Politics of Lost Cultures

There's a good reason to care about Lost Cultures. They leave behind artifacts which can reveal how complex they became, and maybe explain why they failed. Time wounds all heels, after all, and since Democracy died this week, it is worth reviewing what we learned from our own culture when it failed.

I think the greatest destroyer of cultures has been drought. It is what killed off the Mayans, since they had no surface water, using wells coming from an underground river in the Yucatan instead. An El Nino directed the rain that usually fed that river elsewhere for 60 years and water levels fell till the Mayans, who were having problems with plant diseases which caused famine, couldn't irrigate their crops. And they wandered away from their nice stone buildings and less well known but equally cool aqueducts. El Ninos weakened many cultures in the Americas.

The Mississippi Mound Builders had a complex culture with trading which apparently ended with either drought or possibly a series of New Madrid Quakes 500 years before the ones our culture suffered.

The Hohokam were wiped out despite their complex culture centered where Phoenix Arizona is today, but an El Nino drought. It doesn't help that their basic adobe home required the cutting of beams from the local trees, which were also used for firewood. Those trees protected extremely fragile perched aquifers on the sides of mountains that concentrated abrupt and severe rains and captured the water at the base of canyons. Without the aquifers the water was lost and the ability to grow crops or survive extended drought wrecked the culture. The survivors went up hill, where it was colder and less food could be grown or they stayed behind and died of thirst and starvation.

Centuries later the Hohokam were replaced by the culture we know as the Anasazi, though that was not their name. Apparently Anasazi means "Ancient Enemy" and is the insult used by their survivors who really really hated them. The Anasazi were the famous cliff dwellers, hiding out of sight, sneaking out to fields and returning to cliff dwellings with one entrance defended by a guard with a stone ax and you'd better give the right password or get brained to death with it. This level of security was severe, but even that eventually failed. The indians that hated them got into most eventually and killed them off. The survivors are the Pueblo, the Navajo, and the Hopi. Today, most of the canyons that the Anasazi lived in are high, cold, have a little running water, but often little to show for it. They are hard to grow much food in and the general residents of New Mexico are very poor. Paved roads are only on highways and the richer towns where there's money for that. For most, its washboard dirt roads and food stamps because there's just not enough water for much farming.

In Europe, the Etruscans left behind lots of buildings, some amazing graveyards, and inspired the Romans to a complex culture with stone monuments to show they were better than the Etruscans. They did succeed eventually, though the base of Roman culture was the casting of useful household goods made of Bronze. To make bronze you need copper and tin. They could get those from Cyprus, but when those mine played out, they found more in Crimea, meaning they needed to go through the Bosphorus and the Black Sea. This supplied their secondary capitol Constantinople, now known as Istanbul. Unfortunately, being close to the Steppes, they got several surges of the Black Plague from those who traded with Mongols on the Silk Road and much of the population would be wiped out. It is alleged that the Mongols went on the move due to drought in Upper Mongolia, because their herds couldn't survive without grass, but the Mongol invasions of Asia were centuries later. The Crimea had copper but not much tin. Constantinople needed what was there and the empire quietly, or loudly, divided. It had gotten too big to manage.

The Romans needed more tin so they found it in Cornwall, in Southwest Britain, at the very tip of the peninsula. The mine, operated nearly 2000 years ago for the Romans, is literally perched on a cliff a hundred feet above the water and miners edged along wet planks in all sorts of weather following the ore. Horrible, and doomed. Without tin, the Romans couldn't offer the bronze-tupperware easy living and constant expansion needed. It grew too large, and large complex organizations are necessarily overextended and easily broken by external factors, like drought. When the Goths and Visigoths sacked Rome in 400 AD, the residents had been eating each other and were bemused the invaders weren't killing them. They expressed relief that the terror was over. After that, the Roman empire had little to offer and it sort of fell apart. People still lived there, they just weren't Romans in the sense of self identity. They had lost their drive and ambition to do more. They just wanted to get by.

