A Brief History of Modern Civilization, from Clear

A Brief History of Modern Civilization

is an excerpt from my novel in progress, Clear, a working title. It's the final book in a three part series and has been preceded by The Garden of What Was and Was Not and Traveling Without A Passport. Occasionally, I publish excerpts that I consider whole in themselves, much as writers of earlier generations published individual chapters as short stories in then popular magazines as they worked along.

David Stone, Writer

There’s an old story about almost everything. In Italy, with fragments left from Etruscan times and vivid reminders scattered throughout Rome and vast areas of conquest by the Romans, tales go back thousands of years.

Our ancestors learned from wolves to gather in clans when the development of farming ended nomadic life. Clans require territory, and since success meant expanding populations, territory needed to expand with them. Fables, like that of Romulus and Remus suckling from a she-wolf, tell us how small was the gap separating us from the rest of nature, how accepted were our connections.

Establishing communal spaces meant battling other clans along the borders, a ritual that grew more technical, mannered and habitual over centuries, and the clustering together itself demanded rules and class structures. (Consider this seeds of ice hockey.)

The modern emphasis on equality, whether realistic or even honestly practiced, like religion, emphasizes an insistence on escaping nature or, better said, the perceived perils of nature. A nature rife with perils is a nature worth steering your offspring away from. It creates a false reality, its ritualized denaturing enriched by fallacy. And you can’t get there without cutting your hair.

All power springs from nature. Slowly, modern man has become a shallowed, sapped, destructive force, leaving a footprint everywhere of detached genius, unable to honestly observe itself, even in a mirror.

Welcome to the 21st Century.

See also: Is He Crazy of Just A Writer?

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Additional posted excerpts, from The Garden of What Was and Was Not, Resisting the Viet Nam War in 1968; from Traveling Without A Passport, Waking Up In A Strange Place and Flight of A Statutory Racist in Transit.