In the existing tradition, some of the most attractive and impactful definitions of civilization are the most idiosyncratic. For Oscar Wilde, civilization was “what the middle class hates”; for Alfred North Whitehead, “a society exhibiting the qualities of Truth, beauty, adventure, Art, Peace.”58Ortega y Gasset defined it as “postponing force to the last resort.”59For R. G. Collingwood, one of the few professors of metaphysics who deserved the name in the twentieth century, it was not even a type of society, but an attitude which preceded it: a mental process towards ideal social relationships of “civility.” In practice, this meant becoming progressively less violent, more scientific, and more welcoming to outsiders. In a wartime essay, chiefly designed to demonstrate that Germany was uncivilized, he reluctantly allowed, by extension, that the word could be applied to societies according to the degree to which they had undergone the process.60Toynbee, in what may have been an unguarded moment, gave it the same sort of quality: “progress towards sainthood.”61In an obviously self-interested plea on behalf of a “leisure class,” Clive Bell called it “reason, sweetened by a sense of values, . . . a sense of values, hardened and pointed by Reason.”62Critics of civilization often represent part of the truth of it when they condemn it as a kind of tyranny which overlays natural goodness with the tortures of conformity. Oneliners of this sort may be uplifting or stimulating, and they certainly reveal the prejudices of their formulators, but they do not help isolate a subject which can be studied.
“Process,” however, is a potentially useful concept. Those who think the meaning of a word arises from its etymology will say that, properly speaking, civilization has to be a process, because all words derived from French in similar forms—all “-izations”—denote processes.63Yet “progress” taints every “process” so far proposed in this context. Freud’s effort was characteristically memorable and disturbing. His inclination was to see civilization as an accumulation of cultural sediment—a collective effect of individual sublimations and repressions. He called it “a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind.”64 He wanted to free man from the corrosive discontent of civilization: guilt-feeling. The unhappy issue of his initiative has been the “feelgood society,” the joint objective of politics and psychotherapy in the modern West. It is obviously useless as a starting point for writing the history of civilizations—but I hate it anyway. It is a recipe for moral inertia. We need to feel bad about ourselves if we are going to make ourselves better.
Even more pernicious is progress as some sociobiologists represent it: the achievement of people made superior by a peculiarly rapid evolution of the brain—the attainment of “a certain intellectual and educational level . . . an ongoing, living, evolving emanation of the brain,” as one of them puts it.65This can be disguised as a plea to privilege particular forms of representation, such as writing or statehood, as defining characteristics of civilization—“human symbolism writ on a high abstractive level of meaning,” in the same writer’s jargon. But even the most imprecise language cannot blur what is really at stake. “Not only,” says our author, “do the civilizations of history represent intelligence as power, but intelligence in its multifaceted human face pouring itself into a number of deeply-rooted and ancient human symbolic valences or forms.”66Thinking so slovenly that it slops metaphors by the bucketful is unlikely to command discerning respect; but it fools some people. It amounts to a justification of tyranny when the pace of evolution is forced and societies without the requisite “symbolism”—nonliterate societies, for instance, or those not organized as states—are derogated to a subcategory of the unintelligent and underevolved.
Believers in progress tend to place civilization towards the end of it. “ Civilization,” according to another of Toynbee’s sayings, is always “ultimate.”67It is usually treated as a state of being which societies attain in the course of growth out of primitivism, a phase in an inevitable pattern, procured by the natural inflation of the human mind, or by technological accretion; or else social evolution is the motor force, determined in turn by economics and the means of production, or by demographics and the demands of consumption. One sequence reads: hunting, herding, agriculture, civilization. Another reads: tribes, totemic societies, “complex” societies; another leads through tribal headships and chieftaincies to states, another through superstition and magic to religion;another starts with camps and ascends through hamlets, villages, cities. None of these sequences is genuinely universal, though some of them may describe some phases of the histories of some societies. Yet the temptation to depict the past as progressive is astonishingly strong. Lewis Mumford, who had a jaundiced view of civilization, still located it inside a progressive framework, where “ dispersed villages” evolved into the state and the city, immemorial custom into written law, “village rituals” into drama, and magical practices into religion “built upon cosmic myths that open up vast perspectives of time, space and power.”68
The language of evolution bears a heavy responsibility for misleading people into thinking that civilization is a superior way of organizing life, simply because it happens late in history. Societies do not evolve: they just change. If “the survival of the fittest” is a valid criterion, noncivilizations, which have endured better in some conditions than civilized rivals (see, for example, below, pages 53 – 55, 76 ), would sometimes have to be reckoned as more highly evolved.
