THE WATER IS WIDE

When your method of survival is hunter-gatherer, you spend your entire time in that job.  Everyone does it all day, every day, and there is little time for anything else.  You must move from place to place as the grain and roots are gone and the game travels further from you.  Then imagine that you come to a place where food is so plentiful that you can stay and learn to renew it each year.  It is so easy and so abundant, that it is no longer necessary for everyone to work at the production of food.  You even have enough to feed domesticated animals rather than having to hunt them. There can be a division of labor where some will build permanent homes, some will learn to travel on the water in boats, learning the trader’s art with other tribes and sharing knowledge.  There will even be leisure to decorate what is built and to think of other things than just survival.  As the complexity of life grows, it will be neces­sary to find some way to save in­formation to pass it along to coming gen­erations, as all parents wish to do to make the lives of their children eas­ier than theirs had been, and in the pride of accomplishment and the desire for it to last, and so they will invent writing and history, since oral tradition, though it can be very accurate over many generations, can only do so much to save the history and culture of a people.  It takes perma­nent records and the ability to share knowl­edge with someone you will never see to build on that knowledge and make it grow.  With leisure and the ability to store knowl­edge, and contact, through the ease of transportation that the river offers, with many others, knowledge ex­pands, specu­lative thought grows, the arts become more complex and more important to the people.  With larger groups and different spheres of action within a single com­mu­nity, systems of morals and ethics must also be put in place, and more complex reli­gions and philosophies are required to establish meaning.  A differ­ent kind of living is necessary, where people must specialize and become more dependent on one an­other and on the community.  Each has his or her own different contribution to make, which is supported by the contri­butions of others.  Both shall row.... Working together we can cross the water where one alone would fail.  All shall row in a civi­lized society, but in different ways, in different tasks.  The human race has risen to civilization.  In the great river valleys that cradled it all these things arose indepen­dently and differently.  Writing, religion, mathematics, art, po­etry, music and archi­tecture, and the be­ginnings of science were alive, different but vital, everywhere that people had the time to create civilization.

Then because they had time and the beginnings of technology and of the fruits of specialized knowledge that works to­gether to create more complexity and more ad­ventures, their cultures began to spread — down the rivers and even across seas, to influence and civilize oth­ers at greater and greater distances.  The riches of civiliza­tion became clear and were either adopted or stolen by what­ever other humans they touched.  It was a practical way of living that became something more: a way of life that was able to nurture the life of the spirit.

It has become somewhat unfashion­able these days to say nice things about civiliza­tion.  Not only are we to honor the natural world on which we live and which is necessary for that life, we seem to think that civilization is merely a spoiler of that natural world.  Cities mar the landscape, and human beings, we seem to think, would probably be natu­rally good if we were not warped by liv­ing in such a way that we are out of touch with the rhythms of the earth.  And we do do terrible things to it and to its other denizens through pollution and the con­sumption of re­sources.  We do con­sume and we do pollute, and it will be necessary to do what we can to improve that situation simply for the sake of our own continued survival, but we dishonor ourselves when we forget that it is the civilized rather than the natural human being who provides most of the gifts of the spirit.  It was not untouched na­ture but civilization that produced the phi­losophy of Plato, the ethical theories of Confucius, the sym­phonies of Beethoven, the sculpture of Michelangelo, the mar­vels of ancient and modern architecture, and of the com­puter and the airplane. .

  How­ever, much of what we read and hear these days celebrates the uncivilized and dishonors the graces of civility, of the intellectual life, of cooperation and of trust among human beings — all of which are re­quired if civilization is to continue, all of which can be gone if we continue to de­value it.  I have heard some people say that a new dark age is coming. If so, it will be a strange one. In the last dark ages in the west much of our culture was only preserved in monasteries, and, oddly enough, by the Arabs who were influenced by the Byzantine Empire, and through whom it was returned to us in what may have been the only positive consequence of the Crusades. This time nothing will be lost. Everything is saved, everything is accessible through the new technology of the internet, and yet there is more ignorance, more indifference to history, more willingness to believe without evidence or proof. They call medieval times not only the dark ages but sometimes the age of faith. Although we have more facilities than ever before to discern the true from the false, it seems to me that this is as much an age of faith in its popular sense of blind belief. People seem to be willing to believe almost anything they read or hear, and dismiss with indifference anything that may contradict what they wish to believe or that even might teach them to think.

Who will save our ancient wisdom this time, if the doomsayers are right and the barbarian is even now within the gates? Sometimes I think they may be right when I look at our increasing illiter­acy, the breakdown of institutions, which keep stability in society, and the rising use of violence rather than the various tools of civilized negotiations to settle disputes.  If it is true, I suspect that it is people like us, the most highly civilized of citizens, who have assisted in opening the gate and welcoming them in.

If we have, it has been completely unintentional and for the most idealistic reasons, but will have been done by our ceasing to honor civilization enough, seeking out its flaws, and in our attempts to address them, doing damage to its virtues. We have re­jected much of our heritage, the basis for any continuing civilization, naming it racist and sexist. Much of it is, and yet we lose too much understanding of who we are when we will not learn what we have been, and when we reject all of an individual’s thinking because one concept or one attitude is offensive, we lose far more than we gain. We have, in the name of compassion and freedom, encouraged women and girls to bear children alone without the means or abil­ity to rear them prop­erly, endangering the stability of society. In the name of a dis­torted notion of equal­ity and equal access we have de­graded our educational sys­tems; in the name of ecol­ogy we have sometimes almost given up the effort to keep our cities habitable for the poor; and in the name of hon­oring different value systems, we have thrown away the standards which keep us from the vio­lence and ignorance of the barbarian. The unintended consequences of applying our highest values without wisdom can sometimes be problematic, even devastating.

An incident that seemed to me to show how we, ourselves, might bear some re­sponsibility for the dishonoring of civilization happened few years ago when a visiting Unitarian Universalist told me that although his children no longer attend church they are living out their Unitarian Universalist principles by going into a place where nature is unspoiled and living in harmony with the earth by doing or­ganic garden­ing and respecting all living things — except, from what I could gather, people.  I realize that people will say and think al­most anything to rational­ize their disap­pointment with their chil­dren’s lifestyle choices, but what he said seemed to me to be somewhat relevant to the re­cent focuses of the wider movement’s religious education.  If that is living out their Unitarian Universalist principles, our church schools have omit­ted something.  We’re doing well by nature, which is, I agree, a good thing, but we seem to have left out honoring our heritage of civilization.  If this is true in the wider society, and the values that are taught are actually those opposed to civilization, then those who predict a com­ing dark age may be right.