Tag Archives: Dark Age

The Wicked Problem

“She was asked what she had learned from the Holocaust, and she said that 10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and that 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and that the remaining 80 percent could be moved in either direction.”  Kurt Vonnegut

It seems certain that human beings need stories to live, and need to share some of these stories in order to coexist with one another. In our postmodern era these shared stories- meta-narratives- are passe, the voluntary suspension of disbelief has become impossible, the wizard behind the curtain has been unmasked. Today’s apparent true believers are instead almost cartoonish versions of the adherents of the fanatical belief systems, political ideologies and unquestionable cultural assumptions and prejudices of past eras. Not even their most vocal adherents really believe in them, except, perhaps, for those who put their faith in conspiracy theories, which at the root are little but the panicked to the point of derangement search for answers after realizing the world is a scam.      

Yet just because we live in an age when all stories have an aura of fantasy doesn’t mean we’ve stopped making them, or even stopped looking for an overarching story that might explain to us our predicament and provide us with some guidance. The realization that the map is never the territory doesn’t imply that maps are useless, only that every map demands interrogation during its use and as a prerequisite to our trust.   

I recently had the pleasure of picking up a fresh version of one of these meta-narratives or maps, a book by the astrobiologist Adam Frank called Light of the Stars: Alien Worlds and the Fate of the Earth. Frank’s viewpoint, I think, is a somewhat common one among secular, environmentally conscious persons. He thinks that we as a species have been going through the equivalent of adolescence, unless we learn to use our newly developed capacities wisely we’re doomed to a bad end. 

The difference between Frank and others on this score is that he wants us to see this story in a cosmic context. We are, he argues, very unlikely to be the first species in the universe to experience growing up in this sense. Recent discoveries showing the ubiquity of planets, for Frank, puts the odds in favor of life, and even intelligence and technological civilization developing throughout the universe many times before 

Using what we already know about earth and the thermodynamic costs of energy use Frank is able to create sophisticated mathematical models that show how technological civilizations can rise only to collapse due to the impact of energy use on their planetary environment, and why any technological civilization that survives will need to have found a way to align its system of energy use with the boundaries of its biosphere.      

Frank’s is an interesting and certainly humane viewpoint, yet it leads to all sorts of questions. Does the idea of adolescence and maturation even make any sense when applied to our species? If anything, doesn’t history shows the development of civilization to be cyclical rather than progressive? To get a real sense of our predicament wouldn’t it be better to turn to the actual history of human societies rather than look to the fates of purely imagined alien civilizations? 

Indeed, for a book on how our technological civilization can avoid what is an otherwise inevitable collapse Light of the Stars is surprisingly thin on the rise and fall of real human societies over the course of history. To the extent such history plays any role at all in Frank’s model it focuses on the kinds of outright collapse seen in places like Easter Island, which have recently become the focus of historians and anthropologists such as Jared Diamond.         

By focusing on the binary division between extinction and redemption Frank’s is just one more voice urging us to “immanentize the eschaton”, but one can ask if what we face is less a sort of juncture between utopian or dystopian outcomes or more something like the rolling apocalypse of William Gibson’s “Jackpot”. That is, not the “utopia or oblivion” version of alternative futures that probably made sense during the mutually assured destruction madness of the Cold War, but the perhaps permanent end to the golden age climatic, technological and economic conditions of the past as bets on the human future that had been placed long ago draw dead. 

Whiggish tales of perpetual progress we’re popular a few years ago, but have run into hard times of late, and for good reasons. Instead, we have the return of cyclical narratives, stories of rise and fall. The Age of Trump lends itself to comparison with the fall of Rome– a declining empire with a vain, corrupt, incompetent, and increasingly deranged leadership. Trump is like the love child of Nero and Caligula as someone joked on Twitter, which is both funny and disturbing because it’s true.              

