The Meaning of Civilization

I left off my last post with a contentious claim: that Childe’s primary cri […]

Yeah, I know. I’m inclined to think option 3 might be the best one we have if we want to survive the next century. We’ll never know if it’s possible until we try it.

Have you ever read Marge Piercy’s “Woman on the Edge of Time”? she postulates such a society, with some features I like a lot — good science mixed with nature spirituality, ecologically sound agriculture & transportation, shared wealth/literature/art of the old world (our civilization) without money, etc — and a few I don’t (procreation via machine).

The Anasazi seem to have been heavily influenced by the Aztecs and Toltecs. While they, like all cultures, believed themselves superior to all others, I’m not sure this is a valid definition for “civilization.” Such self-righteous ethnocentrism is a universal among all human societies; if that’s our criterion, then we’re reduced once again to a synonym of “society.”

The third possibility in my list is an interesting possibility–but, for now, purely speculative. No such thing has ever existed, and the jury’s out on whether it’s even possible.

3 would most likely occur AFTER a centralized civilization has evolved or collapsed provided that the memes (i.e. educational background) and sufficient technology exist to continue without state-level organization. Granted, that would be difficult — such a transition would essentially have to be PLANNED rather than occur randomly, with planning made possible by a distributed communications network akin to the Web. It is essentially a “post-civilization.”

Curiously, isn’t that what “true communism” AND “true democracy” call for? Maybe such a society — and, therefore, a period of civilization before it — is one natural possibility of the process of social development. Over a long time it looks like this: Egalitarian hunter-gatherers gradually centralize under “redistributor” headmen/elites, population grows, the elites become governments, governments promote public education that gradually broadens to include almost everyone, thus essentially doing away with their own elite status and restoring a semblance of egalitarianism. (This would explain why Christian conservatives and other religious self-identified elites tend to strongly restrict educational opportunities: They KNOW it will ultimately promote their downfall.)

As far as 2 goes, I was tossing those out to show that Childe’s list is somewhat arbitrary: Wouldn’t the Anasazi communities probably have been seen as “Civilization” by the people of the desert SW at that time?

Catal Huyuk did have a lot of what seem to be religious shrines, but that in itself isn’t proof of theocracy. It could have been, but I’m not sure we’ll ever know. The Hopi towns of today have numerous kivas that are used for similar religious gatherings, and their religion is a key element woven into their lifestyle, but the tribe isn’t a theocracy. I suspect CH was something similar; their community is even built along similar lines.

1. Admittedly, I haven’t spent a great deal of time studying Catal Huyuk, but I was under the impression it was something of a theocracy. That, to my mind, qualifies as state-level organization: a theocratic city-state, like Teotihuacan.
2. I usually think of the Anasazi and the tribes of the Pacific Northwest as chiefdoms, not civilizations, so that exclusion doesn’t bother me too much. Keeley’s War Before Civilization focuses primarily on such chiefdoms as “before civilization,” as well as Big Man societies.
3. A technologically advanced society dispersed into small, communicating villages can never arise autochthonously, for reasons I’ll be exploring in-depth in my next post.

Found you by way of IshCon. Very interesting.

Of course, Childe’s list effectively rules out places like ancient Catal Huyuk and Jericho despite the fact that both of them were well-defined, organized population centers (I’m not sure they exceeded 5,000, but they were pretty crowded) because they lacked a state-level organization. Same’s true of the Anasazi and possibly the tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Also, what if the society were technologically advanced but dispersed in small, communicating villages? That would be civilization to me, but not to him.

As Cohen & Stewart write in The Collapse of Chaos, “…most of the stories we teach our children are myths, Just So stories, oversimplifications. They are teaching stories, not truths.” That’s certainly true of the common image of civilization and one we need to outgrow if we ever want to be truly “enlightened.” Personally, I’d add that our view of ourselves is decidedly dissociative — we praise ourselves mightily for doing good & being advanced(sometimes accurately), then justify behavior that even “uncivilized” peoples would consider barbaric without trying to really understand where both sides of our culture come from.