Civilization's Basement
What does it take for culture to go underground?
Recently I’ve been going outside to engage in more of that classic tree communion practice which is all the rage with young people these days. Yet as you may have heard (from your own screams), North America’s summer has been in full-on beast mode. The midday heat around here during this season is usually quite punishing just normally, but this month the temperature even before sunrise has been absolutely mental. At least there’s still no bright direct sunlight until 9:00 AM? Truly this is nature’s mercy, as the addition of daytime sun to this kind of heat tends to, um… regularly kill people.
Maybe I shouldn’t complain, since it’s not as intense in my zip code as it is in say, Karachi or Delhi. But those places have always been in much warmer regions, so if it’s this hot around here 24/7 in summer, then various other places are approaching uninhabitable. It’s not just humans being squeezed for livable environmental locales going rapidly forward either, of course, as the oceans are acidifying not only near the surface but apparently in the deeper depths as well. The habitable range depths of the ocean where most life exists there is thus gradually going to be sandwiched and squeezed by layers of acidification.
For now though, the early morning sunrise hours remain ours to optimize for productivity! Indeed, I wasn’t the only one exercising at the park. Why, there were populous, frenzied swathes of gnats and flies rocketing around in furious circles, caroming off of me, sometimes on purpose and sometimes by mistake. Birds paused and stared at my motionless sweating from the trees’ shade wondering what the hell I was doing here outside if I didn’t need to actively forage for food. Very powerful and passionate ants were enthusiastically finding excuses to check my backpack for crumbs at various different locations, not entirely admitting to themselves that well-stitched knapsack shade was the real target of their appetite. There were even some other human beings around as well. They didn’t even stare at me as much as usual because, well, it was so damn hot they couldn’t spend a single extra moment dawdling outside.
I mention all this because in places with hot or humid weather (like Taiwan, for instance) typically outdoor cultivation or martial arts practice is done in the earlier morning hours before the sun is in the sky. It’s good to casually gauge how feasible and conducive regional climates or weather is to regular martial practice, or some meditation under a tree. But the heat in the mornings here lately has been at least like Taipei gets in the summer—intense enough on some days that I’m not sure it’s healthy to be practicing outside at any hour. The park I practice at is a pretty quick walk from my place (under 15 minutes), and if I didn’t chug a 24oz water bottle mixed with electrolyte powder, I would have been feeling heat exhaustion walking back home after an hour of exercise. I was also wearing a lot of polyester and… I’m actually not sure what effect that has on a person.
New housing in big cities tends to be sky-rise condo and rental apartment towers. A lot of us are gonna be living in those. Still, it’s ideal to regularly do practice standing or martial cultivation training while directly on earth or at ground level. Given the intensifying heat all over the planet’s surface and oceans, I wonder when urban planning and development will instead switch to constructing buildings and housing downwards into the Earth. Maybe this is nonsense speculation, but I assume climate issues later this century will mean humanity ends up living in underground expanded shelter systems. Much cooler would be an artificial "geofront" urban environment, as imagined in the iconic mid-90s anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion.
That other internationally iconic anime series of the mid-90s, Cowboy Bebop, has among the most familiar and believable near future civilizations in science fiction. The 2071 human population’s middle and upper classes dwell in a single international domed megacity on Mars, after a major technology project disaster has left the Earth (and the impoverished stuck there) with a damaged and unstable atmosphere. While there are new technological advances that are impressive feats, humankind remains frustrating for its familiar vices, weaknesses, and self-destructive impulses. The off-world settings are intentionally fantastic for the sake of story and imaginative catharsis, but outside of that it’s pretty akin to our own forthcoming reality. Just relocate the series’s domed Mars megacity to somewhere on Earth, replace the planet’s atmospheric calamity of the earlier 21st century with ongoing unaddressed climate corrosion, and replace the ideal independent local solar system space travel with some near-future terrestrial communal or self-maintained technology.1
When traditional arts and culture are no longer valued or have conventional necessity for a society, they become exclusive, niche, or go "underground". Such are the reoccurring cycles of cultural influence—artistic or aesthetic movements will wane in mainstream relevance and relocate out of the spotlight into periods of hibernation—and are then abandoned or transformed and/or resurface. Recognizing reoccurring themes in culture and history helps people to recognize recurring reasons to maintain and (the inspiration to) transmit over time traditional martial arts and countless other cultural traditions. Traditional practices aren’t meant to be ultimate skillsets across every circumstance or context of human existence, nor are they impossible methods which only ancient geniuses could possibly grok properly. Within traditional practices are aspects which will become important in later generations, or amidst specific contexts that aren’t apparent to each generation.
Any human future will continue to be some order of dystopia. The real concern is if humanity becomes so negligent as to no longer be doing civilization. When neither you nor I go outside to practice in nature or in public due to the heat being dangerous before the morning sun has even risen, there is the brief recognized scent of civilization itself going "underground". Should civilization go underground, metaphorically or literally, it could only re-emerge after experiencing a new transformation.
Like say, the upcoming pipeline of robotics manufacturing, diverse independent digital information networks, right-to-repair tech en masse leading to new unique engineering/tech tools, hybrid transportation or transit systems which travel deep underground or are additionally submersible underwater, etc.