Introduction — Logic of Propositions and Predicates

Chapter I: Axiomatic Set Theory

A proposition is a variable that can be true or false. No others. We can create new propositions from given ones using logical operators.

Chapter II: Topological Spaces

Definition. Let be some set. A choice is called a topology on if:

1. and
2. 
3. 

The pair is called a topological space.

Examples.

1. is any set, is the chaotic topology
2. is any set, is the discrete topology
3. 

	# of topologies
1	1
2	4
3	29
4	355
7	9,535,241

Important example:

is constructed in 3 steps:

1. :

3. Proof that is a topology:
   • Is ? because any .
   • Consider . Then such that and , therefore .

Hagarism without Judaism

The mutual assistance that might have existed between Jews and Arabs due to the compatibility of their goals was faced with problems after the success of the Arab conquest of Palestine. The question of restoring the Kingdom of Israel would become a bit of a doctrinal embarrassment for the Arabs, unlike Jesus of Nazareth who could evade the question of whether he, as a Messianic figure, would fulfill this Jewish expectation and this would pave the way for the development of Christian theology:

In the New Testament (Acts 1:6), Jesus’ disciples ask him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”

Jesus’ response was not a straightforward yes or no. Instead, he said,

“It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority.”

The authors are suggesting that Jesus’ response was a way of evading the question, and that this evasion became a central part of the formation of Christianity. This reinterpretation paved the way for the development of Christian theology, which diverged from traditional Jewish messianic expectations.

For the Arabs, success precluded a gradual dissociation from Jewish messianism, and required instead a sharp and immediate break. Their acquirement of large numbers of Christian subjects also meant a doctrinal softening of the Arabs towards Christians

The rest of the chapter is about the specifics of how the Hagarenes adopted Christian messianism and the technicalities and contradictions that it faced, while solving the problem of their separation from their jewish proteges while not diffusing into the Christians they were ruling in Palestine. With the conclusion that the only consistent way out was to erect an Ishmaelite prophetology of their own.

The prophet like Moses

1 - Farewell To Humanity’s Childhood

(Or, why this is not a book about the origins of inequality)

• There are two common and widely accepted views on the social evolution of humanity and the origins of inequality:

  The first is the view of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his “Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes” (1754) postulates that humanity initially existed in an idyllic, simple and egalitarian form of social organisation, tiny bands of hunter-gatherers, but fell from this state due to the advent of agriculture, which necessitated hierarchies, civilization and states. - page 1

  The second is the view of Thomas Hobbes, which is developed in his Leviathan (1651), and held that due to the selfish nature of humans, their original state of existence was not innocent, but must have instead been ‘solitary, nasty, brutish and poor’. If any progress has been made from that state, it must be due to the same repressive mechanisms that Rousseau complains about. - page 2

• These views, D&D argue, widely accepted they may be, are not actually backed up by any scientific evidence because the facts that are presented in support are not true, have dire political implications, are make the past ‘needlessly dull’. - page 3

• D&D then explain how accepting either of these two views prevents questioning of the current status quo, which is currently fraught with inequality. Indeed, framing the problem solely in terms of ‘inequality’ leads to the belief that solving it entirely is hopeless and utopian, and that a realistic approach would focus on reducing the degree of inequality. In fact, attempting to enforce strict egalitarianism is equated with returning to the primitive initial state of humanity where everyone was ‘equally poor’ (page 6).

• D&D then criticize the work of Francis Fukuyama (The Origins of Political Order) and Jared Diamond (The World Until Yesterday) and Steven Pinker

  *In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.* - Jared Diamond

• On page 14, D&D criticize Pinker for using Otzi the Tyrolean Iceman, who died with an arrow in his side in the Alps, as an example of humanity in its initial state. Instead, they briefly mention the much older burial of Romito 2 in southern Italy. Romito 2 suffered from dwarfism, but lived a relatively long and healthy life, likely due to the accommodation provided by his entourage. - page 14

• The authors then talk about Napoleon Chagnon’s sulfuric study of the Yanomami people as a ‘fierce people’ and how controversial his work is in anthropology - page 16

• D&D trace their argument back to Pinker, who asserts that institutions like the police, the state, and an ambiguous “European civilizing process” associated with the Enlightenment and Voltaire are the only things that prevented us from returning to a violent state. However, the authors challenge Pinker’s view by pointing out that even Voltaire himself never claimed that our contemporary ideals of freedom, equality, and democracy were exclusively “Western” or of European origin. In fact, most Enlightenment thinkers attributed these ideals to foreigners. This is not surprising because “Western” authors from Plato to Marcus Aurelius almost always opposed such ideals. For example, despite the Greek origins of the term “democracy,” all Western thinkers considered it to be a terrible form of government. - page 17

2 - Wicked Liberty

• The Spanish conquests of the Americas and Portuguese fleets visiting Africa, China, and India exposed Europeans to a plethora of previously unimagined social, scientific, and political ideas. The ultimate result of this flood of new ideas came to be known as the Enlightenment.

• However, historians tell a different story. Even when great European thinkers themselves insist that they were getting their ideas from foreign sources (as was the case with Leibniz, for example), they are not taken seriously by historians. Only references to other Western thinkers are usually considered valid.

• As an example, the authors cite the case of Leibniz. He advocated for Chinese models of statecraft, which had existed for centuries in China but became more common in Europe when exposed to Chinese thought and experiences.

• D&D suggest that Europeans may have taken inspiration for their ideas about freedom, liberty, and reason from Native Americans. Specifically, they suggest that Kondiaronk, a Wendat statesman, may have greatly influenced salon discussions in 17th century Europe through the writings of Lahontan, a French aristocrat who served in the French army in North America. The writings were presented as a discussion with “Adario” in the book “Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who Has Travelled (1703)” - up to page 52.

• Some excerpts from the conversation by the channel MakingHistory:

• On page 55, there is an amazing paraphrase of Kondiaronk’s description of what he would do if he lived in Europe.

• According to the authors, Lahontan’s book inspired a whole genre of imitations, including one by Madame de Graffigny, a saloniste, titled “Letters of a Peruvian Woman.” The main character, Zilia, is a kidnapped Inca princess who is critical of the absurdities of European society and the patriarchy. Some consider this work to be the first to introduce state socialism to Europe, as Zilia wonders why the king simply doesn’t redistribute all the wealth he garners from the heavy taxes he levies, just like the Sapa Inca.

• Moreover, the authors note how de Graffigny sent a copy of her book to friends for suggestions and changes. One of these correspondents was A.R.J. Turgot, an economist and Louis XVI’s Contrôleur général des finances, who argued that while freedom and equality are good in principle, they are only possible in “primitive societies that have not yet moved on from hunting and gathering or farming.” A complex “commercial civilization” requires a certain division of labor that highlights the differences between individuals. The authors (probably?) suggest that this is the origin of the “equally poor” argument and note it as an explicit example of American critique of European society that directly provoked a debate in Europe around a central idea of the Enlightenment: Equality. (Pages 59-62)

• Note that every central figure of the enlightenment had an external character critique European society Lahontan-style:

  • A Persian for Montesquieu (Lettres persanes)
  • A Chinese for the Marquis d’Argens
  • A Tahitian for Diderot
  • A Natchez for Chateaubriand
  • A half-Wendat and half-french in Voltaire’s L’Ingénu

• Up to page 75, the authors spend time to develop why the question about the origin of social inequality is necessarily a question about the origin of human civilization. It is therefore unhelpful to consider our ancestors as some sort of primordial egalitarian human soup, but as people who had very specific ideas about what was going on in their societies and what they wanted from it.

3 - Unfreezing the Ice Age

• The humans that inhabited Africa from Morocco to the Cape for hundreds of thousands of years (most of our prehistory) are far more diverse than humans today. Populations separated by deserts of rainforests were isolated from each other, allowing for the development of strong regional population traits. The difference we notice now are largely illusory and are due to having no real basis for comparison. - page 80 to 81

• Our ancestors also lived with small-brained, more ape like species such as Homo naledi, They exchanged with them, interbred with them, drifted away from them etc. But we have no idea what these ancestral societies must have been like. The variance of societies must have been at least as important as the variance in physical types. - page 81

• This was the case up until at least 40,000B.C. It is therefore useless to look for a singular form of human societies in our deep prehistory, and trying to do so is a matter of myth-making only - page 82

• Funny phrase from page 83:

Consider the first direct evidence of what we’d now call Complex Symbolic Human Behavior, or simply ‘Culture’

• The earliest hafted tools and expressive use of shell and ochre date back to 80,000B.C in Rock Shelters around the coastlands of South Africa. However, it’s only until 45,000B.C that such evidence starts to appear widely and on a larger scale. Scientists interpreted this is the revolution in human cognition that paved the way for civilization, but current evidence now suggests that it is only an illusion due to bias in the data.

• The authors explain this by the fact that most of this evidence is based in Europe where the Homo Sapiens replaced the Neanderthals. And go on to talk about the ‘Sapient Paradox’: delay between when our biological development is supposed to have given us the means to develop culture, and the time when we got around to actually doing it. - page 84

• Emerging evidence from all around the world is now showing behavioral complexity even earlier than what the European findings showed, the problem was therefore a mirage.

• In the pages following 85, the authors cite a few of the rich hunter-gatherer burial discoveries that indicate hierarchies and stratification in humans around 30,000 years ago. They cite:

Pettitt, P. (2011). Religion and ritual in the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic. The Oxford handbook of the archaeology of ritual and religion, 329-343.

• These findings have apparently swung the pendulum completely into the other direction, with some archeologists now arguing that human societies before the advent of farming and agriculture were very stratified - page 88

• There is also the appearance of Monumental Architecture, with the temples at Gobekli Tepe (Schimdt, 2006) which is talked about in:

  https://www.dainst.blog/the-tepe-telegrams/

• Other examples include the stone temples in the Germus mountains in southeast Turkey which are extremely ancient

• The massive structures at Gobekli Tepe are massive and imply strict coordination on a large scale, even more so if they were built simultaneously, as is claimed by

  Haklay, G., & Gopher, A. (2020). Geometry and architectural planning at Göbekli Tepe, Turkey. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 30(2), 343-357.

• The main point to stress is that while some humans in the vicinity had begun cultivating crops, it does not seem like the humans who built these monuments had. This is the most striking example of monumentality beyond the emergence of agriculture.

Hunter-Gatherer societies had institutions to support major public works, projects and monumental constructions, and therefore had complex social hierarchy prior to their adoption of farming - page 90

• Page 93 contains a citation from Yuval Noah Harari’s book “Sapiens”, in which he compares early bands of humans to apes instead of humans. This comparison suggests, according to the D&D, that he is stripping these early humans of conscious political thought. Like apes, they didn’t choose to live the way they did, and cannot argue or reflect on the proper way to live.

