Civilization is Coming to Pieces

By Bobby Neal Winters

Civilization is coming to pieces.

There is a group of you who read that last sentence and said, “Yeah, so what else is new?”

And I get it, people say this all the time.  They’ve been saying it for years. For centuries. For millennia.

They’ve been saying it because it is always true.  Civilization is always coming to pieces because civilization has to be actively held together.

Civilization is a human creation. It requires active attention. It must be taught and carried from one generation to the other.  Humans, while on one hand create civilization, on the other hand are constantly playing a game: What can we get away with?

The economists will tell you it is natural for the consumer to want to get a product for the lowest price possible.  That is just common sense.  Trouble is that in the case of civilization we might not know just what that lowest price is.

There are those among us who study such things professionally, so in what I say next I will certainly welcome correction from those people.

Civilization is knowledge.  It is group knowledge.  Knowledge has some nice qualities.  No one can take it from you.  If you give it away, you keep it as well. Those are kind of magical, really.

In the particulars of human life, however, there are ways knowledge can be lost.  There is a phenomenon among the elderly.  I’ve seen it in my own family.  

Jean’s mom went into the hospital with something that had nothing to do with her mental health but within a short time was loopy as all get-out. She came home, recovered, and had to go in again a year or two later and the same thing happened. 

This is a real thing.  I’ve read about it since her passing.  There is a name for it, but I forget.

My explanation for this--and again I welcome correction from those who actually know something--is that our intelligence extends beyond our bodies into our environment.  We set up things so as to help us remember.  An example to make what I am saying plain.  

I have a table saw in my workshop.  Those who use such things know that when you use a table saw you use either the fence or the miter gauge, and only rarely both at the same time.  I use the fence much more frequently than the miter gauge.  Because of this, I am always losing the miter gauge.  What I have done, therefore, is to create a special spot where I keep my miter gauge.  Actually, miter gauges, plural, because I also have a miter gauge for my router table.

To summarize, I have modified my environment to help my memory.

By the time you reach my age, you’ve done that thousands of times and have created a memory environment for ourselves.  It helps us old farts to sort through the thousands of things that we’ve learned over the course of our lives.  If you pull us out of that, then we have to flounder a bit for our minds to find purchase on something.

That is why so many of us are set in our ways. 

Civilization is like this. It is a structure that reinforces the collective knowledge of the human race. (Yes, it is more complicated than that, but I’ve got a column, not a textbook.)

Civilization consists of many interconnected structures: Art, Religion, Science, Education, Great Books, and on and on.  There are things in each of these we need and we might not know that we need it.

For example, let us consider religion, and in particular the Roman Catholic Mass.  The few times I’ve attended mass, I’ve been fascinated by the care taken in its performance by the priest. At the end, the chalice that held the hosts is filled with wine and the priest swirls it around to get all of the tiny pieces that are left.  Seeing such care taken week-after-week must have an effect.  To me, at least, it seems that it will offer a model of taking care that would percolate through the community at large whether they had ever been to mass or not.

This is just a small thing, perhaps, with a small effect. But it is one that would stop if religion were no longer a thing. (I hear John Lennon singing “Imagine” in my head right now; and I have followed his instructions.)

Among the structures that the human race has created that is becoming part of Civilization that I left out earlier is the Internet.

This has been done very recently and it has all come on so very quickly, and as a function of this it is very scary.

Very scary.

Our young people, while they can come up with answers very quickly, often don’t remember them. They don’t keep anything in their heads.  They aren’t learning the internal structures to remember.  They are missing the organic patterns that exist within knowledge.

This also happened when the printing press became a thing, and when writing became a thing.  They dealt with it then, and we will deal with it now.

And we’d better, because Civilization is coming to pieces.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like” the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube.