The collapse

You've undoubtedly heard British philosopher Thomas Hobbes's famous quote that in the past, our forebears' lives were "nasty, poor, brutish, and short."  That's certainly true in my ancestors' case, given that just about all of them were poverty-stricken French and Scottish peasants who uprooted and came over to North America because they thought for some reason it would be lots better to be poverty-stricken peasants over here.

I've had at least some inkling about how difficult life was back then since my history classes in college, but it was always in a purely academic way.  While my parents weren't wealthy by any stretch, we never wanted for food on the table, and any struggles they had paying the bills were well hidden and not talked about.  As an adult, I went through a long period in my life when I was the sole member of the family with a paying job, and it was scary to think that if I'd lost it, we would have been screwed; but I never really was in any danger of that.  As long as I kept showing up to school every day and teaching my classes with a reasonable level of competence, I could count on being able to pay the mortgage.

Hundreds of years ago, though, that simply wasn't true for the vast majority of humanity.  I think what really brought home to me the precarious existence most people led was when I read the book The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History by Brian Fagan (which I highly recommend).  For most of human history, people have literally been one bad harvest season from starvation and one sudden epidemic from being wiped out en masse.  All it took was a single prolonged drought, early frost, or extended period of cool, rainy weather spoiling the crops, and people had nothing to fall back on.

No wonder so many of them were superstitious.  It's easy to put your faith in magical thinking when your lives hinge on a set of conditions you don't understand, and couldn't control even if you did.

What is striking, though, is how insulated the leaders of countries have always felt from the effects of all of this -- often to the extent of ignoring them completely.  There's an argument to be made that it was a series of weather-related poor harvests that lit the tinder box in the French Revolution (and many of the leaders didn't find out their mistake until they were being led to the guillotine).  But to take a less well-known example, let's look at a paper that came out last week in the journal Science Advances about a different civilization, the fascinating Classical Mayan culture, which lasted over six hundred years -- from about 250 to 900 C. E. -- completely dominating the Yucatán Peninsula in southern Mexico and northern Central America before collapsing with astonishing speed.  Cities were abandoned to the jungle, the elaborate building and carving stopped entirely, and the entire region went largely silent until the rise of the city of Mayapan in the twelfth century.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons User:PhilippN, Calakmul - Structure I, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Scientists from the University of Cambridge did a study of the chemical composition of the oxygen isotope ratios in the limestone deposited on stalagmites in caves in the northern Yucatán, which can be read in layers like tree rings.  Oxygen isotope ratios are a good proxy for rainfall; oxygen-18:oxygen-16 ratios tend to drop during the rainy season, so an overall low 18:16 ratio is a strong signal of drought.

And what the scientists found was that during the time between 871 C.E. and 1021 C.E. there was a severe thirteen-year drought, and three shorter (five to six year) droughts.  Water supplies dried up, crops failed, trade stopped, and the inevitable happened -- the common people blamed their leaders.  Violent revolution ensued, and in the end, a civilization that had dominated the region for centuries collapsed completely.

It's easy to think something like this couldn't happen to us, but right now we're in the middle of one of the most dramatic climate shifts on record, with global average temperatures rising faster than they did during the terrifying Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, 55 million years ago.  And you know what the Trump regime's response to this is?

Just last week they announced plans to deliberately destroy the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, one of our chief climate monitoring satellites.  Not because it's malfunctioning; it's working fine.  Not because it costs lots of money; it's already paid for.

No, the reason they want to destroy the satellite is the same as the reason they stopped keeping track of new COVID cases during the height of the pandemic.  If you don't measure something, you can pretend it's not happening.

Destroying the OCO won't stop the effects of anthropogenic climate change, of course.  It'll just prevent us from seeing them coming.

So I may have misspoken at the beginning, in leading you to believe that our ancestors were any different from us with regards to the fragility of our existence -- and the tendency to fall back on unscientific thinking.  But let us hope that the ignorance and greed of our current elected officials won't return us to another era of nasty, poor, brutish, and short lives, where the risk of starvation was never far away.  

This time, though, if it happens it won't be an unfortunate result of living in a world we don't understand.  It will be a self-inflicted wound caused by trusting power-hungry people who know perfectly well what they are doing, but value short-term expediency over the long-term habitability of the planet.

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The ghost children

It's often difficult to look at other cultures, especially ones in the distant past, in a dispassionate way, without making value judgments about them based on the way we do things in our own.

I've written recently about the Roman Empire, which is a culture a lot of people in the western world revere for its dedication to art, architecture, and literature.  The fact remains, however, that they were (from our standpoint) classist and sexist, had no problem with slavery, and punished people for minor offenses in a way most of us would describe as extremely brutal.  You can't laud them for their (very real) accomplishments without simultaneously opening your eyes to the many ways in which their culture, from a modern perspective, breaks all manner of standards for conventional morality and ethics.  Those practices were as much an integral part of Roman society as were the beautiful things they created.

