What is
civilization?
If some people hear that people want to “end
civilization” they automatically respond in various negative
ways because of their positive associations with the word “civilization.”
This piece is an attempt to clarify, define and describe what I
mean by “civilization.”
If I look in the dictionary to find out what the
commonly used definition of civilization is, here's what it says:
civilization
1: a society in an advanced
state of social development (e.g., with complex legal and political
and religious organizations); "the people slowly progressed
from barbarism to civilization" [syn: civilisation]
2: the social process whereby
societies achieve civilization [syn: civilisation]
3: a particular society
at a particular time and place; "early Mayan civilization"
[syn: culture, civilisation]
4: the quality of excellence
in thought and manners and taste; "a man of intellectual refinement";
"he is remembered for his generosity and civilization"
[syn: refinement, civilisation]
[i]
The synonyms include "advancement,
breeding, civility, cultivation, culture, development, edification,
education, elevation, enlightenment, illumination, polish, progress"
and "refinement."
It goes without saying that the writers of dictionaries
are "civilized" people - it certainly helps explain why they define
themselves in such glowing terms. As Derrick Jensen
asks, "can you imagine writers of dictionaries willingly classifying
themselves as members of 'a low, undeveloped, or backward state
of human society'?"
In
contrast, the antonyms of "civilization" include: "barbarism, savagery, wilderness, wildness." These are
the words that civilized people use to refer to those they view
as being outside of civilization - in particular, indigenous peoples.
"Barbarous", as in "barbarian", comes from a Greek word, meaning
"non-Greek, foreign." The word "savage" comes from the Latin "silvaticus"
meaning "of the woods." The origins seem harmless enough, but it's
very instructive to see how civilized people have used these words:
barbarity
1: the
quality of being shockingly cruel and inhumane [syn: atrocity, atrociousness,
barbarousness,
heinousness]
2: a brutal
barbarous savage act [syn: brutality, barbarism, savagery]
[ii]
savagery
1. The quality or condition of
being savage.
2. An act of violent cruelty.
3. Savage behavior or nature; barbarity.
[iii]
These associations
of cruelty with the uncivilized are, however, in glaring opposition
to the historical record of interactions between civilized and indigenous
peoples.
For
example, let us take one of the most famous examples of "contact"
between civilized and indigenous peoples. When Christopher Columbus
first arrived in the "Americas" he noted that he was impressed by
the indigenous peoples, writing in his journal that they had a "naked
innocence. ... They are very gentle without knowing what evil is,
without killing, without stealing."
And
so he decided "they will make excellent servants."
In
1493, with the permission of the Spanish Crown, he appointed himself
"viceroy and governor" of the Caribbean and the Americas. He installed
himself on the island now divided between Haiti and the Dominican
republic and began to systematically enslave and exterminate the
indigenous population. (The Taino population of the island was not
civilized, in contrast to the civilized Inca who the conquistadors
also invaded in Central America.) Within three years he had managed
to reduce the indigenous population from 8 million to 3 million.
By 1514 only 22,000 of the indigenous population remained, and after
1542 they were considered extinct.
The tribute system, instituted by [Columbus] sometime in 1495, was a
simple and brutal way of fulfilling the Spanish lust for gold while
acknowledging the Spanish distaste for labor. Every Taino over the
age of fourteen had to supply the rulers with a hawk's bell of gold
every three months (or, in gold-deficient areas, twenty-five pounds
of spun cotton; those who did were given a token to wear around
their necks as proof that they had made their payment; those did
not were . "punished" - by having their hands cut off . and [being]
left to bleed to death.
More
than 10,000 people were killed this way during Columbus' time as
governor. On countless occasions, these civilized invaders engaged
in torture, rape, and massacres. The Spaniards
.made bets as to who would slit a man in two, or cut off his head at
one blow; or they opened up his bowels. They tore the babes from
their mother's breast by their feet and dashed their heads against
the rocks . . . They spitted the bodies of other babes, together
with their mothers and all who were before them, on their swords.
