When We Are No More

by Abby Smith Rumsey

  THE INEVITABLE INVENTION OF INFRASTRUCTURE

  The cuneiform, and writing in general, was invented to solve a practical problem: how to keep track of goods and services in an increasingly complicated society. But over time, the very success of writing created its own problems. The proliferation of tablets with valuable information led to the vexing questions of storage, security, preservation, and cataloging—an early instance of a Big Data management problem. When assembled en masse by central authorities, the tablets became a logistical challenge. Scribes encountered a predictable array of administrative questions: Where do we put all these tablets? How do we retrieve the ones we need? How do we know they are all safe and in order? Who is allowed to look at them?

  For a while, each question presented itself as a discrete problem that was probably answered ad hoc by the scribes who were busy at their tasks. But it is impractical to keep inventing solutions each time problems arise. Over time, routines developed around storage and retrieval, as well as each aspect of the writing process: how to prepare the tablets, how to make the styli, which shapes indicated which meanings, the layout of each tablet, whether the script was read from the bottom to the top or vice versa, from the left to the right or vice versa. Once created, conventions about who could read them and under what circumstances had to be laid out. Storage systems had the unenviable mandate to protect the tablets from fracture, breakage, and theft; at the same time they had to be arranged for ease of use. And when several hundred cuneiforms grew into several thousand, the simple system for search and retrieval that had worked well enough at one order of magnitude had to scale up by several more. The scribes needed unilateral decisions about filing them according to the date of acquisition, or the date of creation, or the topic that they covered, and so forth.

  The creation of organized knowledge was a slow, laborious process, born of the continuous iteration between problem and solution, ideas and technologies, one pushing the other and creating the familiar feedback loop of technical innovation. In each case, we see the same cycle of development, an ongoing dynamic of technical innovation in the service of practical problem solving, which in turn demands organizational and intellectual adaptations. Specially designed buildings staffed with specially trained experts arose organically to become core information infrastructure. The need to provide physical security, preservation, inventory control, cataloging, shelving schemes—these are all steps in the evolution of each recording medium that repeat themselves with every innovation, from clay tablets to silicon chips. As we strive to record more and more information in more compact ways, we inevitably create increased complexity, in the hopeful assumption that increased complexity is the same thing as progress. It seldom looks like that in the beginning.

  CULTURE IS MORE EFFICIENT THAN BIOLOGY

  As a mechanism of adaptation, culture is far more efficient than biology. Genetic material is more or less fixed at the time of conception. The genome does not acquire new information from an animal’s experiences of life. Learning modifies the nervous system of an animal, but not its DNA. The offspring of a learned animal, bacterium, or fungus will be born ignorant of what its parent knew. It will have to acquire that knowledge from scratch. From the perspective of culture, evolution itself looks like a very dumb system—uninformed by intelligence, indifferent to learning, profoundly wasteful. Every step in evolution is taken by chance, the result of a random mutation in the gene. An animal’s environment can shape how its genetic instruction book is translated into action and behavior. Some genes are turned on and others stay mute in response to stimuli from the world. But in contrast to the flexibility of human culture, genetic adaptability is stunningly slow.

  This also explains why the human capacity to transmit learning across multiple generations through the creation and transmission of knowledge objects is utterly freakish in Nature. That we can do so is itself a genetically encoded endowment, which means it is freakish but still completely natural. As anthropologist David Bidney noted,

  Man is by nature a cultural animal, since he is a self-cultivating, self-reflective, “self-conditioning” animal and attains to the full development of his natural potentialities, and exercises his distinctively human functions only in so far as he lives the cultural life. As contrasted with other animals whose range of development is biologically limited or circumscribed, man is largely a self-formed animal capable of the most diverse forms of activity.

  Our evolutionary niche is to be a generalist, capable of adapting to many different ecosystems. We come into the world incomplete and need to be programmed by the specific culture we are raised in to reach maturity. Because we have settled in so many diverse environments, it is not surprising that cultural distinctions can be so dramatic. What can be a delicacy in one food culture can be taboo in another. What one culture considers beautiful—women with extravagantly long necks, tiny feet, or waspish waists—can be seen by outsiders as grotesque. Before globalization, there were thousands of ways of being human, each with its own language, dress, kinship systems, counting methods, and food ways.

  We should not let the naturalness of human culture blind us to its dazzling power. Our ability to amass know-how over generations turns out to be a biological adaptation that trumps physical strength, speed, and size. Unlike other animals, we do not adapt to different environments by becoming different species. Even though we have spread across the globe and exhibit many physical adaptations that set us apart one from another—straight black hair versus curly red, dark skin versus pale, tall narrow frame versus short and big boned—we call ourselves in all our variety Homo sapiens.

