Saturday February 24, 2024
Hurray! This is my fifth blog entry! That might not sound like that much
of an accomplishment (it isn't) to you, dear reader, but five is my
"lucky" number. This may appear to have something to do with my
flirtations with Discordianism
and its "Law of Fives", the fact humans typically have five digits on
each hand and foot, the five letters in "tessa", the fact that it is the
first prime one can get by summing two others, the number of cells in a
glider, all of these, or none of them. This is going to be a longer entry, so tune in or drop out.
CHAPTER 0: snail mail
The history of mail/postal delivery systems is fascinating to me as
someone who drawn to social history and increasingly, an interest in institutionalism
in a few senses of the word.1 I'm not going to expound too much upon
postal antiquity as interesting as it is, but here's a bit about it.
Although people have of course been sending messages to each other since
time immemorial, the earliest form of a postal delivery system that
resembles one we'd recognize today is usually thought to be that found
in the Achaemenid Persian Empire during the 6th century B.C. At each
node of this network, the messenger or chapar, could switch to a new
horse before continuing on his way, all the better for delivering a
message more speedily. It is from Herodotus' description of the Chapar Khaneh of Achaemenid Persia (as translated by G.H. Palmer that we have the famous, yet unofficial motto of the United States Postal Service (which you may have heard before), "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."
Postal services have long been associated with the nation state and in
many countries there has often been or sometimes remains a postal
monopoly, to varying degrees, by the government. Though certainly
logistics programs, the biggest of which include the likes of DHL, UPS,
and Purolator, exist and are allowed to carry packages/parcels,
in the United States of America, traditional letters are supposed to
only be carried by the USPS. This has often been a contentious matter
for some. Although allowing for competing bodies in this domain has
often been associated with the right wing's advocacy of privatisation.
They've certainly probably written more about this than anyone else,
including the notorious Cato and Fraser
institutes. However, one of the first people who made efforts in the
practice of a nongovernmental postal service (and writing about one) was
an anarchist (or at least libertarian leftist) named Lysander Spooner2.
That he has been most feted by his wouldbe political opponents is a
cruel irony. I somehow doubt that he would have preferred companies
larger than anything in his day, which have only been allowed to be so
successful due to capitalism and government interference in the economy
associated therewith. While today cars and other vehicles make use of
horsepower as a unit of measure, it has never, to my knowledge, been one
employed in the domain of postal delivery. In 1942, the term "snail
mail" first appeared, though it would be almost half a century after that, that e-mail took off.
- Namely "New institutionalism,
a social theory that focuses on developing a sociological view of
institutions, the way they interact and the effects of institutions on
society", institutional economics, "an economic school approaching economic issues from a macro sociological point of view", new institutional economics, "an economic school that analyzes social norms, organizational arrangements etc.", historical institutionalism,
"a social science method of inquiry that uses institutions as subject
of study in order to find, measure and trace patterns and sequences of
social, political, economic behavior and change across time and space."
- Though he has often been claimed by the libertarian right
(minarchists, anarchocapitalists, and maybe some conservatarians),
Spooner was himself anticapitalist, even making an appearance at the
meeting of the International Workingman's Association (better known as
The First International). He opposed slavery (even working alongside
John Brown to form an armed insurrection against it), certain forms of
taxation and wage labour, and advocated for mutual banking, self
employment (so as to keep the full rewards of the labour), a free market
(most advocates of which in the nineteenth century were socialists, do your own research and be blown away)
and on a voluntary basis. Lysander Spooner was to some degree in line with the socioeconomic school of thought known as mutualism.
O tessa o
_\_ o
\\/ o\ .
//\___=
''
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