#central project

In the previous post here, Properly Scientific Civilization, I formulated a way to understand scientific civilization in parallel to my formulations about spacefaring civilizations in Indifferently Spacefaring Civilization (and which, in the same post, I showed how the same schematism could be applied to transhumanism).

I identified a properly scientific civilization as a civilization that has science integral to its central project (or raison d'être), as I had previously identified a properly spacefaring civilization as a civilization that has spacefaring as its central project, or a properly transhumanist civilization as a civilization that has transhumanism as its central project. The scenario that I discussed in Virtual Optimization as a Civilizational Imperative could be understood as a civilization that takes the development of the virtual world as its central project, thus a properly virtual civilization.

There is, of course, much more to be said about a civilization that takes science as its central project. For example, for an idea or a practice to bear the burden of being a central project, that idea or practice must have reached a certain level of maturity that proves that the focus of the central project has passed the test of time. If a civilization has adopted an immature idea or practice as its central project, it may find that, as this project develops, it is not able to stand the test of time, or that it develops in unexpected directions and with unwelcome unintended consequences. 

This is what I see as the great challenge of civilization today that takes the Enlightenment project as its central project. The Enlightenment was drafted into being the central project of western civilization at a very early stage in its development, replacing the failing social institutions of feudalism and the church. When Christianity assumed the role of central project of nascent western civilization in late antiquity, Christianity was already several hundred years old, and had proved itself in persecution and in its ability to attract the greatest minds and the most powerful and effective leaders. This was not the case as western civilization found itself searching for a new central project in the early modern period, and eventually settled on the Enlightenment project.

Science was part and parcel of the Enlightenment project as that project came into being, but it was not as central as we once thought. In our own time, we can see the beginning of the cracks that reveal that science and the Enlightenment project may lead in different directions, and we may be forced to make a choice, or compromise the one or the other in order for two to continue to function as part of the cluster of related ideas that makes up the central project of western civilization (or banish one or the other into the intellectual superstructure).

Science was part and parcel of the Enlightenment, but science predated the Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution marked the beginning of the end of the traditional central project of western civilization. In my post Modernity without Industrialism I argued that there was a distinctive kind of civilization in western Europe from approximately 1500-1800, after the scientific revolution got started, but before the industrial revolution made itself felt.

In retrospect, I realize that what I was discussing in Modernity without Industrialism was a nascent scientific civilization in which science was on the verge of being a central project of civilization, but it was as yet insufficiently mature to function as such. Today we have an entire cosmology that has grown out of centuries of scientific research, but in the early modern period science was only beginning to challenge traditional cosmology, which was based on religious and philosophical models of the universe.

These reflections point to important ways to understand what is and what is not a viable candidate as the central project of a civilization. In my 2017 talk The Role of Lunar Civilization in Interstellar Buildout, I stated that central projects emerge organically from the life of a people. This organicism of central project is related to their maturity. A central project that arises from the ordinary life of a people as they converge upon a modus vivendi in a given biome is a central project that has stood the test of time and is consistent with human nature over the longue durée.

An idea must be consistent with human nature for it to function effectively as a central project -- that, or humanity must be made to be consistent with the idea. And we often do, in fact, find that utopian central projects have as a theme the making of a “new man” (for example, the idea that the Soviet Union would shape a “new Soviet man,” homo sovieticus). This “new man” will be the citizen that the new political order deserves, and who will make this political project a success.

Utopian projects usually fail because they are based upon immature ideas that are pressed into service too early and cannot bear the burden that being a central project of a civilization imposes upon them. The familiar critique of the French Revolution by Edmund Burke, and the more reactionary critique of the French Revolution by Joseph de Maistre, was implicitly based on this observation that immature ideas are not ready to function as a principle to hold together a coherent society, though Burke and de Maistre formulated their critique in religious terms, as the only fully developed ideas with which they were familiar were religious conceptions of society.

For Burke and de Maistre, the problem with the Enlightenment project as the basis of society was that the ideas of the Enlightenment were “artificial” and were not sanctioned from all eternity. But these ideas -- and others as well -- appeared artificial because they were new and human beings were not yet accustomed to them. Science, too, was a new-fangled idea in the early modern period, and not at that time sufficiently robust or mature to function as a central project. However, in the next hundred years or so, science may come to a level of maturity at which it could function as a viable central project of a civilization -- and this may occur at a time when the Enlightenment project has been judged to fail, so that civilization will be once again casting about for something that can serve as a central project.    

