What is a civilisation?
Hello, and welcome to my first article at the Civilisation and Tradition Substack! Here, I am going to explore, what the term civilisation means!
What is civilisation? There are basically two perceptions of this concept. One qualitative - the achievement of a certain level of development of society, in contrast to barbarism and the level of hunter-gatherers. Civilisation as a gradual improvement of human society, as a state of increasing division of labor and complexity of social organization.
The American historian Carroll Quigley (vivabat 1910-1977) is the author of the rather lucid Evolution of Civilizations. For him, civilisation is a productive society, with writing and urban life. This distinguishes civilisations from other types of societies, be they hunter-gatherer or tribal confederations, evoking the stereotypical image of "barbarians", or nomadic tribes that have not yet settled and do not have urban life.
He takes Canada as an example, stating that in order to actually understand its mechanisms, we need to understand terms such as election, protestant, railroads, etc., none of which are originally Canadian, and are used outside of Canada itself. For Quigley, the number of civilisations is up for debate. At the same time, he allows for the repetition of the entire cycle of civilisation in some regions, such as China.
However, Quigley's definition is not as clear as it appears. For although the inhabitants of the Peruvian Andes did not know writing in the true sense of the word, this apparent deficiency in no way detracts from their greatness; on the contrary, it is a testimony to the incredible tenacity of man, capable of forging an empire and terraced fields, fortresses and palaces above the clouds on the mountain slopes of the Andes, the world's longest range of mountains.
It is not the necessity of writing that constitutes civilisation, but hierarchy, man's ability to organize himself, society and the environment in which he lives, to give it direction and order. This hierarchy is not formed by a mere village chief, but has many layers. It begins with the recognition of the cosmic hierarchy - the recognition of the transcendent, continues with his earthly deputies, the authority of the priest and the king, through the clerks, the tax collectors, to the warriors who protect civilisation from external chaos from the raids of unconquered barbarians from outside or from neighbouring adversaries. And so, at the dawn of history, Egyptian civilisation immortalised in the building of the pyramids not only a timeless monument to the inherent glory of its rulers, but also to the ability of the officials of the time to organise this monumental work: the ability to collect and distribute resources to builders, stonemasons and labourers throughout its construction - the ability of man to work together on great projects.
In modern times, the entire surface of the earth, with the exception of freezing ice-covered Antarctica, now belongs to state-organized societies that have reached a level of organization that can be called civilised. On closer inspection, however, we find that not all mankind has reached this level. In the mysterious recesses of tropical rainforests there still dwell uncontacted tribes, or on the remote Sentinel Island in the Bay of Bengal we still find natives jealously guarding their clods. These examples are indeed exceptional, but even today we find states where the reach of the government outside the capital or its suburbs can be very small indeed, and societies maintain their indigenous way of life.
In many places on earth, cultural anthropologists still come across echoes of man in his original state, as a reminder of the long millennia of Homo Sapiens on this planet. Civilised societies, however, are those with dynamic histories, and they emerged at the dawn of history in Mesopotamia and Egypt some six thousand years ago, when man renounced hunting and gathering for agriculture and settled life. And although this is known as the Neolithic Revolution, it can hardly be described as a revolution, since it was rather a long process that may have lasted for numerous generations.
And then the second perception, which focuses on tracing the cultural belonging of societies that have achieved the type of complexity described in the previous paragraph.
Let us begin with the German philosopher Oswald Spengler (vivabat 1880 -1936). In his work The Decline of the West, Spengler challenged the traditional division of history into ancient - medieval - modern and argued that we should examine high cultures (Hochkulturen) as meaningful units of history rather than epochs. According to Spengler, high cultures have individual stages of development, like living organisms. This approach of translating the concepts of the natural sciences into those of the humanities was inherent in Germany at the time; for example, Friedrich Ratzel (vivabat 1844-1904), the leading German geopolitician of the time, also likened states to living organisms. Spengler accompanies his text with charts that show comparisons in philosophy, politics, and the arts and point out the similarities in the different phases. According to Spengler, when high culture loses its creative impulses, it becomes a civilisation For Spengler, civilisation is then merely a passive, unproductive period that merely perpetuates the legacy of high culture. Therefore, when looking at Spengler's model, we should study high cultures, not civilisations, for in the advent of civilisation the creativeness is depleted and what remains is the capacity of organisation, of forging and governing universal empires.