• This causes a paradox, humans somehow had developed anatomically modern brains, but for long periods of history, simply lived like apes anyway?

• Claude Levi-Strauss also observed the Nambikwara in the amazon forest, who during the rainy season settled in villages due to the abundance of resources, but during the dry season split into bands that were led in an autocratic fashion by leaders who would switch back to being nothing but mediators and diplomats that had no coercive power. The Nambikwara were switching constantly between two different stages of human development that should not be able to simultaneously exist. Not to mention that the dry-season leaders were able to change their behavior depending on the situation, which means they must have been quintessentially political actors that could reflect about their own society. - page 98 to 100

• In page 102, the authors claim that there is also overwhelming evidence of seasonal variations in the social structures of human societies in the paleolithic period.

• Marcel Mauss apparently talked about this phenomenon and called it “double morphology”

Mauss, M. (2013). Seasonal variations of the Eskimo: a study in social morphology. Routledge.

• pages 107-110 talked about more examples of this seasonal variations and in page 112 talk about how it implies that they are full political actors that could imagine and seek/avoid different kinds of social order. In fact, it seems as if the way some of these societies were organized was precisely to avoid the emergence of the coercive institutions of an “advanced complex society” such as state”. A possible critique of this is that it’s farfetched to think that these humans would try to avoid something they’d never lived in or seen? Authors answer that large scale polities did exist in neighboring regions in the continent and it’s not unreasonable to think that they were aware of what was going on in them.

• In 114, authors say that this phenomenon of seasonality is a bit of a wildcard and there is no common pattern in the way it manifests itself in these foraging societies. The only constant is variation and the consequent awareness of different social possibilities.

What all this confirms is that searching for ‘the origins of social inequality’ is really asking the wrong question - page 115

• An interesting idea in page 117 is that the rituals associated with seasonality are also highly variable, and even in modern humans where it is a shadow of its former self and the possibilities they offer, keep the imagination of the political mind alive by showing different kinds of possible social orders. Authors think it’s no coincidence that May Day or International Workers’ Day for example is because many British peasant revolts began on riotous festivals at that season.

• Maybe the first Kings to ever exist were just play kings in some ritual or festival, who then became real kings, and are now going back to being play kings again who are largely ceremonial in role.

• Page 118 is a good summary of the book so far, and is important, so here it is in its entirety

WHAT BEING SAPIENS REALLY MEANS

Let us end this chapter where we began it. For far too long we have been generating myths. As a result, we’ve been mostly asking the wrong questions: are festive rituals expressions of authority, or vehicles for social creativity? Are they reactionary or progressive? Were our earliest ancestors simple and egalitarian, or complex and stratified? Is human nature innocent or corrupt? Are we, as a species, inherently co-operative or competitive, kind or selfish, good or evil?

Perhaps all these questions blind us to what really makes us human in the first place, which is our capacity – as moral and social beings – to negotiate between such alternatives. As we’ve already observed, it makes no sense to ask any such questions of a fish or a hedgehog. Animals already exist in a state ‘beyond good and evil’, the very one that Nietzsche dreamed humans might also aspire to. Perhaps we are doomed always to be arguing about such things. But certainly, it is more interesting to start asking other questions as well. If nothing else, surely the time has come to stop the swinging pendulum that has fixated generations of philosophers, historians and social scientists, leading their gaze from Hobbes to Rousseau, from Rousseau to Hobbes and back again. We do not have to choose any more between an egalitarian or hierarchical start to the human story. Let us bid farewell to the ‘childhood of Man’ and acknowledge (as Lévi-Strauss insisted) that our early ancestors were not just our cognitive equals, but our intellectual peers too. Likely as not, they grappled with the paradoxes of social order and creativity just as much as we do; and understood them – at least the most reflexive among them – just as much, which also means just as little. They were perhaps more aware of some things and less aware of others. They were neither ignorant savages nor wise sons and daughters of nature. They were, as Helena Valero said of the Yanomami, just people, like us; equally perceptive, equally confused.

Be this as it may, it’s becoming increasing clear that the earliest known evidence of human social life resembles a carnival parade of political forms, far more than it does the drab abstractions of evolutionary theory. If there is a riddle here it’s this: why, after millennia of constructing and disassembling forms of hierarchy, did Homo sapiens – supposedly the wisest of apes – allow permanent and intractable systems of inequality to take root? Was this really a consequence of adopting agriculture? Of settling down in permanent villages and, later, towns? Should we be looking for a moment in time like the one Rousseau envisaged, when somebody first enclosed a tract of land, declaring: ‘This is mine and always will be!’ Or is that another fool’s errand?

4 - Free People, the Origin of Cultures, and the Advent of Private Property

• Up to 125, authors talk about various mesolithic populations and how the gradual improvement of technologies that would in principle make it easier to travel long distances (connecting populations with different languages and economic systems etc.) resulted mainly in more tightly knit groups divided across cultures, class and language.

• Surprisingly, in page 124-125, authors seem to suggest that this emergence of distinct social and cultural universes might have led to more durable and intransigeant forms of domination.

• The constantly mobile nature of foraging societies meant that individuals could take the first exit route if their freedoms were threatened, the hardening and multiplication of cultural boundaries might have restricted this possibility - 125

• Then there is a discussion on Marshall Sahlin’s ‘Original Affluent Society’ which according to wikipedia:

At the time of the symposium new research by anthropologists, such as Richard B. Lee’s work on the !Kung of southern Africa, challenged popular notions that hunter-gatherer societies were always near the brink of starvation and continuously engaged in a struggle for survival.2 Sahlins gathered the data from these studies and used it to support a comprehensive argument that states that hunter-gatherers did not suffer from deprivation, but instead lived in a society in which “all the people’s wants are easily satisfied.”

Sahlins, M. (1968). “Notes on the Original Affluent Society”, Man the Hunter. R.B. Lee and I. DeVore (New York: Aldine Publishing Company) pp. 85-89.ISBN 020233032X

• In 138, there is this important paragraph where they argue that in the 1960s, researchers were beginning to realize that foragers were perfectly aware of how one would go about planting and harvesting grains and vegetable, but simply did not see any reason to. They cite a !Kung informant who said

Why should we plant, when there are some many mongongo nuts in the world? >

• Such foragers literally rejected the Neolithic Revolution in order to keep their leisure

I interrupt these notes to pose my own prediction of how Graeber and Wengrow will end this book, and I will confirm whether I was right when I actually finish it, here goes:

The Neolithic Revolution is probably a conscious political decision that early humans made. I’m not sure yet why, but once settlements and coercive institutions emerged, they could amass enough surplus production using these coercive institutions (note that the concept of surplus is pointless to a foraging people) to dominate the other groups and populations that hadn’t made the transition and excluding them from territory or incorporating them in their own system. Once ‘civilization’ was spread enough on most accessible land, these foraging groups either had to submit to the new emerging stratified surplus societies (or statelike structures) or adopt their own in order to keep a distinct identity and survive. (Inspired by current touareg populations in the Sahara and special shoutout to the music video of Tinariwen (+IO:I) - Ténéré Tàqqàl)

Am I right or am I wrong?

• Authors then proceed to point out what they consider to be the main flaw in Sahlin’s argument, that he himself concedes, which is that maybe the !Kung were not necessarily more representative of paleolithic societies than the foragers of Northwestern California or the fisher-foragers of the Canadian northwest coast, who were famously industrious and adhered to a stringent work ethic. The Kwakiutl also had lavishly supplied households with a an always increasing quantity of items

• Next is a discussion about Poverty Point, which apparently has evidence of standardised units of measurements across a significant proportion of the Americas - 143

• Artist reconstruction of Poverty Point:

• An aerial view of the earthworks at Poverty Point. Excerpt from USDA Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service aerial photograph CTK-2BB-125. Aerial photograph taken November 11, 1960:

• 145 contains new (to me at least) information about the archaic period of american prehistory:

The Archaic period covers an immense span of time, between the flooding of the Beringia land bridge (which once linked Eurasia to the Americas) around 8000BC, and the initial adoption and spread of maize-farming in certain parts of North America, down to around 1000BC.

• The myth that foraging societies live in a state of infantile simplicity was used to strip native populations of the land they forage in, with the argument that they didn’t really improve the land (like a landlord would) but only used to for their basic needs. They were considered part of the land and had no right to claim property to it. - 149

• 151 mentions the Calusa, a non-agricultural people who inhabited the west coast of Florida. The Leader had absolute political power and was even dressed like a king with a wooden throne. This people clearly had a stratified society with extreme coercion, without ever needing to plant a seed or tethering a single animal.

• 158 to 159 go back to the subject of property. An apparently striking exception to the rule of never claiming property was the sacred or rituals. They cite James Woodburn’s work on free societies and how the items associated with these rituals are the only objects that can be exclusive in nature. Next, they pivot to Emile Durkheim’s definition of the ‘sacred’ as that which is set apart, or the Polynesan word ‘Tabu’ which means that which is not to be touched.

• D&D consider this perfectly analogous to private property as we know it today, at least in its social effects and underlying logic. If you own a car, you have the right to keep anyone in the entire world from entering it, it is sacred to a specific human individual, you, at the expense of the rest of the world.

• Furthermore, the european conception of the absolute and sacred nature of property is taken as a paradigm for all other rights and freedoms. In the sense that you own your right to safety stems from you owning your house and your right not to be killed, tortured or arbitrarily from you owning your body. Naturally the people who did not share this conception of the sacred could be killed, imprisoned or tortured, as they often were.

• 162 to 163, D&D talk about brutal initiation rituals in Australian Aranda people, and the in general, the idea of the sacred is intimately related to exclusive claims to rights over property, and places like Gobelki Tepe and Poverty Point are exactly the kind of places where sacred rituals would happen. The question therefore, of the origin of property as a concept is probably associated with the origin of the sacred, which is as old as humanity itself. The right question to ask, then, is how it came to order to many so many other aspects of human affairs.

5 - Many Seasons Ago

(or the problem of modes of production)

• 170 to 174 are about culture areas and Mauss’ insight about how different populations were broadly aware of what was going on around them, but chose not to adopt some elements precisely as a way to differentiate themselves from them.

Cultures were, effectively, structures of refusal

• In their discussion about foraging societies in the west coast (California and Northwest coast), authors mention Maz Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism - 1905, which was trying to ask why capitalism emerged in western europe and not elsewhere. Weber apparently says that despite trade an commerce existing elsewhere in the world, their was always the expectation that you would use the wealth you gained to get yourself a palace or build a mosque etc. but this wasn’t the case with capitalism, where the wealth one gains is always expected to be reinvested to generate even more wealth, which would put the person under immense pressure from their community in any other place the puritanical strain of Christianity.

