Understanding ruptures and bifurcations in human history (a reading list)

What you could be reading to structure and strengthen your own psyche and intellect in these wildly gyrating times

In this article, I would like to introduce you, dear readers of this Substack, to a series of remarkable books about civilizational transitions, that have really kindled my own imagination, and opened new visions on civilizational change, now and in the past. Just maybe, introducing yourself to past historical patterns may prompt you to look with a fresh eye at what is happening today.

Bear in mind that I am not a professional historian that would be able to adjudicate historical truth, but on the other hand, I have done my own due diligence by reading a body of work written by various respected macro-historians, and I hope that gives my judgment a certain consistency. The books listed here below shed light on various transitional moments in human history.

To understand why I have chosen them, imagine three domains:

• The material domain of geographic, physical, and technological reality, i.e. the physical environment in which humans operate

• The social-organizational domain, i.e. how humans, in groups, organize to face the challenges implicit in those realities

• The mindset, the structure of mind and consciousness, that informs these choices and responses

In the past few years, I have produced some bibliographies that may help guide you in a structured and ongoing reading of works that may allow the construction of your own grounded interpretation of world history. For all of us, it’s all a matter of standing on the shoulders of giants.

Many years ago, I was invited to the charming city of Limoges in France, the birthplace of French unionism in the 19th cy. because of its ceramics industry. One of the people who invited me, belonging to a local ‘Gramsci circle’, gave me a guided tour of the city. He would show me a building, give the the history of the building, but was able to tell me the buildings that had preceded it. I was blown away, and it seemed to me that I suddenly understood what ‘culture’ really meant. Where I was just seeing a bunch of bricks, he was seeing a multi-layered human history on top of these bricks, and was imparting this knowledge and capacity to me.

The goal of my efforts around civilizational history, have much the same goal: enhance your capacity to see patterns, and have a richer experience of our historical moment, to feel more grounded, and less shaken and moved in wild directions.

So here is a short guide to the material in the P2P Foundation wiki, which is back online after having experienced some difficulties.

The first page to consult is my section page on Civilizational Analysis: it is a very comprehensive catalog of macrohistorians, which lists the authors and historians, with links to their most important book:

• A guide to Civilizational Analysis

So this is where you learn the context to read Spengler, Toynbee and their colleagues.

A second very comprehensive reading list retraces my own intellectual journey through my more ‘methodological readings’, i.e. through which methods did I arrive at the kind of conclusions about the change in coordination regime, that you can find in this substack. It’s called:

• Sources of P2P Theory

This is where you learn about ‘integral theory’ and the ‘cosmo-biological tradition’ in human thought.

And finally the third list, which is a bibliography for understanding that ‘third’ human institution, which was repressed in modernity, i.e. the Commons.

• What you should read about the Commons

All these lists are comprehensive and it would take many years. I am thus not suggesting you read all these books, but I am confident you will find some of the classics that you may conclude are indispensable. What I have done here is to map the terrain, hoping to make the inquiry a little less burdensome.

The important thing is, in my humble opinion, that you keep reading in this Age of Distraction. Remember, when you are on the internet, but especially on the new short form focused social media, you are actually NOT thinking, but are engaged reactively, not mobilizing the very neocortex that makes you human.. Your attention is driven by third parties with their own interest. Reading is different, you are engaging with an inner dialogue with the author, forming long thoughts, and structuring your mind.

Let me share with you some of my own reading and learning habits, in the hope that they may also inspire you to more structured reading and learning. I am not suggesting you simply copy them, but maybe you can find the protocols that will help in maintaining a steady diet of encountering qualitative material.

A big change in my own habits came after I read Frances Yates’ book about Memory Castles in the Renaissance. Since paper was relatively scarce, scholars would imagine inner temples and castles, with multiple corridors and rooms, and place their acquired knowledge in these ‘virtual rooms’. They would use particular memory techniques to fixate the ideas in these ‘places’, and this would anchor and structure their knowledge. Think about neuro-linguistic programming as a more modern version of such anchoring techniques. About six years ago, when I embarked on my huge reading project concerning macro-history, I also instituted some new habits to help me in this ambitious undertaking.