Personally I’m much more inclined towards these cyclical versions of history than I am linear ones, though admittedly this is some sort of deep seated cognitive bias for I tend to find cyclic cosmologies more intriguing as well. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any alternatives besides a history with a clear beginning, middle, and end and one that circles back upon itself. It may be a limit of culture, or human cognition rather than a true reflection of the world, but how to see beyond it in a way that doesn’t deny time and change entirely I cannot fathom.   

These days it’s hard to mention cyclical history without being confused for a fanboy of Oswald Spengler and getting spammed by Jordan Peterson with invitations to join the Intellectual Dark Web. Nevertheless, there are good (and strange to say), progressive versions of such histories if you know where to find them.      

A recent example of these is Bas Van Bavel’s The Invisible Hand? How Market Economies Have Emerged and Declined since AD 500. In a kind of modern version of the theory of societies transition from barbarism to decadence and finally back to barbarism by the 14th century Islamic scholar Ibn Khaldun, Bavel traces the way in which prosperous economies have time and time again been undone by elite capture. Every thriving economy eventually gives way to a revolt of the winners who use their wealth to influence politics in their favor in an effort to institutionalize their position. Eventually, this has the effect of undermining the very efficiency that had allowed the economy to prosper in the first place.   

Though largely focused on the distant past, Bavel is clearly saying something about our own post-Keynesian era where plutocrats and predators use the state as a means of pursuing their own interest. And like most cyclical versions of history his view of our capacity to break free from this vicious cycle is deeply pessimistic. 

“None of the different types of states or government systems in the long run was able to sustain or protect the relatively broad distribution of property and power found in these societies that became dominated by factor markets, for instance by devising redistributive mechanisms. Rather, in all these cases, the state increasingly came under the influence of those who benefited most from the market system and would resist redistribution.” (271)

How this elite capture of our politics will intersect with global climate change is anybody’s guess, right now it doesn’t look good, but as long as a large portion of this elite has its wealth tied up in the carbon economy, or worse, think their wealth somehow gives them an escape hatch from the earth’s environmental crisis, the move towards decarbonization will continue to be too little and too late.      

One downside to cyclical theories of history, for me at least, is that far too often they become reduced to virtue politics. In a sort of inversion of the way old school liberal like Steven Pinker sees moderns as morally superior to people in the past, old school conservatives who by their nature are in thrall to their ancestors tend to view those who came before as better versions of ourselves. 

Though it’s becoming increasingly difficult to argue that the time in which we live hasn’t produced a greater share of despicable characters than in times past, on reflection that’s very unlikely to be the case. What separates us from our ancestors isn’t their superior virtue, but the degree of autonomy and interdependence that makes such virtues necessary in the first place. A lack of autonomy along with the fact that each of us is now interchangeable with another of similar skills (of which there are many) is a reflection of our society’s complexity, and for this reason it’s the stories told about the unsustainability of this complexity that I find the most compelling.  

The granddaddy of this view idea that it is unsustainable complexity which makes the fall of societies inevitable was certainly Joseph Tainter and his 1988 book The Collapse of Complex Societies.  Tainter thought that societies begin to decline once they reach the point where increasing complexity only results in an ever thinner marginal return. Although, “fall” isn’t quite the right word here, rather, Tainter broke from the moralism that had colored prior histories of rise and fall. Instead, he viewed the move towards simplicity we characterize as decline as something natural, even good, just another stage in the life cycle of societies. 

More recent works on decline due to complexity are perhaps not as non-judgemental as Tainter’s, but have something of his spirit nonetheless. There is James Bridle’s excellent book New Dark Age, Samo Burja’s idea of the importance of what he calls “intellectual dark matter” and the dangers of its decay. Outside of historians and social scientists, the video game developer Johnathan Blow has done some important work on the need to remove complexity from bloated systems, while the programmer Casey Murtori has been arguing for the need to simplify software.      

To return to Adam Frank’s book- he’s right, the stories we tell ourselves are extremely important in that they serve as a guide to our actions. The dilemma is that we can never be sure if we’re telling ourselves the right one. The problem with either/or stories that focus on opposing outcomes- like human extinction/ or technologically enabled harmony with the biosphere- is that they’re likely focusing on the tails of the graph, whereas the meat lies in the middle with all the scenarios that exclude the two. 

