#central projects

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. 

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.

In my previous post, Civilization and Central Projects, I developed in a more explicit way the idea of central projects as undertakings that form the core of civilizations, as I had mentioned this in some previous posts. Two examples I gave of central projects, illustrated with a quote from J. M. Keynes, but examples that crop up time and again, were the central projects of pyramid building by the ancient Egyptians and that of cathedral building in medieval Europe.

The social context in which Europe went about, “cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches” (in the now famous words of Rodulfus Glaber) is significant in this connection. The spasm of monumental construction that gave medieval Europe its distinctive appearance was not a top-down effort driven by elites in the social hierarchy, but represented a genuine groundswell of popular interest and enthusiasm. Medieval historian Norman F. Cantor has used the phrase “popular piety” to refer to spontaneous expressions of Christian piety among lay persons. Given that western Europe was a late-comer to Christianity, and many people converted only reluctantly and after resistance, that popular piety should emerge so rapidly in Europe is a demonstration of the social power of Christianity to transform societies.

In an article by Hewitt B. Vinnedge, “Popular Church Building in Medieval France” (The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 16, No. 1, Apr., 1930, pp. 44-50), there are some wonderful quotes from contemporaneous medieval sources about the popular nature of medieval construction projects. Here is a passage from Rudolf, Abbott of St. Trond, quoted by Vinnedge: 

“It was marvelous to see, and it will seem too incredible to be worth telling, how so vast a number of people engaged in this labor and never paused by day or night. In their wagons or carts they would procure at their own expense, stones, mortar, sand, wood, and whatever else was necessary for the task at hand. Zealously and joyfully they worked. The very stones that one may find in the foundation, large and heavy as they are, hear witness to the zeal of the people; for when stones of the size desired could not be found in any part of Hesbaye, they were brought from foreign provinces. The columns, too, came from distant places. Some were brought down the Rhine from Worms to Cologne... and then were transported overland in carts. The people in their zeal would hitch themselves to these carts and haul them through the villages, never using oxen or other beasts of burden... As they went, they would be singing hymns.”

Vinnedge also quotes a page and a half from a famous letter of Haymon, Abbot of St. Pierre-sur-Dives, about the building of Chartres cathedral. This is so detailed and so remarkable the reader is urged to consult that paper and read the entire passage.

The quote from Haymon includes this passage:

“For who has ever seen, or who has ever heard in all past generations, that rulers and mighty princes of the world, and persons puffed up with honor and wealth, men and women of noble birth, have suffered their proud and arrogant necks to be yoked to cart reins, and after the fashion of brute beasts have drawn the carts to the sanctuary of Christ, laden with wine, wheat, oil, lime, stones, logs, and other things essential to the needs of life or to the construction of a church?”

The participation of elites of the social hierarchy in the actual labor of construction may be symbolic, but we should not be surprised if it did in fact happen. We can recognize this sort of thing on a much more modest scale in our own time when, for example, the president of some contemporary nation-state spends an hour volunteering at a soup kitchen or something like this.

Whether symbolic or actual, central projects of a suitably monumental cast provide the opportunity for a unification of a society across craft specialization, among distinct sectors of the economy, and along the social hierarchy from top to bottom: all contribute in their own way to the central project, and each thus has a personal stake in the civilization that undertakes such a comprehensive central project. A society with a central project of this comprehensive scope never lacks for meaning, value, and purpose.

To return again to the example of building pyramids in ancient Egypt, Egyptian society from the Pharaoh on down to the lowliest stone cutter were unified into a single organic whole through the means of common contribution to the central project of that civilization. I doubt few would deny the importance of this fact, but I do not think that it receives the attention it ought. Recently in Social Stratification and the Dominance Hierarchy I discussed the claim often made that social differentiation and hierarchy can be employed as a distinctive signature of civilization. I believe this view to be wrong, because dominance hierarchies exist throughout nature, and, in the order of human development, human dominance hierarchies would have preceded the emergence of civilization, which would have been shaped in its development by the selection pressure of dominance hierarchies.

One of the most crucial features of civilization is not this dominance hierarchy transposed into human social categories, but rather the creative negation of the dominance hierarchy that allows individuals from diverse backgrounds and of different talents to all collectively contribute to the building of a civilization. The study of central projects of civilization can cast some light on the ways in which social divisions are suspended or bridged by popular movements to express the human spirit of the age in material terms. 

In a couple of recent posts, Scientific Civilization: The Economic Perspective and Scientific Civilization: The Central Project, I used the phrase “central project” without elaborating on this. I initially found the term “central project” in Frank White’s The Overview Effect: Space Exploration and Human Evolution (p. 5 in the first edition; p. 3 in the 3rd edition), where he references Higher Creativity: Liberating the Unconscious for Breakthrough Insights by Willis Harman. Dr. Harman is affiliated with the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which was founded by Edgar Mitchell, who founded the institute in 1973 as a consequence of his personal insights experienced as an astronaut.