So everyday, I start my morning (after breakfast), with two hours of reading. In general, this means I have three concurring books on my table. I read about thirty minutes of each book, and take notes, not necessarily full summaries, but certainly, I take note of what I feel that I am learning. Then, when I finish a book, I reread the notes about the book; and when I finish a notebook, which will contain several books, I will again read the whole notebook. This means that I am engaging at least three times with the ideas contained in a book. Last but not least, after reading those three books, I take an extra 30 minutes for what I call a intellectual meditation. I ask myself questions such as: 1) what have I read and learned today 2) do I need to change anything about my current worldview to accommodate these new insights and 3) how do these new ideas relate to other themes that I may be thinking of lately ? This exercise, after having taken the notes, creates another layer of anchoring.

Note that I also pay attention to different temporalities. I do follow online developments, do curation for X and my wiki, and have come to the conclusion that it is useful to combine short-term events, to be aware of ‘weak signals’; then, reading essays represents engaging with a different temporarility, since they are the results of weeks or months of work from an author, and finally, books, which represent a huge investment of potentially years. This combination of temporalities also works to connect layers of reality to each other. Please note, I do not open my computer before 1 pm. Another trick I am using is to read synthetic and overview books when I’m home, but to read more concrete history books when I travel, in order to fill some of the gaps in my knowledge. I feel this back and fourth of level of detail also helps my brain make different and deeper connections. Last year, for example, I read about the fourth school of Christianity, which developed outside the territories of the Roman empire, and lacked any grounding in Greek philosophy, a history of Venice, the history of India. I should also remind people that my specific role in the commons-related social movements, has brought me in contact with a multitude of contemporary experimentations, also giving me a layer of empirical experiences that can be used to make knowledge more embodied.

I also use my notes to augment various databases in the P2P Foundation wiki.

Above I mentioned the section of Civilizational Analysis. I have other related sections where I catalog the material:

The first is a database on Cycles and Temporalities. What do we know about cycles and wave-like phenomena that occur in human history ? How do they fit together ? How to determine ‘when’ we are in these unfoldments ?

The second is a database of Patterns which includes ‘Pattern Languages’, that various groups have developed since the publishing of Christopher Alexander’s famous book on the topic. Patterns are like protocols that may occur any time in a definite order, and may be analyzed as biophilic or biopathic, to use Alexander’s language.

And finally, I have a section on ‘P2P Futures’, which contains various structured scenarios on how our world may evolve in the future from many different authors that have been working on human futures.

Of course, the magnitude of this collection may well discourage you, but bear in mind that every section has an intro page to guide you but most of all, that today, you can use the AI’s. We count two million hits of AI bots every single week, which means that every chatbot you know has likely used our wiki to train itself. I routinely use the Google AI search, and add ‘according to the P2P wiki’ to my query and it then replies specifically from the general point of view of P2P Theory and commons insights.

The list below is not meant to be comprehensive and exhaustive. Instead, I have selected a few books that are generally fascinating to read, where I feel you will learn a lot of surprising perspectives that will potentially change how you see the world, a focusing on transitions, ruptures and bifurcations in world history. Indeed, while some aspects of our history are indeed linear and evolutionary (don’t let anybody tell you otherwise, the evidence is overwhelming that there is a rise in complexity over time). But phase transitions very often reverse course, as they are reactions to the perceived faults of a previous era. Thus, when Christians become dominant in the dying days of the Roman empire, they do not simply continue Roman traditions, but react against them just as much. For example, instead of seeing work as an activity for slaves, they claim that humans must both work and play, ‘ora et labora’. Work becomes salvific and positive. Thus, a real value revolution has taken place, and human consciousness has taken a new form, developing new ethics and sensibilities that simply did not exist in the Roman empire. In similar ways, when Buddhism enters China when the Han empire similarly implodes, they bring a reversal in many values. That is what these books are about.

