Legacy of Stuff
by Robert McCauley

One night I thought about stuff.

I thought a lot about stuff. More so than the ‘what is it?’ or ‘where does it come from?” kind of thinking glorified by middle school science videos. I thought about our relationship with stuff.

It’s not a recent thing, this stuff, and it’s definitely our defining achievement as a species.

Evolution and our apish brethren bequeathed us the opposable thumbs and over-developed frontal lobes but stuff is ours. We made it. We still make it, more of it, and on a bigger scale than ever before. We took stuff and ran with it.

No other species has stuff. Some monkeys will use a stick like a tool to dig at termites but they’re just using things they find. Stuff is something that we humans alone make and we’re getting better at it all the time.

In fact, we learn about past civilizations by digging up their stuff with our stuff and then we compare it. By discerning the subtle nuisances of stuff and comparing its similarities and differences to our archeological catalogue of known stuff, we can sketch a pretty accurate picture of how, where and when its associated civilization had lived.

By using some of our most advanced stuff we can figure out intimate details of previously unknown civilizations. We can gather a sophisticated account of the civilization’s level of health care, common medical predicaments, life expectancy, diet, disease, genetic traits or deficiencies (some isolated civilizations drew from a shallow gene pool.) These kinds of details we protect in our own society with laws and privacy commissioners but we can basically learn all of this just by looking at a past civilizations stuff.

Some civilizations have so impressed us by the quality and craftsmanship of their stuff that our most prominent image of them is the stuff they left behind. I am thinking of the Pachacuti Inca with Machu Picchu. They built a complex fortress-like village and temple with hand-cut stones that are so well put together that to this day you can barely fit a piece of paper between the stones. And they did all this over 500 years ago and without any mortar.

We generally gauge a civilization by the complexity, beauty or sophistication of its stuff. It’s hard to look at the acropolis, the Moai or Stonehenge without a sense of awe, mystery and wonderment.

We don’t remember so fondly peoples and civilizations if we can’t picture their stuff.

Try but it’s almost impossible to conjure an image of the Tasaatan nomads of the Mongol plain, or the Wodaabe nomads of West Africa. Both of these peoples are incredibly colourfu and steeped in rich cultures foreign enough to inspire even the most bland senses of human curiosity. Both of these peoples still exist today as ancient relics in a modern world but almost no one can easily picture these people or their civilization.

Here’s a small exercise. Let’s take two civilizations from the same period, see what kind of recognition they stimulate based solely on the best stuff that they made and left behind. [It is in exercises like these where an Arts degree can truly shine.]

Civilization	Best Stuff	Recognition Amongst General Population
Egyptian	Pyramids	97% of people in Grade 6 certification or better*
Scythian	Curvy swords?	Only a very few people who don’t socialize well

* Like many stats, this number was entirely made up but highly probable

Despite the fact that the Scythain civilization at its height rivaled, attacked, sacked and full on ripped it up in Egypt nobody really knows who the Scythians are because their stuff wasn’t as cool. They had tombs, sarcophagi and gold jewelry but they didn’t have jack on the mighty Sphynx.

We, in our current incarnation as humans of the Modern Western Society, basically determine the Legacy of a civilization by the quality of the stuff they’ve left behind millennia after their bones have long turned into dust collecting on our stuff.

So what will be our defining legacy?

The Internet?

No, that’s not really tangible and can’t be left behind.

Automobiles?

No, exposed metals- at least in our climate will rust, whither and turn to dust in a few quick decades.

Future civilizations would likely build on top of our cities as per usual. They’ll likely appropriate our literature and our culture, changing the names and the packaging but largely passing it off as their own.

So what will we, the Fantastic Champions of the Modern Age, leave as our lasting legacy when the Moon People inherit the earth?

Well, perhaps that’s a thought for another day because the night is only so long and tomorrow we have a long day at the beach looking at plastic.