I'm not saying we should condone what they did, but it's important to try to understand it. 

Another example, and the reason the topic comes up, is the Classical Mayan civilization, which lasted from the third to the ninth century C.E., at which point the government collapsed from what appears to be internecine warfare triggered by a massive drought and famine.  The Mayans had some traditions that are difficult for us to comprehend -- a good example is the ritual ball game.  It was played on a court ruled by the Lords of Xibalba (the underworld), and so was considered to be a liminal space somewhere between the real world and the spirit world.  The losers were often sacrificed -- but it was considered to be an honor to lose your life in a ball game, and it assured you a high place in the next plane of existence.

Strange, perhaps.  Although given our adulation of sports superstars, maybe it's not as far away from our culture as it might appear at first.

Even further from our norms is their practice of ritual child sacrifice.  A paper in Nature last week describes the discovery in Chichén Itzá of 64 skeletons, mostly young boys, who were apparently sacrificed to the gods -- most intriguingly, the DNA evidence shows that many of them were closely related to each other, and a few were pairs of identical twins.  There's a legend recorded in the Mayan sacred document Popol Vuh of a pair of hero twins fighting (and winning) against hostile deities, and it's possible that this is why the twins were chosen for sacrifice.  The children died toward the end of the Classic Period, and the conjecture, based upon inscriptions in the tunnels where the skeletons were found, is that the sacrifices were to the rain god Chaac.

Understandable considering what was unfolding climatically at the time.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata, Escritura maya, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Unfortunately, too little is known for sure about pre-contact Mayan practices to be all that certain about the context in which these sacrifices were made.  The Christian missionaries who came into what is now Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala did far too thorough a job of stamping out indigenous beliefs and destroying the Native people's artifacts and writings to have very much to go on.  But what's certain is that child sacrifice was widely practiced -- and not of captured children of conquered enemies, but of their own offspring, leaving behind these pathetic remains, the ghost children of a long-gone civilization.

It's hard to fathom.  "Protect your children" is one of the foundational moral values of most of the world's cultures.  But what I wonder is, what if they believed this was protecting them -- dedicating them to the gods, assuring their place in the afterlife, just as the losers of the ball game believed?  Belief can make people act oddly -- at least, oddly from our perspective.  If the climate was careening toward drought, crops failing, wells and sinkholes drying up, maybe parents felt it was an honor to offer their children up, both for the sake of improving their fate in the next world but for the good of the entire community.

I'm not saying I understand it, not really.  This sort of thing still strikes me as the darkest side of what superstition can drive people to do.  But you have to wonder how an advanced alien civilization would view our own culture.  How many of our own accepted practices would horrify and disgust them?  We routinely turn our faces away from homelessness, poverty, and hunger in our own communities.  The same people who proudly call themselves "pro-life" and follow a deity who said "Let the little children come unto me" regularly vote against programs to help our own society's poor children obtain access to food and medical care.  We shrug our shoulders at famine and war and suffering, as long as the ones affected are The Other -- a different skin color, language, ethnic identity, or religion than our own.  We marginalize people -- in some countries, imprison or execute them -- because they are LGBTQ+.

Once again, perhaps we're not so different from the cultures of the past as we'd like to believe.

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Voices from the jungle

When I was a teenager, I was fascinated with the Mayans.  The history and culture -- what we knew of it at the time -- was fascinating enough, but I think what really captured me was the unique way the language was written.

At that time, very little of the writing had been successfully deciphered, and much of what had been was tentative at best.  In fact, for some time the task was that most daunting of linguistic puzzles; an unknown script coding for unknown sounds in an unknown language.  The surmise that the glyphs primarily represented not just a single language, but two -- the extinct Ch'otli' language and the extant Yucatec language -- didn't help matters.  Complicating things further was the fact that it turns out that similar to Japanese hiragana and kanji, some of the glyphs represent syllables and others represent entire words.  The team effort to completely decipher Mayan glyphs took well over a hundred years, culminating in a paper in 1986 that allowed just about every classic Mayan inscription to be read.

