha male, and could eat the popcorn of his preferred colour?

If we accept that the choice in colour of popcorn can be called “cultural”, then Lekker imported his “cultural ideal” when he went to a new group that had a different cultural preference of popcorn colour.

With the alpha-male power and influence Lekker kept eating the colour of popcorn that he was used to eating. By that time (six months later) both colours were equally sweet, so there was no real fitness difference other than the colour. In the case of Lekker, he was able to keep his rather simple “cultural ideal”.

We humans do this conscious and unconscious process all the time while sticking to a cultural ideal. For whatever reason, a “cultural ideal” of how things ought to be is created, and then individuals take constant actions to approach that ideal. In the case of Lekker, he achieved his “ideal” through power. Paraphrasing my earlier definition, these actions were Lekker’s politics.

Again, I call all the actions that one takes towards achieving a cultural ideal, “politics”.

As I’ve written before, Joan Fuster, one famous Valencian intellectual, has the aphorism that “politics is done by you or is done onto you”.

In other words, we are constantly doing politics by expressing or protecting our preferences, and even when not doing so, others will press their preferences and ideals to you. This might be because some humans have a tendency to press their preferences and ideals to others, unlike the vervet monkeys–there is no evidence that Lekker forced his preference of popcorn colour on others.

That’s where conflict arises, our constant cultural dynamics are smelted and we can apply Gorden’s framework.

Another interesting intellectual to summon here is Christofer Boehm. He was a primatologist and anthropologist who developed much of his career characterising egalitarianism and equality in human and non-human primate societies.

One of Boehm’s theses is that primates, us included, show two opposing tendencies, one is to oppress and the other is to fight oppression.

To oppress is what Lekker did when he took over the alpha position. That position allowed him to keep his ways in the new group who ate a different colour of popcorn.

What the difference is between other primates and humans, according to Boehm’s observations, is that in human small scale societies these groups are significantly more egalitarian than other primate groups and large scale societies–despite being a spectrum of social inequality and oppression in these small scale human societies.

This egalitarianism is not because humans have a significantly reduced tendency to oppress others, when compared to other primates, but because the small-scale societies have developed and sustained a set of strategies that effectively manage the emergence of oppressive tendencies and weeds it out before oppressive regimes, like Lekker’s taking over the group.

Interestingly, in many human small scale societies there is no such thing as a permanent “leader” like a Lekker. There is a prestige hierarchy, but leadership roles tend to be emergent and evanescent–situational, task-specific, non-centralised, and often temporary leadership rather than institutionalised or hereditary. In many cases, these roles are shared by a council, the decisions are made in a communal fashion or different leaderships emerge to deal with a specific problem or situation. When the problem is solved, or the situation changes, their particular leadership role can disappear with it like in the case of the axe-makers of the Wahgi.

Going back to cultural ideals, a cultural ideal can pop up, like popcorn, as well as being susceptible to constant change.

The rest of the macaques who, unlike Lekker, adapted to the local popcorn colour had to pay the small price of giving up the privilege of eating their preferred coloured popcorn from six months prior.

In that case, a change in “cultural ideal” had little repercussion other than maybe a reticence to try something they remembered as bitter.

The fact that we have a sense of stability and continuity is even more surprising. Take my grandfather, who had just turned 100 at the time of writing. His World has undergone immense revolutions in worldviews, technological advances, scientific breakthroughs, information and human connectivity, exploration, material wealth, services, ways of living, the concept of family, social bonds, entertainment options… Yet, his life, despite his experience of a civil war and an acrimonious post-war period, has been relatively stable, with a level of continuity and relative comfort unheard of for most of human history on this planet. One hundred rounds around the Sun provide so much and so little at the same time, encompassing the extremes of human existence in one lifetime.

My grandfather, in particular, had no problem adopting the “cultural ideal” of going to school, being removed from it because of warfare, working as a labourer to provide for his family when his father passed away after the war, living in a fascist autarkic economy and then a Catholic capitalist dictatorship, finding a wife – late by the standards of his time – owning a vehicle, benefiting from an incipient welfare state in terms of social security, healthcare and public education for his children, supporting his wife in opening a business, integrating into the European market and benefiting from an influx of wealth because of the valorisation of oranges, experiencing a transition to democracy, public nudity in the media and on the beaches, gifting a home to his children, taking early retirement, receiving a pension, travelling, and even accepting something as strange as homosexuals constituting a legal family and having the right to adopt children.

Throughout these continuous transitions, my grandfather’s “cultural ideal” reconstituted itself one way or another. Other aspects of that ideal have held strong, such as how an orange field should properly be tended, how my haircut should look, or how youngsters should care for elders.

Continuously, change was pushing against his “cultural ideals”, and those of his fellow elders, through technology, conflicts, discoveries, interconnection, integration, exposure and innovation. In the process, their individual “cultural ideals” changed without much push or pull, as if Lekke had adopted the local popcorn colour instead of his preferred one.

Most likely, most, if not all, “cultural ideals” hold little to no intrinsic value as long as holding them does not take one too far from the demands of reality. Reality, then, is just a selective pressure that constantly reshapes individual “cultural ideals”, while the Sunrise Paradox allows societies to be reshaped in the intervening periods.

In a sense, variation in “cultural ideals” is neutral as long as there is no selective pressure, as in the case of the preferred popcorn colour when both colours were equally sweet. The main difference is that cultural ideals might be reshaped constantly and, potentially, at striking speed throughout a human lifetime, though limits might exist on these changes.

The existence of the concept of “humanity” itself, and how it has expanded across human populations around the planet, represents a change in “cultural ideals” for hundreds or thousands of societies.

For most societies, what constitutes a person, or a human, is deeply intertwined with membership of that society, as we have seen in the case of ethnic categories.

Many small-scale societies call themselves “people”, “persons” or “humans” and, by implication, consider others to be “non-humans”. Moreover, across the continents, many groups call those who speak different languages “mutes” or “deaf”. It always makes me smile that Slavic languages use a word meaning “mute” to refer to Germans. For example, in Czech, Germans are Němci, which translates as something like “mute” or “silent”. Surely, German must sound to them, and many others, as if one wishes its speakers did not know how to speak German – apologies to German speakers here.