Within that graph on the negative side, though far short of species extinction, lies the possibility that we’ve reached a point of no return when it comes to climate change, not in terms of the need to decarbonize, but in Roy Scranton’s sense of having set in motion feedback loops which we will not be able to stop and that will make human civilization as currently constituted impossible. Also here would be found the possibility that we’ve reached a plateau of sustainable complexity for a civilization. 

These two possibilities might be correlated. The tangled complexity of the carbon economy, including its political aspects, makes addressing climate change extremely difficult. To replace fossil fuels requires not just a new energy system, but new ways to grow our food, produce our chemicals, build our roads. It requires the deconstruction of vast industries that possess a huge amount of political power during precisely the time when wealth has seized control of politics, and the willful surrender of power and wealth by hydrocarbon states, including now, the most powerful country on the planet.  

If being faced with a problem of seemingly intractable complexity is the story we tell ourselves, then we should probably start preparing for scenarios in which we fail to crack the code before the bomb goes off. That would mean planning for a humane retreat by simplifying and localizing whatever can be, increasing our capacity to aid one another across borders, including ways to absorb refugees fleeing deteriorating conditions, and making preparations to shorten as much as possible, any period of intellectual and scientific darkness and suffering that would occur in conditions of systemic breakdown.        

Perhaps the most important story Frank provides is a way of getting ourselves out of an older one. Almost since the dawn of human space exploration science-fiction writers, and figures influenced by science-fiction such as Elon Musk, have been obsessed with- the Kardashev scale. This idea that technological civilizations can be grouped into types where the lowest tap the full energy of their home planet, the next up the energy of their sun, with the last using all the energy of their galaxy. It’s an idea that basically extends the industrial revolution into outer space and Frank will have none of it. A mature civilization, in his view, wouldn’t use all the energy of its biosphere because to do so would leave them without a world in which they could live. Instead, what he calls a Class 5 civilization would maximize the efficient use of energy for both itself and the rest of the living world. It’s an end state rather than a beginning, but perhaps we might have reached that destination without the painful, and increasingly unlikely, transition we will now need to make in order to do so. 

There’s an interesting section in Light of the Stars where Frank discusses the possible energy paths to modernization. He doesn’t just list fossil fuels, but also hydro, wind, solar and nuclear and possible sources of energy a civilization could tap to become technological. I might have once wondered whether an industrial revolution was even possible had fossil fuels not allowed us to take the first step, but I didn’t need to wonder. The answer was yes, a green industrial revolution was at least possible. In fact, it almost happened.    

No book has changed my understanding of the industrial revolution more than Andreas Malm’s Fossil Capital. There I learned that the early days of industrialization in the United Kingdom consisted of battle over whether water or coal would power the dawning age of machines, a battle water only just barely lost. What mattered in coal’s victory over water, according to Malm’s story, wasn’t so much coal’s superiority as a fuel source as it was the political economy of fossil fuels. The distributed nature of river to power water wheels left employers at a disadvantage to labor, whereas coal allowed factories to be concentrated in one place- cities- where labor was easy to find and thus easily dismissed. This is quite the opposite to what happened in the mines themselves where concentration in giving the working class access to vital choke points empowered labor, a situation that eventually led to coal being supplanted by oil, a form of energy impervious to national strikes.

But we probably shouldn’t take the idea of a green industrial revolution all that far. Water might have been capable of providing the same amount of energy for stationary machines as steam derived from burning coal, but it would not have had the same potential when it came to generating heat for locomotion or the generation of steel. At least not within the constraints of 19th century technology.   

In another one of those strange, and all too common, mountains emerging from mole-hills moments of human history, it may have been a simple case of greed that birthed the industrial revolution. The greed of owners wanting to capture the maximum income from their workers drove them to choose coal as their source of power, a choice which soon birthed a whole, and otherwise unlikely, infrastructure for steel and the world shrinking machines built from it.            

