The surprising civilizational philosophy of 10,950 BC

I’ll share with you here a philosophical insight that I gleaned from the evidence presented in the book America Before by Graham Hancock that is especially relevant to THIS moment in history…

An admission, I used to be a “young-earth creationist,” which means that I was among the Christians who believe that God created the world and universe about 6,000 years ago. A commonly-held and dogma-driven view of history that we now view as absurd and anti-rational which necessitates ignoring a lot of evidence. Almost nobody (Christians included) is now a young-earth creationist — but (even the intelligentsia of) society still hold some very dogmatic views of history that require ignoring a lot of evidence. Graham Hancock has written several books thoroughly documenting and analyzing this evidence. According to the mainstream view of history, our species suddenly jumped from scratching about in the dust to building the pyramids and other megaliths of tremendous proportions and size — civilizational endeavors requiring mastery of complex mathematics and engineering principles. While our modern civilization can barely keep the lights on in a lot of places (and can’t even keep the Notre Dame cathedral from burning down), we’re made to believe that ancient humans jumped right from chasing down megafauna on the flatlands with spears to the decadent project of building giant monuments perfectly aligned to the astrological starscape above, in a matter of (at the most) a few thousand years, while they were mired in a barbaric and deeply superstitious societal state. Indeed, “young civilizationists” (like young-earth creationists) believe that something magical happened about six millennia ago.

A more rational and scientific view of ancient history is becoming clearer, with a lot of resistance from the young civilizationists; that there was a relatively advanced civilization present about 12,000 years ago that had mapped the earth and the night sky and seeded the ancient civilizations around the globe that we all learned about in grade school, before its demise. I’ve just republished on my website, my deep-dive book review of Magicians of the Gods — if you’re still skeptical of the idea of a lost civilization read that or listen to the podcast version I recorded.

It’s a tantalizing hypothesis that’s no longer in the category of silly History Channel documentaries and click-baity YouTube videos. Plato called this civilization Atlantis, but we frankly have no idea what they called themselves. They may have lived in the center of what’s now the Sahara desert, or the southwestern coast of Spain, or quite possibly, in North America — we really don’t know. We have no idea what their language was like. The names of their greatest men and women are forgotten. But we owe them a lot. Their deliberate efforts and sacrifices resulted in civilization flowering around the globe.
But there is one thing that we know we have (somewhat) in common with them, they most certainly had a universalist theory of ethics and morality. This means everybody has to play by the same rules, it stands in stark contrast with tribal morality where there are different rules for different types of people. If there’s one thing that we know from more recent history, it’s that civilization is downstream (and sometimes it can be a long stream) from universalist morality.

If we look at the world now or at any point in the last several thousand years, the best societies — the places where you might choose to live if you had a choice of where to be born — were the places with the most universal system of ethics. Where a poor farmer had the same rights as a rich aristocrat. For at least a hundred thousand years life in Europe was brutal and short, but then something changed, and in a historically relatively short period of time there was tremendous innovation, invention, renaissance, the abolition of human serfdom and slavery, rule-of-law instituted, human rights enshrined, and great leaps forward in medicine and science. What was that something? What changed? We didn’t undergo a drastic genetic change making us more intelligent. It was a modicum of universalist morality in the form of Christianity — every man had a soul of equal weight worthy of God’s forgiveness and promise of everlasting life. And I know what some of you are thinking…

What about slavery, colonialism, aristocracy, etc? There’s a lot of nasty tribalism in the history of Christendom that doesn’t seem very universalist.

In my philosophical work, I’ve made the case that modern Western civilization (largely propelled by regression to tribal morality) is headed towards a dark age, but this challenging time ahead may serve as a crucible that reignites universalist morality.

If we can reembrace this edifying philosophy, the great leap forward will be dizzying, we will cure cancer, we will defeat death, we will colonize Mars, and I, for one, look forward to salsa dancing on Olympus Mons!