• 179 to 180 discuss the different ethos between the indigenous californians and the peoples of the NorthWest coast. While they both had advanced concepts of private property and it was possible to accumulate a certain quantity of wealth, the underlying ethos was very different in that a wealthy Californian (Yurok) was expected to remain modest and give much of his wealth away in festivities and such, while in the north west coast the Kwakiutl was much more boastful and vainglorious. In 180 there is a systematic extrapolation to this process of differentiation with the main example given being how Sparta and Athens were always diametrically opposed in so many facets they came to define eachother as land does with sea. Marshall Sahlins’ puts it this way

Dynamically interconnected, they were then reciprocally constituted.. Athens was to Sparta as sea to land, cosmopolitan to xenophobic, commercial to autarkic, luxurious to frugal, democratic to oligarchic, urban to villageois, autochtonous to immigrant, logomanic to laconic, .. One cannot finish enumerating the dichotomies … Athens and Sparta were antitypes.

• In 183, the authors ask how we could explain the differences between the Californians and the Northwest coast peoples. Does one start from institutional structures and arrive at the ethos from that, or is it the other way around, with the institutions deriving from the underlying ethos? Are they both just the effects of technological adaptation to different environments?

• These are fundamental questions about what ultimately determines the nature of society

• Book moves on to the subject of slavery and modes of production, by first noting that it’s very hard to archeologically ‘identify’ slavery without written records. However:

We can observe how the elements that came together to form the institution of slavery emerged at the same time starting at around 1850BC,in what’s called the middle pacific period

• Basically increased labour demands from such a bounteous resource as anadromous fish with large salmon runs. It’s assumed to be no coincidence that the first signs of warfare and fortifications emerged at the same time. - 186

• They also observe a significant variation between treatment of the dead at this stage, with clear hierarchy between those who’s burials had decoration and ornamentation, and those who’s bodies were mutilated, used as tools or in general shown to matter very little.

• This was completely absent in the correspondingly early record of California, who’s middle pacific was comparatively more pacific. And the differences cannot be put down to lack of contact, which archeological and linguistic evidence suggests definitely did exist through the movement of people and goods along the west coast.

• Authors talk about the deep ambivalence of some relationships with slaves. In a first sense, slavery is taken as theft of labour in which one does not have to raise a human up to adulthood where they cease to be a liability and start actually becoming productive. Why is it then that some societies take pride in their adoption of captives and spending a lot of effort, almost like pets. 191

• 192-193, the story of the wogies: First attested in 1873 by A.W. Chase. which was related to him by the Chetco people of Oregon. Wogie is a word for white settlers, and the story goes like this:

The ancestors came with canoes from the far north, and found two tribes in the area. One warlike race, which they conquered and exterminated, and one tribe with a diminutive and mild disposition. They were skillful in the manufacture of baskets, robes, canoes etc. but were enslaved because of their refusal to fight. One night after a grand feast, they packed up their things and fled. When the first white mean appeared, the Chetcos thought the were the wogies returned, but they soon found out their mistake, but retained the appellation ‘Wogies’

• The authors not that the Chetcos enslaved a tribe for their labor and skills that they themselves lacked, similar to the Guaicuru . Furthermore, this story seems like a cautionary tale from the dangers of enslaving a people, since the Chetco consider the white european settlers as the Wogies back for their vengeance. More interestingly, however, this was geographically in the boundary between two major culture regions, precisely where one would expect an institution like slavery would be debated and contested.

• 195, authors describe optimal foraging theory: > foragers will design their hunting and collecting strategies with the intention of obtaining the maximum return > in calories, for a minimum outlay of labor.

• Behavioral-ecologists call this a ‘cost-benefit’ calculation. First you figure out how foragers ought to act if they are trying to be as efficient as possible. Then you examine how they do in fact act. If it doesn’t correspond, then something else must be going on.

• Authors note that in this perspective, indigenous californians were far from efficient. They were gathering acorns and pine nuts as staples, which doesn’t make sense in a bounteous region like California. Nut yields vary dramatically from season to season, unlike the reliably abundant and more nutritious fish. Acorns and pine nuts also require a lot of leaching and grinding. In fact, the Northwest coast peoples did enjoy great varieties of fish, so in optimal foraging theory, California is a puzzle

• In behavioral ecology, fish are ‘front-loaded’, meaning you have to do most of the work right away, unlike acorns and pine nuts which were ‘back-loaded’. Harvesting them was a simple task, and there was no need for processing prior to storage. Unlike fish, most of the hard work came right before consumption: grinding and leaching to make porridges, cakes, and biscuits. Fish on the other hand, means investing in the creation of a storable surplus of processed and packaged foods, which creates an irresistible temptation for plunderers; you were basically tying a noose around your own neck.

• It seems then, that Northwest coast societies were warlike simply because they didn’t have the option of relying on a war-proof staple food. But the authors claim that this theory does not match up to the historical record. First, because the capture of fish or dried food was never a significant aim of Northwest coast intergroup raiding. The main aim of raiding was always to capture people, but this was one of the most densely populated areas of NA. Why this hunger for people then? - 197

• It seems the causes of slavery stem from Northwest coast concepts of the proper ordering of society, which in turn, were the result of political jockeying by different sectors of the population on what a proper society should be. Aristocratic title holders felt that they should be exempt from menial work, which became issues in spring and summer when the only limit on fish harvesting was how many hands were available. But low ranking commoners would constantly defect to rival households if pressed too hard.

• There seems to be a shortage of controllable labor especially during critical times of the year. This seemed to be the problem that slavery solves for the aristocrats. They looked abroad, because they lacked the means to compel their own subjects to take part in their endless games of magnificence.

• 200 - The cautionary tale of the Wogies suggests that populations directly adjacent to the Californian ‘shatter zone’ were aware of their northern neighbors and saw them as warlike. Meaning they recognized such exploitation as a possibility in their own society and still rejected it. In fact, the foragers in the Californian shatter zone were building their communities in a schismogenetic fashion: You’d never catch a free member of a Northwest household chopping or carrying wood, but Californian Chiefs made such activities into solemn public duty

• Some Conclusions in page 204 is a good summary in itself, and a must reread. Especially the part where slavery is considered to gave emerged at home.

• Re-examine the second paragraph in page 205 about the role of structuralism and post-structuralism

6 - The Gardens of Adonis

The revolution that never happened: How neolithic peoples avoided agriculture.

212 - a discussion about the world’s oldest town: Çatalhöyük

On-site restoration of a typical interior.

Model of the neolithic settlement ( 7300 BC )

Population 5,000 - 7,000. Large numbers of buildings clustered together. The inhabitants lived in mudbrick houses. No footpaths or streets between the dwellings. Most were accessed by holes in the ceiling and doors on the side of the houses, with doors reached by ladders and stairs.

• The town is important in that it is the first settlement that we know of whose inhabitants got most of their nutrition through domesticated cereals, sheep and goats.

• 213-214, discussion about primitive matriarchy and how new methods of field work in Çatalhöyük changed our perspective, buildings previously thought to be shrines are actually households where everyday tasks are performed, and wall-mounted Ox skulls that we thought to be those of domesticated cattle, turn out to be of fierce aurochs etc.

• 215 is about Matilda Joslyn Gage and her work in “Woman, Church, and State” - 1893 in which she posits the universal existence of an early form of society known as “The Matriarchate” or “Mother-rule” in which institutions of government and religion were modeled after the relationship of a mother and her child in a household.

• 216-217 are about Marija Gimbutas, a Lithuanian-American archeologist and her work in “The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe” - (1982), in which she argued for the old Victorian story of goddess-worshipping farmers, and that from 7000BC to around 3500BC, an ensemble of peaceful neolithic villages existed in the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean where women and men were equally valued, and worshipped under common pantheon of a supreme goddess, whose cult is attested in many female figurines across the middle east and Balkans.

• This came to a catastrophic end after the migration of the kurgan cattle-keeping peoples from the Pontic Steppe north of the Black Sea. They were extremely warlike and very patriarchal and their societies were based on the radical subordination of women and the elevation of warriors as a ruling caste.

• Gimbutas considers them to be responsible for the westward spread of Indo-European languages. This was extremely controversial at the time and she was accused of muddying the waters between research and old Victorian myths. Recent DNA analyses however, indicate that she was probably right. It truly does seem that there was a migration of cattle herders from the north Black Sea at around the third millenium BC.

Haak, Wolfgang, et al. “Massive migration from the steppe was a source for Indo-European languages in Europe.” Nature 522.7555 (2015): 207-211.

Allentoft, Morten E., et al. “Population genomics of bronze age Eurasia.” Nature 522.7555 (2015): 167-172.

Mathieson, Iain, et al. “Genome-wide patterns of selection in 230 ancient Eurasians.” Nature 528.7583 (2015): 499-503.

In a discussion about the origins of farming, page 230, authors criticize Yuval Harrari:

.. Wheat was just another form of wild grass, of no special significance; but within the space of a few millennia it was growing in large parts of the planet. How did it happen? The answer, according to Harrari, is that wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage. ‘This ape’, he writes, ‘had been living a fairly comfortable life hunting and gathering until about 10,000 years ago, but then began to invest more and more effort in cultivating wheat.’ If wheat didn’t like stones, humans had to clear them from their fields; if wheat didn’t wanna share its space with other plants, people were obliged to labor under the hot sun weeding them out; if wheat craved water, people had to lug it from one place to another, and so on. - p. 80 of ‘Sapiens’

• Page 232, authors argue that under experimental conditions, it seems that the genetic mutations that would transform wheat from a wild form of grass into a domesticated plant take roughly 20 to 30 years, or 200 years at most, using simple harvesting techniques.

• It seems humans settled in permanent villages long before cereals became a major component of their diets:

Moore, A. M., & Hillman, G. C. (1992). The Pleistocene to Holocene transition and human economy in Southwest Asia: the impact of the Younger Dryas. American Antiquity, 57(3), 482-494.

If Harrari’s claim was true, the domestication of large seeded grasses would have happened within a few decades, which contradicts available evidence that suggests a time frame of 3000 years for it to fully complete:

Fuller, D. Q., Allaby, R. G., & Stevens, C. (2010). Domestication as innovation: the entanglement of techniques, technology and chance in the domestication of cereal crops. World archaeology, 42(1), 13-28.

• 237 to 241 discuss the prominent role of women in the development of neolithic technology. Women were instrumental in exploring plant properties, experimenting with harvesting techniques, and debating the social implications of these practices. Moreover, women likely developed fibre-based crafts and industries, and the mathematical and geometrical knowledge linked to these crafts. Despite this, the text argues that the role of women is often overlooked in scholarly discourse.

