Looking at human movement

     We humans are physical creatures ruled inexorably by gravity, and regardless of our other movements, we always move or stay stationary on the surfaces under our feet or bodies, almost always horizontal surfaces. While we have many other types of movement – gesture, facial expression, speech – these horizontal movements are our focus. And we can find various movement patterns that endure over time. These movement patterns can be described physically and measured in various ways.

     We gather in big cities, or we spread out in small groups. We meet the same few people every day, or we interact briefly with each one of the many different people we encounter in a day. Small groups and large organizations and whole civilizations come into existence, last for a time, and dissolve to form new groups, organizations, and civilizations. In all human history, we have transformed from living in small nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers in the African wilderness to becoming our modern global industrial civilization – an amazing transformation from decentralization to centralization.

A scientific way to study society and history

     The study of society and the study of history have not yet become scientific disciplines on the same order as the “hard” sciences: physics, astronomy, chemistry, and biology. Tying research to our human movement patterns would make both fields more scientific.

     Are we humans fundamentally different from all other physical phenomena? Yes. We have big brains. We have language. We invent religions and laws and technologies. But, we move. We share movement with all other physical phenomena, from astronomical to infinitestimal.

     This work takes the view that some of the most important observable facts of human social life are our horizontal movements and movement patterns.

Basic movement patterns

     This movement perspective originated in the work of Nobel-prize-winning scholar Konrad Lorenz, who studied animals in their natural habitats, the field of ethology. Lenore Monello Schloming, co-author of this Wild to Civilized project, combined Lorenz’s many observations in his book “On Aggression” with her own observations of movement patterns among dogs and other species – and formalized them into a typology. Curiously, the quality of space itself allows only three basic arrangements or movement patterns among vertebrates of the same species:  

Everyone together, flocks, herds, crowds:  Anonymous followers in a protective crowd; when one is startled, they all flee together in one direction.

Everyone apart, territorial individuals:  The dominant one claims the space and scares off the submissive intruder, who seeks its own territory.

Together with some, apart from others, packs, bonded pairs, tribes:  Personal, long-term bonds with aggression redirected against outsiders or towards a shared goal.

     Each pattern has a typical spatial arrangement as well as its own quality of relationships. Aggression can be defined as forward movement towards an object. Fear is retreat. Dominance and submission, a pervasive behavior in humans and some other species, can also be identified in terms of movement.

The classic concepts:      

     Community and Society

     Decentralization and centralization

​     This work aims to define, in a precise way, two fundamental concepts in the study of society, the concepts of Community and Society, sometimes called by the German terms Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, respectively.

Community refers to small, close-knit groups with long-lasting personal friendship bonds within each group, what we call decentralization.  Society refers to a large collection of people who move rapidly and have many brief, impersonal, stereotyped relationships. We call it centralization.

     These two concepts are theoretical extremes. Many intermediate forms occur in actual societies. But a tension always exists between the two forms since their movement patterns are incompatible within the same space.

     These two concepts were first identified by two emigré aristocrats, Louis de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre, who fled France to escape the French Revolution (1789) and the guillotine. As descendants of feudal lords, they pushed to identify the quality of social life in medieval Europe – small farming villages, strong communal ties, and a unifying religion – which they contrasted to the emerging cities and industrialization throughout Europe and the new Enlightenment philosophies of the 17th and 18th centuries – rationalism, science, secularism, individualism, and natural law.

Movement patterns and technology, our survival skills

     A constant feature of all movement and movement patterns is their involvement with some sort of technology that helps us and other animals survive. The first stone tools developed in those prehistoric hunting-gathering nomadic packs. The Agricultural Revolution led to the first settled villages. As new agricultural techniques produced a food surplus, non-food-producing specialists developed the various craft technologies – bakers, cobblers, tailors, etc. – who traded their products in the first towns and markets. A huge burst of inventions led to the first cities and the subsequent rise of the industrial form of production, which accelerated with increasing speed, leading to today’s highly industrialized, interconnected, techno-digital-corporate economies around the world.

     Broadly conceived, language itself is a technology, an invention of words and ways to string them together to communicate a message that involves some kind of coordination with others, as when husbands and wives and different scholars talk with each other, the former about what to have for dinner or to hint at sex, the latter about whether the universe is infinite or how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. 

A few other movement patterns

     Male warrior bands   Patterns of movement among male warrior bands occur in various forms throughout history:  male hunting groups, invading warrior bands (Vikings, Mongols, etc.), warrior bands that protect autocrats, militias, guerillas. and other groups that command lethal force (Navy Seals, Texas Rangers, “special ops,” Mexican and other cartels, local police forces, etc.), street gangs, the mafia, and more.

     Structure of government    Patterns of movement change as cities and regions are conquered and incorporated into empires with one-person autocrats (emperors, pharaohs, monarchs, dictators), who are protected from rivals by warrior classes who also enforce the autocrat’s dictates and tax collection on large populations. All governments seem to have a similar structure.

​     Promiscuity to fidelity    Patterns of movement differ in sexual relationships, from promiscuity with many brief partners to exclusive permanent bonds between two partners, as well as in-between patterns.

