Today’s tsunami of economic, social, technological, and geopolitical dislocation may be more than a temporary setback for humanity. It could lead to an erosion of the ability to access the fragile media we have used to record our lives.
The loss of the mostly papyrus-based documents in the great fire at the Library of Alexandria was already a disaster from which the world never fully recovered. What we face today is potentially a far more serious human setback.
Part of the challenge is that we’re in a period of a tectonic shift in human history with the fortunate or unfortunate characteristic that it’s perceived as “business as usual” and not as a period of extreme change. We see no urgency in finding ways to preserve or even understand history. We see learning consigned to fragile electronic storage, which is even more perishable than papyrus or paper.
- We have become existentially dependent on electricity for survival, and this pervasiveness is a byproduct of wealth. Yet, it’s evident that wealth and constant electrical supply are already unstable, and are likely to wane and become patchy for many societies over the coming decades.
- Electronic storage devices, as well as electronic languages, have been successively replaced at a rapid rate since the post-World War II period, with a declining ability to retrieve and translate older content (knowledge) into current forms. While the technology and software still exist within specialist areas to access and translate the content, much material is no longer generally accessible. With economic decline, the ability to educate or to assign resources needed for this retrieval process becomes narrowed to pools of expertise, much as literacy and information became confined to monasteries during the Dark Ages.
- Politically driven education agendas in many countries have already reduced the general ability to find information, despite the internet, and have restricted awareness that such knowledge exists and is vital. Most societies today are driven by rumor and ignorance.
Couple that with the reality that most people in all societies would rather accept the diktats of their governments than accept responsibility for individual choice. The rapid march toward societies disassociated from their past becomes inevitable.
Societies ignorant of their past inevitably focus solely on short-term survival, which becomes a transactional process.
It was clear to King Ptolemy V Epiphanes, in 196 B.C., that a transition had occurred in Egyptian history. His was a Hellenistic dynasty, just more than a century into its domination of Egypt—from its recent history as a Persian satrapy—after it had been conquered by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C.
Perhaps, out of fear of Egypt losing a window into the history of the native Egyptian dynasties, he demanded that a stele of black granodiorite stone be erected in Memphis, Egypt, with the same message repeated in hieroglyphic and demotic scripts, as well as in ancient Greek.
The stone was later moved to the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile delta, where it was eventually discovered by Napoleonic invaders in 1799.
The Rosetta stone became the first means by which modern scholars could read and understand the hieroglyphics that carried the history of Egypt over the preceding millennia. Ptolemy V’s move was prophetic because a century and a half later—as Caesar pursued his rival, Pompey (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus), into Egypt in 48 B.C.—the conflict caused the fire that destroyed the great library of Alexandria.
With that, we lost the knowledge of millennia of human endeavors and progress. The Rosetta stone subsequently became a precious clue as to how we might reopen a tiny, inadequate window to much of Egypt’s pharaonic past. There were fewer mechanisms by which we could understand much of prehistory or even the Dark Ages—and the corresponding “dark ages” in Eurasia, Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific—because written language was scarce and difficult to preserve.
Arguably, we have been seeing a decline in deep literacy and, therefore, an absence of contextual comprehension of history and cultures since World War II. The mid-20th century marked the period when technological and scientific dominance occurred over classical social knowledge and education. This reached a point by the late 20th century when technological and scientific education came to see knowledge of “the classics” as a rival, or as unnecessary, to science and technology.
The reality—as the peaking of the worship of science and technology was achieved—is that deep literacy and historical knowledge are essential partners of science and technology in the constant evolution of human tool-building. Without literacy and access to an understanding of context (wisdom), science and technology began to lose objectivity and purpose.
History records the cycles of wealth and decline—boom and bust—in which civilizations and population numbers collapse at the pinnacle of wealth and hubris. We’re entering such a phase now, with more global consequences than ever.
What have we done to preserve access by future generations to the great history and lessons of our era and preceding eras? How can we devise our own “Rosetta stone” to pass the torch to generations, even a few decades down the path?
