The Purpose of AE (APPLIED EPISTEMOLOGY)

[Mick Harper]

It only occurs to me now that building a vast amphitheatre would only be worthwhile if you could fill it regularly and there's no way you could fill it regularly with a Greek or Latin classic. Would you or anyone you know go and see Oedipus in the original?

So most nights (I suppose, days) it would be No Sex, Please! We're Carthaginian. Or maybe a Mithraic Billy Graham. Volleyball tournaments would be just about possible. 'Come on, you serfs.'

[Mick Harper]

This would make a great film. With Mel Gibson speaking in Occitan.
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Page Hundred and Twenty-Two of Forgeries

So much for educated people and the broad masses, so much for classical theatre and demotic theatre. But there was another audience who could pay and were on the lookout for something a bit more ambitious. The ruling elite. The court. The people Shakespeare had watching Pyramus and Thisbe from the sidelines.

Now top people are not great fans of Euripides. Or opera, for that matter. Some are, most aren't, and they could afford troupes to perform material more to their taste. Except before 1000 AD there wasn't any material to their taste. Performing troupes were constrained by the same technical considerations as above.

In fact both sets of constraints because with the Roman Empire long gone nobody in the ruling elite spoke either Latin or Greek, by now strictly scribal languages. The higher-ups spoke demotic languages (though not always the demotic langue du pays).

Historians understand all this and conjure up visions of bards reciting genealogies but historians rarely point out bardic recitations grow wearisome after about one hearing – after about two verses to be perfectly honest. Masques and suchlike were impractical on a regular basis and anyway grow wearisome too on a regular basis. What to do?

Well, some Septimanian troubadours thought, let’s get these monkish scribes who have learned how to transcribe demotic languages to teach us how to do it. Learning to read and write in the vernacular took time and trouble but paid spectacular dividends if you were in the bards-to-nobs business because

• it did not matter that Occitan written in Latin letters was laborious to decipher, they were learning lines for business not reading for pleasure

• it did not matter that the Occitan of Marseilles was wildly different from the Occitan of Perpignan, both were approximations of literary Occitan

• specialisation of labour was now achievable because there was no need for the people writing the material to perform it

• this material, being de novo, could be tailored to the contemporary tastes of court folk. Out with Theseus and Ariadne, in with Tristan and Isolde

• the repertoire was constantly expanding since writing plays was a paying proposition for the first time since Euripides

• especially when the repertoire went international – Occitanian material (and methods) could be translated into any other demotic written language

• of which predictably there were soon quite a number in other parts of western Europe

[Mick Harper]

Bricklaying was probably not the best metier I could have chosen but I was after a sort of Pink Floyd effect.
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Page Hundred and Twenty-Three of Forgeries

We know something along these lines happened from the historical record but we also know from the same historical record it made little difference to the overall development of Western Europe. Courtly establishments are not great ones for societal innovation.

But they are highly enthusiastic about artistic innovation so the new written demotics were here to stay and the clamant objections of the mandarinate in the Church, the monasteries, the law courts and the universities, determined to keep their Latin monopoly, were firmly resisted. The spread of literary vernaculars was unstoppable. The second brick in the wall of exponential development had been laid.

* * *

There was still the same old problem. Why would anyone bother to learn to read and write unless there was a professional need to do so? Sure, there was at last a literature in your own language but would you pay five hundred pounds for a Piers Ploughman, a Canterbury Tales, a Gawain and the Green Knight?

Nor me. But I might like to listen to Piers Ploughman, the Canterbury Tales and Gawain and the Green Knight and that would be no great pleasure were I speaking an English variant different to the one(s) spoken by the writers of Piers Ploughman, the Canterbury Tales or Gawain and the Green Knight.

In fact it would be most unlikely Piers Ploughman, the Canterbury Tales or Gawain and the Green Knight would be written at all were there not a pre-existing class of Standard English-speakers to read them and to listen to them. By the fourteen hundreds there was such a class because once demotic literacy is introduced there is a constant push-pull towards standardisation of the spoken form around the written form, though it had little to do with any penchant for poetry.

