By Morf Morford
Tacoma Daily Index
I’m not a huge science fiction fan, but there are lessons we can learn from the thoughts of those who consider how human beings will cope with a range of challenges from war, over population, disease or even zombies.
Besides being entertaining, these books, short stories or films are exercises in human problem solving.
One formula science fiction writers use is to consider a basic need, system or process common to civilizations across history. This could be work, families, transportation or anything else universal to human life in any climate, culture, faith or economy.
Someone once asked anthropologist Margaret Mead what she considered to be the first evidence of civilization. She answered: a human thigh bone with a healed fracture found in an archaeological site 15,000 years old. Why not tools for hunting or religious artifacts or primitive forms of communal self-governance?
Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. Few animals survive a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal.
Mead points out that for a person to survive a broken femur the individual had to have been cared for long enough for that bone to heal. Others must have provided shelter, protection, food and drink over an extended period of time for this kind of healing to be possible. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts, Mead said.
In other words, civilization literally is when we work together toward a solution or put down our preferences and, together, face a common challenge. This is true at every level from an isolated hunter/gather culture to current business in an urban center using the gig economy.
The primary reason for starting a business is to solve a problem or meet a need. No matter how great your idea is, or your product, or even your business plan, if it is not a solution to someone’s problem it won’t matter to anyone.
Science fiction looks at how the future will solve problems – or even what those problems will or might be.
Science fiction also sometimes explores how people do not solve problems, how they took a turn, made a decision or suffered some calamity that set them back – or against each other.
How civilizations begin is fascinating and instructive.
How civilizations end is even more fascinating and instructive. And horrifying.
One principle you learn if you study history is that every civilization has a shelf-life. There are all too familiar stages of virtually every major civilization. From the Assyrians, to the Mayans to the ancient Romans, empires and civilizations tend to follow similar formulas. They don’t need to, but the principles seem as inviolable as gravity.
There are many ways of interpreting history and culture and progress, but I particularly like the structure Carroll Quigley applies to civilizations (http://www.draftymanor.com/bart/h_quigl3.htm) in his Seven Stages of Civilization.
His premise is that civilizations tend to emerge, grow, decline, and fall in a specific and observable sequence of stages:
1. Mixture
2. Gestation
3. Expansion
4. Age of Conflict
5. Universal Empire
6. Decay
7. Invasion
As I explore and expand on each one of these, consider how your home culture (or any culture, really) fits into his scheme.
Mixture
Civilizations are born at the intersections of societies. Where rules and customs are understood, and shared, the members of that society have no incentive to change; in fact, social pressure tends to prevent change.
Where differing cultures intersect at their margins, it is not so clear what rules should be followed. If you have travelled outside of the United States, for example, you see very quickly how rules, from driving to how you hold a fork, are very different – even in a place like Great Britain – where you might not expect to see much difference.
Out of the mixture of cultures has come a new culture, with the opportunity, like ingredients used in a recipe, to become a distinct civilization.
Gestation
To continue my cooking metaphor, this the time of cooking, a time of ideas simmering and sorting themselves. This could be considered “alone time” when the society gains the critical mass required for its members to begin conceiving of themselves as having a unique – but shared – identity. This could be many decades or a few years. But as with cooking, it is an essential and formative process.
Expansion
As any society becomes stabilized in its identity, it begins to solidity into a distinct culture, with an emphasis on four particular areas:
production of goods
increase in population
increase in geographic extent
increase in knowledge
Expansion is a sign of power and strength, but it carries within its center its own demise. Expansion tends to split a civilization (particularly toward the end of the period of expansion) into what can be regarded as a core area and a periphery, usually, but not always, defined by geography.
Age of Conflict
In time the idealistic notions of the founders become institutions. Some look forward, some look back. Some idealize the past; Others look to the future for either utopia or dystopia. Either way, the civilization enters an age of conflict; with itself and essentially anyone else.
This period is marked by four trends:
a decline in the rate of expansion
an increase in class conflicts, especially in the geographic core
an increase in imperialistic wars
an increase in irrationality and general pessimism
As legal, political, even religious institutions prioritize the preservation of their own privileges, the civilization—particularly in the core—becomes more static, bureaucratized and legalistic. This tends to punish innovation instead of rewarding it.
The declining rate of expansion pits the entrenched elite against the great mass of the people. When resources are perceived as being limited, competition between classes ensues. “The rich” hang on to their wealth and prerogatives, but, realizing that they are in the minority, divert the attention of the increasingly resentful masses with entertainment, and appease them with token gestures of wealth redistribution. Meanwhile, resentment at not enjoying the same increase in the standard of living as their parents leads the masses to feel insecure, and this feeling manifests as social disruption and other irrational behavior.
Universal Empire
This “empire” and yes, it is much like the empire as portrayed in the Star Wars movies, sees itself as the source and essence of all meaning and purpose.
Unlike many other historians, Quigley insists that any civilization can survive indefinitely as long as it keeps reforming or circumventing its institutionalized, if not fossilized, instruments of expansion.
With the cessation of major hostilities, (consider the decade or two after World War II for the United States) an apparent Golden Age ensues.
This is later regarded as a time of peace and prosperity. There is peace because there are no more political opponents, no more ideological adversaries. And there is prosperity derived from relaxing internal trade barriers, instituting common systems of measurement and coinage, and increasing domestic government spending to maintain what is felt should be the proper appearance of a universal empire.
But these are deceptive. The peace is the calm of exhaustion, and the prosperity is the burning of internal resources to maintain a standard of living that cannot long be supported.
Decay
During this time, as recognition of the civilization’s debt spreads, the standard of living falls. Law and order break down. Civil unrest sparks protests, some of which turn violent. Taxes cannot be collected, and other forms of public service such as military service (and military actions themselves) are resisted. Property cannot be protected except (if at all) by force. Personal violence becomes a daily occurrence. Trade fails, as fraud can no longer be punished. City life fails; basic survival needs force people into the country where they can grow food, and the “middle class” disappears. Religious revivals sweep the land. The medical technology that sustains life becomes difficult or impossible to obtain, resulting in high rates of infant mortality and shortened lifespans. Finally, literacy itself fails.
Invasion
You don’t need to be historian to see that the phase of decay is a peak of vulnerability. Historically this has meant literal invasions by enemy hordes, but in our era, invasion could be through cyber-attacks or that most lethal and semi-eternal force – disease and microbes.
The empire could rebuild or its fragments become pieces of other empires.
And if you know the whole Star Wars saga, you know that it starts all over again.
