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The Blacksmith and the Bookkeeper, Part 1
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Under a spreading chestnut-tree
The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands;
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bandsÉ
- From "The Village Blacksmith" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
When Longfellow first published his tribute to the Blacksmith in 1841, the vocation of "smithy" was then quite ubiquitous, necessary and well-entrenched in economies around the world, having evolved over epochs of human experience. The role of the "bookkeeper" was likewise ubiquitous, necessary and well-entrenched. Today, bookkeeping has adapted and still thrives in the 21st Century, while blacksmithing is practically extinct. This series of articles explores the role of each in 19th Century economies, the blacksmith and the bookkeeper, explains the extinction of the one and the growth of the other, and compares the post-modern role of "programmer" to both, culminating in forecasts for the likely evolution of software programming as a viable future profession.
Any occupation exists within an economic sphere that is constantly changing. I've used the term "fitscape" to describe such systems, to wit:
"From a Darwinian perspective, a complex adaptive system harboring autonomous agents competing for resources can be called a "fitness landscape." As these agents [evolve and] become more fit for the landscape over successive generations, the landscape itself is modified in the process. I use the term 'fitscape' to refer to any complex system incorporating such competitive, adaptive agents -- for example, an economy at any level, a biosphere at any level, a community of interest ... a fitscape ... is always in flux. It does not represent a delicate balance requiring husbandry but rather is a system in which change, based on adaptive fitness, is applauded."
(From Network Distributed Computing: Fitscapes and Fallacies, Max K. Goff Prentice Hall PTR, April 2004; ISBN: 0131001523)
The fitscape from which both the blacksmith and the bookkeeper hail has evolved quite dramatically since both of these ancient vocations emerged to serve our species. It is important to note that autonomous agents compete to "make a living" in a fitscape, and as such tend to fill all possible "life sustaining" niches such as to provide for their specific "needs." It is also important to note that the activities of those autonomous agents impact the fitscape in which they compete, thus ensuring that the fitscape itself evolves even as do the agents.
While this may seem painfully obvious, when it comes to the study of economics, that feedback mechanism (i.e., the fitscape evolves as a result of agent activities) is often dismissed; a function of exogenous variables which are outside the scope of consideration for the problem in question. But as we will see, the impact on the exogenous environment of remittable activities of autonomous agents can be profound indeed. Bearing in mind the concept of the evolving fitscape in the discussion of the role of the blacksmith and the bookkeeper in human activities, the application of the concept to software engineer as vocation should be clear when discussed later in this series.
Blacksmithing is one of the most important vocations in human history. It began with the Iron Age, when primitive man first began making tools from abundant iron ore. Virtually all world cultures entered their own Iron Age, each on their own timetable; but the utilization of iron as tools and weapons was a vital step in the progress of world civilizations. When Pythagoras observed that a blacksmith striking his anvil produced different notes according to the weight of the hammer (circa 500 BC) , the aboriginal theory of Western music was born; the blacksmith, as essential vocation, was then already well established in Ancient Grecian economies. By the time Longfellow got around to singing the smithy's praises in the mid-19th century A.D., the profession had enjoyed steady, growing demand for millennia, with no end in sight. Indeed, the then nascent Industrial Age meant overtime for the smithy's shop; lots of new factories needing lots of specialized tools meant lots of hammering for decades to come.
Imagine the laughter in Longfellow's smithy shop that would have inevitably followed the suggestion that the blacksmith's days were soon numbered. But that very Industrial Age demand carried within it the seeds of the demise for a once indispensable occupation.
At first, the smithy was not aware that his hammer would soon ring no more, that machines would take the place of hammer and anvil, more efficiently creating the tools and weapons for an increasingly sophisticated cultural milieu. In essence, the smithy, unaware, created the tools which would lead to the closure of his own shop, which is to say that by making a living, the smithy was instrumental in the evolution of the greater fitscape in which he served; were it not for the smithy, there would have been no Industrial Age, which in turn ultimately gave rise to the extinction of the smithy.
Today it is difficult to imagine how pervasive and important Longfellow's smithy was to a well-functioning society in mid-19th century America (as well as economies in other locales around the world). Blacksmiths worked with iron to make or repair the tools that were necessary for farming (including horse and oxen shoes) and for the myriad enterprises in the shops of the villages and towns. Smithy's also made the tools that were necessary for the daily household chores, such as pots and pans for the fireplace.
