The Little Dark Ages to Come
Posted on 24 December 2011
There is a Little Dark Ages posited in my book, COUNT TO A TRILLION, which sparked some discussion in the comments concerning the degree of loss of technical know how and the feasibility of recovering from a collapse, partial or total, of civilization.
I said
“As in the real Dark Ages in history, my yarn assumes that a collapse of economic and political unity does not involve necessarily any loss of technical know-how.”
A reader with the name of Deiseach asks:
I would mildly demur here; was there not some loss of “technical know-how”, at least in certain outlying areas, between the end of Roman occupation/final collapse of the Empire and the re-vitalised culture of the Middle Ages?
My answer: That is why I said “not necessarily.”
The Middle Ages introduced Christendom such inventions as the clockwork, spectacles, the astrolabe, the hourglass, paper, the Zero, the sun dial, the compass, navigation instruments such as cross-staves nocturnals and quadrants, the stirrup, mail and plate armor, the oar, the rudder, the artesian well, the horsecollar, the high-backed saddle, the bit and bridal, advances in poliocratics too numerous to mention, including the design of fortress walls and special engines needed to batter them — and, depending on what date you define as the end of the Middle Ages, gun powder. The Eleventh Century also saw the introduction of the university system which is still in use today, which is why your diploma is in Latin, so mass literacy can also be ascribed to the Middle Ages.
There were also social advances in the Dark Ages, such as the manumission of slaves to serfs. While it is no fun being a serf, it is better than being a slave, since serfs had legally protected rights, not the least of which was an inability for the landlord to put him off his land.
The abolition of divorce was a tremendous boon to women — odd as this sounds to modern ears, who have been deceived into thinking that a woman’s ability to leave her husband is a liberty rather than a liability. The Romans also practiced infanticide and abortion, a horrific practice from which the more civilized and refined humans of the Dark Ages recoiled, and which was not reintroduced into the West until Darwinian concepts, such as eugenics and scientific racism and other barbaric atavisms dressed in the fancy dress of new name became popular.
The Medieval Guild system served much of the same purpose as the modern trade union (despite that economists, particularly free traders like yours truly, dislike both). The Romans and their barbarian tribesmen surrounding them had a slave class to do their manual work, both skilled labor and brute labor, which economists and progressives alike also dislike.
Over against that, there is indeed a loss of craftsmanship, particularly in the early Middle Ages, the Dark Ages, of statues, of aqueducts,of Roman Roads, and the coin money system fell out of use, and with it the use of professional standing armies, and was replaced by the feudal system of an exchange of mutual oaths for military service.
So, yes and no. My point is that the economic and political system (by and large) collapsed, but the technical knowledge (by and large) did not. One can object that certain political systems were intact, as the Emperor was still Roman Emperor in Constantinople, and the Church structure retained its complex and civilized character (indeed, was the repository and source of civilization); and one can point out the poor, nasty and brutish state of Dark Age cities circa 600 AD compared to the glories of Rome circa 60 AD, with her public baths and circuses, and one can point out the extinction of the artisan class, and the corresponding losses of techniques not found again until the Renaissance. I grant you your point.
BUT since it is commonplace among Protestants, Edward Gibbon not the least, and very commonplace among Science Fiction writers, to equate technological advances with political and economic and even social advances, to sum up these disparate elements under the name “Progress” and to assume that a deep depression or a world war, even an atomic war, will involve the return to the Stone Age, or, at least, the Bronze Age.
Cities can be destroyed with weapons, and can fall to sword and fire, or, in the modern day, with bombs or atomic bombs. Civilization, which is an idea, is harder to destroy, since bombs can only destroy the physical systems of transmission of the idea, books and records and teachers.
Hence in my novel, I propose a period of war and plague and famine severs the modern day from the early future in which my hero is born (called perhaps facetiously by the men of that day “the Little Dark Ages”). But it is not a total collapse of civilization, but, instead, is the end of the hegemony of Europe and America.
Other science fiction writers (as David Wingrove did in his KUNG KUO series) assume that China will take our place, if and when we join Spain and England and Rome and Greece in the list of nations whose histories outweigh their futures, not to mention Nineveh and Tyre, so I decided the India and Brazil would be the leaders in the Twenty Second Century, and, after their fall, the Copts in Egypt, the Boers in South Africa, and the Cantonese in China would rise to predominance in the Twenty Third Century.
In the Twenty Fourth Century, the center of civilization swings to equatorial nations where space elevators, beanstalks, can be erected, since this becomes the economic chokepoint of the world economy, to Ecuador and Spanish Guinea and Sumatra, which are the strongholds of the returned star-farers from the NTL Hermetic, the ship pictured on the cover of the book.
In the sequel, the HERMETIC MILLENNIA, the story proposes that the Twenty Fifth Century is a period of atomic wars, and the breakdown of the World Concordat, and the rise of a group called the Cryonarchy, who are descendants of Menelaus Montrose. Then the Uniate Orthodox Catholic Church rises to power, as it has a monopoly on the world energy supply and the longterm hibernation facilities. Next comes the reign of posthumans called the Giants, artificial creatures of tremendous frame and stature able to hold up massive skulls containing elephantine brains. They are overthrown by the eugenically guided Simon Families, who have learned the secret of longevity, but, one which only applies to women: ruled by superintelligent centenarians, they are called the Witches.
