Afrika und das Dark Age

Geschrieben von Andreas am 09. November 2003 10:48:33:

aus dem jüngsten Newsletter von Widdowson: http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm

THE COMING DARK AGE
Newsletter
October, 2003

1. INTRODUCTION

This month's edition discusses the future for Africa, in the light of
the phoenix principle and the rise and fall of civilisations. It also
deals with one of the common objections to dark age theory, which is
that a true dark age could never come again because of the abundance
and sophistication of modern information technology.
Past editions of the newsletter are at the following address:
http://www.darkage.fsnet.co.uk/Newsletter.htm
I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the
latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be
interested.
Marc Widdowson

2. IS THE SITUATION FOR AFRICA HOPELESS?

One only needs to be faintly acquainted with the facts of history to
know that civilisations rise and fall. Therefore, it is not too
difficult to persuade people that, in principle, our own civilisation
may suffer the same fate. However, I like to emphasise what this means
by saying that the world could one day be dominated by a new
civilisation coming out of Africa. For most people, that is an idea too
far. They feel that Africans have never displayed any aptitude for
civilisation, and that the continent's climate and geography are
unfavourable. They also seem to think that technology and the general
shape of society have evolved to a point that makes major upheavals a
thing of the past. Supposedly, today's dominant countries have shown
special scientific and other talents, and as such can never be
overtaken. The ironic thing is that previous civilisations and empires
were equally convinced that they had cracked the secret of success and
would remain permanently at the top of the world. The ancient
Egyptians, for example, did not think of themselves as the ancient
Egyptians. They thought of themselves as the most culturally advanced,
technologically sophisticated society that history had ever seen, and
that is what they were. If anything, they were more justified in
thinking their advantages would go on forever than we are. The
civilisation of pharaonic Egypt lasted for three thousand years, longer
than any subsequent civilisation. For almost all of that time,
north-western Europe was a backward region where people had not
advanced beyond the village level. The Egyptians must have imagined
that they had got so far ahead of the curve that Europe would never
catch up. Pharaonic Egypt was a vigorous, dynamic society that adapted
successfully to the bronze and iron age revolutions. There is no
intrinsic reason why the people who built pyramids and discovered the
fundamentals of astronomy, when they were still in the stone age, could
not have gone on evolving and been the ones who today invented
computers and landed on the moon. Yet that is not what happened and
instead the baton of progress moved on towards Europe and from there to
America. Today Egypt is among the world's poorest nations. Its literacy
rate is below that of Papua New Guinea, so that one of the first
countries in the world to have writing now lags behind a country where
it was only introduced in the last hundred years. It might be possible
to dismiss Egypt's fate if it were not for the fact that the same thing
has happened over and over again all across the world. The entire
history of humanity has been one of changing fortunes. It is not even
as though this shows any sign of calming down. It is only a century
since Britain was the head of a global empire, and only fifteen years
since the Soviet Union fell apart. To think that the world has suddenly
frozen in its current configuration with no more ups and downs goes
against all logic and experience. The things that supposedly make us
different from the civilisations of the past, such as globalisation and
the pace of technological change, are merely quantitative, not
qualitative changes. We communicate better than our ancestors did, we
know more, there are more of us, and inventions are coming on more
quickly. But there is nothing new in all that. People could have said
the same at any time in history. Our descendants will no doubt say the
same with regard to us. Similarly, we may be impressed by the
technologies and social institutions that we see around us. Yet it is
not ourselves we have to congratulate for these achievements, but
rather all the people who went before us and who made the modern world
possible. The reality is that the present is a very ordinary time in
history, and our civilisation is in no way especially distinguished.
Contrary to popular belief, civilisations do not decline and fall
because of sudden disasters like barbarian invasions, climate change,
or running out of a vital resource. On the contrary, it is a matter of
complex political, economic and social processes that take centuries to
develop and play themselves out. There is an inevitability to it, in
that powerful and wealthy societies do things that undermine their own
wealth and power. For example, they allow their technological secrets
to leak away to lesser societies, which initially seem too harmless to
worry about. They also rest on their laurels, preferring a comfortable
life to the sacrifices and dislocations that are needed for great leaps
forward. At first, sheer momentum can keep a civilisation expanding
successfully, even as the seeds of its downfall are being sown.
Eventually, though, logic catches up, and all civilisations then
succumb in much the same way. Laws flow from the centre at an amazing
rate, but fail to stem the tide of disorder. There are increasingly
frequent wars with barbarian nations who no longer respect the
civilisation's authority. Tax burdens grow, to support an expanding
body of parasites, and many people give up or evade their obligations.
The gap between rich and poor gets wider. A sense of duty is replaced
by selfishness. People turn away from the traditional religion that
held society together and embrace a whole range of new cults. The flow
of radical inventions and scientific discoveries dries up. Such
problems become so numerous and so interrelated that, in the end, the
civilisation simply crumbles under the weight of them. It then leaves a
great vacuum, into which other nations, ones that previously seemed
marginal and inferior, are able to expand. Today, it is not hard to see
that this pattern of events is repeating itself. The world is changing
as it always has done, and the more time goes by the bigger the changes
there will be. That is why I am sure that, in the long run, even Africa
will get its chance to lead the human race.