Once a stretch of line has been pegged out and marked as civilization’s own, observers start noticing or imagining ways in which it is different from the rest. Almost every theorist has proposed checklists of criteria which a society has to meet in order to qualify as a civilization. All these lists are useless.
All the characteristics traditionally used to identify civilizations raise problems-which are hard, perhaps impossible, to solve. It has often been said, for instance, that nomadic societies cannot be civilized; “civilization began when agriculture and a definite form of organized village life became established.”69Yet the Scythians, and their heirs on the Asian steppelands, created dazzling and enduring works of art, built impressive permanent structures—at first for tombs, later for administrative and even commercial purposes—and created political and economic systems on a scale far greater, in the Mongols’ case, than those of any of their neighbors whose traditions of life were more settled (see pages 110–13).
Again, cities have frequently been thought of as essential to civilized life; but no one has ever established a satisfactory way of distinguishing a city from other ways of organizing space to live in. Some of the impressive sites we shall visit in the course of this book—such as Great Zimbabwe or Uxmal—have been denied the status of cities by some commentators, although they were heavily populated and formidably built. In medieval Mexico or Java and Copper Age Southeastern Europe there were peoples who preferred to live in relatively small communities and dwellings built of modest materials; but this did not stop them from compiling fabulous wealth, creating wonderful art, keeping—in mostcases—written records (or something very like them), and, in Java, building on a monumental scale (see pages 238, 320, 334 ).
Some strivers for a definition have insisted that civic communities have to be defined economically—usually by preference for trade or industry over the production of food. This will not do, because, in most societies for most of history, communities recognizable as cities have been part of a wider countryside and most of their populations have been absolutely dependent on agriculture. To disqualify strictly agrarian societies from civilization is to invalidate much of the work that has been done on the subject. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is the kind of radical revision that demands careful justification. No such justification has so far been proposed. Economics, in any case, do not make a city: only the state of mind of the citizens can do that. In Santillana del Mar there are cattle grids in the streets, but civic pride frowns from every crested stone facade. Every real-life “Gopher Prairie” in the American Midwest in the early twentieth century had claques of “boosters” to testify to the urbanity of their wretched little settlements. Every metropolis on an erstwhile frontier existed in the imaginations of its founders—and sometimes in the laughably grandiose plans they scratched on any materials to hand—before it became big or viable or economically specialized. To suppose that a city has to be “ postagrarian” is worse than a mistake, it is a sin: the sin of pride in the sort of cities we have nowadays in the industrialized world, the crime of insisting that our own standards are universal.
Writing is an ingredient often demanded by definers of civilization; but many societies of glorious achievement have transmitted memories or recorded data in other ways, including knotted strings and notched sticks, reed maps, textiles, and gestures. The distinction between writing and other forms of symbolic expression is more easily uttered than justified in detail.70Elements of two works which, after the Bible, have had the greatest influence on Western literature, the Iliad and the Odyssey , were probably composed without writing and—like much ancient wisdom in all societies—transmitted by memory and word of mouth. The epics of almost every literary tradition preserve echoes from an age of oral tradition. Chinese novels, until well into the present century, were divided into chapters by the storytellers’ traditional recapitulations and included end-of-chapter “teases” to induce another copper for the pot. In the pages which follow, many societies are seen to have confided what was memorable, and therefore of lasting value, to oral transmission, and to have devised writing systems in order to record rubbish: fiscal ephemera, merchants’ memoranda.
Some of the other criteria—division of labor, economically structured class systems, states or statelike institutions, organs for making and enforcing laws—are so obviously plucked ‡ parti pris from the social environments of the men who have proposed them as to be unworthy of consideration. Most societies have them, and can rejoice or repine in mixed measures. But there is nothingparticularly civilized about any of them.71Other supposed desiderata are too vague to be useful, or occur too selectively, or depend on incomplete prior arguments about how societies in general “evolve” or “develop.” They are usually presented in a ragbag represented as a systematic analysis. The editor of the 1978 Wolfson Lectures on The Origins of Civilization speculated on the possible relevance of irrigation, technology, population pressures, “evolving social structures,” “property concepts,” ideology, and trade.72In the end, city life, religion, and literacy were selected as the only criteria; in consequence, the lectures revealed something about the origins of city life, religion, and literacy, but those of civilization were left untouched.
In proposing to treat civilization as a relationship between man and nature, I am not merely erecting, in place of those I have discarded, another set of hurdles—another list of criteria which societies have to meet before they can be admitted to the ranks of the civilized. I am, rather, extending a scale along which societies place themselves according to the degree to which they modify their natural environments. Some of the civilizations chosen as examples in the rest of the book are familiar to readers of comparative studies of civilizations. This should not be taken as an endorsement of the criteria: it is a purely practical device to enable readers to relate the more unfamiliar, recherche, or surprising examples to what they already know. It is also intended as a way of showing that many societies excluded from traditional lists of civilizations actually fulfill some of the conventional criteria or possess characteristics generally thought to define, or at least to mark, civilization.
Back to Nature: Array by Environment
There are four principal reasons for classifying civilizations according to environment.
First, it represents a change of perspective by comparison with the usual angles of approach. Even if the experiment fails, it is worth making, because every new vantage point extends vision. History is glimpsed between leaves: the more you shift your viewpoint, the more is revealed.
Second, environment—although riven by boundaries which are matters of subjective judgment—is real and objective: rain and sand, heat and cold, forest and ice can be seen or felt and their intensity measured, whereas, if one classifies civilizations according, say, to their degree of “development,” the result will almost certainly be a ranking determined by the beholders’ sympathies. The criteria will be scraped off the surface of a mirror. The phases or stages, templates, and types usually used to split civilizations into manageable groups are all constructed by students, whereas environment is imposed by nature.
Third, the usage I advocate is justified by tradition. The term “civilization”was coined in eighteenth-century Europe in the course of men’s attempts to distance themselves from the rest of nature. In part, their project was of selfdomestication: to fillet out the savagery within by means of social rituals, manners, and rules of “polite” conduct. At a further level, the same project reached out to reform nonhuman nature: to tame animals, or scientifically breed beautiful or exploitable beasts and plants, or landscape parks and gardens, “improve” land, and generally turn the physical environment into a setting fit for the activities of politesse . The epithet “polite” and its cognates in most European languages suggest both polish and politeia . Landscapes too wild to be recrafted were explored, surveyed, measured, and sometimes reimagined by painters of the picturesque, who rearranged their elements and soothed their irregularities. A Dutch writer of 1797 actually defined civilization as the reformation of nature.73One of the virtues of Toynbee’s writings on civilization was that they kept in touch with this tradition. In 1919 , long before he became an ecological prophet and spokesman for the defense of the “biosphere,” Toynbee formulated a definition of civilization as a stage “in a process in which human individuals are molded less and less by their environment . . . and adapt their environment more and more to their own will. And one can discern, I think, a point at which, rather suddenly, the human will take the place of the mechanical laws of the environment as the governing factor in the relationship.”74Fortunately, he forgot or abandoned this definition, for there is no such threshold or turning point: processes by which environments are adapted are continuous and cumulative. Nevertheless, Toynbee was a pioneer of historical ecology, who never left the environment out of his descriptions of civilizations; and his doctrine of “challenge and response”—according to which challenging environments inspire civilizing responses—is a powerful and useful characterization of one of the ways in which civilization is measurable.
Finally, the very act of classifying civilizations environmentally reveals truths: that no linear or progressive story unites their histories; that they are neither determined nor uninfluenced by environment; that no habitable environment is utterly uncivilizable; that environmental diversity helps; that civilizations start in specific environments but can sometimes conquer, colonize, or cross others; and that peoples of diverse provenance have excelled as civilizers in different conditions. No part of the world is uniquely privileged, no people uniquely fitted for civilization.
