Work in Progress: The longue durée of Development
Friday 22 October 2021
I’ve been in Brazil for a week now, first at Petrópolis and now on Ilha Grande, an island off the coast with no cars and no roads. It’s pretty basic here, but I have electricity and an internet connection, a place to sleep and shower, and plenty of food to eat, so I have all the comforts of home. I spoke with a father and daughter visiting from São Paulo, and they feel that Ilha Grande is a special place, so they return here with some regularity. I can imagine that the place grows on you. The father did an amusing pantomime of people in São Paulo being afraid of each other on the street, saying that it was completely different here on Ilha Grande. I said it was the same in the US, with cities being increasingly violent, but there are some safer places where people can be less concerned about crime.
I’ve been keeping up a stream-of-consciousness account of my experiences in Brazil on Discord, but, to be honest, I’ve always hated the kind of travel writing that degenerates into scattered observations, or, “they do it like this, here, and we do it differently at home.” As always, I am interested in the big picture, and the big picture reveals itself only with the passage of time, much reflection, and a true cognitive effort to transcend the familiar.
Some big picture themes are slowly unfolding for me. I didn’t consciously plan contrasting experiences, but now I have realized that I have gone from an industrialized urban center of a former monarchical state to an island that is mostly a tropical jungle. Next I will go to a small town (Paraty) and then a big city (Rio de Janeiro). My initial contrast between Petropolis and Ilha Grande has been instructive.
In last week’s newsletter I discussed the dignified 19th century architecture that characterizes Petrópolis, and how there had to be sufficient infrastructure available at this time to erect these structures. At a location like Petrópolis, there were several options available for infrastructure development: tools and materials could be brought in by cart (difficult over dirt roads, but not impossible), or some tools and craftsmen might be brought in and materials sourced near the sites of construction, or craftsmen might come with only their knowledge, building their tools and sourcing their materials locally. Or some combination of all three might be the case, which is likely for a large urban center over the longue durée of development.
Before the transportation systems made possible by the industrial revolution, it was much more efficient to bring in knowledgeable workers to a remote location, with a few crucial tools, and have them build a forge, start making iron and steel for tools, build a sawmill with these tools, cut lumber with the sawmill, and so on, until enough local infrastructure is available to build a palace for an emperor. The very fact that transportation was difficult and expensive meant that the skills to build everything needed for a city needed to be widely distributed, and industry needed to be local. With the use first of steamboats and trains, and then diesel shipping and highways, transportation became both cheaper and more effective (more able to move large, heavy machines and material over long distances), and the centralization of industry could begin.
We are now more than a hundred years into this centralization of industry, and we have learned to our sorrow all the problems of supply train disruption and the loss of local craftsmen and local industries. Nevertheless, the process continues apace, with only occasional interruptions, and no real sense of urgency about what has been lost in this process. It has become a commonplace to mourn the loss of community with industrialization, but just as significant is the loss of local expertise and the local industries that go with local expertise: the ability to produce brick and steel locally, etc.
We are all wealthier and more comfortable as long as the balancing act of late industrialized civilization can be kept going, but when the balancing act becomes too complex to be to sustainable, the reckoning is going to be brutal and unforgiving.
On Ilha Grande, on the other hand, the reckoning will not be so dramatic. The island has virtually no infrastructure, and primarily subsists on tourism for its revenue. But if civilization were to collapse, the people on Ilha Grande would be fine. The power would go off and stay off, and the cell phone networks would go down and stay down, but the people would fish and gather tropical fruit and would trade with the mainland, and their standard of life would still be pretty good. Not so for those in cities after the collapse of civilization, though those cities that have retained the greater part of their infrastructure and expertise would be far better off than those specialized to produce a single commodity, or, worse, those cities whose employment and revenue has been based on things like financial services, insurance, and law.
The earliest conditions of industrialization were conducive to a broad distribution of talent and expertise. Also, these earliest conditions of industrialization were the direct descendent of pre-industrial economies in which social mobility was much more restricted. I have recently come to realize that the restriction of social mobility, while almost universally considered a social evil today, has several redeeming features. When social mobility is restricted, this will mean that people of a wide variety of talents and intelligence will be available at each and every level of society. There will be intelligent and stupid members of the elite classes, intelligent and stupid merchants, intelligent and stupid soldiers, and intelligent and stupid farmers. With this distribution of intelligence throughout the orders of society, the most difficult jobs in each social order will go the few that can handle them, while the jobs that require no intellect will be filled with the many capable of them. In other words, restricted social mobility allows for comparative advantage to be exercised at each level of society. In theory this happens today in societies of less restricted social mobility, but in actuality the entry level positions that everyone in the western world looks down upon are starved of talent while the most talented compete (sometimes destructively) for the top spots.