The literate class is no different from any other elite grouping, they like to signal their eliteness to one other, and especially to the non-elite. There is little point being part of an elite if this basic minimum cannot be met. One does not park one’s yacht over the horizon. It’s bad enough having to live on the damned thing.

A demotic–literate society presented a brand new elite-signalling problem. Hitherto in world history, speaking the elite language separated upper from lower. In Roman Britain, for instance, there had been Latin-speakers, there had been ‘British’-speakers, and nary the twain; in medieval England everyone spoke English.

There were, it is true, a scribal form of English and natural spoken English(es) but that distinction was of no use for signalling purposes -- carrying around a copy of the Ancrene Wisse didn't really cut it. Besides, the elite of medieval England were frequently illiterate.

[Mick Harper]

You can see here the effect of the twin barriers to academic advance:
(1) observing the rule 'thou shalt not trespass on another discipline's preserve'
(2) observing the rule 'thou shalt observe your own discipline's paradigms'

If linguists have laid down the non-existent foundation that English is derived from Anglo-Saxon and French is derived from Latin, then medievalists are going to live out their sorry lives in a jerrybuilt structure where it takes a thousand years for Renaissance Europe to get back to the approximate cultural level of the Roman Empire.

[Mick Harper]

I quite liked my building blocks scheme. This chapter can probably stand alone as a worthwhile lifetime achievement. Two lifetimes.
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Page Hundred and Twenty-Four of Forgeries

At the end of the Middle Ages this Standard English had already ceased to be a language in the ordinary sense being grammatically formalised around the rules of Latin and having a near-phonetic vocabulary that mapped to the Latin alphabet (plus some introduced English letters, plus a selection of digraphs, plus a morass of weird pronunciation rules).

If it is difficult to accept just how radical the shift is from a natural idiomatic regional English to Standard English, consider the astonishing fact there is no second person singular in Standard English. This major inconvenience came about purely from elite signalling.

There is no th sound in the Latin alphabet so scribes used Y to write the th sound, which was fine for Ye Olde Englyshe Tea Shoppe but not so fine when anybody who wanted to write thou, was obliged to write you, and anybody reading you when they were actually reading thou, ended up saying you whether they meant you personally or you collectively. Better to show one was a member of the elite than worry about ambiguity.

English came late to the game and is still quirky even in its Standard form. Over in Italy, where the alphabet had been specifically designed for local use, and where they had been mapping natural Italian (especially natural Florentine) for a lot longer than the English, they had produced a near-phonetic Standard Italian as early as Petrarch’s time.

Much, I might add, to the detriment of Italian literature. While we were exploiting the quirks of English to become world leaders in every branch of the written word, the Italians were stuck with being world leaders in opera. But in England, in Italy, in most of Western Europe, the spread of standardised written demotics meant the third brick in the wall of exponential development had been laid.

* * *

Still not enough. Manuscripts are expensive and so long as the medium is expensive, the message is expensive. So long as the message is expensive, the message will be limited to the Bible, courtly romances, poems for recitation, plays for performing, translations of the classics, academic treatises, governmental records, mercantile communications.

This is a fundamental rule irrespective of the language the message is couched in and no matter how many people are able to read it. Medieval demotic literature was no better suited for developmental purposes than everything that had gone before.

Before printing. Cheap printing, moveable-type printing – the Chinese as per usual already had expensive block printing so continued turning out Confucius, courtly romances, poems and the rest.

[Mick Harper]

I wonder if the Woodcraft Folk still exist. The more radical the politics, the more traditional the leisure pursuits.
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Page Hundred and Twenty-Five of Forgeries

There is nothing in the least technically difficult about moveable-type printing. It did not need advanced metallurgical skills, woodcraft folk could do it. Anybody could have done it from Sumer onwards so we can only presume it was the churls of Western Europe who did it because they were the only people in the world, the only people thus far in world history, that had a mass market in standardised literary demotics for their products.

