5 ms·

Toward a Manual for Civilization

51 points by triplesec 13y ago

triplesec 13y ago
Precis of a new detail the last HN post in 2010. They will be seeking suggestions from all over the world for a Library of Ltility http://blog.longnow.org/02011/04/25/the-library-of-utility/ http://blog.longnow.org/02011/04/25/the-library-of-utility/ Seems to me as if it might be fun to come up with some arguments for what might constitute an optimally efficient booklist. "It would be a very selective library. It would not contain the world’s great literature, or varied accounts of history, or deep knowledge of ethnic wonders, or speculations about the future. It has no records of past news, no children’s books, no tomes on philosophy. It contains only seeds. Seeds of utilitarian know-how. How to recreate the infrastructure and technology of civilization so far "It is an interesting thought exercise to ask yourself what information you might want if you had to truly start over. "And in our forthcoming Salon space at Fort Mason Center, we’ll house approximately 3,500 volumes in a floor-to-ceiling library featuring carefully selected books that could be used to help restart civilization. We are not trying to be apocalyptic or at all predictive, but the conversation that is inspired by this exercise seems to be endless and valuable. "We will collaboratively curate this corpus with Long Now’s members and the public. We understand that by definition we ourselves will have a western-centric viewpoint of what might be collected, but as the project gets going we plan to seek submissions that represent views from as many cultural viewpoints as possible."
- VLM 13y ago
  "It would not contain the world’s great literature" Is there any point in providing instructions to create machines for broadcasting information, ranging from printing presses to the internet, if you don't provide a source of formulaic drama (Shakespeare?) to keep it economically viable? Can you have a broadcast TV infrastructure without something like formulaic sequels of Shakespeare to lure the people in? Or if not him, someone's work? Its like providing blueprints, and diagrams, and videos, and textbooks describing how to make a chicken coop, and then after they finish studying and methodically replicate our work and build a million really awesome chicken coops, they ask "OK we have these very nice chicken coops as per your designs... now, tell us what exactly is a chicken?"
  - triplesec 13y ago
    I suspect a set of new societies would create its own dramas and ideas fairly quickly. I'd agree that the Greek and classic and some modern insightful writings and plays might be useful nonetheless!
MarkTee 13y ago
Sounds like a high tech version of the Georgia Guidestones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones
- VLM 13y ago
  Or an expressly non-literature version of the Harvard Classics from about a century ago. Trying to keep it utilitarian is going to be where most of the fuzzy lives...
opminion 13y ago
If the purpose were that the collection is minimal, which is not stated explicitly, it would be interesting to know which criteria to use when deciding which works to replace. For example, how to decide when a modern unifying textbook makes older books obsolete? Reaching consensus in such topics must be very difficult.
sparkie 13y ago
The problem with trying to write a manual of 'civilization' is that we don't know what it means to be civilized yet. The western world assumes it is civilized, but that's only because it has no idea what it's armies are really doing in other parts of the world (ie, mass murder), it's because people have no real understanding of how their tax money is stolen by the few, and because the media is dominated by those who are complicit in covering up those crimes. A manual for civilization, if we're going to assume that our current state is civilization, can be nothing other than manuals on warfare, population control and taxation. The rest of the structure arises as a consequence of those. If I were given the chance too bootstrap civilization, I'd definitely avoid being tainted by this trainwreck.
- kilroy123 13y ago
  I agree, about the public not really paying attention to what we do militarily in other parts of the world. However, haven't all the big civilizations of the world done the same? Romans, Greeks, British, and the US. Didn't ancient tribes in America and in Africa always war with other tribes? Maybe there is no such thing as civil. Maybe the closet thing is a world where every country is a true competent democracy.
  - sparkie 13y ago
    I wasn't necessarily singling out the western world as the perpetrators, but meant that the entire human history has been plagued by war, deception and control. Our current system is just a continuation of it, and until we can break free from that history, I don't think we can call ourselves civil. I don't think every 'country' in the world being a competent democracy is that either, because a country is a spoil of war. Nations exist only in our heads - they don't exist in the physical, natural world at all. Part of my point about rebooting civilization without being tainted by our system is to eliminate such misconceptions from the social consciousness, or rather, not plant them to begin with.
- mathgladiator 13y ago
  I think you are holding a very high bar for 'civilized'
bachback 13y ago
God, that is so sad. The first thing we have to get rid of this is extremely superficial notion of usefulness. Art and culture is there to inspire, to learn new things, not to be merely useful in a world limited by thought. When calculating machine came along people thought they were "useful" for replacing human beings called computers.
- emiliobumachar 13y ago
  Try to view it as an art project.
bazzargh 13y ago
"no children's books" If we don't teach children to read then the rest of the library is useless.
DanielBMarkham 13y ago
Civilization is the manner in which people interact over long periods of time. It's like climate -- a moving average. I don't think collecting books on farming or how to build a telegraph is going to do much in the way of instructing folks how to create a civilization. Sure, it might give them the technical details of how to do stuff, perhaps very important and utilitarian stuff like purify water, but a civilization does not spring from a collection of gadgets. Put a different way, for the Romans it wasn't the fact that they could re-channel rivers, build great stadiums, or maintain public roads that made them civilized. It was the fact that over long periods of time being a Roman carried with it special privileges and obligations. Being a Roman meant something. There were shared values and ways of doing things. These shared values and ways of doing things _led_ to all that other stuff, not the other way around. So a manual of civilization, to the degree one could be constructed, would be about priorities, principles, and attitudes. Not how to build a better spinning wheel.
TORIG-TG 13y ago
This is the premise of the science fiction book, Foundations. The human race is statistically expected to fall into a galaxy-wide "collapse" and a group tries to write a manual/encyclopedia of know how to be placed on every planet. http://www.amazon.com/Foundation-Novels-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0553293354 http://www.amazon.com/Foundation-Novels-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0553...
return0 13y ago
> after the fall of the great Egyptian, Mayan, and Roman empires we had evidence and examples of their engineering achievements all around us. But aqueducts or senate buildings are worthless without a society around them to maintain, contextualize and protect them. I think this highlights that their project is futile. Without a population willing to follow the Manual, it's useless. E.g., the ancient greek texts were lingering for millenia in monasterys before the collective frame of mind started reading them, and yet still, they didn't follow the Manual, they altered and upgraded it.

