What is civilization?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

The modern concepts of the civilized world have been shaped by societies that rose out of bloodsoaked mud.

All the New World societies arose from the deliberate and wholesale extermination through either slave labor or deliberate, targeted massacres, of the indigenous peoples of those states. The fundamental principle underlining them is not Love Thy Neighbor, but Butcher Thy Neighbor. The concept of civilization is based on adherence to such principle as rule of law and good faith. Nowhere are these found in the gruesome conquests of the Americas. The same pattern recurred in Australia, where the newcomers swiftly exterminated the Natives, most egregiously in Australia. The United States, most of all of all the New World states, has been inclined to move into its neighbors' countries, occupy them for decades, shoot their leaders, create dictators, shoot dictators, replace them with new dictators, and this in a continual, unfolding process.

In the age of Imperialism, Europeans brought civilization to Africa by chopping off hands and shooting bullets into people so they'd not have surplus ammunition. They established civilization by land-theft and confiscation, reducing the natives to third-class citizens in what had been their own land. The Cold War superpowers who first entered space regularly followed up with this here and in South America by having their own gangs of pillagers, rapists, and looters working for them, for the benefit of the many so would the many suffer. The concern was not the people but the interests of their global empires, no more and no less. And then there are the Congo Wars where an entire continent pillages and destroys its way through a region the size of all of Western Europe, while civilization focuses on the lives of the rich and the famous and the latest shenanigans of Russia.

Asia witnessed the laughable stupidity of the superpowers and colonial empires in such things as deliberately starving millions of people to death, the wholesale barbarism of the Japanese Empire, and the reliance on the part of the British and the French on brutality and cruelty to sustain their systems. Including wars where European states deliberately forced narcotics on a state larger and richer than they were. For no reason other than "freedom of trade" which meant only "freedom of trade on our terms, there is no "No, I don't want to trade" option. One of Asia's most esteemed and civilized societies in the last century slaughtered more human beings in the pursuit of one goal than has any other, and all that rose from that remains. Two other Asian societies and one entire subcontinent remain poised on the brink of nuclear war, product of the new civilized age. Instant sunshine as the method to the solution of all problems.

Of course any such list would be foolish without noting that enlightened, civilized Europe spent the first half of the 20th Century perfecting the tools of despotism and mass slaughter, and that one of Europe's supposedly most enlightened societies went into the rest of it and hunted down and butchered people, machine-gunning women and children in the back. Then in the 1990s this spiraling violence appeared once more, when the rest of Europe sat on its hands, and all the world sat on its hands about the even larger-scale atrocities in the Congo. Nor would it be fair to exclude the other totalitarianisms, the one that arose from a military putsch that was perfectly happy to invite its fellow gangsters to reduce its own cities to rubble, the one that happened to rely on the view that from each according to his ability and to each according to his need follows the Party becoming replaced by the Central Committee, the dictator replacing the Central Committee. All for the good of the workers, and don't question those graves in the forests, they're definitely not to be spoken of.

If we define civilization at all, it thus must rely on cruelty, avarice, greed, the compulsion of the rifle and the machine gun and ultimately of the atomic bomb. Civilization is a horror and a destructive, parasitic, negative force, it has no positive ability to sustain itself without perpetuating itself by means of cruelty. Civilization is the action of theft claimed to be for the highest of principle, massacre claimed to be respect of the individual value of human life, it is the value of greed, lust, and domination. Certainly there is no objective means of looking at the span since the 15th Century where the modern global civilization evolved and calling this freedom, liberty, equality, justice, or fairness without confessing that the terms are themselves meaningless, debase, null, and void by their very natures. As I see it, the only law of civilization is this: Fire and Sword. There are no others, and only in our self-delusions and self-serving tales intent on making it all better that we burned and slaughtered our way to paradise can we say otherwise.

Thus in answer to the question of "Can civilized people prevail over the uncivilized in a discussion of ideas" the real response is "First, let the civilized discuss ideas, not how to shoot at the "uncivilized" and make evil good." There can never be moral justifications for such things, unless we're willing to claim that morality means "What's good for me is good for me, thus all is good." There can only be craven self-justification of immorality.

Your thoughts?

Comments

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

There was a time when civilization was defined by the proliferation of art and literature. Following that, there was a period when civilization was defined by the burning of books and the restriction of art to narrow themes. The minds of some people are still stuck in the second period.