Memo to the Chinese: alphabets help too.

It is difficult coming up with any other explanation because there was nothing special about Europe c 1450. In every other respect, in comparison to most of the civilisations from Sumer onwards, Medieval Europe was depressingly undeveloped, her most obvious contribution to the advance of humankind being the Gothic cathedral and that was just their version of the monumental building bug that had infected everybody else from Sumer onwards.

Still and all, with the arrival of printing the fourth brick in the wall of exponential development had been laid.

* * *

Forget the Renaissance. That was just getting back to the start line (the clue is in the name). It was Printing-plus-Reformation that was important. Printing for the cheapness, Reformation for being allowed to exploit the printing.

Once there was a Bible in High German at five pounds a throw and they were allowed to read it, every German was potentially his own Renaissance Man. This was not the case for Printing-but-no-Reformation: Spaniards, for instance, were mired in the era of Don Quixote, the Green Knight.

But Reformations are a mixed blessing. Germans were only potentially developmentally-minded book-devouring all-rounders because revolutions have a nasty habit of replacing the old with the new-old. Lutheran and Calvinist regimes turned out to be just as restrictive about what people should be allowed to read as Catholic ones.

The Germans did try out various freer forms of Protestantism, but Anabaptists and their fellow schismatic schismatics discovered freeform tends to be dispatched in short order by non-freeform. Thank God.

[Mick Harper]

Page Hundred and Twenty-Six of Forgeries

But it did mean Germany was unavailable for much in the way of developmental advance while they sorted out their religious differences, and it was those sensible Dutch who stole the German bikes. If there was any justice in the world it ought to be the Dutch we have to thank for the modern world but they never quite made the leap.

Too busy avoiding being dispatched in short order by Habsburgs and Bourbons. It was left to the English to usher in exponentiality (hooray). This is odd because the English are nothing special (boo). But they soon were

1500 England a bit behind Europe / Europe a bit behind everyone else
1600 England has caught up with Europe / Europe has caught up with everyone else
1700 England a bit ahead of Europe / Europe a bit ahead of everyone else
1800 England out of sight / Europe out of sight

The explanation for these twin trends could ex hypothesi go something like this

1. Europe alone in the world has standardised literary demotics
2. Europe alone in the world develops cheap books in standardised demotics
3. Protestant Europe alone in Europe has unrestricted cheap books in standardised demotics
4. England alone in Protestant Europe converts unrestricted cheap books in standardised demotics into an exponential industrial revolution

except (4) seems to lack even a hypothetical justification and if the English are nothing special, that last decisive step cannot be explained by native genius.

Though since England did produce a native genius at this time, we might begin with Isaac Newton. My animus against academia tempts me to place the Rise of England to the day Newton left Cambridge to become a stay-at-home genius but this is not a suitable point for exponential departure since

* Newton is a very medieval figure who read and wrote in Latin and was more crackpot mystic than Protestant.

* Newtonian science, science of any kind, played a negligible part in the Great Leap Forward. Science is always overrated. Science-and-technology are only bracketed together because technologists crave respectability, scientists crave relevance and the rest of us crave the assurance somebody somewhere must know what on earth is going on.

* Being in or out of a university is irrelevant (except in terms of producing originality) because universities are unsuited for human development, personal or collective. They are medieval institutions with entry requirements that preserve them as self-perpetuating oligarchical guilds with a jargon impenetrable to outsiders – formerly Latin, latterly academese. In any case they must have been irrelevant to the medieval/modern interface because everyone had had universities for centuries, not just in England and not just in Europe.

* Guilds are always inimical to change though, as it happens, universities will soon cease to be guilds because on present and exponential trends everyone will soon be required to attend university, and nobody knows what happens to guilds when all are members. It's never been tried before. Probably not being in a guild will become a badge of distinction. It's too late for me, my children, but think what it would be like if your gap year could last a lifetime.