In other words, energy transitions are political and moral and have always been so. In a way looking to hypothetical civilizations in the cosmos that may have succeeded or failed in these transitions lends itself to ignoring these questions of values and politics at the core of our dilemma, and thus fails to provide the kind of map to the future Frank was hoping for. He assumes an already politically empowered “we” exists when in fact it is something that needs to be built in light of the very real divisions between countries and classes, the old and the young, humans and non-humans ,and even between those living in the present and those yet to be born.  

The outcome of such a conflict isn’t really a matter of our species maturing, for history likely has no such telos, no set terminus or promised land to arrive at- only a perpetual rise and fall. Nonetheless, one might consider it to be a story, and there really are villians and heros in the tale. Whether that story will ultimately be deemed to have been a triumph, a tragedy, or more likely something in between, is a matter of which 10 percent all of us among the swayable 80 ultimately side for. 

Preparing for a New Dark Age

Monk Scribe

Back what now itself seems a millennium ago, when I was a senior in high school and freshman in college, I used to go to yard sales. I wasn’t looking for knickknacks or used appliances, but for cheap music and mostly for books. If memory serves me you could usually get a paperback for 50 cents, four of them for a dollar, and a hard cover for a buck.

I have no idea what made me purchase the particular books I did, and especially works of fiction. At that point in my life I didn’t so much know what literature was as I had heard rumors that there was something out there called literature I’d likely be interested in. Unlike Stephen Greenblatt, who I wrote about last time, I certainly didn’t buy books for the sexually suggestive covers, and thankfully, for given the area I was living at the time, I would now be surrounded by shelves of harlequin romances- though, come to think of it, it might have made me more skillful in love.

I don’t buy so many books anymore, having become a Kindle man where I press a button and wallah a work I’m after appears magically on my little screen. I also live in an area with very good libraries- both public and university- which for a bibliophile like myself is about as good as Florida for a person who worships the sun.

Yet, I still have maybe a hundred books surrounding me that I own but have never read. Sometimes, I’ll rummage through my shelves to pick out a book I probably haven’t even opened since I bought it, and the untouched pages will be brittle and break under  my clumsy fingers. The other day, I came across Walter M. Miller, Jrs’ novel A Canticle for Leibowitz. I’ve been working on a story with Catholic and dystopian/utopian technological themes and thought it might be a good idea to read this science-fiction classic before I proceeded any further into the labyrinth of the tale I was crafting because I knew it dealt with similar ideas.

I did not anticipate the power for me of this wonderful little novel. It touched on themes I had been thinking about for sometime- the search for a long range view that looked to the past as well as the future, the tension between knowledge and power, and the understanding that this tension was an existential component of the human condition, the brake on all our utopian aspirations, and perhaps the “original sin” that would ultimately sink us.            

I will look at the deeper lessons of A Canticle for Leibowitz sometime in the future, for now I just want to talk about its suggestions for the long range human future and specifically one aspect of that long range future- how do we preserve human knowledge so as to avoid ever going through another long dark age?   

A Canticle for Leibowitz was published in 1960. Had Miller sketched out rather than merely stated the apocalyptic conditions that precede the world portrayed in the novel it would have certainly given our own generations versions of the apocalypse with shows like The Walking Dead a run for their money. The novel occurs after the world has been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust known as The Flame Deluge. After the horrors unleashed by the war, including the creation hordes of radioactive mutants from “the demon Fall Out” , the masses seek revenge on the holders of knowledge they deem responsible- murdering them and destroying their works Khmer Rouge style in a world-wide intellectual genocide known as the Simplification.

A Jewish electrical engineer, Isaac Edward Leibowitz,,who had been working for the US military in the run up to the war joins the Catholic Church, perhaps the only long lived institution able to survive the Simplification, and founds a monastic order and monastery known as the Albertian Order of Leibowitz. The order is committed to preserving human knowledge from the Simplification by book smuggling (booklegging) and afterwards aims to store and preserve this knowledge in their Utah desert monastery, a collection of thoughts from the past which they call the Memorabilia.

