Civilizations and Civilization
HUBERT: C’est un cas bien particulier qui m’amene.
MORCOL: Je ne connais que des cas particuliers, Monsieur.
—R. QUENEAU, Le Vol d’Icare(1968), p.14
“Phew!” muttered Bob under his breath, and I wrinkled my nose, too. The smell that assailed us defied description. But then the thought occurred to me that some of our own civilized odors are not too delicate either. What about the smells that hover over some of our industrial cities—the smogs, factory stenches, unburned gas exhausts from a million noisy autos, garbage smells drifting out of back alleys? I smiled. Probably an Aleut would wrinkle uphisnose at them. I guess it all depends on what you’re used to.
—TEDBANKII, Birthplace of the Winds
(New York,1956), p.73
“Has it ever struck you,” he said, “that civilization’s damned dangerous?”
—AGATHACHRISTIE, “The Shadow on the Glass,” The Mysterious Mr. Quin
In a dim, grim square in downtown Providence, a few blocks from where I was writing these lines, workmen were installing an ice rink between embarrassingly empty office blocks. The city fathers hoped, I suppose, to freeze-frame a splash of life, color, poise, and charm. When they finished it, the ice rink inspired fun but stayed cold. Meanwhile, other optimists were laying down vivid lawns in Lapland.
Neither effort, some readers may think, says or does much for civilization.For even the world’s best ice-dancing is tawdry: glitz and lutz to Muzak. Lawns are platforms for the mentally numb rites of suburban England in summer: small talk and silly games. What wilderness wants to be coated with this bourgeois shellac?
Yet we should applaud the heroism of the ice rink in the concrete jungle, and the lawn in the ice. They represent the terrible paradox of construction and destruction at the start of the civilized tradition: the urge to warp unyielding environments in improbable ways; the itch and risk to improve on nature. The results of civilization are equivocal: sometimes the environment is gloriously transformed; sometimes it is mocked or wrecked. Usually, the effect is between these extremes, along the range of achievements reviewed by Sophocles in a passage which appears at the head of this book: wearing the earth, cleaving the waves, controlling beasts, creating towns with “feelings,” and building refuge from weather.
Like most terms calculated to evoke approval, such as “democracy,” “equality,”“freedom,” and “peace,” the word “civilization” has been much abused. Of course it denotes a type of society.1The difficulties begin to arise when we ask, “What type?” or demand a description or characterization, or inquire into awkward distinctions—between, say, “civilization” and “culture,” or “civilized” and “uncivilized.” In the course of many unsatisfactory traditional attempts to capture a term for it, the civilizing ingredient—the magic which transmutes a mere society into a civilization—has been seen as a process, a system, a state of being, a psychic or genetic disposition, or a mechanism of social change. “Civilization” has meant so many different things to different people that it will be hard to retrieve it from abuse and restore useful meaning to it.2It may be helpful to set out the ways in which the term is usually understood and the way in which I propose to use it.
Loosely used, “a civilization” means an area, group, or period distinguished, in the mind of the person using the term, by striking continuities in ways of life and thought and feeling. So we can speak of “Western civilization” or the civilizations of China or Islam, or of “Jewish civilization” or “classical civilization” or “the civilization of the Renaissance,” and readers or listeners will know roughly what we mean. This usage is justified by convenience and legitimated by wide acceptance; but it is imprecise and insubstantial, riven with subjective judgments. The words “society” and “culture” would serve the same purpose equally well. The perceived continuities will vary from observer to observer; some observers will deny them altogether, or perceive others which cut across the proposed categories.
One way of getting round this problem is to insist that there are particular continuities which distinguish civilizations, such as a common religion or ideology or sense of belonging to a “world order”; or a common writing system or mutually intelligible languages; or shared peculiarities of technology, agronomy,or food; or consistency of taste in art; or some combination of such features. All such criteria, however, are arbitrary—as I hope we shall see—and there seems no good reason why some societies should qualify as civilizations because of them, whereas other features of culture, such as dance or prophetic techniques or sleeping habits or sexual practices, are not necessarily admitted as civilizing.