• Moreover, The terms ‘agriculture’ and ‘domestication’ might not adequately describe early human interaction with the environment. The Neolithic relationship between people and plants is posited as being about creating garden plots, tipping the ecological balance in favor of desired species. This Neolithic mode of cultivation was successful, fostering population growth in lowland regions of the Fertile Crescent. The visibility of women in contemporary art and ritual might reflect their status and achievements in these societies. The beginnings of farming are a media and social revolution, with women’s work and knowledge at the core. Furthermore, it emphasizes that this process was leisurely, non-coercive, and led to equality, unlike traditional narratives that imply it was born out of necessity.

7 - The Ecology of Freedom

How farming first hopped, stumbled and bluffed its way around the world

• 250, there’s been many instances of societies transitionning from foraging to agriculture (over long stretches of time of course, where they effectively tried different forms of foraging and farming), therefore it doesn’t make sense to ask the question “what are the social implications of the transition to farming” as if there’s only on set of possible implications.

• Transition to agriculture doesn’t necessarily imply transition to more unequal societies just to manage land. Communal tenure, ‘open-field’ principles and periodic redistribution of plots were all often practiced

Ostrom, Elinor. Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge university press, 1990.

• 251 Basically: Agriculture private land ownership, territoriality.

• In fact in the Fertile Crescent, the opposite seems true. Which means the process is far less unidirectional and far messier than the “Neolithic Revolution” term implies.

• 252 - Archeological science has now identified between 15 and 20 independent centers of domestication, many of which followed very different paths of development.

• Some examples of peoples who switched back to foraging after farming are given in page 254

• On why agriculture did not develop sooner, given that humans existed for at around 200,000 years, authors point out that there have only been two periods in that time where the climate was warm enough to sustain an agricultural economy for long enough to leave a trace in the archeological record. The Eemian Interglacial (between 130,000 and 115,000 years ago) and now, now being The Holocene (started 11,700 years ago).

• For some reason authors seem to skip past the Eemian Interglacial and why there was no agriculture then??

• Some scientists argue that the Anthropocene actually started in the late 1500-early 1600s, with the devastating effects European expansion in the Americas had on indigenous populations (conquest and disease), some 50 million hectares of cultivated land reverted to wilderness, forests reclaimed regions used for agriculture for centuries. It seems the carbon uptake from vegetations increased on a scale sufficient to affect the earth’s system and bring about a period of human-driven global cooling

Koch, Alexander, et al. “Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492.” Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (2019): 13-36.

• In any case, despite the fact that the Holocene presented conditions that were suitable for agriculture, it was a golden age for foraging societies.

• 260 is about ‘Ecological Freedom’ which is basically the proclivity of human societies to move freely in and out of farming. Raise crops without surrendering one’s existence entirely to the logistics of agriculture.

Smith, Bruce D. “Low-level food production.” Journal of archaeological research 9 (2001): 1-43.

• 261 to 262 is about the brutal collapse of central Europe’s first farmers:
  • Kilianstadten
  • Talheim
  • Schletz
  • Hexheim
• Each of these early Neolithic farming societies which were established at around 5000BC, ended in turmoil with the digging and filling of mass graves, which attests to the annihilation of an entire community. Chaotic jumbles of remains of adults and children of both sexes, their bones showing signs of torture, mutilation and violent death, breaking of limbs, taking of scalps, butchering for cannibalism. In Kilianstadten, younger women were missing, suggesting their appropriation as captives:

Wild, Eva Maria, et al. “Neolithic massacres: Local skirmishes or general warfare in Europe?.” Radiocarbon 46.1 (2004): 377-385.

Schulting, Rick J., and Linda Fibiger, eds. Sticks, stones, and broken bones: Neolithic violence in a European perspective. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Meyer, Christian, et al. “The massacre mass grave of Schöneck-Kilianstädten reveals new insights into collective violence in Early Neolithic Central Europe.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112.36 (2015): 11217-11222.

Teschler-Nicola, Maria. “The early Neolithic site Asparn/Schletz (Lower Austria): anthropological evidence of interpersonal violence.” Sticks, stones, and broken bones: Neolithic violence in a European perspective (2012): 101-120

Basically, the idea is that the demographic growth did not happen in this case, these societies’ numbers dwindled into obscurity after these massacres, and only took off again after a millenium or so - page 262

8 - Imaginary cities

This chapter is about the first cities in mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Ukraine and China

• A first discussion about Elias Canetti’s idea that the first cities existed in the minds of people in small hunter-gatherer communities who were speculating what a larger community would be like. His proof is the herd animals that were depicted in the walls of caves. - 276

• Authors argue that very large social units, in a sense, are always imaginary, and that there is a difference between how one relates to friends, family or neighborhood, and how one relates to empires, nations and metropolises.

• This issue of scale is crucial in the standard textbook argumentation of human social evolutionists: early forager societies were egalitarian precisely because they were small. Larger agglomerations are treated as somewhat unnatural, which is why we require elaborate institutions like states, the police, bureaucracy etc. It would make perfect sense then, that the rise of cities would also correspond with the rise of states. - 277

• The evidence however, suggests otherwise. Many of the early cities governed themselves with no temples of palaces that would suggest any ruling stratum or existence of different social classes. They would only emerge much later in history. In some cases centralized power appears and then disappears. Simply put, the mere fact of urban life does not necessarily imply any form of political organisation.

• 279 is about Dunbar’s number, which implies that conflicts will inevitably arise in communities whose size exceeds it. however, in 280, authors argue that close kin relations do not make up the majority of social relations in many forager groups such as the Hadza in Tanzania or Australian Martu. Same goes for !Kung San or the Ba Yaka, any member of them could come from anywhere in a large geographical area.

• 282 - It seems as if these societies exists simultaneously in two different scales.

• 284-285, a return to descriptions of the earliest cities, with an emphasis on the existence of planning at a municipal scale, and a self-conscious identity of these urban people.

• A following section about why the first cities arose. The main interesting idea is the stability of rivers and sea levels made settlement in river deltas more of a stable affair around 7000 years ago in the Holocene, which is not the case in its beginning where rivers were wild and unpredictable

• Around 292 is about archeologists reluctance to call mega-sites in ukraine cities because of a lack of centralized governments or state structures

• in 295, about the circular nature of Nebelivka, Ukraine. Authors speculate about how such an organisation might have taken place, as it was seemingly a bottom-up process with individual household members being part of the decision making process, and are consciously sharing a conceptual framework for the whole settlement.

• Authors compare this to modern Basque societies in the highlands of the Pyrenees-Atlantique, which also used a circular concept that was consciously egalitarian (everyone has neighbors to the left and to the right, no one is first or last):

Nebelivka settlement ground plan

Ascher, Marcia. Mathematics elsewhere: An exploration of ideas across cultures. Princeton University Press, 2002. (Chapter 5)

• These Basque villages, due to the fact that they contain around 100 households, and therefore form communities of a size beyond Dunbar’s number, are taken as evidence that large groups do not necessarily require administrators or chiefs to function. The ‘mega-sites’ in Ukraine are also considered evidence that egalitarianism on an urban scale was possible in early cities. - 297

• Book turns back to Mesopotamia, where urban societies seem to have existed since 3500BC in the arid landscapes of the Persian Gulf, and up to 4000BC in the north:

Area TW from the west; the lowest level excavated up to now lies still some 15m above modern plain level, this depth representing occupation dating to the earlier fifth and sixth millennia. The visible section spans the late fifth, the whole of the fourth and the very early third millennia BC.*

Oates, J., McMahon, A., Karsgaard, P., Al Quntar, S., & Ur, J. (2007). Early Mesopotamian urbanism: a new view from the north. antiquity, 81(313), 585-600.

• 298 is interesting for general knowledge: Mesopotamia was already in modern memory thanks for biblical scripture. Orientalists from the Victorian era excavated sites with scriptural associations like Nimrud and Nineveh, hoping to uncover figures of legend like Nebuchadnezzar, Sennacherib and Tiglath-Pileser. But they found even more interesting artefacts, like a stone tablet at Susa in western Iran, containing the Code of Hammurabi, ruler of Babylon in the 18th century BC. Clay tablets from Nineveh containing the Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as the Royal Tombs of Ur, where kings and queens that were unknown to the bible were interred with riches. Not to mention, an entire people unknown to the bible: The Sumerians.

• All this -including the biblical story- reinforces a picture of Mesopotamia as a land of eternal kings, monarchy and aristocracy. Early Mesopotamian cities bear no evidence of monarchy at all (4th and 3rd millenium BC). However, half a millenium later, evidence of monarchy starts popping up everywhere: Palaces, aristocratic burials, defensive wall structures

• 299 Corvees

• 300 citation 49

• 301 primitive democracy in Assyria

• Section about the city of Uruk around 308

• 313 about Mohenjo-Daro

A view of the Buddhist stupa in the background located in the higher settlement to the west, generally referred to as the citadel mound, and it is mostly comprised of the ruins of ancient administrative buildings constructed on top of a massive mud-brick platform.

The Great Bath

• The main idea is that monarchies weren’t necessarily present in the earliest cities in Mesopotamia, and the existence of proto-democratic institutions with people’s councils etc. is further of a hint of a possibly different political structure in pre-monarchy Mesopotamia

Van De Mieroop, M. (2013). CHAPTER THIRTEEN DEMOCRACY AND THE RULE OF LAW, THE ASSEMBLY, AND THE FIRST LAW CODE. The Sumerian World.

From: Yoffee, Norman. “Political economy in early Mesopotamian states.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24.1 (1995): 281-311.

Critics of typological thinking or step-ladder models in archaeology have a particularly good case in early Mesopotamia. In Mesopotamia, states emerged quickly, were nonregional, and are best described as city-states. This evolutionary scenario is by no means unique to Mesopotamia, since city-states, also emerged in the Indus Valley, in Shang and Zhou China, in Maya, at Teotihuacan, and in the Andean highlands. Only Egypt, among the earliest states, seems a complete exception to the evolution of city-states, since it was from the start a regional state. Whereas some Mesopotamian historians have considered community assemblies as residuals of a prehistoric past or of tribal customs of nomadic people who settled in city-states, the existence of assemblies can be seen as ordinary expressions of local power. Assemblies are identified in early vocabulary texts throughout the third millennium, in the OB period (where in many texts they make decisions that pertain to family law and other local matters), and in Old Assyrian texts showing that assemblies form part of the government along with the king and royal-estate. Although references to assemblies and other local bodies that take action on behalf of the community can be found in almost any ethnography, it seems an artifact of social evolutionary thought (in which “centralization” and “integration” are terms implying direction of economy and society by irresistibly powerful kings) to think that such local forms of power and authority disappeared in the earliest states. Although assembly houses have not been excavated in Mesopotamia, the city hall as a structure is mentioned in Old Assyrian texts, and one might hope for the discovery of a council house like the one found at the Maya site of Copan.