In the entire animal kingdom, mankind is the only species that can survive all over the planet, except for the parasites that colonize our own bodies and accompany us wherever we go. In ecologists’ language, the human species has broad “tolerance limits.”75By land and sea, over the bleakest edges of the ice caps, and at very high altitudes, there is almost no environment on earth where people have been unable to establish societies. It used to be thought that civilization could only happen in particular kinds of environment: not too harsh,like ice lands and deserts, because people would never be free to acquire wealth or leisure; not too easy, like teeming or fertile forests, because people would not need to work hard or cooperate to organize distribution of food. Indeed, the record so far of human achievement does show that some environments can be adapted to civilized life more easily than others. Where exploitable resources are densely concentrated, around viable means of communication, civilizations tend to start earlier and last longer than elsewhere. Yet people’s capacity to lead civilized lives in unpromising places remains dazzling. Today some of the most expensive real estate in the world is in desert wastes. Visionaries are talking about colonies on the seabed and cities in space. Wherever humans can survive, civilization can happen. The visitor to small islands—or the reader who visits them vicariously in the pages which follow—will see some startling cases of civilizations founded in poor, vulnerable, and marginal or isolated spots. In highlands, examples are displayed of breathtaking endeavors on poor soils or in rarefied atmospheres. Rain forests—usually thought of as hostile environments—are seen to have enclosed some of the most spectacular, monumental, and arduous built-up areas ever created.
Nor, on close examination, do some of the supposedly favorable environments turn out to be as conducive as is commonly thought. The fertile river valleys, which are conventionally admired as the “cradles” of civilization, emerge as strenuous, demanding, and intractable regions, imposing a terrible challenge and evoking heroic response. One might think of a temperate seaboard as the perfect place from which to start if one wanted to establish a civilization; yet in practice such settings have exacted long and laborious efforts, often checked by vulnerability to weather, natural disaster, and human attack. The apparent superiority of particular European and North American environments, which so fascinated and rewarded Ellsworth Huntington, arises purely from the fact that the civilizations current in those regions have not yet been extinguished. As they were late starters, this is not surprising; nor is it safe to suppose that they will last longer than civilizations now vanished from environments despised as too hot or too wet. Is late survival a better indicator of a propitious environment than an early start?
Some readers may feel that I protest too much, but this is a finding on which I want to leave no room for doubt or misunderstanding. Ellsworth Huntington, that profoundly Yankee Yalie, decided in the 1940 s that “innate inferiority” could be inferred “when people of a given type consistently fail to take advantage of opportunities and inventions which are freely open to them.” The evidence he cited was Aboriginal Australians’ distaste for hunting with guns,Bushmen’s reluctance to ride horses, and the cultural conservatism of Ecuadorean Indians.76To another scrutineer, these might equally well appear as cases of sage discrimination.
The professor in question was in most respects an enlightened man, remarkably critical of his own prejudices, who doubted whether “backwardness in civilization necessarily means hereditary lack of mental ability”; but he illustrated a common defect of would-be definers of civilization: he liked his own land and time too well to judge the rest of the world by any other standard. Like Britannicus in Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra , he was the kind of barbarian who “believes the laws of his island are the laws of nature.” He produced a draft towards a map of the “world distribution of civilization” based on the number of motor vehicles per person.77He demonstrated the importance of “innate capacity” by comparing Newfoundland and Iceland: because the climates were similar, the Icelanders’ prodigious wealth, learning, and inventiveness had to be explained by the superior selectivity by which Icelanders had been bred—whereas only one Newfoundlander was worthy of an entry in Encyclopaedia Britannica .78A great deal of impressive effort went into this comparison; but it was misguided. The relative prosperity and learning of the two communities emerged from centuries of contrasting historical experience and cannot be crushed to fit a single cause.
