IDENTITY AND A RIFF ON CENTRAL PLACE THEORY

I just read “In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong” by Amin Maalouf
This is a stimulating book, that contains a lot of wisdom in a small package.

Maalouf points out that people have many dimensions to their identities – nationality, citizenship, language, and religion are his emphases. I would add family, tribe, profession, neighborhood, etc. He suggests that a lot of the problems in the world come from people who feel threatened, and who as a result focus on just one aspect of their identity. He offers this as a partial explanation of why people kill and commit suicide, be it in the name of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism, be it in the name of Israel or Palestine, be it in the name of Tutsi or Hutu. Where people identify with only one aspect of their multidimensional identities, they become more prone to fanaticism in the name of that aspect.

He suggests some radical reforms. He suggests that people respect each other’s dignity. He suggests that in an environment where individual and collective dignity are respected as are individual rights, democracy is useful (while recognizing that some of the worst atrocities have been committed in the name of democracy and other worthy ideals). He suggests that language is a key factor of identity, and that we should move toward a world or at least a Europe where the norm is that individuals speak three languages – the international language (English), their national language, and a third major language. And he suggests that we need a world in which people can identify with not only their own peer group, but with the general advancement of mankind. The anger at globalization is perhaps most localized by those who feel that their identity is challenged by the process, but who do not feel that they will share adequately in the benefits to identify with the world’s progress.

Last Sunday (August 3) I wrote an entry triggered by reading “How the Irish Became White”. I think it complements Maalouf’s book in a way. Maalouf focuses on the identities people feel and choose to act upon. Sunday I was focusing on the fact that identities are socially constructed. To go back to my example of the person with seven European great-grandparents and one African great-grandparent. That person in America was expected to take on a “Black” identity. The implications of being “Black”, especially following the Civil War and Reconstruction, were very bad – poverty, powerlessness, poor jobs, etc. The identity of being “Irish” came to mean, among other things, being “White”, and that made all the difference!

I wanted to take off on two specific references he makes in the book. Maalouf describes (page 91) Arnold Toynbee’s explanation of the history of the human race as consisting of three periods:
· The first (prehistory) in which communications were extremely slow, but knowledge advanced even more slowly, and human societies were much alike;
· The second (history), lasting several thousand years, in which knowledge developed at a faster rate than the means of disseminating it, and human societies differentiated one from another; and
· The third, starting quite recently, in which knowledge developed still faster, but communications became faster still, resulting in human societies becoming more alike again.

Christaller's central place theory sought to explain the pattern of towns and cities found everywhere. Big cities are linked to a network of smaller cities, linked in turn to networks of towns, linked to networks of villages. Zipf’s Law, in one of its aspects, noted the regular curve describing the relative size of these urban agglomerations, and noted that more modern societies tended to have larger central places, and of course larger networks. I suspect that the structure illuminated by Christaller and Zipf is related to Toynbee’s observation. The faster communication, the more extensive the network linked to a single central place.

I would point out that the system is anisotropic. Communication does not move equally rapidly in all geographical directions. Colombia’s history was affected by the fact that in the colonial times one could travel more quickly from Colombia’s coast to Spain by ship, than one could travel from the same place on the coast to the capital in the mountains. Maps showing rates of travel in the United States in the 19th century show patterns very different from the circles one might naively expect. (see “A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present,” Edited by Alfred D. Chandler and James W. Cortada). Indeed, thinking of radio and television, communication has in the 20th century flowed much more rapidly from the center to the periphery than in the opposite direction.

Information and knowledge flow very rapidly today among rich peoples. How fast does it flow to the one billion people who are not connected to electrical grids, or to the half of the world’s population that has never made a telephone call.

Language might be seen as layering over geographical space. Information flows more rapidly within populations that speak the same language. Information and knowledge is generated most rapidly in English today, and probably are communicated more rapidly to people who speak English than across language barriers.

And indeed, institutions also determine the speed of propagation of knowledge. I suppose professional institutions, like professional societies, are prototypical. In geographic areas in which those institutions are strong, professional knowledge can be expected to propagate quickly. Where educational institutions are strong, academic knowledge can be expected to spread quickly. And in areas, like Africa, where such institutions are not strong, academic and professional knowledge, understanding, and information can be expected to spread slowly.

I grew up in Southern California, which became a global “Central Place” for the creation of knowledge and information in the 20th century; it certainly was not that before the 20th century. Universities like UCLA, USC, UC Irvine, UC San Diego, and Cal Tech together churn out thousands of scientific publications per year. The aerospace industry there churns out technology, as does its share of the information technology industry. Hollywood churns our films and television programs. But all of this intellectual capacity was created in less than 100 years; Argentina and Chile, that had comparable status to California in 1900, did not develop anything like the same information and knowledge generation capacity in the 20th century.

Thus, in my minds eye, I can see a map of the globe with centers of knowledge and information generation as points of light, changing in brilliance in historical time as the cities grow or shrink in importance. I can see communication networks layering over the globe, providing faster channels in some places than in others, in some languages than in others, in some institutions than in others. But the model could be expected to explain a lot about development.

Maaloof also quotes Mark Bloch, “Men are more the sons of their time than of their fathers” (page 101). I suspect that such was not the case in prehistoric times, in which things changed very slowly, and sons lived in environments and used knowledge and information much like their father’s. But as technology changes more rapidly, and as man’s impact on his environment is greater and more rapid, the half-life of knowledge and information gets shorter. Things have to be reconstrued more often. So as each new generation reconstrues reality, the gap between fathers and sons increases. It would be interesting to see if this is true, if the generation gap is smaller in more traditional societies, greater in the societies that are most in flux.

Anyway. Let me recommend “In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong.”