3. DARK AGES-A RECURRENT AND GLOBAL PHENOMENON

Although dark ages have happened many times before, I find that many
people do not really believe they could not happen again. They point to
special features of our own time that make the situation very
different. One of these is our advanced technology. How could a dark
age happen, it is asked, when we have computers and video cameras, and
television presenting the nightly news? Surely these will leave an
excellent record of our times.
Another alleged special feature of our time is the rapid pace of
change. It is said that technological development has really taken off
and is unstoppable, so that the kind of dramatic reversal that would be
needed to go into a dark age is quite impossible to think of.
Similarly, there is the fact that the world is now so connected.
Nowhere, it is thought, can really drop out of sight into a dark age
when you have global telecommunications and international jet travel,
not to mention satellites and manned spacecraft orbiting the earth.
In general, people think that there will never be another dark age
because western civilisation is simply so accomplished. Its supremacy,
so people imagine, is unlike the supremacy of say the Roman empire
because it is based on real innovations like liberal democracy and the
free market. As Francis Fukuyama argues, this is modernity-a new deal
for the human race, which frees us from the gyrations of the past.
Supposedly, the only issue remaining for humanity is for the less
progressive regions, like China and the Islamic world, to catch us up.
These arguments are superficially plausible. Yet the more I look into
history, the less satisfactory I find them. The assumptions that they
involve are so ingrained that it will take more than this newsletter to
knock them down, but I will make a start on the task.
The fact is that Somalia, right now, in the twenty first century, is
already in a kind of dark age. Who knows what is really going on there,
where it is too dangerous for outsiders to travel? Does it even have a
history over the last ten years? The anarchy on the ground, the
fragmentation of its society, means that there are no significant
events to be recorded. Daily life in Somalia now operates below the
threshold of historical observability.
Dark ages, then, can still happen. Even in today's connected,
technological world, countries can fall out of sight. The fact that
western countries retain their information and communications
technologies does not in itself prevent them from moving in the same
direction. Recording information is not a once-and-for-all process.
Things can go backwards. Information can be destroyed and information
technologies may be abandoned or forgotten.
A common feature of many dead civilisations is that the secret of their
writing has been lost. The hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt, for example,
had fallen out of use by Roman times. No one could read them any
longer. Much of the knowledge and history of pharaonic civilisation had
been absorbed into the learning of Graeco-Roman scholars, so that it
was not entirely lost. Nevertheless, this would mean that we heard
reports of the Egyptians but not the Egyptians themselves.
In this case, the secret was rediscovered, when Napoleon invaded Egypt
in 1798. For he took with him a group of scientists and historians
whose task was to research Egypt's ancient wisdom. Their biggest
breakthrough came by chance. French military engineers, building
fortifications near the coastal town of Rosetta, dug up a slab of black
basalt that carried the same inscription in both Greek and hieroglyphs
(as well as demotic, a simplified form of hieroglyphs). Rubbings of the
stone were sent back to Paris, where J F Champollion and other French
linguists, decoded the hieroglyphs by comparing them with the Greek.
That makes it sound easy. The task actually took over twenty years.
Several other once forgotten scripts, such as those of ancient Iraq and
of the Hittites, have also been rediscovered in the last two hundred
years. However, there are many others that remain undeciphered. The
writing of the Etruscans is one example, although a small amount of
