Reaching Between Civilizations—and Reaching for the Unity of Civilization

The problem of defining “a civilization”—which has defeated so many efforts-—is straightforward compared with that of defining “civilization.” Yet it might be held that the former depends on the latter: you can only identify a particular civilization as such once you have established how to recognize “ civilization” in general. The first is a phenomenon easily verifiable by empirical scrutiny. There are civilizations—lots of them—even if we have difficulty in agreeing in every case whether a given society deserves to be classed as one. In what seems a rather silly game, some scholars have tried to enumerate them: Toynbee thought there were twenty-one, all told.⁵⁴Carroll Quigley counted “two dozen”⁵⁵ ; for Samuel Huntington the world today is covered by “seven or eight” or maybe nine.⁵⁶The term “civilization,” without particularity, denotes a universal concept, of which the reality is open to doubt; or else it signifies what I called above “the civilizing ingredient”—the feature all the civilizations properly so called have in common.

All the societies I call civilizations do indeed have something in common: their program for the systematic refashioning of nature. That does not mean that there are any limits to their possible diversity. By calling this book Civilizations , in the plural, I repudiate the claim that civilization is indivisible.

This claim is usually put forward in two contexts: first, when “civilization” is used as a name for the totality of human societies, rather than a property or character which some or all of them have in common; and, second, when it is used to mean a state towards which all societies tend, by way of progress. There is no convincing evidence that all societies have any common tendency, except to be social. Progress towards any historical climax—whether it is the classless society or the Age of the Holy Spirit or the Thousand-Year Reich or liberal democracy or some other “end of history”—is illusory. So there seems little point in pursuing this claim, either to hound it or to bring it home. In this book, the history of civilizations is treated as a field of comparative study, riven with discontinuities. At intervals, I try to embody a sense of discontinuity in the reader’s experience of the work by a startling or abrupt change of scene.

Still, readers may be nagged by the doubt that civilizations could fuse and justify believers in their ultimate unity. As well as the story of their encounters with nature, another story—that of civilizations’ communications with each other—gradually builds up in the course of this book and ends by dominating it. Mutual assimilation is part—an increasing part—of that story. World history is about peoples’ relationships with each other. Its most representative episodes, environment by environment, reflect great cross-cultural themes: migrations, trade, exchanges of influence, pilgrimages, missions, war, empire-building, wide-sweeping social movements, and transfers of technologies, biota, and ideas. Some of the environments considered in this book—deserts, grasslands, and oceans—figure not so much as settings for civilizations but rather partly or entirely as highways between them.

This theme demands inclusion because civilizations nourish each other. Perhaps because it takes a certain arrogance to confront nature, civilizations have usually been contemptuous of most of their neighbors. In ancient Greece and ancient China, the rest of the world was considered to be inhabited by barbarians of little worth. In ancient Egypt, inhabitants of other lands were regarded as less than fully human. This is, I think, more than an instance of the apparently universal reluctance of people in societies to conceive outsiders in the same terms as themselves: it is usually said that most human languages have no term for “human being” except that used to denote speakers of the language concerned,⁵⁷but it would be more accurate to say that the terms by which groups denote themselves are inelastic. It does not mean that outsiders cannot be denoted by respectful or even reverential names. Real contempt for the other is a civilized vice rather than a universal trait.

The self-differentiation of the civilized is of a peculiar kind, precisely because it is selective. People who belong to a civilization share a sense that their achievements set them apart from other peoples. Even when locked in mutual hostility—like ancient Rome and Persia, or medieval Christendom and Islam—civilizations tend to develop relationships which are mutually acknowledging and sometimes mutually sustaining. They are enemies visible to each other in a kind of mirror. Even when, as in these cases, civilizations have neighbors whose kinship they sense, they tend to look farther—sometimes to distant parts of the world—in the hope of finding other civilizations, rather as beings on other planets are supposed in some works of popular science fiction to be searching the universe for intelligent life-forms like their own. Though there are occasional exceptions (see pages 230–71), it seems to be hard for any civilizations to survive at a high level of material achievement except in contact with others, unless they are very big.

In partial consequence, the story of civilizations includes the story of how they established mutual contact. Now, all those civilizations that have survived to our own day are in close touch. Indeed, it is often said that they are all blending into a single global civilization. The question of whether a global civilization is possible is considered towards the end of the book; but if there were such a prospect, it would merely add one more civilization to the plurality, not fuse them in an all-encompassing unity.