Forget Me Not

Reading Jane Jacobs final book, about the impending dark age, got me thinking about some of the research in Mann’s 1491. One of Jacobs’ themes is the potential for “cultural amnesia,” or the withering away of useful knowledge as it was no longer transferred between generations. The Native American parallel is breathtaking; as losses to strange and unexplained epidemics mounted to the eighty- and ninety-percent ranges, their world must have been one of untrained apprentices trying to fill the shoes of aged experts, skeleton crews trying to support complex infrastructure maintenance, and a whole generation suddenly cut off from the hard-won knowledge of generations past that had been the key to survival. Probably a great feather in the cap of the group selection camp (see No Australopithecus . . . below.) Add to all of this the inevitable civil wars as a) these superstitious people looked for someone to blame, and b) complex balances of power were suddenly disrupted, and the catastrophe makes Gibbon’s work on Rome look like a walk in the park. Apparently the Jamestown and Plymouth crowds were only allowed to stay because there was no longer the strength to repel them, and the local Indians were looking for any allies they could get. The irony.

How much, then, of culture can be written down? What percentage of the population would North America have to lose to reach a point of non-renewal? There has already been a loss of information simply from its unpopularity; from craft skills to architectural ornament to the underlying logic of cross-ventilation and the meanings of traditional ceremony. Tzonis wrote an inquiry into the meaning of Classical ornament vis-à-vis pagan religion that’s always worried me in its implication for forgetfulness – and the danger of the Taliban and their North American equivalents.

If dogma is the enemy of longevity is tradition its ally? At what point should inquiry yield to longstanding trial and error? Where does the enlightenment fit into all of this?