In her fascinating and erudite book (Decay and Afterlife) about the meaning of ruins, author Aleksandra Prica makes a telling point about the cultural role of ruins. It is in ruins, she argues, that a society finds itself.  In ruins, a society sees both its past and its future, reminding itself that it did not emerge in an historical vacuum and that it will not end apart from the same.  A society's ruins are its successor's genesis:  one culture's demise is the birth of another.

    And life goes on.

    As I read through the book, I thought frequently of the closing scene in the original "Planet of the Apes."  Finally free to roam the planet with his newly acquired girlfriend, astronaut Charlton Heston (Taylor) comes upon what the most sinister of the apes knew all along he would see.  Half buried in the sand of the beach on which he is traveling, its once proud beacon now barely visible above the waves is the Statue of Liberty.

    A civilization that even now considers itself "exceptional" is, in the end, another ruin, gone, to use a common metaphor, the "way of all flesh":  dust for the ages.

    It's a humbling end.  Be thankful for ruins, for they are the lens through which we see ourselves as we are:  magnificent yet fragile creatures who are caught in a maelstrom of contingencies which we will never overcome.

    Even if there is a God.