Unlike our own apocalyptic anxieties which seem so artificial, as if we’ve become addicted to the adrenaline high of scarring ourselves nearly to death, the fears Miller was giving voice to were frighteningly real. Three years after his novel’s publication we really did almost destroy ourselves in a Flame Deluge with the Cuban Missile Crisis and only escaped our own destruction by a hair’s breath.

Yet, even with these real world anxieties, or perhaps because they were so real, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a rip-roaring funny book, Canterbury Tales funny or even Monty Python funny. Especially the first part, which deals with a hapless monk- Francis- who discovers original manuscripts of the soon to be sainted Lebowitz himself. The rest of the book is not as humorous, much more tragic, as we watch humanity make the same mistake over again with knowledge being used in the name of the lust for power, and that lust for power enabled by knowledge again nearly destroying us.    

Miller, of course, was playing with real history, the way the Christian monasteries had preserved knowledge in Western Europe after the fall of Rome. It was a theme explored, though from a much different angle, by Isaac Asimov some years earlier in his Foundation Series where the preservation of knowledge through the establishment of two different “foundations” at the ends of the galaxy is a deliberate effort to shorten a galactic dark age from tens of thousands to a “mere” thousand years.

Monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz risked themselves to gather and preserve their Memorabilia, knowledge which they did not understand, willing to wait thousands of years if necessary for the day when “an Interrogator would come, and things would be fitted together again.”  (62)

If I take the picture presented by Stephen Greenblatt in his The Swerve: How the World Became Modern as historically accurate, the reasons our  historical monks ended up preserving knowledge was much more accidental than their analogous novelization by Miller. According to Greenblatt, the monasteries ended up preserving knowledge due to a contingent rule of some orders that monks spend some of their time reading. To read, of course, requires something written and monasteries became one of the few places in the early middle ages to not only collect but preserve books through copying.

Still, according to Greenblatt, we shouldn’t be confused that they were doing so in anticipation of a rebirth of learning, and weren’t all that intellectually engaged with the books they preserved and copied. During reading or copying monks were forbidden to discuss the books they had in front of them, which is probably good for us. They became instead immense hive-mind photocopiers cloning and shelving a hodge podge of surviving works from the ancients, a task which had someone not done with detail and regularity would have quickly led to the disappearance of the vast intellectual heritage of the classical world.  The thoughts preserved on papyrus and animals skins would have in a short time been eaten away by literal book worms.

There is an argument out there, Francis Fukuyama’s is the one that comes to mind, that we are unlikely to experience the kinds of cyclical declines and dark ages seen in prior periods of human history because knowledge is now global. I think there are some other holes in that argument, but for now I won’t quibble, and want to focus on only one chasm- the possibility that the entire globe could experience some hammer blow that would shatter civilization everywhere all at one go.

These are catastrophic risks, things that we should be intensely focused on avoiding in the first place, as The Global Catastrophic Risks Institute, and Future of Humanity Institute among others, have been urging us to, but which we should also implement ways of absorbing the hit should it come. Basically catastrophic risks are disasters, natural or man-made that would have the effect of devastating human civilization on a global not just a local scale. They are not likely but have a chance that is less than zero.

Though we dogged the bullet that haunted Miller, we might still be faced with the threat of global thermonuclear war at some point in the future. Current saber rattling in the Pacific is not a good sign. We could be whacked by a massive object from outer space such as the one which wiped out the dinosaurs, or zapped by a gamma-ray burst, or crushed by the super-intelligences we are trying to build in an AI apocalypse, there could be a super-pandemic, perhaps created deliberately by some group of technologically proficient, nihilistic maniacs trying to kill us all, or a truly runaway greenhouse effect triggered by a methane release in the warming artic. In other words, there are a lot of things that might near push us back to the stone age even if no one of them are particularly likely.