51 points by triplesec 13y ago

Precis of a new detail the last HN post in 2010. They will be seeking suggestions from all over the world for a Library of Ltility http://blog.longnow.org/02011/04/25/the-library-of-utility/ http://blog.longnow.org/02011/04/25/the-library-of-utility/ Seems to me as if it might be fun to come up with some arguments for what might constitute an optimally efficient booklist. "It would be a very selective library. It would not contain the world’s great literature, or varied accounts of history, or deep knowledge of ethnic wonders, or speculations about the future. It has no records of past news, no children’s books, no tomes on philosophy. It contains only seeds. Seeds of utilitarian know-how. How to recreate the infrastructure and technology of civilization so far "It is an interesting thought exercise to ask yourself what information you might want if you had to truly start over. "And in our forthcoming Salon space at Fort Mason Center, we’ll house approximately 3,500 volumes in a floor-to-ceiling library featuring carefully selected books that could be used to help restart civilization. We are not trying to be apocalyptic or at all predictive, but the conversation that is inspired by this exercise seems to be endless and valuable. "We will collaboratively curate this corpus with Long Now’s members and the public. We understand that by definition we ourselves will have a western-centric viewpoint of what might be collected, but as the project gets going we plan to seek submissions that represent views from as many cultural viewpoints as possible."

VLM 13y ago
"It would not contain the world’s great literature" Is there any point in providing instructions to create machines for broadcasting information, ranging from printing presses to the internet, if you don't provide a source of formulaic drama (Shakespeare?) to keep it economically viable? Can you have a broadcast TV infrastructure without something like formulaic sequels of Shakespeare to lure the people in? Or if not him, someone's work? Its like providing blueprints, and diagrams, and videos, and textbooks describing how to make a chicken coop, and then after they finish studying and methodically replicate our work and build a million really awesome chicken coops, they ask "OK we have these very nice chicken coops as per your designs... now, tell us what exactly is a chicken?"
- triplesec 13y ago
  I suspect a set of new societies would create its own dramas and ideas fairly quickly. I'd agree that the Greek and classic and some modern insightful writings and plays might be useful nonetheless!

