EPILOGUE to “The Rise & Fall of the Human Empire”
We are anything if not
an interesting species. We invent words that lead to language, thinking
in these words that lead to thoughts, selective thoughts that become
philosophies, building our lives around these philosophies into religions,
treating these religions as sanctuaries of truth, then fighting to the death to
defend these religions as truth personified when they are inventions of our
imaginings to protect us from ourselves.
From the opening chapters
of our existence those many millenniums ago, we have felt self-conscious and
vulnerable to the forces outside, a gift of our consciousness. Alas, we
have always been fearful of the unknown and the unknowable, consumed with
self-doubt, wondering why we are here, and why we have been separated from the
animal kingdom of Mother Nature that terrifies us, problems
these other species don't experience as they simply exist instinctively.
To combat this
self-doubt and these misgivings, these fears, and this sense of loneliness, we
have created an artificial world that we treat as reality out of these
words. This includes God that we have invented as He must exist in our
consciousness as absurd as that seems to many in this "Secular Age"
of postmodernity.
It was the
seventeenth-century French philosopher, theologian, mathematician, and
physicist, Blaise Pascal (1623 - 1662), who posited the philosophical
wager that human beings gamble with their lives that God either exists
or does not. Since we do not know whether God exists then we should play
it safe rather than risk being sorry.
[Being born during The
Great Depression as an Irish Roman Catholic by the
good Sisters of St. Francis, my long life has often played havoc
with these early certainties. I am a renegade Catholic, but a Catholic
nonetheless, thankful that I had this early nurturing which has served me well
in my many careers. I confess to being a Catholic writer seeing
life through that specific filter with that inevitable perspective. Ideas
have always fascinated me, even controversial ones. That said, I have no
inclination to be either a proselytizer or crusader. My hope is only to
stimulate thought in others to be better in touch with themselves. Nor do
I believe the "Good Books" were the works of other
than men divinely inspired as they may be. In this "Secular
Age," we are constantly bombarded with extraneous multi-faceted
stimulation telling us what to think, what to believe, value, and how to
behave. Our consciousness with its curiosity is without barriers less we
construct them around ourselves.]
Words are our most
sophisticated invention. We have created societies and civilizations out
of words from primitive to modern, from pagan gods to the monotheistic God
of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. We see the same God at the helm
to guide our species through life and to safety. Yet, each of these
religions treats their monotheistic God as different and as more divine than
the others, warring endlessly with each other.
Pagan religions made
human sacrifices. Christianity makes symbolically cannibalistic
sacrifices in the changing of bread and wine into the body and blood of Jesus
Christ (transubstantiation), while the purpose of both pagan and Christian
rituals are to pay homage to their polytheistic gods or monotheistic God.
With words, we have
created sacred books such as the Bible, the Torah, and
the Koran to preserve and reinforce our dependence on The
Word to protect and secure our existence beyond our mortality.
We have gone to war with others of our species for failure to acknowledge and
follow the beliefs of The Word or for our failure to conduct
our lives consistent with The Word.
As evidence of the power
of The Word, we have built magnificent churches, temples, synagogues,
and cathedrals displaying our ingenuity centuries before the science of
architecture and engineering had reached the heights it enjoys today, physical
evidence that our species is in touch with the Almighty.
The Rise & Fall of
the Human Empire is a modest
attempt to show how the use of words has led to language than to
mature ideas, We have in turn built our lives around ideas only to have
them come crashing down due to man's shortsightedness. From the dawn of
consciousness, we have progressed and periodically regressed but always remaining optimistic, even utopian, in the worst of times, believing
we are equal to the challenge.
Anthropologists claim
language was first a form of gossip built around the primitive anxieties of
love and hate, envy and jealousy, fear and loathing, loneliness and
isolation. It was neither an instrumental nor a terminal device of
consciousness but simply a spontaneous intuitive response to ill-defined needs
that have come to dominate our unconscious behavior. This was displayed
in another sense during "The Hunting & Gathering" period some 3,000 years ago, a time when men would band together to forage for food by
killing animals much larger, agile, powerful, and menacing. These men
invented crude weapons and used cunning to trap and subdue these prey.
This success led to their survival and enhanced their sense of power using
their consciousness.
Men and women next
became farmers learning to till the soil and seed plants to provide food in
abundance to supplement the need to kill animals exclusively for food, even leading to the
domesticated of animals as beasts of burden, which led to the formation of
small groups becoming larger groups and then small colonies.
These developments
radically changed social existence as close-knit groups led to the formation of families transferring dominance of the group from women to men. Every
aspect of human existence has evolved progressively and mainly spontaneously
and situationally. This was true of the family, the home, the nature of
morality and ethics as they were all inventions of "Men of Ideas"
and over time reified into conventions, then defended as if designed by God as the case may be.
As farms, land became
property, ownership of property became wealth, which led to power and dominance
of the most resourceful property owners. At the same time, farmers who
perfected weapons for hunting now employed these weapons to defend their
property.
"Men of
Words" and "Men of
Ideas" escalated into prominence. First as servants to
landowners then monarchs and kings who seldom had the time or inclination to
learn how to read or write as they saw themselves as "Men of
Action," depending upon these clerks to ensure their legitimacy
and to sustain their dominance by keeping their ledgers and tracking their
logistics.
On the pages of this
book, we see the rise and fall of empires and civilizations: the Greek
Civilization and the Roman Empire, the Catholic
Church, the Spanish and British Empires.
We also see men of words
as philosophers, theologians, economists, and psychologists providing "Men
of Action" with the rationale to legitimize their prominence and
dominance.
War is the leading
catalyst to the Industrial Revolution, the Age of Faith,
the Scientific Revolution, the Renaissance, the Reformation,
the Age of Enlightenment, the Technology Revolution,
and now the Information Age while the Secular Age as
such is not defined.
Doubt and misgivings are
often the spark to lift our species out of its comfort zone to eventually
soar. We seldom think of motivation being so mundane, but it was quite
apparent in the monasteries of the Middle Ages when monks with too much time on
their hands followed their curiosity to the dismay of the Catholic Church, a curiosity
that led to science, philosophy, and psychology. Words and ideas are
present and mutually interdependent in this narrative over mainly the last 500 years.
Words have led to
systems of thought, and these systems have led to constructs by which we now
live called by their advocates in a political sense as democracies, oligarchies, and
theocracies, and institutionally as universities, corporations, think tanks,
governments, and other citadels of intrigue.
With these many
millenniums as our history, we are running out of room, running out of water,
running out of food, and running out of fresh air to breathe that continues
unabated unless and until we change our ways of thinking, behaving, and living.
The irony is that with
our species exalted consciousness and problem-solving capabilities we have
become slaves to our appetites, and want our cake and eat it, too. This
has unwittingly placed the survival of our species in jeopardy, as we are still
obsessed with the new, failing to see with every new thing, something is lost
with “cut & control” finality.
This observer has
enjoyed a long life born when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Adolph
Hitler were coming to power which was in the era of The Great
Depression, and on the eve of what would become the Second
World War in which over one hundred million would perish. It is
this shortsightedness that I have come to identify our species with as NOWHERE
MAN seeing him ineluctably moving into NOWHERE LAND.
And for that reason, I have written this book.
[In the first sixteen
years of this new century, I worked off and on to create 24 essays.
Philosopher and novelist, Charles D. Hayes suggested that I
post these as 24 individual essays on Amazon's Kindle, which I did
in 2016, and now is this book. The title is credited to Ken Shelton,
author, publisher, consultant, and friend who is familiar with my work.]
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