NONZERO

Introduction

PART I: A BRIEF HISTORY OF HUMANKIND

1. The Ladder of Cultural Evolution
2. The Way We Were
3. Add Technology and Bake for Five Millennia
4. The Invisible Brain
5. War: What Is It Good For?
6. The Inevitability of Agriculture
7. The Age of Chiefdoms
8. The Second Information Revolution
9. Civilization and So On
10. Our Friends the Barbarians
11. Dark Ages
12. The Inscrutable Orient
13. Modern Times
14. And Here We Are
15. New World Order
16. Degrees of Freedom

PART II: A BRIEF HISTORY OF ORGANIC LIFE

17. The Cosmic Context
18. The Rise of Biological Non-zero-sumness
19. Why Life Is So Complex
20. The Last Adaptation

PART III: FROM HERE TO ETERNITY

21. Non-crazy Questions
22. You Call This a God?

Excerpt from

Chapter Thirteen

MODERN TIMES

[SNIP]

Historians differ over when it becomes fair to speak of a single world economy (As early as 1500, even though Europe’s stance toward the New World was essentially parasitic? In 1800, by which time some residents of the New World—albeit mostly immigrants from the Old World—were engaged in more equitable exchange with Europe? Or not until a century later, when trade levels approached those of today?) But this disagreement, really, is the point: progress toward a global web of interdependence was so long and relentless that pinpointing a threshold is hard.

This progress lay not just in the growth of international exchange, but in its changing nature. In ancient times, with transport crude, slow, and pricey, most trade involved goods with a high ratio of value to mass: jewelry, tapestry; and other exotic, superfluous things. (“Splendid and trifling,” as Gibbon said of trade in the first century A.D.) But over the centuries, as transportation grew more cheap and routine, trade in bulky essentials grew practical. Even in the Roman Empire, hauling wheat long distances over water had made economic sense. In modern times, hauling such things far overland began to make sense.

As regions specialized in the things they did best, and imported the rest, mutual reliance for such basics as food, clothing, and tools could ensue. Non-zero-sumness flourished not just within states, but between them.

This economic fact had political consequences. War had long been by some measures a negative-sum game, since even the “victor” suffered. Now, with economic interdependence among nations growing, war became still more disruptive, more negative-sum—and peace more widely welcomed. Within three weeks of the end of hostilities between the United States and Britain in 1814, coffee prices in Saudi Arabia dropped 30 percent. And this was before the steamship and the railroad train.

With the benefits of peace growing, stability became more and more a conscious goal of foreign policy. Not coincidentally, it was the intensely commercial Italian states of the early modern period that had pioneered the idea of having a resident ambassador in another state. By the early nineteenth century, with the industrial revolution turning even large nation-states into intimate neighbors, Europe’s great powers had made ambassadors a permanent fixture.

Today we take for granted the corollary notion that formalized civility should be the normal state of relations among polities. But the notion is far from venerable. During the Middle Ages, to the extent that there had been anything worthy of the name “international law,” it consisted of the following premises, as one scholar has summarized them: “the high seas were no-man’s-land, where anyone might do as he pleased”; in the absence of agreements to the contrary, rulers were “entitled to treat foreigners at their absolute discretion”; and war was “the basic state of international relations.”

That this was no way to run a planet gradually dawned on humanity, and got especially forceful articulation in 1625, when Hugo Grotius, in his treatise Law of War and Peace, noted that the waging of war tended to be self-defeating——to produce negative sums, in other words. Grotius’s point has slowly won wide acceptance. The world’s failure thus far to act on this knowledge, and vanquish war, should not obscure the real achievements of the modern age: internationally accepted rules governing conduct on the seas, treatment of foreigners, and many other things.

Like so much else in the modern age, this trend has drawn strength from the printing press. The intellectual historian Bruce Mazlish has noted that, even as the press energized nationalism, it helped create a world literature; great works were translated and published abroad. These works included Grotius’s Law of War and Peace and various other tomes and essays in the sciences and humanities. Intellectuals, along with merchants, increasingly became a transnational class, creating a supranational consciousness that nourished the evolution of international law and international ethics. The press, having helped break up empires, helped weave filaments among the fragments.

Once again, the printing press was exhibiting its paradoxical properties, as both solvent and glue. And once again, the paradox is resolved by viewing the press as a congealer of common interest, a tool by which people with shared goals reap positive sums through concerted action. As we’ll see in the next two chapters, the same paradox, and the same resolution, applies to later information technologies.

[SNIP]