For most of human history, who speaks the language, or wears the same kind of tattoos and body markers, is WHO a person is. Others are just that: others. Interestingly, others can be a mixture of mythological creatures, animals and other beings that interact with real people but are not themselves considered people. Of course, there are ample exceptions to that in-group/out-group division, and cases of individuals from other ethnicities being adopted into groups that see themselves as the only people do exist. We even practise that kind of adoption with animals or inanimate objects like rivers, which acquire personhood through a system of beliefs, or even legal systems.

The fact that “humanity” exists as a global, all-encompassing term that includes every individual of the Homo sapiens species is something that has had to be built on top of the systematic destruction of “cultural ideals” that had clear definitions of what a “person” is.

What a “human” is fascinates us constantly, across all areas of existence, even when we look to the past. Through my research, I have had the opportunity to work with Neanderthal experts. Despite being considered a different hominin species, we now know that Homo sapiens repeatedly reproduced with Neanderthals, and that all humans outside sub-Saharan Africa are descended from Neanderthals.

The biological definition of “species” becomes blurred here, as Homo sapiens and Neanderthals could reproduce. My colleagues would have no problem referring to Neanderthals as “humans”. To this day, there is a profound debate about how “human” Neanderthals were. To engage in that debate, academics usually base their hypotheses on perceptions of their cognitive capacities and the cultural artefacts that can be found in archaeological contexts. In a way, this means outsourcing what it means to be human to what a given population, tens of thousands of years ago, could leave in the sediments of its settlements.

Again, our artificial classifications based on physical characteristics and cultural or ethnic ones get mixed and blurred, and we extend our newly minted concepts to tens of thousands of years ago. In the case of Neanderthals, this is mostly an academic or philosophical exercise. But who, or what, constitutes humanity has had, and will continue to have, repercussions for generations to come.


The deep fall, from privilege to mass evil

Changing the cultural ideal, like in the case of my grandparent 100 years, or what it means to be human, or the popcorn colour, sometimes seems to be quite neutral, and easy to transition from one state to the other.

However, other changes seem to be torturing for the ones experiencing them and happen at a high cost in terms of well-being for all the ones being involved.

For primates, losing other privileges, like the spot as the alpha male can be much more emotionally gruelling. No more choosing of the best food, being cuddled and deparasitised more than the others, abundant sex… Losing all of that when one is used to it sucks. So it makes sense that evolutionarily we have inherited this strong emotional attachment to privilege.

When I was at a top research institute, the head of the department took a liking to me, so we started organising weekly meetings. I really appreciated that privilege because the guy was hyper-busy and difficult to reach. I also was invited to be a “permanent visitor” to the department, meaning that my access to the institution would be prolonged for as long as the director wanted. I really liked the atmosphere there, beyond the director himself. My colleagues were gorgeous, I made many meaningful friends, the intellectual landscape and seminars were enriching and engaging, and a lot of scientific effervescence and advances were happening there in real time. Also I had access to a climbing wall and free sauna. I love both of these.

I left the institute and went travelling. I had an online meeting with the director and I forgot to cancel it because my mind was somewhere else. He did not take it kindly. I kept joining to the weekly online group meetings, but the interaction felt colder than before. A few months after I wanted to come back for a few weeks visit, and I was told through the administrators that I no longer had not that privilege. I did visit for one day, but I was told by the administrators that I was not being welcomed. I kept appearing at the online meetings still. But after a couple of appearances I was notified that I was begin cut off from access to the digital infrastructure. There were other details, but the important thing is that it felt bad, really bad, terrible, awful. The emotional upheaval, even though it was a slow-motion train crash, felt like one of the worst emotions of my life. I felt guilty over my own actions, but also a sense of powerlessness and injustice.

Luckily, I have this coping mechanism of doing cold dips. Losing the heat of your body quickly reminds you that there are other things in life.

After the final notification of being removed from the online groups, I went for a cold dip on the Baltic Sea in February, and it hit me. The emotional disturbance that I was feeling was the aggregation of losing privileges.

I could understand how that emotion, over thousands of generations of evolution, could potentially build this impressive force of needing to have power to oppress others, to keep the privileges in place. This is my speculation, of course, but the emotional upheaval hints at deep origins.

At that time I probably would have sold my soul if I had the option to gain the kind of power to reverse the perceived injustice and bring back my privileges.

Thankfully, I did not have that option to sell my soul. Plus a cold head, and body, helps to relativize things. Also, the understanding I gained through that upheaval is another coping mechanism for me. Gaining that insight at the price of that privilege felt like a comfort price. And life continues.

My personal experience of losing paradise, losing privilege, combined with the concept of “cultural ideals” politics and oppression allows me to connect with the concept of evil.

I will frame “evil” as understood by the interview with Ben Ferencz, one of the prosecutors of the Nuremberg trials (who was 98 at the time of the interview). In his view, the evil he has studied all his life after the Nuremberg trials was when humans rationally, and cold-mindedly, pursue the oppression and extermination of others at a massive scale.

As he put it:

people in very high places, people of good education and high rank are quite competent at becoming mass murderers against any group that they think threatens either their nationality or their religion or their economic circumstances. I have seen that. These are not crimes committed by devils with horns. These are committed by educated, well intentioned, patriotic people.

Ben was the chief prosecutor, he was 27 years old at the time of the trials. He only had space to prosecute 22 people out of more than 3000. Here is how he selected the ones to persecute:

I had at least 3000 people on detention. All of whom were complicit in mass murder. I selected who to prosecuted based on several factors. First of all, we have them in captivity. [...] I picked those of the highest rank and then checked out their background, from the Nazi party records which we captured in Berlin. Those who had Doctor degrees, and had... Or generals, they got priorities. I picked out 21 or 28, it was we only had 22 seats in the dock. Is that absurd? Of course it is absurd. There were only 22 seats in the dock for the Hermann Goering trial, so we have a selection.

From then on he studied all the cases of genocide, mass murder, war crimes, organised slavery and heinous crimes done at a massive scale across cultures across the planet. He wanted to understand of how people who were so well trained, spoke many languages, had multiple degrees and PhDs were able to do what they did in the final solution and setting up the extermination camps.

