‘Civilisation’
AC Grayling
To travel round the streets of a city in the Western world on an ordinary day is to see an idea expressed in stone and brick, concrete and glass: the idea of civilization as this word is now understood. Schools, hospitals, fire brigade headquarters, government departments, office blocks, shops, restaurants, theatres, hotels, railway stations, police stations, courthouses, parks, playgrounds, stadiums – and in the streets themselves streams of cars and buses, people waiting at traffic lights that change in regular sequences, an orderly bustle of daily life – are all expressions of an underlying idea of social organisation and structure. In the buildings electricity and water supply is taken for granted, in the early morning rubbish is collected and the streets cleaned, in the evening places of entertainment welcome customers. Parking lots display neat rows of cars lined up, at the bus stop and the theatre queues politely form.
People are shocked if a street brawl occurs, or someone dies on the pavement in front of them, or a building is consumed in flames. What happens between people in the privacy of houses and apartments around the city, where individual differences and proclivities manifest themselves most markedly, is generally not on view in the public domain; the display of sharper aspects of human passions are sequestered to the cinema screen and the playing field, where they are made safe for spectators, who can experience the catharsis they offer by vicarious means.
Also taken for granted is the contract, understood in both explicit and implicit terms, that underlies public and private life. People are expected to abide by the laws and regulations, mainly designed to ensure the smooth running of the social order and to provide means for resolving difficulties when they arise, as in a busy and various society they inevitably do. Businesses seek to make profits, employees seek to earn wages in excess of the bills and taxes they have to pay, in order to be part of the structure. At all levels there is bureaucracy and expense attendant on membership of society. The obligations imposed, and the necessities entailed, are an assumed part of that structure. At almost every level there is hierarchy and responsibility; however disengaged an individual might be, short of living on the street without possessions – and even there – everyone is in the web of the social organisation in multiple ways, and life outside it seems impossible.
In the interior of personal lives there is undoubtedly far more depression, anxiety, struggle and ambition than is apparent, certainly to anyone merely travelling around a city to view its surface arrangements. Despite the challenges it can represent, most people accept the norms of membership, and give scarcely a thought to the idea of trying to exist outside them. For those who do, society itself has little tolerance.
‘A city in the Western world’; that phrase in the first paragraph expressly invites comparison with cities in the ‘global South’, a phrase that succeeded the earlier expression ‘the Third World’ to denote poor countries where the structures of ‘civilization’ appear less secure. In these societies most of the amenities of education, health care and welfare support are provided within families or communities rather than organised institutions whether public or private; the social contract is more personal, the quality of public provision – the condition of roads, the power and water supply, sanitation, policing, the dispensing of justice – more haphazard and intermittent because there is not enough material wealth to make them work to the standard expected in a European, Australasian or North American setting. Correlatively, corruption and mismangement is more obvious; in sophisticated Western societies there is no less of either, but it is better hidden, and because the pot of resources from which it is drawn is bigger and deeper, is anyway less noticed.
A tumultously overcrowded city in a state of perpetual apparent semi-dereliction – the cliché of a ‘global South’ city – invites a puzzled thought. Contrast such a setting with that of societies continuing to live in near Stone Age conditions – the Hadza of northern Tanzania, the Sentinelese, uncontacted tribes in the Amazon jungle and Papua New Guinea – and one sees the Global South cities as transitional, as what happens when urbanisation, and aspects of the economic life that drive it, pull people’s aspirations from traditional ways towards the concrete-and-high-rise model of ‘developed’ societies.
Some – call them ‘the sceptics’ – might well ask whether the journey from the former condition to the latter is worth it, given the way-station in a global South setting. Others – call them ‘the believers’ – might emphatically think it is.
The doubts of the sceptics might be reinforced by considering the situation of people who have been unwillingly subjected to the influence of Western civilizational imperatives – by colonisations whether imperial or commercial – a chief and in many respects tragic example is provided by the Aboriginal peoples of Australia.
The certainties of the believers might be reinforced by the observation that until relatively recently – and not very long ago – the cities of the West were no different (and in many respects worse) than those of cliché versions of Global South cities today. One example suffices: chamber pots were emptied from windows onto the streets of eighteenth century London, to the frequent peril and perennial discomfiture of pedestrians. The London rich might have lived in comfort then, but the London poor were still living in squalor in the first decades of the twentieth century, and would find many of the circumstances of life in a Global South city today very familiar. Indeed, most of those living along Skid Row (Central City East) in Los Angeles today would think the same.