However, for science to emerge organically from the life of a people as a central project, that life would have to be through-and-through scientific, that is to say, ordinary people in their daily lives would have to exemplify the spirit and the practice of science. While there are already intimations of this in the world today, there is nothing like the broadly-based appreciation of science that would be necessary to the organic emergence of science as a central project. Thus, at this time, science is still a utopian ideal in terms of coherent social vision.

Thanks again to Paul Gilster for giving me the opportunity to have a long essay of mine appear on Centauri Dreams, where I get more readers and more comments than any other forum available to me.

This post is a thought experiment that builds on my previous Centauri Dreams essay, Space Development Futures. I wanted to explore forms of civilization that are spacefaring, but which do not center on their spacefaring activity. An obvious such form of civilization would be a civilization that focuses on SETI, which might run the gamut in terms of space development from a minimal scenario of a few satellites used for SETI to a maximal scenario such as described in Kardashev and Sagan.

Narratives of Knowledge in Etiological Myths and Central Projects

It is easy to find attacks on the social sciences that are basically criticisms of the social sciences for not being the natural sciences. And it would be easy to immerse oneself in the worst sociological literature from the last few decades and come away with a very black pilled view of the social sciences, and a dismal impression of the direction of science over all. But it would be equally easy to immerse oneself in the worst physics literature of the past few decades and to come away with an equally black pilled view of physics and the future of science overall. But the latter rarely happens; the natural sciences forgive and forget when it comes to history. 

The narrative of the natural sciences is more selective, fully indulging in the bias of survivorship, and  more readily forgetting the blind alleys and bad theories. The social sciences are more apt to live in an eternal present where bad theories are kept alive both by naïve scientists and bad actors in the sciences. Does this mean that the social sciences have more bad actors and a greater level of naïveté than the natural sciences? Probably, but there are probably also other mechanisms at work in addition to these causes. 

The solution is not for the social sciences to become more like the natural sciences, but for the social sciences to fashion a narrative for itself as a rigorous science in which the cause of human knowledge is relentlessly advanced. It should be noted that this must be a scientific narrative, and not the reigning political narrative that today dominates the social sciences. And a rigorously scientific narrative for the social sciences would be a fragment of a grander scientific narrative, an interdisciplinary narrative, that would weave together the accomplishments of the natural sciences and the social sciences into a whole greater than its parts.

The program for the unity of science among the logical empiricists of the early twentieth century was a program of the reduction of the many special sciences to physics, which was taken to be the foundation of all the sciences. This kind of reductionism plays into the contemporary criticism of the social sciences from the natural scientific perspective. In other words, a partial narrative for one branch of the sciences is made to furnish the narrative for all the sciences. Ultimately, this won’t work.  

What would ultimately work would be a master narrative of all the sciences that was equal to being taken for the etiological myth of a scientific civilization. One could argue that an etiological myth of the heroic origins of science was implicitly if imperfectly present in narratives of progress up through the nineteenth century, but the experience of the twentieth century put an end to progress, optimism, and heroism. Today we prefer the anti-hero to the hero. It shows. The twentieth century sowed the wind, and now we reap the whirlwind. We may have been closer to being a scientific civilization during the early modern period, before the industrial revolution—a period that I sometimes call modernism without industrialism—than we are today. But that was the first blush of science, when it was as naïve as it was enthusiastic.

From a mythological perspective, an etiological myth is distinct from the central project of a civilization, so that a heroic etiological myth of the origins of science would be the origins myth for scientific civilization, but not the central project of scientific civilization (a civilization needs both an etiological myth and a central project). The central project would be distinct, but whether it would be focused on the growth of scientific knowledge as an end in itself, on the adventure of scientific discovery (the extension of the etiological myth into the future), on ever larger scientific enterprises (big science extrapolated to a cosmological scale), or on some other aspect of science, perhaps some aspect of science not yet known to us today, we cannot say. There has been in human history no instance of a properly scientific civilization, so we do not yet know if anything drawn from science can furnish a coherent and viable central project for a civilization; this remains to be seen. 

