Lewis Mumford observed that the first cities were cemeteries. Enclosed areas with tightly packed bodies were only for the dead. Cities weren’t re-purposed for the living until the advent of civilization in Mesopotamia 6,000 years ago.
For the elites of the ancient world, the city was the foundation of their control. Cities were focused around a central structure, a temple which influenced all aspects of life. “Control over the reins of power” anthropologist Roger Matthews wrote, “may have been mediated via thorough manipulation, deliberate or not, of ritual practice and religious belief imposed on the local, rurally-rooted, populace.”
Just like today, the elites of the ancient world maintained control by manipulating the population, but also by sharing the benefits of imperial economic expansion. The earliest civilizations we know of developed written language explicitly so they could tally stored food and other resources, quantifying information and improving efficiency. They pioneered mass production in pottery, and in some cases, invaded neighboring regions to acquire resources “including metals, assorted hard stones, timber and slaves.” [1]
Today the city remains the heart of civilization, but it resembles it’s cemetery origins more than ever. Looking down from above, the skyline resembles mausoleums and gravestones protruding from the earth, marking the quarters of the living-dead. Entombed within are the vampires and zombie slaves of industrial civilization. “Here lies Goldman Sachs, 1869 – Forever. May they never rest in their pursuit of profit.”
“Urban forms condition [the] mind,” Mumford wrote. Indeed, the city has been the central hub by which civilization extends its cerebral power, shaping people to serve its needs. The destruction of shared spaces has confined public interaction to obscure ceremony. Homeless are funneled off the streets by employing spiked floors around apartment complexes or by installing benches that make sleeping difficult or impossible. The modern city assigns commercial traffic with a status holier than public protest. Its surveillance tools, like God, are omnipresent. They include a dragnet of facial recognition technologies, hidden microphones, license plate readers. Like some kind of mechanical dreamcatcher, “StingRay” devices collect cell data from the ether, all without a warrant.
Today’s civilization no longer needs to physically orient people in order to influence them. It can reach almost anyone through technology. Today’s temple is the circuit board; from above, it too has lanes that look like highways, the great arteries of progress, forming and shaping behavior, corralling energy to serve the monoliths of power.
We used to be able to physically separate ourselves in order to be alone, but isolation is no longer possible. Constantly assailed by photo-electronic apparitions, we feel we cannot rest, even in our own homes. Where people once ventured outside to socialize, today people go out to be alone. We have become like wraiths, disembodied and restless, without faith or meaning. The temples of civilization are paradoxical in that they bring us closer together for productive purposes, even as they isolate us, suffocating our humanity.
We seemed destined to be controlled by a vivo-necrocracy — a government of the living dead, of people committed to unnatural endless growth to increase numbers on a spreadsheet, while reality is eroded to barren desert. Under such a system, collapse of the temples of power is not only an economizing outcome, it is the last hope to restore life itself.
[1] Secrets of the dark mound: Jemdet Nasr 1926-1928, Dr. Roger Matthews, pg 36
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