These considerations might prompt the sceptics to ask whether civilization is a good thing, given that it turns on corralling people into regimented conformities, its economic model divisive and unequal, requiring acceptance of a condition in which people are ‘free’ only if they stick to the narrow paths laid out for them by social organisation. Veer off, and society is unforgiving.
The believers reply that staying on the paths has many benefits; life in a contemporary developed society is luxurious in comparison to the limiting and limited effort to maintain daily existence which is the lot, in not very different ways, of those not so advantaged, in the entire range from hunter-gatherer to ‘global South’ conditions.
And the believers – here making a value judgment about the superiority of ‘advanced’ societies’ culture and science over that of traditional outlooks – will add that the conditions of civilized life, understood in the sense here at issue, has been productive of the finest things achieved by human progress.
To which the sceptics will in turn reply: at what cost?
This debate begs an earlier question: what is ‘civilization’? The foregoing remarks turn on an assumed conception of ‘civilized’ which, as this word is now used, contrast with ‘primitive’, ‘preliterate’, ‘uncultured’, ‘savage’, and its most common use is to describe conditions, and the behaviour it mandates, which is the opposite of boorish, barbaric, rude, vulgar and ignorant. These contrasts are informative, and immediately indicate what is at issue. A speaking example is provided by the second-century CE Greek historian Arrian of Nicodemia, whose Anabasis of Alexander is one of the principal sources of information about the conquests of Alexander the Great. He wrote that the conqueror said to his followers, ‘My father Philip found you a tribe of impoverished vagabonds, most of you dressed in skins, feeding a few sheep on the hills…he gave you cloaks to wear instead of skins, he brought you down from the hills to the plains…He made you city-dwellers; he brought you law; he civilized you.’[i] That encapsulates the matter nicely. Centuries before Arrian gave Alexander this speech, the refined Greeks of the classical period – in the sixth to fourth centuries BCE – called those who lived beyond their sphere ‘barbarians’ because their unintelligible talk sounded like ‘bar bar bar’.
In Alexander’s remark lies the basis of subsequent thinking about the concept of ‘civilization’, etymologically rooted in Latin civis, ‘a city dweller’ (originally from Proto-Italic *keiwis, derived in its turn from Proto-Indo-European *ḱey ‘to settle, to lie down’). The word ‘civilization’ itself dates from the eighteenth century Enlightenment as the preceding centuries of European expansion – the beginnings of globalisation – brought into view ‘uncivilized’, ‘savage’, ‘primitive’ peoples, and encounter with them turned into colonial domination of them. Modern usage continued Alexander’s assumption about the shepherds of the hills, together with its propagandistic aspects; after the rise of the Church in the fourth century CE those who did not convert were described as pagans, ‘countrymen’, ‘peasants’, and the term soon came to have as negative a connotation as ‘uncivilized’.
As these thoughts show, the concept of civilization combines ideas of urbanisation, organisation, governance, law, custom, social stratification, specialisation in economic activity, religion, morality, literacy, education, arts, and the emergence of self-definition of groups eventually as ‘nations’ and states. There has been a copious discussion among historians and philosophers since the 17th century – and among anthropologists and ethnologists as their disciplines have more lately evolved – about what ‘civilization’ is and how to describe its defining features.
A major shift has taken place in this discussion. What had become an orthodoxy about ‘the rise of civilization’, namely, that it began in the Fertile Crescent of the Near East about six thousand years ago, in the first city states of Sumer on the Euphrates River and soon after along the Nile in Egypt and the Indus, has been challenged, on at least two grounds: that features of social organisation and urbanisation appeared much earlier, and that assumptions about the nature of social structure might be mistaken. The current classic statement of this challenge is Graber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. A question to be asked about this otherwise excellent book is whether it does not itself fall victim to ‘reading-in’ an alternative set of assumptions; although it invokes philosophical conceptions such as those of Rousseau, it sees the past through the lenses of current decolonising, feminist and Marxist perspectives which – though they have a great deal to recommend them, providing powerful correctives to preceding perspectives – are as much lenses as these latter. That presses the question: can we see anything without an interpretive lens of some kind?
One major obligation that the new challenges to ancient history obliges us to undertake is to ask, with the sceptics, the uncomfortable question: Is civilization, after all, a good thing? No doubt the right answer is ‘yes and no’, but it brings to mind another answer, given by one who was asked which past century he would like to live in, which was: ‘The eighteenth century, provided that I could take my dentist and his equipment with me.’
[i] Arrian of Nicodemia The Anabasis of Alexander translated E. J. Chinnock 1885, Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/files/46976/46976-h/46976-h.htm retrieved 25/3/24.