The Arsenal of Civilization

Project Gutenberg is for you.

Yet even the Second Dark Age was shortened by the clever few who bothered to preserve the lost wisdom of the Faustian Era….

I am somewhat concerned that my generation believes the right things for the wrong reasons. There is a fair amount of evidence that we are more likely to reject the universalist dogma than any other, but many suggest that this is due to stupidity acquired through digital involution; the end result of countless hours of short form video. For it often requires a considerable amount of intelligence to even understand what a progressive is talking about. Thus the simple-minded video watcher is in a strange way protected from those arguments that could only exist in the world of text. Needless to say, smartphone addicts do not a civilization make. To solve this problem one must devise a program of study dedicated to strengthening the attention span of this generation outside of the confines of the progressive mindset.

The Internet is often perceived to be a wasteland blasted by the wages of artificial intelligence. Even Wikipedia rarely rises above the level of a third-rate encyclopedia of decades past. Yet even oases of civilization and high culture can be found there, if one knows where to look. Some of the best places to look are the repositories of the public domain.

There is a wealth of content in the public domain. At the time of this writing, this includes all literature, films and music produced before the year 1930. Much of this comes from the great ages of Western civilization; the “Old World” or the Age of Discovery. Therefore, it is largely imbued with the right ethos and mindset for those who would seek to rebuild a superior society. In most of these works is indeed a lost realism regarding the state of mankind, which is well-nigh impossible to find in the literature of today. The literature and historical worldview prevalent before the first world war also contains a certain optimism regarding technical progress which has largely been lost. This includes everything from the journals of great explorers to the Principia Mathematica, to the adventure novel series which is the namesake for this publication. Many Christian publishers have invested greatly in the republication of great literature, and can certainly be commended for their efforts. While this has ensured the survival and re-publication of such classics as The Lord of the World, or the works of G. K. Chesterton, there are as yet few analogous publishers for other sorts of archaic historical and scientific works. Unfortunately, the scientific community today seems largely incurious and apathetic towards its own heritage. This attitude is almost certainly one of the causes of the seemingly intractable reproducibility crisis.

Much of this corpus is available on Project Gutenberg, a website devoted to free downloadable files corresponding to at least seventy thousand publicly available volumes. It is aptly named, as it might soon have a similar effect on our era as Gutenberg himself did upon the Late Middle Ages. The progressive consensus will be broken only by the recovery and dissemination of the antediluvian works; the intellectual class will not be persuaded by memes. Indeed, it would not be inaccurate to call this body of work produced before the advent of universalism the Arsenal of Civilization.

However, this database is beset by certain limitations. Project Gutenberg is at present only searchable by author and title, and is hence unsuitable for casual browsing. While it does make a limited attempt to classify works by subject, this system is as yet crude and relatively primitive. For this reason Tom Swift will organize a better interface for accessing the database. It is also possible for any user to mirror this repository, thereby protecting it from any agents of bad character seeking to modify the corpus for ideological reasons.

Yet there is a certain value to the physical volume that cannot be ignored. The human brain does not process pixels nearly as well as it does pages. There is also a certain soulless quality to any media flashing across the liquid crystal display that is best avoided as much as possible, especially at younger ages. Our culture would be greatly enriched if this material were to be printed into proper books, and distributed where the youth might read it. There are many services around the internet, most notably amazon KDP which will print books made to order for a nominal fee. I propose that the treasures of Gutenberg be disseminated to the public in this way, and that a website be constructed to perform this process more effectively.

In the presentation of these volumes lies a great opportunity for artists. Illustrating these books, and publishing them in useful collections would render them far more appealing to the general public. One could design animated trailers to promote them. There is much material here which would make excellent films. Remember, it is all available for the taking, to make use of it in whatever way you can imagine.

The Gutenberg corpus could if properly catalogued and disseminated form the foundation of a private library system dedicated to the great principles of the West. I have already written at some length how such a system could form the cultural basis for the next civilization. Some have suggested bookstores based on similar principles as well. These private libraries would be especially meritorious in regions where the population is too low to maintain independent schools. In such cases they could serve as centers for education and intellectual discussion. For these reasons I believe that the initial progress of the next civilization will be directly proportional to the knowledge we retain from the last.

So go to Gutenberg and start printing today. Print and preserve these books for your children and your countrymen. Why buy the overpriced paperweights they dare to call textbooks? Build your own library for pennies on the dollar! The next civilization begins with you!