To return to my question above: in the face of a catastrophic scenario how could we preserve human knowledge so as to avoid ever going through another long dark age? The first issue that strikes me when I start thinking about this is the quite practical one of what medium would be best to store information for the long haul?

Right now, of course, we are all about digital copying and storage. Google has so far scanned a little over 20 million books, a service I love, and that has kept my acidic fingers off of a gem like the first publication of Adam Smith’s Moral Sentiments, though the company’s public service in doing this has not been without controversy.

You’ve also got to hand it to the scandinavians who seem to do everything with meditative forethought. (I credit the six months of darkness.) The Norwegians not only have the Svalbard global seed bank which preserves the world’s agricultural inheritance in a Norad like facility in the icy north near the north pole, but are now aiming to digitize and make available all the world’s books in Norwegian.  Should a global catastrophe occur having done so might have cause in the words of Alexis Madrigal:

…Norwegians become to 27th-century humans what the Greeks were to the Renaissance. Everyone names the children of the space colonies Per and Henrik, Amalie and Sigrid. The capital of our new home planet will be christened Oslo.

Even absent Google, Americans aren’t totally left in the dust as archivers by our polar- bear- pale brethren up north. We have the quite respectable Internet Archive and the world oldest (although the word “old” seems strange here) digital library, Project Guttenberg.  

Yet, there are a number of possible catastrophic scenarios, such as an AI Apocalypse, where this capacity to easily store and recover digitized information might be irrevocably lost. You also need functioning electricity grids and/or battery production manufacturing capacity both of which seem at danger should a truly big-one occur. Disturbing on this score is the fact that a number of libraries are eliminating their physical collections as they embrace digitization, something that the Internet Archive is now trying to rectify by collecting actual physical copies of books.

Venerable institutions such as The Library of Congress and The Smithsonian Institution already have extensive physical collections, not just of books, but of physical artifacts as well, and should they somehow survive a global catastrophe, I picture them being our equivalent of the Library of Alexandria where people will flock to access not just books but working versions of vital technologies that might otherwise have been lost, such as electrical lighting, which the monk, Brother Kornhoer, in A Canticle for Leibowitz has to jerry- rig back into existence almost from scratch.

The use of paper as a medium to store our books and blueprints at first seems like the tried and true option, after all it served us so well in the past, but as anyone knows who has a book more than 50 years old, modern paper decays very fast. And using paper as our medium of storage also assumes that whatever catastrophic event has happened has left us with enough trees. Even the antique version of paper, sometimes made from animal skins, succumbs after a few centuries to the literal “book worm”, and you also need either printing presses or whole human institutions of scriveners such as the monasteries and monks to make copies.

The late classical world already had monastic institutions that were widespread before the loss of knowledge- a loss which took a long time to unfold. Our own loss of knowledge, should it (however unlikely) occur, seems less likely to creep into being then come along with a bang, and in the age of Scarlett Johansson who wants to be a monk?

As always thinking about the deep future, the The Long Now Foundation has its Rosetta Project where it preserves the world’s languages on electroformed solid-nickel disk, a model which might serve as a template for long-term information storage. Here’s their description:

The Rosetta Disk fits in the palm of your hand, yet it contains over 13,000 pages of information on over 1,500 human languages. The pages are microscopically etched and then electroformed in solid nickel, a process that raises the text very slightly – about 100 nanometers – off of the surface of the disk. Each page is only 400 microns across – about the width of 5 human hairs – and can be read through a microscope at 650X as clearly as you would from print in a book. Individual pages are visible at a much lower magnification of 100X.

Something like the Rosetta Disk avoids the ravages of the book worm, and will certainly last a long time, but you do need a microscope to read it, and it’s pretty easy to imagine a future where microscopes are a rare or even non-existent tool. We could make larger versions of the Rosetta Disk so that the text is readable to the naked eye, but then we run into the limitations of cost: we can’t very well copy even more than a handful of the books in existence using this method.  And they would only be reproducible on a large scale basis it seems by using one of the other methods.

