I
One conceit in science fiction that always appealed to me is the idea of civilizations that have inherited technologies that they no longer quite fully understand. H.G. Wells was probably the first to explore this theme, but it runs through many different strands of speculative fiction. A Canticle for Leibowitz was maybe the last great novel to do it, but I’m happy to be corrected with a more recent example.
II
Folks in programs with names like “Science, Technology and Society” like to remind us that there are social technologies too. Democracy is a technology for conflict resolution in the context of a state. Markets are a technology for organizing production and allocation of scarce goods in super-Dunbar settings. In fact, I’d say that STS types tend not to take that point seriously enough.
III
If you buy (I) and (II), the obvious next step is to put them together and consider social technologies that have been inherited by cultures that no longer understand them. AFAIK the first to make this argument explicitly was Chesterton but, again, I would not be surprised if someone could locate a similar statement in the ancients.
The more I think about it, the stronger my suspicion that my tribe might be like a band of scavengers that survived some cataclysm ca. 1960, and now regard any enduring antediluvian social institutions with bewilderment and loathing. Not merely in the sense of considering and rejecting them on the merits (as often we should), but finding them literally incomprehensible. What is marriage for, except a contractual bundle to arrange health insurance and hospital visitation rights? What was the point of the prohibition of no-fault divorce? How on earth did people get by before ubiquitous contraception and the sexual revolution? What was up with everyone participating in religious life with apparent sincerity? How did anyone manage to survive without a modern welfare state?
When I listen in on conversations among my friends on the left about the bad old days, the consensus is not even that these institutions were bad and worth abolishing, so much as that they were inscrutably evil in their lust of oppression for its own sake. Which is weird because these are the same people who nod approvingly about the idea of “social technologies” and especially about the hidden wisdom of various cultural practices of indigenous groups.
To be clear, I’m not endorsing conservative answers to these questions. Chesterton’s fence proves too much, and sometimes we are right to tear it down. But I do think it strange that so much of past social life seems totally alien to us, just fifty years out.