What historians call the Golden Age of Greece—which ran from about 500 to 300 BC—spawned the foundational Western philosophers Plato and Aristotle; mathematicians such as Euclid whose geometry is still taught in schools today; classical Greek dramatists such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, whose plays are performed even now; an architecture so grand that it has been imitated in our own time, especially in government buildings; and the practice of democracy, a form of governance that would go into eclipse for over 2,000 years until the American and French revolutions.
What most people don't know is that the ancient Greeks who lived through that era did not think of themselves as being in a golden age. Instead, they thought of their society as a much degraded version of the heroic age that preceded it, an age described in such works as Homer's Illiad and Odyssey and Hesiod's Works and Days. How utterly difficult it is for most people living today to imagine a society whose members believed that the future would only bring further degradation and decline perhaps until civilization itself disappeared. History was to them cyclical with dark and golden ages—golden ages that start out with great vigor and hope and then grind down to dark eras that destroy the progress of the past.
Today, most modern people think of time as linear and history as merely a story of the gradual and now rapid rise of technological, social, political and cultural progress. Since time is linear, the trajectory is always forward and expected to be up. We humans will never again fall prey to the civilization-ending mistakes of the past. Our technology has no equal. Humans have decoupled from the limits nature previously imposed on them. They may even soon live and thrive on other planets. And, when limits or difficulties seem insurmountable, human ingenuity creates new technologies to overcome those perceived limits or difficulties.
Whether our not you agree with today's linear view of perpetual progress, that view gives us permission to create technologies that will have consequences for people living thousands, even tens or hundreds of thousands of years in the future.
Perhaps most consequential are nuclear technologies, both for military and industrial purposes. If our civilization were to disappear today, who would take care of the nuclear power plants, the fuel processing facilities, the nuclear waste dumps, the nuclear cores of warheads, and the myriad facilities that handle nuclear materials? Even if the facilities mentioned were shut down and locked up, after only one or two centuries of neglect they would almost certainly degrade to the pointing of leaking into the environment and contaminating land, water and air.
A rough but not entirely parallel story of such a process was outlined in Alan Weisman's The World Without Us. Weisman imagines that humans disappear all at once everywhere and leave everything running. I'm imagining a gradually declining civilization, the infrastructure of which degrades over time from neglect resulting from the lack of resources and/or competent people to fix it. That leads to neglected chemical factories and oil refineries and chemical waste dumps. It leads to biological research facilities improperly cared for containing perhaps novel viruses that when stored properly, say, in cryogenic chambers are inert, but when released could ravage human and animal populations.
We humans are having a hard enough time today managing the facilities mentioned above as tons of chemical wastes are released into the environment every day. The record so far on the 59 so-called "level 4" biological research facilities does not foster confidence on that front either. Nuclear power is now being touted as the best way to address climate change and fossil fuel depletion. Any usefulness a rapid build-out of nuclear power plants might have for us today, however, could end up being catastrophic for generations far in the future who must live with the results of this experiment as its many facilities deteriorate and leak into the environment.
For many humans alive today who have access to the latest technology, this may seem like a distant and foolish worry. First, if it does happen, it won't affect those of us living today. Second, our continually advancing technology will allow us to deal with any problems before they become big. Third—and most important—our technologically advanced civilization will persevere and continue for centuries and even millennia into the future. This last statement MUST turn out to be true in order to justify morally the use of technologies today that will become extremely hazardous to humans in the future if there is no complex, energy-intensive society with suitably trained experts to care for those technologies.
When civilizations in the past fell, they were regional affairs. The world was simply not connected as it is now. And, those dying civilizations weren't leaving behind vast quantities of chemical, biological and nuclear wastes and contaminates. When our civilization falls, as Joseph Tainter, author of The Collapse of Complex Societies, wrote, it will affect the entire globe. That's because we are one civilization now unified by worldwide communications, transportation, logistics, and trade and increasingly a world culture propagated by film, television and especially the internet.
That culture spends a significant amount of effort convincing us that our way of life will last forever. Often this comes in the form of science fiction such as the many Star Trek related films and television shows that depict the push-button future of a space-faring society in which poverty and war have been eradicated—at least within the confines of the fictional United Federation of Planets.
When our civilization will fall and what comes after it are imponderable questions. But whatever it is, the people of that next age will be severely handicapped by all the nuclear, chemical and biological hazards we've left for them to deal with because we thought our civilization would last forever.
Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.
It's a good thing that the Greeks only left good things mentioned in the blog.
ReplyDeleteWe might well get known as the filthy civilisation
Привіт!
ReplyDeleteТак, глобальні 'еліти' не розуміють необхідності відмови 'гри в геополітику'. По суті 8/9 людей світу живуть ≈7-10$/день.
І ті високодемократтчні, соціальні країни і їх громадяни (Швеція, Норвегія,Фінляндія,Швейцарія) становлять мінімум популяції. Майже скрізь п'ють колу, їдять піцу і бургери, вчать одну з трьох найпоширеніших мов світу.
