Codex Context

It's been a while since I've talked about one of the aims of the Leibowitz Society -- to collect a comprehensive work of knowledge that can be used as a "seed" for reconstructing knowledge on the other side of a dark age. While this might seem like an odd notion -- we still have lots of libraries and books out there -- consider that collapse may not come about only because of a shortage of oil or a gradual unwinding of our economic structure. We forget sometimes that there are still thousands of nuclear weapons in existence, that comets and meteors fly by regularly, and that there is a very real possibility of a global pandemic at some point in the future. How quickly would a "superbug" level our complex and intricate technological society, for example? Life After People could be Life After 98 Percent of the People Are Dead and I think the world would still look much the same. Also, there is a tendency for things to build off of each other. An economic crash could lead to war, which in turn could lead to a pandemic. 
Likewise, it may seem like an odd notion to want to preserve our knowledge. After all, we are the heirs of a long process of technological improvement and innovation, the mastery of humanity over our natural world. If we did it once, we can figure it out again, right? I don't really know the truth of that answer, though. If we had a fifty-fifty chance of advancement as a species, there's the other side of the coin which said "nuh-uh, not happening." There are also other arguments we might consider, such as potentially being the only sentient life in the universe. Ponder that one for a moment. Or, we might look at our children and decide that we would like them to be able to make some sense out of the shambles we seem to be leaving them. Perhaps a latter generation might figure out where we went wrong, and pick up where we left off, even reaching for the stars at some future point (I don't see the end of cheap oil as necessarily being the end of human progress, if we are smart -- after all, how much oil has been basically pissed away on things like Pet Rocks and Sunday drives just for the hell of it? Could we live without both of those?). If there is a collapse, then likewise, there needs to be a blueprint for rebuilding after that collapse, a body of knowledge to use as that blueprint.

Ideally, this body of knowledge would fit on a portable hard drive or DVD, and contain several thousand works of important and significance to the human race, such as books on medicine, history, drama, power generation, pick something. The key challenge and difficulty there, however, is creating a system of storage which would last for generations, as well as maintaining equipment which could read it at a future date. There is also the challenge of making sure that people would be able to understand the knowledge as well, essentially having a "living" Rosetta Stone that would be able to understand the language that it is written in, even after the common language has changed so much so as to make the original work incomprehensible. This may seem a little silly, but look at something written two or three hundred years ago, then something written six hundred years ago, then consider how long the Dark Ages lasted, in a time where collapse meant less than it would now.

The other possibility would be maintaining a large physical library of books. A decent starting point for rebuilding society's lost knowledge would probably fit on two large shelves, or maybe four or five crates, appropriately printed on acid-free paper and sealed against moisture and insects. The only problem with this approach is that...it fits in four or five crates. While people have argued back and forth about mobility vs. permanency in various circles, the reality is that we may or may not have a choice about staying put or going someplace. We may also simply not be able to move a collection such as that to safer ground in the face of a disaster of some sort. In this case, portability is what we would need, but this would make looking back at a data-driven solution.

There is a third possibility, though. While it might not be an ideal solution, I think it would be possible to compile a work of around a thousand pages to be a guide and supplement to either of the above approaches, a mini Codex, so to speak. Each of the seven core knowledge areas (Agriculture, Engineering, Science, Medicine, Defense, Culture, Community) would have a section which would be a summation of the more basic principles of each area and would give people a starting point to work with. While some people might question the approach of a single volume and how effective it would be, remember the distinction between content and context -- while it's useful to have information to put in the "bucket," the fact that you understand there's a "bucket" there means you are far ahead of people who do not understand that. In other words, if we are aware of the existence of germs, for example, we are then at least able to begin taking precautions to deal with them during surgery and treating infection, without having a whole plan for this laid out for us, necessarily.

For those keeping track, this is also roughly the same length in pages as the average Bible. A scribe might balk at copying tens of thousands of pages of a private library, but copying a thousand pages would be doable for a person, even if it took a year or more to complete. In addition, printing something like this with a press would not be hugely difficult, compared to that multiple-volume scenario as above. It would be easy for a person to largely have a work like this studied and memorized, given enough time. Finally, a person could throw a copy or two of the Codex in with all their other stuff and take it with them, if they had to move.

The challenge is obviously trying to decide what should be included in something like this. There are plenty of options and different people may choose to organize it in different ways. Going forward, in between commentary on our steady collapse and mass civilizational insanity, I'd like to begin exploring this in detail and perhaps actually start writing the first outline of the Codex Universalis. As a starting point, maybe tackling Engineering would be a good choice. This would cover things like how to build a shelter, build a bridge, generate power, provide clean water, and so on. What do you readers think should be included in that section?