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The Switchback Theory Of Information Flow

A prominent 18th century theory holds that one can analyse information flow across the face of the Earth as movement from a centre outwards, and that since the days of Sumeria and Babylon, that centre of information has been moving ever westward until it now resides in California.

California, by most people’s standards is a strange place. The home of Hollywood is also the home of dog beauticians, Venice Beach posers and the breatharian philosophy, in which the followers attempt to partake of no food or drink but get their life energy from the air. It is the home of wild theories, unusual life experimentation methods, naive hippies who grew up and got wise, and material excess.

It is also a place where numerous social experiments are occurring – it was the first place in the world where flexi-time at work became common, thus allowing employees to work at times suitable to them rather than the company. It has also seen some of the most successful commune-based social experiments, many of which are still ongoing today.

There is also San Francisco, a city with a large gay community – such that being gay is fast becoming the norm there – and which is applying the greatest pressure to legalise and formalise gay and lesbian marriage and other rights. Other subcultures, such as surf culture, have their strongest expression there.

But at the same time, it’s also where the world’s fifth largest economy resides, and where some of the greatest leaps and bounds in science are occurring, particularly in the fields of technology and neurology. It has a powerful entertainment culture which pumps out its material – along with California ’s own brand of philosophies, beliefs and dogma – out to the rest of the world. It is home to an enormously popular brand of psychology, to neurolinguistic programming and to a New Age philosophy which is gaining massive cache in the world today.

It is, in short, a perfect description of a centre of information, and it is one which, at the present time, is unparalleled in the world.

But wait. Wasn’t there a time when New York was the centre, and before that Britain, and before that Germany, Rome and all the way back to Sumeria, and can it not be said that information has been flowing westward ever since those early days?

This is the theory that 18 th century philosopher George Berkeley (above) began to formulate, and which has successfully propagated across an undercurrent of philosophy and enquiry, being further developed and formulated as it goes. Today it is understood by many, not only in governments (particularly the USA) and universities but also by modernist and futurist philosophers such as Robert Anton Wilson and Timothy Leary.

Briefly put, the theory holds that the original centre of information was located in the lush valleys and city states of ancient Sumeria around 2500BC. Being the only place with writing, military prowess and high culture, it was a magnet for other cultures to learn from. However, as time passes and Sumeria stagnated, the centre of information passed along with emigrants, philosophers and seekers after knowledge to Egypt, where it found its next powerful expression by 1000BC

From there, as Egypt waned, it passed to Greece (500BC), then to Rome by 500AD with the fall of its pagan Empire and the rise of its Christian one, then to medieval and Protestant Germany around 1500, and then onward to Britain (1700), then with economic migrants across the Atlantic to New York (1900) and finally across the Wild West to California (2000), where it resides today, all the time picking up speed in its westward flow.

Most people thus predict that, in keeping with the fast westward flow, the next information centre is Japan – that emigrants will head westward into the Pacific and that by 2100, California will have waned just as Britain and New York have.

This is a neat theory, but is it accurate? It’s a theory with a strong backing, and one that many politicians, philosophers and hedonists have used to shape their view of the world and wrap modern economic and social thinking around.

We hear American politicians speaking of ‘old Europe ’, as a culture which has passed its prime and which no longer needs to be listened to. We look at Japan with undisguised fascination at its futurist-appearing culture (actually, living there as I have, its ancient social systems and respect for tradition are also very visible) and we watch as China rises in power.

But is it an accurate theory? In our world today where more than ever our beliefs about world phenomena increasingly shape those phenomena – particularly economic booms, busts and prices – can we afford to hold onto such a rigid theory?

In first thinking about this question, what must be considered is exactly what constitutes an information centre. We can do this by looking not only at modern California , but also at ancient Sumeria, and find their common points.

Looking more closely at these definitions, and bearing in mind the observation made by Robert Anton Wilson that only in the centre of information can you have so many crazies, hippies and eccentrics in one place, the standard theory of the westward flow of information begins to look inaccurate.

In fact, it seems to betray a kind of Semitic and Euro-American bias which may not be well founded in the facts of history.

For example, Egypt 1000BC as a centre of information does not fit very well with the facts. Granted it was a centre of great political power under Pharoah Ramesses the Great and the dynasty his father founded, with an Empire stretching from modern Turkey to the Sudan, but Egypt is renowned for its strict religious and social conservatism, such that little changed on this score for over 3000 years. Additionally, much of the idiosyncratic Egyptian cultural and religious influence was lost on its neighbours – even Hermetic philosophy, which originated in Egypt, had to be greatly re-formulated by the Greeks in Alexandria before it could take its place in the world.