There follows one civilization after another during which various artificial subspecies of mankind rise to predominance. After then, in the Forty-Fifth Century, humans with various animal characteristics woven into their DNA, called Chimerae, overthrow their creators and rise to power. Then in the Sixth Millennium, the Natural Order of man domesticates all forms of life on earth, under the maternal guidance of a subspecies called the Nymphs. After them rise the Iatric Clades in the Seventh Millennium, which, in homage to Jack Vance, I have called the Hormagaunts … and after them arise a vanvogtian race called the Locusts who rule from the Eighth to the Ninth Millennium … then is the advent of the Melusine …
But this is talking about a book not to be released until next year, and its sequel, so let us not get ahead of ourselves.
I will forbear to mention that in the fourth book, THE CONCUBINE VECTOR, moves from discussing mere subspecies of the first human race over a period of millennia, to discussing the second and third human races, popularly called the Swans and the Morlocks, not to mention their various artifacts, called Virtues, Thrones, and Powers. And that manuscript is not yet completed.
Thank you for your courteous reply and explanation of your point, Mr. Wright.
I was thinking along the lines of the Dark Ages running roughly from around the late 4th century to somewhere in the 9th/10th centuries, and that the peripheries (such as the British Isles) would either go backwards when the Romans pulled out, or never possessed the benefits of the Romans in the first place (like my own island, to which Roman roads, aqueducts, and arches were completely unknown – compare native constructions such as the possibly 6th century Gallarus oratory with later building like the Rock of Cashel, which benefited in the 11th century from Continental contacts due to the links made by Irish missionary activity in Europe).
Now, the areas which were nearest to the height of civilisation would, naturally, retain most of the knowledge, so it seemed to me that it would – in your world – be quite possible to have a Little Dark Ages where the overall standard of technical sophistication went down, but certain places were at or near the peak achieved by former times while other places went back to ploughing with a horse plough. The difficulty would be in spreading or re-introducing the old knowledge, since means of travel would be difficult and primitive and might mean you could take an aeroplane from X to Y, but to get from Y to Z you would have to go by mule, even if X, Y and Z were all in the same continent (or even country). Menelaus’ world could, therefore, have undergone a collapse of society and a loss of technical knowledge but still be capable of re-climbing the ladder to advance in civilisation once again.
Again, what was kept and what was forgotten might depend on the taste of individuals and what was considered beneficial, useful or beautiful; such as a (possibly) 14th century Irish version of a portion of Lucan’s “Pharsalia”, though not perhaps in a version that the author would have recognised, as it was re-written to fit into Irish literary traditions and to appeal to Irish taste. So we didn’t have the Roman arch, but we went nuts for Roman literature
“Thence arose in Rome matter of disunion, and a civil war, and a war that was greater than (that) from the decision in the senate. For this is civil war, in the first place, a war in which everyone rises to attack another of the folk of the same city; and it was a war that was greater than (that), for not only did the folk of the same city arise to begin that war, but even gossips and friends, so that son was against father, and (one) brother against another.
Now there were many causes and reasons why the mishaps of civil war were fated to arise at that time in Rome and in the senate. The first of these causes, the cause by which every mighty, powerful people on the globe is abated and cast down, to wit, pride and glory and high spirit filled them because of the greatness of their strength and their lordship and the abundance of their treasure: for at that time the wealth of the Romans was immeasurable, because of the abundance of their gold and silver and matchless garments, and the beauty of the ornaments of their resplendent houses, and their covered canopies and their shining sollers, their ships, their galleys, their chariots and their four-horsed carriages, their beakers and horns and cups and abundance of every other good thing, and because of the extravagance of their consumption of food and drink by day or at night. For of all the Romans there was not one man who deemed it honorable to say that any of the people was better than himself; so that for sake of gold and treasure base clans were arranged among them into high clans and into high mighty grades; and neither the laws nor the decisions of the senate were rightly with them, so that everyone in the City had great hatred and ill-will for another; and they all desired that a cause of war should grow among themselves and also among their leaders, so that each of them might attain his ill-will and his evil design on another.
Another cause of the Civil War was the disparting of dominion among three lords; for so long as water remains above earth and air above water, and so long as the restless, fading moon and the pure-radiant, golden sun are on their immoveable, unstaying course, ordering day and night, harmonious fellowship or loyal union will never be found in the world or on earth among sharers of dominion before or after.”
An deiseach is correct in applying “Dark Age” specifically to Western Europe between ca. 400 and 800, beginning with the collapse of imperial administration and international trade and ending with the Pax Carolingia. But it is also true that except in the outlying areas and in pockets, technological knowledge was not lost. Glassmaking disappeared from the Rhineland for a time, and of course, England slid back a short ways due to a fairly massive influx of Anglo-Saxons soccer hooligans. But actually the Goths and the Franks were rather respectful of the culture they sacked and looted and regarded themselves in some sense as its custodians. The real hard times came with the Saracens, Vikings, and Magyars, men “who knew not Rome” and bore her no respect.
