Further Reflexions on Civilisation

The thing about civilisation is that it doesn't happen in any order or logical progression.  Sometimes, as with the Romans and the Harappans and the Aztecs, it begins thousands of years ahead of itself, and when it collapses, or is conquered and overrun, it leaves the world wondering and bemused and utterly perplexed about what might have been its great driving concepts and achievements.   What the Aztecs achieved with their careful garbage collection and waste management--and the punctilious fulfillment of what they took to be their religious obligations--was simply ignored, never thought twice about, by stout Cortez and all his men, who proceeded, once they had gained final, absolute, murderous control of the Mexique (the three or four per cent that was left of them), to foul the streets, shit in the water supply and, so far as they were able, without specially meaning to, to turn New Spain into a feculent semblance of the thoughtless, Stygian insanitation of Europe.

Of Harappan civilization, and its unprecedented ditching and draining directly into the Indus River--at least it got the sewage out of the house and on down to the edge of town--from what are nominated (by eager, suspectly anachronous archaeologists) bathing pools and flush toilets, we know essentially nothing...und daüber, penso io, sollten wir doch schweigen: nemmeno non sappiamo perchè non ci sono copie nelle civiltà ereditàrie....

Concerning ancient Roman civilisation--based on an amazing shared appetite for violent entertainment (or, as Gore Vidal finely said, on a fascination with murder) and an overwhelming desire (lust? fetish? need?) on the part of each and every Roman to spend at least four hours a day communally urinating and defecating (in constantly self-flushing communal toilets) and bathing nakedly together in pure, fresh, hot, tepid and cold water (the purest that could be brought from the calcareous Appenines to Rome, and from karst springs elsewhere), to which end, all their engineering and material resources (left over after the Games) was, by unanimous consensual approval, dedicated--we who have succeeded it are still stunned and dazzled by it, and fundamentally incredulous and uncomprehending of it.  Machiavelli, for all his idolization of his country's glorious past, never once, I think, mentions the Thermae, and pretty certainly has no concept of their significance.  So it was that when Attila the Hun cut the aqueducts in the year 456 Romans began to stink.  Then, of course, it was the least of their worries, but over the succeeding centuries they--worse than forgot--dimly half-remembered what it had been not to stink, until, by the first decades of the twentieth century, when Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas went on walking tours among them, "Italian" was synonymous with Garlicky Body Odor Overlaid with a Splash of Nauseating Perfume.  Then, in the 1990's a miracle happened:  Fast-recovery hot water heaters.  And, by the year 2001, much to the astonishment and delight of Americans and Northern Europeans--for the first time in 1,537 years, Italians ceased to stink.  Nay, they even smelled good.  It was as if the heavens had parted.