It’s been a few years now that Bar­bara and I have been lis­ten­ing to books on CD as we fall asleep. Usu­ally a chap­ter at a time, unless we, umm… you know, retire early. We’re lucky to have a well-​​stocked pub­lic library, with a lot of works by excel­lent and engag­ing lec­tur­ers who aren’t too whiny or hes­i­tant. And (thank good­ness) not all of them are about Greece and Rome.

I mean we haven’t avoided Greece and Rome; nobody can. We’ve had our share of Great Men, Great Philoso­phers, Emper­ors, Tyrants, the world accord­ing to Thucy­dides and Plutarch. Even the “periph­eral” [flag that word for a moment, please] his­to­ries we lis­ten to—the Celts, Asia Minor, Persia—and the off-​​brand facets his­to­ries like the Ara­bic Sci­en­tists and the Enlight­en­ment and stuff always touch on Greece and Rome, democ­racy and empire. Wind, fire, all that kind of thing.

Maybe it’s osmo­sis, or maybe it’s some­thing more akin to repeated slaps on the fore­head with a rolled-​​up scroll while broadly mouthing “LOOK AT THIS AGAIN”, but I’m start­ing to notice some­thing I never saw before. Like any nerd, I grew up learn­ing about Greece from brightly col­ored mythol­ogy books, and Rome out of Spar­ta­cus and such. Our Social Stud­ies classes were all about 1970s Patri­o­tism tinged by that 1950s Dewey-​​would-​​lose-​​against-​​Marx Cold War cit­i­zen­ship stew and ped­a­gog­i­cal style our teach­ers were raised up in. The Found­ing Fathers read about Greece and Rome, inspired by the democ­ra­cies of Athens and the repub­lic of Rome, blah blah. So maybe one needs to have been slapped on the fore­head a few dozen times with the actual his­tory before that patina of received wis­dom starts to crack.

Viz: it wasn’t that simple.

Now any actual his­to­rian will prob­a­bly be mak­ing the Wry Smile Eye-​​rolling Face now. But of course most of us well-​​educated liberal-​​thinking tech­ni­cal folks don’t bother too much, no mat­ter how earnestly and effi­ciently we pur­sue knowl­edge, to dive down the rat-​​hole of Nar­ra­tive Construction.

It all starts with Egypt, of course. I remem­ber as a Junior High stu­dent I would get up at 6am (for some rea­son) and watch a tele­vi­sion class about Egypt­ian art on some broad­cast Cleve­land TV sta­tion. And you know they men­tion this Ptolemy dude, either the Emperor (wait, Egypt didn’t have Emper­ors, it had Pharaohs) or the Astronomer Who Was Very Wrong (wait, were there Astronomers or just Astrologers before Coper­ni­cus?), and it grad­u­ally sinks in and it’s only decades later that some other tid­bit or two falls into place and Whoa whoa hang on, that was Greek no I mean Mace­don­ian I mean Hel­lenis­tic stuff, and Egypt was the south­west­ern Alexan­drine empire, and—hang on—so the Romans were deal­ing with the rem­nants of Alexander’s empire?! and so on. Strands con­geal, like DNA pre­cip­i­tat­ing in an Eppen­dorf tube (hey, that’s my heritage).

And then Whoa, hang on again—so all those let­ters from Bible dudes and Greek Philoso­phers and Geome­ters were from Turkey?! and then But but the “demo­c­ra­tic” Athe­ni­ans were total ass­holes and thank good­ness Alexan­der came along and… well, and so on. Call it “provin­cial­ism giv­ing way slightly to pay­ing atten­tion”, or maybe “nar­ra­tive recon­fig­u­ra­tion”, depend­ing on your background.

Clearly it isn’t that his­tory is writ­ten by the win­ners, but rather that they write and dis­trib­ute the Cliff’s Notes.

OK. That’s the setup. Here’s one point: Seems as though the writ­ers’ guide­lines for Cliff’s Notes demand Clear Sep­a­rat­ing Bound­aries. Starts and End­ings. First there was Egypt where they had mum­mies, then there was Greece where peo­ple were Demo­c­ra­tic, then there was Rome with fuzzy hel­mets and brass skirts, then there was (in advanced classes) Byzan­tium [sic] which was pretty for­eign and dis­si­pated like Paris or some­thing, then after a bit over there you get your King Arthur, and then after a while some­body turns on the lights and we get tele­scopes and gun­pow­der, and here we are. Nice clean starts and fin­ishes, all along the way, like dinosaurs being wiped out so lit­tle furry mam­mals can turn into Balu­chith­erium [sic] and stuff.

