Excellent essay. Decivilization and presentism, two of the most serious existential threats to our success as a species. Another, I believe is the denialism of basic innate human nature by deeply unintelligent, self proclaimed authoritarian elites, and the disastrous consequences evident throughout true history. They don’t get to play God without things ending very badly.
I’ve often thought of civilization as a system of “encoding reality” much like cognition in a Friston framework. Time causes model drift as cultures touch each other, and the usually required energy expenditure to expel entropy keeps the wheels on the train. When the energy required to maintain integrity grows above a certain point the civilization cannot maintain coherence and dissolves into another model, or anarchy, or disease and death of the constituent standard-bearers.
Current Western civilization has vast resources available to expel entropic change, more so than any time in history. Witness the bounce-back from COVID. What’s daunting is the lack of insulators in current civilizations models - internet, television, and global network infrastructure raises the “temperature” of information entropy far more effectively than before and the thermal bath of high entropy “variations” of cultural encodings of reality are affecting people’s ability to keep a coherent version of culture in their minds.
Interesting and concerning. Cultures have survived and thrived when they have struck a balance between past, present and future. Burke’s partnership comes to mind. I think Christianity - when not corrupted, of course, melds reverence for the past, the practice of the present and an aim for a better kingdom to come. What happens if we lose that balance? If we lose that synergy, and all that matters is the here and now, why value what came before or what will come after us? If we don’t value our past, why should our children value the past when we become the past? So yes, a culture can go backwards, and decivilze itself.
Excellent essay. Decivilization and presentism, two of the most serious existential threats to our success as a species. Another, I believe is the denialism of basic innate human nature by deeply unintelligent, self proclaimed authoritarian elites, and the disastrous consequences evident throughout true history. They don’t get to play God without things ending very badly.
I’ve often thought of civilization as a system of “encoding reality” much like cognition in a Friston framework. Time causes model drift as cultures touch each other, and the usually required energy expenditure to expel entropy keeps the wheels on the train. When the energy required to maintain integrity grows above a certain point the civilization cannot maintain coherence and dissolves into another model, or anarchy, or disease and death of the constituent standard-bearers.
Current Western civilization has vast resources available to expel entropic change, more so than any time in history. Witness the bounce-back from COVID. What’s daunting is the lack of insulators in current civilizations models - internet, television, and global network infrastructure raises the “temperature” of information entropy far more effectively than before and the thermal bath of high entropy “variations” of cultural encodings of reality are affecting people’s ability to keep a coherent version of culture in their minds.
Interesting and concerning. Cultures have survived and thrived when they have struck a balance between past, present and future. Burke’s partnership comes to mind. I think Christianity - when not corrupted, of course, melds reverence for the past, the practice of the present and an aim for a better kingdom to come. What happens if we lose that balance? If we lose that synergy, and all that matters is the here and now, why value what came before or what will come after us? If we don’t value our past, why should our children value the past when we become the past? So yes, a culture can go backwards, and decivilze itself.