Thanks are due to Paul Gilster for posting this essay on Centauri Dreams. This essay is about 13,000 words and is divided into fourteen sections, as follows:

Ankle Deep in the Shallows

Periodization of the US Space Program

Scenarios for Spacefaring Breakout

A Stagnant Space Age

A Digression on Periodization

Institutions and Their Central Projects

Institutional Drift in Private Enterprise

The Consolation Prize for Institutional Drift  

How the Space Industry Got Its Groove Back  

Finding a Compromise That Works

Human Purposes in Deep Time  

Sufficient Conditions for Spacefaring Civilization

The Weston Principle  

The Beginning of the Inquiry

This essay is part of a larger project that I hope to eventually publish as a short book to be titled Spacefaring Mythology. The above essay, re-written and re-titled for the book, would be the first chapter, with the structure of the book being five chapters as follows:

Thinking Historically about Spacefaring Civilization

Superstition and Folklore among Spacefaring Peoples

Mystical Experiences in Spacefaring Societies

Spacefaring Mythologies

Here be Dragons: Our Changed Relationship to the Unknown

Chapter four of the above table of contents will be based on my earlier Centauri Dreams post Spacefaring Mythologies, while chapter five of the above will be based on a Tumblr post New Unknowns for Old. What will be chapters two and three are in the process of being written, first as blog posts, then to be re-written for the book. The extensive comments that I receive on posts that appear on Centauri Dreams are especially valuable to me, as these communicate original reactions to the material, and I will be reading these comments carefully when re-writing the material in book form.

I may add to this plan—I have a couple of different possibilities in mind for an additional final chapter—but I am not likely to eliminate any of the above content. I will be discussing this ongoing work in my Grand Strategy Newsletter.

In several posts I have discussed the possibility of a scientific civilization. These posts, inter alia, include:

David Hume and Scientific Civilization

The Relevance of Philosophy of Science to Scientific Civilization

Types of Scientific Civilization

The Central Tension of Scientific Civilization

Scientific Civilization: The Economic Perspective

Scientific Civilization: The Central Project

Another Counterfactual Civilization with Science as its Central Project

Scientific Civilization and the Politicization of Science

The Industrial Revolution and Scientific Civilization

The limits of science are the limits of scientific civilization.

Folk Concepts of Scientific Civilization

It now occurs to me how I can treat scientific civilization in accordance with my definition of civilization, which is something I did in regard to spacefaring (in contradistinction to science) in my Centauri Dreams post, Indifferently Spacefaring Civilizations, in which I schematically laid out the different kinds of spacefaring civilizations that there could be based on permutations of my model of civilization.

I take civilization to be an economic infrastructure joined to an intellectual superstructure by a central project. Thus there are three over-arching institutions that jointly constitute civilization (each of which has distinctive relationships to the others), and each of these three institutions is composed of countless less comprehensive institutions that fall under these umbrella institutions.

In regard to a scientific civilization, then, the permutations are as follows:

The Null Case: science is not present in any of the elements that constitute a given civilization. This is a non-scientific civilization. 

Economically scientific civilization: science is integral to the economic infrastructure; also called intellectually indifferent scientific civilization.

Intellectually scientific civilization: science is integral to the intellectual superstructure of civilization; also called economically indifferent scientific civilization.

Economically and intellectually scientific civilization: science is integral to both the economic infrastructure and the intellectual superstructure of a civilization, but is absent in the central project; also known as morally indifferent scientific civilization.

Properly scientific civilization: science is integral to the central project of a civilization.

The three additional permutations -- 1) science as central project but absent elsewhere, 2) science integral with central project and economic infrastructure but absent in the intellectual superstructure, and 3) science integral with central project and intellectual infrastructure but absent in the economic infrastructure -- are non-viable institutional structures and must be set aside. Because of the role that a central project plays in a civilization, whatever defines the central project is also, of necessity, integral to economic infrastructure and intellectual superstructure.

With this analysis I can clear up a few things I have previously said about scientific civilization. Without realizing I was doing so, when I was thinking about scientific civilizations I was thinking about what I above called properly scientific civilization, i.e., civilizations that take science as their central project, or as an integral constituent of a multi-faceted central project. The scenario that I wrote about in Another Counterfactual Civilization with Science as its Central Project is a clear instance of an economically indifferent scientific civilization.

Our civilization today, with science present in (though perhaps not fully integral to) the intellectual superstructure, and essentially bound up in the economic infrastructure (because of the place of science in the STEM cycle that drives industrialized civilization), but not present as the driving force in the central project, clearly represents a morally indifferent scientific civilization.  

Perhaps we could say that our civilization has approximated a properly scientific civilization, or that we have at least experienced intimations of a properly scientific civilization, as in the painting above by Henri Testelin of Colbert Presenting the Members of the Royal Academy of Sciences to Louis XIV in 1667. More often the experience of science has been like that of the painting of Faraday, below, by Harriet Jane Moore, working alone in his laboratory, without the gorgeous trappings of a royal court.