[Mick Harper]

The page starts with an example of an over-appropriate name, as per our Noms de Fakerie thread.
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Page Hundred and Twenty-Seven of Forgeries

No, the starting gun must be technological, ànd it is hard to argue with the invention of the steam engine. Specifically Newcomen's steam engine of 1712. I assume the name ‘Newcomen’ is coincidental rather than coined but either way he was a very modern phenomenon, an ironmonger and a Baptist.

Though not the inventor of the steam engine, just the inventor of the steam engine that took off. There had been plenty of steam engines before, they are not technically difficult to build. Anybody from Sumer onwards could have done it – Hero of Alexandria did do it and doubtless unrecorded others also did it in antiquity. Even in the seventeenth century the French and the Spanish did it before the English but they, like the ancients, lacked Baptist ironmongers.

Engineers not inventors are what is needed to get steam engines off the ground, France and Spain preferred artists to artisans. Baroque is what you get without a Reformation. Baroque factories even! It is not that Catholic Europe did not understand what was required. Louis XIV was desperate to keep up with the go-ahead Dutch but whenever he let the go-ahead Colbert loose with unlimited budgets and unprecedented powers, all France got for her money was more efficient tapestry factories. That is the nature of top-down decision making.

N.B. libertarians. Any country that wants to develop rapidly, and knows how to do it because other countries have already shown how, should use top-down decision making. It is much more difficult when nobody knows how, when it is being done for the first time. The insurmountable obstacle being that all countries are top-down and any country that is not, will soon cease to be a country. Either the state will dissolve into chaos and/or another state, a top-down state, will take it over.

Unless something changed, the world was doomed to an endless diet of top-down regimes and 'the top' in top-down never encourage development, being first in the firing line. The trick is not to have anybody at the top just long enough. The English achieved this thanks to the English Civil War. But everyone has civil wars, what was so special about theirs?

1. It was discretely regional – most civil wars are messier
2. It was truly Marxian – most civil wars are internecine within the ruling elite
3. It was waged by the populace – most civil wars are oligarchical affairs
4. It was ideological – most civil wars are for simple regime change
5. It was won by the insurgents – most civil wars are won by the incumbents
6. The insurgents voluntarily handed power back to the incumbents.

That is unprecedented. Perhaps the English are geniuses!

[Mick Harper]

It is odd that I would argue the Civil War turned out to be so epochal since I am always getting into trouble arguing that, when it comes to domestic politics, the Civil War made no difference whatsoever. English historians are divided into Roundheads and Cavaliers, there is no room for conscientious objectors.

[Mick Harper]

I had forgotten I had written this years ago when I wrote that yesterday.
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Page Hundred and Twenty-Eight of Forgeries

Despite the unceasing claims of historians and political zealots, the English Civil War was a non-event in the general thrust of English history. In religion, zilch. The Elizabethan Settlement of the sixteenth century, consisting of a not very Protestant established Church, mildly restricted properly Protestant churches and a severely restricted Catholic Church, lasted until Catholic Emancipation in the nineteenth century.

In politics, zilch. The Civil War was a minor interlude in the leisurely stroll from a strong monarchy and a querulous parliament in the sixteenth century to a strong parliament and a querulous monarchy in the nineteenth century. But the Civil War was critical for some radical changes in English literary habits.

For eighteen years, 1642–60, there was mass participatory religious and political theatre. Now this is not so unusual in civil wars either – the same pattern had been witnessed in Florence, Münster, Geneva, Prague and half a hundred other places in Western Europe 1500 – 1700. It was a practice going back to the Roman Republic of the Gracchi, Marius and Caesar; further back to the Greek polis and no doubt all the way back to Sumerian city states.

But all these évènements were played out by oratory and tumult. That's cities for you. The English Civil War was not just spread over an entire country, it was spread over an entire country with access to cheap printed material in a language by now familiar throughout that entire country. Oratory and tumult might be all the rage in London but in the broad acres everyone was fighting their corner with books and pamphlets.

