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Message: <blockquote data-quote="fusangite" data-source="post: 2455620" data-attributes="member: 7240">A few problems here: (a) while the First Age may have been as long as you say, Tolkien's books make it abundantly clear that the second and third ages were ca. 3000 years long(b) Tolkien's historical narrative is one of diminishment and loss from an initial golden age to the age of men(c) why is it inevitable that any civilization will develop indoor plumbing?(d) look at Australia: tens of thousands of years of continuous human habitation without any of the technological changes you see as inevitableYou are defining regress and progress by the standards and definitions of the society in which you live. There is something basically hubristic about seeing what happened to our particular civilizations as the inevitable way all history is programmed to unfold. Secondly, civilizations don't "move" because they don't like local environmental conditions; they adapt to them. And if civilizations better adapted to their local conditions come along, they move in to the region. Civilizations all over the world have grown up in the shadow of potential recurrent disaster.Now, this strikes me as really strange. Why would a highly specific regional artistic and intellectual movement that occurred in Europe be part of some kind of laid-in teleological program of how all civilizations develop?</blockquote>