As we shall see in the course of this book, it is a matter of measurable fact that some Africans have excelled as civilizers of certain environments, some pre-European Americans in others, and some Europeans and Asians in their places. Civilizations too impressive in their contexts to be ranked in terms of quality have been constructed by people of every shade of pigmentation, from a range of cultures so diverse as to defy generalization. It is therefore impertinent to claim that people of any particular description, or any provenance, are necessarily incapable of civilization. This applies to claims on grounds of environmental disadvantage as well as to those based on theories of race or culture. These are the generalizations of the ogre, who smells blood and grinds bones, or of the cultural narcissist, who can admire no reflection but his own. The option some peoples exercise against civilization may be at least as rational, in its place, as that which others exercise in favor.
To recognize this is not to endorse the kind of mindless relativism which dares not differentiate. Some people are more civilized than others. You can give civilizations their places on a scale, without committing the obnoxious betise of a comparison of value: the more strenuous in challenging nature, the more civilized the society. “More civilized” does not necessarily mean “better.” In measurable ways—measured, for instance, by the durability of the way of life, or by the levels of nutrition or of standards of health or longevity of the people concerned—it sometimes means “worse.” If, however, some civilizations in this book are condemned for the abuse of nature, or are seen to be self-condemnedby failure, I hope no reader will take this to be an indictment of civilization in general as a strategy for human communities.
The world is a place of experiment—an expendable speck in a vast cosmos. It is too durable to perish because of us. But it will surely perish anyway. Our own occupancy of it is a short-term tenancy: time enough, Norbert Elias hoped, for humans “to muddle their way out of several blind alleys and to learn how to make their life together more pleasant, more meaningful and worthwhile.”79We ought to make the most of it while we have it. This may be more satisfactorily achieved by a sort of cosmic binge—a daring self-indulgence of the urge to civilize—than by a prudent and conservative desire to protract our own history. Just as I would rather live strenuously and die soon than fester indefinitely in inert contentment, so I should rather belong to a civilization which changes the world, at the risk of self-immolation, than to a modestly “sustainable” society. Just as I would rather join a war or a movement of “protest” than submit to superior force, so I want to be part of a society keen to challenge nature, rather than submissively to remain “at one” with her in static equilibrium. Dazzling ambition is better than modest achievement. If you listen too hard for cosmic harmonies, you never hear the music sent up to God by the lover and the bard.
It is often said—and rightly—that societies are not organic beings and that it is misleading to draw analogies between the lives of communities and those of creatures. Yet, in one respect, societies are like individual people. In both, vices and virtues mingle, in the greatest saints and in the most politically correct common rooms. For every good intention, there is a frail deed; each provides the standard by which the other is measured. Civilizations, compared with other types of society, certainly have no monopoly of virtue. But a true pluralist has to relish the diversity they add to life. A genuine cultural relativist, bound to respect every society’s conception of itself, is unable to condemn them.
A common misrepresentation of history is as a trap from which we cannot escape, a system in which long-term trends must be indefinitely protracted. Because, for the whole of recorded history so far, civilization has been one type of society among many, we may be tempted to suppose that this will always be the case. The loudest prophecies to the contrary are uttered by apocalyptic visionaries who predict various routes back to barbarism: through the overexploitation of the world’s resources, which will leave civilization as an unaffordable luxury; through the degradation of mass societies in deracinated cities; through mutually assured destruction in civilizational wars; through vast migrations which will smother the developed world with hordes of the hungry and deprived; or through cultural revolutions which eliminate elites, abolish tradition, and squelch all refinement of taste (see pages 458 – 62 ).
Thunderous, threatening prophecy suffers today from the same disabilities as encumbered Cassandra and Jeremiah: it may be true but it is too familiar to dispel contempt. I should not like to discount the possibilities the prophets invoke,but I think it is more likely that the opposite will happen: instead of facing a future without civilization, we shall face, for a while, a future without anything else. We live in a laboratory of mankind, surrounded by peoples who live every imaginable way of life permitted by the limitations of the planet. In remote iceworlds, jungles, and deserts, resisters of civilized temptations have shown extraordinary ingenuity in keeping out of others’ way and preserving habits and habitats where change has been slow and intrusions few. It is doubtful whether their resistance can continue, as they yield to the seductions of “cargo” and retreat before the missionaries and miners, the loggers and lawyers.