Hello there,
I would like to take you on a virtual journey to a tiny speck of land in the South Pacific known as Rapa Nui. Now popularly referred to as Easter Island.
In this small uninhabited island lies neath open skies with artifacts and soldiers on the field. Row by row as if connected bone to bone. The sea against their back. Inscribed in craftmanship on lava stone.
Nearly 900 colossal statues ~ moai ~ stand created by Rapa Nuis between the 13-16th centuries. The moai depict carved human figures with oversize heads, often resting on massive stone pedestals called ahus.
A small group of Polynesians rowed their catamarans across vast stretches of the open sea. Countless evening stars, ocean swells, storms, and a few deaths later they arrived at a small 63 square mile paradise in the middle of nowhere.
The land was green, well-watered, with rich volcanic soil supporting thick woods. Whereas the weather was too cold for breadfruit and coconut palms, the sea compensated with seafood. Seals. Porpoises. Turtles. Nesting Seabirds…
Within 5 to 6 centuries, the settlers had multiplied to about 10,000 people — a lot for 63 square miles. They built villages with good houses on stone footings and cleared all the best land for fields. They governed themselves within the clan system and each clan began to honour their ancestry with impressive stone images.
So impressive that when the first visitors arrived on the island they remarked: “We could not comprehend how it was possible that these people, who are devoid of heavy thick timber [or] strong ropes, nevertheless had been able to erect such images, which were fully thirty feet high.”
“Devoid of heavy thick timber”
The island was so treeless and eroded that the visitors had earlier mistook its barren hills for dunes.
So what happened?
Each generation of images grew bigger than the last, demanding more timber, rope, and manpower. Trees were cut faster than they could grow. By A.D. 1400, there was no more tree pollen, the forests had been utterly destroyed.
We might have thought that intergenerationally, someone, a chief or a king, or a peasant would have taken the steps to halt the cutting, to protect the saplings, to replant.
We might have thought the scarcity would have raised their natural alarm system.
But what happened is that the person who felled the last tree saw it was the last one. But fell it anyway.
All shade vanished. A generation survived from their reserves. They ate all their dogs, helpless rats, nesting birds… Wars broke out…
And alas there was nothing left but the moai.
But they still held a strong belief the moai would bless them in plenty for their honour in erecting them aplenty. So the sound of hammering still rang from the quarries.
The people had been seduced by a kind of progress that becomes a mania, an ideological pathology.
Here we go!!
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Progress Meter
prog·ress / n / 1. advance or development, esp towards a better state: the progress of civilization
Measuring progress is the single most important metric in life.
But we have always encountered problems.
Two main problems.
One is best illustrated by the Four Burner Theory. The four burners are as follows:
- Family.
- Friends.
- Health.
- Work.
The theory states that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful, you have to cut off two.
I like to repurpose it using the juggling analogy. We have four balls and two hands. Save for the split second in the split-stance, there will always be two balls in motion and two balls in hand. Money can buy you another juggler. Systems the same. But only at work. The others are dependent on self.
Ultimately, if there is one ball you want to hold on for longer, the shorter hands-on time for the other balls.
Since life is a finite amount of time and energy, life is full of trade-offs. Therefore progress is a constant shift of priorities from the back burner to the front burner and vice-versa.
The second one lies in our inability to apply the concept of progress from one area of our lives to another.
Medical researchers call such lag the “translational gap,” the time difference between formal discovery and first implementation.
We can relate by recalling the lag between when we realize an activity is good for us versus when we actually implement it.
Lag Facts:
- From the first chipped stone to the first smelted iron took nearly 3 million years.
- From the first iron to the hydrogen bomb took only 3,000.
- Two centuries between the discovery of germs and the acceptance of germs as a cause of disease.
- Much more recently the wheel. It took 6,000 years between the invention of the wheel and the implementation of luggage wheels.
- Digital computers were developed only during the second half of the 20th Century yet the basic principles were understood more than 100 years earlier.
Likewise, this gap exists in our daily activities.
To hedge against the sneaky deception of progress.
We need to create a robust progress meter that is multi-dimensional accounting for easy, hard and harder things.
P.s. I’m so fascinated about Progress Studies that I have decided to write a blog chain about this topic. If you would like to co-study, co-discuss or even co-write, hit me up by replying to this email.
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Book Notes
Rating: 9/10.
If history was this well written in many [text] books, then each and every one of us would be in love with history.
Wright’s ability to distill and synthesize vast historical information into a succinct and compelling book is impressive.
The book examines human history from Stone Age hominids dating back nearly 3 million years ago through to the dawn of civilization 5,000 years ago and to the subsequent rise and fall of the Sumerian, Roman, Mayan, and Easter Island civilizations.
The central desti-question is, “Where are we going?” through the “Where do we come from?” and “Who are we?” detours.
Sample mind-blowing snippets:
- Civilization has only been around for roughly 5,000 years, representing a minuscule 0.02 percent of human existence.
- 5,000 years represents only 70 consecutive lifetimes of 70 years each.
- Over 99 percent of human existence has been in the Stone Age.
- The massive, rapid changes to humankind in the past few millennia are all cultural and not physical; our last physical change occurred long before civilization emerged, “To use a computer analogy, we are running twenty-first-century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago or more.”
Check out my full book notes —> here.
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Best Stuff I Read
If this pandemic marks a tipping-point in Western ideology, away from reliance on markets, we need to recognize the useful things that markets now do, so that framers of new institutions “understand what will be excised, and what may sometimes need to be replaced”. Markets do four main things well: They collect and synthesize information; they “naturalize outcomes, defusing social conflict”; they encourage resource utilization; they separate product and consumer from the process of production (3,940 words)
2. Nature Versus Nature? Add ‘Noise’ to the Debate
We think of the passage from genotype to phenotype as being determined by two rival forces, Nature and Nurture. But a third force, Noise (which is to say, randomization), maybe more influential than either. Embryos exhibit seemingly random variations from their earliest days. A study of armadillos — which reproduce in litters of genetically identical quadruplets, making them ideal for controlled tests — show that “arbitrary coin flips” start to occur when an embryo consists of a mere 25 cells. (3,200 words)
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What I’m Going To Watch
All I know is that it is about class warfare and that it is one of the most talked-about movies in my alt-social networks. WHO AM I? (read in Beenie Man‘s Voice) to be left behind?
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Feel free to shoot me an email anytime with comments, critiques, and open-ended questions.
Till next Saturday, take care.
Happy weekend ?
Solomon Muigai.