His conclusion on what motivated humans to engage in such dark, evil, cold-minded initiatives is that humans do such massive “evils” to others under three motivations: religion, ideology or keeping of privileges.

The third one resonated with me. It was the first time I heard that privilege could be a fundamental part of human nature.

Moreover, the other two motivations–religion and ideology, or patriotism–could be easily seen as cultural mechanisms to regulate privilege through the exercising of power, or its removal (like in revolutions). If Ben’s observations hold true, this might suggest a possible evolutionary mechanism linking the evils of mass murder and privilege.

As with the opening of this texts, understanding the dark side of humanity from a non-judgmental way would be part of our effort.

Understanding that many of our dark dynamics might come from a strong, evolutionarily build, and shaping an emotional package. Often, parts of ideology and religions build on that emotional package to redirect the emotional dynamism of losing privilege, or the fear of losing it. These dynamics are important in shaping what humanity wants.

If we do not develop the cultural infrastructure to regulate the dynamics of privilege we, in societies where oppression can reach industrial scale, and the lack of effective mechanisms to fight it–as the small-scale societies that the likes of Christopher Bohem and James Woodburn described– we are poised to repeat these monstrous acts.

Then, it will be important to understand how, when and in which ways cultural ideals are created, sustained and shaped, because in cultural ideals many privileges are often stored.

Interestingly, with Lekker I have been writing about his individual “cultural ideal” and his actions can be called politics as “the actions taken towards a political ideal”. Both of these are concepts, “cultural ideal” and “politics” here are seen from an individual perspective.

However, what we want to focus on are shared cultural ideals. These, after all, are the ones that truly drive the kind of oppression that genocides and slavery imply. Yes, we humans have that in us, do we want that?

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Global visions to global ideals

Global visions to global ideals

Posted on by wanderer

Whatever process we focus on to achieve a “global ideology” would be far from any given form of that ideology. However, as we have seen, a “global vision” already exists in certain technical areas. These areas can be seen that as having reached de facto global standardisation. Other process might follow the technical dynamics, we shall investigate what, and how, other aspects of what it means to be a human can reach global ideals.

Similarly with languages, and the primordial diversity that we illustrated when talking about first encounters between diverse human groups, historically the differences between human populations have been enormous, testing the limits of what it means to be human.

Cultural groups have organised themselves in a wide variety of ways, from the way unions are made, kids are raised, division of labour constructed, ways of seeking food and refuge, medicine, artistic expressions, ways of keeping the group knowledge, religious visions and practices… Almost every aspect of what characterises to be human has experienced an explosion in diversity, with the only commonalities being that these aspects are shared by virtually all human populations. Reproduction, food, shelter, language, body modification/ornamentation, artistic and spiritual expressions, being probably the main ones.

Humans also seem to share multiple universal –or quasi-universal– characteristics. As we have seen, these are the smiles and laughter, pointing towards things, the taboo of reproducing with your mother or your son, a division of labour based on gender, food based taboos, religious beliefs and afterlife, a cosmovision, oral traditions and stories, rituals, music and arts, ethnobotanic knowledge, modification of the environment, humour and the use of technologies such as fire, spears, hammers, strings, ropes, baskets and other such tools. Maybe also the fact that we usually laugh across cultures when somebody falls! That is difficult to prove universally, still, it seem that, at least across ten distant foraging societies, pain and misfortune to be a recurring theme.

Although that list of things seems like a huge set of characteristics, that is nothing when compared with the astonishing diversity of human culture. To find common ground within this diversity is what allows to ask a common question.

Common ground is important, because, even if a lingua franca is shared by different cultural groups, the concepts that are encoded by that language shall also be shared if need to be mutually understood. For example, it is useless to have a word to define a food that is only known by one cultural group. We valencians have given to the world the word Paella, and also an emoji. Paella is both the the pan where the meal is cooked, and the meal itself. Many of the readers might not be familiar with the word paella, you can google it and it would be an easy find. For the ones familiar with the word, probably their knowledge came about by eating the dish itself, and not from reading the definition of Paella. Alternatively, one could have eaten a seafood rice “Arroz con Mariscos” in Peru previously, and when reading about paella, without having actually tried it, been able to understand more or less the concept because these meals, and the experience of eating them, are similar enough even though are called differently and traditional Valencian paella not having seafood, but rabbit and chicken.

In summary, new language and concepts have to be incorporated in the first part by experience, like learning a language for the first time, as newborns do. That takes time. A newborn potentially takes about 2 to 3 years to reach language fluidity through the incorporation and linkage of all the concepts that are being incorporated in the brain, with a vocabulary and a grammar associated. And after that period one never really stops learning, as new concepts and vocabulary keep appearing in ones life, even if it is just the names of new people who are integrated into the human community, such as spouses or newborns. No matter what society we live in, language is something that gets richer and richer throughout ones life.

Similarly, when learning a second language it is significantly easier if the language is close to the one that is already known, especially in terms of vocabulary. Concepts in both languages tend to have words that sounds in a similar way or are closely related. With that the effort to learn is little, because there is a common ground where many bridges are already established. On the other hand, when learning distant languages the effort needed is significant, as each word and concept is virtually new and the bridges have to be build one by one in a process that is somehow equivalent to learn how to speak again, though quite distinct as well, as knowing one language already shapes how one adquires others.

With ideologies, and in general cultures, we can make the analogy with the languages. Similar ideologies have already many bridges of mutual understanding, while distant ones have few points of connection where to build a mutual understanding. Often, for people from one culture to understand the other, there is the need to immerse into the other in order to truly absorb all the concepts needed for a mutual understanding. That is time consuming and impractical.

It is difficult for the members of two different ideologies to truly understand the other. In fact, it is the opposite in many cases, ideologies and identities are on occasion build and defined through the radical opposition to the other. What is reinforced is what makes them different. For example, french youth in the 70s and 80s quickly developed Verlan (l’envers, “the inverted” in french). Velan is a complex argot that flips syllabic order in words. The tradition goes back to at least the XIX c., among prisoners, the underworld and popular groups. But by the end of the XX c., it took off as a generational phenomena to create a code that limits who can understand it. It is generally limited to one or two key words per sentence, while mixed with other known argot. Through language, youth could distinguish themselves and create an identity distinct from the older generations and the wider french society, especially in urban ghettos, where these demographics suffer general societal disenfranchisement. Similarly, in Bouganbille, Papua, the Uisai dialect of Buin, inverted the language gender, not only in nouns but throughout all the linguistic system—pronouns, verbs, numerals, demonstratives and adjectives. Since such change is so profound and systematic, some linguists propose that it was a deliberate act by the Uisai to distinguish themselves from the other Buin communities.

