Scott Nearing (1883-1983)
Civilization and Beyond:
Learning from History
Introduction
Thoughts About History and Civilization
We may think
and talk about civilization as one pattern or level of culture, one
stage through which human life flows and ebbs. In that sense we may
regard it abstractly and historically, as we regard the most recent
ice age or the long and painful record of large-scale chattel
slavery.
From quite another viewpoint we may think of
civilization as a technologically advanced way of life developed by
various peoples through ages of unrecorded experiment and
experience, and followed by millions during the period of written
history. It is also the way of life that the West has been trying to
impose upon the entire human family since European empires launched
their crusade to westernize, modernize and civilize the planet
Earth.
A third approach would regard civilization as an
evolving life style, conceived before the earliest days of recorded
human history and matured through the series of experiments marking
the development of civilization as we have known it during the five
centuries from 1450 to 1975.
Thinking in terms of this age-old experience, with six
or more thousand years of social history as a background, it is
possible to give a fairly exact meaning to the word "civilization"
as it has been lived and is being lived by the present-day West. It
is also possible to understand the history of previous civilizations
in cycle after cycle of their rise, their development, decline
and extinction. At the same time it will enable the reader to
recognize the relationship (and difference) between the words
"culture" and "civilization".
Human culture is the sum total of ideas,
relationships, artifacts, institutions, purposes and ideals
currently functioning in any community. Three elements are present
in each human society: man, nature and the social structure. Human
culture at any point in its history is the social structure: the
aggregate of existing culture traits, the products of man's
ingenuity, inventiveness and experimentation, set in their natural
environment.
Civilization is a level of culture built upon
foundations laid down through long periods of pre-civilized living.
These foundations consist of artifacts, implements, customs, habit
patterns and institutions produced and developed in numerous
scattered localities by groups of food-gatherers, migrating
herdsmen, cultivators, hand craftsmen and traders and eventually in
urban communities built around centers of wealth and power: the
cities which are the nuclei of every civilization.
Urban centers, housing trade, commerce, fabrication and
finance, with their hinterlands of food-gatherers, herdsmen,
cultivators, craftsmen and transporters, are the nuclei around which
and upon which recurring civilizations are built. Within and around
these urban centers there grows up a complex of associations,
activities, institutions and ideas designed to promote, develop and
defend the particular life pattern.
A civilization is a cluster of peoples, nations and
empires so related in time and space that they share certain ideas,
practices, institutions and means of procedure and survival. Among
these features of a civilized community we may list:
(1) means
of communication, record-keeping, transportation and trade. This
would include a spoken language, a method of enumeration,
writing in pictographs or symbols; an alphabet, a written
language, inscribed on stone, bone, wood, parchment, paper;
means of preserving the records of successive generations;
paths, roads, bridges; a system for educating successive
generations; meeting places and trading points; means for barter
or exchange;
(2) an
interdependent urban-oriented economy based on division of labor
and specialization; on private property in the essential means
of production and in consumer goods and services; on a
competitive survival struggle for wealth, prestige and power
between individuals and social groups; and on the exploitation
of man, society and nature for the material benefit of the
privileged few who occupy the summit of the social pyramid;
(3) a
unified, centralized political apparatus or bureaucracy that
attempts to plan, direct and administer the political, economic,
ideological and sociological structure;
(4) a
self-selected and self-perpetuating oligarchy that owns the
wealth, holds the power and pulls the strings;
(5) an
adequate labor force for farming, transport, industry, mining;
(6) large
middle-class elements: professionals, technicians, craftsmen,
tradesmen, lesser bureaucrats, and a semi-parasitic fringe of
camp-followers;
(7) a
highly professional, well-trained, amply-financed apparatus for
defense and offense;
(8) a
complex of institutions and social practices which will
indoctrinate, persuade and when necessary limit deviation and
maintain social conformity;
(9) agreed
religious practices and other cultural features.
This
description of civilization covers the essential features of western
civilization and the sequence of predecessor civilizations for which
adequate records exist.
Successive civilizations have introduced new culture
traits and abandoned old ones as the pageant of history moved from
one stage to the next, or advanced and retreated through cycles.
Using this description as a working formula, it is possible to
understand the development followed in the past by western
civilization, to estimate its current status and to indicate its
probable outcome.