At a further level, the word “civilization” denotes a process of collective self-differentiation from a world characterized, implicitly or explicitly, as “ barbaric” or “savage” or “primitive.” By extension, societies judged to have achieved such self-differentiation are called “civilized.” This usage is obviously unsatisfactory—because barbarism, savagery, and primitivism are also nebulous terms, partisan and value-charged—but it is easy to understand how it arose: it began in eighteenth-century Europe, where politesse and manners, sensibility and taste, rationality and refinement were values espoused by an elite anxious to repudiate the “baser,” “coarser,” “grosser” nature of men. Progress was identified with the renunciation of nature. Reversion to the wild was derogation. Men might be the sucklings of wolves, but their destiny was to build Rome. Savages might be “noble” and set examples of heroic valor and moral superiority; but once rescued from the wild, they were expected to renounce it forever.3The so-called Wild Child of Aveyron was a boy abandoned in infancy in the high forests of the Tarn, who survived by his own wits for years until he was captured in 1798 and subjected to an experiment in civilization, which his custodians were never able to complete to their satisfaction. Perhaps the most poignant moments in his pathetic life, described by his tutor, were of reminiscence of his solitude:
At the end of his dinner, even when he is no longer thirsty, he is always seen with the air of an epicure who holds his glass for some exquisite liquor, to fill his glass with pure water, take it by sips and swallow it drop by drop. But what adds much interest to this scene is the place where it occurs. It is near the window, with his eyes turned towards the country, that our drinker stands, as if in this moment of happiness this child of nature tries to unite the only two good things which have survived the loss of his liberty—a drink of limpid water and the sight of sun and country.4
Finally, “civilization” is commonly used to denote a supposed stage or phase which the histories of societies commonly go through or which they achieve at their climax. I find this usage repugnant a fortiori , because it impliesa pattern of development, whereas I disbelieve in patterns and am skeptical about development. Societies change all the time but in different ways. They do not develop, evolve, or progress, though in some measurable respects they may get better or worse, according to different criteria, at different times. They conform to no model, work towards no telos. History does not repeat itself and societies do not replicate each other, though they may evince similarities which make it useful to classify them together. The pages which follow are full of examples of how theories of social development tend to be written a parti pris , in order to legitimate some solutions while outlawing others. Whenever “ civilization” appears as a phase in the context of such a theory, it comes loaded with value: it may be a culmination or a crisis; it may be gleaming or gloomy; it may denote progress or decadence. But it is always an item in an agenda, distorted by a program of praise or blame.
A young man, down on his luck as he hovered between the center and edge of the French empire around the turn of the eighteenth century, seems to me to have had a revealing inspiration. His background was noble and tragic; his habits were simultaneously evasive and assertive. His family had sold their birthright for cash, but he went on calling himself “Baron de Lahontan.” In 1702 , he was in Paris: the place where—and not long before the time when—the word “civilization” was first coined in its modern form.5
The penniless ex-aristocrat was dreaming of his beloved Canada, where he had been fortune-hunting in adolescence and had come to admire the natural nobility of the people his countrymen called “savages” (see page 134 ). How, he wondered, would a Huron, transported from that wilderness, react to all the grandeur of this great city? From a world uncluttered by civilization, with a mind unprejudiced by its values, Lahontan’s Huron admired the stones of Paris. But it did not occur to him that they could have been laid by people. He assumed they were natural rock formations, fitted by chance to be human dwellings. His delusion seems to have been a literary topos. When a “savage” from St. Kilda saw Glasgow in the early eighteenth century, “he remarked that the pillars and arches of the church were the most beautiful caves he had ever seen.”6The surprise of the “savage” measures the difference between an environment modeled by people and one molded by nature. It leaps the gap between the civilized condition, in which the adaptations are forced on nature, and a different type of society, in which they evolve in man.
These stories go to the heart of the problem of what a civilization is. I propose-to define it as a type of relationship: a relationship to the natural environment,7recrafted, by the civilizing impulse, to meet human demands. By “a civilization” I mean a society in such a relationship. I do not necessarily mean that all civilizations are in any sense good, though I happen to like some of them, or bad, though I am aware of their dangers. One lesson of this book is that civilizations commonly overexploit their environments, often to the point of selfdestruction.For some purposes—including, in some environments, survival itself—civilization is a risky and even irrational strategy.
