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The ‘most advanced’ civilization and the elongation of history

On the little we know about our history and lots we make up

I. The ‘most advanced’ civilization’

Besides all pre-fabricated stories laughing at our naivety when we brag about being ‘the most advanced civilization’, we still have a lot to ponder on how been ‘so advanced’ we have…

  • consumed all the air even that of the neighbour’s
  • sucked as much as we could resources from the planet surpassing any vampire from the bloodiest commercial movies of that type
  • deforested forests until staying as moors
  • flattened nature with so much cement that we were close to ingest it as ‘soft drink’
  • produced the most assorted selection of toxins to feed ourselves and we extinguish each other so there will be no one to turn off the light
  • institutionalized hunger worshipping ‘growth indexes’ together with poverty so the business is ever present on our table
  • incroporated ‘competition’ as a religion to destroy with the elegance of white gloves
  • drawn frontiers so small kings play ‘war’ without truce nor glory fighting over little papers and consciences
  • replaced the right to live for ‘progress’, ‘modernity’, ‘development’ and co.
  • turned oceans and our surroundings into dumps and as if that was not enough we have filled sidereal space with tin
  • ‘created’ in a dubious way knowledge which in order to perpetuate it we almost extinguished all trees and besides we put it in a safe place so it becomes a ‘valuable’ merchandise only for the few
  • handed over our crops to a robotic armies that turned food into monstrosities that even domestic animals reject and plants start to defend themselves

Anyway, someone could insist that we are almost on the thresholds of high technology… but the vulnerability of that technology before climate ravages or any disaster | attack is so high that in 10 seconds we could go back to minus zero.

 

II. The ‘most advanced’ compared to what?

In case that reluctantly we accepted for a moment that we are the ‘most advanced’ civilization, we would need to be clear about which are those ‘less advanced’ than us.

  • Most official chronologies do not go further than 3,100CE and that’s not longer than 5,000 years. (Coincidences come and go with religions maintaining that life started around that time).
  • Criteria to denominate one or another ‘civilization’ in that period varies as much as the concept of civilization itself. It’s hard to unify that criteria with competitive stairs that need to demolish the other one in order to be
  • We hardly know a little bit of those 5 ‘civilizations’ and with many gaps in between. Comparing does not fit
  • Parameters to accept others as ‘civilization’ is or was filtered by an excluding scale of the different: ‘salvages’ and ‘barbarians’ are the favorite ones, and if they had no ‘written’ language just like theirs they were evicted from ‘learned’ categories, religion only if it is/was approved socially by official ranks, political powers only in case they were similar and their conventions first as moral recipes and then as ‘laws’ that made/make sure no one dares to defy ‘established orders’. In that way anyone can be better than others, it’s enough to decree ‘if you do not do as I do, I am better’.
  • Not until recently we still kept repeating in parrot-fashion that Columbus ‘discovered’ ‘America’. Someone erased the pages of crossings from Vikings, Chinese, Polynesian, Phoenicinas and many other peoples in countless previous times, including those of their contemporaries who did not come in the name of the royal crown as well as those peoples that had contact among them way before. History gaps avoid comparisons way too pointless.
  • From the little we know and the sufficient we have seen, we still have not overcome sciences and technologies applied to colossal constructions left by civilizations 5,000 years ago or much  older. It’s not about size, but of efficiency, techniques, complex calculus, etc. Most of them are always related to celestial bodies, stars, etc., which still bedazzle ‘functional’ visions that tag them as ‘mystery’ instead of giving credit to other ‘civilizations’ capacities because in that case the cliché of how ‘advanced’ we are would stumble down.
  • No need to speak about lasting capacity of those millenial constructions, today most of ours, without maintenance, would hardly make a century.
  • Another crushing factor showing us the size of our lack of knowledge in order to compare ourselves with other ‘civilizations’, is that we barely know the name of peoples from our time. Sufficient evidence to see we have named even with generic names those peoples which shared only a language, or another feature, but from then on only the echo repeating their presence sometimes
  • The notion of ‘primitive’ civilizations, with the stick on their hand and an ‘under-development’ that was barely enough to feed themselves, is nothing more than that: a notion. Now that we have evidence of their age doubling, tripling what was sustained by archaeological remains, artefacts, tools, fossils and others, who lived like us, had science and applied in levels we still do not understand.

Besides, which is the certainty we could have of what’s told by official history? Some facts were erased, others patched up between the lines, other decorated to suit them to their interests and other distorted to silence the inevitable. Our ‘advanced civilization’ played so much with its history that for someone from abroad or another time would be very difficult to discern what we were, what we made up and what we wanted to be.