A very relevant quote from the same reference:

Similarly, in older social evolutionary theory, it had been argued that kinship systems broke down in early states as new territorial, economic, and political bonds grew in importance. Although Chang argued this was not the case for Shang China and few regard the importance of kinship to have diminished in South American or Mesoamerican states, the conclusion seems to have been that New World states were different from Old World ones on this point. From our survey of Mesopotamian political economy, however, one can observe the important roles of ethnic and kin-groups in all periods of early Mesopotamian social life, even if our understanding of the details of residence and descent is much debated. If we can hastily devise a social evolutionary generalization on kinship in early states, it is not that kinship disappears in them, but that new official arenas in early states are created in which members of kin-groups can compete, often mobilizing their kin for selective advantage, but in which some important offices are not necessarily tied to membership in any particular kin-group. Furthermore, success in the competition for new offices and ranks often depends on the ability of a person to recruit non-kinsmen as well as kinsmen.

• 319 authors talk about how scholars demand irrefutable evidence for democratic structures in the distant past, but readily accept flimsy evidence for hierarchical structure because they are treated as a default mode of history.

• While arguing against this, authors mention the Buddhist Sangha, and that early Buddhist texts mention that Buddha himself was inspired by South Asian cities/republics

• It’s also worth mentioning that the existence of social castes which are not necessarily considered equal does not automatically imply the same hierarchies in the management of communal affairs, as an example the Seka system in Bali, where despite everyone having their own rank in the hierarchy, everyone is expected to participate on equal terms on practical affairs. - 320

• 321, Criticism of a commonly held theory that kingdoms tended to appear in river valleys, because agriculture there requires complex irrigation systems, which in turn requires some sort of administrative coordination and control. Bali is again given as a counter-example due to the fact that the kingdoms in the area never actually managed irrigation. It was a matter reserved to farmers themselves through egalitarian processes of consensual decision-making. (what a sentence lmao)

– missing sections probably, review

9 - Hiding in Plain Sight

The origins of social housing and democracy in the Americas

• Around 330 is about the arrival of the Mexica people in the valley of Mexico, where they eventually found the Aztec Empire and its capital Tenochtitlan, which is modelled after another city that they found lay in ruins: Teotihuacan, the ‘Place of the Gods’. by that time, It was centuries since anyone lived in it and its original name was forgotten. Our view of Teotihuacan is mainly through the Aztec (Culhua-Mexica) point of view.

• It was the Aztecs, for instance, who made up the names ‘Pyramid of the Sun’, ‘Pyramid of the Moon’ and ‘Way of the Dead’, which archaeologists and tourists alike use to this day when describing the city’s most visible monuments and the road that links them all.

View of the Avenue of the Dead and the Pyramid of the Moon.

• We know now that the city of Teotihuacan had its heyday eight centuries before the coming of the Mexica, and more than 1,000 years before the arrival of the Spanish. Its foundation dates to around 100 BC, and its decline to around AD 600. We also know that it was on par with a city like Rome in its heyday.

• Estimates of its population at around from 100,000:

Published estimates range as high as 200,000 and drop down to as low as 75,000 people (Millon 1976: 212), but the most thorough reconstruction to date (by Smith et al. 2019) rounds off at 100,000 and relates to the Xolalpan-Metepec phases of the city’s occupation, between c.AD 350 and 600.

• 331 - Evidence suggests that Teotihuacan had, at its height of its power, found a way to govern itself without overlords – as did the much earlier cities of prehistoric Ukraine, Uruk-period Mesopotamia and Bronze Age Pakistan.

• Unlike the standard package of Mesoamerican kingship (royal temples, ball-courts, images of war and humiliated captives, complex calendrical rituals celebrating royal ancestors, and records of the deeds and biographies of living kings), Teotihuacan has none of these. There are few inscriptions in general, which is why the language spoken there is unknown, but we do know it was cosmopolitan enough to have Maya and Zapotec minorities that were familiar with writing:

Manzanilla, Linda R. “Cooperation and tensions in multiethnic corporate societies using Teotihuacan, Central Mexico, as a case study.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112.30 (2015): 9210-9215.

It seems likely that there was a writing system, but all that can be found are isolated signs:

Taube, Karl A. The writing system of ancient Teotihuacan. Vol. 1. Center for Ancient American Studies, 2000.

Headrick, Annabeth. The Teotihuacan trinity: The sociopolitical structure of an ancient Mesoamerican city. University of Texas Press, 2007.

Domenici, Davide. “Beyond Dichotomies: Teotihuacan and the Mesoamerican Urban Tradition.” Urbanized Landscapes in Early Syro-Mesopotamia and Pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. Papers of a Cross-Cultural Seminar held in Honor of Robert McCormick Adams. Harrassowitz Verlag, 2018.

On the other hand, there seems to be plenty of pictorial art (Thousands of artifacts from stone sculptures to diminutive terracotta figures that could be held in the palm, as well as vivid wall paintings). But nowhere is there a single representation of a ruler dominating a subordinate, unlike contemporary art from the Maya and Zapotec. Scholars have largely failed at identifying anything resembling a kingly figure. Strikingly, sometimes the artists seem to have deliberately frustrated such efforts, for instance by making all the figures in a given scene exactly the same size.

Similarly, no ball courts as is usually found in the Maya cities:

Miller, Mary Ellen, and Stephen D. Houston. “The Classic Maya ballgame and its architectural setting: a study of relations between text and image.” RES: Anthropology and aesthetics 14.1 (1987): 46-65.

Same thing for tombs, no equivalent to the great tombs of Sihyaj Chan K’awiil at Tikal or K’inich Janaab Pakal in Palenque

Map for reference:

The Maya area within the Mesoamerican region. Both Tikal and Calakmul lie near the center of the area.

• Personal note: All this discussion about Teotihuacan shrouds it in mystery and gives it an almost mystical feel, so to put you back down to earth and remind you that this was just a city inhabited by some dudes, here’s a toilet: Toilet in Teotihuacan.

• 332 - Apparently, archaeologists have combed through the ancient tunnels around the Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon and under the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, only to discover that the passages do not lead to royal tombs, or even robbed-out tomb chambers, but to chthonic labyrinths and mineral-crusted shrines

Taube, Karl A. “The Teotihuacan cave of origin: the iconography and architecture of emergence mythology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 12.1 (1986): 51-82.

It seems there is some effects of schismogenesis at play at Teotihuacan: For instance, the city’s artists appear to have been aware of formal and compositional principles found among their Mesoamerican neighbours, and to have set about deliberately inverting them. Where Maya and Zapotec art draws on a tradition of relief carving derived from the earlier Olmec kings of Veracruz, favouring curves and flowing forms, the sculpture of Teotihuacan shows humans and humanoid figures as flat composites, tightly fitted to angular blocks Alabaster statue of an ocelot from Teotihuacan, 5th–6th centuries, possibly a ritual container to receive sacrificed human hearts (British Museum)[116]

Figurines at the local museum

• This is schismogenesis at an urban scale according to Esther Pasztory

Unpopular with the Wealthy and Elites

…among wealthier Brazilians and some politically influential actors such as businesspeople, the mainstream media and evangelical churches (Almeida, 2019; Pereira and Viola, 2019; see also Van Dijk, 2017).

Almeida, R. (2019) ‘Bolsonaro presidente: conservadorismo, evangelismo e a crise brasileira’. Novos Estudos CEBRAP 38(1): 185–213.

Pereira, J. C. and Viola, E. (2019) ‘Catastrophic Climate Risk and Brazilian Amazonian Politics and Policies: A New Research Agenda’. Global Environmental Politics 19(2): 93–103.

Van Dijk, T. A. (2017) ‘How Globo Media Manipulated the Impeachment of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff’. Discourse & Communication 11(2): 199–229.

Prelude to the Bolsonaro Regime

Once Michel Temer became president through Rousseff’s controversial impeachment in 2016, several authoritarian and neoliberal reforms were then advanced, reducing labour rights, public spending, and governmental programmes aimed at social inclusion (Søndergaard, 2020).

Søndergaard, N. (2020) ‘Reforming in a Democratic Vacuum: The Authoritarian Neoliberalism of the Temer Administration from 2016 to 2018’. Globalizations 18(4): 568–583.

Work on sustainable development in Brazil had, therefore, already been watered down when Bolsonaro’s ascension galvanised the reversal of social and environmental protections (Siegel and Bastos Lima, 2020).

Siegel, K. and Bastos Lima, M. G. (2020) ‘When International Sustainability Frameworks Encounter Domestic Politics: The Sustainable Development Goals and Agri-Food Governance in South America’. World Development 135: 1–13.

Bolsonaro

Bolsonaro sowed doubt about the reliability of the nation’s electronic voting system — without any evidence:

• Bolsonaro is sowing doubt in Brazil’s electoral system (CNN)
• Bolsonaro vs. Lula: All you need to know (CNBC)
• Bolsonaro’s attack on Brazil’s electoral system sparks outrage (The Guardian)

He also sought to dismiss the severity of torture and human rights abuses committed during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964–1985):

• Brazil: Bolsonaro Celebrates Brutal Dictatorship (HRW)
• First Conviction for Dictatorship Crimes in Brazil (HRW)

“I am in favour of torture, you know that. And the people are in favour as well.” — Jair Bolsonaro (1999)

Once, following a visit to a settlement of African slave descendants called a quilombo, Bolsonaro suggested they were all overweight:

“I visited a quilombo and the least heavy afro-descendant weighed seven arrobas (approximately 230 pounds). They do nothing! They are not even good for procreation.”

From a 1999 interview on Brazilian television:

“Elections won’t change anything in this country. It will only change on the day that we break out in civil war here and do the job that the military regime didn’t do: killing 30,000. If some innocent people die, that’s fine. In every war, innocent people die.”

In 2015, Bolsonaro referred to immigrants from Haiti, Senegal, Bolivia and Syria as the

‘scum of the world’

When expressing his opposition to the 2017 Migration Law, Bolsonaro stated that:

‘[immigrants’] behaviour, their culture, is completely different from ours’ and that the law would ‘open wide’ the country ‘to all sorts of people’

In 2017, he controversially said that:

“a policeman who doesn’t kill isn’t a policeman”

He once said to Congress (The Guardian, Folha de S.Paulo):

“Yes, I’m in favor of a dictatorship.”