Just in case you want the real meat, you will find it in Pitirim Sorokin’s Social and Cultural Dynamics , a four volume monster that fortunately also exist in one abridged volume, and that focuses on the main bifurcation in human civilizational history: that between Sensate societies, oriented towards the material, the empirical and the rational; and Idealistic societies, that focus on the spiritual but also on Reason, and actively turn away from the focus on the material world. Very occasionally, there are ‘integrative periods’, such as the 5th century BC in Greece, or the 13th cy. AD in Western Europe with Thomas Aquinas. It is my deepest wish that the next historical period will be precisely such an integral period, and I am documenting possible signs of such a transition in two special sections of my wiki, one dedicated to Integral Theory, and one to what I call the Cosmo-Biological Tradition. I am currently reading Aurobindo and Teilhard de Chardin who both represent this tradition in their own way.

So think of it this way: as you get to know the cycles, and what their functions are, you start understanding that each cycle has, as it were, its own program, it own agenda, and therefore, by knowing ‘when’ you are, you become more able to see the ‘patterns’ that emerge in this type of moment of the cycle, and you can start behaving less post-seasonally (i.e. not adapted to the new challenges of your time), and more seasonally (appropriate to your time), or even better, ‘pre-seasonally. In this latter option, you have the capacity to anticipate changes, and you become a potential agent of change for an augmented future.

This then, the moment we are living through, is a moment of interlocking cycles, which are concurrently entering into their crisis modality.

• 2008 was definitely the end of a Kondratieff cycle, and thus an economic challenge

• The year 2026 signifies the end of a civil cycle <and> the end of a hegemonic cycle, which signals the need for a new civic system internally and a new world system ‘externally’.

• We may very well be, at least in the West, at the end of a cycle of centralization (I understand this is contentious, but I see the Western nation-state as the very model of centralization for the West, as it replaced the decentralized city states from the Medieval Era), so this means we are at the end of a 500 year cycle, and for the West again, most likely at the end of a 1,000 year Spenglerian civilization cycle.

But if you are familiar with my work, you know I believe we are also at the end of the cycle of civilizational coordination, i.e. the end of a “geographical” order that was based on market and state coordination mechanisms. New coordination mechanisms, and thus new coordination elites and new ways of distributed the surplus, are being born in the era of digital networks and ecosystems.

(The meaning of AI deserves a separate discussion.)

Enough said, let’s go to my book list, and I hope you will enjoy them and consider reading some of them eventually.

(Here is also a list of 204 booknotes)

Book 1: Understanding the basic non-rational premises to create meaning for human suffering

Beyond Civilization: The World’s Four Great Streams of Civilization: Their Achievements, Their Differences and Their Future. Keith Chandler. Rivendell Publishing Company, 1992

There is a way to read this second book as a continuation of the first one, and I want to acknowledge that this book was hugely influential for my own understanding.

Keith Chandlers sharply divides the tribal, kin-ship based world from the civilizational world. The first world is based on convivial social structures, based on family, and while there is suffering, danger, conflict, and cruelty, it is experienced in a natural setting in which we protect ‘loved ones’ from common dangers. He stresses that animism and shamanism are broadly similar the world over, and that a Siberian shaman could talk to one in the Andes. But once civilization emerges, as a violent complex of social strata that are forced to live together, the expansion of human suffering needs to be explained. And this, he argues, is the role of religion. Think about Godel’s argument, that no system can justify itself on its own premises, or that there is no mathematics without unprovable axioms that form the basis of it. The same goes for social systems: the premises for living together must come from ‘outside’ of us, and religion provides the non-rational, but NOT ‘irrational’, premises to organize communal life outside of kinship.

Chandler then offers a quadrant, East-West, North-South, to distinguish the basic principles that determine the logic of a particular civilization, based on how they related order and disorder (chaos) to each other. Thus he distinguishes

• The Eastern (Eurasian) religions, which see order as illusory and want to move to non-order. This is the way of Buddhism and non-dual Vedanta in India. You turn away from the illusion of the material world to reach emptiness and ‘Nirvana’.

