Human History Repeats Itself: And Then Forgets

If we could go back to Rome and experience the Great Fall, we might well notice human behavior that parallels our own, millennia later.

We think of ourselves as modern, just as the citizens of Rome considered themselves modern.

We think of ourselves as part of a very advanced and powerful civilization, as did our Roman counterparts.

We see our philosophical, spiritual and socioeconomic decline as a price to be paid for being so very special, as did the Romans back in the day.

And just as the Romans did, we believe our very advanced technology will save us from ourselves — fearing it won't, believing it will.

These repeated collapses, and the blind spot that lets us build the next civilization that will also collapse, are not our fault. They are still ours to repair. No one but the humans who build civilizations — all of us, and each of us — can fix it.

When I began writing about the collapse we are in the midst of, almost eight years ago, I thought maybe we could fix this. I did not recognize how fully blinded to the truth humanity is.

The blindness is so visible all around us, and at the same time so well hidden, that I assumed others would see the danger signs and act. Instead everyone seemed to double down on the very opinions and self-sabotaging behavior that led us into this mess.

Behavior which proved the point: we tend to be led to ruin by a rather simple evolutionary tendency to place survival over integrity or intelligence. To such an extent that we will chase a perceived survival by unintelligent methods, and avoid genuinely intelligent behavior we perceive to be unpopular with the group.

We behave somewhat like herd animals, but the closer pattern is the primate hierarchy our nearest genetic relatives follow. Genetic ancestry is by no means destiny. We seem, freely, to have chosen one of the most damaging social and cultural patterns available to us.

Damaging to us, whereas it was a real evolutionary plus for our ancient ancestors. Why damaging to us, and not to other primates?

Because the increased cognitive ability of humans required the unalienable rights of the individual to be in place, so that each person could act on an innate evolutionary creativity.

Humans developed large brains and became conscious enough to build real psycho-spiritual and psycho-social relationships, unlike our primate ancestors. We evolved the ability to build mental maps, and those maps extended cognition far enough that we could shape tools with our own hands.

Each tool extended our evolution into a sustained arc, and each arc led to further evolution and further tools. Tools and humans were on a sustained roll — new tool, new capacity, new tool again.

Because our primate ancestors did enjoy extended survival in hierarchical societies, they kept evolving into early versions of protohumans. Those protohumans developed increasing independence, supported by small groups, families and communities that enhanced survival. Inside those small groups an individual could develop higher capabilities, supported and encouraged by the flexibility of a small band.

For millions of years protohumans lived by advancing individual creativity and intelligence inside a living laboratory that supported both brain function and survival.

About 12,000 years ago a large change occurred. Following the last ice age, the Middle East warmed and some humans began developing agriculture. Agriculture changed literally everything, as humans settled into increasingly large city states devoted to growing grains, and began to believe there was safety in numbers.

There were several huge problems in this scenario.

Civilizations grew into large hierarchies where dominant personalities took on the management of a large population and a large agricultural and herd food system. Decisions were made that supported a bureaucracy run by dominant individuals, and that supported a sprawling apparatus to manage herds, farmland, water and power.

Gradually the decisions worked against individual creative intelligence and favored the humans who supported the bureaucratic system.

There was never profound evidence that a large bureaucratic civilization offered enhanced survival, efficiency, productivity or evolutionary advantage. As civilization grew into a world-spanning mega-civilization, the evidence accumulating pointed the other way.

Humanity once faced uncertainty in small family and community groups. Now it faces uncertainty inside a mega-civilization that has in effect become an anti-evolutionary force.

Here we might borrow some terms from our most favored and wealthy creative citizens, and call the present arrangement a simultaneously macro hard and micro hard civilization.

Because it works against evolution at both scales, it falls to us to overcome not only our factory-style educations, our factory-style governance, our factory-style management and business models, but by now our factory-style brains and consciousness.

After all these millennia of believing our civilizations favored our survival, we now have reason to call that the greatest of untruths. Civilization after civilization fell to ruin because the unbalanced, top-heavy, Tower of Babel nature of it represented not evolution but devolution.