Long-established thought-habits cry aloud in protest
against such a description of civilization. Until quite recently the
word "civilization" has been used in academic circles to symbolize a
social idea or ideal. Professor of History Anson D. Morse of Amherst
College presents such a view in his Civilization and the World
War (Boston: Ginn 1919). For him, civilization is "the sum of
things in which the heritage of the child of the twentieth century
is better than that of the child of the Stone Age. As a process it
is the perfection of man and mankind. As an end, it is the
realization of the highest ideal which men are capable of
forming.... The goal of civilization ... is human society so
organized in all of its constituent groups that each shall yield the
best possible service to each one and thereby to mankind as a whole,
(producing) the perfect organization of humanity." (page 3).
Such thoughts may be noble and inspired; they are not
related to history. We know more or less about a score of
civilizations that have occupied portions of the earth during
several thousand years. We know a great deal about the western
civilization which we observe and in which we participate. Professor
Morse's florid words apply to none of the civilizations known to
history. Certainly they are poles away from an accurate
characterization of our own varient [sic]of
this social pattern.
We are writing this introduction in an effort to
make our word pictures of mankind and its doings correspond with the
facts of social history. With the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging
over our heads, it is high time for us to exchange the clouds of
fancy and the flowers of rhetoric for the solid ground of historical
reality. The word "civilization" must generalize what has been and
what is, as nearly as the past and present can be embodied in
language.
Civilization is a level or phase of culture which has
been attained and lost repeatedly in the course of social history.
The epochs of civilization have not been distributed evenly, either
in time or on the earth's surface. A combination of circumstances,
political, economic, ideological, sociological, resulted in the
Egyptian, the Chinese, the Roman civilizations. One of these was
centered in North Africa, the second in Asia, the third in eastern
Europe. All three spilled over into adjacent continents.
No two civilizations are exactly alike at any stage of
their development. Each civilization is at least a partial
experiment, a process or sequence of causal relationships, altered
sequentially in the course of its life cycle.
These thoughts about culture and civilization should be
supplemented by noting the relationship between civilizations and
empires. An empire is a center of wealth and power associated with
its economic and political dependencies. A civilization is a cluster
or a succession of empires and/or former empires, coordinated and
directed by one of their number which has established its leadership
in the course of survival struggle.
The total body of historical evidence bearing on human
experiments with civilization is extensive and impressive. It covers
a large portion of the Earth's land surface, includes parts of Asia,
Africa and Europe and extends sketchily to the Americas. In time it
covers many thousands of years.
Experiments with civilization have been conducted
in highly selective surroundings possessing the volume and range of
natural resources and the isolation and remoteness necessary to
build and maintain a high level of culture over substantial periods
of time. In these special areas it was possible to provide for
subsistence, produce an economic surplus large enough to permit
experimentation and ensure protection against human and other
predators. Egypt and the Fertile Crescent were surrounded by deserts
and high mountains. Crete was an island, extensive but isolated.
Productive river valleys like the Yang-tse, the Ganges and the
Mekong have afforded natural bases for experiments with
civilization. Similar opportunities have been provided by strategic
locations near bodies of water, mineral deposits and the
intersections of trade-routes. Others, less permanent, were located
in the high Andes, on the Mexican Plateau, in the Central American
jungles.
Histories of civilizations, some of them ancient or
classical, have been written during the past two centuries. There
have been general histories in many languages. There have been
scholarly reports on particular civilizations. Prof. A.J. Toynbee's
massive ten volume Study of History is a good example. Still
more extensive is the thirty volume history of civilization under
the general editorship of C.K. Ogden. These writings have brought
together many facts bearing chiefly on the lives of spectacular
individuals and episodes, with all too little data on the life of
the silent human majority.
At the end of this volume the reader will find a list,
selected from the many books that I have consulted in preparation
for writing this study.Most of these authorities are concerned with
the facts of civilization, with far less emphasis on their
political, economic and sociological aspects.
In this study I have tried to unite theory with
practice. On the one hand I have reviewed briefly and as accurately
as possible some outstanding experiments with civilization,
including our own western variant. (Part I. The Pageant of
Experiments with Civilization.) In Part II I have undertaken a
social analysis of civilization as a past and present life style. In
Part III, Civilization Is Becoming Obsolete, I have tried to check
our thinking about civilization with the sweep of present day
historical trends. Part IV, Steps Beyond Civilization, is an attempt
to list some of the alternatives and opportunities presently
available to civilized man.
Any reader who has the interest and persistence to read
through the entire volume and to browse through some of its
references will have had the equivalent of a university extension
course dealing with one of the most critical issues confronting the
present generation of humanity.
