We arrive in ancient Rome ... when without warning - it 'falls'. It didn't crumble. It doesn't explode. It didn't crack - it just fell? Hoping to put this minor setback behind us we hurriedly hop the next camel-train to Egypt and there to find that it's been taken over by the Greeks!
But the insanity doesn't stop there ! One of my ancient relatives needed a visa for Harappa in the Indus Valley and was refused outright! He tried appealing but found that not only had the Harrapan Immigration Minister skipped town - the entire country had vanished along with the whole of Mohenjo Daro, their bestie neighbors in the Indus Valley.
This is nothing less than poor civilization management with fake-truth making things worse. The nonsense about Sumer for instance: It was all a media 'beat-up'! The idea of Mezopotamia being dismantled as a failed Alien experiment is a simple urban myth. A lie first told by the Akkadians, spread by the Baylonians and in their turn the Assyrians and Hittites ad-nauseum.
By all means - call me alarmist, but how could you know that one of my all-time favorite holiday destinations was
Ur in Sumer, Mezopotamia. Sumeria had been voted 'Best Civilization' for nearly 2000 year. As is common with success in civilizations there were those who resented Sumer's 4.9 rating [almost 1 million Google reviews] :It was then that the Akkadians decided Sumer would not be around for next year's 2004 bce vote.
Gilgamesh, a friendly travel agent from Uruk, said rumors about the Best Civilization Contest were true and he also told me about Sumer's 'frenemies' plans i.e. the Akkadians next door. As promised, in 2004 bce, the Akkadians showed Sumer the door . The Babylonians did the same to the Akkadians etc. and the whole thing became boring, predictable and a seriously distressing mess for civilization planners of the day.
Aside from the screwing up of my holiday destinations, the whole thing was quite depressing since Sumer had just started a thing they called 'Writing-Stuff': Something the out-of-towners had no clue about. They couldn't see why scratching in mud or sticking things into clay was any kind of a deal when their kids and chickens back home did it everyday !? By the way ... the Indus Valley Harrapans were a clever bunch themselves: See what I mean? Depressing.
HOLIDAY HELL ... places we can longer stay. ...
In his find, our friendly archaeologist is merely one more of us with a story of self delusion: Perhaps self-delusion refers as much to a case of hope over expectation. The cartoon serves a third and important message about our inclination to see what we want or wish to see. In a scenario where the discovery of a new pyramid would lead to world acclaim it would be a battle with our nature to avoid at least some heightened level of excitement and with it, the dangers of flawed perception.
When contemplating humanity and its nature we do have a stake in the game and without hesitation point always to the positive: Never ignore the heroic and wherever possible highlight the good; Always those aspects of our humanity that we hope, expect or wish to see rather than to reveal your awareness of the abundant evidence of the rapacious predator, (to varying degrees of course), existing in greater than lesser numbers within our species.
Mia Culpa: In this heartless accusation of Man being truly Human I must, by the biological Species-Specific law confess that I too am Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad and Donald Trump et al … but surely, with me, in a much nicer way.
Civilizations do not 'fall' – they simply become un- interesting. The process may not be one of decline but of incline: And often very steep. A. J. Richter
As inconvenient as science has reliably proven to be – it impermissible to hold any hypothesis that cannot be disproved: That particular restriction was laid down at the time of the ‘Large Noise’. By conceited contrast, social sciences and the ‘humanities’ have no such impediment where laws are a galaxy-wide roadway surfaced with glittering ‘cats-eyes’ spelling out ‘do-whatever- the-hell-makes-you-feel-clever’.
The body of people that comprise the social-sciences of which I am one, happily pass their own laws i.e. those they may fancy at any given moment, or they may act on a belief that is presently proving popular with the masses and then, at some future point, invent ways to measure all manner of fascinating things providing always that the chosen measure can have no means of ever being successfully tested for relevance, truth or effectiveness.
In search of the ‘CIVIL’ bits of CIVILIZATION At the very beginning of sorting out the matters of Man there were endless numbers of degrees and doctorates on offer in what had come to be known as Social Sciences. A sizable number of clever people had come to believe that ‘knowing about humans’ was not only a desirable and good thing but may also reveal a key to an important species’ survival!
For this and every other reason I can think of, I see value in picking through the rubble of past civilizations for insights that could help clarify the contrary nature of Man and his role in the rise and fall of his own civilizations.
We consult the tattered 2000 year old anthropological map drawn up by René Descartes, Plato, Denis Diderot, Max Weber et al that had then been ‘improved upon’ by Rousseau, Auguste Compte, Karl Marx etc. and decide for ourselves that Civilization’s first waypoint is Sumer and its city of Ur.
The ‘Civil’ in Civilization is a Unicorn. As a species we are advancing at a glacial pace to an eventual understanding that a belief in the ‘overwhelmingly good nature of humanity’ reveals a foolish Pollyannaism and Naïveté. Notwithstanding this, we are getting closer to accepting the other, negative, truth of us. As with all paradigm shifts there will be holdouts with the church providing the marching bands in a parade led by deluded hopefuls holding to notions that Man is at worst - The Noble Savage.
Since the proclamation of man having been made in the image of his maker he has been perennially burdened by expectations that will always clash with his species’ true nature. Here’s a thought … why don’t we tell a polygamous animal to be monogamous? Not impossible for an advanced thinking being ?… relationship statistics indicate that though socially and emotionally right it’s not working too well: Sounds like a recipe for failure to me.
In university days I was presented with and learned about the ‘species specific behaviour’ of animals: The specifics fully ascribed to any animal a set of behaviours that could reliably be found in the animal’s nature and behaviour. At that time, at least to me, behavioural ‘blue-prints’ applied to animals 'of a lower kind' and that humanity‘s advanced intelligence and self-awareness will have elevated us well beyond base animal behaviours of any meaningful kind.
Perhaps in a paltry defence I was led astray by our early psych. days where training lovable rats to do clever things in ‘Skinner boxes’ magnified the clear distinction between a simple animal and a 'superior' form of animal. Borrowing a little from Faust – an animal is an animal no matter how far he rises. I wonder if the failure to see ourselves as merely another animal continues to block good minds seeing that we are an animal with behaviours that too often prove seriously animalistic.
Those that continue to unconditionally fete Man as creatures of a divine hand makes it especially hard for them to grasp the banal status we hold as simple mammals. It could be worse: Currently we are the smartest primates. Given the strange, wonderful and scary things happening around us in the study of what we presently describe as ‘The Phenomena’, holding the rank of smartest may not last as long as we have confidently assumed.
Pseudonyms and Misnomers
Overly simplistic, but to obtain a declaration the you were indeed a Civilization needed little more than agreed-to ratio's of populations with even rudimentary culture with dwelling types and forms to acquire the heady rank of 'civilization'. The striking thing about any of the trending definitions of civilizations or even the oldest is that no mention is ever made of Man needing to show how well he behaves in his new status nor is he expected to act in a civilized manner i.e. in a polite and well mannered way.
And here we have what I have so long searched for: why had civilizations down the ages behaved without any evidence or projection of cultural or national pride of its qualities of humanity. The word civil has for me always implied a developed understanding of reasonableness, fairness and integrity in our dealings with our fellow man. The very first ‘civilizations’ terminally suffered the fallacy of that implication.
From Sumer in Mezopotamia and onward in time – Man's ever-present noxious ‘species specific’ potential did not prevent the emergence of a civilization but consistent with my clear and certain knowledge, it was almost always man’s destructive conduct that ended it.
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