Surely there’s a name for this fal­lacy. “Con­sec­u­tivism” maybe? “Dis­cretism”? It is a fal­lacy, clearly; I’ve been hang­ing around a half-​​hour a day with actual his­to­ri­ans, the sort who sound as if they fling their arms around as they read, and they’ve man­aged to get choco­late in my peanut but­ter all over the place: Greeks in my Egypt, and [Greek!] Asia Minor in my Rome, and Celts in the Bible, and Per­sians in my Sparta, and cats and dogs liv­ing together.

And thence: Self-​​definition is all about the bound­aries. Insert a cunningly-​​crafted keen insight about bound­aries here, one that touches on all the expected things about brain­wash­ing, self-​​definition, provin­cial­ism, cul­tural pride, homo­gene­ity and diver­sity, ingroups and out­groups, wind, fire, all that kind of thing. Shorter ver­sion: “Hey, you know those are just Cliff’s Notes you’re read­ing, right?”

All this? All this was crys­tal­lized into an anas­ta­mos­ing tis­sue of rant because I just read Alexis Madri­gal talk­ing about the awful awful things that have hap­pened in our Amer­i­can cul­ture and the grow­ing dichotomy and the wor­ries every­body in pub­lic pol­icy expresses all the time about jobs and decline and inequal­ity.

It makes me sad, every time I see this sort of thing. Sad because of the box it grows within. It’s the provin­cial Star­tups Will Restore Us box, the Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment box, the one dec­o­rated with fine print that counts how many jobs (asses in office chairs!) and Press Releases From Tech Spin­offs (young peo­ple are the only ones who ever do any­thing inter­est­ing!) and with a star-​​shaped brass sticker that reads “Now with 25% more EARNEST HOPE!”

This box is a spe­cial kind of con­ser­vatism. Burke would rec­og­nize it, because it’s all about not break­ing things. Fun­da­men­tally it’s a ubiq­ui­tous habit of want­ing to restore—and more insid­i­ously, to expect change to hap­pen the same way it hap­pened last time—and it relies on the Cliff’s Notes ver­sion of eco­nom­ics and his­tory. As though the only peo­ple in an econ­omy were a few charis­matic megafauna, a corps of earnest and essen­tially non-​​profit bureau­crats, and the undif­fer­en­ti­ated Classes: upper, mid­dle, poor, from which those oth­ers arise now and then by spon­ta­neous gen­er­a­tion. All tidily pro­jected into the future by extrap­o­la­tion: The big charis­matic megafauna of the future must be like the ones of the past, tech­ni­cal not artis­tic, lead­ing not inte­grat­ing, rebuild­ing not repur­pos­ing. The insti­tu­tions of the future will be like our recently lost ones (com­pa­nies, states, all that), the best Mankind has found in the March For­ward. And the Classes, well, they are out of bal­ance.

Now see in your Dark Age, which after all is merely a lacuna between a cou­ple of those ex post facto dis­crete vol­umes of Cliff’s Notes, change hap­pens. The diver­sity of what hap­pens, the details of who’s doing what for whom and under what name, that car­ries on as before. Per­haps moreso. When­ever Empire stum­bles, nov­elty seems more promis­ing out at the unre­marked periph­ery, in the lost provinces and the places where exotic weirdos start try­ing new stuff out. Not in the core.

Some day, hope­fully in a few decades, some­body will real­ize sus­tain­abil­ity is a thing that hap­pens only in places where cen­tral plan­ners look away. I won­der whether we ought to stage a “Dark Age” of our own, rather than wait­ing for all these rebuild­ing rework­ing reboot­ing eco­nomic “devel­op­ment” efforts to fail in turn.

Devel­op­ment is exploita­tion, in Holland’s sense. Let us explore for a while. It’s not merely that the keys aren’t under that light pole, it’s that there are no doors out here in the lovely dark. Let us be bet­ter now to one another, and not worry so much about hon­or­ing the beloved dead: the fac­to­ries, the jobs, the state lines, and the habits of empire.

This is not about “rev­o­lu­tion”, by the way. This is sim­ply a request. Let us please have a King Cnut of Eco­nomic Devel­op­ment: Richard Florida might do fine, if only he was pay­ing atten­tion, because he has con­quered our mind­set for sure. Let him set him­self up on a throne at the shores of our “eco­nomic col­lapse”, and make what­ever ges­tures are called for by his audi­ence to stem the tide of fun­da­men­tal trans­for­ma­tive change, and let him then turn wisely to the fans and lack­eys and point out the moral of this les­son: that Emer­gence is not what you expect and foster.

Sorry. I couldn’t help but laugh out loud there.Richard Florida would never say any­thing of the sort.

Nonethe­less, let us emerge into the dark­ness, in other words. Every­thing that has hap­pened here under the lamp has already come and gone. We should totally leave this lone light here, burn­ing, if noth­ing else to draw the moths and bats it’s always drawn and act out its role as sym­bol of many sorts. Me, I’m headed over there towards those noises….