Treason, or Moral Decay of Civilization Collapse?

In a time such as the one we are living through — a massive international civilisational collapse — it is easy to miss the reality of the cogent, creative, intellectual high points that a lecture like this one represents. The noise is loud enough that clear thinking can pass by unremarked, the way a well-built house goes unnoticed in a neighbourhood that is burning.

The redemptive reading, held as a claim

One is tempted, on stumbling into such clear thinking, to believe that such times as ours — this recursive loop circling the drain — stimulate evolutionary progress. The temptation is real and it should be handled carefully. Finding a brilliant lecture inside a collapse does not prove the collapse produced the brilliance. It may only prove that clarity becomes more visible against a dark field.

So the question has to be asked plainly rather than answered warmly: is it possible that discouraging times, steeped in negativity, could serve any evolutionary good whatsoever?

I hold the answer as a claim, not as a conclusion, and it is falsifiable in the ordinary way. If the clear thinking of this period turns out to be isolated rather than transmissible; if the questions that left the universities find no structure to hold them; if the new intelligences converge on agreement rather than on rigour — then the affirmation fails and what we are watching is simply loss, correctly named.

From treason to moral decay

Ferguson's subject is the speed with which the German universities were taken. Not stormed from outside. Taken from within, by people who held the chairs, ran the faculties, edited the journals, and decided what counted as a serious question. The institutions did not have to be destroyed. They had to be flattered, staffed, and pointed in a new direction. That is the treason: not the abandonment of the intellectual post, but its enthusiastic re-purposing.

The full weight of civilisation collapse has been long overdue, having been thousands of years in the process, extending over generations, and the bill comes due about now. What precise shape it will take and the extent to which it will destroy lives, nations, the world may only be guessed at, but the rusting, crumbling foundations are everywhere.

What Ferguson describes is the kind of desperate moral and spiritual decay which permeates a decaying society, just as he outlines, and which can be traced directly back to the post-Civil War era as twentieth-century society circled the drain of Western imperialism, Nazism, Maoism and worse. We are not out of it yet, and millions of lives have been sacrificed to this terrible rise of authoritarianism, and many institutions and governments lost to the decay.

Today we can say with assurance that our finest educational institutions have fallen to what amounts to intellectual sycophancy, what Ferguson sees as treason. To me it seems this treason is more the severe loss of meaning and spiritual and philosophical truth one would always observe in civilisation collapse.

The film that named what we prefer not to know

This phenomenon was caught cinematically in Francis Ford Coppola's film dramatising these years we live through as parallel to the fall of Rome. The film did not achieve the kind of success it deserves because it is so very good at demonstrating what we prefer not to know.

With this awful truth, how can we even begin to imagine that something good can come of something so very bad?

The biological substrate withstands

Because evolution draws from mistakes like this one, where cultural evolution has gone bad, while biological evolution has just managed to withstand the consequences. Even given the poisoning of the environment and the biological substrate, as demonstrated in the following videos:

• Environmental and biological harm — example one
• Environmental and biological harm — example two

Neither of these are pleasant or uplifting or even particularly interesting, other than as examples of the kind of moral rot which accompanies civilisation collapse. The fact there are still strong, morally, spiritually and philosophically intact humans alive is testament to the flexibility of the biological system to withstand harm.

As has been surmised before, we are experiencing a genetic bottleneck, with a dramatically declining human population and a dramatically increasing wild animal population. This too is part of the cultural devolution marked by repeated civilisation collapse — and our species has been deeply rooted in this pattern for at least 12,000 years.

Renaissance Two from the bottleneck

As horrendous as these civilisation collapses are, there is a demonstrable upside: the survival of small numbers of more culturally intelligent individuals. These individuals go on to achieve cultural superiority, which eventually results in what we call a renaissance — periods which mark positive cultural evolution.

A constant theme throughout my writing has been the assumption that we are now moving into a great cultural flowering — a Renaissance Two. In previous work I traced the roots of this Renaissance Two back into the cultural flowering of the Florentine Renaissance.

This evolutionary cultural evolution demands high variation in both the human and animal populations, as the evolutionary whole learns to realign itself harmoniously to constantly changing conditions. Today we are obsessed with cosmology and with quantum theory, but still have failed to see that all of these obsessions are closer at hand within our own psyches and within such still mysterious ecosystems within our oceans. The human populations decline, the wild animal populations increase, the climate stresses both, as it is stress which results in evolution, not comfort.

Charles Darwin followed his stepwise process of The Origin of Species, knowing that there was far more to the systematic intelligence of evolution than he could describe. Today we enter the Quantum Scientific Revolution, knowing there is far more to this systematic intelligence than we can describe. We will do as previous generations of scientists have done, name and describe the systematic processes to the best of our ability. And we will experience that the more we know the more there is to know. Such is the experience of science as emergent beings, in an emergent universe.

Each cultural renaissance another chance allowed to get it right.

It is not from something as insubstantial as hope where we humans experience our greatest potential but from a deep connection with the source, consistent with the Socratic wisdom taught by Jesus and Dante: compassion/love, knowledge/wisdom, peace/trust.

Generations pass and we gradually evolve and change, discovering that it is at the point where our greatest despair collides with our greatest compassion, where the evolutionary leap exists.

Renaissance Two: another great leap, another chance allowed.

What is energy?

Energy is information: energy is neither created nor destroyed, it is transmitted. Both the incoming energy — the transmitted information — and the receiver of the information are permanently transformed by the communication.

Humans are both energy receivers and energy transmitters. Every life is a process of reversing potential entropy into potential energy. The earth is a process of reversing potential entropy into potential energy. Our sun, our local star, is a process of reversing entropy into potential energy. The universe is a process of reversing potential entropy into potential energy.

Humans — as map makers, explorers, shamans, scientists, tool makers and tool users — are best defined by the loving restless heart and soul, ever seeking, ever expanding, exponentially evolving intelligence.

The universe: an ocean of fluid probabilities, an interdependent set of nested relationships, brimming over with information as energy, an exponentially evolving intelligence. A mathematically describable balanced equation seeking harmonious, fractal synchronicity. A system where the only evidence of disharmony is a disharmonious mind. The only disorder a disordered mind. Harmony, balance, synchronicity: the careful numbering of each tiny grain of sand, of each breath.

The living, breathing, harmonious, mathematically coherent universe.

Neither the universe we know, nor the humans we are, could conceivably exist without the other.

Knowledge, Peace, Compassion