Ruminations of an Old Goat

Seventeen years ago, the 500th anniversary of Columbus' discovery of the New World passed virtually unnoticed in the U.S. Many cities originally planned extensive celebrations only to cancel them in the face of a massive campaigns against them. It seems Columbus wasn't PC enough for the late 20th century. Later, I read an article that summarized many of the "issues" all these protesters had with recognizing Columbus' voyage and discovery. The article read like a laundry list of modern grievances against Western Civilization.

The Indian- excuse me, Native Americans, advanced the argument that it was stupid to celebrate someone who's chief claim to fame was getting lost (because Columbus originally thought he had found the passage to India rather than the New World). Another argument was that Columbus didn't discover anything new because the Native Americans knew the Americas were here the whole time. Women's groups complained that Columbus should have had women as part of his crew. Various others claimed Columbus' true legacy was the spread of European diseases and European greed among the indigenous races.

In other words, Columbus' actions in the latter part of the 15th century were judged using standards prevalent in the latter part of 20th century America. It was this hubris that angered me at the time. It is this same hubris that angers me today. Civilizations, like individuals, mature with time. Civilizations, like individuals, have needs that must be met before other, more advanced needs can even be considered.

First and foremost, a civilization must be able to survive before it can worry about anything else. Even in the earliest days of mankind, when the closest thing to civilization was a small tribe, survival of the civilization was the single greatest motivation. If two tribes found themselves competing for the same resources, they wouldn't try to sit down and discuss the best way to manage the resources. There was no time for that in a hand-to-mouth existence. After all, the food the other tribe takes today might be the food your tribe needs tomorrow. The tribes would fight brutally and to the death, for death would likely befall the losing tribe anyway.

Only when a civilization had advanced to the point where its survival was not threatened could the civilization look towards safety; permanent settlements, trade with neighboring settlements, development of laws (morality) and a bit of economic innovation such as developing pottery or agriculture.

Once safety is assured, civilizations can advance to include the concepts of love and friendship. Those options may not necessarily be accessible to all citizens in the civilization -- peasants through out history have lived on the edge between safety and love -- but certainly the wealthy members of society could indulge in love.

Anyone who's studied psychology can see that I'm applying Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which are generally applied to individuals, to entire civilizations. The point of this is that only the most advanced and wealthiest of civilizations are so safe, so strongly assured of their position that they can attempt to wipe out bigotry, be spontaneously creative, develop morals that apply to all people, write blogs and indulge the idiots who insist on applying the morals of the most advanced civilization the planet has ever known to societies which were only a few levels of development beyond survival.

That brings me around to writing and the question of what happens when the trappings of civilization are stripped away. Now, this is hardly an original idea and libraries are full of such stories. But the vast majority of those stories deal with just how quickly even the best of us fall into savagery. Wells' War of the Worlds is one such book. There's Goldings' Lord of the Flies, Frank's Alas Babylon and even Niven and Pournelle's Lucifer's Hammer. The latter two novels at least feature a small group of people struggling to maintain some form of civilization in the face of disaster. Even there, the "good guys" have had to make hard survival choices, such as turning away people seeking sanctuary with them.

It's easy enough to see how a civilization would change it's priorities when its major trappings were stripped away. But are there any stories in which the trappings of civilization do not change yet the citizens still fall to a lower level of civilization? How deadly would a pandemic have to be for civilization to crumble? How many zombies are necessary for civilization to collapse?

To bring this back around to the original topic, what would it take to knock those politically correct idiots right off their pedestal and into the muck of human survival?

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Henry Vogel is a storyteller and former comic book writer. He is a prime mover for The Curse of the Were-Weasel. His column, "Ruminations of an Old Goat," appears weekly on Monday mornings.