I had a hopeful but naive view of humanity. I thought that progress in science and technology would naturally lead to a more educated and tolerant society. Sigh.
Historically speaking we don’t even know that science and technology will progress.
You know the weird trope in a lot of RPGs where an ancient artifact is this strangely advanced thing? If you think about it, that’s happened before. After the fall of the Roman empire, Western Europe was in a dark age. People were living in the ruins of buildings they couldn’t figure out how to build, and often those ancient artifacts were better than anything that could be produced by current technology. Imagine something like some of the Greek clockwork showing up in some dark age village.
That’s not the first time that happened, either. The early classical Greeks were often living in the ruins of Mycenaean Greek castles, and after the bronze age collapse some of the societies in the region didn’t even maintain writing as a technology, so there were artefacts that were impossible for the people of the time to reproduce with current technology.
We also saw the collapse of the Indus valley civilization that had things as advanced as plumbing and sewage systems, where those technologies were lost to the indian subcontinent until much later.
There are ruins in Zimbabwe which are incredible of castles made of stone, completely inconsistent with what we imagine when we hear the word “Africa” as well. It seems that the high level of technology represented by Great Zimbabwe was not comparable to later civilizations until relatively recently.
The Terracotta army created after the death of the first emperor of the Qin dynasty in China was on such a level of magnitude and precision that the following periods of the Han dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period simply couldn’t have reproduced it.
The Moche civilization in ancient Peru was known for its elaborate irrigation systems, advanced ceramic arts, and complex social organization, but the civilization collapsed and with the end of that civilization much of their technologies were lost.
Many societies before us didn’t see history as a straight line, but a cycle. If it’s true that civilization existed for in some form for 100,000 years before recorded history began which is suggested by some things like the story of the 7 Pleiades sisters where one sister left to describe a 6 star constellation where 100,000 years ago there may have been 7 stars showing then it could be that such a worldview is mor consistent with reality than our modern one.
While our postmodern view of societies says that civilizations fail because things aren’t progressing enough, the dark age Christians believed that their predecessors collapsed because of a lack of moral virtue. The Bronze Age civilizations blamed “Sea People”. The Mesopotamians told stories about a great flood sent by the gods as punishment for hubris. Two American civilizations claim that our current world is either the 4th or 6th one to exist and the rest were destroyed in cataclysms.
When you started talking about the fall of Rome I was about to go all “Ackchyually the dark ages weren’t all that dark,” but then you just kept. citing. more. examples. and proved your point. Well played, sir!
I had a hopeful but naive view of humanity. I thought that progress in science and technology would naturally lead to a more educated and tolerant society. Sigh.
Historically speaking we don’t even know that science and technology will progress.
You know the weird trope in a lot of RPGs where an ancient artifact is this strangely advanced thing? If you think about it, that’s happened before. After the fall of the Roman empire, Western Europe was in a dark age. People were living in the ruins of buildings they couldn’t figure out how to build, and often those ancient artifacts were better than anything that could be produced by current technology. Imagine something like some of the Greek clockwork showing up in some dark age village.
That’s not the first time that happened, either. The early classical Greeks were often living in the ruins of Mycenaean Greek castles, and after the bronze age collapse some of the societies in the region didn’t even maintain writing as a technology, so there were artefacts that were impossible for the people of the time to reproduce with current technology.
We also saw the collapse of the Indus valley civilization that had things as advanced as plumbing and sewage systems, where those technologies were lost to the indian subcontinent until much later.
There are ruins in Zimbabwe which are incredible of castles made of stone, completely inconsistent with what we imagine when we hear the word “Africa” as well. It seems that the high level of technology represented by Great Zimbabwe was not comparable to later civilizations until relatively recently.
The Terracotta army created after the death of the first emperor of the Qin dynasty in China was on such a level of magnitude and precision that the following periods of the Han dynasty and the Three Kingdoms period simply couldn’t have reproduced it.
The Moche civilization in ancient Peru was known for its elaborate irrigation systems, advanced ceramic arts, and complex social organization, but the civilization collapsed and with the end of that civilization much of their technologies were lost.
Many societies before us didn’t see history as a straight line, but a cycle. If it’s true that civilization existed for in some form for 100,000 years before recorded history began which is suggested by some things like the story of the 7 Pleiades sisters where one sister left to describe a 6 star constellation where 100,000 years ago there may have been 7 stars showing then it could be that such a worldview is mor consistent with reality than our modern one.
While our postmodern view of societies says that civilizations fail because things aren’t progressing enough, the dark age Christians believed that their predecessors collapsed because of a lack of moral virtue. The Bronze Age civilizations blamed “Sea People”. The Mesopotamians told stories about a great flood sent by the gods as punishment for hubris. Two American civilizations claim that our current world is either the 4th or 6th one to exist and the rest were destroyed in cataclysms.
When you started talking about the fall of Rome I was about to go all “Ackchyually the dark ages weren’t all that dark,” but then you just kept. citing. more. examples. and proved your point. Well played, sir!
I’ve been on a pretty big history kick lately. :)