An Easter Parable is included in the print anthology Rising in Words with this introductory note: "A case study of history and its uses from 2003. This was my first use of a new model to describe a deep origin of empire in the psychology of its people. I have often explored imperialism since by tracing cultural roots with similar methods, for example in The Renewing Dissident’s Notebook later in this volume."

Only by respecting the past can we ready ourselves for the future.

(Whatever this abstraction in words might convey to you now, I hope it will mean something more by the end of this article, in more than one sense.)

An Introduction to History

My own view of history began with a lifelong interest, and began to coalesce during a time in which I had a strange argument, pivotal to my thinking, surrounding a very famous event or period of events (the execution of millions of Jewish and other people under the auspices of National Socialists ruling what they called the Third Reich) — or at least now that I look back at the argument, I realize its pivotal influence.

A history teacher of mine for this subject, apparently chafing at demands made by those who would make his academic specialty "practical," told me rather haughtily that he didn't know what history was for, when I had suggested a utility of history (specifically that famous subject of his seminar) and had said that otherwise, what is history for and why study it? My suggestion, while hardly an original or really controversial one, had apparently pressed him, a history professor, quite uncomfortably, even as it remains all but forgotten among the general populace. My suggestion was nothing but this, and I continue to believe it: history teaches lessons, lessons useful in the future.

Our accounting of the past, also known as history, is full of little examples from which we can abstract a variety of intimations. About which theories, of course, the mute facts of the past say nothing on their own (and 'facts' may even be inaccurate themselves). But with the application of theories as models for interpreting the apparent evidence of the past, we can derive lessons, including negative and positive examples for avoidance or emulation. The 'primitives' and ancients who represented history ancestrally or legendarily, and the pre-academic ancient historians primarily cared for history because it could be used this way. Modern historians generally like to claim it as a special academic discipline 'for its own sake' (even as some manhandle and manipulate its power to teach, to instead support their preexisting theories), while frankly most modern people do not think about it much at all. In neglecting the instructive power of history both these sorts of presentist modern people do themselves a great disservice, one group leaving history grounded only by their disposition, the much larger group remaining unconcerned and ignorant.

For how indeed can we learn very much, if we only learn from those short moments of our own life, a mere instant in the human lifespan? We should never ignore those lessons we can derive from history, large and small, simple and complex, flattering and insulting, impolitic and popular… all lessons. We should also endeavor to learn the teachings of history's implied parables well, fully making knowledge of the past our own wisdom, and unceasingly ask, what overlooked lessons have we failed to learn since?

In this article I do not wish to speak much of the lessons of some great — that is to say, famed — Republic or Empire, Rome or Britain or Germany or America or some other. And despite the title of this article, I do not wish to speak of that famous Easter miracle here, the great religious symbol of Christianity, the iconic resurrection of Jesus and ascension to heaven, nor do I wish to speak of the preceding polytheistic feast days for fertility goddesses such as Eastre. I wish to speak of a tiny island in the Pacific Ocean, not of its eponymous day — of Easter Island, and its sad and often forgotten, perhaps often misunderstood little tale. The history of Easter Island's rise and fall provides an amazingly persuasive case study in much we should learn about civilization and empire, beliefs and orthodoxies, decay and rebirth, things we might learn with more difficulty from more famous, more complex and distorted examples.

The Rise

Easter Island, Isla de Pascua, or Rapa Nui is as isolated a place as Earth provides. Maybe an unassuming place to teach anyone a lesson, much less a great lesson, Easter Island could easily have passed the whole human scale of time dismissed as a speck of rock in the middle of nowhere, where nothing important ever happened or could have happened — yet the name is common knowledge. The reasons why — the moai, and secondarily the disappearance of their makers — provide strange evidence that indeed something special did happen there.