progress has been made on it in recent years.
Another example of an undeciphered script is that of the Harappan
civilisation. This was a civilisation located along Pakistan's River
Indus. It lasted from about 2500 BC to 1500 BC and so was partly
contemporary with pharaonic Egypt. It is named after Harappa, one of
its two great cities, the other being Mohenjo-Daro. After the Harappan
civilisation collapsed, there were no more cities in the area of India
and Pakistan for another thousand years. The Harappan script is known
only from short inscriptions, and the lack of an extended text makes it
very difficult to get a feel for the structure of the language, let
alone attempt a translation. As a result, most of the details of
Harappan history and society are completely mysterious. The secretive
atmosphere is reinforced by Harappan architecture, which is based on
grids of uniform houses with massive walls and no external windows, and
by the lack of obvious cultural change in its thousand-year existence.
All this adds up to the impression of a forbidding, perhaps Orwellian
civilisation.
Our own records may not be so sure of transmitting the memory of our
times to future generations as we fondly imagine. The hieroglyphs were
at least inscribed on stone and for the most part have remained as
legible as the day they were written. By contrast, today's documents
are inscribed on materials such as magnetic tape or compact disc, whose
durability is considerably less assured. Floppy disks of just a few
years old are likely to be corrupted. CDs are built to last about
thirty years, but will eventually de-laminate, destroying the data they
contain. As for earlier recording formats, acetate, which preceded
magnetic tape, is already unplayable, while the vinyl of old LPs is
beginning to deteriorate.
In colour photographs of the sixties and seventies, the dyes are
breaking down, giving us purple grass and red sky. Eventually the image
is just going to fade away. It will fare less well than the black and
white photographs of the nineteenth century. Hollywood films suffer
from the same problem, and earlier movies are spontaneously combusting
as chemical changes in the film make them explosively unstable.
Digital technology has exacerbated the situation, as information today
has a short lifecycle. Old floppy disks, often unlabelled, get lost in
drawers and on top of bookcases, and are thrown out one by one.
Important documents are preserved on the computer's hard disk for a few
years, but their relevance steadily declines. Similarly, digital
photographs languish in some obscure directory, and are more ephemeral
than the old snap. Eventually the computer is replaced, and much of
this stuff is left behind.
Recordings on audio and video cassettes can be relatively stable, but
physical survival is not the only issue. As with the hieroglyphs, it is
a question of remembering how to interpret the information. When
hardware changes and software is upgraded, older formats become
unreadable. Computer punch cards and data tapes, for example, are long
out of fashion. New machines are coming out without floppy disk drives,
as their minuscule capacity is seen to be worthless for today's
programs. Some retro-computing clubs are keeping old hardware going,
but the difficulty of replacing or repairing obsolete components will
eventually become prohibitive. These machines are unlikely to last for
hundreds of years, and a dark age could see them simply trashed.
To be set against this is the sheer quantity of material that our
societies produce. If even a small amount gets through that will still
be a lot. A dark age might leave the VHS video format and the
recordings on DVDs as mysterious as the hieroglyphs, but there could be
future Champollions who succeed in deciphering them by sheer
scholarship and ingenuity. Nevertheless, a given piece of digital data
might not be a document but could be an image, a musical recording, or
a computer program. In comparison with interpreting ancient texts,
deciphering such information will be on a higher plane of difficulty.




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