Consider a colony of bacteria as a single organism growing in a dish. The colony increases in size, its character as a whole changing and taking on large features that are visible on a scale that does not require the aid of a microscopic lens to examine. In fact determining the fuzzy mass to be comprised of individual cells is a feat of scientific acumen and technological sophistication due not to the difficulty of the concept, it being as simple and mundane as the relation of a person to his family and community, but rather of the practical challenges of seeing into the microscopic realm itself.
We need the microscope to discover the single cell, much more to describe and classify it. But for the microscope, we need a theory of light, of reflection and refraction, a skill in the construction and complementary placement of lenses, and knowledge of how to locate the focal points of lenses. Then to finely control them with knobs and threaded tubes, thus we need to be able to turn and bore and thread metal, and so clearly must find ores and refine them to start with, to melt pure sands into glass and form and polish and shape a lens. Without priests and philosophers, this would be shear impossibility.
It is no accident that our longest history is measured
not by our fathers’ tales, but by unearthing layers of artifacts, and naming the ages by the raw materials of which the implements our ancestors were using are made: the ages of stone, of bronze. And as our early empires spread across the plane which we had yet to imagine as a sphere – think of how different it feels to believe that you live in a plane of undetermined size than to live on a small globe – as we established and grew and extended our circles until they collided in hyperbolic fury, we founded empire in every field, hill, and dale.
The empire of the father, the empire of the mayor; that of the priest, of the gangster, of the sheriff, the merchant, the smith, the mason, the artisan, the governor and the king and of course the empire of the emperor, all were founded and struck into the shape of a ring which we fashioned in whatever materials were at hand, while we yet sought for more efficient means of the manufacture of empire. It is in the nature of man to master his domain, and to expand it. The common way of thinking of empire is in terms of geography, territory and turf. But the priests and the philosophers are tolerated solely on the basis of their contribution to the expansion of empire into the scalar realm; instead of concentric circles which travel ever outward while receding from our influence on the plane, the scalar empire is extended into the vastness of all spaces and concepts of space.
Even on a single scale, the vastness of space is impossible to comprehend. But to perceive that element of geography which arises from geomancy, the spiritual apprehension of scale itself, and the variation in the speed and frequency of significant events at different scales, one must come to terms with the vastness of the small as well as of the large. And into the vastness of the small, just as into the vastness of the planar sphere of the world, we seek to establish our presences and controls.
There is a philosophical impulse to sequester knowledge of the scales of phenomena, a spiritual impulse to hoard up deep understanding. To the extent that this impulse represents a protective intent rather than a feature of empire, an attempt to forestall the disaster implicit in too much knowledge accompanied by too little understanding, it has failed completely. The protective impulse of the secret priests has given way inexorably to the wielding of secret power in the conquest of Everything. And perhaps that is all it ever was. Perhaps the reason I will not publish mathematic theories is that I cannot come to acceptable empirical terms with the act, though I tell myself that it is for your own protection and mine as well. Little good will my small withholding accomplish, in any case, unless my premise of the great power that inhabits such theories is true.
Still, how can it be denied? By conquering the realm of the single cell, we have altered the very nature of the large organism formed by the human species. Growth in ecological populations is governed by a general, ultimately mechanical, law that can be mathematically expressed; but due to our invasion of the realm of disease, human population growth has escaped the bounds of the sigmoid function in the last few generations, which is nearly impossible. If we had not done it, I would have thought it completely impossible.
The danger of empire remains however. Though we may rewrite the laws of the boom, we cannot long forestall the rule of the bust. The theory that population will outgrow the capacity of the planet to supply nourishment for life was based on the mechanical model of growth. By tapping into a knowledge of the scalar realms, which an economist would express as technology, we have escaped the trajectory of the predictable curve of growth traveled by the generations of other species; though ultimately we cannot but launch ourselves into oblivion in any case, and I would argue that an impossible acceleration of the rate of growth can only be accompanied by a sooner arrival of the inevitable peak and more rapid decline than if we had left the bacterial scale well enough alone instead of trying to dominate it.
crossposted at Street Prophets