However, the developing historical consensus seems to be that the Dark Ages are dark to us, not to them. I quote me:
And of course, for Ireland, our Golden Age came in the 8th century – smack in the middle of the Dark Ages.
I found your “Autumn” post but not those excerpts in it. Where did you get that last blockquote?
Nevermind. Go-go Gadget reading comprehension!
I wrote it. Haven’t finished the whole paper, so it’s not published yet.
So, basically, “you don’t lose information you’re using”?
I can’t remember, but at some point in the last year another LJer I read made a big post on that….
“Cities can be destroyed with weapons, and can fall to sword and fire, or, in the modern day, with bombs or atomic bombs. Civilization, which is an idea, is harder to destroy, since bombs can only destroy the physical systems of transmission of the idea, books and records and teachers.”
Cities and civilizations can and have been destroyed by plague and famine. The ideas and even the records still existing do nothing for you if there is not the man power to implement the ideas and the food for that man power. A relatively short string of crop failures in key locations would be enough to completely reorder a society.
The Maya built their cities but required intensive agricultural methods to sustain themselves, a relatively short string of years with no rain brought it all crashing down so that almost all of the great cities were wiped away completely and those that survived were massively changed into something quite different.
Disrupting the production and distribution of food (or water) into any of today’s megacities would be a more efficient and effective way of wiping them off the face of the earth then any atom bomb. Burning corn for ethanol combined with a few not the best years of crops otherwise has given us riots, uprisings, and regime change in large portions of the world. Imagine what significant crop failure over a few years in one of the large breadbasket areas would do to the world.
I feel a book comin’ on!
There’s no way of knowing, but I suspect that most imperial subjects were happy when the empire finally went down and they could get out from under the boot of Rome. Human beings for the most part aren’t natural imperialists and are content with a simple life among their tribesmen. It’s only imperialist arrogance that equates the return to a natural way of life with collapse and a dark age. Unfortunately, this so-called dark age was soon ended by the rise of another Roman empire, the pagan-murdering monsters of your beloved Church. This is the great untold tragedy of the European people; for two thousand years they have lived under the boots of foreign ideas and empires which have sought to eradicate their native religions and cultures. This is why Europeans have much in common with Native Americans; we are all victims of anti-pagan crusades and imperialism which have robbed us of our cultural heritage and identity.
The fall of Rome resonates in our time, because, thanks largely to your friendly Zionist neocons, our empire has become badly overstretched and the people of the provinces grow desperate to get out from under the boots of distant capitals, cabals and cultural imperialists. When our Rome falls, there will be another collective sigh of relief, some necessary bloodletting, then civilization will renew itself. I for one look forward to the coming dark age as time of great opportunity, an age when new seeds can take root once the suffocating tentacles of this bankrupt empire have finally been severed forever.
You are a better science fiction writer than I am. This is very imaginative alternate history.
What do you mean by “Native American”? Someone born in America? Do you mean an Indian? As a so-called sorcerer, you should be wary of letting other people use the Rule of Names on you to control your thoughts.
Ecce, ingentem acervum mauris equorum!
Actually, we need not guess what folks were thinking, since not all writings perished. I commend to your attention
http://www.fordham.edu/Halsall/source/gildas.asp
A fair history of the time (though with a few infelicities) is Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity and also Barbarians and Romans by Justine Randers-Pehrson. An oldy but goody is Sir Charles Oman’s The Dark Age.
I can never tell if Proverbs 26:4 or 26:5 applies to situations such as this.
At any rate, a Merry Christmas to you and yours, Mr Wright.
“the pagan-murdering monsters of your beloved Church”
Which is why at Woodstown in my own county, the excavation of the Viking trading site and early settlement is full of massacred peaceful pagan Viking traders and their booty is all found in monastic sites:
“There was abundant evidence for craft-workings in fine metals (e.g. silver), as well as iron working, stone, glass, bone, antler and amber. Some finds, including copper-alloy stud mounts with gold foil and a copper-alloy book clasp may have been treasure trove from monastic raiding.
The archaeological evidence indicates that during the middle of the ninth century the site was occupied, and presumably taken over, by Viking raiders. Evidence of Viking metalworking in silver and lead was found, and the site has produced the largest assemblage of lead pan weights outside of Viking Dublin. Exotic finds of possible Norwegian schist whetstones and a fragment of a silver Kufic coin from Byzantium reflect the wider world in which Vikings operated. Ships’ nails and rivets reflect their maritime basis. A single warrior grave with full battle armour was also discovered, but due to the acid soil no skeleton survived.”
Oh, wait: it’s the other way round. Booty from native Irish monastic sites is found amongst the gear of the pagan Viking traders. Hmm – who was murdering whom, again?