• The West (of Eurasia), took the opposite path, and this goes for Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Here, Chaos is bad, and a creator God creates order in the chaos, which is good. The task of a believer in such a ‘sociological’ religion is to help God create more order in the world. Here the world of matter, definitely ‘matters’.

• China is the North, it uniquely combines both chaos and order in equilibrium, Yin and Yang are both needed and need to be seen as complementary and harmonious.

• The Aztecs, who see both order and disorder as problematic, are the counterpoint to Chinese spirituality.

Chandler completely identifies civilization as the world of conquest and domination, i.e. class society, centered around hierarchy and inequality. But he sees what has been happening since the 16th cy, first in the West, i.e. the rejection of inequality, as the beginning of a return away from the civilizational model. Hence, the concept of post-civilization, which I also adhere to in my own writings.

Here is Neelesh Marik:

“The impetus for this book stemmed from a philosophical project of integrating Eastern and Western thought, the pursuance of which led to the discovery of four (not just two) outlooks straddling the face of human civilization, and a rather startling realization that these could never be synthesized because they are psychologically incompatible. The Theory of Mind-sets, however, led to the conclusion that it is possible to transcend these four mind-sets into what the author calls ‘the post-civilized mind’, a transcendence which, as it turns out is not only possible, but necessary and even indispensable for the survival of the human species.”

(https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/457728.Beyond_Civilization)

Book 2: Overcoming our Split Mind

The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. By Julian Jaynes.

Reading this book was a great adventure, and I cannot recommend it strongly enough. The surprising thesis of this book is that early humanity had a split brain, and thus, a split mind. Thus, we literally ‘heard voices’, whenever we were thinking. His recommendation is to read early literary classics like the Odyssey and the Iliad, ‘literally’, thus, when Homer writes that heroes heard their stomachs or saw the Gods, they are reporting how they experienced reality. He gives many examples in art and culture, including a close reading of passages in the Old Testament, to show what he means. People heard voices and thought they were the Gods or spirits speaking, as a general and not exceptional condition for humans. Then gradually, our brains fused to become unitary, and we recognized our inner voices. You would be surprised how much sense you can make of the history of art and culture, and society and civilization in general, by accepting this as a serious premise.

Here is George Adelman introducing the book:

“This is an exciting, ingenious, heavily documented, beautifully written, and “utterly preposterous” (to use the author’s term) theory of the development of human consciousness. The author, who teaches psychology at Princeton, argues that consciousness is an only recently evolved capacity of the human brain and that going back a mere 4000 years, and even less, most human beings acted not under their own conscious control but followed the command of voices – auditory (schizophrenia-like) hallucinations – that they perceived as coming from the gods. This earlier “bicameral mind” was not conscious but consisted of a commanding half and an obeying half. Jaynes presents evidence for this daring hypothesis from man’s prehistory, archeology, art, and early literature (the Iliad, the Bible, ancient Egyptian chronicles, Eastern religious writing, etc.). One’s first inclination is to reject all of it out of hand as science fiction, imaginative speculation with no hard evidence; but, curiously, if one is patient and hears out the story (Jaynes’s style is irresistible) the arguments are not only entertaining but persuasive. After all, consciousness is a mystery, hypnosis and schizophrenia are not understood, thought is still considered by some to be internal vocalization, etc., and this explanation, outlandish and purely correlative as it is, may be very useful.“

(https://www.julianjaynes.org/resources/articles/origin-of-consciousness-book-review-adelman/)

Book 3: The Alphabet and the Goddess: how media revolutions affect the feminization or masculinization of cultures

The Alphabet vs. the Goddess. Leonard Schlain.

This is also a book with a fascinating and perhaps counter-intuitive thesis, but may be read as a forerunner of the now very fashionable books by Iain McGilchrist, The Master and his Emissary and the Matter with Things, which posits the existence of a dual mind, and believes humanity has over-evolved the ‘rational-analytic’ mind to the detriment of our holistic capacity.