Câmara Aberta TV program, May 23, 1999:

“The pau-de-arara [a torture technique] works. I’m in favor of torture, you know that. And the people are in favor as well.”

Câmara Aberta TV program, May 23, 1999:

“Through the vote, you will not change anything in this country, nothing, absolutely nothing! It will only change, unfortunately, when, one day, we start a civil war here and do the work that the military regime did not do. Killing some 30,000, starting with FHC [then-President Fernando Henrique Cardoso], not kicking them out, killing! If some innocent people are going to die, fine, in any war, innocents die.”

Operação Lava Jato

Operation Car Wash (Wikipedia)

• São Paulo court rules Lula family never owned triplex (Brasil Wire)
• BBC podcast on Lava Jato
• White House admits CIA involvement in Latin America’s war on corruption (Brasil Wire)

Operation Car Wash is the infamous large-scale corruption investigation that began in Brazil in 2014. The operation initially focused on uncovering a money laundering scheme involving the state-owned oil company Petrobras, but it eventually expanded to investigate corruption across various sectors of Brazilian politics and business. The climax of Lava Jato was the conviction and imprisonment of Lula, the former president of Brazil, for allegedly accepting a triplex apartment in Guarujá from a company called OAS in exchange for contracts with Petrobras.

Bolsonaro appointed Sergio Moro — the judge who put Lula in jail and prevented him from running in the 2018 election — as his “super justice minister” after his election. He also promised Moro a supreme court seat: Folha de S.Paulo.

How anti-corruption crusades paved the way for Bolsonaro (The Atlantic)

It is now apparent that Moro was not acting as an impartial judge, but actively conspiring with the prosecution to ensure Lula was imprisoned. The prosecution presented evidence despite knowing it was weak; Moro gave the team tips on how to go after Lula and attack him in the press. The most recent of many explosive reports indicate prosecutors coordinated to put pressure on Brazil’s Supreme Court.

• The Intercept, March 2021
• The Intercept, timeline

The Intercept Brasil also revealed that wiretapping on Lula’s phones was kept from the public; that there was a plot to leak information to the Venezuelan opposition at the suggestion of Moro; and that chief prosecutor Deltan Dallagnol gave paid lectures to the very same banks he would later be tasked with investigating.

Moro had accelerated court dates to ensure that Lula was sentenced and that an appellate court ruling could come in just in time for the former president to be barred from running in the 2018 elections. The rulings rendered Lula ineligible for the presidency — and in April 2018, he was arrested on Moro’s orders. One of Moro’s last acts in his judgeship was to publicly release plea-bargain testimony from one of Lula’s former allies, Antonio Palocci, six days before the first round of elections.

“In a democratic and accusatory penal case, the role of prosecution must not be mixed with that of judgment,” said Minister Gilmar Mendes. The chats published by The Intercept had documented prohibited collaboration between the prosecutors and Moro, which Mendes said revealed lawbreaking: “Without a doubt, from the content of the conversations divulged, we can highlight manifestly illegal situations.”

On March 8, just a day before the judges publicly deliberated Moro’s bias, Supreme Court Minister Edson Fachin made a surprise decision throwing out all the Car Wash convictions against Lula — on the grounds that Moro’s mandate at the court in Curitiba was to judge crimes related to Petrobras, and so Lula’s case fell outside his purview. Many critics saw this as a last-ditch effort to spare Moro the embarrassment of having the court rule against him on bias grounds. The remaining judges decided to continue their deliberations regardless — and finally ruled.

Car Wash prosecutors, who long insisted that they were apolitical, were in fact internally plotting how to prevent the return to power of Lula: The Intercept.

Epilogue

Lula won the 2022 election and returned to the presidency in January 2023. Among his first acts:

• In sweeping moves, Lula reestablished the Amazon Fund and signed environmental executive orders (Amazon Watch)
• Brazil’s Lula recognises six new indigenous reserves (BBC): The lands — including a vast area of Amazon rainforest — cover about 620,000 hectares (1.5m acres).

Le clerc:

• Page 19:

  L ’homme de religion maintient l’opposition Occident-Orient dans le cadre de l’opposition Christianisme-Islam. Pendant longtemps, victoires et défaites ont alterné. Cette fois-ci, pourtant, la guerre a été rapide et la défaite durable : l’ennemi s’installe et s’organise selon ses propres normes. Le clerc peut néanmoins avoir l’illusion que c’est la vieille confrontation qui continue. D ’ailleurs, pour ces sortes d’accidents, il a une justification prête depuis toujours:

  Surat Al-Isra’ (17), verset 16

  This position doesn’t need to worry about the Other or analyse him because he’s reduced to an instrument of god and nothing more. However, it is no longer a satisfactory answer from the moment this Other imposes dialogue on his own terms

• Page 20 et 21:

  Il entend dire : la faiblesse de l’Islam provient du fanatisme et de la superstition. Il reprend ses textes, les lit, les relit et n’y trouve que tolérance et foi raisonnée.

  Il entend dire aussi : La force de l’Occident est fondée sur la Raison et la Liberté. Essayant de se faire une idée de cette liberté dans l’histoire, il tombe, et non par hasard, sur des écrivains anticléricaux et il est horrifié d’apprendre que Galilée fut emprisonné, Descartes calomnié, Rousseau persécuté, et que Giordano Bruno périt sur le bûcher parce qu’il osa défendre les droits de la Raison contre la raison d’Etat. Il pense alors à l’Abraham du Coran, héros de l’investigation personnelle, et se dit : Comment les chrétiens osent-ils parler de tolérance après tant de forfaits ? Bien entendu, il ne pense nullement aux persé­cutions du Calife Mutawakkil contre les mu’tazilites, aux autodafés des Almoravides, il ne voit plus, dans l’histoire de l’Islam, que les traducteurs d’Al Mâmûn penchés sur leurs livres grecs et syriaques, et les manuscrits rares d’Al-Hakam que les barbares espagnols, dit-on, engloutirent après la chute de Cordoue pour en faire des ponts à bon marché

  Conclusion du clerc: “La cause de notre faiblesse ? Mais c’est notre infidélité à l’égard du Message divin.” Le clerc sépare alors le dogme de la vie, le premier est sauvé pur et sans tache, tandis que l’histoire réelle n’est plus que la succession des avatars d’une Révé­lation trahie. Autrefois, Dieu fatigué d’être bafoué par son peuple élu se réfugia chez les Arabes mais plus tard la Raison traquée par le despotisme, l’obscurantisme, se retira dépitée chez les Chré­tiens et leur communiqua, malgré leur propre religion, gloire, puissance et richesse. L’Anddousie n’est plus une terre comme les autres, conquise et perdue, elle devient le symbole de la Raison qui, mal-aimée et trop souvent délaissée, nous a, à son tour, abandonnés.

Le politicien

• Page 24:

  Le politicien qui a pris la place du clerc sur le devant de la scène pense : notre décadence eut sûrement pour cause ultime un esclavage séculaire. Du coup vont reprendre force tous les jugements classiques qu’il avait autrefois lus et non assimiliés : que l’esclave ne peut ni bien travailler ni bien se battre, que l’agriculture, le commerce, la science et la philosophie ne peuvent jamais s’épanouir dans la servitude. Après bien d’autres, il réfléchira sur les mésaventures d’Athènes et de Rome et il se laissera convaincre que la chute des Empires est toujours la victoire de la liberté sur l’esclavage.

  On dira : tant que l’Islam fut arabe il fut libre, tolérant et victorieux ; devenu turc, il changea de nature et déchut. L’Islam turc fut vainqueur tant que l’Europe elle-même fut asservie et fataliste, mais dès qu’elle se libéra au temps de la Réforme, elle vainquit partout.

  Puisque le mal est diagnostiqué, le remède est trouvé. Le régime turc était le pouvoir d’un seul, il faudra donc élire une Assemblée ; le régime turc réglementait toutes les activités, il faudra alors donner libre cours à l’initiative privée ; le régime turc s’accommodait de l’ignorance, il faudra donc sacrifier tout pour propager l’instruction.

  Et ce juriste-politicien va se mettre à l’œuvre dans une débauche d’arguties et de subtilités. Le Prophète se trompe une fois au sujet de la technique de la pollinisation des palmiers-dattiers et le reconnaît franchement. On en tire la conclusion abusive que le dogme islamique n’impose pas une stricte organisation des pouvoirs publics et qu’il peut, par conséquent, s’accommoder de n’importe quel régime choisi par les musulmans.

  L’Ijmâa (consensus) juridique devient une véritable charte démocratique, corroborée par la procédure que choisit le Calife Omar pour désigner son successeur.

  Le dogme est ainsi sauvé une seconde fois, puisque toute l’organisation classique despotique est décrétée non musulmane, et du même coup l’avenir est dévoilé : organisons une démocratie représentative et la puissance nous reviendra de nouveau.

  Cette vision libérale, qui comporte en elle diagnostic et thérapeutique à la fois, se trouve encore dans tous les pays arabes ; dans certains comme l’Egypte, discréditée par ses échecs, elle ose à peine se faire entendre de temps en temps dans l’université ou au parlement, dans d’autres, comme le Maroc, elle a encore assez de confiance en elle-même pour se présenter à visage découvert.

  La liberté, se demande le politicien, nous l’avons bien, mais la puissance ? Et comme il croit que cette puissance lui est due, il se retourne sur et contre le peuple. Pour la première fois, avec le recul nécessaire, il le voit vraiment, tel qu’il est : ignorant, crasseux, assoupi.

  ## Le Technophile

  L’Occident, dira-t-il, ne se définit ni par une religion sans superstitions, ni par un Etat sans despotisme, mais simplement par une force matérielle, acquise par le travail et la science

  appliquée. Il rira désormais des idées que se sont faites de l’Occident clerc et politicien. Dans le grand amphithéâtre de l’université du Caire, Salâma Mûsa posera en 1930 à la jeunesse égyptienne la question suivante : « Les Occidentaux ont-ils la même religion? la même origine raciale? les mêmes institutions ? > Et il répond : « Depuis un quart de siècle une vérité s’est révélée à moi, une seule et qui est celle-ci : la différence qui nous sépare des Européens civilisés est l’industrie et l’industrie seule u. > Le technophile citera souvent l’exemple du Japon : existe-t-il une religion plus étrangère au monothéisme raisonné, une histoire plus sanglante, un peuple plus asservi que ce que nous trouvons dans ce Japon des Samouraï ? Pourtant en peu de temps, il vainquit blancs et jaunes simplement parce qu’il alla droit au secret de l’Occident. Faisons comme lui, ne perdons plus notre temps en discussions théologiques

  La critique de l’histoire islamique qu’avait amorcée timidement le politicien libéral est maintenant totalement écartée. Le technophile ne sent nul besoin d’interpréter le dogm e ou de le détourner de son sens traditionnel, il l’ignore tout simplement, puisqu’il ne détermine en fait ni force ni faiblesse. En mettant la tradition hors de discussion, il contribue à la sauver une dernière fois.

