What Happened?

 What we know about our deep history is outweighed, many times, by what we don't know.

 I'm researching Heian era Japan, as I've mentioned before. The period ended in 1185 AD, not that long ago, yet we know almost nothing about how people lived. We understand most of the social order, the upper echelons of society, but that's about all. We don't even have much of an idea what people ate.

 It's the same everywhere. There's still argument about how the Giza pyramids were built: by thousands of slaves, or by a smaller group of more professional men. No one really knows. People argue over who the Sumerians were and where they came from. Historians and archaeologists bicker over who the Hyksos were, who conquered part of ancient Egypt in 1650 BC and who were "possibly from Western Asia". In other words, the best we can say it that they most likely came from somewhere in one half of the largest continent on Earth. Not exactly precision, is it?

 This tells me that as a species, human beings really don't remember much. Give us two generations and a minor dislocation - a war, a famine, plague - and we forget most of what we knew before. It happens amazingly fast. When Rome fell information was stored in dozens of major libraries across the Empire, but 50 years later nobody knew how to build Roman roads, or even the buildings that had filled every town. The philosophy of ancient Greece was forgotten in Europe completely, and had to be relearned from the Muslims a thousand years later. That staggers me. How can a whole continent forget all that wisdom?

 Part of the answer is that we destroy it deliberately.

 That post-Roman loss was led by the Catholic Church, which set out to destroy any book and all learning that wasn't approved by the clerics. Knowledge came from God, they said, not any other source. The Church did it again in the Americas in the 16th Century, trying to wipe out whatever they could of the former cultures. Rome tried to obliterate all memory of the Druids. History is full of examples like this, and it makes me so angry I can hardly speak.

 That was my heritage. It was mine by right, and these bastards took it away.

 It's important we remember this, and try not to let it happen again. Because we're entering a very tough period now, globally, with the horrendous damage we've done and are still doing to the world. 7.7 billion people is too many for the Earth to support for very long. We use too much water, too much land. I think there's going to be a crash, and the longer it takes to arrive, the harder it's going to be.

 I hope we preserve what we can, because if we forget our past there's nothing to stop us doing the same stupid things again in the future.

We All Wear Levi's

 There's a meeting of the Commonwealth Heads of Government at the moment, with the acronym CHOGM. Catchy, eh? They're deciding who'll replace the Queen as head of the Commonwealth. As a Republican I could care less, but there's another issue too, which is that 70% of Commonwealth countries apparently still ban homosexuality.

 Now to my mind, who sleeps with who isn't my business. If two men are in love, or two women, that's fine. Love is very rarely wrong. But still, do we really have the right to lecture other countries, other cultures, on what to believe?

 That's cultural imperialism. There's still a good bit of it about, unfortunately, sixty or seventy years after the end of the European Empires. People get upset because Saudi Arabia, among other countries, punishes thieves by cutting off their hands. They get angry because homosexuality is illegal in Zambia, or women have few rights in Pakistan. Those things seem strange to me too, even a bit backward. But I know that's because of my perspective as a man raised in the increasingly liberal West. I'm not sure I have the right to lecture other peoples on issues like these. Their cultural histories are different from mine, so their outlooks are too.

 The world wasn't like this, once. Marco Polo could travel to China and be amazed by the differences. Ibn Battuta covered the world from Morocco to China and wrote of the wonders he saw. Now we can travel from Britain to Cuzco or Samarkand, and most likely find a McDonald's on a street corner and a little shop that sells Pepsi. Everything has to be made the same. I think that's a pity. I'd rather live in a world of myriad cultures with different rules and traditions, than one in which every pub is a Wetherspoons and we all wear Levi's.

 I'd like to see homosexuality accepted everywhere, and women's rights too. I'm liberal to my bones. But if the price of that is losing the things that make us different, losing much of the world's cultural identities... well, then I don't know, because I love those differences too. It's the sort of conundrum which liberals have failed to deal with in the past. We all defend a woman's right to have as many children as she wants, but we also know that overpopulation is killing the ecosystem, so which belief do we abandon? Which holy cow do we shoot?

 Instead of trying to sort through this, at CHOGM they've spent days deciding that the next Commonwealth head will be the heir of a hereditary monarch. Imperialism, still kicking after all this time.