(Drivebycuriosity) - Decades ago I enjoyed Walter Miller Jr.´s classic novel "A Canticle for Leibowitz". Recently I read it again and enjoyed it less ( amazon). The book was published in the year 1960 when the cold war was getting hotter and fostered the fears of a global nuclear conflict. The plot - set in the deserts of the south west of the northern American continent - starts centuries after a devastating worldwide nuclear war that had destroyed the existing civilizations and continues over 600 centuries.
The radioactive deluge, the fallout, destroyed not only the civilization, it also changed the genes of many survivors, causing "grotesque
creatures who prowled the fringes of the desert and often wore hoods,
masks, or voluminous robes to hide deformity". The apocalypse also inspired a widespread hate not only on technology and scientists, but also on all knowledge.
As a result the northern American continent was "very thinly populated by the people of the forest and
the plain, who were, for the most part, not savages, but simple clanfolk, loosely organized into small communities here and there, who lived by
hunting, gathering, and primitive agriculture, whose birth rate was
barely high enough (discounting monster-births and sports) to sustain
the population. The principal industries of the continent, excepting a
few seacoast regions, were hunting, farming, fighting, and
witchcraft-the last being the most promising “industry” for any youth
with a choice of careers and having in mind as primary ends, maximum
wealth and prestige".
The novel focuses on the "New Roman" Catholic Church that is working to restore civilization. The plot focuses on the monks of a remote monastery who aim to preserve literacy and learning throughout a black millennium.
"It did not matter to these monks that the knowledge they saved was useless,
that much of it was not really knowledge now, was as inscrutable to the
monks in some instances as it would be to an illiterate wildboy from the
hills; this knowledge was empty of content, its subject matter long
since gone. Still, such knowledge had a symbolic structure that was
peculiar to itself, and at least the symbol-interplay could be observed.
To observe the way a knowledge-system is knit together is to learn at
least a minimum knowledge-of-knowledge, until someday-someday, or some
century -an Integrator would come, and things would be fitted together
again".
A Flame Of Knowledge
After many centuries that Dark Age seemed to be passing. A small flame of
knowledge had been kept smoldering in the monasteries, confirming proud thinkers that had claimed that valid knowledge was
indestructible and that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But was the consequence? Does history repeat?
The novel raises the question, are we doomed to do it (the nuclear Armageddon ) again and again and again? "Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix, in an unending sequence of rise and fall? Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, Greece, Carthage, Rome, the Empires of Charlemagne and the Turk. Ground to dust and plowed with salt. Spain, France, Britain, America-burned into the oblivion of the centuries. And again and again and again".
I liked the early parts of the book better than the finish. The plot starts mysterious, spiced with humor, but later the author focused too much on his doom message.
P.S. I couldn`t help to notice that history as we know it worked quite in the opposite direction. The rise of Christianity helped to destroy the Roman Empire and therefore the civilization in Europe (I explained it here). Europe`s Dark Age, the middle ages, where aggravated by the Roman Catholic Church, that fought violently to monopolize knowledge and blocked any progress with the terror of inquisition. Over centuries religious zealots were hunting down and burning hereditists & alleged witches.