Therefore, for practical proposes, the understanding of the other, and willingness to do so, is what constitutes the basis for a needed mutual understanding.

This process, however, builds upon the biased connections that we already have seen in the previous sections: exchange, commerce, colonization, conquest, universal technical languages, a universal natural language, and as we hinted with maps, nation states.

Upon these connections, there are other levels that we will explore it. Mainly, the export of a set of global ideals by Western powers. This process is not merely limited to the Western World, but I argue that most of intercultural conflicts, oppression and disagreements emerge from a handful of behaviours: how one looks, how one eats, how one fucks, how one works, how one owns, how one kills…

Provably even these last words might arise some emotional reaction in some readers. That reaction, indeed I claim, shapes much of what the aims, and limits, of our question.

Moreover, since the Europeans have proceed to export how one looks, how one eats, how one fucks, how one works, how one owns, how one kills; across the world as a dominant culture, they done so in a brick and mortar way, through infrastructure, and the build up of global institutions.

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Politics of Maps

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The cultural ideal, privileges and industrial-scale evils

Roads: rules and signs

Posted on by wanderer

Let’s leave bureaus, sports, aid and law for a bit, and focus on one more scientifico-technical standard that emerged on the back of technological development at the beginning of the XXc.

The world had not finished with mathematics, music and signs as technical or symbolic languages. A much more passionate topic rolls on: road signage!

As with clocks (timekeeping), religion and administration (the calendar), accounting (mathematical signs), the printing press (punctuation), musical instruments (music sheets), geodesics and administration (the metric), statistics (significance and error conventions), the telegraph (the Morse code), the World Fairs (places for technonerds to meet), the railways (time zones), bicycles (standardised parts) and typewriting (QWERTY keyboards), the motorised vehicles that were taking over the planet at the beginning of the XXc were poised to push some convention upon us.

We might be familiar with the signs that emerge on the side of roads. They might be circular, squares, triangles, octagons, or sideways squares (diamonds), shields and house-like shapes (pentagons). Their colours would be red, white, blue, yellow, green, with the occasional brown, pink, or orange. There are also luminescent ones, with colours that change, usually from green to orange and to red. These signs have a combination of standardised pictures, messages and numbers to convey an almost global meaning. These signs are expected to be understood by the people who go about on the roads with their motor vehicles.

The signs and traffic lights did not exist before the clogging of the pre-existing roads with these fast vehicles, though bicycle clubs were the first ones to experiment with road signage, especially indicating slopes. The new road conditions called for easily identifiable signs to be read quickly by any driver, no matter their origin. So, with the fast, and numerous, vehicles the signs went up. Soon enough people in Europe were aware that the signs had to be shared across national borders, otherwise vehicles crossing from one country to another could be confused by different meanings. Speed of reaction was, and still is, crucial.

Following the international conventions that we have seen emerging from the end of the XIXc. on the back of technical inventions and imperial powers, they organised what probably is one of the most boring conferences in history. In 1909 the European vehicle associations met in Paris to decide on a small set of common traffic signs. They did a similar thing in 1931 and 1949 in Geneva to unify a larger set of signs on a European scale. By 1968 security triumphed over boredom, they met in Vienna and created the “Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals”, aiming to make traffic signalling universal for the whole planet.

They failed.

Map of "danger" sing shapes on by country. Red, blues, green denote triangles use ad warning or danger. Yellow and orange indicate diamonds use. Purple has both.
Map of “danger” sing shapes on by country. Red, blues, green denote triangles use ad warning or danger. Yellow and orange indicate diamonds use. Purple has both.

Currently, there are two main road sign standards on the planet, plus a lot of other stuff in between. One of them is the European one, which gave the world the “Vienna Convention”, adopted by 68 countries (roughly red on the map), and the North American one, boringly called the “Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices for Streets and Highways” (MUTCDSH), and used, with many variants, in the yellow countries on the map. But not all is well and standard in the US for the MUTCDSH, as some states engaged in Typefacewars, maybe the most bland wars in history. In southern Africa, ten countries use the also engaging name of the Southern African Development Community – Road Traffic Signs Manual (SADC-RTSM).

Road traffic sign from South Africa, as encoded in the Southern African Development Community – Road Traffic Signs Manual

But even in MUTCDSH- and SADC-RTSM-derived countries, The Convention forms the basis of much of the traffic signage, or is similar enough. If a non-Irish European drives through the US, most of the signs would be immediately familiar. The biggest differences between The Convention and Non-Convention countries are that speed limits and obligatory signs are rectangular, and yellow diamonds with black signs are used as warnings. Instead, The Convention uses round signs for speed limits and obligatory signs and an upward-pointing red and white triangle for warnings — also shared by SADC-RTSM, but one might find different animals. Even that difference between Convention and Non-Convention danger signs is not much, as an upward-pointing triangle is just the upper half of a diamond, therefore it is not much of a stretch of the imagination to understand the other.

The story of road signage does not stop in the 20th century! In 2025, the Global Forum for Road Traffic Safety (another global boring organism that rules your life but you probably never heard about) passed a resolution to replace the entire text of the Convention! The exciting road-signage path rolls ahead!

We then took this little traffic diversion to show three ingredients that we will see from now on shaping many of the global questions of the planet. First, an agglomeration of big and middle-sized countries that are in close proximity to each other and need to share a convention for the benefit of them all find terms to agree with each other. Second, when new technology standards — especially related to communication — emerge and extend, the consolidation into commonly agreed rules tends to take shape relatively fast. Third, colonial powers force the conventions into colonised territories without the input of the societies under dominion.