If the king has an idiot son, he can be compartmentalized and put to one side, while the daughter marries a competent man who can go on to rule the kingdom. Of course, it doesn’t always work out like this, and many idiot sons have succeeded their fathers, to the misfortune of all. But, generally speaking, the necessary compromises will be made in order to get competent people into positions that require competence. And every order of society has its dead end work that requires no great competence, and these jobs can go to those who deserve them. The important thing here is that in every order of society there are intelligent and capable people who can ensure that the tasks of a given social order are competently completed, and perhaps also improved.
Since the Enlightenment we have become so obsessed with the idea of unearned privilege and the idea of the lower orders of society being arbitrarily suppressed and denied the fulfillment of their potential, that we can no longer see the advantages of having some really smart and capable people “trapped” (as it were) in some occupation or order of society. I have come to believe that this is part of what made the industrial revolution possible: intelligent people unconnected with any elite sector of society were able to make improvements to the technologies they used every day, until these collected improvements push technology over a threshold and a new kind of civilization came into being.
In the midst of the very concrete experience of a tropical jungle of Ilha Grande, I had an exceedingly abstract idea, which might be considered an approach to thermodynamics by way of ontology, or an approach to ontology by way of thermodynamics. I asked myself this question out of the blue: why do objects remain where we put them? Like a lot of philosophical questions, this sounds like the kind of question a child would ask, and an adult would dismiss. But as philosophers we don’t dismiss strange questions, we ask why they are strange, and what we can learn by unraveling the strangeness of a question.
The strangeness of the question — Why do objects remain where we put them? — arises from construing it in thermodynamic terms, because we know that closed systems tend toward entropy. There are far more disordered states of things than ordered states of things, so an ordered state of things such as putting an object someplace and expecting to find it later ought to be expected to disintegrate into less ordered states of being. And so it will, over time, in many cases. But over how much time, and to what extent? There are countless things that can happen that will mean we will not find things where we left them. Someone else might take the object away. A cat might knock it down. An earthquake could shift objects about.
Still, some things do remain where we put them, and the continuity of leaving something somewhere and it remaining there not only represents the ordered state-of-affairs of the action of leaving an object at some location, but each additional moment the object endures at this location adds to the overall order of the state-of-affairs. As the order grows over time, its likelihood to remain so ordered would seem to decrease. Again, we certainly do see this in our experience: an object left might be there tomorrow, but not the day after, or the week after, or the month after, etc. But, again, some things do remain, often out of neglect. Sometimes statues are knocked from the pedestals, lie on the ground, are covered with earth, and eventually are part of a stratum uncovered by an archaeologist.
I have had it in mind for some time to write an essay — a meditation, as it were — on the cave bear altar in Chauvet cave. Around forty thousand years ago, some human being set a cave bear skull on a rock in a cave, and there it still sits today. This seemingly trivial action is among the most permanent actions that any human being has ever accomplished — far more permanent than the actions of Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, or Napoleon.
Perhaps this cave bear skull will still be sitting on its altar another 40,000 years from today. Perhaps the cave will someday fill with silt, and the cave bear skull will be effectively cemented in place on its altar, and be preserved in this situation for billions of years, long after the sun has entered its white dwarf stage and the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxies will have merged.
Even if the cave bear altar is not preserved into the distant future, the fact that it has sat where it has for thousands of years suggests that, of the countless disordered relationships possible between the cave bear skull and its altar, the skull has remained on the altar in its current ordered state for a significant period of time — not yet biological time, or geological time, much less cosmological time, but still a considerable amount of time — an amount of time for most thermodynamic systems of the size of the cave to have reached equilibrium.
One could appeal to the principle of parsimony, such that the cave bear skull continuing to rest on its altar is the simplest state of affairs, but there is also an implicit appeal to simplicity in thermodynamic arguments. In any case, this idea is new to me, and I probably should have waited to write it down until I’ve thought more about it. But it has potential, if I can sort it out.
