"Samuel Huntington defines a civilization as “the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species.” "
I didn't read Huntington, however the question about "what does civilization mean" reminds me an analysis expressed by Ortega y Gasset in the Mass Revolt. Tbf he wasn't talking about "civilization" but to what according to him a "civilized" society differs from an uncivilized one, and he believed a civilized society is a society in wich violence is considered as a land of last resort in order to solve individual and social conflicts. What do you think?
I read Ortega y Gasset years ago and will need to revisit. When I think of civilization, complexity and scale come to mind. Clearly, a subsistence-level hunter-gatherer band is not “civilized” by any stretch of the term. For a society to scale up, a large, cooperative population is required in order to achieve a division of labor. To maintain a large, cooperative population requires a means of resolving disputes without resorting to violence. When violence is required, there must be a distinction between “authorized” and “unauthorized” violence that is accepted by society at large.
Western civilization is obviously capable of great violence, but is also heir to a just war tradition that goes back millennia (eg, Aristotle: “The proper object of practicing military training is not in order that men may enslave those who do not deserve slavery, but in order that first they may themselves avoid becoming enslaved to others”). So yes, I’d agree that regulation of violence is an essential component of being civilized.
I noticed when reading the piece and these comments, that in my mind I’ve tended to hold an automatic association between “civilization” and “empire”. I think that must be because of so many world history books, tv shows, movies, and the Civilization games, which all keep putting them together. I am not sure the term “civilization” is better understood by inherently presenting it as a grandiose ambitious and heroic story.
I have like one unoriginal historical observation that I keep bringing up (because it’s the best one, you see), which is the approximately simultaneous historical appearance of Socrates, Siddhartha Gautama, and Confucius (and Lao Tzu, or the work attributed to him anyway) ~400-500 BCE. I am not sure it’s possible to pinpoint when civilization exactly starts—it does seem more like a gradient at times—but the values they or direct students conceive are all broad cultural turning points: turning leaders away from old superstitions and political faith in sorcery and shamanism, engaging as morally as possible in personal relationships despite class and caste differences, an early inkling of a mystical cosmology of the universe which while not scientific yet has become impersonalized and reasoned with its own theory and also is not about submission or ancestral deities, and also stuff like the cultivation of early forms of humane consideration of violence and the aspiration to resolve conflicts without unnecessary bloodshed. Sunzi is from this era as well, and his greatest idiom, one of the greatest of all and to be repeated later: the ultimate goal if engaging in battle/strategy is to win without fighting.
Burial rites and practices suggest a lot about the cultural state of a society. These change over time and according to political stability, and the big indicator of either civilizing refinement or dissolution is the presence and kind and role of human sacrifice. Kingdoms in China backslid into burying staff and servants with aristocracy and royalty across the warring states period until the Han dynasty ended it permanently. Rome too got pretty messed up. Human sacrifice is a gradient measurement and shift to and fro itself. The violent cult brainwashing or intimidation to create child or teen suicide bombers and terrorists, the forced conscription of prisoners and minorities to become human cannon fodder or be physically and sexually mutilated domestically, the practice of state executions, acceptance of mass shootings, pardoned or sanctioned extrajudicial killings exist on this scale of human sacrifice somewhere as well. We obviously tend to associate these developments with the health or presence of liberal democratic govt, but even within those technical boundaries I think the human sacrifice factor and presence suggests its health and stability as a system.
Socrates and Plato hated democracy as well, so maybe it’s irrelevant to make glorious future.
There is certainly a connection between civilizations, empires, and world religions, which all require scale and complexity. The Roman Empire spread a civilization (Greco-Roman) and left behind a religion (Christianity, still based in Rome). Ultimately, the civilization and the religion (both greatly transformed) outlasted the empire.
William Christian: "Not until the first millennium BCE do the first universal religions appear. Though associated in practice with particular dynasties or empires, they proclaimed universal truths and worshiped all-powerful gods. It is no accident that universal religions appeared when both empires and exchange networks reached to the edge of the known universe, controlling populations with diverse belief systems and lifeways. Nor is it an accident that one of the earliest religions of this type, Zoroastrianism, appeared in the largest empire of the mid-first millennium BCE, that of the Achaemenids, and at the hub of trade routes that were weaving Afro-Eurasia into a single world system. Indeed, most of the universal religions appeared in the hub region between Mesopotamia and northern India. They included Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism in Persia, Buddhism in India, Confucianism in China, and Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Mediterranean world. Their appearance persuaded the German existentialist philosopher Karl T. Jaspers, in a world history first published in 1949, to name this period the 'axial age.'"