The appearance of the old Polynesian culture, primitive according to its technological classification as New Stone Age, might belie its remarkable achievements, potential, and sophistication. Instrumental to this culture was the management of resources and disputes among chiefs and people of clans on small islands with limited resources. They accomplished this social order through the twin theocratic principles of mana, spiritual power, the hereditary priest-chief's mediation between god and people, and tapu or taboo, sacred rights of the chiefs to enjoy and distribute resources. With the mana providing the mystique justifying the chief's role, and the tapu providing his material social clout, this Pacific analogue of a customary monarchy produced some of the planet's most stable and peaceful societies on the islands where it was most successful. In European terms, this system was as if the chief on an island essentially held a position equivalent to a combination of royalty and clergy, with his religious importance directly supporting the requisite quasi-ownership rights to which kings and nobles are accustomed in their dominions, with none of the inconvenience of a conceptual division that required formulations like "the divine right of kings" and produced so much friction. Practically, maintenance of his legitimacy would satisfy the chief's self-interests, and it must have satisfied his people to have a judge to answer their concerns and disputes who could be unbiased and theoretically beyond temptations, who might mediate ownership of the fruits of resources, provided they were available in sufficient quantity so that he might prove useful.

Otherwise, if the population outstripped resources despite all management to avert this, the gods would of course be seen as unfavorable, and both the chief's religious mystique and his practical usefulness bonded in understood mana and tapu would become irrelevant. In these cases, as in every other society in which the social fabric becomes shredded without a viable replacement, the warriors and the criminals of society begin to dominate and exploit others barbarically. But these troubles were generally incidental to the usual peacefulness achieved in Polynesia, and when wielders of ironwood (toa) clubs became warriors (toa), the situation evidenced unusual problems rather than any usual recourse to violence, or essential militarism with the techniques and psychologies it breeds. The usual 'primitive' military tactics and technology in evidence in the Polynesian case, as in some others, actually proves the shared vitality of the culture in achieving what its people do value instead, including peace, prosperity and stability; they do not need or think to desire a less primitive warfare, and so they do not expend energy in its invention.

Renowned as great navigators and skilled seafarers (abilities both useful for fishing and trade, and necessary for the emigrant voyaging occasionally needed to alleviate population pressures), Polynesian canoe sailors somehow colonized the particular island in question circa 400 CE, despite its separation from the nearest settled island by a full 1200 miles. They called this rocky prominence of three extinct volcanoes, merely 66 square miles of land above the waves, 'Navel of the World' (Te Pito O Te Henua).

They prospered and multiplied, making use of the resources native to the island such as numerous seabirds, a forest of palms and other trees, and offshore fishing, and the agricultural staples carefully imported on their immigrant catamaran canoes. If such a small population were comprised of most people who live now, or even most who have ever lived on Earth, and were transplanted to such an island with only raw materials and isolated there, they might manage to scrabble together a shabby existence as castaways. Yet these Polynesians actually thrived and advanced their shared culture with their achievements. Clearly such a civilization had its considerable strengths, albeit very different ones from other civilizations elsewhere.

On Easter Island, never more than several thousand people produced the artisans to build several hundred statues of enormous size, the legendary moai. These amazing statues, intended to rest atop ahu shrine platforms, are so massive the topknot stones of one type weigh in at up to 11.5 tons; clearly not only the carving but the engineering of the island were highly advanced considering their technology. Monoliths similar to some of these giants have been carved elsewhere in Polynesia. But the Easter Islanders or Rapanui elevated this practice to a primary art (probably a competitive one among clans and chiefs), as they did with petroglyphic rock carving. They also developed the only written language in all of Polynesia, the Rongorongo script, as well as pursuing traditional Polynesian crafts and arts.

This must have seemed a blessed time on Rapa Nui, and it was indeed a Golden Age of its kind, though maybe it seems a glory writ small by world historical standards. But the peculiar isolation and the peculiar smallness and harshness of the island would afterwards prove the hardest test for the way of life practiced by the Rapanui.

The Fall

The apparent facts of the island's prehistorical past (before the arrival of European and South American explorers, slavers, whalers and settlers) are in this case debated and remain in doubt, for reasons which will become clear. But this is what appears to have happened according to most accounts (putting aside opinions of the more inventive interpreters such as the pioneering Thor Heyerdahl, and of the baseless such as Erich von Däniken):

The forest began slowly disappearing. However it was done exactly, transporting and lifting moai took many logs, and much rope, also from trees. Weaving nets to fish needed fibers from trees. Making oceangoing canoes to fish offshore took logs. Building shelters took trees. Fuel for cooking required wood. Rats, the unbidden Polynesian stowaways originally from Asia, nibbled and ruined nuts before they could produce palms. But most of all, the island was simply too small to host several thousand people dependent on trees. Erosion of soil and natural forest habitat for wildlife proceeded beyond the pace of natural regeneration. The native palm and all native bird species were to go extinct long before modern times.

