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and inventing even in the worst conditions.
It may be hard for us to fathom how bad things were for most people during the ten centuries of feudalism, but we do need to try to grasp what a catastrophe the fall of the Roman Empire was, as to human progress. It brought on massive illiteracy and ignorance, loss of medical knowledge and immense suffering from disease, filth and lack of sanitation, and loss of the public bath culture of the Romans and Greeks; it was the severest blow to education, learning and science--summed up by the destruction of the Alexandria Library and skinning alive of its last philosopher, Hypatia, by a mob of Christian monks in 415 AD. That event marks the end of Rome's "pax romana" and rule of law (the upside of Roman rule) and the descent of Europe and the Mediterranean into rampant superstition, with resultant pogroms, witch-hunts, witch-burnings, book-burnings, suppression of free thought, "baptism by the sword," intense persecution of Pagans and of all internal variety and dissent within the Christian religion, the cementing of state power with a tyrannical church and bloody Crusades and other religions wars; also, the catastrophic loss of the status of women and their nurturing and life-affirming Deities, which did not even begin to be recovered until very late in Middle Ages--a loss that has reverberations to this very day and may, indeed, be a chief cause of the demise of the human race, since lack of respect for Mother Earth and narrow, exploitative science, used for the profit of the super-rich, that is deliberately myopic about the complexity of nature--the "whole" of nature--is the greatest mistake of the modern era.
Further, because most people were enslaved to the land and essentially "owned" by one "lord" or another, travel--with its immense cultural and educational benefits--became severely restricted. Ignorance, illiteracy and "book-burning" also brought on a loss of navigational skills and knowledge. Mathematics itself became almost equivalent to the "Devil" (except in the Arab world). Vast archives of learning were lost--and only bits of it were recovered, often via the Arabs, as Europe finally began to pull out of this incredibly horrible era.
Say what you will about the Romans, they acknowledged the "plebians" as a rightful political force--a dramatic advance in human organization that is with us to this day, partly because the Romans spread it so far and wide and were so influential. (It made the leap from circa 1 A.D. to circa 1776 on the other side of the world.) Of course it wasn't perfect--nor even perfect as an ideal--but the notion of the "balance of power" within a society, with everyone having a say, is critically important to modern government. Conditions in the farming areas were terrible, it's true, with the brutalist kind of slavery a common evil. And I certainly wouldn't defend the brutal imperial wars--the application of the Romans' talent for organization to warfare and imperial conquest--but they did, indeed, have a better notion of, at first, republican, and then, imperial rule than any other conquerors in history, and it included RESPECT for the religions and cultures of conquered areas, the RIGHT of the "plebians" to have a say in their own affairs, and the SOCIAL MOBILITY of all classes including urban slaves.
The Romans also acknowledged, revered and encouraged learning. Literacy was widespread in all economic classes during the long Pagan Roman era--a benefit that was utterly lost with the collapse of the Empire. The Church eventually accumulated libraries but they were NOT available to most people and they were heavily censored and bowdlerized even among the Church clerical class. Public education--widespread in the Pagan Rome world--vanished for nearly 15 centuries.
ALL of this was lost--the notion of the "plebians" having rights, the notion of social mobility, the notion of SECULAR government, the notion of religious tolerance, the notion that there is an objective world that scientists, doctors, engineers, navigators and other knowledgeable, intelligent people can understand, the notion of free travel, the notion of cultural openness and exchange, the notion that there are things to be learned from others--all this and more was lost in the inevitable decline and fall of the unsustainable Roman system, with its ultimately fatal economic and political flaws. But it did last for 500 years, not because it was tyrannical but because it was beneficial.
Now, I am the first to say that smart, innovative feudal peasants and the lowest clerks in the Church (the copyists) saved western civilization during its ten centuries of vast ignorance and stark misery. They are a credit to the human race. There were some others in addition--the Freemasons (who preserved the engineering knowledge and skill that built the cathedrals, but were forced into secrecy because of the Church's dark suspicions of science and mathematics), the midwives and herbalists who preserved some medical and plant knowledge, at great peril of their lives, the Troubadours who kept the Goddess religion alive (also forced into secrecy and subterfuge), a couple of kings here and there who valued knowledge (and generally had to battle the Church to preserve and pursue it) and the odd teacher, philosopher or visionary who tried to shine a light under this dreadful "Iron Curtain" that had been drawn over human knowledge and the freedom of the human mind.
