The Ball Cube: Towards A Higher Resolution Mythology

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The major themes and characteristics of our mythology come from the Bronze Age (hence the enduring obsession with Classical civilisation). The Greeks inherited theirs from Egypt. I could write a book on it, but one tiny e.g. will suffice for now. The sun is pictured as a perfect disk in Egyptian mythology, and the Greek solar myths build on this view. Their science and social structures reflect the same cosmology and world-view through geocentric, heliocentric and Newtonian mechanistic phases. Rigid systems of perfect circles, perfect cycles and Platonic forms of order render any deviation 'problematic'.

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That whole world view was just about sustainable (if you could put up with occasional inquisitions and genocides) in a sleepytown world of slow change and low technology – but … Nowadays we know there are no perfect circles or straight edges, we have higher resolution vision, so we need a higher resolution mythology to cope.

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All societies are underpinned by a mythology, and when the mythology fails to keep pace with historical changes in technology, environment, demographics and economy societies experience what I call cultural subsidence. My major concern here, as always, is to find new mythological bases for underpinning our further evolution as a society. This science of building new mythological constructs is called mythography.

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Here’s a tiny glimpse of how we can use mythography to construct a higher resolution mythology that will help us get our bearings and chart a way ahead as history pushes us towards increasingly detailed knowledge of the ‘the world’.

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1 – The Mythology of Aural Space: Information took approximately 4 million years to double from the first stone axe to the height of the Roman Empire. Original Bronze Age mythology was low resolution: everything was present and almost static so it was easy to keep up with rate of change. You could have a sufficiently clear picture within the one-dimensional ‘aural-space’ of storytelling, which, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, enveloped us completely. The cultural dynamics were therefore relatively simple and the comprising tensions to be resolved were relatively simple too. The poles of Bronze Age culture and mythology are epitomized by Plato and Aristotle and by Athens and Sparta: metaphysics versus materialism.

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2 – The Mythology of Aural and Visual Space: Information took just 1,500 years to double from Rome to the Renaissance. . The Renaissance saw emergence of mid-resolution mythology. With information doubling more quickly we needed a higher resolution mythology to prevent the world blurring. The printing press with its uniform linear script gave us a 2D mythology: aural and visual. This technology also seemed to give us the ability to replicate ‘perfect’ straight lines and circles ad infinitum. The clockwork machinery of Newtonian cosmology was now possible. The notion of squaring the circle came to prominence, reflecting the requirement to resolve the dualism implicit in 2D mythology. The technique of painting in perspective was a clear reflection of the 3D geometry behind 2D mythology.

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The big-picture higher resolution dichotomies thrown up in this mid-resolution 2D world include Catholic vs Protestant belief, republic vs monarchic statehood and fake vs genuine values (e.g. fake ‘Christian’ slavery, colonialism and patriarchy vs the ‘Christ-like’ sincerity of abolitionists and proto-emancipationists). Our history from the Renaissance to 1900 was the story of these dichotomies. They are ‘higher resolution dichotomies’ than we saw in Classical times because they take the old materialist vs metaphysical dichotomy and apply it to more highly specified evolutions in beliefs, politics and values, i.e. evolutions based on historical developments in technology, economy, demography and environment.

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3 – The Mythology of Aural, Visual and Fluid Space: Information now doubles approximately every year! When we look (scroll, surf and click) through the ‘Windows’ it’s all a blur. The floors are going wavy and walls begin to crumble. Meltdown ahead. We need a higher resolution mythology to get a good focus and provide sustainable underpinning.

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Technology now demonstrates the principles intuited by the sages of old – smash a glass hologram and each shard contains the entire image – and we are shards of God, in His divine image.

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Science now demonstrates that nothing is flat – all lines and plains – and all systems and organizations- are fractal. And string theory, complexity theory and Bell’s theorem of super luminal connections combine to demonstrate that everything is connected to everything else, everywhere and instantly!

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All the old dichotomies still abound, from Classical ‘metaphysics vs materialism’ to the higher resolution 2D dichotomies mentioned above. But now they have mutated again, expanding into a further dimension, and taking on a new more fluid character, e.g. ‘comparative epistemologies’, ‘pluralism vs separatism’, meaning vs nihilism, those who seek continuing history of change vs those who seek an end to all change and to all history. These are very much 3D dichotomies: not just about how we apply metaphysics vs materialism, but about what those applications ultimately lead to: surfing on the flow or sinking to oblivion.

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We need a 3D mythology, with a 4D geometry behind it to move forward socially, economically, cognitively, spiritually and cohesively. Thanks to Einstein’s special theory of relativity and the ability of digital media to represent 4D cubes or ‘tesseracts’ this is now possible – and necessary!

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The puzzles and tensions presented by 21^st century cultural dynamics seem ‘wicked’ (i.e. insolubly complex) because they have acquired an extra dimension: aural, visual and fluid. We need a framework for navigating safely in this environment; we need not to see a blur every time we look through the windows! But nobody has a clue what to do about it!

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Cue The Ball Cube! Where alchemists once sought to square the circle we must now cube the sphere! I have developed a tool called The Ball Cube in order to addresses the underlying need for higher resolution mythological underpinning for sustainable cultural evolution. The Ball Cube is a highly original incubator-based digital game designed for in-house or broadcast TV. It combines aural, visual and fluid space in equal measure. It aims to enhance resolution and stop the blur, to enable clear focus, to enable three dimensional thought patterns to grow in preparation for an increasingly 4D future, to clarify strategic thinking and sharpen operational effectiveness, to enable wicked knots to be unpicked, enable unresolved parties and problems to find resolution …

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The Ball Cube can help all kinds of cultural dynamic groups from those in conflict (e.g. police and rioters), to those in supply-demand relationship (e.g. banks and businesses, goods and media product supply chains and consumers), infrastructure supply-framework relationships (e.g. BP and govt energy policy makers, train companies and transport policy makers, etc.), corporate teams, premier league football teams, major political party teams (a preferable alternative to existing models for getting work-force/teams ‘on message’ and sharing passion for an ‘imposed’ vision), and so on.

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Look out for ‘theballcube.com’, due for launch 2012.