Persistent Impermanance

From a review of David Stuart's big book on the Maya:

Yet Stuart views their history not as an arc but as a series “of numerous ups and downs, of many foundations and abandonments.” He tracks the building of Maya urban centers, their peak during a period of expansive power, and their sudden collapse and relinquishment. “Persistent impermanence,” he writes, characterized the Maya approach to life, which, at its core, they saw as ephemeral. This transitoriness expressed itself in their cyclical calendar, which established precise turning points defined by catastrophic pivots, occasions for renewal, and the intervals in between. In retrospect, the Maya’s desertion of cities likely owed to a combination of factors—among them, overpopulation, war and political polarization, drought and the changing weather patterns, the scarcity of water supplies, and unstable commercial structures. Of course, scores of other peoples—including in our time—have suffered similar bouts of inclemency. None gave up their habitations with such regularity.

This persistent impermanence also characterized the Mississippian societies of the US, towns like Cahokia and Mounville that rose to glory for a generation and were then abandoned and largely forgotten. 

In my philosophical moods I think about this regularly. What endures? Often that is the basics of the socio-technical system, for example the grain-growing village of western Europe, or the irrigated wet rice societies of east Asia, where peasants lived as their ancestors had for millennia. But other things that loom large in our imagination were fleeting experiments, taken up with enthusiasm but soon abandoned. Cities that rose to power under mighty rulers but faded away under their weak grandchildren are known around the world. If you follow the careers of artists or scholars in Renaissance Italy you see that they moved from place to place as particular courts were glorious for a while but then broke up or fell to conquerors. At a lesser level you often read about the wonders of some community in some particular era – Greenwich Village in the 70s, say – accompanied by mourning that it did not last.

Such, it seems, is human life.