MarkTee 13y ago

Sounds like a high tech version of the Georgia Guidestones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones

VLM 13y ago
Or an expressly non-literature version of the Harvard Classics from about a century ago. Trying to keep it utilitarian is going to be where most of the fuzzy lives...

opminion 13y ago

If the purpose were that the collection is minimal, which is not stated explicitly, it would be interesting to know which criteria to use when deciding which works to replace. For example, how to decide when a modern unifying textbook makes older books obsolete? Reaching consensus in such topics must be very difficult.

sparkie 13y ago

The problem with trying to write a manual of 'civilization' is that we don't know what it means to be civilized yet. The western world assumes it is civilized, but that's only because it has no idea what it's armies are really doing in other parts of the world (ie, mass murder), it's because people have no real understanding of how their tax money is stolen by the few, and because the media is dominated by those who are complicit in covering up those crimes. A manual for civilization, if we're going to assume that our current state is civilization, can be nothing other than manuals on warfare, population control and taxation. The rest of the structure arises as a consequence of those. If I were given the chance too bootstrap civilization, I'd definitely avoid being tainted by this trainwreck.

kilroy123 13y ago
I agree, about the public not really paying attention to what we do militarily in other parts of the world. However, haven't all the big civilizations of the world done the same? Romans, Greeks, British, and the US. Didn't ancient tribes in America and in Africa always war with other tribes? Maybe there is no such thing as civil. Maybe the closet thing is a world where every country is a true competent democracy.
- sparkie 13y ago
  I wasn't necessarily singling out the western world as the perpetrators, but meant that the entire human history has been plagued by war, deception and control. Our current system is just a continuation of it, and until we can break free from that history, I don't think we can call ourselves civil. I don't think every 'country' in the world being a competent democracy is that either, because a country is a spoil of war. Nations exist only in our heads - they don't exist in the physical, natural world at all. Part of my point about rebooting civilization without being tainted by our system is to eliminate such misconceptions from the social consciousness, or rather, not plant them to begin with.
mathgladiator 13y ago
I think you are holding a very high bar for 'civilized'

bachback 13y ago

God, that is so sad. The first thing we have to get rid of this is extremely superficial notion of usefulness. Art and culture is there to inspire, to learn new things, not to be merely useful in a world limited by thought. When calculating machine came along people thought they were "useful" for replacing human beings called computers.

emiliobumachar 13y ago
Try to view it as an art project.

bazzargh 13y ago

"no children's books" If we don't teach children to read then the rest of the library is useless.

DanielBMarkham 13y ago

Civilization is the manner in which people interact over long periods of time. It's like climate -- a moving average. I don't think collecting books on farming or how to build a telegraph is going to do much in the way of instructing folks how to create a civilization. Sure, it might give them the technical details of how to do stuff, perhaps very important and utilitarian stuff like purify water, but a civilization does not spring from a collection of gadgets. Put a different way, for the Romans it wasn't the fact that they could re-channel rivers, build great stadiums, or maintain public roads that made them civilized. It was the fact that over long periods of time being a Roman carried with it special privileges and obligations. Being a Roman meant something. There were shared values and ways of doing things. These shared values and ways of doing things _led_ to all that other stuff, not the other way around. So a manual of civilization, to the degree one could be constructed, would be about priorities, principles, and attitudes. Not how to build a better spinning wheel.

TORIG-TG 13y ago

This is the premise of the science fiction book, Foundations. The human race is statistically expected to fall into a galaxy-wide "collapse" and a group tries to write a manual/encyclopedia of know how to be placed on every planet. http://www.amazon.com/Foundation-Novels-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0553293354 http://www.amazon.com/Foundation-Novels-Isaac-Asimov/dp/0553...

return0 13y ago

> after the fall of the great Egyptian, Mayan, and Roman empires we had evidence and examples of their engineering achievements all around us. But aqueducts or senate buildings are worthless without a society around them to maintain, contextualize and protect them. I think this highlights that their project is futile. Without a population willing to follow the Manual, it's useless. E.g., the ancient greek texts were lingering for millenia in monasterys before the collective frame of mind started reading them, and yet still, they didn't follow the Manual, they altered and upgraded it.