The culture becomes fragile as the institutions that embody traditions falter.Ĭoe identifies a central tradition in the history of the Maya, one that can be easily overlooked because of its mundaneness. It then ends its usefulness, usually catastrophically. Tradition works right up until the moment it doesn’t. And because tradition refers to a potential rather than a demonstrable ‘thing,’ it can’t be proven. Tradition is not concerned with documented or scientific facts, but rather with shared experiences that are lost in time. Nor does anyone really know why or how tradition ‘works’ to keep us alive. In reality tradition is nothing but inter-generational gossip. Less robust cultures merely die.īy definition no one knows the source of any particular tradition. Robust cultures formulate new traditions from the existing cultural melange. A set of interacting traditions is one reasonable definition of a culture. And through this incessant talk they create the key to their adaptive success: tradition, that is to say, the unquestioned lore of how things are done, the rules and regulations of how to live, routines about how to stay healthy, and, ultimately, how to survive. They gossip, chat, argue, brag, lie, sing, rumourmonger, and prattle. But they have a compensatory magic power. On their own, human beings - those frail, sensitive, weak creatures with persistent back problems - don’t have the requisite variety to exist very long in any environment at all. The greater the number of possible responses to environmental change, the greater the chance of staying alive, not simply as individuals, but also as societies, cultures, and civilisations. This is called the Law of Requisite Variety and it identifies not an actual power but rather a potential for survival. The fundamental principle of cybernetics is that when the complexity of the environment exceeds that of any natural or man-made system, the environment will ultimately destroy the system. One modern theoretical construct helps to explain why the Mayan civilisation disappeared, and, more important, what is necessary to preserve what remains of the Mayan culture. They just stopped as an organised political, military, and economic force in the world. They weren’t invaded they didn’t succumb to some novel disease (as they would en masse after the Spanish occupation seven hundred years later). The Maya more or less disappeared as all but a linguistic/cultural entity. The development of their spectacular urban centres, their complex ritual practices, and their unique art came to an abrupt halt in the 9th century CE after a continuous run of cultural and political successes over the previous millennium.
But while Mayans are survivors, their civilisation has not been.
Unlike most of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, the Maya still exist as a large population.
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