Before 1642 the English had been no more bookish than anyone else. Thomas More claimed, as far back as the 1520's, half of Londoners were literate but whether this is true in any meaningful sense they sure as hell didn't show it if their reading matter is anything to go by – a thin gruel of religious orthodoxy and highbrow tomes. The only popular works were gruesome martyrologies and almanacs.

The Civil War changed all that – suddenly the most astonishing variety of material was required reading. Nobody is interested in politics or religion in good times, everybody is consumed by them in bad times.

Where there is demand there shall be supply, unless government and NGO's forbid it. But in times of civil war, government and NGO's are the problem not the solution. For the first time in human history, there was a mass literacy industry and no mandarinate with the power to keep a lid on things.

When the bad times stopped, when people were no longer interested either in politics or religion and there was once again a strong mandarinate to keep the literacy lid on, there was a new factor. Two new factors. A national literary industry looking for ways to diversify and a national literacy market yearning for diversion.

Naturally the government and the NGO’s did their level best to cram everything back into the old pint pots but from 1660 until ... Walpole, they were obsessing over whether they wanted the status quo, the status quo ante or the status quo ante before that. Handing over power peaceably may be the gentlemanly way of doing things but it is not nearly as effective for settling matters as bloodletting.

While the top people were at their oligarchical musings, the pot was bubbling away, lidless. But would it last? Many a slip twixt pot and lip. Still, the fifth brick in the wall of exponential development had been laid.

* * *

[Mick Harper]

Only two pages to go!
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Page One Hundred and Twenty-Nine of Forgeries

One more to go. It is not only top people who hate change, everybody hates change. In these days of exponential change, people can at least choose to be first-adopters, but what about the first first-adopters? The people that had to face exponential change for the first time in human history.

How did matters appear to those world first-adopters, the English of the seventeenth, eighteenth and (will it never end?) the nineteenth century? How did the English turn a transitory set of highly peculiar circumstances into exponential development whether they wanted to or not?

It was all very accidental, all very British. The Stuarts favoured and intermittently tried to impose the Continental model of absolute monarchy, a system inimical to development, but Jacobite and Carolingian English Baroque was not popular and it was replaced by a popular regime, a system inimical to development, during the period 1642–60. Popular proved not to be popular and the experiment was halted in 1660.

The English had had a double vaccination against the New Ways of Renaissance and Reformation, and turned with relief to an updated version of their tried and tested Plantagenet/Tudor model. This basically meant leaving most things to be decided at the local level by small landowners (Tories) and leaving anything requiring national attention to large landowners (Whigs). Works a treat.

As long as you are an island nation, where not much requires national attention. If you are a continental nation and the centre has to hold, and hold everything, if you want to continue to be a continental nation, you will assuredly be a less happy land.

But over in England (even more truly an island nation now the damned Scots had been brought to heel) there was that added complication of a nation seething with literate dissenting ironmongers. Since both mass literacy and mass dissent were here to stay, could there be an England in which these people were guaranteed a place but knew their place?

Probably. England is not hidebound when it comes to social hierarchies. It also has the good sense to retain social hierarchies, one wouldn’t want to be Australia. That was not the problem. The problem was there was nothing to stop these educated (though never by universities) lower order innovators churning out better and better steam engines.

This was deeply upsetting to all orders of society and something really ought to be done about it. But what? Why were they churning them out? It is not enough to be allowed to create an Industrial Revolution, you actually have to do it.

It was all because of that throwaway parenthetical remark ‘educated (though never by universities)’. This is what is new, this is what distinguishes Newton from Newcomen, this is what distinguishes England from Sumer. Newton might have had to leave university to make something of himself but Newcomen was not allowed to go to university in the first place.

Until the mid-nineteenth century Protestant dissenters were not permitted inside the hallowed halls. It is very old hat coming up with theories linking Protestantism with commercial enterprise but lots of places had Protestants, only one triggered exponential industrial enterprise.

