Cultural Angels

I have this vague idea that every civilization, unless it is somehow terminated early (by war or famine or whatever), develops to the same level of sophistication in understanding the universe before it fails. For example, the Egyptians somehow knew how to measure the distances to stars (the Nabta Playa complex allegedly does so to great accuracy) and, of course, were capable of engineering feats that leave us in awe even today; while Greeks knew about such things as special relativity and chaos theory (Plotinus discusses both); but neither got much further than that before they failed. Obviously, I suspect our fate will be similar.

But what is especially interesting to me is that each civilization uses different tools to do so, and it seems that all the other things we think of as central to that culture stem from this. The Egyptians may have well used magic, the Greeks used dialectic, and we use science. By this I assume that the Egyptians had a Saturnine angel; the Greeks, a Solar angel; and we, of course, have a Mercurial angel. But consider the ramifications: the Egyptians took a very long time to get there, but had tremendous cultural longevity (and their solid-as-a-rock monuments persist even today); the Greeks got there very efficiently, needing little resources to do it (and produced remarkable beauty which is still imitated today); we have produced little cultural value of our own, rather favoring to steal from others (and have needed a massive population, massive industrial base, and massive communication and travel in order to accomplish what we have).

Thus, I do not think that the destruction of the environment and the ransacking of the world's peoples is an accident: it is the necessary byproduct of the designs of the Western cultural angel. One must suppose that there is a good (and a Good) reason for it, and trust in Providence.