The most daunting thing is that the patterns connecting spelling to pronunciation were convoluted.  Some words had "echo vowels" -- vowels repeated from the previous syllable when written, but not pronounced (e.g. yop, leaf, written using the syllables yo-po).  Other written-but-not-pronounced vowels were "disharmonic" -- not the same as the preceding syllable -- and the rules governing which syllabic glyph to use are abstruse to say the least.  (Of course, in reality, the Mayans have nothing on English for bizarre spelling-to-pronunciation correspondences; consider how -ough is pronounced in the words rough, through, thorough, ought, drought, and hiccough.  I even have an idea of why that mess happened historically, and I still think it's ridiculous.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata, Escritura maya, CC BY-SA 4.0]

And, of course, the main difficulty was the paucity of examples of the script, mostly due to the Spanish, who came in during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and proceeded to destroy as many of the heathen inscriptions they could get their hands on.  People like Diego de Landa, bishop of the Yucatán in the late sixteenth century, burned just about all the Mayan codices, and his belated efforts to preserve what was known about the script and the languages they represented were half-hearted at best.  Even so, historian and linguist William Gates -- in what has to be preserved forever in the annals of chutzpah -- said, "ninety-nine percent of what we today know of the Mayas, we know as the result either of what Landa has told us... or have learned in the use and study of what he told."

Well, if you count that he destroyed ninety-nine percent of the inscriptions first, then yeah, ninety-nine percent of the remaining one percent were preserved by de Landa and his friends in the Inquisition.

It's heartening, though, that five hundred years later, we find remnants of that lost civilization.  (There are still people who speak Mayan languages today, but it's undeniable the Spanish pretty well obliterated the culture of an entire people.)  Just last week, it was announced that some explorers trying to map out caves in the Yucatán stumbled upon three pieces of pottery dating back to the Late Postclassic Period (1200-1550 C.E.).  One of them was in fragments -- crushed when it was caught in between growing tree roots -- but the other two are in remarkably good condition.  The Mayans had a positive fascination for caves, and thought (like many early civilizations) that they represented the entrance to the underworld, a place called Xibalba (literally, "place of fright").  Just as the Greeks did at the cave of the Delphic Oracle, the Mayans brought offerings and sacrifices into caves to appease the gods and spirits of the nether world, and it's thought these three vessels were probably examples of those ritual gifts.

Even by comparison to other cultures' ideas about the horrors of the afterlife, Xibalba is impressively awful.  The lords of Xibalba seemed to enjoy causing pain and humiliation, and sent human spirits after death into a series of tests in various "houses" -- Dark House (completely pitch black, as you might have guessed), Rattling House (ice cold, with pounding hailstorms), Jaguar House (guess what lived there, and were dreadfully hungry), Bat House (ditto), Razor House (filled with blades that moved around on their own), and Hot House (which was on fire).  Just the names of the gods of Xibalba would be enough to dissuade me from ever going there (not, I suppose, that you had a choice).  There were:

• Xiquiripat ("Flying Scab")
• Cuchumaquic ("Gathered Blood")
• Ahalpuh ("Pus Demon")
• Ahalgana ("Jaundice Demon")
• Chamiabac ("Bone Staff")
• Chamiaholom ("Skull Staff")
• Ahalmez ("Sweepings Demon") and Ahaltocob ("Stabbing Demon") (who teamed up to hide in the dust of unswept parts of your house, then jumped out and stabbed you to death, which is a pretty good incentive to keep the floor clean)

Which definitely makes me wonder who spent their time making this shit up.  I mean, if you're gonna come up with wild tales, at least leave out the sentient razor blades and pus demons.

So it's a fascinating culture, but one I'm rather glad I don't belong to.  The Judeo-Christian hell I had to contend with when I was a kid growing up in the Catholic Church was bad enough.

Be that as it may, it's pretty cool that Diego de Landa and his ilk didn't silence all of these distant voices from the jungle.  I've been lucky enough to visit that part of the world twice, and the pyramids and stone temples they left behind are awe-inspiring.  Perhaps there are still more relics out there in the rain forest waiting to be discovered -- and which will give us another lens into a vanished civilization.

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I've mentioned before how fascinated I am with the parts of history that still are largely mysterious -- the top of the list being the European Dark Ages, between the fall of Rome and the re-consolidation of central government under people like Charlemagne and Alfred the Great.  Not all that much was being written down in the interim, and much of the history we have comes from much later (such as History of the Kings of Britain, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, chronicling the events of the fourth through the eighth centuries C.E. -- but written in the twelfth century).

"Dark Ages," though, may be an unfair appellation, according to the new book Matthew Gabriele and David Perry called The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe.  Gabriele and Perry look at what is known of those years, and their contention is that it wasn't the savage, ignorant hotbed of backwards superstition many of us picture, but a rich and complex world, including the majesty of Byzantium, the beauty and scientific advancements of Moorish Spain, and the artistic genius of the master illuminators found in just about every Christian abbey in Europe.

It's an interesting perspective.  It certainly doesn't settle all the questions; we're still relying on a paucity of actual records, and the ones we have (Geoffrey's work being a case in point) sometimes being as full of legends, myths, and folk tales as they are of actual history.  But The Bright Ages goes a long way toward dispelling the sense that medieval Europe was seven hundred years of nothing but human misery.  It's a fascinating look at humanity's distant, and shadowed, past.

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