Another example might be Rome 500AD, which was indeed a strong centre of Christian political power, but its heyday had already passed. Even in the days of the Republic and the original pagan Empire, it was extremely strict in its social hierarchy, and little in the way of philosophical innovation was tolerated if it caused the Empire to become unbalanced. Persecutions of minorities – Christians, Mithraists, Jews – regularly occurred.

In fact, compared to Egypt , Phoenicia circa 1000AD was much more innovative, and compared to pagan Rome , Alexandria circa 0AD was much more tolerant.

With these thoughts in mind, a new theory of the flow information can be formulated. Or rather, yet another modification to its 300 year old framework.

Considering other possible sites of information centres throughout history and keeping in mind that some of the proposed centres in the original theory may not be accurate, the new theory holds that the general movement of information throughout history is indeed westward, but at regular intervals, it ‘switches back’ eastwards before resuming its westwards course.

This switchback flow of information seems to take a ‘two steps forward, one step back’ approach, almost as if surging westwards into the future, then stopping to take a sample of information from its own history to bring back into the present.

So far, since Sumeria, four switchbacks have been observed so far, and each of these will be discussed in turn.

The First Switchback

 

The centre of information began – as it does in the conventional theory – with Sumeria, but rather than leaving the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and heading for Egypt , the switchback theory proposes that it headed upstream, towards Accad , or Akkadia.

Akkadia rose from the waning remnants of the Sumerian sphere of influence. The inhabitants there spoke not Sumerian but a Semitic language which has been called Akkadian after the city.

At its height, under such kings as Hammurabi and Sargon the Great, its influence and power outclassed Sumeria. Akkadian became a lingua franca for the whole of the Ancient Middle East, becoming the root of such languages as Aramaic and Hebrew. Hammurabi formulated the world’s first Law Code – one which both the king and his people had to obey, and whose features (including limits on taxation and the right to a trial) can be found in all modern legal systems.

But like all things, Akkadia waned and Phoenicia took its place by 1200BC – these amazing seafarers, voyagers and engineers were the merchants of the ancient world, and they vigorously competed with the Minoans of Crete for the Mediterranean sea trade.

Phoenicians created the world’s first alphabet – which through Greek is the origin of our own – and they had the fastest and sturdiest ships that had been designed so far in history. Evidence of Phoenician influence has been found as far away as Ireland and West Africa . In fact, they may even have made it as far as Brazil .

A tablet bearing a Phoenician entreaty to the Gods was found in the 1960s on the north coast of Brazil – many experts are impressed with its authentic feel in the use of its language. It might be genuine, or it might be a very clever fake, but either way, the Phoenician liking for long sea voyages does lend itself to this type of story.

As Phoenician influence waned, the first switchback occurred.

India circa 800BC was a melting pot of innovation, futurism and spiritualism. Information which had been flowing steadily eastward from Sumeria and Akkadia now found full, flowering expression.

It was at this time and place that the Rig Vedas were first written down and the foundations for yoga and Theravada spiritual and medical systems were laid. India was the centre for advances in engineering and medical science (including the invention of blood transfusions). From these innovations, the great social experiment of Buddhism would spring some three hundred years.

The Second Switchback

From India , the centre of information moved to Classical Persia . Here, with the rise of Zoroastrian religion and thought, a great spiritual revolution was taking place. Zoroastrianism was the first religion to think of the world in dualist terms – as either good or evil – and this reckoning has gone on to influence virtually all the major world religions today.

Additionally, with leaders such as Darius and Cyrus the Great, engineering and social innovations came on in leaps and bounds – not least the profoundly humanist conscience of Cyrus the Great as told in the famous story of the release of the Jews from Babylonian Captivity.

From Persia, the centre of information moves to Greece , as it does in the conventional theory. Classical Greece’s innovations in technology, engineering, science and philosophy are today world famous, but probably more than any other information centre so far, it can be said of Greece that it was an extremely futurist society. There were colleges of philosophers who did nothing but create theories and perform experiments. The greatest social innovation that Athens created was democracy, which dominates the modern political landscape.

It is here that the second switchback occurs, turning towards the city of Alexandria in Egypt .

Now it is generally accepted that Rome circa 0AD was the world’s information centre, but my theory holds that Rome was far too socially conservative and backward leaning (particularly towards Greece) to be a true centre.

Alexandria at this time, however, was a thriving powerful trade centre, and the location of the largest library the ancient world had ever seen. A perfect mix of east and west, it was a city of philosophers naturally extending past and reinventing the philosophies of the Classical Greeks, and despite being part of the Roman Empire , it was markedly more lenient in its legal system than many other cities of the time. It was also a place of refuge, as depicted in the story of Mary and Jesus’ flight to Egypt.

Alexandria was in many ways the spiritual home of the Gnostic Christians. These futurists sought to examine the teachings of Jesus in a way consonant with the works of Classical Greek philosophers and Egyptian spiritualist traditions, expanding the mind and one’s consciousness into new ways of being and re-formulating Hermetic philosophy into a way for the world.