Не прості люди починають війни, створюють зброю і технології, експлуатують і витискають останні соки з ресурсів Землі. Це еліти, які згадали про 'демократію', яка по суті є лише ПЕРЕВАГОЮ більшості над УТИСКОМ меншості. Що робити тим хто не згоден, правильно - мовчати. Таким намагаються промивати мізки за допомогою реклами, маркетингу, соц.мереж і різних психо-соціальних методик, неоліберальною економікою, де ти нікчема, якщо не працюєш по 60 годин на тиждень, не тратиш всю зарплату одразу, не береш кредити для статусної їжі, алкоголю, транспорту і нерухомості.
Ось де ми. Живимо 1% тих хто чхати хотів на майбутнє планети, людей і біосфери.
Google translate provides this translation of the above comment:
ReplyDeleteHello! Yes, the global "elites" do not understand the need to abandon the "game of geopolitics". In fact, 8/9 people in the world live on ≈7-10$/day. And those highly democratic, social countries and their citizens (Sweden, Norway, Finland, Switzerland) make up the minimum population. Almost everywhere they drink cola, eat pizza and burgers, teach one of the three most common languages in the world. Not ordinary people start wars, create weapons and technologies, exploit and squeeze the last juices from the Earth's resources. These are the elites who mentioned 'democracy', which is essentially just the ADVANTAGE of the majority over the OPPRESSION of the minority. What to do to those who do not agree, it is correct - to remain silent. This is how they try to brainwash with the help of advertising, marketing, social networks and various psycho-social methods, neoliberal economy, where you are worthless if you do not work 60 hours a week, do not spend your entire salary at once, do not take loans for status food, alcohol , transport and real estate. This is where we are. We live 1% of those who wanted to sneeze on the future of the planet, people and the biosphere.
Our ever increasing dependence on electronic communication and electric powered vehicle movvement, heating, lighting, entertainment, and manufacturing. makes us ever more vulnerable to the impact of soar flares. The 1859 Carrington Event occurred in the very early stages of the electronic age and really little impacted society, apart from frying up the telegraphs and disrupting communications in the few industrialised countries of the age. But imagine the effect now of a major solar flare comparable to the 1859 event. Just think of one high rise apartment block of 50 storeys. Water suddenly not being pumped through to the apartments. Heating and lighting failing. No electric power. Lifts (elevators) no longer operational. Then consider this across one of the hundreds of megacities around the world where so much of the populaion are stored in these high ruse human storage facilities. Mortality rates would be high. Workers would be unable to commute to the generating stations, traffic movement paralysed, food supplies rapidly rotting in non functioning freezers and refrigerators, hoaspitals dependent on generators, but unable to access the electonically stored records and data essential to the functioning of hospital. What effect would a power crisis have on nuclear generating stations? A Carrington Event of similar or larger magnitude to that of 1859 could be disastrous for human society, and perhaps more especially in those countries with advanced economies so dpendent on eletonic communication.
ReplyDeleteWe've all heard it umpteen times: the ancient Greeks were supposed to have been absolutely the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree in ancient times, so much so it was their heritage that enabled the modern world to come into being. But I think certain details need to be filled in here.
ReplyDeleteContrary to what many might think, Greek mythology is actually one of the most morally repugnant mythologies the world has ever known. (I can provide many examples of the eyesores for those interested.) Modern retellings of the Greek myths are mostly sanitized versions or careful selections with all the eyesores kept out of sight. The late scholar of ancient Greek literature John Pinsent tells us in his book Greek Mythology that “It is all about homicides, exiles, quarrels, seductions and illegitimate births, many of them taking place inside the family circle.” Elsewhere he spells out for us a “bald catalog of incest, adultery, parricide and matricide” which, he assures us, “provides the raw material for most Greek tragedies.” What I'd be curious to know here is what sort of people we would expect those raised on such narratives to end up as. Perchance the example of the Western world since the 16th Century would provide an answer.
The Greeks also practiced slavery on a scale unmatched by others before them. Scholar of slavery Junius Rodriguez tells us in The Historical Encyclopedia of World Slavery (Vol 1) that, "It was in the civilizations that developed in Greece and Rome that the world's first true slave societies came into existence... [They were] the first peoples to elevate slavery to an institutional level that had not been attained in more primitive societies. In short, 'the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome' stemmed largely from slave-based economies that utilized human capital to an unprecedented extent." Aristotle also thought all non-Greeks are so stupid they're only good for serving the Greeks as slaves. Arrogant enough. Rodriguez also pointed out that Europeans in later times used the shining example of the Greeks to justify slavery.
Given all this, perhaps it ought not to come as a surprise anymore how we've now ended up with ONE globe-spanning civilization, as a result of which collapse would no longer be merely regional. The answer is simple: from the 16th Century onwards, fancying itself to be charged with the sacred mission of spreading the light of ol' Hellas, the Western world threw its weight around the planet and exploited well nigh all of the rest of humankind, so that the rest of humankind eventually decided it had no choice but to adopt the very same ways of the West in order not to continue being exploited (though the Western world, chiefly America, is still working hard at maintaining its status as the global hegemon, as we all know). Ways leading to very undesirable outcomes for all.
One sometimes wonders (recalling what Aristotle said above) who the truly stupid ones are.