Leonard Schain’s book has a similar sounding thesis. Essentially, he claims that the invention of the alphabet, abstract signs that no longer have a direct relationship with the underlying meaning, unlike logographic languages (such as Chinese) or hieroglyphic languages (Egypt), effectively rewire the brain and create a masculinization of human culture.

Thus, when the Roman empire starts collapsing and literacy rates go down with it, that heralds a feminization of medieval society; evidence would be that the number of shrines dedicated to Maria vastly exceeds those dedicated to Jesus, and that new cultural trends such as courtly love emerge, as well as the strongest possible stress on monogamy as a guarantor of a better social positioning for women. By the 11th cy., as evidenced in that formidable book, The First European Revolution, by Richard Wright, through the Peace of God movement and their social contracts that spread like wildfire, the clergy is able to significantly internally pacify the feudal social order and create three centuries of high civilizational growth.

Counter-intuitively, when print re-emerges, and with it, the victory of the Reformation in much of Northern and Western Europe, a re-masculinization of European culture will occur. The evidence for this are of course the witchhunts, which were much more prevalent in the Reformation-controlled regions, and could be interpreted as a war against the feminine, and the place it had obtained in the High Middle Ages. I’m not fully convinced by the thesis, but I found it sufficiently stimulating to look at history in a new way.

Here is what the publisher says:

“Shlain contrasts the feminine right-brained oral teachings of Socrates, Buddha, and Jesus with the masculine creeds that evolved when their spoken words were committed to writing. The first book written in an alphabet was the Old Testament and its most important passage was the Ten Commandments. The first two reject of any goddess influence and ban any form of representative art. The love of Mary, Chivalry, and courtly love arose during the illiterate Dark Ages and plummeted after the invention of the printing press in the Renaissance. The Protestant attack on holy images and Mary followed, as did ferocious religious wars and neurotic witch-hunts. The benefits of literacy are obvious; this gripping narrative explores its dark side, tallying previously unrecognized costs.

Shlain goes on to describe the colossal shift he calls the Iconic Revolution.”

Book 4: Lesser Known Societal Revolutions

Book: R. I. Moore. The First European Revolution, c. 970-1215. Oxford and New York: Blackwell Publishers, 2000

This book was also a stunner. According to the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne, the real fall of Romanized Europe only occurred in the 8th cy. , when the Moslems invaded the Mediterranean area and stopped naval commerce. The attempt at unification by Charlemagne eventually failed and this created the breakdown of Western European regions, marked by the ‘peer to peer’ castellization of numerous local lords building their own castles. Abuses of power were numerous as were the complaints of the people against rapes and the theft of Church wealth. By 975, the monks of Cluny started organizing protests with the people in tow, confronting the feudal knights with their sins and abuses, and this alliance proved successful. In a few decades, 600 Peace of God agreements were signed.

These agreements stipulated:

1. ‘Make love not war’: feudal families promised to enter into negotiated marriages rather than in constant fights

2. Primogeniture was installed: the oldest son becomes the sole inheritor of family wealth. This pacified internal family struggles.

3. Commoners lost their right to hunt, which created an incentive for a agricultural revolution

Overall, these measures stabilized the social relations in medieval Europe and led to three centuries of very high economic and population growth (tripling the population of Western Europe). It allowed for the rapid growth of industrial guilds, agrarian commons agreements, and the proliferation of the Cistercian monasteries, the early factories of the Middle Ages.