Or as the 12th century Welsh-Norman apologist for the Norman Conquest of Ireland, Gerald of Wales, has it in his “Topography of Ireland” (circa 1187, translated 1863):
“Chapter XXXII: A sarcastic reply of the Archbishop of Cashel
I once made objections of this kind to Maurice, archbishop of Cashel, a discreet and learned man, in the presence of Gerald, a clerk of the Roman church who formerly came as legate into those parts; and throwing the blame of the enormous delinquencies of this country principally on the prelates, I drew a powerful example from the fact that no one in that kingdom had ever obtained the crown of martyrdom for the church of God. Upon this the archbishop replied sarcastically, avoiding the point of my proposition, and answering it by a home-thrust: “It is true,” he said, “that although our nation may seem barbarous, uncivilized and cruel, they have always shewn great honour and reverence to ecclesiastics, and never on any occasion raised their hands against God’s saints. But there is now come into our land a people who know how to make martyrs, and have frequently done it. Henceforth Ireland will have its martyrs, as well as other countries.”
(Translator’s comment: There was probably in this reply an allusion to the death of Thomas of Canterbury).”
So Gerald was expecting the Christians to massacre the pagans – dang, no, got it wrong again! Other way round – Gerald was expecting that the native pagan Irish would be killing the Christian missionaries, and twitted the native Irish archbishop on the peaceful spread of Christianity in Ireland (nobody killing anybody) and the Irishman retorted that the Normans knew all about making martyrs, what with the Recent King’s Unpleasantness concering Thomas à Becket.
I would advise you, dear Sorcerer, to be careful about getting on the wrong side of Irish saints; as Gerald tells us:
“Chapter LV: That the saints of this country appear to be of a vindictive temper
It appears to me very remarkable, and deserving of notice, that, as in the present life the people of this nation are beyond all others irascible and prompt to revenge, so also in the life that is after death, the saints of this country, exalted by their merits above those of other lands, appear to be of a vindictive temper. There appears to me no other way of accounting for this circumstance, but this: – as the Irish people possessed no castles, while the country is full of marauders who live by plunder, the people, and more especially the ecclesiastics, made it their practice to have recourse to the churches, instead of fortified places, as refuges for themselves and their property; and by divine Providence and permission, there was frequent need that the church should visit her enemies with the severest chastisements; this was the only mode by which evil-doers and impious men could be deterred from breaking the peace of ecclesiastical societies, and for securing even to a servile submission the reverence due to the very churches themselves, from a rude and irreligious people.”
And where did the learning come from? Two Irish scholars hawking wisdom in the marketplace.
http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2011/12/what-happens-when-pair-of-irishmen-go.html
BBWWAAHAHAHAHA!!!
There’s more of Rousseau than Rhiannon in that tirade. Athena and Odin, deliver me from ignorance!
The loss of knowledge seems most dependent on, for lack of a better term, social infrastructure, or what we might call institutional coherence. Without the Church, the loss probably would have been far greater; during the dissolution of the Roman Empire, it was priests and monks doing most of the copying of valuable works. In the period following Rome’s fall, there was a massive demographic contraction in urban areas (Rome itself went from being over a million people to thirty thousand), as people moved into the countryside and the overall population declined. Communities became isolated. Literacy, which hit about ten percent during the height of the Empire, would’ve begun moving back toward the one percent that was about the norm for the ancient world. Prior to that, the Church was already johnny-on-the-spot, having taken up civic functions like census-taking, as the wheels fell off Roman political institutions. And during its first three centuries of its persecution by the Caesars, it had built up a tremendous intellectual cachet, with libraries and schools (Christianity and the Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea). If you wanted to purpose-make an institution to save the essence of civilization, you realistically couldn’t have planned or done any better.
In this situation Deiseach described, the unequal distribution of technologies was likely. In that respect, it would’ve resembled the Third World. I’ve seen DirecTV dishes on shanty houses in the slums of Mexico. And in other parts of the world, it’s not that uncommon a site to have cell phones in rural areas, where the main means of transportation is still four-legged. And Menelaus’s world does indeed resemble that. Relative to his time period, it is the Third World. It may also be that the consequences of a “Little Dark Age” would be more severe, since they would have much farther to fall and would be much more vulnerable to infrastructural collapse.
Cell phones are much cheaper than landlines to produce, both in terms of the phone itself and the equipment needed to make a network. Considering as how the wait time for landlines in many places in the world is over a century unless some additional greasing of the wheels takes place and that a cell phone is only a few bucks it makes perfect sense that people that walk everywhere on dirt roads and live in houses made out of old bricks, scraps of wood, plastic, and even some cardboard would almost all have cell phones.
Getting cable or satellite TV is also relatively easy if one is not too concerned about the law prosecuting for the use of splicing and descramblers. Which they shouldn’t be as so many other people do it and the city or state governments often have regulations for the business that is providing the service, even if doing so is illegal at some higher level of government.
I am much less sure of how people in shanty towns occasionally manage to get big screen high definition TV’s. Considering as they were much rarer then the other things I figured I probably didn’t want to know.
The funniest or saddest thing were people complaining about irregular electricity but then going out and cutting down the transmission lines for scrap metal at night.
And are equally capable of complaining about phone service after blowing up/cutting down the nearest cell tower. And of course satellite TV requires, hmm. Satellites, I think. Some people, I suspect, do not actually know this.