We're kind of there ourselves. If we were a great nation, we wouldn't think what we're doing these days is anything close to Great. Its muddling, mediocre, getting by. Like Rome after the Visigoths sacked it. We exported our jobs, we argue about bridges while our cities are falling apart, we feed people we know need to be killed and kill people we ought to bring home from foreign wars and put to work doing useful and productive things. We have no pride, no identity. This is a big failure of a culture that hasn't realized it has gone under and died. We're in what I call Cultural Inertia. We complete actions that make us feel comfortable because those actions led to a positive outcome in the past, but now they are disconnected and the outcomes are much more random and sometimes destructive, other times are merely wasted effort going nowhere. We aren't accepting that things have changed. That more radical solutions are needed.

Here's a bunch of videos with various levels of insanity, none of which are really driven by simple economics or rational about resources. Watch them or not, but be prepared to laugh at some of these statements.

Now, onto my own opinion. The American Empire is too big, and the East offers little to The West. We're not staying together for The Children. This is an abusive marriage and it needs to end. And it will end, one way or another, because since there's little positive from The East but hungry mouths and pointy knives, The West is likely to just lose interest in everything they have to say. When the planes stop flying because tickets cost too much, the exchange from West to East and back again will slow to a trickle. When stuff stops moving, we stop doing business with them, and we find local alternatives. Those local alternatives may cost more, but we'll be able to get them because they are already here. The East simply won't matter. They become a backwater festering in their preconceptions, mandates, demands, and mistakes while the West is refreshed by our own challenges in water supply, the distance between our cities, the failing infrastructure and how important those are to either be repaired or abandoned. Our problems become Our Problems, ones we own and must deal with, locally, because the East never helps us. They point and laugh and say OIC.

Yes, there's lots of dumb in California politics because our Legislature is useless, our Governor easily distracted, and people here are too busy making money to vote so extreme groups get signatures to create laws, which get voted on and become law, despite not requiring those laws be actually legally reviewed prior to the vote. They have to then get challenged in court and either struck down or defined by the courts, which slows everything down and makes for hilarious content on Morning radio stations in the rest of the country. This is what happens when you actually apply that inane phrase from the 1960s: "If the people lead, the leaders will follow." The corollary is if the people are nuts, the leaders are too. I like to think that insane politics leads to collapse, and excess tolerance instead of telling them to shut the hell up while we deal with real problems. We are getting distracted by bad ideas in Washington, unfunded ones, and ignoring bigger issues. Our Laser-like focus should be on jobs. And why systemically we're getting wrecked as less and less of them remain to be had.

People say that breaking up America is throwing out the baby with the bathwater, but I contend there is no baby. We have fractious and unmanageable states and special interests which are taking every bit they can reach, exactly like a starving person hoards food in a famine. The big companies have exported our jobs overseas and pay politicians to ignore this with campaign contributions for loud causes that have little to do with what the company is really up to. This is about protecting their shrinking profits and wages, not anything valid or useful.

If our culture wasn't failing, we'd be fixing Detroit and Sandy. There would be families in the 9th ward in New Orleans instead of empty stinking shacks with their drywall ripped out and replaced by a contractor as if that fixed what was wrong, namely that the 9th ward is 10 feet below sea level so it will flood again. A viable culture would plan for the future rationally, and do useful things. We'd have our aqueducts being built from the Frasier River over to Montana and the injection wells for the Ogalalla Aquifer being prepared to refill a water supply for millions of farms that fed 2 billion people, and would again if the water is restored. This is a big thing that a civilization does. But we aren't doing that.

We're not a civilization anymore. We're squabbling over diminishing resources, ignoring the cause (evil CEOs, China, dirty politicians) of our bad economy, ignoring the needs of the population to pander to their lowest common denominator for votes. We are just as rotten as Rome in 390 AD. We'll topple. And I think that Peak Oil is that final nail in our coffin, when we stop thinking of ourselves as Americans of the United States and start thinking of ourselves as Nevadans or Idahoans or Montanans or Oregonians or Californians or Cascadians. The East has little to offer. We make our own stuff here. Why are we sending you tax dollars we could use here, and maybe save ourselves?

I dunno about you, but I'd rather join a new culture here than die with the last one. Why go down with the ship when you're already sitting in a lifeboat?