Bruce L. Venarde writes:

“What Moore manages, in just 200 pages of elegant and even lapidary prose, is to explain the creation of European society in a fashion that links a variety of topics ranging from agricultural organization to strategies of marriage and distribution of patrimony to educational curricula and arenas. At the literal and figurative root of the birth of Europe is the formation of a new and undifferentiated mass of agricultural laborers. … Above the peasantry, the elite groups in the newly constituted regime were the classic medieval three orders, an old notion refurbished vigorously after 1150 or so: oratores, bellatores, and laboratores, those who prayed, fought, and worked. Those who prayed, Europe’s professional clergy, were for a long time the vigorous advocates and defenders of the newly defined laboring poor. From the late tenth century, monks, nuns, bishops and popes allied with local communities of faithful people and shared their concerns not only for their physical well-being but their spiritual interests, as expressed in relics, shrines, and an organized system of parishes that provided autonomy and a focus for community identity and, in its priest, an arbiter of social peace. The clergy defended the “little community” against the excesses of the mounted warrior class “

Book 5: The Pulsation of the Commons

Book: Ecological Revolution: The Political Origins of Environmental Degradation and the Environmental Origins of Axial Religions; China, Japan, Europe. by Mark D. Whitaker. Cologne, Germany: Lambert Academic Publishing, AG. , 2009

Last but not least, I have to recommend this relatively unknown book that gave me documented evidence of the role of the ‘pulsation of the commons’ in human history. In brief, this extraordinary book gives a history of the ebb and flow of degenerative and regenerative societal systems, focusing on three areas of the world: ancient China, medieval Japan, and post-Roman Europe. It gives fascinating details about regenerative periods of human history you will likely have never heard about. Did you know for example, that the Togukawa period in Japan, represented 250 years of a stable population with stable resource use.

The story as I remember it is the following:

1) The civil war between warlords also is marked by the existence of the Pure Land Buddhism church, which has armed peasants and monks defending forest commons, ruled by authentic ‘Ostromian’ commons charters.

2) When the Shogun finally wins, he disarms the peasants, and though he expropriates the Church, he keeps the land protected as imperial commons. He forces the feudal lords to come to the capital to spend their surplus (forbidding wheels to force to hire labor); teaches the Samurai to follow Zen meditation practices to calm their fighting spirits, and creates a social hierarchy where the dignity of the peasantry is recognized.

This is how Mark Whitaker describes his own aims:

“The origins of our large scale humano-centric axial religions are connected to anti-systemic environmental movements. Many major religious movements of the past were environmentalist by being health, ecological, and economic movements, rolled into one. Since ecological revolutions are endemic to a degradation-based political economy, they continue today. China, Japan, and Europe are analyzed over 2,500 years showing how religio-ecological movements get paired against chosen forms of state-led environmental degradation in a predictable fashion. … The term ‘ecological revolution’ is stressed because the material and ecological relations in world history’s oppositional social movements have been overlooked. These oppositional ideological movements have three common environmentally linked factors. They are anti-systemic health practices, local ecological protection movements against state/elite jurisdiction and extraction, and involve more ecologically rationalized economic-technological institutions within a religious mobilization. Such major religious social movements in world history take place in contexts of massive environmental degradation, political economic consolidation, and immiseration—and social reorganization attempts at escaping this context.”

These are two books I haven’t read, but only explored, but I hope you will agree they are important contributions to understanding the changes in the existential positioning of humankiond:

Book 6: On the emergence of Mind and the Human Imaginary

• Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind. By Ajit Varki Danny Brower. Twelve, 2013

One hundred thousand years ago (and for sure 40,000 years ago), art and cultural artefacts appeared in the archeological record, showing a differentiation between humans and the earlier hominid species from whom they evolved, or rather, a first cultural differentiation occurred within humanity, as artefacts starts appearing and multiplying, including art.

Here is how the authors of the Un-Denial blog introduce the thematic of the book, focusing both on the discovery of death, and the subsequent need to cope with the dread of dying.

The authors of the Un-Denial blog explain:

The correct question is “what’s prevented other intelligent social species like chimpanzees, elephants, crows, and dolphins from evolving brains similar to humans?”.

The answer is that a more powerful brain with an extended theory of mind becomes aware of mortality by observing common dangerous activities like hunting and childbirth, and this awareness of death causes depression and reduces risk taking, thus preventing the trait from being passed on to the next generation.

This barrier has prevented the evolution of a more powerful brain in all but one species.

