
Toward a Manual for Civilization - triplesec
http://blog.longnow.org/02013/08/14/toward-a-manual-for-civilization/
======
sparkie
The problem with trying to write a manual of 'civilization' is that we don't
know what it means to be civilized yet. The western world assumes it is
civilized, but that's only because it has no idea what it's armies are really
doing in other parts of the world (ie, mass murder), it's because people have
no real understanding of how their tax money is stolen by the few, and because
the media is dominated by those who are complicit in covering up those crimes.

A manual for civilization, if we're going to assume that our current state is
civilization, can be nothing other than manuals on warfare, population control
and taxation. The rest of the structure arises as a consequence of those.

If I were given the chance too bootstrap civilization, I'd definitely avoid
being tainted by this trainwreck.

~~~
riffraff
this is too reductionist, imo.

I think it can be agreed that we[0] are slightly more civilized than we were
some centuries ago? (e.g. no burning witches, no indentured servitude, no
slavery, no segregation)

Then, is it crazy to think that we live in very corrupt democracies that yet
_may_ possibly be better than absolute monarchy, feudalism, totalitarism and
african kleptocracies ?

I'm not sure you want to throw out everything, the problem with saying "we are
not civilized" is posing civilization as binary value.

Anyway I think TFA is talking more about technology than social systems.

[0] rich west, OECD, G20, G7 or whatever

~~~
sparkie
I'm not sure we can agree on all that. We're still burning witches (eg. Bin
Laden), and figuratively (Assange, Manning, Snowden etc), steadily removing a
due process that assumes innocence that was created 800 years ago. Star
chambers have re-emerged to hide the crimes of oligarchs too, particularly in
the UK.

Slavery still exists, it's face has just changed. The modern slavery is
economic slavery - the requirement to labor, and be taxed on that labor in
order to survive.

And to suggest that segregation is no longer an issue is disingenuous. Take a
look at Israel for example, a great role model being "the only democracy in
the middle east".

On top of not being much more civilized than our ancestors, each year, people
still celebrate the life of one of them, whose work was the mass murder and
torture of aboriginal Americans. Very civilized, and patriotic. Yes,
patriotism! What wonderful social values we have in the civilized world.

I don't know if we should say civilization is a binary value or a spectrum,
but I'm pretty sure that one which routinely conducts murder and celebrates it
is definitely on the "non-civilized" side, according to my understanding of
the word.

I can probably agree that democracy is slightly better than what was had in
the past, but democracy no longer exists, it has been eroded now to the point
where recovery is not likely.

~~~
riffraff
So, let's consider the colonization of the Americas.

Most people today would probably agree that mass murder and torture of
aboriginal americans is bad. This was _not_ true at the time it happened.

Bartolome de Las Casas is known _because_ he was an exception, and yet he
thought a perfectly legit idea to use african slaves rather than americans,
until his late years.

Do bad things still happen? Yes. The difference is that more people now have a
framework by which they would consider them "bad" than there were in the past.

~~~
sparkie
Most people agree that mass murder of Iraqis was bad at the time, just 10
years ago - it didn't prevent it from happening. The US drone program is still
routinely murdering many, even though most people consider it bad.

I'm pretty sure most people would've considered the mass murder of Americans
bad at the time too, since Christianity was prevalent, and we know what it
says about murder. There's obviously a difference from now, in that people
were more xenophobic at the time, but there are still similarities to the
current day.

It seems that while most of us are civil individually, as a collective, the
civility is lost, and what is manifested is the barbaric elements among us.

The framework for what people consider to be good/bad is flawed and
contradictory, because while most of us agree that murder is bad, we routinely
pay a hit man to conduct it. Very few people consider that's what's happening
when they pay tax, but it doesn't make it any less true. Some people recognize
the fact and pay tax out of fear of what the hit man may do to them if they
don't pay, and many others will suffer cognitive dissonance in which they
convince themselves that it's necessary for "the greater good", and downplay
the mass murder and torture.