It is testament to exactly the type of ‘information’ Rome sought at this time to understand that this amazing futurist city was destroyed at the hands of the newly Christianised Romans. Its great pagan library was burnt, the city fell into disfavour, and the enterprising, consciousness-expanding Gnosticism was replaced by a rigorously fundamentalist, and thoroughly Roman, brad of Christianity, called Catholicism.

There now was ushered in a period of a thousand years of fundamentalist, Dark-Age, ignorance. For the works of the Greeks and Alexandrians to survive, it was down to the Arab Muslims.

Third switchback

Cordoba circa 900AD was one of the true flowerings of Islamic civilisation, and one which is justly famous throughout the world outside the West.

Largely a re-creation of Alexandria in Islamic form, it too possessed a great library and gathered around itself a collection of scholars, mystics, Sufi spiritualists and philosophers who re-articulated much of ancient philosophy into forms which laid the foundations of modern thought. They also were instrumental in preserving much of the ancient Greek and Alexandrian works of philosophy, poetry and science.

Quite rightly is it said that without the Arab scholars of Cordoba , we almost certainly would be lacking Plato, Socrates, Euripides, Archimedes and many others in the modern world.

Among those scholars were Ibn Sina (Avicenna), who wrote the famous Medical Canon which became a reference text throughout Europe and the Islamic world for centuries, and Ibn Rusht (Averroes) who wrote numerous commentaries on the Classical Philosophies and formulated his own syncretism of Ancient Greek and Islamic thought.

As Cordoba waned, the third switchback occurred. This ensured that the centre of information stayed within the Islamic world.

Baghdad previously competed with Cordoba for dominance, but the encroaching Christian Kingdoms in Spain ensured that Cordoba finally dropped out around 1200AD. Much of the centre of philosophy, literature and Sufism moved to the centre of Islamic power in Baghdad .

The centre did not stay here for long, however. To a certain extent, Baghdad play the role of Rome to Cordoba’s Alexandria. More hardline scholars began to catch the public imagination and the mixing of Islamic philosophy with Greek thought was forbidden.

Just as Baghdad began to rise, so it began to close and the information centre moved on.

The Fourth Switchback

It is at this point that this theory begins to more closely map the conventional theory.

From Baghdad, the information centre flowed to the city states of Renaissance Northern Italy, where the cities of Florence, Milan, Venice and others witnessed an extraordinary outburst of artistic and philosophical flair. Profoundly futurist, these cities gave rise to such geniuses as Leonardo da Vinci, who devised the helicopter 500 years before it was possible to build, and Michelangelo, an openly homosexual artist (like the present author!) who flagrantly displayed his love of the male form in his work, even taking it to the heart of the Catholic Church.

The rise of the Venetian trading empire also ensured that these cities were powerhouses of economic influence.

From Italy, the information centre moved to Britain (*1) around 1700, where the Industrial Revolution was just getting under way. Northern England in the 1700’s must have been a truly exciting place to live. The rise of the industrialist innovator who saw no limitations to what mankind could achieve – and indeed, saw that very lack of limitations as God’s intention so that mankind could create heaven on earth – came hand in hand with Britain’s place at the forefront of science, with Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, William Herschel, and later, Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday and Nikola Tesla, overturning every aspect of the previously understood models of the world and mankind’s place in it.

It was exactly at this time and place that the conventional theory of the westward flow of information centres was first postulated.

But Britain’s ambitions as a world power, which had held sway for some two hundred years, finally sunk with the Titanic. The great ship that was the triumph of British engineering could not withstand the rising power of America.

And it was to New York that the centre of information moved. New England was the new home of science – Harvard University is still one of the most prestigious universities in the world. It became a centre of engineering, art and philosophy. And of course, economic power. The stock markets of New York were and still are the most powerful economic centres in the world – every stock market and ultimately every business in the world looks towards to New York in order to regulate its own trading habits. When New York rises, the world’s economy rises, when it falls, the world falls.

But, again, like Baghdad, just as it was rising in 1900, it was eclipsed – not by fundamentalism, but by the very thing that has made it famous - its rising economic power, which underwent a major collapse. The Depression era of American history ensured that not only did a kind of mythical period take place within American history, but also that the information centre switched back to Europe.

Paris in 1920 was by far and away the freest social and artistic expression of life since the Renaissance. It was here that virtually every major artist of the early twentieth century gathered to sit in the cafes to discuss, pose, network, inspire and create. Everyone from Van Gogh to Picasso, from Gauguin to Matisse was here at some point.

It is as if the information flow had switched back to pick up the finest in European artistic expression before heading back westwards, where it finally arrived in California in the 1960s.