Cultivation of tropical staples in the island's colder growing climate would have been difficult even without compounded problems. Unknown environmental factors may also have contributed to the accidental pattern — colder weather than normal on this subtropical island or at least below the usual expectation of Polynesians, more storms, lower yields of crops or fish than typical. We do know that food supplies were likely decreasing as canoes could no longer be constructed and the ocean denied its food and its means of emigration to the Rapanui, and the forest supported less native and itinerant life. Evidence of the local diet shows apparent attempts to compensate with any food they could raise, grow or catch. The Rapanui no longer prospered, they struggled for survival.

During this time of trouble, it seems that initially the Rapanui turned to what they already knew and believed in to deliver them. They were constructing more and more moai, to judge from the hundreds of unfinished ones, perhaps to mollify the gods via the traditional belief in chiefly mana. Of course intensifying this practice only accelerated deforestation. Further supporting the same system of beliefs, the socio-religious organization though the power of the chiefs which had failed to provide guidance in resource management sufficient to control the burgeoning population, and avoid environmental devastation in the first place, evidently then failed to change anything once the situation already existed, unsurprisingly. As did further pursuance of the competition of clans — especially as it involved constructing moai.

But as often happens, despite a desire to preserve the reliable, valued, or unquestioned foundations of a society, a society under pressure changes considerably anyway. Seeing the failure of the traditional ways, people grasped at perverse and desperate alterations and variations on the old culture and old beliefs. Respecting tapu at this point probably seemed inconvenient at best; hungry people must have resented concentration of increasingly precious resources. Now the warriors took over the clans and marginalized the role of chief. These were called "the men with bloodied hands" — elsewhere in Polynesia warriors or toa were named after the ironwood tree from which their simple weapons came. But the Rapanui invented new and more deadly weapons of obsidian — the mata'a spearhead.

Sometime during the period of decay most of the moai were toppled and wrecked, perhaps in some sort of statement against ancestors of other clans, or in general frustration against the established order, or simple despair. Their carving and erection also discontinued. Hundreds of unfinished moai remain in the island's quarry of Rano Raraku, and actually it is this area which preserved many of the best surviving examples.

Instead of the traditional religion the new warrior class preferred their Birdman cult, in which men competed to bring back the first nest egg of the sooty tern, perhaps an invocation of fertility with greater relevance to circumstances than chiefly mana, and one that may have temporarily settled arguments over power; the winner granted chieftainship to his sponsor, until next year. This strange annual instability must have seemed much preferable to the worse disorder to come.

According to war historian John Keegan, a mere 111 people survived to the nineteenth century on Rapa Nui, after its coup de grâce by slave-raiding and disease brought by European sailors. Their oral traditions have been combined with archaeological recreation to yield our knowledge of their self-decimation. We know the warriors fought wars—whether over religion, over land and resources, over clan affiliation, over prestige, over insults and more serious offenses (including cannibalism, as social relations further degraded and starvation threatened)—or all of these reasons. Many of the Rapanui apparently directed their intellectual and physical resources to warfare or avoiding warfare, demonstrating a hitherto-untapped depth of genius for both these means of adapting to brutal existence. Families closed off many caves with statue stones to keep violent death at bay. Some even dug a defensive ditch in a desperate attempt to separate themselves on a peninsula. Keegan believes the Rapanui independently and rapidly invented all the basic aspects familiar to Western militarism through Clausewitz which were possible in their small theatre of war. Based on the evident mass-production of spearheads and casualties to their numbers, this may have included attempts to fight decisive battles during the seventeenth century.

As Keegan points out, the late-stage development of Western-esque, militarized Clausewitzian warfare, and eventually an analogue of modern total warfare should not be considered civilizational progress for Easter Island — merely evidence of the misplacement of pressured genius. We must consider it in context. Certainly, for the variant of Polynesian culture present at Easter Island it was horrible in its incineration of cultural progress, representing as it did a decadence and collapse of usual social structure which once had no need of it to settle disputes. (Whether it proved to represent civilizational progress and prowess for the West either is a question we might do well to ask about the victims of the conflagrations of the 20th century, horrific wars inspired largely by supposedly disparate views which all sought the extension of politics in warfare, and the ultimate extension of politics in ultimate warfare.)