[Mick Harper]

It is now!
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Page Hundred and Thirty of Forgeries

England was the only place where Protestants were allowed, but not allowed to go to university. But then again every civilisation since Sumer had prevented people, quite intelligent people, from going to university, England was first out of the traps with people who weren't allowed to go to university but still got educated.

As soon as there were cheap books on every conceivable subject, everyman could stay at home and do a Newton.

These new non-educated educated people actually had an inbuilt advantage over Newton – ironmongers do not have their heads in the stars, Baptists do not spend half their working lives researching crackpot mysticism, their crackpot mysticism comes already installed. They are not subject to any of the attractions so carefully laid out by the academy to ensnare enquiring minds and turn them into unenquiring minds.

True, unenquiring minds are, broadly speaking, more useful to society but the point is one cannot go to university and invent the Industrial Revolution. Nobody knows why this is, it is just the way the human brain works. If the head is too full of information put there by authority figures in formal settings, the human brain can never get out from under. North Korea is everywhere. It is still as true today as it was in the seventeenth century – or for that matter in the fourth millennium BC.

The Industrial Revolution finished when the Wright Brothers got off the ground and our own Revolution – the non-physical one of the Information Age – is still dependent at every turn on people who, for one reason or another, managed to get out of university and into their garages just in time. Before the heady autodidacticism of Practical Mechanics got fatally derailed by the much easier catechism of celestial mechanics.

Once you’re told something you can never discover it.

* * *

So, to sum up human history. If you want to get ahead in the inventing game the cardinal rule is to avoid cardinal rule. Strong mandarinates always keep a lid on things, Calvinist, Catholic or Confucian. On the other hand, if you don't have a strong mandarinate you tend to get taken over by other people who do have strong mandarinates so you'll end up with a strong mandarinate anyway.

It was a race against time! Would the English on their relatively secure island manage to quell their mandarinate long enough to be inventive and then use the inventions to keep out the other mandarinates long enough for the inventions to supply sufficient gewgaws to provide so much happiness they would never be tempted to return to strong mandarinates and then use their inventions to impose their own weak-mandarinate model on everyone else, thus solving the problem forever and ever amen? Yes.

ENDS

[Mick Harper]

One of my favourite AE arenas is 'socialism vs capitalism', starting with the observation there is no such thing because there is no such thing as capitalism. It's just the default position of human economic activity.

But the main reason is that all my best friends (and relations) are socialists, have been all their lives, and show no signs of doubt despite socialism being disastrous all their lives. Not to mention before they were born and doubtless will long prove so after them. But that's just me. It's an important test case for AE because the tendency is worldwide.

I have just watched a YouTube about a particularly toothsome example.

* In 1945 socialism was introduced into Vietnam courtesy of Ho Chin Minh and his comrades.
* Between 1945 and 1975 the Vietnamese socialists fought constant wars against seemingly stronger opponents and vanquished each in turn supporting one striking fact about socialism: it is a superlative system for fighting wars.
* In 1975 Vietnam was left in peace (save for a war against socialist China which it won easily) and found itself--perhaps unsurprisingly--as one of the poorest countries in the world.
* Between 1975 and 1985 when it was finally able to apply to apply socialism to the whole country, Vietnam remained one of the poorest countries in the world.
* In 1985 Vietnam adopted the policies being applied in China by Deng Xiaoping, the rapid replacement of socialism with 'market forces' (i.e. people doing what comes naturally) and Vietnamese GNP per head quadrupled and quadrupled again and is set fair to quadruple again any time soon. As was happening contemporaneously in China.

You would think this might cause the Vietnamese (and the Chinese) to doubt the efficacy of socialism but this has very much not been the case. Rather the reverse, one would say. And perhaps they have a case. Of sorts.

[Mick Harper]

A central notion of AE goes something like this:

[Mick Harper]