Roads, moreover, are the paramount example of infrastructure. It is needed, inherited, maintained over generations and represents connectivity like nothing else. For much of the modern world, the combination of technology and infrastructure drives the need for a — virtually — universal language. Coordination forces create the political motivation for neighbouring, independent administrations to sit down at a table and try to agree on a common set of conventions. Once a standard achieves enough maturity through this process of regional standardisation, technological development and colonial imposition, the parts of the planet that are still not part of this dynamic are more likely simply to adopt that standard. New players, then, either adopt it or at least have it in consideration.

With these three characteristics, it is easy to see how Europe is the place in the World that has the most influence in shaping much of the standards and internationalisation, as we have seen in the Western Dominions entry.

Similarly, exceptions to these three general trends are easy to see, with densely populated islands that have not been colonised recently, like the Japanese archipelago and Great Britain, and big countries like China and the US. The US and the UK in part explain the survival of two Western standard flavours, as they were big enough, isolated enough and innovative enough to consolidate and protect their own conventions, but still share much with the rest of international protocols.

This kind of mindset and framework would be important for our question of what humanity wants.

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International organisations

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Aviation, One language to rule them all

Bureau, THE metric bureau

Posted on by wanderer

The humble metric system, as we have seen, was not established immediately. The legacy of the metric that I want to focus on is how it came to be, and what bureau was created to establish, motitor, standarize and update the metric.

The metric gathered support little by little from 1795, until, by 1875, the infamous Metre Convention, with the US being one of its founders! made it the International standard we all know and love, well at least one of these two is true.

The convention did not just stop at pushing for an international, standarised, metric system, no, they created one of the first bureaus. That we will be evaluating for now.

The 1875 one is the Weights and Measures: the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, or in its original french Bureau . They also established a conference (General Conference on Weights and Measures) and a committee (International Committee for Weights and Measures). Again, more on bureaus later, and committees, and conferences, and…

But why, by 1875, was it needed for a French mostassaf to be in charge of an international bureau at all? This is the interesting question. What is relevant for the metric system is not the use of units for measurement set by a national administration, but the fact that it implanted the idea that we all must use it and be raised in it.

The french Weights and Measures mostassaf did not came out of nowhere. Going back to the scientific homogenisation, we need to add the germans to the mix.

By 1841, 28 measurements of the magnetic field of the Earth where taken over a six year period. These measurements, all over the planet, where centralised by the “Magnetic Society”, or  Magnetische Verein in the original german. This was a society not a bureau, yet. As a society, the compromise was just to gather, standarise and share the measurements, so they could be useful across the planet. There was an extra benefit for endeabour, navigation. Like with the making of accurate clocks to measure longitude, an accurate description of the magnetic field allowed better seafaring transits, as the north and south magnetic poles of the Earth do not coincide with the geographical poles of the planet. Actually, the magnetic ones have a tendency to wander, quite fast indeed (hundreds of kilometres per decade), and even flip! (north becoming south). This was know for decades, or centuries, but was Gauss who in the 1830s started measuring its strength, and latter instigated the creation of the society, with international aims and ambitions.

Later on, the also german based Mitteleuropäische Gradmessung (Central European Arc Measuremen), linked with the need to measure the meridian to estimate the circunference of the Earth, and hence, the metre, was created on 1862. Interestingly, the Mitteleuropäische Gradmessung still exists in the form of the International Association of Geodesy, again, an association and not a bureau. By 1859 it was known that several meridians had not the same length, and that as measurement techniques would advance, the nominal definition of the metre would constantly change, even if so slightly.

A Catalan office —well aware of the Barcelona lie— Calos Ibañez e Ibañez de Ebro, was in charge of the International Association of Geodesy when in 1875 the Meter Convention was stablished. At the time of Carlos running these two pioneering international organisms, these were planned as contributing to increase precision in navigation, cartography and geography, as well as the emerging railways and telegraphs. Railways and telegraphs will come hunting us, but that’s for later.

So, despite the logic of unification being a concept from the particular French Revolution — which linked the metric with revolutionary ideas to make their political movement of decapitating kings (and many others) universal — the universalisation cached up four generations later, and, for the first time the particular Catalan mostassaf was not to be for a town, or state, but for all the planet!

From this story what I want to emphasise is that the importance is the base of knowledge of the standard, more than the standard itself, whatever it is.

How a continuously fighting world of nations came to decide that they could trust a base of knowledge? Moreover, how for the first time —unlike with mathematical, temporal, musical, and punctuational spontaneous standardisation — these nations decided to bureaucratise the process of standardisation with scientific geeks at the front of the first modern international institutions. This how process boils down to write laws that would be shared across borders and mutually understood, plus trust that the mostassaf would be available and willing to keep, share and not abuse its privative and privileged knowledge. Again, remember that the term mostassaf comes from an Arab religious figure of moral and measurement accountability.

So what makes the metric stand? Truly, a handful of things:
i) It was the first one designed from the get-go to be universal;
ii) it was based on natural units accessible, in principle, to anyone who had the time to finance the measure;
iii) it was easy to learn, aligning with mathematical notation, already quite universal and on base 10;
iv) it was set to work with technical and scientific communities;
v) the scientific communities were expanding, encompassing industrial and geodesical needs for better instruments, better measurements, faster and easier comparisons and sharing of technical information and better land and sea surveys for better administrative oversight (more on administrations later);
vi) its creators also kinda pushed for it to be adopted universally, following the spirit of revolution;
vii) there were not many alternatives at the time, to be honest.

Let us look at the last option (vii), alternatives? The only real contender for standard measurement used for scientific and technical applications by the end of the XIXc was the British Imperial system (still slightly kept by the US and Liberia). The imperial traces its roots to the standardisation of English measures, as designed by the 13th-century Magna Carta, but standardised by 1496, rectified in 1588 and made the British Imperial system by 1826.

We have the imperial length units. Let us look at these!. The basis is the foot, abbreviated as ft. The multiples are a yard as 3 ft, chain 3×22 ft, furlong 3×220 ft, mile 3×1760 ft, league 3x3x1760 ft. Well, it seems they were trying a base 3, but kinda gave up on it, soon. For the sub-units: twip 1/3^3×640 ft, thou 1/3×4000, barleycorn 1/3^2×4, inch 1/3×4, hand 1/3. OK, OK, kinda keeping with the basis 3 there, sometimes 4 as well, maybe inspired by the 60 for time — 3x4x5 — but also not quite. Now let us look at the distance units at sea: we have the fathom 6.0761 ft, cable 607.61 and nautical mile 6076.1… Now there is a base ten! But not much sense otherwise.