Itś not an option either to enter the field of values, principles, morals, ethics and other dances for comparison, for each people had or has its own cultures, conceptions and circumstances. Those doors opened selfishly to show how ‘exotic’ others can be or to fall into ‘circus’ for vacation entertainment, are also used to collect bestiaries of alleged sacrifices, cannibalisms and killings that for our distinguished ‘civilized’ ones who kill with sophisticated style gives them the right nowadays to distort, judge and invent cheap horror stories.

In the previous 5,000 years where our official history comes from, we do not even know if we are just one civilization or many that met each other, or what is that we ‘classify’ as civilization. In short, we have no ground to make comparisons and say ours is ‘advanced’.

 

III. The elongation of history

Within those 5,000 years of official history we also have problems to define, catalogue, classify and tag ourselves. We have gaps even within the last 500 years; for the millennium they expand even further.

Did you hear about the woman that was Pope? She has a name: the Pope Joan. It happened around the year 855 and to our days there is so much literature, recent by the way, validating or invalidating the fact that doubts spread leaving gaps on historical moments of our own ‘civilization’. Just 1,156 years ago…

The other 4 millennium, gaps are larger, names cover other names, territories blur, making way too ephemeral the line between realities, myths and fantasies.

Anyway, those 5,000 years were too constrained for history and decided to make herself the favour so we can see her inconceivable immensity, where 5,000 years are not even the thousandth part of one of her billions of sighs.

When millennium reached millions of years and then went on to billion years, resonated the ‘posible’ antiquity of the planet (till now estimated in 4,5 billion years), or the universe (13,7 billion years). And then we knew we know nothing, and on top of that our 5,000 years are not even visible in the billions preceding us.

That elongation of history erases any intention to denominate ourselves the ‘most advanced civilization’, our thumb is not even registered. And beyond time, periods or eras, which are not even lineal but cyclical, returning each one on its own turn or cycle not on its accumulated count, also enlarged and widened the endless possibilities of the little we know about ourselves:

  • We still don’t know where our history starts or the histories of different peoples populating us
  • We ignore where we come from, if we sprouted from here or here we were transfered or where we fabricated ourselves
  • Perceptions we have on ‘species’ are so vague as our own ‘species’, ‘gender’ or ‘descendants’, to the point that now appear new ‘species’ we don’t know how to classify
  • Certainties on matter, elements, forces and others governing us find additional approaches and factors, like what is unseen, in some cases far more determinant than what is seen
  • There is no science undergoing deep questioning on their paradigms, theories, conceptualizations, methods and methodologies
  • The elongated billion years of our forgotten history overwhelms us daily with information and knowledge probably reaching only very few people, will take time to be ‘official’ and worst to reach ‘teaching books’, let’s not speak about assimilating them into daily life… a ‘backward civilization’, to say it somehow, as far as knowledge of itself is concerned
  • Gaps becoming oceans when dealing with how were humans millions of years ago, and if we escape lineal history, if they were related with this planet, world or cosmos or, there are others which are already being spoken of
  • We just started to find different relationships among species, animals, vegetables, minerals or of any type, in their interdependence within eco-systems, instead of ‘worshippings’ or paternalistic ‘care’ of Mother Earth
  • We do not even understand our own species, if it’s one or more, or if we are many living together or if we all are different. There go running fissures even to social strata established more on conventions than following the nature of who we are
  • What before was on the verge of myth and legend, now starts to turn into scientific evidence, like the forests under the Antartica, giant animals appearing as ‘monsters’ and which are not only part of protohistory but also of contemporary history, or, geographies of giant masses of land where there is water now which filled the pages of fabulous stories
  • Knowledge that keeps appearing on other forms of reproduction among beings where gender nor science fiction have presented without ‘machines’ and today we know they are natural processes

The elongation of history avoids any comparison with other ‘civilizations’, to the extreme of dissolving into drops whatever constitute the concept of ‘civilization’. And when we verify that whicever is this ‘civilization’, it’s at the mercy of destructive forces which put in the horizon fear and unload bullets with the satisfaction of knowing their safes are growing, no argument on ‘advanced’ fits here…

Further down, some links published in January and specially February 2011, related to the elongation of history where the dance of millions and billions of years report we just barely woke up from the long dream which dozed off the memory of who we are.

Links do not follow any specific order, they are less than 10% of all the information compiled during these two months, the language in which are written were kept in the link and their selection does not obey any order. It’s just a sample of the immensities we still need to remember and the long road we still need to walk to integrate all this into our daily life. (If you have any problems with any link, please do not hesitate to let me know and I will try to send alternatives).