Crossing the barrier requires an improbable evolutionary event, analogous to the energy per gene barrier that blocked complex life for 2 billion years until a rare endosymbiosis (merging) of prokaryotes (simple cells) created the eukaryotic cell (complex cell common to all multicellular life).

About 100,000 years ago, one small group of hominids in Africa broke through the barrier by simultaneously evolving an extended theory of mind with denial of death.

While denial of death may appear to be a suspiciously complicated behavior to evolve quickly, it can, for example, be implemented by a modest tweak to the fear suppression module that mammals use when forced to fight. A side effect of this solution is that not only is death denied, but anything unpleasant is denied, thus the adaptation manifests as denial of reality (aka optimism bias).

On its own, denial of reality is maladaptive because it causes behaviors not optimal for survival. However the two maladaptive behaviors, an extended theory of mind and denial of reality, when combined, become highly adaptive by enabling the evolution of a more powerful brain, which is clearly useful for an intelligent social species.”

(https://un-denial.com/denial-2/theory-short/)

What this book points to is the importance of the world of the mind, that interfaces with the ‘real’ world of physical reality we interact with. We encounter the world through the virtual world that we enacted and we live as much within it as we do in any objective world. There is a beautiful science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick which illustrates this, ‘Eye in the Sky’, in which a group of visitors to a nuclear facility, then an accident occurs and the lead characters wakes up and faints repeatedly, but each time, in a slightly different world. This enigma is resolved once we understand that the accident removed the barriers between the individual worlds of the visitors, and that the lead character is subsequently in each of these different worlds, as interpreted by other people’s filters. This book was a genuine revelation to me in my teenage years, to understand the plurality of worldviews.

For more info on this ‘Denial of death’ theory see also: Ajit Varki’s Mind Over Reality Transition (MORT) theory.”

(https://un-denial.com/2019/05/07/on-the-emergence-of-behaviorally-modern-humans-the-denial-to-domesticate-dtd-theory/)

Book 7: The Dialectic of Death in the Higher Civilizations

Franz Borkenau’s findings stresses that the centrality of death continued to play a fundamental role in the evolution of civilization:

• Borkenau Franz. End and Beginning: On the Generations of Cultures and the Origins of the West. Edited by Lowenthal Richard. (European Perspectives.) New York: Columbia University Press. 1981.

As John David Ebert, whose Youtube channel inspired me to embark on my project of civilizational reading, writes: ‘It is an extensive meditation on the relation of death to civilization and it is a masterpiece.’

See first the following dialectic in the religious civilizations:

• Egypt & Mesopotamia: “Death Transcendance” (immortality affirmed; world denied)

• Judaic & Greek Societies: “Death Acceptance” (immortality deemphasized, world affirmed)

• Christianity: “Death Transcendance” (immortality affirmed; world affirmed)

Then comes the fourth, post-religious civilization:

• Post-Renaissance: “Death Acceptance” or “Death Embracing” (immortality denied, completely; world affirmed; soul abolished)

John David Ebert stresses that this is a dialectic, spiral-type unfoldment:

“Cultures of the first generation are in resonance with cultures of the third; while cultures of the second generation are in resonance with those of the fourth. Borkenau is careful to stress, though, that this resonance is not a mere repetition, but rather a higher development on the turn of the spiral. Christianity is no mere regression to the Egyptian emphasis on immortality, for it adds a complex dimension of ethics due to its inheritance and synthesis of the Judaic and Hellenic worldviews. The Renaissance, likewise, does not just retrieve Hellenism, but rather picks it up and develops it into a civilization of the machine that takes the annihilation of the Afterlife and the disintegration of the personality to a new level of complexity.“

(https://cultural-discourse.com/on-death-civilization/)

This ends my current list of recommendations! So as a reminder, the first part of this article leads to systematic treatments, and second list was focused on books that shed a specific light on civilizational turnarounds.

I hope you will share my reading pleasure, and that these books may inspire you to positive transformative action at whatever scale you are comfortable with.