Well, I was in Mexico in ’02, so we’re talking pre-hi-def. But you make a perfectly good point about the lack of infrastructure and the availability of technology, which feeds back into what I was saying. Moving back to the Classical world, why would literacy rates decline after the fall of the Roman Empire? Because books became more scarce. Why did books become more scarce? Because the scriptoriums, scribes, and networks of distribution for making and selling those books weren’t available. It became economically, politically, and socially untenable to produce expensive and labor-intensive volumes in quantities previously seen.
And that’s another thing we can thank the Middle Ages for, the forerunner of the modern publishing industry. In Late Antiquity, Christian scholarship was instrumental in refining the codex form of the book and employing it in new ways as a medium for information storage and as a research instrument, in a time when the publishing industry, such as it was, was quite primitive. Book-production was largely made up of privately-funded operations and channels of distribution largely followed the relationships of the nobility and upper classes. When the Church began its own book-making, there were two important differences. First, production was organizational, rather than just private, and second, books were being produced for distribution among the body of believers. In essence, the first stones were laid were the foundations of mass literacy. In the transition from Classical to Medieval worlds, the rise of illuminated led to the creation of sophisticated monastic publishing operations. The publishing of illuminated manuscripts, in time, became dominated by secular commercial operations. Once Gutenberg introduced his printing press, the framework for commercial publication already existed.
As you say, books were luxury items and jealously guarded. One of the causes of the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne, as related in the Annals of the Four Masters:
“The Age of Christ, 555.
The seventeenth year of Diarmaid.
The battle of Cul Dreimhne was gained against Diarmaid, son of Cearbhall, by Fearghus and Domhnall, the two sons of Muircheartach, son of Earca; by Ainmire, son of Sedna; and by Ainnidh, son of Duach; and by Aedh, son of Eochaidh Tirmcharna, King of Connaught. It was in revenge of the killing of Curnan, son of Aedh, son of Eochaidh Tirmcharna, while under the protection of Colum Cille, the Clanna Neill of the North and the Connaughtmen gave this battle of Cul Dreimhne to King Diarmaid; and also on account of the false sentence which Diarmaid passed against Colum Cille about a book of Finnen, which Colum had transcribed without the knowledge of Finnen, when they left it to award of Diarmaid, who pronounced the celebrated decision, ‘To every cow belongs its calf,’ &c. Colum Cille said:
O God, wilt thou not drive off the fog,
[gap: extent: 1 line]
which envelopes our number,
The host which has deprived us of our livelihood,
The host which proceeds around the cairns!
He is a son of storm who betrays us.
My Druid,—he will not refuse me,—
is the Son of God, and may he side with me;
How grandly he bears his course,
the steed of Baedan before the host;
Power by Baedan of the yellow hair
will be borne from Ireland on him the steed.
Fraechan, son of Teniusan, was he who made the Erbhe Druadh for Diarmaid. Tuathan, son of Dimman, son of Saran, son of Cormac, son of Eoghan, was he who placed the Erbhe Druadh over his head. T hree thousand was the number that fell of Diarmaid’s people. One man only fell on the other side, Mag Laim was his name, for it was he that passed beyond the Erbhe Druadh.”
The “celebrated decision” of King Diarmaid was this; when St. Colmcille was staying with St. Finian of Moville, he borrowed a psalter belonging to Finian and asked permission to copy it. Finian refused, but Colmcille secretly copied it by night. When it was done, Finian demanded the copy and Colmcille refused to hand it over; they went to King Diarmaid to decide between them, and he gave the judgement based on the legal precedent that, as a calf belongs to the owner of the cow, so the copy of a book belongs to the owner of the book: “To every cow her calf, to every book its copy”.
This is said to be the earliest copyright judgement in Europe
Colmcille, despite this, refused to hand over his book and eventually prevailed upon his royal kinsmen in the Northern Uí Néill dynasty to go to war with Diarmaid.
This is the Cathach, the alleged copy made by St. Colmcille, a psalter dated to the late 6th century.
Books and the Irish were always Srs Bzns.
I have to say, John, that Mr. Stapledon’s Magnum Opus may have some competition once you complete this series.
Thank you for your kind words.
Completely off-topic, but this is the quickest way of submitting a question:
As you’ve noted yourself to be a fan of Aang and his buddies while bracketing the Eastern influences in Avatar which remain staunchly problematic, I’m interested in your take on Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, the dub available on Funimation.com. I’m of the persuasion that it’s a fascinatingly well thought out take on what it would be like if Theosophy and Gnosticism were both universally true. To wit, it’s an Eastern realization of Western, especially 19th-century German, heresies.
Because there is only a weak, relativistic moral framework in the show — technowizards can do anything they want, as long as they bow to the rule of “equivalent exchange,” and the bad guys will kill millions to get out of that rule — and because Truth is specifically personalized as a jerk tollkeeper of the door to formless demons beyond, characters desiring the good muck around without direction in a bleak atheistic outlook, bumbling about, despairing during crises and furiously bestowing mercy as heroes do without reason more than instinct. If the writing weren’t so engaging, it’d be too much to handle.
(Of the main characters, only one is specifically not an atheist. He and his fellow sandpeople, victims of genocide from the haunting, lingering backstory, bow to the one creator. Solely among the world, including those who reject religion, the fake Arabs conceive of the divine as something like “the” and not “a” god; this character’s take is basically worshiping creation by destroying genocidal would-be god-men in revenge. He spends much of the story as a terrorist hunted by state police; all other characters think this is just, at least those characters who care about such things. Bad guys correctly note that in a world without a moral compass these things are meaningless, comically ill-defined.)