On
another occasion:
A Spaniard . . . suddenly drew his sword. Then the whole hundred
drew theirs and began to rip open the bellies, to cut and kill -
men, women, children and old folk, all of whom were seated off guard
and frightened . . . And within two credos, not a man of them there
remains alive. The Spaniards enter the large house nearby, for this
was happening at its door, and in the same way, with cuts and stabs,
began to kill as many as were found there, so that a stream of blood
was running, as if a number of cows had perished.
This pattern
of one-way, unprovoked, inexcusable cruelty and viciousness occurred
in countless interactions between civilized and indigenous people
through history.
This
phenomena is well-documented in excellent books including Ward Churchill's
A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas,
1492 to the Present, Kirkpatrick Sale's The Conquest of Paradise:
Christopher Columbus and the Columbian Legacy, and Dee Brown's
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American
West. Farley Mowat's books, especially Walking on the Land,
The Deer People, and The Desperate People document
this as well with an emphasis on the northern and arctic regions
of North America. There is also good information in Howard Zinn's
A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present and
Voices of a People's History of the United States. Eduardo
Galeando's incredible Memory of Fire trilogy covers this
topic as well, with an emphasis on Latin America (this epic trilogy
as reviews numerous related injustices and revolts). Jack D. Forbes'
book Columbus and Other Cannibals:
The Wétiko Disease
of Exploitation, Imperialism and Terrorism is highly recommended. You can also find information in Jared Diamond's
Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, although
I often disagree with the author's premises and approach.
The
same kind of attacks civilized people committed against indigenous
peoples were also consistently perpetrated against non-human animal
and plant species, who were wiped out (often deliberately) even
when civilized people didn't need them for food; simply as blood-sport.
For futher readings on this, check out great books like Farley Mowat's
extensive and crushing Sea of Slaughter, or Clive Ponting's
A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse
of Great Civilizations (which also examines precivilized history
and European colonialism).
With
this history of atrocity in mind, we should (if we haven't already)
cease using the propaganda definitions of civilized as "good" and
uncivilized as "bad" and seek a more accurate and useful definition.
Anthropologists and other thinkers have come up with a number of
somewhat less biased definitions of civilization.
Nineteenth
century English anthropologist E.B. Tylor defined civilization as
life in cities that is organized by government and facilitated by
scribes (which means the use of writing). In these societies, he
noted, there is a resource "surplus", which can be traded or taken
(though war or exploitation) which allows for specialization in
the cities.
The wonderful contemporary writer and activist Derrick Jensen, having
recognized the serious flaws in the popular, dictionary definition
of civilization, writes:
"I would define a civilization much more precisely, and I believe
more usefully, as a culture-that is, a complex of stories, institutions,
and artifacts-that both leads to and emerges from the growth of
cities (civilization, see civil: from civis, meaning
citizen, from latin civitatis, meaning state or city), with cities
being defined-so as to distinguish them from camps, villages, and
so on-as people living more or less permanently in one place in
densities high enough to require the routine importation of food
and other necessities of life."
Jensen also
observes that because cities need to import these necessities of
life and to grow, they must also create systems for the perpetual
centralization of resources, yielding "an increasing region of unsustainability
surrounded by an increasingly exploited countryside."
Contemporary
anthropologist John H. Bodley writes: "The principle function
of civilization is to organize overlapping social networks of ideological,
political, economic, and military power that differentially benefit
privileged households." In other words, in civilization institutions
like churches, corporations and militaries exist and are used to
funnel resources and power to the rulers and the elite.
The twentieth century historian and sociologist Lewis Mumford wrote
one of my favourite and most cutting and succinct definitions of
civilization. He uses the term civilization
.to denote
the group of institutions that first took form under kingship. Its
chief features, constant in varying proportions throughout history,
are the centralization of political power, the separation of classes,
the lifetime division of labor, the mechanization of production,
the magnification of military power, the economic exploitation of
the weak, and the universal introduction of slavery and forced labor
for both industrial and military purposes.
