EPILOGUE to "The Rise & Fall Human Empire"

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.]