Civilizational Memory

Characteristics

Venkatesh Rao:

"Civilizational memory can be understood in terms of three entangled strands — affective, declarative, and procedural. These correspond, roughly, to myth-based, event-based, and econo-legal senses of history.

The US constitution, for instance, embodies all three elements in a single print-based artifact.

There is the sacralized mythology (bordering on theology, complete with a reverential hermeneutic tradition) of what the Founding Fathers believed, desired, or intended. This is affective memory.

There is the creation of the constitution as a genesis event that occurred in a particular place and time (a metropolitan region — Philadelphia, 1787), with associated discoverable and disputable historical facts. This is declarative memory.

And finally, there are the 250 years of legal tradition continuously refining and enacting the idea of America in behavioral terms, through constitutional (and constitutive) understandings of matters such as rights, contracts, currencies, traffic laws, standards for weights and measures, and so on. This is procedural memory."

(https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/welcome-to-the-cosmopolis)'