The question I considered in Stagnant Supercivilizations -- whether such are possible, and, if they are possible, what they would be like -- can be given another formulation in light of what I have written recently about the structure of civilizations, namely, that a civilization is a social institution with an economic infrastructure, an intellectual superstructure, and a central project that integrates infrastructure and superstructure (e.g., in my recent post Eurozone Civilization I amended my working definition of civilization to include the idea of a central project: “... a civilization is an economic infrastructure and an intellectual superstructure joined by a central project”). A stagnant supercivilization would be a supercivilization with a stagnant central project.  

What could serve as the central project of a stagnant supercivilization? A stagnant central project? What could constitute a stagnant central project? How can we differentiate stagnant central projects from central projects that are still vital and living? Are central projects ipso facto progressive (or ought they to be)? Does the existence of a central project imply that a civilization has a natural teleology toward which it is converging? Or does not the very idea of a supercivilization point to a civilization that has come to full maturity, i.e., a civilization that has attained its natural teleology, and for which nothing more remains but to bear witness to this accomplishment and to stave off decline and dissolution for as long as possible? In other words, a supercivilization may be a civilization that has exhausted its possibilities and is, by definition, stagnant. With its central project realized, that central project is, at the same time, dead.

It all depends on how you define a supercivilization. I believe it was Kardashev who introduced the term “supercivilization” (I don’t know that for certain), and we know that Kardashev defined supercivilizations in terms of their energy resources. Carl Sagan re-cast Kardashev’s civilization types, and often wrote of million-year-old and even billion-year-old civilizations, which might well be considered supercivilizations simply in virtue of their longevity. I have speculated in several posts (cf.Another Counterfactual Civilization with Science as its Central Project and The Globular Cluster Opportunity, as well as the above-referenced Stagnant Supercivilizations) about the possibility of very long lived civilizations that never become technologically advanced (and, presumably) never attain “technological maturity,” which is the idea that Bostrom uses to define existential risks). It would also be possible to define supercivilizations in terms of the volume of space that they occupy, much as we identify a terrestrial superpower in terms of its ability to project power globally. Are there other ways to define a supercivilization? Possibly so.

A supercivilization defined in terms of energy resources, longevity, or spatial extent could then be defined as non-stagnant if the defining quantity were non-stagnant, presumably growing (though a declining non-stagnant quantity would presumably define a supercivilization in dissolution). Thus growing energy resources, lengthening history, or increasing spatial extent could all be taken as definitive of a non-stagnant supercivilization. Each of these scenarios constitutes a particular exemplification of the Expansion Hypothesis: expansion in energy, time, or space. But a definition of a supercivilization in terms of a central project allows for the characterization of supercivilizations without implicit reference to any expansion hypothesis. The question is not whether a supercivilization is expanding or shrinking, but whether its central project is vital or moribund.

Whether or not the central project of a supercivilization was moribund or not might be a matter of interpretation. Say that we take as our terrestrial example of a stagnant civilization the Byzantine Empire, which, I have noted elsewhere, has been called, “a machine for getting people into heaven.” Thus the central project of Byzantium was soteriological, and this could be continued indefinitely as long as new souls to be saved were being produced. However, should the Millennium come, the soteriological project would turn into an eschatological project, and, once the eschatological project had come to fruition with the return of Christ, Byzantine civilization would have been over, and replaced by the something much greater, and also different. Thus the central project of Byzantium transcended measures of space, time, and energy and extended throughout a mythological reconstruction of cosmic history. We might interpret this central project either as being vital until the end of the world, or as perpetually moribund, without essential novelty, and it would be relatively easily to imagine a supercivilization parallel to Byzantine civilization.

We need not ask if the central project of a supercivilization, whether vital or stagnant, is anything of interest to human beings, since by the time a supercivilization derived from contemporary terrestrial civilization comes into being, if any such do come into being, humanity will have been long extinct by that time. The question, then, is whether there is any conceivable intelligent agent for which a central project holds any interest. Could a stagnant central project hold the interest of any intelligent agent into the indefinite future? For that matter, could even a vital central project capture the interest of an intelligent agent indefinitely? If a supercivilization ever comes into being, these will be relevant questions for a social order effectively made immortal by technology. It may be impossible for any civilization, whether supercivilization or not, to be anything other than stagnant over the long term, i.e., over cosmologically significant periods of time. 