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

Civilizations have been largely defined by pottery shards found in their trash dumps. That, and how they buried their corpses.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Mention of pottery shards reminds me of the ostrakon and its associated practice of ostracism.

What you describe is not how civilizations define themselves but how they are defined by the anthropologists of today.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

The existense of art and literature implies civilization in question has already subjigated the surround wilderness/peoples to the point that they have the excess time/resources to spend on such things.

[jerseycajun.livejournal.com]

My thoughts are that the end result of civilization is good (unless you desire to think of fire and sword every time you see the court system resolve a conflict between two parties without violence and condemn it for how we got there), and that the way we have traditionally achieved it has not been good. I think it's more fair to assess civilization and "how we got it", independently. Human beings being what we are, there will always be a measure of poison in the advancement of society. We're fallible creatures. That's not an excuse, but an observation. At the same time, the best we can do is try to is learn from the past and at least try not to soil ourselves the same way twice, or to the same extent.

[fierceleaf.livejournal.com]

Civilisation is gross domestic product (GDP). Look at the map

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(http://www.econguru.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/gdp_nominal_per_capita_world_map_imf_2007.PNG)

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You see, civilized countries are more prosperous and vice versa, Qatar suddenly became civilized because of oil.

And if one wants to make people in shitty countries more pleasant he should invest money. The real hero is merchant. It is not very pleasant experience to be the civilized bum.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

That's a rather Marxist analysis.

[harry-beast.livejournal.com]

Before you invest, make sure you have armies and gunboats standing by in case the ingrates in those sh*tty countries try to nationalize your company.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

That's what occurred to me too! In fact the monthly topic was born that way. Someone (I think root_fu) initiated a series of threads on conspiracy theory (of all topics), and some response posts were written by others, and so the idea was born.

Uhm, I got lost down memory lane... The grass was greener then, no?

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Wasn't it the monthly topic recently?

[blue-mangos.livejournal.com]

Yes, it happens sometimes that posts spawn other reaction posts. Because you like this topic you approve. But I remember about a year ago when it happened on the topic of rape several of you got all whiny. Interesting ;o)

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

The only thing more barbarous than civilization is the lack of civilization.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

DQ'ed.

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Hypercivilization is more barbarous than no civilization.

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

That and not being able to find a wifi hotspot.

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

Yes, the west is guilty of all violence because we are westerners discussing this, and we all need to feel guilty together. The genocides happily committed by people named Genghis Khan or Idi Amin or Mao Tze-tung? they were just innoculated with a western virus. The stalinist policy of sending millions to the Gulag? It was just simplified hegelianism. Somalia, Darfour, Rwanda, Congo? they just fight their own wars with the guns we sold them.

I suppose all the nameless victims of these genocides are what we might call real civilizations then? The Mayans, the Babylonians, the native Americans, the aboriginees... we should rather have a world peacefully populated by prehistoric tribes and devoid of technology, than a modern world guided by principles enforced aggressively. Removing ourselves, there is the end of good and evil. If and when we remove our diabolical western culture, the world will become a cornucopia of good knowing no conflict within itself.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Idi Amin was nothing but the type of person who in a Western context would be blowing up a Shetl or a Mosque. Mao was adopting a Westernized ideology to a Chinese context, he wasn't even the first to do that. Hong Xiuquan waged the bloodiest, largest modern religious war in the same timeframe of the US Civil War.

I'm simply pointing out that civilization is rooted in bloodshed and horror, it's not a question of morality but of whether we go with hemlock or cyanide from a strictly *moral* POV. It makes no difference whether the culture worked to death is 1940s Russian or 1500s Aztecs.

[fierceleaf.livejournal.com]

Sociopaths are 1-4% of every population. Biology leads to cruelty not European's nerdy stuff.

[sandwichwarrior.livejournal.com]

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

They look like they're winning some hearts and minds!

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

Is that a magic wand in his hand? :)

...He'll need it.

[vehemencet-t.livejournal.com]

Being civilized is a matter of perspective.

One could argue that some "primitive" societies and cultures with which we have either made contact or have anthropological record, actually acted far more "civilized" than our greedy, profiteering, tyrannical, imperialistic, consumerist culture.

I think there is reason for a critique of civilization as we know it, although I think modern primitivists take it to a ridiculous level and too far.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Yep. It's easy to make an argument that any society that allows its members to starve in the streets when it has the means to help them isn't civilised.