  A l’argument de la génération précé­dente, le technophile répondra : « N’est-ce pas sous Cromwell que l’Angleterre jeta les bases de son hégémonie maritim e? N’est-ce pas sous les deux Napoléons que la France devint une puissance industrielle ? Le despotisme n’empêche rien, peut-être même est-il une condition de l’avancement des peuples. »

• Page 30 et 31: The author states that Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani is a precursor to all three (Abduh, Sayyid, Musa) and predicted the fate of the orient, but was misunderstood until defeat forced the arab world into modernity, with the three archetypes the first to understand parts of al-Afghani’s thought and try to develop it

• Page 34: Author states that the clerc is using a self-ascribed definition of the West that is outdated, rendering his analysis and criticism null. The main actor in Western society is bourgeois capitalist, and does not have the same occupations and considerations as a clerc. When our clerc finds himself in a polemical sequence with a western clerc, who represents an outdated conception of the west, the essence of west remains completely untouched and unconcerned by their discussion. Laroui seems to ‘imply’ (but later denies it) the west of consciously giving the wrong diagnostic to the orient, mentioning that it was Renan’s own definition of the west and recounts the story of Muhammad Abduh visiting H. Spencer in 1903 where he said: “Les Anglais dégénèrent [..] Dans le domaine de la vertu et de la morale et cela, à cause des idées matérialistes constamment en progrès, qui ont déjà corrom pu les Latins, qui nous gagnent maintenant et gagneront par la suite tous les peuples de l’Europe”

• Page 35 et 36: ”La pensee Liberale” also suffers from the same out of phase phenomenon. Author states that Lotfy Sayyid does not recognise the existing duality/plurality of western liberalism, and that Lotfy Sayyid didn’t have John Locke, Montesquieu or John Stuart Mill as references but [verbatim]: “mais bien chez des hommes dont la pensée avait perdu, dans le climat raréfié de la fin du siècle, tout germe vivifiant” Author also (rather too quickly) applies the same logic to the technician, where he states Saint-Simon’s industrialism and “english economists” as the missing references in our technician’s thought, who instead relies on H.G. Wells or Bernard Shaw (qui sont des vulgarisateurs pragmatiques, he says) according to a Salama Musa citation from Comment se cultiver (en arabe), p. 251.

• Page 39: La conscience de notre clerc est religieuse quand il analyse sa société, mais elle devient libérale quand il critique l’O ccident ; il sait bien que les droits de la femme sont sacrifiés dans l’Islam, au moins dans la pratique. Mais comment résistera-t-il au plaisir de se servir du rapport Villermé et d’autres écrits accusateurs sur l’exploitation du travail féminin ? Et que de fois n’avons-nous pas vu un politicien arabe, cynique et désabusé chez lui, se convertir instantanément en apôtre socialiste pour dénoncer l’exploitation des ouvriers européens par les trusts internationaux?

Morocco

• Page 43: Allal el-Fassi being Morocco’s Muhammad Abduh with more knowledge of the west Allal’s thought consists of denying some historical determinisms. L’Occident positif, le travail, la liberté ne découlent pas du Christianisme qui, en histoire, fut toujours synonyme d’oppression et d’exploitation. De même, la décadence, la servitude, la passivité ne viennent pas de l’Islam, mais d’éléments qui lui sont étrangers. Il appréhende sa société à travers une conscience religieuse et critique l’Ociddent à partir d’une conscience libérale. Il dénie pour lui un déterminisme qu’il affirme pour l’Autre et soutient une permanence islamique anhistorique qu’il refuse au Christianisme occidental. About the progressive western left, Allal says:

  “Nous nous en séparons lorsqu’elle considère sa lutte contre le clergé comme une règle évidente applicable à toutes les sociétés, même à celles qui n’ont pas connu l’Eglise et ses méfaits… Et si nous comprenons fort bien les positions de la gauche occidentale dans ses conditions historiques, en revanche nous ne comprenons pas du tout comment nous pouvons prendre à notre compte une bataille qui n’est pas la nôtre et combattre ce qui n’existe pas…” - from “Nos points de rencontre avec la droite et la gauche occidentales”

• Page 61: L ’O ccident opposé à nous est l’Occident opaque, confiant dans ses parcs, ses routes, ses canons et qui croit pouvoir se passer de l’acquiescement de l’homme. Mais l’Occident critique qui, sans renoncer à ce cadre embelli et confortable, rappelle à tous l’espoir, autrefois exprimé dans des légendes éparses, d’un homme uni et réconcilié et qui, au-delà de nous et de lui-même, s’adresse au futur, celui-là doit être entendu, si nous voulons dépasser les sons inarticulés d’une fureur impuissante. Author cites Franz Fanon:

  F. Fanon, le champion le plus radical et le plus éloquent de l’authenticité négative, était obligé lui aussi de conclure dans ce sens en parlant “*des thèses quelquefois prodigieuses soutenues par l’Europe”

  • Les damnés de la terre, p. 242* >

• Page 63: A l’intellectuel occidental, disons que sa logique meurtrière se soucie bien peu de notre salut. Libre à certains peuples, plus profondément blessés, de se laisser abuser par cet appel féroce et trompeur. Trompeur car qui ignore que la révolte contre la Raison est née en Occident, que c’est le positivisme triomphant qui donna naissance à la psychanalyse et à l’ethnologie, et que cette dépréciation de la Raison fut par la suite utilisée, et de quelle façon! contre les peuples de la nature. L’aristotélisme est une partie d e notre héritage culturel et si sa logique, autrefois étudiée par des milliers d’étudiants à l’om bre des mosquées, est aujourd’hui rénovée et enrichie, ce n’est pas une raison suffisante pour que nous ne la reconnaissions plus.

  About the idea that one should take everything or leave everything (from the west), author writes: Et à notre frère, irrité par le vide d’un Moi disloqué, qui reprendra sans critique cette politique du tout ou rien, il faudra lui rappeler des faits oubliés. S’il refuse aujourd’hui l’Occident au nom d’une intransigeante fidélité, c’est parce que son Moi perdu a également perdu le souvenir de son passé. Dans ses terres de soleil et d’oliviers il fut maintes et maintes fois déplacé. Que de villes détruites, de puits empoisonnés, de vaisseaux brûlés, pour qu’il se reconnaisse dans un M oi qui lui fut d’abord opaque et pesant! Aujourd’hui, il est fier d’une langue qu’il a pendant des siècles estropiée, d’un message qu’il a travesti et d’une pensée qu’il essaya, bien des fois, d’étouffer par les flammes. Hier, il combattait le D ieu du désert qu’il invoque aujourd’hui, il refusait l’hellénisme dont il se fait maintenant un honneur d’avoir sauvegardé les chefs-d’œuvre

• Page 66: About Morocco, author writes: Aucune idéologie n’a chez nous une coloration historique autonome; elle prend, dans le vaste champ des idées, ce qui lui sert à l’instant, d’où cette instabilité, ce changement constant de perspective historique qui choquent tout lecteur qui a déjà orienté l’histoire d’une certaine manière.

• Page 68: Dans l’idéologie arabe contemporaine, aucune forme de conscience n’est authentique : chez le clerc pas plus que chez le technophile; il reflète une image différente du contact avec l’Occident mais le centre de sa pensée n’est pas plus à lui que celui du technophile ne lui appartient en propre.

• Page 73: Dans l’idéologie arabe contemporaine, aucune forme de conscience n’est authentique : chez le clerc pas plus que chez le technophile; il reflète une image différente du contact avec l’Occident mais le centre de sa pensée n’est pas plus à lui que celui du technophile ne lui appartient en propre.

• Page 100:

  Laroui says “ils écartent un hadith au nom d’un autre et ainsi, simultanément ou alternativement, ils acceptent une partie de la tradition pour pouvoir en récuser une autre”

  Rodinson Correctly criticizes this in the preface (page XII) by pointing out Schacht hyperscepticism and rejection of almost the entire body of hadith

Reference Electrodes

Because only potential differences are measured, reference electrodes are used.

The ideal Standard Hydrogen Electrode (SHE) has a 0V potential at all temperatures, it’s defined by the couple (STD: 1 bar pressure perfect gas and a concentration of ). This redox reaction occurs at a platinized platinum electrode. The electrode is dipped in an acidic solution and pure hydrogen gas is bubbled through it. The concentration of both the reduced form and oxidized form is maintained at unity.

The Normal Hydrogen Electrode¹ is the closest real electrode to the SHE with identical pressure and concentration. Its potential is SHE, the concentration needs to be slightly higher to approximate SHE even further.

Calomel Electrode:

The calomel electrode is a type of half-cell in which the electrode is mercury coated with calomel () and the electrolyte is a solution of potassium chloride and saturated calomel.

The electrode reaction is:

Nernst Equation

For this half equation:

• : Reduction potential at temperature of interest / Fermi level
• : Standard half-cell reduction potential
• : Number of electrons exchanged

Cyclic Voltammetry

The peak happens because the rising Fermi level of the electrode allows it to give (and falling allows it to take ) electrons from the solution.

Keep in mind the metal electrode’s Fermi level will match the solution’s Fermi level which is defined as (HOMO + LUMO) almost instantaneously after putting the electrode in the solution.

The peak is not a plateau because the reaction is limited by mass transport — the reactants no longer have enough time to reach the electrode surface and the concentration decreases as they are consumed, leading to falling current values.

Levich Treatment

Can be used to find the diffusion constant for a given species as a function of the rotation rate of the rotating disk electrode². Sigmoidal voltammograms are expected with a steady-state limiting current :

• : Number of moles of electrons
• : Rotation rate in rpm (for )
• : Diffusion coefficient
• : Kinematic viscosity in
• : Bulk analyte concentration in

Koutecky-Levich Treatment

The Koutecký-Levich analysis allows researchers to obtain kinetic parameters for a redox reaction such as the standard reaction constant³ k° and the symmetry factor α.

The first step is to plot at a fixed potential the values of the current at the various rotation rates (Fig. 1a). The value of the potential is chosen before the current plateau. The second step is to plot the inverse of the current values as a function of the inverse of the square root of the rotation speed (Fig. 1b). This is what is called the Koutecký-Levich plot.

Figure 1: (a) I vs. E curves obtained on an irreversible system on a Rotating Disk Electrode at various rotation speeds. The dots represent the points chosen to plot the Koutecký-Levich lines shown in (b). These lines are then extrapolated (c) to obtain the electronic transfer current (d).