It’s a world without revelation in dire need of redemption, basically. Characters wanting to do good things do very evil things and suffer the consequences, though we can only truthfully call things good and evil because we aren’t fictional characters in that fictional world.
As a philosopher and a nerd for animation nominally for kids — this stuff goes over their head, so be careful they don’t still drown — what are your thoughts?
I have no thought on the topic, having never seen anything of FULL METAL ALCHEMIST aside from commercials for it. Sorry. My geek cred fails here.
I have often wondered at the possibility of a collapse in our technological culture. I work in the HVAC field and routinely come up against a loss of support in equipment and systems only a decade old. Obsolescence is rampant. Manufacturer bankruptcies make parts unavailable and equipment becomes repairable only with massive retrofitting. Usually this ends up being replacement rather than repair.
Locating technical assistance for old technology is near impossible. In addition, even within still functional companies, help is lacking or unavailable for their older equipment. So very much of our culture is dependent on technology, yet the technology ages rapidly and must be replaced routinely. If the sources for replacements are lost how can they be replaced?
Most of our new technology is also layered upon preexisting technology that everyone takes for granted. I think few people have the ability to reconstruct this base knowledge if it becomes lost due to catastrophic events. Also the variety of engineering disciplines involved in the creation of the technologies in the first place were extensive. Bringing them together again would require considerable organization of resources.
Finally, so much of our accumulated knowledge for reference is now contained in corruptible sources, cd’s (fragile), hard drives (magnetically sensitive), chips (static sensitive) all require a base technology to recover the information contained within them. A loss of the base technology would result in the loss of the information even if the information is still intact. Anyone who works in the nuts and bolts of this field knows the likelihood of this drops over time. And not much time is required. A decade or two is probably plenty of time for the data to corrupt.
Even printed materials are deteriorating in quality. Textbooks and manuals are not expected to remain relevant for very long at all and often contain obsolete information by the time they are published and distributed. So very much knowledge is passed on from person to person. In my own field, few are interested in learning the base knowledge I use daily in my work. It is much easier to just condemn and replace. When I go, it goes with me.
I think our culture is much more fragile and unstable than most realize. A significant disruption of the culture is definitely possible. Maybe not to the stone age, but a major setback.
True, but I think we have to discern between a primary knowledge base, specialization, and application. The actual key concepts, theories, methods, and elements of knowledge that could be considered essential–i.e. without A you can’t understand B–is a relatively small number, but fields have been increasingly divided into sub-disciplines and ever smaller areas of study. I’m not sure much of it isn’t needless redundancy and that it might a good thing if all this academic debris weren’t swept away, so that we were left with the essentials. In any case, much of it would reconstructed with time.
I remember reading an interview with a former naval officer who was held as a prisoner of war during Vietnam. He talked at some length about his education, how the Naval Academy granted precisely one bachelor’s degree that was “half humanities and half hard sciences” and all the you needed for pursuing a graduate degree in pretty much any STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) field you could name. As he said, “We were engineers who could read.” If you wanted to restore technological civilization after a cataclysmic collapse, being an adaptable generalist with a solid grounding in logic would most fit the bill.
I have often wondered at the possibility of a collapse in our technological culture. I work in the HVAC field and routinely come up against a loss of support in equipment and systems only a decade old. Obsolescence is rampant. Manufacturer bankruptcies make parts unavailable and equipment becomes repairable only with massive retrofitting. Usually this ends up being replacement rather than repair.
Yep, ran into that in the Navy– there are ways around it, though. Less than five years back, we still had several required pieces of equipment that contain vacuum tubes. There ARE ways to get the information- museums are a favorite.
Less randomly, there are a lot of folks worried about the same thing that there’s a cottage industry in solid copies of vital information, and has been for ages– my mom has a collection of EVERYTHING needed to make guns, from finding and refining ore to making all the tools required, and testing out the chemicals to make the powder. Got it from her dad.
Have a list of titles? I’ve been putting together a list I’ve dubbed as the Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Apocalypse as a hobby, but I’m trying to make it functional.
Sadly, no– we’re about five hours away in the summer, and I’m forbidden to drive the passes in winter with her grand-babies. The only one in the collection I can remember is Jack Knife Cookery, and it’s a generic wilderness survival book suitable for kids.
It’s not a series, though, it’s just a collection of used books picked up between 1950 and I guess 1980 or so– if you ask for help finding smithing books you’ll get the majority of them in a good used bookstore, and there are lots of hobby gun smithing sites that can point you in good directions for the actual forging end of things. Sword smithing sites are good, too.
Actual post-apocalyptic situation, a dump is your best bet to get metal, not a mine; a couple of sword making books and a bunch on agriculture would be your friend. (I know, I know, teach my grandma to suck eggs, you already know this stuff….) A bunch of those picture-books about minerals would fill in the gaps….
