Our Evanescent Culture - Richard Heinberg, museletter-209.pdf

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And the Awesome Duty of Librarians

How secure is our civilization’s accumulated knowledge?

It is a question that, in a fundamental sense, transcends many lifeand-
death concerns (threats of sickness, natural disaster, or military invasion) that prompt us collectively to spend fortunes on insurance, health care, and weaponry. We know that we each individually will die, though we are willing to go to great lengths to delay the event
as long as possible. But we have an overarching shared interest that the world of ideas will go on without us: that our descendants will continue to compose music, invent tools, refine scientific knowledge, and write histories, extending into the indefinite future the
cumulative, constantly evolving universe of signs, symbols, and skills that have enriched our lives. Cultural death—the passing of the wisdom, artistic creations, and practical knowledge of an entire people, painstakingly built up over many generations—is a loss almost too wrenching to contemplate.

Yet cultural death happens. The examples from history are legion.
Anthropologists and archaeologists have identified well over 10,000 distinct human cultures, of which most have perished, many by absorption into one multi-ethnic civilization or another.

Linguists have cataloged over 6,000 human languages; again, most are extinct or endangered, often for a similar reason—absorption of indigenous populations into multi-ethnic urban civilizations. But civilizations are also mortal: about 24 are known to have existed over the past 5,000 years, and again most are now dust.

Here is perhaps the most salient fact: when past civilizations were in the process of decline and collapse, they seem to have given insufficient thought to preserving the best of their achievements; indeed, the reverse often happened—libraries were burned, statues defaced, tombs looted. Archaeologists make heroic efforts to piece together the histories of these vanished empires, but they face enormous hurdles. Even the monumental and long-lasting civilization
of ancient Egypt left behind more questions about itself than answers: we’re not even sure how much arithmetic and geography the average educated Egyptian knew.
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It’s ironic to think that the cave paintings of Lascaux may be far more durable than the photos from the Hubble space telescope.

Original URL

http://heinberg.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/museletter-209.pdf

http://heinberg.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/museletter-209.pdf