But a visual is better than thousands of words, and words of measures. Here is a side-by-side comparison of units of length in the traditional English system vs the metric one.

Comparison of English customary english and their interrelation with metric

For mass, the basic unit is the pound. Fair enough. But the shorthand for pound is lb. Yeah, we have seen that pound and livre are, in theory, referring to the same old Roman unit, but still, lb looks quite different than p or pn. Anyway, let us see its divisions: grain is 1/7000 lb, drachm is 1/256 lb, stone is 14 lb, quarter 28 lb, hundredweight 112 lb and ton 2240 lb. Little sense, but in base 12 or 60, like time, still makes no sense. For multiples it has base 14 (1, 2, 4, 800). Yet for divisions it has a basis, ehem, no consistent basis. A grain is 1/(14×500) — why 500? Well, a drachm is 1/2^8…

Sorry, I tried.

I will not even try the volume units. A beer pint is just a large half-litre drink.
Cheers to that!

The other option could have been the Burmese system. Myanmar still has traditional Burmese units of measurement. The Burmese system maybe has been maintained, in part, because for mass and volume it follows a neat base-two system, in which each unit is a factor 2 bigger than the previous — the metric being a factor 10 between units. Unfortunately, this is not the case for length and area; no, for length the Burmese system is a mess. For example, as of 2010, the state used miles to describe the length of roads, square feet for the size of houses, square kilometres for land area in cities, acres for agricultural areas, kilometres for the dimensions of the country. Still, when I was travelling there in 2015 I did check if they were the US of Asia for the metric, but for reasonable driving they did use km for distances to places and km/h as road speed limit indicators.

So, form the above list, let us focus on points (iv) to (vi): the need, willingness and expansion of technical and scientific domains beyond national borders (more on nations later).

The expansion of the metric is interlinked with these technical and national advancements and ended with some of the first bureaus on the planet.

The republican French, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Revolution, did a technical and industrial fair in 1798. This was not much international, as they were in the middle of intense wars, still not called Napoleonic. At the exposition they showed devices demonstrating the new metric system of metres, grams and litres, and, following European fair traditions, they had prizes for outstanding products, mostly fabrics and textiles, but now including innovative technical and industrial devices. One of them was the precursor of the modern pencil, and pencil colours.

They held three more expositions until 1806, and then new ones shall happen every 3 years; this allowed for enough new inventions, geographical explorations, arts, sciences and devices to be developed between events. But by 1809 France was indeed in the middle of the Napoleonic wars.

By 1819 the now French kingdom restarted the expositions, which happened roughly every 4 years.

Then the Kingdom of France decided to revolutionise a bit again and become the kingdom “of the French”. Notice the difference; it will be important later on. Then they decided to make an exposition every 5 years, starting in 1834.

The 1844 one was quite a success internationally, spawning similar fairs in other nations — Bern (1845), Madrid (1845), Saint Petersburg (1848), Lisbon (1849). Then in 1849 there would be the last national exhibition, as in 1851 the British did their Great Crystal Palace Exhibition, which for the first time had the dimension of a world, and not national, fair. From there on, world exhibitions would happen regularly, a bit like the Olympic Games now, and cities would compete with each other to host the event.

These World Fairs, or “the Expos” for us old enough to remember them being a thing, initially were great opportunities for showcasing the most advanced scientific and technological discoveries of the time. This was especially important in an era when more efficient and powerful steam engines, steel, locomotives, rails, and later electricity and telegraph were taking over the European nations and their colonies. In these events, industrialists and scientists from around the world could meet and agree on stuff.

That stuff, my friends, was the metric system, which by the end of the Napoleonic Empire, like decimal time, had gone down the drain. Napoleon reintroduced the customary units, but retained the metre and kilogram for these units to be compared against. The metric systen was also taught at schools and academia. It was simple to teach, as we have seen.

Meanwhile, the metre lived on in other states that were under the influence of the French Empire and retained the metric system, like the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Piedmont, later the Italian kingdom.

And the US, of all places, had a central role for the metre. The Coastal Survey Office, since its inception in 1807, but really by 1836, standardised all the coastal measurements with the metre as its basis.

And even nations that escaped Napoleon, like Portugal, by 1814 adopted the metre, though retaining the traditional names when needed.

Spain, as we have seen with the Catalan measures, had a diverse set of systems. But by 1849 decided to standardise measurements with the metre and kilogram, and by 1851 decided to conduct a survey of the state. The Spanish bureau of measures also adopted and developed new measurement tools to compensate for thermal expansion of the standard metre rods. That made the use of the metre more precise and more manageable. Then it provided standard metres to the Egyptians, and the standard was used throughout France and the German Confederation.

On the first French Universal Exposition in 1855, the Swiss had finished, and presented, their official map with the metre adopted as unit of length, and this was awarded a medal.

Moreover, the Congress of Statistics was held in Paris at the same time as the exposition. There, statisticians, probably tired of wasting time making conversions of units, and probably not happy with the metre being kept by a France-based mostassaf, decided to settle on a uniform decimal system of measures, weights and currencies.

Again, the US pushed for the metric system by 1866. One of the bases of precision balances was in grams and kilograms. In 1866 (made in Bangor, Maine, where I’m writing this now) the legislative organ passed the Metric Act, which defined the metric system in terms of customary units rather than with reference to the international prototype. Interestingly, this anchored the customary measurement units to that of the metre, even if it legislated the other way around.

Then, at the 1867 Exposition Universelle, again in Paris, the statistician geeks formalised the universalisation desire with the creation of a Committee for Weights and Measures and Monies. Now it would not be the French revolutionaries calling for universalisation, but a bunch of geeks with the ears of wealthy industrialists interested in easier technical standards.

