> Imagine, then, the survivors of the collapse of a civilizationānot a fast collapse, since this would leave them with all the mental furniture of their former society, but the long and ragged arc of decline and fall thatās the standard mode of collapse in actual history.Ā Our survivors, as they huddle together in whatever makeshift shelters theyāve been able to contrive, havenāt simply lost the material trappings of the fallen civilization. Theyāve also shed the philosophies, sciences, and ways of understanding the world that the dead civilization developed, partly because educational and cultural institutions are usually among the first things to go when a civilization begins to implode, partly because watching a civilization wreck itself doesnāt exactly inspire trust in its habitual ways of thought. As the survivors have children, and the children grow to adulthood in a harsh and mostly empty landscape, the last scraps of the old civilizationās way of understanding the world give way to something new.
> The realities that define the postcollapse world, [Giambattista] Vico points out, are not conceptual abstractions but concrete sensory experiences. Those are the things that matter. Abstract theories of law that presuppose vanished social institutions and conditions donāt matter; what matters is setting up clear and specific rules that anyone can learn and follow: āif a man steals a loaf of bread, let him be beaten twelve times with a birch stick.āĀ Abstract rational theories about how the world works donāt matter; what matter are clear, lively, memorable narratives in which colorful figures act out the things that people need to knowāand since itās much easier to memorize speech if itās full of rhythms and repeated sounds, the myths and legends that emerge from this process are always transmitted in the form of poetry. Three themesāreligion, marriage, and the burial or other disposal of the deadābecome the anchors around which communities coalesce, because these define, in concrete, sensory terms, the relationships that matter: religion, the relationship with the nonhuman environment; marriage, the relationship with mating and children, and thus with the future; burial, the relationship with ancestors and thus with the past.
> Over time, as communities begin to prosper and interact with one another, the concrete and sensory becomes the foundation on which the first reappearance of abstract reasoning begins to build. Vico devotes many of his pages to showing how that process works out in the political development of societies, and we can let those examples pass for the present. The point that matters here is that abstract conceptual thinking starts out as a way of expanding and embroidering the original stock of concrete sensory experiences that define the new cultureās world; as social conditions change and education becomes more general, it shifts focus to that of explaining traditional images that no longer quite make sense; finally, the rising conflict between image and abstraction is settled in favor of abstract rationality, and the society has its Enlightenment, enters on its Age of Reason, and begins to suffer from the liability discussed in last monthās post, the confusion between culturally acceptable representations and the reality they represent that eventually brings the society down in flames.
> Thus, in Vicoās scheme, each civilization passes through three broad and loosely defined ages in the course of its history. He borrowed a scheme from classical literature, and called these the Age of Gods, the Age of Heroes, and the Age of Men: gods, because religion is the dominant social force in the first age; heroes, because aristocracies that claim descent from heroic forebears are the dominant social force in the second age; men, because humanity in the mass becomes the dominant social force in the third age. The first age begins in what Vico calls āthe barbarism of sense,ā a state of cultural and mental chaos in which the concrete sensory images that fill consciousness havenāt yet been brought into a meaningful relationship to one another; the third age ends in what he calls āthe barbarism of reflection,ā a state of cultural and mental chaos in which the abstract intellectual concepts that fill consciousness are no longer brought into a meaningful relationship with one another. Put another way, the cycle of history as Vico understands it begins in brutality and ends in madness.
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