"Samuel Huntington defines a civilization as “the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species.” "
I didn't read Huntington, however the question about "what does civilization mean" reminds me an analysis expressed by Ortega y Gasset in the Mass Revolt. Tbf he wasn't talking about "civilization" but to what according to him a "civilized" society differs from an uncivilized one, and he believed a civilized society is a society in wich violence is considered as a land of last resort in order to solve individual and social conflicts. What do you think?
I read Ortega y Gasset years ago and will need to revisit. When I think of civilization, complexity and scale come to mind. Clearly, a subsistence-level hunter-gatherer band is not “civilized” by any stretch of the term. For a society to scale up, a large, cooperative population is required in order to achieve a division of labor. To maintain a large, cooperative population requires a means of resolving disputes without resorting to violence. When violence is required, there must be a distinction between “authorized” and “unauthorized” violence that is accepted by society at large.
Western civilization is obviously capable of great violence, but is also heir to a just war tradition that goes back millennia (eg, Aristotle: “The proper object of practicing military training is not in order that men may enslave those who do not deserve slavery, but in order that first they may themselves avoid becoming enslaved to others”). So yes, I’d agree that regulation of violence is an essential component of being civilized.
I noticed when reading the piece and these comments, that in my mind I’ve tended to hold an automatic association between “civilization” and “empire”. I think that must be because of so many world history books, tv shows, movies, and the Civilization games, which all keep putting them together. I am not sure the term “civilization” is better understood by inherently presenting it as a grandiose ambitious and heroic story.
I have like one unoriginal historical observation that I keep bringing up (because it’s the best one, you see), which is the approximately simultaneous historical appearance of Socrates, Siddhartha Gautama, and Confucius (and Lao Tzu, or the work attributed to him anyway) ~400-500 BCE. I am not sure it’s possible to pinpoint when civilization exactly starts—it does seem more like a gradient at times—but the values they or direct students conceive are all broad cultural turning points: turning leaders away from old superstitions and political faith in sorcery and shamanism, engaging as morally as possible in personal relationships despite class and caste differences, an early inkling of a mystical cosmology of the universe which while not scientific yet has become impersonalized and reasoned with its own theory and also is not about submission or ancestral deities, and also stuff like the cultivation of early forms of humane consideration of violence and the aspiration to resolve conflicts without unnecessary bloodshed. Sunzi is from this era as well, and his greatest idiom, one of the greatest of all and to be repeated later: the ultimate goal if engaging in battle/strategy is to win without fighting.
Burial rites and practices suggest a lot about the cultural state of a society. These change over time and according to political stability, and the big indicator of either civilizing refinement or dissolution is the presence and kind and role of human sacrifice. Kingdoms in China backslid into burying staff and servants with aristocracy and royalty across the warring states period until the Han dynasty ended it permanently. Rome too got pretty messed up. Human sacrifice is a gradient measurement and shift to and fro itself. The violent cult brainwashing or intimidation to create child or teen suicide bombers and terrorists, the forced conscription of prisoners and minorities to become human cannon fodder or be physically and sexually mutilated domestically, the practice of state executions, acceptance of mass shootings, pardoned or sanctioned extrajudicial killings exist on this scale of human sacrifice somewhere as well. We obviously tend to associate these developments with the health or presence of liberal democratic govt, but even within those technical boundaries I think the human sacrifice factor and presence suggests its health and stability as a system.
Socrates and Plato hated democracy as well, so maybe it’s irrelevant to make glorious future.
There is certainly a connection between civilizations, empires, and world religions, which all require scale and complexity. The Roman Empire spread a civilization (Greco-Roman) and left behind a religion (Christianity, still based in Rome). Ultimately, the civilization and the religion (both greatly transformed) outlasted the empire.
William Christian: "Not until the first millennium BCE do the first universal religions appear. Though associated in practice with particular dynasties or empires, they proclaimed universal truths and worshiped all-powerful gods. It is no accident that universal religions appeared when both empires and exchange networks reached to the edge of the known universe, controlling populations with diverse belief systems and lifeways. Nor is it an accident that one of the earliest religions of this type, Zoroastrianism, appeared in the largest empire of the mid-first millennium BCE, that of the Achaemenids, and at the hub of trade routes that were weaving Afro-Eurasia into a single world system. Indeed, most of the universal religions appeared in the hub region between Mesopotamia and northern India. They included Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism in Persia, Buddhism in India, Confucianism in China, and Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Mediterranean world. Their appearance persuaded the German existentialist philosopher Karl T. Jaspers, in a world history first published in 1949, to name this period the 'axial age.'"
Western civilization is the worst form of civilization, except for all the others. LOL