That committee finally, after the Franco-Prussian War, created the Bureau, the International Bureau of Weights and Measures, with two governing organs and the headquarters. The newly created German and Italian states already adopted the metric system as their standard. These nations now were part of the bureau, which was tasked to facilitate the standardisation of weights and measures around the world. The bureau had three parts: a conference as a forum for representatives of member states; a committee of metrologists as an advisory board of high standing; the headquarters as the meeting place and laboratory facilities that inform the decision and advisory bodies for decision-making. Corporations, interestingly, often work similarly to that: the conference would be the shareholders’ meeting, and the committee the board of directors.

The Catalan Carlos Ibáñez e Ibáñez de Ibero — the head of the Spanish survey and national measures institute, and maybe familiar with the mostassaf concept — was one of the main pushers of an international standard based on the metre. By the bureau’s creation, he was made the initial president of the committee, the Permanent Committee of the International Metre Commission (confusingly, also named International Committee for Weights and Measures and General Conference on Weights and Measures; do not ask). Being Catalan of origin, Ibáñez, since 1853, also impulsed the remeasurement of the “Barcelona lie”, that is, the Paris meridian, extending the measurement from the Shetland to the Sahara. That effort, and other European meridian measurements, awarded him the first presidency of the International Geodetic Association by 1867.

The 1875 Metre Convention put the decision-making of the standard measurement of the planet in a bunch of nation states’ hands. The original signatories being Argentina, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Peru, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ottoman Empire, United States of America (yeah, you have seen it well, US is here!), and Venezuela (which no longer ratifies the Metre Convention).

Metre Convention on the planet. Dark green, member states; light green, associate states; red, former member states; light red, former associate states.

Interestingly enough, the metre is also not completely dominant in the UK, where the standards for the metric system, and the metal piece that defined the kilogram for 160 years, were made.

In the US there is also the fun fact that, unlike the UK, industry is not forced to use the metric system for all their products, despite being one of the original seventeen signatory nations to the Metre Convention.

Therefore, when NASA asked its suppliers to work with the metric system, but one of its suppliers, who procured thrusters for a probe to Mars, worked with customary units of pound-force-seconds, the result of such an integration of two different systems was that the poor Mars Climate Orbiter probe simply went on its sweet way to Mars just to descend to about 57 kilometres above Mars’ surface, instead of its planned orbit at about 150 kilometres. At that height, and without enough angular velocity, and with the drag of the tenuous Martian atmosphere, the orbiter simply produced a nice flame in the atmosphere.

That is the price of not having a unified unit system.

So being the first, and not having many alternatives, plus being relatively memorable and accessible (had to knock at the Parisian mostassaf from time to time, but was a cool person), made the whole system go global, or pay the price if not.

The metric system simply illustrates how national administrations and gatherings of world representatives agree to standards. In the metric case this quasi-standard emerged through technological need, the ease of communication that allowed repeated forums where actors interested in standardisation and sharing could gather and lobby in a uniform way, the relative ease of the new system and its spirit of universalisation, and a specific individual with the right connections and maybe aware of the connection between moral and measurement accountability through an old mostassaf legacy in our lands.

If we compare the metric to the other standards that we have seen — mathematical and musical notation, francas, timekeeping and punctuation — all of these share similarities. Technical advancements for clocks creation and the need of better measurements for navigation and trains in the case of timekeeping; more communication, new instruments and bigger orchestras for music; economic interest for francas; facilitation and economic dissemination for punctuation. With the exception of the calendar, none of these standards had behind them the will of the states or nations. And even the legislation for calendars happened at a customary and slow attrition, state by state, without an international gathering, convention or bureau leading it.

Like the weights and shekel 3000 years ago, we can look at more modern cases of this seemingly spontaneous standardisation originating by the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th. For example, if you ever used headphones, the connector, or “jack”, to the sound device might have always been the same diameter 1⁄4 in and shape, or have only two–three standards (1/8). Another piece quite familiar to most of us nowadays is the keyboard I am typing this on, which is an almost international standard, called QWERTY, named after the order of the letters on the first keys’ row. Looking elsewhere, the bicycle chain is 0.5 in between pins and 5⁄16 in for roller diameter. The size of cargo containers, 8 ft wide by 8 ft 6 in high and 20 or 40 ft long. Yeah, metric did not make it for jack, bikes and cargo, damn.

More on the emergence of these (and other) standards later.

What we can infer, however, is that standardisation follows a mixed route of informal conformity by useful means of exchange, plus a forcing pace by institutional action. Then, in an interconnected, and colonially dominated, world, the metric system in particular shows the first, or one of the first instances, of how slow attrition to shared standards could be hastened by gatherings and lobbying committees. And how that commitment results in autonomous bureaus that horn in their task. In the experience of THE Metric, the legislative power of national institutions could be weaponised to steer reluctant populations that were happy with their local traditions and units, however clumsy, to adopt new and bureaucratised standards countries away, instead of their local mostassaf. Or shield them, as in the US, however clumsy. A new state-sponsored universal education could get away with old traditions by educating children in new, maybe more memorable, systems.

With the dreaded metric we can see how all the pieces are falling into place to have the ruleset to ask our question: what does humanity want? But before that we need to go through the emerging bureaus and other international organisms that, for now, rule, the World.

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The sound of music

Posted on by wanderer

To keep postponing the Metric, let us explore another metric — the music metric. Since my music ignorance is as immense as music is —and I do deeply apologise to all he music lovers out there— I take metric to mean notation.

As we all know, sound is difficult to record compared to visual signals. We have pictorial art going all the way back to 60.000, to 80.000 years, but no record of sounds before the invention of gramophones and ceramic disks. Though we do have evidence of music being played at least 40.000 years ago, with evidence of close to 200 fragments ivory or bone flutes, whistles, and pipes and a conch shell horn. Percussive instruments can be traced to the same period, with mammoth bones as drums, and reindeer-antler as drum sticks and possible rattles (Morley, 2013). However, from the beginning of music to the first sound records, the only way to play music created previously was either to have an unbroken sequence of people remembering how to play it, or to encode it in a system that could be reproduced later — either by other humans or by moving machines.

As always, the Greeks and Babylonians (Sumerians, to be exact) had already dealt with the encoding of music, but music is an immensely complicated language, and these scripts were only able to store the strings, the intervals, and tuning parts of the music.