The third step is to extrapolate the Koutecký-Levich line to 0, which corresponds to a theoretical infinite rotation speed (Fig. 1c, black dot). At this point, the current value corresponds to the electronic transfer current — the current that you would obtain if there was absolutely no limitation by mass transport.

Figure 2: (a) I vs. E curves obtained on an irreversible system on a Rotating Disk Electrode at various rotation speeds. The dots represent the points chosen to plot the Koutecký-Levich lines shown in (b). These lines are then extrapolated (c) to obtain the electronic transfer current (d). This is carried out at various potentials to obtain the Tafel curve shown in (e).

Performing these three steps at several potential values (Fig. 2a, b, c, d) allows you to plot the Tafel curve (Fig. 2e). The slope of this curve gives the value of the symmetry factor while the current value at gives the value of the standard kinetic constant , given the concentration of the reactive species and the number of electrons involved in the redox reaction.

Impedance Spectroscopy

Some resources:

In a Lissajous curve, a distorted ellipse means there is too much of a perturbation on the system — the AC part of the signal is too big and becomes non-linear.

Sometimes the chosen AC amplitude is good for some frequency ranges but not for others, meaning you have to make different measurements with different AC amplitudes.

Electrochemical systems are modeled using equivalent circuits (with basic R, L, C components or others like CPE: Constant Phase Element).

Electrode Kinetics

Global Symmetry

Let’s start simple. The Lagrangian density of a Dirac Bi-spinor field is:

Applying the Euler-Lagrange equations would give us the famous Dirac Equation, but we’re not interested in that right now. We want to see if there are any transformations which leave this Lagrangian invariant. To start off, we’ll try one of the simplest possible transformations, a global phase-shift. This basically amounts to changing the phase of the field by the same amount everywhere and is equivalent to rotating around the unit circle in complex space:

A minor detail that we will need is that the Dirac adjoint is defined as and it transforms like so:

Plugging this new transformed field in to the Lagrangian:

Now and are just complex phases and have no spacetime dependance so we can just move them next to eachother, they cancel out and our Lagrangian is invariant:

Local Symmetry

It turns out our Lagrangian is already symmetric under this global transformation, but it doesn’t take us very far. Gauge theories for some reason arise when we try to enforce symmetry under Local Transformations. Let’s what that looks like:

In a way this is a “stronger” constraint because we could just get back the global transformation by using a constant ϕ(xμ). But now our transformation can be local because it depends on where we are in spacetime. Depending on the function ϕ(xμ), we could really mess up the ψ field. I can already hear you mumbling “that’s all well and good but what the blazes is that gonna achieve?”, but let’s try it anyway:

Not so good but let’s go further..

So the mass term is invariant just like before, but now since the phase-shift depends on position, we cannot simply move it past the derivative like last time, we get that pesky middle term with . Seems like a bust, unless..

Let’s do something crazy, we clearly have an issue with so let’s mess it up in just the right way. Introducing where . The Lagrangian becomes:

We can clearly make this invariant if:

Using the same process as before:

So we managed to make the Lagrangian invariant but look! The new field is interacting with our Dirac field in the term , and there’s a weird coupling constant dictating the strength of the interaction. What does this mean? We do know of a field that behaves in this specific way.

Behold! The Electromagnetic Field! In fact, is the E&M four-potential . The weird constant is nothing but electric charge! It seems obvious now that it should be the coupling strength of the E&M field with the Dirac field. We insisted on a symmetry we had no right to, and rediscovered electromagnetism in its quantum nature. Isn’t that mindblowing?

Tying up some loose ends

Since Aμ is now a field itself, it needs to play by the rules of Special Relativity, a.k.a obey the Klein-Gordon equation which arises from the Proca Lagrangian:

The first term is already invariant, but we need to eliminate the second term to make the whole Lagrangian invariant by setting . This is to be expected because excitations in the E&M field (a.k.a photons) are massless. Hence, our new full-blown Lagrangian of Quantum Electrodynamics is:

We can construct the well known antisymmetric Electromagnetic Field Tensor as follows:

When we imposed , that is nothing but the Lorenz Gauge condition from classical electrodynamics.

Just for the sake of closure, and because you can never go wrong with them, Maxwell’s equations can be pulled from the QED Lagrangian by applying the Euler-Lagrange equations for Aμ where the four-current is defined as :

Epilogue

Let’s recap, we started with a simple free Lagrangian density which was already symmetric under global phase shifts. We tried to impose local gauge symmetry which, a priori, we have no right to expect should work. It turns out, this local gauge symmetry imposes the conservation of a certain quantity, and that is electric charge.

We tried one trick and we got the Electromagnetic field, Electric charge, Quantum Electrodynamics and the kitchen sink!

Conclusion

That was a pretty good improvement, but it’s possible to do even better. Our algorithm will still cause a maximum recursion depth error for a very big , and it’s possible to make a logarithmic time O(log n) algorithm using the closed form for fibonacci numbers, also known as Binet’s formula:

where is the gloden ratio.

You might think this is constant time but due to the powers in the formula, we need to use the math.pow() function, which is not O(1) like the usual addition and multiplication operations. It’s also worth noting that this method is subject to floating point errors during computations with big numbers, so your results might be slightly off if you decide to try it for yourself.

That’s about it for now, I hope you learned something with me today.

Penrose Diagrams

A Penrose diagram is just a fancy Minkowski diagram. It’s got worldlines, future light cones, past light cones, all the cavalry. It’s just that Minkowski diagrams are hard to follow and understand when you introduce exciting things that warp space-time. The paths of light bend and the light cones’ shapes change and it becomes all wibbly-wobbly . This is not the case with the Penrose diagram. Due to something called conformal transformation, (I’ll have to learn more about this myself later, but not knowing what that is won’t stop us from using the diagram.) light paths stay at 45 degree angles no matter the space-time geometry. This is very handy with stuff like event horizons and black holes.

Setting up the situation

Imagine a hostile alien civilisation that is indeed capable of building and weaponizing a Kugelblitz. They, for some reason, are pissed with us and they have a fleet of spaceships placed at equidistant (equidistant.. so grown up!) intervals around the solar system. These spaceships would collectively launch beams of light that would form a shell that converges on planet Earth. The energy from this pulse of light is enough to make a black hole, but it needs to move into a small enough region in space for the event horizon to actually form and the light to trap itself -and us with it-. Also, let’s assume there is no obi wan to help us in this situation.

Earth is doomed

I will be (badly) drawing Penrose diagrams in order to describe the situation. Because I can only draw on 2 dimensional paper, I am going to use one dimension for time, and one for space, nothing unusual so far. the pulse will be represented as two converging beams coming from the left and the right, essentially trapping Earth in its one spacial dimension universe. Also, two enemy spaceships on each side of Earth would suffice to represent the sphere of spaceships that would be used in actual 3D space. If you think this is cheating, try to project a sphere (3 dimensions) onto a line (1 dimension). If you do the projection down the middle (not the special case of a tangent), you’ll get two intersection points, hence two spaceships. Here’s the what the situation would look like:

Before the pulse of light enters the solar system, things would be pretty normal on planet Earth. Humanity will be completely unaware of its impending doom. The beams of light are moving at c, obviously. Which is why they are at a 45 degree angles in the diagram.

When the beams have moved into a small enough region, the event horizon will form. Cutting Earth off from the rest of the universe. Believe it or not, Earth would still not notice anything for a short time after the event horizon forms. This is because the supposed force carrier of gravity would also move at c, which is the same speed as the converging beams. Here’s the Penrose diagram when the event horizon forms.

Since the diagram would be symmetrical, and hand-drawing the lines of equal distances and times is difficult, I simply focused on the right side of the diagram. Drawing the flipped left side of the diagram is trivial and is left as an exercise for the reader. (I’m sorry but I’ve always wanted to be evil and write this somewhere)

The future light cone of Earth is already completely cutoff from the rest of the universe, the space-time geometry below the event horizon has changed (this is represented by space and time switching places in the diagram) and will only allow radially inward trajectories. This would mean that both Earth and the pulses will still inevitably fall towards the singularity. It’s the end of humanity, It was fun while it lasted.

This is what happens when you introduce a black hole into a Penrose diagram. Intriguingly, the lines of constant space and time switch places, and space is “falling” towards the singularity at angles higher than 45 degrees. The best way I’ve heard it put is: Trying to avoid the singularity at this point, would be like trying to avoid next Monday. Yes, Mondays suck, but there’s no way around them.

Also note that I extended the line of the event horizon to include a certain time before the true event horizon has formed. This is because there is a moment before the formation of true event horizon when there is not enough time for the planet to get out of the way even if it could move at the speed of light and miraculously ‘phase’ through the light pulses. The Deus Ex Machina

Now imagine that all these events were happening in a movie, and the writer (like all good writers do) decided to introduce a Deus Ex Machina to save humanity.

This could be an infinitely strong Dyson sphere, which would appear from a higher dimension and completely cover the Earth-Moon system.

The Dyson sphere, even if infinitely strong, is still facing a tall task in order to truly protect the Earth.

In order for it to have a chance, it would need to occupy a region of space that is bigger than the region where the light pulse first forms the event horizon. If the sphere itself is already below the horizon: Inevitable Death (More like a mathematical undefined form because of the sphere’s infinite strength but I wouldn’t bet my life on what that form means). The Dyson sphere needs to be light enough so that when the pulse hits it, the mass-energy increase of the sphere from the pulse is not enough to make the Schwarzschild radius too big and have the sphere fall below the resulting event horizon, if that happens : Inevitable death. - It actually needs to be so light that the mass-energy increase wouldn’t give it enough gravitational pull to throw the rest of the solar system into chaos. Is it really survival if the solar system goes haywire? Who knows what might hit Earth when it becomes a shooting gallery?

If, the Dyson sphere satisfies all those, Earth might just make it. Hell, if we got a dyson sphere, we could use the energy from their own attack against them. And humanity lives happily ever after.

Epilogue

This ‘scenario’ is heavily based on a challenge question on the (Excellent) youtube channel: PBS SpaceTime. In fact, I relied entirely on the answer I wrote and sent a few weeks before I started this blog. If you watch their challenge video, then you might have noticed that I did not even mention Newton’s shell theorem even if it was talked about in the channel. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think Newton’s shell theorem is relevant here at all to the reason Earth doesn’t notice anything until the last moment. I’ve already talked about how the (admittedly theoretical) force carrier of gravity would also move at because it’s a local phenomenon so the change in the geometry of space time would move along with the pulse of light. Furthermore, LIGO detected gravitational waves directly for the first time just last year, and I’m pretty sure they propagate at . I believe that makes my claim stronger, but please notify me if you have an alternative explanation, or a clarification.