  Instead we adapt to our different environments by developing different cultures, with distinct languages, cuisines, social structures, economic and political organizations, and belief systems. We have developed radically different iterations of the “human” in our efforts to adapt to environments as diverse as Arctic tundra, high plains, rainforests, and coastal zones. We all grow up in a culture, and that culture—even the fact that we are cultural creatures—is largely invisible to us until we encounter someone, some thing, or some idea that comes from a different culture. It is telling that before globalization, when cultures could live in perfect isolation one from another, it was common for those who traveled across climate zones, mountains, or oceans to report that the human beings they met there were not actually fully human. As they moved across the globe, European explorers discovered populations that were so alien to them that they viewed them as inferior versions of humankind. It was just as common for those encountering the Europeans to think they were not human at all, but demons, or occasionally gods.

  Because we are by nature culture-making creatures, distinctions we like to draw between what is natural and what is artificial or man-made are illusory at best. Culture mediates all of our experiences simply by providing each of us the basic template or mental model by which we interpret the world. Any feeling of there being a gap between humans and Nature is itself a by-product of culture. It is widespread in the developed countries of the West, but not in all parts of the world. We often blame the feeling of alienation from Nature on our technologies. But that feeling of separation existed well before the invention of computers, cars, and air-conditioning. Assigning blame to our tools and technologies is a by-product of secularization. Why we have that feeling is “explained” in Genesis as part of the human condition. But having rejected that explanation, we simply turned to technology as the culprit.

  But there was nothing accidental or unnatural about the invention of writing in Mesopotamia. It had to have come naturally to us, because writing was invented multiple times and in multiple places. The Egyptians, Chinese, and Mesoamericans each developed writing systems of astounding complexity and ingenuity quite independently of each other. Cultures coming into contact with these writing civilizations adopted what they found and adapted the script for their own purposes. Extending the reach and longevity of knowledge became a distinct competitive advan
tage not only over animals, but also over rival Homo sapiens.

  The strategic alliance between knowledge and power, record keeping and administering power intensified over the centuries of rising and falling empires in Mesopotamia. The Assyrian potentate Ashurbanipal, who ruled from 668 to ca. 627 B.C. and was by all accounts a learned man, amassed a library in his palace at Nineveh (across the Tigris River from present-day Mosul). Over thirty thousand tablets survive from the ruins of the royal library and are housed today in the British Museum in London. By then, the long life of recorded knowledge was already a given. People took for granted that artificial memory could respond to needs, desires, and ambitions that were equal in importance to survival as food and water. Among the many legal, administrative, and financial records of the Assyrian state, the royal library held tablets inscribed with medical cures, astrological and calendrical charts, magic spells, divinations, prayers, and poetry. Given the fact that these tablets outlived people for generations, they became the go-to medium with which to communicate with spirits from the past, record predictions of the future, and immortalize their own desire to cheat death. What is the earliest poem we have from the cuneiform era? The Epic of Gilgamesh, written in the second millennium B.C. It is the story of man seeking to live forever.

  CULTURE SLOWS THINGS DOWN AND SPEEDS THINGS UP

  Michel de Montaigne cautions us that nothing in life is fixed and forever. All is in constant flux. “We, and our judgment, and all mortal things go on flowing and rolling unceasingly. Thus nothing certain can be established about one thing by another, both the judging and the judged being in continual change and motion.” But memory helps in the adjustment. Autobiographical memory gives us a sense of who we are and provides continuity as we age. We filter information all of our lives, and as we age our filtering process changes too because, as Montaigne said, we change and the world changes. As we move through infancy, childhood, adolescence, maturity, and on into old age, the task of memory also changes. In the beginning of our lives, acquiring knowledge about the world and about ourselves is our primary task. Later in life, when we know ourselves and our world better, we experience fewer novelties, and the ones that we encounter are very often assimilated into previous similar experiences. Memory begins to focus less on learning new things than on integrating all that we have experienced and known to provide a sense of continuity between past and present selves. We ask ourselves how our lives turned out the way they did and examine past experiences in the light of what we now know, like rereading a mystery after we know how it turns out in order to understand how the story unfolded and why we missed important clues the first time. This is memory’s task of retrospection, to integrate the knowledge that we have, to impute a sense of cause and effect to the events in our lives, and to offer a sense of meaning.

  Culture provides the large-scale framework for memory and meaning. It aids in the creation of new knowledge, but it also acts as a filter that over time determines what is of long-term value from the social perspective. It does so by being very conservative, retaining behaviors, practices, beliefs, values, and knowledge over long periods of time, be it the United States stubbornly holding on to inches and quarts when the world has moved on to centimeters and liters, or the unbroken stewardship of religious sites for millennia. Natural memory is designed to be labile, flexible, easily modified or written over to suit new environments. Artificial memory is designed to be stable, fixed and unchanging, slow, and resilient, freeing up mental space for individuals to learn new things. We are all born into a culture, specific to a time and place, that provides a wealth of ready-made knowledge and know-how for us to use in making our way in the world without delay. Culture is the set of given, ready-made elements that make up a living past, and that living past determines the basic parameters of lives and the choices available to us over time. It provides the baseline context of order and meaning in our private lives by directing our attention to some things and steering us away from others. In the nineteenth century, middle-class women in the Western world were encouraged find a meaningful and well-ordered life in the private sphere as wife, mother, or in Catholic countries, through a religious vocation. Contemporary middle-class women are raised with the expectation that they will seek a meaningful and orderly life in the public sphere as well, earning their living and aspiring to professional success alongside men.