Some societies make do with the environment nature provides. They live off the products and inhabit the spaces nature gives them—or sometimes they build dwellings in close imitation of those spaces, with materials which nature supplies. In many cases they live by moving with the seasons. In others they set up home by making small modifications: hollowing out, for instance, or superficially decorating caves; penning or herding the animals they need; or grouping for their own convenience the plants they want to cultivate. Others risk interventions in the environment which are intended only to conserve it or provide for their own survival, without any program for changing it permanently. All of them take at least one big step towards modifying it: controlling fire to cook food, keep cold at bay, and destroy or regenerate plants.8I call these cultures “civilized” only according to the degree to which they attempt to refashion their natural environment.
For the standard of civilization is set by other societies, bent on the defiance of nature: hazard-courting societies; human communities who transform the world for their own ends. They recarve its landscapes or smother them with new environments which they have built themselves; they struggle to impose their own kind of order on the world around them. Sometimes, they try to secede from nature altogether—to pretend that people are not part of the ecosystem and that the human realm does not overlap with the animal kingdom. They try to “denature” humanity: to fillet the savage out of themselves, to domesticate the wild man within by elaborate clothes and manners.
You can see the scars of their struggles in the deep, sharp lines on which civilizations have erected their buildings, laid out their settlements, formalized their gardens, and arranged their fields. A passion for regular geometry—overlaid on nature’s bristles and bumps—runs through their history. At its most uncompromising, civilization wants to perfect nature in line with the prophet’s vision of the end of time, when every valley shall be exalted, the hills made low, and the rough places plain: a world regulated with the spirit level and the measuring rod, where the shapes conform to a pattern in a geometer’s mind.
I assume for purposes of this book that there is no such thing as exclusively human history. History is a “humane” discipline: it is too far steeped in tears and blood and affectivity and hatred ever to be anything else. If it were a “science”—in the old-fashioned sense of the word, a field of study governed by laws, in which effects were predictable—I should find it uninviting. The study of mankind is man and, to historians, nothing human is foreign. But to understandman properly, you have to see him in the context of the rest of nature. We cannot get out of the ecosystem in which we are linked, the “chain of being” which binds us to all the other biota. Our species belongs in the great animal continuum. The environments we fashion for ourselves are gouged or cobbled out of what nature has given us.
All history is, therefore, in a sense, historical ecology. This does not mean that it has to be materialist, because many of our interactions with the environment start in our minds. Like the geometry of civilizations, they are imagined or excogitated before they happen outwardly. All the traditional ingredients in the checklist of civilization are underlaid by ideas: cities by ideals of order, for instance, agriculture by visions of abundance, laws by hopes of utopia, writing by a symbolic imagination.
Yet the glutinous natural environment with which societies are surrounded does mean that the history of civilization cannot be written wholly in terms of ideas or of works of the imagination. It is not and cannot be a subject only of art history or of intellectual history. It belongs in the soil, seeds, and stomachs. It has to encompass episodes in the history of technology, because, at his most effective, man meets nature at the edges of his tools. It has to be about food, because, at their most dependent and their most destructive, people encounter the environment when they eat and drink it. (I have been criticized by fellow historians for writing economic history largely in terms of food—but to most people, for most of the time, nothing matters more.) It has to cover the terrain of both German words for it: Kultur and Zivilisation .9Study of civilization has to be informed by readings in lots of different disciplines, especially archaeology, anthropology, geography, and art history. It has to travel beyond the places in which historians usually confine it. In the pages which follow, readers kind enough to persevere will find material on the buildings of the Battamaliba rather than the Bauhaus; there is more on the Aztecs than Athens, more on the Khmer than the Quattrocento. Civilization-history has to be total history: winnowed and threshed and swept out of remote corners of the past, not just picked out of the archives and libraries like the living worm. This makes it perhaps impossible to write, but surely irresistible to attempt.