In his book Dr. Harman says of central projects:

“These projects, although involving visible material artifacts, were actually the vehicles for more abstract social and psychological aims. The great cathedrals, besides serving as highly visible central projects to attract the best and most adventurous minds of the age, also served to educate the consciousness of the larger population... Central projects, in this sense, are means of focusing the energies of a population during an evolutionary transition to a higher level of culture.” (pp. 174-175)

Harman here is not making central projects definitive of civilization, but suggesting that central projects emerge during evolutionary transitions of civilizations, almost as a kind of self-directed occupational therapy to engage the energies of a civilization as it focuses on attaining a higher level of culture. While I like the phrase “central projects” enough that I have started using it myself, I see it much more as descriptive of the nature of a certain kind of civilization.

Most settled agricultural civilizations have had some kind of great central project, usually religious in conception, that has involved monumental building projects, or great works of art, and it is the synthesis of aesthetic and intellectual conception and the concrete details of construction that knit together a society into an organic whole of the sort that we have come to think of as paradigmatic of civilization.

I have several times previously quoted a famous passage from J. M. Keynes’ The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, relevant to the above, as follows:

“Ancient Egypt was doubly fortunate, and doubtless owed to this its fabled wealth, in that it possessed two activities, namely, pyramid-building as well as the search for the precious metals, the fruits of which, since they could not serve the needs of man by being consumed, did not stale with abundance. The Middle Ages built cathedrals and sang dirges. Two pyramids, two masses for the dead, are twice as good as one; but not so two railways from London to York.”

The two examples that Keynes offers -- pyramid building and masses for the dead -- are nicely symbolic of the central projects of two civilizations, the civilization of ancient Egypt and the civilization of medieval Europe.

Harman notes that, “Perhaps the most recent central project was the Apollo project that culminated in Neil Armstrong’s famous footstep on the moon.” In a related vein, Frank White wrote, “I have come to see space exploration as part of a long tradition of central projects.” Note that Harman focuses on a great event (and a singular event) while White formulates the conception in terms of an ongoing tradition.

Thus one distinction we can make in the conception of central projects is between moments that mark a transition, and an ongoing effort that shapes the overall direction of resources in a civilization. Another distinction that can be made is between central projects as descriptive and central projects as prescriptive or aspirational. This latter distinction is at least partially a function of how a central project is formulated. It is descriptive that the central project of the European Middle Ages involved building cathedrals and singing masses for the dead; it is prescriptive or aspirational that the central project of the European Middle Ages was Christian salvation, i.e., the preparation of the soul in this vale of tears for its true life, the life everlasting. 

These two distinctions can be applied to the idea of space exploration as a central project of industrialized civilization. Harman views space exploration as a central project that culminated in the Apollo moon landings -- and presumably helped us to transition to a higher form of culture. I think that this view is not unusual, and indeed I think part of the post-Apollo malaise (only part, not all) was due to the fact that humanity had made this great accomplishment, but we were not changed by it, and no higher form of culture or consciousness emerged from this great effort. White sees space exploration as an ongoing effort, and from this point of view we could argue that the change in consciousness is only slowly dawning for our species as the overview effect sinks in gradually.

If we take the other distinction, we can understand space exploration as descriptive or prescriptive. I think that this means, in this context, that we can look as space exploration as the actual sequence of heroic events by which human beings have pushed knowledge and human presence beyond Earth, or as part of a much longer and larger arc of the quest for scientific knowledge, which can ultimately only be justified as an end in itself. As Keynes would have said, since scientific knowledge cannot serve the needs of man by being consumed, it does not stale with abundance.

Another distinction that might be a fruitful lens with which to examine our civilization is that between a civilization with and a civilization without a central project. Central projects give meaning, value, and purpose both to the individual human life and to social wholes pursuing the goals of central projects. Civilizations without central projects are civilizations adrift, lacking in meaning, value, and purpose. Again, this is at least in part a matter of formulation. I am sure that you could find individuals today who felt fully invested in contemporary civilization and who take is purposes as their own, and you could find other individuals who feel adrift and who would argue that civilization also is adrift, without meaning or value.

More distinctions could be made in order to give a more fine-grained account of central projects, their definition, and their scope. How much of a society must be involved in an effort for it to be a central project of a civilization? Were there Egyptians who looked at the construction of the pyramids as folly, and the mere expression of Pharaonic hubris? Did Egyptian society include those who had no part in, or even who felt no part of, the central project? When can a central project be said to be well and truly over? The La Sagrada Familia cathedral is still under construction today, but we assume that the central projects of the European Middle Ages, including the construction of great cathedrals, is over, and the civilization for which this was the central project now defunct.

Many more like questions could be pursued; the investigation of central projects could be a source of many insights for a science of civilization.

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