Sesquipedalian Census, or Napoleon the Enlightened
When we lived in small groups nobody needed to count members. Even toddlers knew the group. It's kleptocracies, remote governments, government by proxies —
representatives,
ha ha — that want to count heads.
Still, the idea of "census" came slowly, and in stages: and required sophisticated math concepts and statistical approximations and sophisticated interpretation to make much sense. Ancient kings and their courtiers might devise strategies for estimating losses in a battle: issue each soldier a coin, know how many coins were distributed ... count the coins reclaimed after the battle: and you know, fairly accurately, how many losses you sustained, how many men you have still walking.
But the modern census started with Napoleon. He had bureaucrats under the charge of some sophisticated mathematicians "count" Frenchmen. (
Frenchmen, what a funny concept: when there are Gauls, and Celts, and Catalonians ... all insisting that they have as much right to live as anyone else. The "French" language had to be shoved forcibly down everyone's throat. No trouble for the Gauls, but it sticks in the craw of the Catalonians, to name only one example.)
Forty million is what they came up with. It scared the bejesus out of every one of Napoleon's kleptocratic neighbors. The emperor of Austria trembled like a baby.
You see, these other monarchs had no idea how many "people" they had.
"Primitive" peoples can typically count to three. After three, they say "many." Governments up to Napoleon said, One, two, three; then they said "many." How many peasants are there? Many. Or they'd wax poetic:
like leaves on the trees, like sands on the shore ...
Napoleon said, "Forty Million." A terrifying concept, for those sophisticated enough to know that a million is a lot, but too unsophisticated to know that the number is meaningless without other similarly accurate numbers to compare it to. What would the Austrian emperor have thought if his spies told him, the French have got forty million; but you're got thirty-eight million, or sixty million. The emperor should shit his drawers only if told, "The French have got forty million, and you ain't got but six hundred thousand." That's the time to pass out cold.
Mozart and da Ponte had Don Giovanni's Leporello number the Don's conquests quite specifically.
Ma in Ispagna son già mille e tre. Very funny: because it's so totally unlikely (not just the number, but the implicit accuracy of record keeping). Hemingway's Nick Adams goes fishing, he sets up a perch in the grass. A grasshopper comes and sits on it. He plucks the grasshopper, hooks it , casts it, catches a trout. By that time there's another grasshopper sitting on the perch. No matter whether Nick catches a dozen trout or thirty, he will expect another grasshopper to be sitting on the perch for him to grab as his next bait. Nick doesn't take a census of the grasshopper in the county before he goes fishing. Don Giovanni didn't go to city hall to prowl for records before he went looking for another wench. No, no: one, two, three ... many.
Industrialists didn't take a census of the peasantry before testing how many children could sicken and die in their factories before there were no more children ready to be exploited
for a penny a week.
Nietzsche said that the superman was like the ocean: infinite, capable of taking into himself endless amounts of poison and garbage while remaining himself pure: like God listening to endless gibberish from selfish morons wanting unstinted shit for Christmas. Peasants, wenches, children ... red bicycles ... Austrians ... One, two, three ... many. And many more.
The thing about language, any moron can use it. Any moron can say "infinite" without having passed a test administered by Georg Gamow.
Trouble is: we blather about many, and escalate it to infinite, without having measured the ocean or counted the wenches or the children.
I once sat with a lawyer, my jaw dropped, as I watched him "calculate" how much money we were going to make selling some stuff we were about to trick the IRS into helping us finance. The lawyer envisioned us publishing limited editions of lithographs. We'd print 250 there, sell the first 50 at $750, sell the next 50 at $1,000, raise the price to $2,000, sell them out, print the nth edition, sell the first image as cocktail napkins ... And within minutes had showed us a volume grossing $55 million: in a coupl'a years. This lawyer had no idea how difficult it was to sell one! or how long it took how few editions to sell beyond fifty. To him, money was infinite: put up a perch, and pluck the dollar that arrives to sit on it. Cast, catch, re-pluck.
I smiled and nodded not because I believed that I (or anyone) could sell all those images out, but because I knew that the dentists and doctors and plumbers my lawyer would approach for the capital, the IRS pushing their scam, would have no more idea about how hard it was to sell anything out than my lawyer did, and that therefore, by New Years, we'd have hundreds of thousands of new dollars in our bank accounts and multi-millions of dollars worth of new inventory, some of which actually would sell (provided it was me doing the selling).
The logic is impeccable: as long as you know nothing of the real world.
Sure there are publishers who've printed a Sinatra album, an Elvis album, a Beetles album ... sold it out, printed more. But there are many more publishers who printed a YoYo album, and sat with the inventory, paying the warehouse bill till they go belly up.
Never mind: that's more than I meant to say about all of that. I didn't mean to lose sight of my target: kleptocracies.
The Romans didn't invent salt mining. It was the Celts who were the salt masters in the Roman's part of the world. The Celts organized salt mining, salt extraction. Salt was essential for preserving food. Preserved food is essential for kleptocracy: for keeping armies moving: on their stomachs. The Celts flourished. Until the Romans noticed that they were flourishing.
The Romans flourished not by inventing anything, but by stealing inventions, and then administering them. Let the Celts invent the salt business: the Romans could then just take it away from them: the way the US, the universities, the corporations stole the internet from Ivan Illich, Jesus, and me: perverting it as they did so. Point is: once the alpha kleptocracies, following blindly in the wake of the Romans, assuming that there will always be other poor countries to exploit, other poor countries to steal resources from, the buyer determining the selling price for the seller, has destroyed all the open grasslands, all the wet lands, all the forests, all the reefs ... we'll set up a perch, but wait and wait for a new grasshopper to come and be bait for us. We'll look for new wenches to deflower and won't even find any old whores. And children to work for a penny a year? why there simply will be none to be found, none to be found at a penny a second either: and neither will we be here to do the finding.
First draft, what the hell.
where I discuss the arbitrary political nature of Standard Time as distinct from the natural time that Prigogine assumes is infinite and predates the universe. I'll now discuss it again in the context of Social Epistemology / Reality / Time, repeating as appropriate. (Calendars too need more than a few words, but there's already a fabulous web site on the subject: I'll add the URL when I find it.)