Here’s one! Assuming my memories aren’t false, it lists the ones that have a lot of this or that element in them– I just checked, and fool’s gold is indeed noted for being high in iron, so I think I’m remembering right. I’d highly recommend ANY of the audubon books because they’re packed with data and were able to stand up to three curious kids who weren’t always careful to wipe their hands.
Your best modern resource might actually be one I hate to suggest– the granola muncher crowd. I despise the “organic” ag movement, but a lot of the books are good for teaching you about crop rotation, growing conditions, water management, living off the grid, designing areas for livestock and using their refuse, etc. My folks “compost” the bull…poo… after every winter, and a good organic farming book will explain the whole multi-year rotation thing, why you can’t just use horse manure, why chicken manure has to be cut with something else and that sort of thing. (Mom uses a tractor to pile the stuff up, lets it cure two or three years– I don’t remember– and then gives it away at cost. One year a cow died and they just put the corpse at the bottom of the pile, and a couple of years later the bones were cooked totally clean, not even any smell. The piles are also hot enough to be snow-free unless the water gets about six feet deep.)
Oh, I’m way ahead of you. I have agriculture, homesteading, primitive skills, and the like, along with books on: blacksmithing, machine tools, cavalry, horse-riding, historical military manuals (assuming the loss of modern firearms), medieval mnemonics, oral transmission (as a contingency for the loss of literacy), logistics, urban planning…
I take what I call a “day one to year one hundred” approach, every subject is suborned more or less to that schema, so I have reason for even the odd entries.
Why not use lightweight gold alloy plates as a transmission medium?
Slightly more seriously, you need to make sure that the books you wish to preserve for a decent amount of time are on the correct type of material, normal paper is not designed to last long at all. Archival paper and parchment are designed to last longer. Manuals and textbooks are usually printed on papers that are very poor for preservation.
Of course, the climate of where you are and where you are storing the documents also would have a big impact on how long it would last. If you can get a nice tunnel in hard granite in a desert which is naturally climate controlled then your things will last quite a bit longer than otherwise.
I thought about the use of gold plates in the context of a fictional story, but that’s something else.
If we’re staying with in the realm of the realistic, digging a cavity into the side of a limestone hill would work. Caves and other underground spaces naturally stay at a constant of fifty degrees Fahrenheit and the porous structure of limestone naturally absorbs moisture. Other than that, keeping books out of direct sunlight will do the most to preserve things over time. To read, you could use red lamps, as in a photographer’s photo development room, maybe with some infrared and UV filters.
If you can hand-milk a cow (and even more impressively, a goat), I salute you, sir! I’m sure there are dairy farmers out there who can’t do it, because they’ve grown up with milking machines.
It’s almost frightening, when you come to think of it, how many old skills have been lost in just a couple of decades. When I was seven or eight years old, there was a working blacksmith’s forge beside my school; now there’s not even the trace of it ever having been there. Skills like churning with a dash churn or even knowing about drinking water from a river (you don’t unless you really have to, and you make darn sure to boil it first) are things of the past.
I take it you aren’t familiar with scouting, or if you are then it is one of the branches of scouting that has drifted a lot. In the BSA everyone learns a lot of the basics in terms of survival and first aid and then there is the merit badge Wilderness Survival that goes into more detail.
Then there is the SCA and other similar organizations that have preserved quite a lot of skills that would otherwise be lost.
I’ve drunk boiled water from a lake. The Parks & Recreation were making a particular point of it, because of a water-borne disease. But there are still campers who know this sort of thing.
Also, thanks for the recommendations. I’ve also put thought on how to preserve information that would typically be included in recorded form. For instance, how do you preserve music? Sheet music isn’t enough, if you wish to really and comprehensively preserve it. You would need not only documentation on music theory, but also acoustics, psycho-acoustics, physics, engineering, instrument design (and perhaps documentation of famous instruments, like Stradivarius violins), manuals/textbooks on instrument performance (and related tasks like conducting), as well as historical information.
However, that doesn’t preserve specific performances or recordings, so you would need to figure out some way of preserving a waveform, perhaps as a series of x/y coordinates, or as printed one and zeroes in binary form, if you’ve digitized it. If in binary, you would need documentation on deciphering binary. Granted, in text form, the recordings would be immediately playable, but given time and technological re-development, they would figure out how to play them.
correction: wouldn’t be
Lucifer’s Hammer has a good passage about that very thing, i.e. what books to store during the apocalypse. The only one I remember is probably obvious: The Way Things Work.
No problem!
Honestly, your really honest best option… is to write an e-book series with all the information you want, called the Bootstrapper’s Guide to the Apocalypse, and look into print-on-demand services.
The human mind is the #1 way to preserve information. I can’t tell you how to take care of cows, or orphaned kittens, or even how to prepare half of the complicated dishes I cook, but I could teach you.
“Your best modern resource might actually be one I hate to suggest– the granola muncher crowd.”
I may be getting myself in deep water here, but that’s one of the reasons I (and other Europeans) object to Monsanto and genetically engineered crops. Hear me out before you consign me to the outer darkness of weaving my own yoghurt!