Then again, we could always look to nature. Life on earth has over 3 billion year leg up on human beings when it comes to storing and passing along information- it’s called DNA. You can put an amazingly large amount of information on an equally amazingly small segment of DNA as in about half a million DVDs of storage on half a gram!  In the beginning of 2013 researchers in the UK were able to encode Shakespeare’s sonnets, and MLK’s “I have a dream!” speech among other things on DNA. Much more than any medieval abbot, nature abhors copying errors, and therefore DNA makes not merely a great storage medium, as long as where it is stored is cool and dry it can last for thousands of years, but a means to make copies with near hundred percent fidelity.

DNA exceeds digital media for storage and copying and matches something like the Rosetta Disk for longevity, the problem is the technology to make, store, and read such DNA texts is relatively high tech, and therefore vulnerable or unworkable in many catastrophic scenarios. It’s also much less readily searchable than digital media or even indexed paper texts.

Perhaps what we need to make sure a good bulk of the world’s knowledge survives a global catastrophe is a tiered system of preservation with only the most essential technical and scientific information, including how to build and use other forms of information dissemination and storage, put on something like large Rosetta Disks, a second level of not as essential but important and culturally significant knowledge being stored on long-lasting paper, almost everything on digital media, and absolutely everything we could get our hands on stored on DNA.

All of these things would have to be done before the occurrence of any catastrophic event that lunged us backward into a new dark age. Once the lights went out we certainly shouldn’t expect, like Miller, that the Catholic Church would play the same role in preserving knowledge as it had in the past, for, as Mark Twain said, “history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes”.  Indeed, should we create the kinds of information preservation mechanisms I outlined above, we would need an organization already dedicated to those mechanisms to manage those efforts, and in today’s world such an organization seems likely to be secular.

I can imagine a type of global organization whose members were in their day-to-day reality scattered across differing organizations we have in place today for disseminating and storing knowledge: universities, major libraries, scientific institutions such as the Royal Society a small number of whom would in a pre-catastrophe world run the types of information preservation efforts I have sketched out who, in the unlikely case that a global catastrophic event occurred, would work slowly and over generations to re-establish the world’s learning.

I have already suggested ways we might pay for this.

The great bulk of what we would need to re-establish should a large chunk of the world’s knowledge be destroyed would be technological and scientific. Knowledge that would be essential would be things like, agricultural techniques and science, the Germ theory of disease and the techniques behind vaccinations, how to build and maintain infrastructure such as sewage and plumbing disposal, energy utilizing systems including electrical grids, civil engineering, and the technology behind knowledge behind storing and sharing information. Above all, the scientific method would need to be put firmly back in place.

One of the problems I foresee should an almost complete blackout occur are gaps in knowledge domains that are essentially unpredictable before hand. That is, it seems a safer bet to assume that not only will knowledge have been lost but the knowledge of how to understand whatever knowledge has remained might be lost as well.

It would certainly be an interesting interdisciplinary project to design the kinds of texts that would be necessary to re-establish some field of science should it almost completely disappear. To do so would probably require philosophers and historians of science, mathematicians, practitioners of the science itself, linguists, cultural anthropologists, and instructional designers who were adept at teaching complex ideas to those with minimum starting points in terms of literacy and numeracy.

Given that the source of a global catastrophe is perhaps most likely to come via our own scientifically induced prowess it’s quite sensible to ask if we should be making all this effort to salvage our scientific and technological capacity in the first place? This relationship between our knowledge and our possible destruction is a question dealt with on a profound level in A Canticle for Leibowitz, and I’ll turn to it next time. Yet, as we know man does not live on bread alone, so what of the preservation less material knowledge, the art and wisdom that is the legacy of our global civilization?

Hopefully we would be able to preserve at least some of our human cultural legacy. Thinking about what we might save from our culture under severe constraints in terms of number might be an interesting and perhaps even revealing parlor game ,so I’ll end this post by inviting you to play.

If you could save only 10 books, 10 songs, and 10 artworks from all of human history that should make it through a catastrophic event which would you choose?