Today’s data after a slight drop-off during my 3-month absence is 17,300 Followers and 2,431 direct email Subscribers (including 300+ handpicked outstanding scholars).
I have moved into my new property and hope to recommence the project Theory and History of Society before the end of July. I have not had much opportunity to think about society during the removal. But relevant analogies keep suggesting themselves.
For example, the Social Science Files project obviously deals with the evolution of society rather than the evolution of trees. However, the relative superiority of certain habitats is an important criterion in both. There are reasons why Australia, despite the primitiveness of its current government, shows signs of being more competitive sociopolitically than the Anglo-Celtic predecessor habitat from which it emerged. Smart people and professionals from the mother country continue to migrate here, despite the rising risk of a communist predator shark in Southern Pacific waters.
Not all Type 7 Elitist Societies share the ‘communist’ sub-classification. And, clearly, discontinuous institutional change is more important in determining the destines and survival of societies than continual evolution which characterises most of nature. But an analogy with trees has some usefulness in the history of institutional evolutionary selection. After all, it is the canopies of trees that capture the light and give birth to new shoots which can then be dispersed. The very top of the tree is the maximum point of stress and exposure. Like societies, trees compete to have the highest tops.
I have a full four more mundane metaphorical ‘evolutionary tops’ on my mind today.
The first type is the property tree top analogy I left behind in the UK a decade ago.
And then the one I farewelled 3 weeks ago in the Blue Mountains behind Sydney.
[The prehistoric tree of the house I sold 3 weeks ago, climbing ropes in foreground.]
The second is the exciting roof top apartment I moved into 2 weeks ago in Sydney, with its lovely panorama of tree tops, roof tops, and the rigging of the ‘topsails’.
The third is the new solid wood desk top delivered last week, and upon whose potentially backbreaking weighty base future Social Science posts will be written.
The fourth is the lap top that arrived this morning, which I will turn on for the first time later today. The first hurdle will be the tactility and cognition transition from an ‘ancient’ 2019 iMac to the latest Apple chip technology. There is a setting-up process.
Tree top, roof top, desk top, lap top. Awaiting is the mountain top e.g. in Zagros from which the pioneers of Types 1 and 2 would soon descend and create Type 3.
But I have yet to decide whether I will recommence in reverse chronology with the ‘functionalist’ system governance born in 1642 London or whether I continue onward with the ‘coordinated’ (Homeric) governance that first emerged in 16,000 BCE Levant.
Stay tuned. There is much more to come.
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