Imagine an ecumene — the whole of civilizational creation and activity — as a substance with its own unique physical properties. Just like your beloved water, it can exist in distinct phases: solid, liquid, gas, and so on. But the possible phases of an ecumene are vastly more numerous and varied, representing meme complexes that describe civilizational practices or ways of life. There may be multiple competing or coexisting “cells” of substance in the same environment. These cells spend long spans of time bound in stable equilibrium, punctuated by convulsive changes of phase or emergences of new cells with unseen phases.

One could, and we do, illustrate the long low hum of Humanity’s history as an amorphous cell called Hunter-Gatherer, drifting about in the available conceptual “ways of life” possibility space. After a veritable eternity, 213 generations, distinct cells called Nomadism and the unassuming but ineluctable Farming split off and gradually fill the space, sometimes peacefully thriving, sometimes aggressively taking “territory” (both literal geography and mindshare) from the others. A symbiotic cell called Urbanism grows from the farming cell, with a subtle and concentrated sort of power. It is a prolific mutation catalyst, giving birth to further aggressive cells called Inquiry, Commerce, and Empire. No one plans these changes; they emerge from the lower-level activity of individuals reacting to the historical moment they find themselves in, and in aggregate acting to generate the next moment.

The assemblage of cells becomes an integrated organ, sustaining itself with ever more tightly interlocking networks of influence. Note well that the fortunes of, say, any individual empire do not decide the state of the Empire cell — as long as empires strive and clash, rise and fall, the idea of empire thrives.

Now of course, the game rules of growth and mutation for these cells, and the dice rolls that march them forward turn by turn, are based entirely in the inherent capacities and tendencies of the species whose culture and behavior they describe. I will continue to emphasize to you how rare it is for a world to develop self-awareness sufficient to be classified as an ecumene — a bronze volume in the Library. But even then it is almost always a case of stable, wide-scale, relatively simple cells of systems like your Hunter-Gatherer or Nomadism, drifting and fluctuating gently, exhibiting rich internal color and pattern, but never threatening to give rise to another, more aggressively dynamic cell. It took a potent dose of strange creativity, passion, and chutzpah on the part of individual humans and human communities for each of the ever more heightened (in terms of order, not necessarily merit) cells to be born and nurtured along. Vanishingly few ecumenes have the potential for it. Humanity is of a rare class of ecumene with a seemingly insatiable lust for trying out new ways of living. This could mean worshipping a bag of thorns, or insisting on subsisting in a frozen desert, or making a living insuring ships that carry fragrant molecules around the planet, or spending all of one’s available time manipulating abstract mathematical constructs for the pure theoretical fun of it. I insist again: most species do not do these things.

Some states of equilibrium may persist for what seems like essentially forever to the individuals living within. Human life on Earth, for almost every generation that lived there, seemed unchanged for all of known history and impossible to change in the imaginable future, if viewed at a level of “empires doing empire”, rather than the lower, oft-fluctuating level of “which empire do I live under”. But in the case of Humanity, once mutation begins, the mutant cells have a tendency to breed new mutant cells at a faster and faster rate. Once cells like Industry and Capitalism emerge, the organ soon rapidly convolutes into a labyrinth of strands, which fibrillate into frail filaments, and then disintegrate into an incoherent soup. (In exceedingly rare cases, the strands may assemble into a new, stable organ of exceeding sophistication, in a final phase change. We shall discuss this phenomenon at another time.)

The progression of phase changes has broken down; there is no stable state on the other side of this final change. What had been an organ of increasing sophistication instead devours itself. This is, in the abstract, what became of Humanity on Earth. Not many ecumenes make it through as many iterations of phase change before breaking down, but (essentially) all do, eventually, break down.

Please accept my highest regards,

V.F.