The English historian Arnold Joseph Toynbee (vivabat 1885-1975) is best known for his magnum opus , the 12-volume A Study of History. He uses the term "civilisation" to refer to an intelligible field of historical study). He criticizes the parochialism of French historians who try to write the history of France as if it were a permanent thing. So he asks - what are the main events and processes that we need to understand in order to understand a country? In England, for example, the Industrial Revolution, the emergence of parliamentary democracy, colonial expansion, the Reformation, the Renaissance, the feudal system, the defence against the Vikings and the baptism of the Anglo-Saxon tribes were such. Each of these processes is also comparable to other countries , such as the Netherlands or France. Such groups of countries are linked by common processes and it makes sense to compare, for example, the Reformation in England, France or Scotland, as well as the colonial expansion of the English, French or Dutch. This is how he actually arrives at the concept of civilisation, although he tends to use the terms "civilisation" and "society" as synonyms.
The French Fernand Braudel (vivabat 1902-1985) comes up with his own conception of civilisations in his work Grammaire des Civilisations, for him civilisations are geographical spaces on a map, societies, economies and ways of thinking. For him, what is interesting is not the history of events or conjunctures (economic cycles) but the longue durée, history in its length and in its depth.
The Czech sociologist Jaroslav Krejčí (vivabat 1916-2014) also theorized about civilisations, summarizing his work in the title Postižitelné proudy dějin. He is a follower (though hardly an uncritical one) of Toynbee´s current, taking as his basic classificatory criterion the question of the human predicament, i.e. what is the place of man in the world and what should be his focus. Krejčí also uses the phrase socio-cultural formation as a synonym.
The theme of the clash of civilisations from a political science perspective was popularized by the American political scientist Samuel Phillips Huntington (vivabat 1927-2008), in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, in which he polemicised the euphoria following the end of the Cold War and the predicted end of history. For him, civilisation is the highest possible cultural category apart from humanity itself, and his understanding of civilisation transcends political or linguistic divisions, and much more so overlaps with religious divisions. The fact that this type of division makes sense is demonstrated by the Objective Lists website, which has divided the world into 9 cultural regions by comparing specific indicators.
It is also worth mentioning the historian and YouTuber Rudyard Lynch, known for his channel WhatIfAltHist, in which I recommend his series of videos about different civilisations . For example, he considers Latin America as a separate civilisation as it has some elements of its own. It cannot be understood purely on the basis of the known characteristics of Western civilisation.
Spengler is the only one of these authors who uses the term civilisation to refer to the no longer productive part of the cycle of higher cultures. Compared to the others, he also uses very specific nomenclature to refer to individual civilisations. For the sake of clarity I will therefore stick to the terminology of the other authors.
Understanding what civilisations are and how they work is meaningful to us, here and now. At a time when our civilisation is in deep crisis, we should understand it so that we know where we are, what lies ahead and what we can do about it.
See also:
BRAUDEL, Fernand: Grammaire de Civilisation
HUNTINGTON, Samuel Phillips: Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
JONES, Jeff: ObjectiveLists, link
KREJČÍ, Jaroslav: Postižitelné proudy dějin
LYNCH, Rudyard: WhatIfAltHist, Civilizations video series, link
QUIGLEY, Carroll, Evolution of Civilizations, link
SPENGLER Oswald, Decline of the West
TOYNBEE, Arnold Joseph, A Study of History, 12 volumes