Rather than being content with what we have being better than what we had, we
should consider the ways in which we haven't changed from the past and do
something about them. One thing that hasn't changed is that we're still paying
the hit man. Will the hit man ever stop killing people when we continue paying
it? Perhaps we should be thinking how to create a different framework in which
there is no hit man. Perhaps then we may be called 'civil'.

~~~
riffraff
> I'm pretty sure most people would've considered the mass murder of Americans
> bad at the time too, since Christianity was prevalent, and we know what it
> says about murder.

No, the problem being that non-europeans were considered less than humans even
by prominent theologists. "We are all equals" is a terribly recent idea. In
the same way, cat burning was considered good family fun until the 19th
century, we have only started to extend basic rights to non-human sentient
beings.

> Perhaps then we may be called 'civil'.

And again, you have reduced the issue to being civil yes/no.

We shouldn't be content with the way we are, but that doesn't mean we haven't
improved.

------
triplesec
Precis of a new detail the last HN post in 2010. They will be seeking
suggestions from all over the world for a Library of Ltility
[http://blog.longnow.org/02011/04/25/the-library-of-
utility/](http://blog.longnow.org/02011/04/25/the-library-of-utility/) Seems
to me as if it might be fun to come up with some arguments for what might
constitute an optimally efficient booklist.

"It would be a very selective library. It would not contain the world’s great
literature, or varied accounts of history, or deep knowledge of ethnic
wonders, or speculations about the future. It has no records of past news, no
children’s books, no tomes on philosophy. It contains only seeds. Seeds of
utilitarian know-how. How to recreate the infrastructure and technology of
civilization so far

"It is an interesting thought exercise to ask yourself what information you
might want if you had to truly start over.

"And in our forthcoming Salon space at Fort Mason Center, we’ll house
approximately 3,500 volumes in a floor-to-ceiling library featuring carefully
selected books that could be used to help restart civilization. We are not
trying to be apocalyptic or at all predictive, but the conversation that is
inspired by this exercise seems to be endless and valuable.

"We will collaboratively curate this corpus with Long Now’s members and the
public. We understand that by definition we ourselves will have a western-
centric viewpoint of what might be collected, but as the project gets going we
plan to seek submissions that represent views from as many cultural viewpoints
as possible."

~~~
VLM
"It would not contain the world’s great literature"

Is there any point in providing instructions to create machines for
broadcasting information, ranging from printing presses to the internet, if
you don't provide a source of formulaic drama (Shakespeare?) to keep it
economically viable?

Can you have a broadcast TV infrastructure without something like formulaic
sequels of Shakespeare to lure the people in? Or if not him, someone's work?

Its like providing blueprints, and diagrams, and videos, and textbooks
describing how to make a chicken coop, and then after they finish studying and
methodically replicate our work and build a million really awesome chicken
coops, they ask "OK we have these very nice chicken coops as per your
designs... now, tell us what exactly is a chicken?"

~~~
triplesec
I suspect a set of new societies would create its own dramas and ideas fairly
quickly. I'd agree that the Greek and classic and some modern insightful
writings and plays might be useful nonetheless!

------
MarkTee
Sounds like a high tech version of the Georgia Guidestones:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones)

~~~
VLM
Or an expressly non-literature version of the Harvard Classics from about a
century ago.

Trying to keep it utilitarian is going to be where most of the fuzzy lives...

------
opminion
If the purpose were that the collection is minimal, which is not stated
explicitly, it would be interesting to know which criteria to use when
deciding which works to replace.

For example, how to decide when a modern unifying textbook makes older books
obsolete? Reaching consensus in such topics must be very difficult.

------
bachback
God, that is so sad. The first thing we have to get rid of this is extremely
superficial notion of usefulness. Art and culture is there to inspire, to
learn new things, not to be merely useful in a world limited by thought. When
calculating machine came along people thought they were "useful" for replacing
human beings called computers.

~~~
emiliobumachar
Try to view it as an art project.

------
DanielBMarkham
Civilization is the manner in which people interact over long periods of time.
It's like climate -- a moving average.

I don't think collecting books on farming or how to build a telegraph is going
to do much in the way of instructing folks how to create a civilization. Sure,
it might give them the technical details of how to _do stuff_ , perhaps very
important and utilitarian stuff like purify water, but a civilization does not
spring from a collection of gadgets.

Put a different way, for the Romans it wasn't the fact that they could re-
channel rivers, build great stadiums, or maintain public roads that made them
civilized. It was the fact that over long periods of time _being a Roman_
carried with it special privileges and obligations. _Being a Roman_ meant
something. There were shared values and ways of doing things. These shared
values and ways of doing things _led_ to all that other stuff, not the other
way around.

So a manual of civilization, to the degree one could be constructed, would be
about priorities, principles, and attitudes. Not how to build a better
spinning wheel.

------
return0
> after the fall of the great Egyptian, Mayan, and Roman empires we had
> evidence and examples of their engineering achievements all around us. But
> aqueducts or senate buildings are worthless without a society around them to
> maintain, contextualize and protect them.

I think this highlights that their project is futile. Without a population
willing to follow the Manual, it's useless. E.g., the ancient greek texts were
lingering for millenia in monasterys before the collective frame of mind
started reading them, and yet still, they didn't follow the Manual, they
altered and upgraded it.

------
TORIG-TG
This is the premise of the science fiction book, Foundations. The human race
is statistically expected to fall into a galaxy-wide "collapse" and a group
tries to write a manual/encyclopedia of know how to be placed on every planet.

[http://www.amazon.com/Foundation-Novels-Isaac-
Asimov/dp/0553...](http://www.amazon.com/Foundation-Novels-Isaac-
Asimov/dp/0553293354)

------
bazzargh
"no children's books"

If we don't teach children to read then the rest of the library is useless.