The Future – Westward or the Fifth Switchback?

All of which brings us to an important question. As we review the flow and switchback of information over the last four and a half thousand years, we notice that the information centre is accelerating around the world. It took 1700 years for the first switchback to occur, but the last one only 700. But things have started to speed up at a much grater rate in the last 100 years.

With the advent of the internet, the information centre is already starting to flow extremely fast – can it be said there will be an information centre in the future or will it simply be delocalised across the face of the earth?

The conventional theory states that the next centre of information is expected to be in Japan in around one hundred years’ time. While this seems likely, there are a number of other candidates that present themselves. These are discussed in turn, with advantages and disadvantages to each one:

Japan has the distinct advantage of being right on the conventional westward flow. It is also, in some aspects of its culture, profoundly futurist. It is a powerful economic and innovating technological centre, and its culture is changing rapidly. Its spiritualist tendencies are currently marked by syncretic experimentations such as Soka Gakkai, a syncretism between Buddhism, Christianity and Vedic and Classic Greek thought. However, the main two disadvantages are that it seems unable to maintain its vigorous economy beyond the next twenty years due to a lack of workforce, and its social system is too group-minded to allow for individual experimentation.

China is also on the conventional westward flow. Like Japan , it is futurist, but unlike Japan it has no shortage of a workforce and it is expected to be an economic power second to none by 2050. However, it lacks a spiritual dimension and the totalitarianism of its Communist government ensures that social conformity is compulsory. Despite that, the rise of groups such as Falun Gong – a spiritualist movement with aspects from Buddhist, Taoist, Greek and Christian thought – shows that such totalitarianism may not be such a barrier after all.

Amsterdam or Berlin (back to Europe again), both of which are potential switchbacks for the information flow, are cities undergoing profound social and experimental changes. Just as California’s centre largely formed when the hedonic hippy generation grew up and got sensible, so it remains to be seen what happens in thirty years time when Europe’s Ecstasy Generation grow up. The centre of these cultural movements was definitely Amsterdam – with its leniency to all forms of drug culture, its liberality concerning sexuality and gay rights – and Berlin – with its massive annual Love Parade. Amsterdam , however, suffers from the same problem as Japan – waning economic strength and a dwindling workforce, although Germany suffers from neither of these. It also remains to be seen what might happen with the European Union and whether it will go federal.

Brazil is the final possible destination and is also a switchback for the flow. Brazil is fast becoming an economic powerhouse, and its intrinsically tolerant culture has allowed a wide range of forms of expression and lifestyles to flourish. The capital city, Brasilia, is officially designated as a city of all religions, and there are representatives resident from virtually all world religions, from Buddhism and Christianity to the Native American Church and Santo Daime. It is already a centre of world sport, and it is taking steps to unite numerous third world and Latin American countries with itself as a kind of informal leader. Significantly, it is also forging its own particular brand of social democracy found nowhere else…at least, as yet.

Summary of the Switchback Theory

As can be seen from the map above, the Switchback Theory of Information Flow does make for a more complex picture than the conventional theory, but then, information is like that. It doesn’t always follow patterns of migration, and to a certain extent, there is a measure of chaos in anything that might be called a flow.

What is interesting is that this theory proposes not a linear, one dimensional flow from past to future, but a much more interactive, serpentine flow, moving from past through the present to the future, then switching back to pick up the past and finally flowing forward again.

A schematic representation of the theory helps to clarify and remove some of the apparent complexity, while also illustrating the serpentine flow.

And a schematic of the movement of information may also help to clarify how the different aspects of our modern information bank has been built up by contributions from each of the previous information centres.

The advantage that this theory has over the conventional theory is that it ultimately leaves the future open, rather than making solid predictions about the future. Mankind, and particularly innovators, philosophers and hedonists, has always been able to flourish more openly, joyously and successfully in a world where the future hasn’t already been decided.

And in fields such as economics, technology and culture, where what people believe more strongly determines what actually occurs, and in a world that is becoming faster and faster flowing than ever before, an open future is the most important thing of all.

© Bruce Rimell, June 2005

Notes

(*1) This theory does not take into account Lisbon's economic and political power in the 17th and 18th centuries due to its fairly dogmatic religious culture at the time. The same goes for Madrid in the 16th and 17th centuries. Northern Italy and Britain were the much more happening place to be at those times!

References

Timothy Leary 'Musings on Human Metamorphoses'

Robert Anton Wilson 'Cosmic Trigger - Volumes 1-3'

Joseph Campbell 'The Masks Of God - Volumes 1-4'

Samuel Noah Kramer 'The Sumerians'

Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy 'The Jesus Mysteries'

Paul Kriwaczek 'In Search Of Zarathustra'

Justin Wintle 'The Rough Guide History of Islam'

 

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