By the time visitors came to the island in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and gave it the three names by which it is known today, its civilization had collapsed beyond hope of repair, and became easy prey to even further ruination by the depredations of rather merciless outsiders. Its legacy of creative accomplishments had been forgotten by the few pathetic remnants of its population, who no longer preserved much of their history or understood their heritage. What the world and the island's present inhabitants know now has had to be deciphered from what little the survivors remembered, but mainly from the physical evidence on the island, an ongoing process.

Lessons

I think we can find larger lessons in all of this than environmental fragility, although this proved a crucible. These lessons are applicable to other crises in which any group of people defined by their cultural beliefs may find themselves.

Apparently enough, the Rapanui lacked the resources to support their belief system in practice. Still, it seems that their operative beliefs remained remarkably static until it was too late, and they preferred continuity until they were fully desperate. What can we learn from this? Environmental doomsayers have seized upon the local fate of the Rapanui as an analogy for not heeding planetary resource limitations. But quite aside from this particular claim upon the Rapanui's downfall for a 'neo-Malthusian' agenda and its debatable relevance to the situation of all humanity, let us look at an issue far larger, universally relevant and more important.

Beyond just a mere lack of resources and failure to respond to it, the Rapanui predicament shows in the larger sense a contradiction, a failure to reconcile evidence of their situation compared to cultural values, the shared models by which a group of people comprehend the world, by which people assign value to elements and practices in their experience and act accordingly. So in the larger sense belief denied reality, not because the exigencies of the dire situation could have been obscure in any way (the disappearing forests must have been obvious), but simply because the preservation of belief, even evidently erroneous faith that demanded rapid modification, was more comfortable and more popular. At least generally, the Rapanui followed the comfortable and popular traditions, even well beyond the point of no hope for most of the population, and no hope at all for preserving the health of their culture. Of course one wonders, with the seemingly clearer hindsight of those blessed with different blinders, 'How could this foolishness have happened?'

The Rapanui most likely did what they did not only out of the common human impulse for conformity, and certainly not because they were all unusually foolish or stupid, but because the objects of their conformity had their roots in original wise evaluation. They likely clung to the values and behaviors they held sacred and special, which had served their Polynesian ancestors so well in the past in managing resources and populations in more beneficent and connected locales, and ensuring stability and peace, and engendering the expressions of the artist guilds, precisely because of the manifest utility and greatness of their beliefs — in the past.

What was once the glory and the virtue of this civilization was brought to a calcified state, like the highest values and cherished behaviors of the imperia of the West, and civilization toppled under its own weight. Such an eventuality was underlined well by the frontier general Maximus in Gladiator, who insisted to the Emperor himself that “Rome is the light” of civilization, but had no awareness of the depths to which Rome itself had already sunk in its decadence via old values (especially, in that case, blind over-love of martial glory).

For at times civilization demands change in order to continue to advance rather than collapse due to the eternal pursuit of its presently cherished character. The evidence of apparent reality announces such moments loudly if we listen. As clear as such implicit warnings seem to an outsider in another place or time not subject to the same comforts of old beliefs, to an insider, such a clarion call might seem mere background noise, somehow still sounding "all is well."

Imperial thinking in the largest sense means nothing less than hardening of beliefs which deny reality, usually in times of pressure or trauma. This will almost certainly seem a novel definition, and probably seem an incorrect one. (It may however prove a more thorough and serviceable definition than relying on any conventional definition of an imperial system — particularly an exclusive definition by which only a political "empire" in name qualifies as such; frequently, the citizens of de facto political empires prefer to avoid the term, and potentially, self-described empires might represent some relatively open-minded, fluid and preferable circumstance in their time and place.) We don't recognize inward empires as empires, only their occasional blatant outward expressions. We see the proverbial tips of the icebergs and they seem enormous and prominent — but underneath the surface lie the truly enormous masses of frozen thought, the untold dangers of the deep.