Taking various anthropological and historical definitions into account,
we can come up with some common properties of civilizations (as
opposed to indigenous groups).
Anthropologist
Stanley Diamond recognized the common thread in all of these attributes
when he wrote; "Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression
at home."
This common
thread is control. Civilization is a culture of control. In civilizations,
a small group of people controls a large group of people through
the institutions of civilization. If they are beyond the frontier
of that civilization, then that control will come in the form of
armies and missionaries (be they religious or technical specialists).
If the people to be controlled are inside of the cities, inside
of civilization, then the control may come through domestic militaries
(i.e., police). However, it is likely cheaper and less overtly violent
to condition of certain types of behaviour through religion, schools
or media, and related means, than through the use of outright force
(which requires a substantial investment in weapons, surveillance
and labour).
That works very effectively in combination
with economic and agricultural control. If you control the supply
of food and other essentials of life, people have to do what you
say or they die. People inside of cities inherently depend on food
systems controlled by the rulers to survive, since the (commonly
accepted) definition of a city is that the population dense enough
to requite the importation of food.
For a higher
degree of control, rulers have combined control of food and agriculture
with conditioning that reinforces their supremacy. In the dominant,
capitalist society, the rich control the supply of food and essentials,
and the content of the media and the schools. The schools and workplaces
act as a selection process: those who demonstrate their ability
to cooperate with those in power by behaving properly and doing
what they're told at work and school have access to higher paying
jobs involving less labour. Those who cannot or will not do what
they're told are excluded from easy access to food and essentials
(by having access only to menial jobs), and must work very hard
to survive, or become poor and/or homeless. People higher on this
hierarchy are mostly spared the economic and physical violence imposed
on those lower on the hierarchy. A highly rationalized system of
exploitation like this helps to increase the efficiency of the system
by reducing the chance of resistance or outright rebellion of the
populace.
The media's
propaganda systems have most people convinced that this system is
somehow "natural" or "necessary" - but of course, it is both completely
artificial and a direct result of the actions of those in power
(and the inactions of those who believe that they benefit from it,
or are prevented from acting through violence or the threat of violence).
In contradiction to the idea that the
dominant culture's way of living is "natural", human beings lived
as small, ecological, participatory, equitable groups for more than
99% of human history. There are a number of excellent books and
articles comparing indigenous societies to civilization:
Chellis Glendinning's My name is Chellis
and I'm in recovery from western civilization is an amazing
and readable book, and it's one of my favourites. You can also read
an excerpt of the chapter "A Lesson in Earth Civics" online. See
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/civics.html.
She has also written several related books, including When Technology
Wounds: The Human Consequences of Progress.
Marshall
Sahlin's Stone Age Economics is a detailed classic in that
same vein. You can read his essay "The Original Affluent Society"
online at numerous places, including: http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm.
Anthropologist
Stanley Diamond's book In Search of the Primitive: A Critique
of Civilization is another great classic.
Richard Heinberg's essay "The Primitivist
Critique of Civilization" is also highly readable, and available
online in many places including http://www.eco-action.org/dt/critique.html.
There are also some good general websites
with related writings, excerpts and articles. Check out Radical
Anthropology at http://www.radicalanthropology.com/writings.htm,
Primitivism.com, Dead Trees EF! Online Publishing (http://eco-action.org/dt/index.html),
and the essays at Earth Crash Earth Spirit (http://eces.org/).
What these sources show is there were
healthy, equitable and ecological communities in the past, and that
they were the norm for countless generations. It is civilization
that is monstrous and aberrant.
Living inside
of the controlling environment of civilization is an inherently
traumatic experience, although the degree of trauma varies with
personal circumstance and the amounts of privilege different people
have in society. Derrick Jensen makes this point very well in his
incredible book A Language Older than Words, and Chellis
Glendinning covers it as well in My name is Chellis.
The inherent
ecological unsustainability of civilization is another important
point. That issue will be expanded on in writings here, in particular
in the writings on the city and industry.
Related:
See Ran Prieur's Critique
of Civilization FAQ for related information and critiques.
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