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THE COMING DARK AGE
Newsletter
November, 2005
1. INTRODUCTION
In this month's newsletter I would like to talk briefly about miscellaneous aspects of human creativity, dark ages and the phoenix principle.
Past editions of the newsletter are on the website, although this has not been updated for a year. I welcome all comments, suggestions and contributions, especially the latter. Please forward this newsletter to anyone you think might be interested. Marc Widdowson
2. CREATIVITY AND THE PHOENIX PRINCIPLE
The basic argument of the Coming Dark Age site is that dark ages are an essential part of the workings of human creativity. We use the term phoenix principle to describe the idea that it is necessary to destroy an old and failing way of life in order to create a new and ultimately better one. It might be asked, why can we not just steadily evolve from the old to the new-why is it necessary to destroy and rebuild-and at one level the answer is simply that it is an empirical fact that this is the way history works. Beyond this, the point is that there may be no evolutionary solution as existing institutions force you down a particular avenue, which may no longer be optimal. For instance, if you have a towns in a particular position, you build motorways and water and gas supply networks that converge on that position. If now external conditions change so that it would be better for the town to be located fifty miles to the east, it is not just a question of moving the town but also of shifting the road and utility networks that serve it. However, you cannot simply swing a motorway or a gas pipeline through an angle of a few degrees so that it ends in a different place. What you tend to do therefore is limp along, with the town in its existing, sub-optimal position, because it is just too difficult to move it. This means that your society is less fit than it used to be, and with enough problems of this kind it may eventually enter a dark age. The dark age is then the solution to the very problems that caused it. This is because the motorway falls into disrepair and disuse. Local people scavenge the roadsigns and metal barriers, carting them away. Weeds erupt through the tarmac, breaking it up, and spreading over everything. After hundreds of years the former route of the motorway is just a phantom imprint on the landscape. At last, your society can recover from its dark age, and now there is no reason to follow the old line of the motorway. You have carte blanche to build towns, motorways and utilities where they are needed, not where tradition constrains them to be. There are many examples of this phenomenon in the various historical dark ages, which are mostly documented on the Coming Dark Age website. It is interesting to note, however, that this phenomenon seems to have applied even in the earlier, prehistoric experience of the human race. To quote Francis Pryor in his book 'Britain BC' (p. 122): "One of the reasons why the introduction of farming, and the transition from the mobility of the Mesolithic hunter-gatherer to the more sedentary lifestyle of the Neolithic period, seems so revolutionary is that the two periods are actually separated by about half a millennium of apparent emptiness. There is remarkably little archaeological evidence to account for the second half of the fifth millennium BC (ie from about 4500 to 4000 BC)...Another example, which also happens to coincide with a transitional period, is that between the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age, in the seventh and eighth centuries BC." The 'emptiness' of the archaeological record corresponds to the 'darkness' of more historical dark ages. The significant thing to note here is how the dark epoch spanned a techno-cultural revolution in each case, from mesolithic to neolithic, or from late bronze to early iron. Another example concerns the Natufian culture that inhabited the middle east around 12,000 to 9000 BC. The Natufians lived by hunting gazelle. Initially, they killed male and female gazelle in equal numbers. However, as population grew, they developed a strategy of killing males preferentially, since killing males had hardly any impact on the gazelles' ability to reproduce themselves. Nevertheless, they tended to kill the larger males, and this produced an evolutionary selection pressure that caused the size of the gazelles to decrease over time. As a result, later Natufians show signs of nutritional distress that are not present in earlier Natufians. Natufian culture and society regressed and they were forced back to a nomadic way of life and, due to population pressure, a move into marginal environments like the Nagev desert. This produced a thousand year period of retrenchment. When society began to move forward again in this area it was through the development of agriculture and a switch to domesticated sheep and goats instead of gazelle. In other words, it was necessary for the traditional Natufian way of life to fail wholeheartedly before people were forced into a more complex, more intensive and ultimately more promising ecological mode.
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