An Old View)

Yesterday we discussed the physical range and speed of the human voice, and its ability to vibrate an awesome volume of air. Today we will consider another power of the human voice by examining its abstraction: communication.

One of the old mysteries of anthropology was the great disparity in development of different cultures. As the Western world expanded into the most remote corners of the world, it found people that were technologically far behind. Isolated tribes that lacked even writing systems, the wheel, and agricultural systems, to say nothing of firearms, ships, and medicine.

At the time, the simplest explanation was that some groups of people were fundamentally more advanced than other, almost like a different species. It was assumed by many that the savage could never be an educated man. But as these different worlds became more overlapped, there came opportunities for the tribesman to participate in the systems of the more advanced cultures, and it was discovered that any race and color could attain the same understanding and integration as any other participant in that culture.

A New Theory)

Now we live in a time where this experiment has played out repeatedly and universally. The old theories of superior and inferior races do not hold up to the reality that we have perceived. Having so many more data points to draw our conclusions from, a new pattern has emerged.

The factor that determines whether a culture is advanced or not is the amount of inter-cultural communication that that culture is subject to. Trade routes first caused drastically different people to become intimately familiar with one another’s language and customs. The English had to have an understanding of the Chinese, and the Chinese of the Arab. And they did not only trade in goods, but also in ideas. On the other hand, the isolated tribe in the wilds of Africa remained as a people frozen in time, remaining at the same level they had been for thousands of years.

It is now clear that communication, not race, is the driver of technology and advancement. And any race that becomes integrated in communication with others soon shares the same technologies and patterns of thought. It as we members of humanity share our voices together, everyone advances. As we remain isolated, we stagnate.

This causal link probably went unrecognized for so long because our level of communication is easily taken for granted. It transforms us seemingly effortlessly. We will explore this fact a little further with tomorrow’s post, where we examine the different milestones of communication that we have achieved, and the sudden and automatic spikes in technology that followed.