For all the faults and failings of agrarian civilizations, there is a sense in which the self-awareness of agrarian civilizations exceeded the self-awareness of industrialized civilizations. Almost all agrarian civilizations were rigidly hierarchical and stratified, but from the bottom to the top of the feudal hierarchy of agrarian civilizations everyone understood that agriculture was the source of the wealth and productivity of their society. Wealth was measured in land and number of peasants working the land. Income was formulated in terms of annual produce of the land, which, over time, became more formalized as part of a commercial economy. It is from this that we read in nineteenth century novels that so-and-so had an income of so many pounds per year: this is the survival of the accounting of agricultural civilization into the early development of industrialized civilization.

This reflexive self-awareness on the part of agrarian civilizations of the economy that sustained that civilization is not shared by industrialized civilization. Very few today seem to understand that the source of our wealth and productivity is science. This is a failure of collective self-knowledge. Even the putative “leaders” of contemporary society seem to have little awareness of the centrality of science to the economy, but if the scientific method had not been systematically applied to industry, we would not have progressed beyond the technology and engineering of earlier civilizations. That we have outstripped these earlier civilizations many times over in terms of wealth and productivity is a measure by which the scientific method and the cultivation of scientific knowledge can transform an economy.

This reflection on the lack of self-knowledge on the part of our would-be scientific civilization suggests a way in which scientific civilization might be defined, specifically, that a scientific civilization is a civilization that knows itself to be a scientific civilization, and in which all sectors of society know that the wealth and productivity of their society is derived from science, and from technology and engineering made possible by science.

In previous posts I have suggested several other ways in which scientific civilization might be defined. For example:

In Scientific Civilization: The Economic Perspective I suggested that a scientific civilization could be defined as, “a civilization that invests a significant portion of its economic activity in science.”

In Scientific Civilization: The Central Project I implied that a scientific civilization is a civilization that has science, or the pursuit of scientific knowledge, as its central project.

In Sciences Hard and Soft I suggested that a scientific civilization is a civilization in which science has come to full maturity, by analogy with Nick Bostrom’s use of the term “technological maturity” -- but how scientific maturity can be defined may be more difficult to say.  

In my notebooks I have several additional ways in which scientific civilization might be defined, though I have not yet given an exposition of these other ideas for defining scientific civilization. For example, skimming a recent notebook I find this entry on 11 June 2016:

Science communication is only a problem in a non-scientific civilization in which there is a disconnect between science and the non-scientific public. One way to define a scientific civilization is as a civilization in which there is no disconnect between scientific research and popular knowledge, as scientific knowledge is pervasively present in the general public. (There would still be disagreements, and different scientific research programs would find differing degrees of support in different sectors of society, but it would be understood that these disagreements will be resolved by further research even as new scientific problems appear on the horizon.)

Different definitions of scientific civilization would yield different civilizations identified as scientific civilization, though some of the above may overlap or coincide. For example, it is entirely possible that in a civilization that has the pursuit of science as its central project that all sectors of the populace would understand the centrality of science to that civilization, so these two definitions of scientific civilization may coincide. However, I think that the idea of scientific maturity is much further off even than the possibility of a civilization with science as its central project, if scientific maturity is attainable at all, so that these definitions do not coincide, but they might coincide at some point in the distant future. Indeed, it may require a civilization that takes science as its central project to drive the development of science to scientific maturity.  

Ideally, given a multitude of possible definitions of scientific civilization, it would be possible to reduce all the definitions to one, or to single out one definition that is, in principle, preferable to all others, or to have the various non-coinciding definitions of scientific civilization systematically related in some essential way, as in the degrees of continuum, or as stages in the development of scientific civilization.

It may be that only a fully scientific civilization could understand what definition of scientific civilization is adequate, and, if the Hegelian principle holds good, that the owl of Minerva takes flight only with the setting of the sun, it would not be possible to adequately define scientific civilization until a scientific civilization was already senescent.

The central projects of many ancient civilizations were not for the squeamish.

In several recent posts I have considered the nature of central projects:

Scientific Civilization: The Economic Perspective

Scientific Civilization: The Central Project

Civilizations and Central Projects

An Anecdote about the Unifying Role of Central Projects

The latter two I edited together to create a longer and more unified argument, which I posted on Medium:

Civilizations and their Central Projects

It occurs to me now that the idea of a central project that serves as a unifying focus for a civilization can be employed to improve my earlier formulations on axial ages and what I came to call “axiailization,” i.e., the historical process of converging upon an axial age.