When roads were first built in America the blacksmith repaired wagons. In order for the villages to grow a wide diversity of skills and talents we needed, which the blacksmiths not only represented but also enabled. At that time in America no village could have continued to exist without a working blacksmith. Many other trades could not exist until the blacksmith fired up his forge because the smithy repaired the tools for all other professionals. When blacksmithing began, it was the master of all trades, but became very specialized over time due to the increase in the need for blacksmith services.
So what do blacksmiths have to do with software? The analogy is simply this: we can posit that software developers are the post-modernist version of the blacksmith. However unthinkable as the almost complete disappearance of the smithy trade may have been to 19th Century sensibilities, obviously the realities of the Industrial Age decimated a linchpin occupation that had been central to world economies for some three thousand years. In a relatively short period of time, the blacksmith went from essential to superfluous, existing today only as an artifact in a cultural museum. Could the same fate await the role of "software developer" ... at least insofar as programming skills are concerned?
Before more fully exploring the thesis of software developer as reified smithy, an examination of the role of the bookkeeper would be prudent, for the sake of juxtaposition, comparison, forecasting and nuance.
The preponderance of archeological evidence indicates that the Sumerians were the first to develop writing, circa 3300 B.C., give or take a century or so. These are the estimated creation dates for the oldest clay tablets found at the site of the ancient city of Uruk, located in the southern part of modern day Iraq. Pictorial symbols for the names of people, places and things regarding governance and commerce were carefully carved on the ancient tablets. Most of the tablets discovered during excavation in Uruk were documents about property, inventory and, even then, taxes. We can, therefore, reasonably conclude that the function of bookkeeping was essential well prior to the invention of books. Indeed, keeping track of assets and exchanges of property predates the Iron Age and the birth of the blacksmith as well.
Modern day bookkeeping (or more accurately, accounting) traces its roots to the debits and credits of an Italian Renaissance colleague of Leonardo da Vinci name Fra Luca Pacioli. After the European dark ages, business boomed and it is believed that merchants started using a double-entry bookkeeping system--or something similar--to cope with the growing volume and complexity of transactions. While several systems were developed to summarize and communicate the essence of business transactions, only one survived and evolved to become the standard system in use today. But unlike our friend the blacksmith who seems to have disappeared, the bookkeeper is doing quite well, thank you very much, having today evolved into accountant, CPA, auditor, banker, financial advisor, finance professor, et al, the advent of Industrial Age cum Network Age technology notwithstanding.
Pacioli did not invent double-entry bookkeeping. But in 1494 he published the first complete textbook, "Summma de Arithmetica, Geometria: Proportioni et Proportionalita" which described the system with such detail and clarity that it became the standard system for keeping accounts around the world, a status still enjoyed today relatively intact. According to accounting scholar A. C. Littleton, there were seven "key ingredients" which ultimately led to the creation of the Renaissance bookkeeping standard:
Note that these ingredients were not entirely absent from Ancient Greece, for example, or the Mesopotamian cradle of civilization. But it wasn't until the European experience in the mid-15th century that all seven ingredients approached ubiquity across the continent, thus giving rise to a standard for accounts that has proved to be resilient even into the Network Age.
As for the importance of the bookkeeper, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence suggests that the very genesis and purpose of written communication was to facilitate the recording of transactions. Just as the smithy was the hands-on enabler of commerce, the bookkeeper was its historian, without whom the concept of private property could not uniformly be implemented. We got to and through the Industrial Age because of these two juxtaposed missions.
Both legendary smithy and aboriginal accountant were historically vital, centrally necessary vocations, enabling social and technological innovation which goaded cultural fitscape evolution over the course of human experience. Since at least the 1st century B.C., the yin-yang of blacksmith and bookkeeper together served the evolving economic order well, over waves of weighty changes and generations of learning and growth. No matter the fashion, the ascendancy or decline of a particular belief system, the state of technology or the demographic mix, both professions flourished over about a three thousand year period, leading players in the unfolding drama of human civilization.
So why did one profession continue to grow throughout the Industrial Age, adapting magnificently into the Network Age, while the other has become an artifact of another era ... Industrial Age road-kill which we have now long ago forgotten? The answer to that question, and the relationship of both blacksmith and bookkeeper to the post-modern software programmer is the topic of the next installment in this series.
Max Goff is the Chief Marketing Officer for Digital Reasoning Systems, Inc., headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee.
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