The repetitive patterns of decay among civilizations and their political structures noted in Aristotelian tradition, especially the cyclical fall for every rise predicted by the medieval historian Ibn Khaldûn, might owe its inevitability, at the most basic level, to this phenomenon of the fossilization of human life, some form of living losing the strength of adaptation which created it — people holding onto some promising thing too hard, like a reliable permanence amidst instability, a role which asks far too much of any one thing. This phenomenon does not limit itself to the political sphere, in which we recognize "empires." Fossilization of thought into empires of orthodoxy could apply to any sort of cultural thought — to aesthetics, to social behavior, to religion, to morality, to ideology, to literature, to mass media, to science, or to philosophy. Even those who may not embrace the past still bear it in their minds without knowing. In the recurring syndrome, unless it becomes permissible to lay down the virtues of one age so that they might become stepping stones for the next, they become burdens weighty as the moai. The world is not fixed but presents us with changing circumstances; thus our appraisals of things should not remain fixed either. Today's orthodox virtues become tomorrow's orthodox vices — although few recognize the change.

Under similar pressures to those upon the Rapanui, caught between the demands of their own beliefs and the harshness of reality, other people in the world have turned their struggle outward to impress their worldview upon others and bring more resources under their control. They have conquered and formed empires or been conquered, or first one and then the other. The Rapanui could do no such thing. They had to face their own demons instead of wreaking them on others — as people have done often in the historical record, making the empires so frequently mistaken for the flower of a civilization and thus diligently recorded in history. (Instead, I suggest that empire means the withering presupposing the flower, a slow dying of some form once beautiful, although this sort of flower is often less apparent itself, and favored by less explication on the pages of history. The flower: the highest culmination of a way of life among individuals, following from the characteristic ideas and ideals of a culture. The imperial decay: the life bleeding out of these ideas.)

There are so many of those outward empires recognizable in common knowledge. The Vikings expanded through aggressive raids and aggressive trade when Scandinavian crops were scant or failing. The Arabs built their empire when long-feuding tribes finally found brotherhood in Dar al-Islam (the House of Submission), as long as they fought crusades ever outward against Dar al-Harb (the House of War). The Zulus, faced with overgrazing, hardened their regimental system and terrorized a huge portion of lower Africa. The Romans, faced with a general insignificant vulnerability in the Mediterranean world, having forged a myth of imperial destiny made it real with cunning brutality. And the Prussians, beset by enemies and a lack of resources, developed a more efficient and more brutal formula of war for their era until they dominated central Europe (and from that tradition came a famous strategist of regimental and regimented mind named Clausewitz who envisioned decisive warfare to settle the political questions of states).

These sorts of outward empires become the most famous. But the sort of thinking that can create an outward empire creates an inward one. Or rather, the thinking that creates an 'empire' within a person demands an 'empire' within a social group, a group who if they can, would like to transfer their burden outward. But if they cannot — they still create an empire, merely a more inward one, with the same flaming out and sputtering of the fire of civilization. An empire inclusive represents arrogance against change and time and life itself. Thus Shelley's Ozymandias had ordered the following inscribed on his now-crumbled monument: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

For the Rapanui there was nowhere to go, no one to fight except themselves, and no extant cultural solution for their calamity. They turned their considerable ingenuities to developing unlimited, total warfare and employing it against one another for short-lived dominance, or to surviving this, or to desperately modifying their culture in an effort to find new solutions. The demons of their own creation would devour them, rather literally.

In the case of Easter Island we find the essence of empire, the clearest pattern of unavoided imperial thinking, as could be sniffed out only when trapped into revealing its most terrible, unmitigated price.

The Ends of History

So ends this attempt at theory to interpret and learn from the mute facts of one seemingly minor piece of human history. Is the story of Easter Island as isolated as the island on which it took place, without application to the wider world and more modern times? Certainly it is a unique story, as is any event in history. But surely there is more to it than that. Surely we can take from it many lessons. Surely we can learn a lesson of rebirth instead of death from this parable of Easter and its dead people of the egg. To do so would at least give some meaning to an ancient self-crucifixion, and it might save us from enduring anything similar. Learning such lessons is necessary if we are to seek our own rebirth for our world civilization in the future, and resurrect the forgotten promise of a higher civilization about which we rightfully still dream, and of which we are capable.

Only by respecting the past can we ready ourselves for the future.

Author's Note: If, upon completion of this article, the reader still cannot fathom its relevancies to his or her own time, place, mentality and life, especially discomfiting comparisons, then the author respectfully requests a repeated reading.

Selected Sources and Further Reading

A History of Warfare by John Keegan

Easter Island Home Page
http://www.netaxs.com/~trance/rapanui.html

Easter Island Foundation
http://islandheritage.org/

The Rongorongo of Easter Island
http://www.rongorongo.org/

Aku-Aku by Thor Heyerdahl