It is 700 years since the death of Marco Polo, a Venetian merchant who was one of the first to travel to China, and to write about what he experienced there. With letters of introduction from the Pope, Polo, his father, and uncle travelled down the Silk Road to the palace of Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, and founder of the Mongol, Yuan dynasty of China. Kublai, impressed with Polo’s intelligence and his ability to speak several languages, appointed him as a foreign emissary. In this capacity Polo travelled to India, Burma, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam, and ended up spending 24 years in Kublai’s service before being allowed to return home. On his return to Venice Polo actively participated in a war with Genoa. He was captured by the Genoese, and spent 3 years in prison, where he dictated the book that made his travels famous. Polo was the first European to report in the west, China’s use of gunpowder, coal, and paper money. After his release from prison Polo married and had 3 daughters. His travels inspired many people to their own adventures, including Christopher Columbus.
Starting as early as 200 BCE, the Silk Road wasn’t one single road, and in some definitions included sea routes too. It was an important east west trade network. Trade is a great wealth multiplier. It allows people to specialise in what they are good at, be that through specific skills or local resources or conditions, and to then exchange their goods or services with others. This helps maximise prosperity for all peoples. Historically trade has also allowed for the sharing of ideas. Although some of this sharing of ideas has been more recent than you might think. Eastern religious texts were only translated into western languages starting in the 1820s. And practices like meditation have been taught to a broader populus only from the 1950s. As ideas and practices have spread from east to west, capitalism has been flowing in the other direction. Though there are still large differences in culture, economic systems, and freedoms across the globe, the world is becoming more and more integrated.
As humans have spread across the planet and expanded in numbers, we have increasingly become more connected, more aware of the geography, customs, culture, and beliefs of other people around the planet. But with it this expansion and contact has often brought conflict, slavery, ethnic cleansing, and even genocide. This is because our contact with other humans of different cultures has usually been driven by greed and arrogance, rather than understanding and compassion. For some time now we have fully grasped the nature and extent of our world, but we have so far not sufficiently understood what that really means. At this time, as the forces of intolerance, sub-division, and authoritarianism rise once more, in part as a reaction to globalisation, can we find the will and the means of leveraging our connectivity in a positive direction. Our technologies can bring instant access to information from anywhere on the planet, if we let it do so. Ultimately greater connectivity will lead to greater integration, and with it needs to come more tolerance and acceptance of differences. Connectivity and integration does not have to mean sameness.
In 2015 I went to a New Scientist sponsored event about consciousness. One of the speakers explained brain imaging techniques to measure different states of consciousness. What was measured was the extent to which disparate parts of the brain communicated with each other, the complexity of that communication, and the distance over which it took place. Not too surprisingly, higher levels of consciousness were associated with greater complexity and a greater distance of communication occurring between separate sites in the brain. As an analogy this can inform us about our collective planetary human consciousness. With a greater number of long-distance complex connections, we too can collectively reach a higher level of consciousness. Marco Polo may not have been the first or the most important human connective synapse, but he is still one that stands out as a reminder to us all to integrate, a little bit more.
“The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a few pages.” Marco Polo