Credit most certainly belongs to these mostly "lowly" people or outcasts, who continued to think creatively in such difficult circumstances. But it does not do to denigrate the achievements of Roman civilization and the long lasting catastrophe that followed its collapse. Both things can be, and are, true.
One thing more I should add: The original inspiration of Christianity--that "all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" ("love thy neighbor" because he or she is as human as you are)--while it atrophied for ten centuries and became the horrible opposite of itself, in the hands of truly evil, powermongering popes and bishops, DID eventually contribute an immensely significant NEW IDEA to western civilization--and one that the Roman Pagans only had a dim and partial idea of (the rights of the "plebians"--and also their general notion of social mobility, and cultural/religious tolerance). That idea: that we really and truly are born equal and have equal rights--that every person is both valuable and independent. The Church tied this to their bizarre ideas of God and the soul--but it persisted beyond their strange and twisted theology to become the linchpin of human progress.
We are very much on the point of losing that human equality to a new form of corporatism that hauntingly resembles the Church in the Middle Ages: Vast, transglobal business corporations--especially in the "first world" countries of the U.S. empire, and most especially in our own. We have only to look at our vote counting situation to understand this--now controlled by one, private, far rightwing connected corporation--ES&S, which bought out Diebold--using 'TRADE SECRET' programming code with virtually no audit/recount controls! The 9th century popes could not have devised a more diabolical scheme to control human affairs!
But there is a great movement afoot in Latin America to establish equality in that region--a movement that the U.S. and its corporate masters, of course, hate like the plague and are actively trying to destroy. But it is born of the legacy of the original Greek democracy, of the Roman Republic and the education aspects of the Roman Empire, of the Enlightenment that finally emerged from the long, bleak Medieval period, of U.S. democracy as it once was, of the U.S. "balance of power" republic, as it once was, of the egalitarian goals that our society once averred, and, finally, of Christian notions of equality and social justice. The great socialist and communist movements of the past are also influential--and Cuba, that rather astounding remnant of the communist era--is also influential (especially as to its provision of universal free health care and education). All of these many influences make the Latin American leftist democracy movement a strong, healthy, vital movement and probably unstoppable.
And possibly the most interesting part of it is its environmentalism. Two of the leftist democracy countries have now amended their constitutions to include the rights of Mother Nature! The leader of one of those--Evo Morales, the first Indigenous president of Bolivia, a coca leaf farmer, a peasant, leader of the coca leaf farmers union--is the one who has stood up most courageously, in world forums, and demanded action on climate change.
As our empire spins out of control--with four wars in progress, additional wars no doubt in the planning stages, and increasing poverty and enervation (boring culture) here--the inspiration for the future--the ideas and energy needed to restore our planet and further human progress--may well come from somewhere else.
In Michael Pollan's book, "The Botany of Desire," he discusses how Peruvian peasant farmers prevented potato plague, on their farm lands, that hit Ireland with such devastating consequences, when ONE variety of potato was imported to Ireland and the starving masses became dependent on it. The Peruvians plant MANY varieties of potato--thus, if a disease strikes one, they have many others to rely on. A simple lesson that applies everywhere and to everything. A SCIENTIFIC lesson, from very intelligent people, who probably couldn't read, but were great observers and passers along of knowledge. And a POLITICAL lesson, from the same. VARIETY is the key to life, to learning and to progress. It is the key to human happiness. And monomaniacal systems--whether it's the pope or a corporate cabal of billionaire fatcats or a "Caesar" imposing them on others--WILL decay and collapse and fall--quite possibly, in our case now--that of humanity and our biosphere--forever.
Maybe one part of the solution to saving our planet will rise in Latin America, out of this vibrant tumult that is demanding equality. Maybe the technology to implement the terraforming that we must do, here and elsewhere, will arise somewhere else (China? Japan?), and the two will come together--respect for Pachama and knowledge of her ways combined with high tech energy conversion--via something started here (by the Pentagon!): the Internet. And maybe some innovation by a child benefiting from the Chavez government's provision of computers to every schoolchild will help spread new forms of entertainment and happiness that are more satisfying to the human soul than consumerism.
We shouldn't be pro- or anti-technology--just as we shouldn't deny the contributions of the Roman Empire--or the U.S. empire--to civilization. We need a bigger view--of history and of present reality, and of our imaginings of the future.
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