The term “Axial Age” was simultaneously introduced in the twentieth century by Karl Jaspers and Lewis Mumford. I took up Jaspers’ formulation and wrote several posts on axial ages and axialization, including the following:

The Next Axial Age

Axialization of the Nomadic Paradigm

Axial Crisis or Axial Fulfillment?

Addendum on Axialization: Organicism and Ecology

Axialization and Institutionalization

Extrapolating from the idea of an Axial Age in antiquity, to a next Axial Age that would provide new institutions for the change to civilization wrought by industrialization, I eventually came to a generalization of axial ages I called axialization, such that, “...the institutions intrinsic to the civilization in question can produce the definitive mythological synthesis that expresses the central idea of the civilization in question.” This is a formulation that is not specific to any one civilization, or indeed to civilization at all, as I have also applied it to the human world of the Upper Paleolithic.

The Axial Age identified by Jaspers was an Axial Age for agricultural civilizations -- what I often call agrarian-ecclesiastical civilization, to emphasize the centrality of agriculture as the economic infrastructure and an Axial Age spiritual tradition as the intellectual superstructure (cf. my talk at the 2015 Starship Congress on “What kind of civlizations build starships?”). I often also add that the distinctive feature of axial age spiritual traditions is the identification of a human nature posited as universal, the analysis of the human condition as a function of this universal human nature, and the response to the human condition that constitutes an axial age religious tradition.

I imagine many readers will disagree with me that a new axial age must emerge from industrialized civilization, since the axial age religious traditions of agricultural society no longer address the human condition of industrialized society and thus must be replaced. Even if the reader rejects this, there is still a sense in which we should recognize the possibility of another axial age arising from industrialization, if one agrees that axial age traditions are predicated upon a conception of human nature posited as universal.

Given that the technological maturity upon which industrialized civilization is maturing will deliver into our hands the means to alter human beings and thus to alter human nature and the human condition, when this does eventually happen, axial age traditions predicated upon past human nature will no longer be relevant (or, at least, not relevant in the same way) to future human nature once technological intervention in the human condition results in a new human nature, or several human natures, or humanity being superseded by some other kind of being with no human nature at all, but another kind of nature.

In this case, the Axial Age of Jaspers is the axialiation of Mere Humanity, while some future axialization would be the axialization of a successor species to human beings. In any case, whether we locate the axialization of industrial-technological civilization before or after a change in human nature (which could also come about gradually as a result of evolution), we can see that such an axialization is possible given that certain conditions are fulfilled. Whether or not these conditions will in fact be fulfilled is an entirely distinct question.

If we employ the idea of central projects to the idea of axialization, we could say that axialization occurs when the central project of a civilization is given a definitive expression. Previously I associated axialization with a mythological expression of an age, but I think now this is not an essential aspect of the process. If a scientific civilization came to maturity with a definitive expression of science as the central project of the age, its axialization might take the form of, say, something like a grand unified theory, and it might be expressed in a series of mathematical formulae. We might not be able, at our present intellectual capacity, to appreciate this like we can appreciate mythic or aesthetic expressions of a central project, but we may yet come to that capacity in the fullness of time. 

The institutions that emerge after an Axial Age, when human beings or post-human successor species live in the full consciousness of the definitive expression of an age may be counted as distinct from the Axial Age or as an expression and realization of the Axial Age. This is related to the earlier distinction I made between interpreting a central project as an event or as an ongoing project. The example employed in the exposition of this distinction was the space program: was the Apollo program a turning point, a pivot, an axis, or was it the beginning of a new era of civilization defined by space exploration as a central project? 

We could interpret events either way, and make a reasonable case for either interpretation. And, of course, from an overview of history, what appears to us to be an ongoing project, taking decades or centuries or even millennia, may in the future look like an “event,” as, for example, the “event” that we call the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution, which spanned many thousands of years. So these interpretations are not necessarily mutually exclusive, but we must specify the scale of time with which we are concerned.

Civilization subsequent to an Axial Age or the accomplishment of a central project (or a subsequent post-civilization institution) may make no essential advance on the definitive expression of a central project, in which case the central project is more like a pivot, but the central project may also be used as a template for the expansion and iteration of the scope of the central project. Where a central project offers opportunity for expansion, that expansion may be creative or uncreative, opening up new ground for human beings or our successors, or simply constituting more the same, but in new environments and circumstances. 

I realize now, after a few days of posting about central projects how much more there is to say on the topic, which is unfolding itself before me the more I think about it. So I regard this as an active area of research in the scientific study of civilization, and I will be returning to it as my ideas develop.