Excavation at Star Carr in Yorkshire, bbc.com
If I had the brain capacity, I’d write a book called something grandiose like Infrastructure and Civilisation. To bring out just how important working infrastructure is to us.
You can’t have ‘civilisation’ – people living in towns and cities – without it. How did it grow, from the earliest actions to build shared causeways? We are handy, but it must be more than that.
I just read an interesting book called Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World. It’s by Harvey Whitehouse, an anthropologist who also conducts psychology experiments on small children and co-compiled a database of hundreds of cultures already studied by anthropologists and archaeologists to analyse for key factors – as I said, interesting.
It made me reflect that both modern society and physical infrastructure require two things: co-operation between people (to build and maintain far larger social and physical structures than one person or even family could do) and sanctions, in other words ways to get people to do, or not do, things.*
Both have their origins well before homo sapiens, of course. Primates are largely social co-operators – and have strong views of what’s not fair, that they will go out of their way to punish. Sanctions for anyone not behaving well don’t have to involve written laws or dedicated police: for a social animal whose life depends on co-operation, disapproval works well on its own.
I grew up with a just-so story about competition being the motive force of progress, but it is much, much more interesting to look at how people work together.
It’s certainly my experience of infrastructure. 99% co-operation with some rules and regulation to force social-mindedness where necessary.
(And my current read is Progress, A History of Humanity’s Worst Idea!)
What’s the required balance of co-operation and rules for sustainable infrastructure?
*Whitehouse talks about why slavery did not in the end work out – why it’s more effective to get people to co-operate, when you grasp our basic psychology.
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