Pathfinders

May 5, 2007

I have just begun Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration by Felipe Fernández-Armesto. It is a book that tells one part of the grand story of humanity: global convergence. There could be no convergence without a previous divergence. If all human beings alive on the earth can trace their lineage back to a common ancestor who lived in Africa about 150,000 years ago, then human beings must have spent those intervening millennia going their own ways and developing a multiplicity of cultures. Only in the past few millennia has that process of divergence been seriously reversed.. and human beings from all corners of the earth put back in touch with each other.

My issue so far with Pathfinders is the lack of fluidity in the description of cultural change. It seems to me that diverging and merging have always been a part of human cultural experience.. the only difference is that now, because of technology, that process goes on at a global scale. But at all times individual cultures were getting amalgamated into a larger structure and then that larger structure would split into new cultures.

For some reason this process has for some time reminded me of the patterns that Windows Media Player uses as an abstract background for music. Note the following series of images:

There is a story in those pictures. The blue had been dominant, but then the orange invaded and created a completely orange screen. Then blue comes back and reverses the situation. This blue dominance gives rise to another pattern and then orange comes back and takes over the screen. This series of images illustrates the way diverse patterns get swallowed up by a totalizing pattern.. but then that totalizing pattern itself breaks up into smaller parts.. which are then promptly captured by yet another totalizing pattern. Thanks to technology the totalizing pattern is now global instead of regional.. but the same fluid interchange between whole and individual parts remains.

Think of this in terms of popular music. At one time there were lots of small musical cultures in different parts of the United States. In a few decades these small music cultures were overwhelmed by the development of a national popular music.. their individual traits having been incorporated into this national music. Out of that national music culture new subcultures arose.. such as rap or punk or reggae. At first these seem like small differences, but before long they start to break down the unity of the national music culture. It is the same pattern as outlined above: small cultures overwhelmed by large totalizing one, which in turn dissolves into small cultures.

Had I a little more mathematical know-how I could define this pattern with a formula. But I don't have such know-how.. and so I have tried to describe it. Such patterns are everywhere.. and incidentally have something to do with our propensity to see "golden ages" and "declines" in different traditions.