  The poet Czeslaw Milosz cherished his individual identity, but he knew that it emerged from the larger culture of the country and century in which he was born and over which he had no control. “The clothes I wear, the technological conveniences I use, the verified and the unverified scientific hypotheses I have been taught, are not mine but my century’s, and at most, it is only a tinge of the individual which slips into one or another set of given, ready-made elements.” We may choose to dissent from our own culture, or make the choice that Milosz did, to move from his native country, Poland, to another world altogether—in his case Northern California—to escape a repressive political regime that threatened his very sense of autonomy. Given how much of our individuality emerges from our native culture, such a choice comes at a very high price.

  Before the advent of the Internet, people had far less access to the diversity of human cultures that together make up the collective memory of humanity. On the one hand, from the perspective of our species, collective memory accelerates our adaptability to changing environments, lets us “pass Go” and slip the bonds of plodding evolutionary changes. It amplifies the human potential, both physical and mental. On the other hand, shared memory is the midwife of innovation and, paradoxically, accelerates the change in our environment. When we encounter a problem new to us, for example, we never have to start from scratch. We start from where the last people working on the problem (or a similar problem) left off. We recycle that solution, take it apart, tinker with it, and retool it to solve some novel problem or serve some new purpose. Without culture having captured and preserved that solution to begin with, we would have to start from scratch, just like the accursed Adam and Eve. After the Sumerians invented the cuneiform, no society having any contact with them, their successors, neighbors, or trading partners had to start writing from scratch.

  Collective memory and the sheer power of knowledge accumulated over millennia both push us ahead and pull us from behind. Our knowledge allows us to make change readily, but in turn it forces us to adapt to ever-increasing innovations. Because of these dual forces acting on us, at moments of change we can find ourselves as a society behaving a bit like Doctor Dolittle’s animal friend, the legendary pushmi-pullyu (push me-pull you), endowed with two heads—that of a gazelle at one end and of a unicorn at the other. The dear creature would often find himself processing the same information with two different minds, making two discrete decisions about what to do, and taking off in two different directions at the same time. If he tried to move in opposite directions, he struggled and stalled. And if he moved in two similar but still different directions, he would move along a path that was a little bit of both and end up where neither had expected to go. The faster he tried to move, the less predictable his destination became.

  In the present day, with the double whammy of rapid changes in both the natural and social worlds, it can feel like our collective memory is a drag on our ability to adapt fast enough, binding us to a dying past when we are eager to move into the future. But the slower we move, the more control we gain over our final destination. In periods of great instability, the past becomes more useful as we increasingly tap into the strategic reserve of humanity’s knowledge. Yet it is at moments like this when the past is most easily lost.

  CHAPTER THREE

  WHAT THE GREEKS THOUGHT: FROM ACCOUNTING TO AESTHETICS

  Julius Caesar is famous for writing books and for burning books. The account of his conquests of Gaul and Britain is in print over two thousand years after he wrote it, translated into hundreds of languages, and still widely used as a primer for Latin students. His history
of the civil war waged against former friend Pompey and foes in the Roman Senate is still a point of departure for anyone wanting a contemporary account of the Roman Empire’s chaotic birth. His success as an author exemplifies the adage that history is written by the victors. They determine what the “past” looks like to succeeding generations.

  In our day, Caesar is equally—and incorrectly—famous for having deprived us of a vast and literally irreplaceable legacy of classical literature. In 48 B.C., on a campaign to help Cleopatra in her battle to subdue her brother-husband-rival Ptolemy XIII, Caesar set fire to the ships in Alexandria’s harbor to thwart an enemy incursion by sea. It is likely that sparks from the naval firestorm at sea were driven by the wind and landed on the roofs of the great Temple of the Muses (or Mouseion, whence our word “museum”) that housed a collection of three hundred thousand scrolls—known today as the Library of Alexandria. These losses are a regrettable, if predictable, by-product of war. But Caesar is not to blame for the “Great Vanishing” of classical memory. Within a few years, Cleopatra’s beloved Mark Antony restocked her library with two hundred thousand volumes pillaged from the great Library of Pergamum. At its peak in the following centuries, Alexandria’s library held over half a million scrolls. The cultural amnesia induced by their complete loss was not Caesar’s doing, but the work of many generations, Christian and Muslim, who felt no responsibility to care for pagan learning.