     From extended to nuclear families    Patterns of movement changed as extended families (parents, children, and one or more relatives, who live together and share in childcare, eldercare, food preparation/preservation, and small home-based industries).

          became

nuclear families (parents and children only, who all leave the home to their individual bureaucratic destinations for schooling, jobs, food, clothing, and other needs).

     America’s ladder of opportunity   A nation of immigrants, recent or descendants, start out in ethnic enclaves with strong group identities and move from poverty to higher-income levels and assimilate, in varying degrees, into mass society and individualism. Their path is from decentralization to centralization. 

     The homeless    In our society of material wealth, we tend to think that all the homeless need is housing. It does not work. The homeless have lost their social support networks. Veterans, ex-prisoners, new immigrants, the mentally ill, addicts, and post-schooling youth have all lost their families and former relationships, and struggle to find new support networks.  

​Are we decentralizing now?   

     Shrinking population. Declining standard of living. Grandparents moving in. Nursing homes closing. Smaller homes. Living with more people. More private and home schooling. Trade schools booming. Doom? We are an adaptive species. 

     Decentralizing can be measured by how many resources (skills, manufacturing, raw materials, food supply, education), how many relationships (grandparents, relatives, work and trading partners, leaders), and how much rule-making are brought within smaller spaces.

Toward a world history mapping project?

     We do not intend to replace any research, but perhaps to provide a platform where relevant research can be entered, to help define movement patterns at particular times and places in history.

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Organization of this work

 

Part I      Overview of human history and prehistory in terms of movement patterns and our methodology with movement patterns.

Part II     The three basic movement patterns that occur in vertebrates.

Part III   The three basic divisions of labor that involve humans moving in different patterns.

Part IV    Special topics:  bureaucracy, schooling, freedom & tyranny, loneliness & depression,

                 wealth & slavery, the future of civilization.

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Bios: Skip Schloming, Ph.D., Lenore Monello Schloming, M.A.

     Our intellectual careers began in academia and took unexpected turns. We met and married while graduate students in sociology at Brandeis University during the tumultuous Sixties -- anti-war, anti-establishment, pro-civil-rights, and hippie communalism. Based of direct observation of various animals and the work of Konrad Lorenz, Lenore developed a typology of movement patterns among humans and other vertebrate animals. Skip linked his dissertation to Lenore's typology by focusing on how three basic types of division of labor involve movement patterns approximating Lenore's typology. Skip completed his dissertation “Centralization and Decentralization” and received his Ph.D. in 1974. Lenore completed her dissertation “The Geometry of Social Life,” had it reviewed – and received twin sons. Skip's mentors and advisors were noted conservative sociologist Robert A. Nisbet at UC Riverside and noted socialist sociologist Lewis A. Coser at Brandeis.

     Our doctoral research and the 1970s oil crisis led us to 60 acres in rural Maine where we homesteaded for ten years, built a home, workshop, and barn, and operated a small private elementary school. Skip wrote one-act musicals for our young students and subsequently wrote the book and lyrics for a full-length adult musical, a fantasy satire based on the Emperor’s New Clothes: “That Emperor’s Fool, A Musical About Nothing,” www.thatemperorsfool.com.

     From our marriage onward, we managed rental housing in Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts, owned by Lenore’s parents and eventually by us. This property brought us back to Cambridge in 1989.

     In 1996, we became the president (Lenore) and executive director (Skip) of the Small Property Owners Association, a group of small landlords who had suffered for 25 years under Cambridge’s stringent rent control system. It launched a statewide referendum in 1994 that ended rent control in Boston, Cambridge, and Brookline by popular vote in this very liberal state. For 23 years as this group’s heads, we drafted over 200 monthly newsletters, critical of nearly every aspect of landlord-tenant law in Massachusetts. We are now drafting a work "Rents in America: Why Rental Housing Policy Fails"

     Throughout our ventures, our doctoral work remained salient. We have lately developed our ideas more fully. This website-in-progress reflects an urgency to get our ideas to scholars and the public before we die. We plan to fill it out further.

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Our writings include:

• The Small Landlord Letter, on the role of small landlords, who provide affordable housing for America's moderate- and low-income tenants, many of them minorities and people of color, yet small landlords are being forced out of the rental market by ill-conceived regulation (www.smalllandlord.com).

• Wild to Civilized, human movement patterns from the prehistoric African wilderness to today’s global industrial civilization, based on our doctoral dissertations in sociology (www.wildtocivilized.com).

• That Emperor’s Fool, a musical for all ages, a fantasy satire based on the Emperor’s New Clothes, ready for premiere production (www.thatemperorsfool.com).

• In progress: Rents in America: Why Rental Housing Policy Fails, based on experience in Boston, Cambridge, and Massachusetts, and on nationwide laws usually drafted by legal services lawyers, the free lawyers for tenants, in conjunction with local tenant activists, all of them the socialist legal-services lawyers in every U.S. state and territory, funded by tax dollars.

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Questions or comments:  schlomings@gmail.com.

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