The idea being that these GM crops can withstand pesticide use that will kill everything else (the Roundup pesticide) but that they are sterile, so you have to buy the seed each year; then you buy the pesticide (and you have to buy the specific pesticide, Roundup, also produced by Montsanto) and while you’re at it, sure you might as well buy the fertilizers as well, not to mention the crop sprayers and all the rest of it.
Selling things like this to Third World farmers, in the guise of increasing crop production and feeding the hungry, makes me uneasy, because you can see for yourself how fast a farmer could get dependent on one company for everything. Crop variety dies out; if in the wild weeds become resistant, then you’re depending on new varieties of GM seed and pesticide combinations from one company (you can’t shop around) – it would be very easy to end up in hock to the ‘company store’ and if any step in the dance is missed, then crop failure and famine is around the corner.
The biodynamic crowd may be moonbats, but they do have a point about not putting all your eggs in one basket.
Hear me out before you consign me to the outer darkness of weaving my own yoghurt!
*laughs* Win and awesome!
(making yoghurt seems like a fun, and there’s philosophy angles!)
I understand the worry about GM being abused– I just weigh a possible future abuse against a known, current problem (like those solved by golden rice, or areas where past mismanagement has caused infestations that can’t be controlled otherwise) and consider that the problem can be solved if you keep the threat in mind.
One of the reasons my parents put up with the faddish “farmers” is that they appreciate that they are keeping heirloom species and old techniques alive, and they are learning what’s involved in getting their food. (they also find out why that helpful, crusty old couple down the road does so many “horrible” things when they seem so nice– dynamic education!)
I rather doubt the sincerity of many (Note: MANY! Not all! Not even all of the reflexively anti-GM folks– there are valid philosophical reservations, and some GM stuff that I don’t care for.) anti-GM folks, because the protest before this one was that the modified plants weren’t sterile; the solution is always the same, no matter the problem, which is usually a warning sign of an answer looking for a problem.
I think a better solution is to directly fight the abuses when they show up, and to encourage new techniques for raising food– preferably by actual farmers and ranchers who will allow two-way communication. (If someone is doing something wrong, there’s usually a reason.)
Of course, all of this requires that farmers be able to do their work with reasonable assumption that it won’t be taken from them by men with guns as soon as they’re done. That’s generally the real issue, same as with direct food aid.
All the hybrid corns are sterile. It’s the fate of hybrids for the most part. In fact, corn (meaning maize in your language, I suppose) is incapable of reproducing on its own.
Agreed.
I sometimes think that in a rational country (I know, I know) we’d subsidize re-enactor farms at various levels of technology and crops, along with their attendant manufactories.
Sort of like in Mote in God’s Eye, come to think of it.
Can I get a copy on an e-book reader? I’ll put it in my Faraday box with a solar charger.
why are you microwaving an e-reader?
The 2009 series (Brotherhood) is so gripping that it’s worth putting two weeks of evenings aside to check it out. It’s to nihilistic anime what Red Mars is to hard sf. You’re pretty good at analyzing philosophical underpinnings of popular entertainment, and the way you give credit to even that dirty dog Heinlein where it’s due proves to my mind you’re just the man for the job.
“If you can hand-milk a cow (and even more impressively, a goat), I salute you, sir! I’m sure there are dairy farmers out there who can’t do it, because they’ve grown up with milking machines.”
Actually, my wife, myself, and my children have milked cows and goats; raised and butchered chickens, sheep,and rabbits; gardened, canned, and dried fruits and veggies; and made butter, cheese, yogurt, and ice cream from the milk. We did it for economical and quality purposes but it has never been simple.
The time required for cheese making alone is 4 to 6 hours per batch, excluding pressing which is two days to a week. Butter can take a couple of hours. Gardening takes months and can be wiped out in a single storm. If we were required to provide only our own food we would be very hungry and poorly nourished. Our food producing, transportation, preservation, and distribution system in this country is mind boggling complicated. It is a wonder it works at all yet it works very well.
Locating the supplies of food requires instant communication, purchasing the same, arranging transportation and distribution so that it is sold to the consumer before deterioration involves complex exchanges of information that must occur rapidly. Any significant break in the channel anywhere will cause a chain reaction of disruption. They occur and are handled now due to rapid data exchange. If we had to return to only telephone communication (as an example) I really do not think we would be able to adjust before severe shortages would appear in our population centers. Look at what happened after Hurricane Katrina and expand to a larger scale. There is simply no way to go “back to basics” in a panic. Such a transition would require years, even lifetimes.
I am not saying anything will happen but it is certainly not an impossibility.
They occur and are handled now due to rapid data exchange. If we had to return to only telephone communication (as an example) I really do not think we would be able to adjust before severe shortages would appear in our population centers. Look at what happened after Hurricane Katrina and expand to a larger scale. There is simply no way to go “back to basics” in a panic. Such a transition would require years, even lifetimes.
The situation is made worse by tax laws that penalize having large stores of those things that don’t go bad.
Realistically, the best chance of survival would be to form groups that are as small as possible while still allowing individuals or families to specialize– it’s just not very effective to have the same people caring for the animals, doing the butchering, doing the farming, curing the leather, spinning and weaving, especially if it’s not something they’re use to doing. (Water power would be very useful for things like churning butter and pumping water, I suspect.)