While reading an abridged version of the cosmological sections of Pierre Duhem’s massive study of Medieval science, Medieval Cosmology — published by the University of Chicago, I paid closer attention to some mathematical discussions by later Scholastics. As Duhem noted, those discussions were very sophisticated anticipations of the concept of limit which matured in the 1800s though it was probably somewhat implicit in the writings of mathematicians of the 1700s who were developing Newton’s ideas. Those discussions by the Scholastics were sophisticated but unconvincing in some unsettling way…
And I realized they were verbose and clumsy because of a lack of proper terminology, perhaps a lack of concern for the seas of words they were generating. To be fair, it’s not clear they were in the position to develop the fundamental concept of ‘set’, but I’ll put aside that major difficulty for the sake of making a point. Some of the discussions would have hit the bulls-eye if they’d had concepts and words corresponding to ‘open set’, ‘closed set’, ‘least upper bound’, and ‘greatest lower bound’. Someone who’s been through an advanced undergraduate course in analysis, or better, could easily understand the difficulties that would cause in discussing limits. Add to that the problems caused by lack of modern algebraic symbols and you’ve got the sort of prose that was ridiculed by Renaissance thinkers who were intellectual children compared to those late-Medieval Scholastics. Yet, the children had a point that the language was simply too much in several ways.
That led me to think about an apparent language problem in my occasional discussions about decentralizing political and economic systems. I’ve read some discussions, especially on libertarian sites, where some read ‘distributivist’ and think it means top-down distribution of power. I doubt if Hilaire Belloc, author of The Servile State [Corrected on 2012/02/09. I originally made a big mistake and gave the title as The Road to Serfdom, which was written by Frederich Hayek.] would have defined his political and economic self-description that way. If there are some who call themselves distributivists while believing a central authority ‘distributes’ power, so be it.
Yet, maybe the term raises suspicions for good reasons? Or maybe it’s at least inadequate? Maybe those suspicions could be alleviated, those inadequacies addressed, only by floods of words of the sort the late-Medieval thinkers generated in their efforts to discuss certain problems within their explorations of the concepts of ‘infinitely small’ and ‘infinitely large’.
Let me assume there is a problem that can be solved, opening the possibility of more sophisticated ways of discussing and analyzing human communities.
The 1913 Webster uses phrases such as “To divide among several or many” and “To dispense; to administer” and “To divide or separate” to define ‘distribute’. There is a hint of top-down organization, that is, a hint we start with some sort of given whole and then divide it, perhaps for the sake of administrative efficiency.
Can the word “aggregate” better fulfill my goal of speaking of a complex bottom-up process, local and concrete communities forming dispersed and abstract communities — without drawing in each and every member of the community to life in a “greater” community? That greater community might be — in fact, often should be — no more, and no less, than a set of relationships between business and political and religious leaders from the smaller and more concrete communities.
The 1913 Webster defines ‘aggregate’ by way of phrases such as “To bring together” and “To add or unite, as, a person, to an association”. So far, so good, but I’m still not happy with aggregate.
I need a word that takes in the sense of aggregate and allows for some degree of conscious, bottom-up planning but mostly evolution in a largely Darwinist sense. Evolutionary developments can be recognized pretty quickly, sometimes as they are occurring. I would bet that one mark of a society giving birth to a successful nation or even civilization is that it has knowledgeable and insightful leaders who recognize the nature of emerging structures and attributes, nurturing some and trying to head off or just delay others. The need for such leaders would increase as the human race advances. A relatively primitive and small-scale farming community might develop into a more complex community, manufacturing tools and furniture, trading food and tools for cottons, financing that trade in goods, without a lot of prior awareness of what’s emerging. So long as the community leaders nurture what is emerging, it might matter little that they can’t really anticipate what might come from these new ways of living and making a living.
I’m not good at coining words but it’s an interesting puzzle. How about: eggregate.
Eggregate: for entities to come together in a larger-scale association of entities by natural developments, including evolution, not by centralized planning or other top-down means. So, a group of local bankers getting together to plan for a multi-community industrial complex might well be within my definition of natural association but not if a far-away government comes in to participate in any substantial way.
A group of communities developing by natural means into some association of communities would be a type of eggregation.
The ‘e’ in evolution comes from ‘out’ and ‘volve’ brings a sense of unrolling. Evolution is an unrolling or unfolding, which is somewhat false in Darwinist terms, but these sorts of coinages rarely have pure pedigrees. The ‘gregate’ in aggregate comes, roughly speaking, from a term meaning to gather a flock.
Eggregate: ‘out of ?’ we ‘gather a flock’. Out of what already exists, a greater community is gathered by natural means including bottom-up human planning.
The collection of letters, ‘eggregate’, doesn’t seem to be in use as a word, so I’ll continue.
Eggregation would typically be a type of evolution but there are certainly some forms of evolution which would fall outside of ‘eggregation’ as there would be eggregations which are not evolutions. For example, the formation of colonies and then multi-cell organisms from single-cell organisms would be an evolutionary development and an eggregation. The arising of modern human animals from hominids would be an evolutionary development but not a eggregation. Certain human organizations, such as a chartered bank or a chartered social services club, might be formed by eggregations which aren’t evolutions, though they might be part of a more general evolutionary process.
I don’t know if I like ‘eggregate’ but we need new words to navigate between those who see only those forms of natural evolution without purposefulness and those who see only those forms of political organization which are planned by a team of bureaucrats and engineers working under the direction of a committee of politicians.
I’ll think about it as I go about my work of developing new ways to understand this world, including the human realm.