A famous science fiction novel is Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, which posits a future historian who manages to turn history into a predictive science. He predicts the collapse of his culture’s galactic empire, and 30,000 years of barbarism. But he suggests an alternative, which won’t avert the collapse, but will cut the interim to just 1,000 years.

The whole concept is frought with faulty modernist assumptions like, well, “barbarism” to pick an obvious one. But his solution of identifying key “crises” at which certain choices should be made to avert prolonging the “bad times,” and setting off what’s basically a secret society to monitor things and make the right choices, sometimes without even realizing it as they’re only guided by little sage-like recordings made by the now-dead historian – it’s intriguing.

It brings to mind that myths and narratives guide humanity, and the possibility that a group of people adept at studying myths and their interaction with human cultural behavior, might elect to identify key ethical and political values that nurture empathy and consensual, egalitarian societies, and consciously construct “new myths” to encode those values and guide practices. They’d have to be somewhat smart enough to encode within the narratives guidelines for keeping the narratives going, too. Or something like that.

Evidence suggests such efforts have happened before, too. I recall reading of archaeological evidence in both the middle east and the far east that groups of people came together to collect, merge and write down what eventually became the foundations of the Bible and, I think, Taoist writings.

Maybe it’s time for a new attempt from a different direction? Anthropologists, assemble and activate!!