The bit that is often told about the Greeks is the mythical Pythagoras. Beyond his triangles — which mostly were a well-established Egyptian knowledge — the Pythagoreans linked music and ‘harmony’ with mathematics, which they copied from the Babylonians this time. (Interestingly, the Chinese Shí-èr-lǜ scale follows the same logic.) Beyond copying and being attributed things he did not create, Pythagoras did make the musical and mathematical ‘divinity’ a religious sect by the 6th century BCE — if you want to perpetuate nerdy, complex, boring knowledge, you’d better make a religion out of it. In instruments, pitches, notes that were a half or 3/2 apart ‘sounded’ good. With strings, this is related to length, but also tension or tuning. Pythagoras and his followers could not resist giving this a ‘mystical’ meaning, trying to fit existence into his ‘divine’ vision — but reality, as it turned out, had other ideas.

What Pythagoras actually discovered — before wrapping it in mysticism — was that the harmonics of strings resonate with each other, a simple fact of physics that our ears have evolved to enjoy. From what we understand now, it is mostly a coupling of harmonics in strings and “overtones” in general. In other words, when an instrument produces a ‘pitch’, it gives off not just one pure wave but many smaller ones that resonate with it — and these combine to sound harmonious because they complement each other. Then, if you add another tone that also resonates with the primary frequency, or some of the overtones, that is also harmonious.

Our auditory system also resonates with nearby frequencies, which is why we find it oddly unsettling when two notes are almost — but not quite — the same. And there is a cultural layer on top. If you hear something that is slightly dissonant often enough, it will “sound good enough” not to care. It’s only when we hear music from another culture — one that divides its scales differently, using another temperament — that we start to notice those dissonances. Once your ear adjusts to the new metric, returning to the old one feels oddly off for a while.

And again, we go to Western Europe to observe the origins of most modern music notation. In this case, it started with the singing of prayers. As you can notice, voice is a continuum; there is no predefined ‘do’ or ‘re’. So voice, and music, had to be discretised into common units that everybody could ‘aspire’ to. This standardisation, inspired by the mathematical spirit of universality, was thought to be divine — which made following Pythagoras rather straightforward. Until it wasn’t (but more on that later).

Before the well-known pitch system, what ecclesiastical choruses did by the 10th century was to annotate when the melody went ‘up’ or ‘down’ on top of the lyrics. Then a reference line was added to show the relative high and low of the melody. From there, by the 11th century, more lines were added above and below to structure the pitches in a standardised way. In parallel, it was necessary to know what the actual ‘pitch’ was, and that’s where the same guy who started adding the extra lines developed solmisation, with the familiar Do–Re–Mi–Fa–Sol–La–Ti (or Si) sequence appearing (though Ut instead of Do). This provided seven basic notes, which mirrored pre-existing scales like the Byzantine Pa–Vu–Ga–Di–Ke–Zo–Ni and the Indian svaras Sa–Re–Ga–Ma–Pa–Dha–Ni. This naming (blue in map below), however, was never fully standardised: the British preferred C–D–E–F–G–A–B (red in the map), as in guitar chords (E–A–D–G–B), while Germans and neighbouring regions (green, yellow, and sky blue in the map) used C–D–E–F–G–A–H.

If one doubles around the central note, this provides the conventional twelve notes to be placed on top of the five-line staff developed by the 13th century. If you place a symbol on top of the five lines, plus four in between them, and two more on top and bottom, you have eleven spots; adding one more small line (a ledger line) at the bottom when needed is easy and gives the Babylonian twelve. At this point, we have something that looks a lot like the modern musical staff, or pentagram, and symbols that look a bit like the familiar ‘white’ [whole note], ‘black’, and ‘round’ musical notes. These symbols, known as ‘neumes’, took longer to standardise; there was still variety until around 1700, but by then most European notation had settled into the familiar form — even recognisable to a musically challenged person like me. Five thin lines, a ‘clef’ symbol at the beginning, and the pleasant ant-like procession of pitch along them. But like mathematics, musical notation is immense!

For the temperament, or tuning itself, Pythagorean (Babylonian and Chinese) fixing of the twelve notes to perfect ratios of 1/2, 3/2, 2/3 and their powers (C 1⁄1, D 9⁄8, E 81⁄64, F 4⁄3, G 3⁄2, A 27⁄16, B 243⁄128, C 2⁄1) failed because, contrary to belief, some of these pitches do not sound harmonious when played together — particularly something called the Wolf interval. It also made it difficult to shift the scale up or down beyond the twelve notes, since the spacing between them was uneven. To solve this, particularly for string instruments with many keys, like the piano, equal temperament became the standard by the 18th century, in which the distance between notes is, as the name suggests, equal. Developed independently in Europe and China in the XVI c., in mathematical terms each frequency interval is 1/12 of the octave (the distance between the highest pitch and the lowest), and the ratio between consecutive intervals is 12√2 — all equal in a logarithmic scale.

There is much more to it than that, and music notation and temperament have been evolving ever since, not unlike mathematics, with hundreds of signs emerging. Moreover, other familiar notations like the C–D–E–F–G–A–B guitar chords are ever-present. And music notation beyond the Western one is rich and diverse. But acknowledging my immense ignorance of music — and the fact that the basics have been quite established and spread around the world — I will limit myself to this standard that, like mathematical notation beyond numerals, has taken over the world.

From then — plus a few more inventions in tuning, non–string-pipe instruments, and electronic music among others — we have the fascinating fact that music written in one period can be played by future or distant musicians who have never heard it, as long as they possess the relevant knowledge and skill.

That transfer of sound into visual form (and back) is a truly fascinating invention — a collective effort across generations showing how sensory experience can be encoded, standardised, shared, and reinterpreted again and again. And, for better or worse, this very standardisation enables immense creativity while also stifling non-standard forms — a kind of ‘Western’ myopia, or more aptly, tone-deafness.

Thus, to recount: by the year 1800, and to this day, we have the following global or quasi-global standards — timekeeping, the calendar, mathematical notation, the Copernican principle, music notation, and temperament. These are not that many, but we will see that the other topics introduced — commerce and francas — will play a dominant role in the following two centuries.

Plus the infamous metric system! Nobody expects the metric system.

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