- This was originally published at Deep Transition Network -
What is civilization?
As I mentioned here in DTN the other day, Chris Smaje and I are unfolding a conversation together by email, the end result of which will be published in various places, including here in DTN. Our conversation starts out exploring the word, 'civilization'. What does this word refer to? We've both found that the word, in use, is more than a little ambiguous.
"Smaje has coworked a small farm in Somerset, southwest England, for the last 17 years. Previously, he was a university-based social scientist, working in the Department of Sociology at the University of Surrey and the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College." - from Chris Smaje - Resilience It is his background in social science which drew me to ask him to engage in this conversation with me. Surely he would have a handle on what civilization is. But as you will soon see (when the article is published), we're finding 'civilization' a bit tricky to pin down. At the moment I'm thinking that perhaps the solution to the problems this floating signifier presents might best be solved by simply laying out just what we mean by the term when we use it. Well, especially when we use it in other than casual ways in passing -- such as when we are writing about civilization or its potential transformation.
I'm going to post a rather lengthy excerpt here from Derrick Jensen's book, Endgame. It's a book which I'm in fundamental disagreement with regarding his social change praxis. But this passage seems to me to offer us some important understanding about what civilization is -- though, of course, not everyone will agree to define civilization in this way. Here is that passage:
"If I’m going to contemplate the collapse of civilization, I need to define what it is. I looked in some dictionaries. Webster’s calls civilization “a high stage of social and cultural development.” The Oxford English Dictionary describes it as “a developed or advanced state of human society.” All the other dictionaries I checked were similarly laudatory. These definitions, no matter how broadly shared, helped me not in the slightest. They seemed to me hopelessly sloppy. After reading them, I still had no idea what the hell a civilization is: define high, developed, or advanced, please. The definitions, it struck me, are also extremely self-serving: can you imagine writers of dictionaries willingly classifying themselves as members of “a low, undeveloped, or backward state of human society”?I suddenly remembered that all writers, including writers of dictionaries, are propagandists, and I realized that these definitions are, in fact, bite-sized chunks of propaganda, concise articulations of the arrogance that has led those who believe they are living in the most advanced—and best—culture to attempt to impose by force this way of being on all others.
I would define a civilization much more precisely, and I believe more usefully, as a culture—that is, a complex of stories, institutions, and artifacts— that both leads to and emerges from the growth of cities (civilization, see civil: from civis, meaning citizen, from Latin civitatis, meaning city-state), with cities being defined—so as to distinguish them from camps, villages, and so on—as people living more or less permanently in one place in densities high enough to require the routine importation of food and other necessities of life. Thus a Tolowa village five hundred years ago where I live in Tu’nes (meadow long in the Tolowa tongue), now called Crescent City, California, would not have been a city, since the Tolowa ate native salmon, clams, deer, huckleberries, and so on, and had no need to bring in food from outside. Thus, under my definition, the Tolowa, because their way of living was not characterized by the growth of city-states, would not have been civilized. On the other hand, the Aztecs were. Their social structure led inevitably to great city-states like Iztapalapa and Tenochtitlán, the latter of which was, when Europeans first encountered it, far larger than any city in Europe, with a population five times that of London or Seville. Shortly before razing Tenochtitlán and slaughtering or enslaving its inhabitants, the explorer and conquistador Hernando Cortés remarked that it was easily the most beautiful city on earth. Beautiful or not, Tenochtitlán required, as do all cities, the (often forced) importation of food and other resources. The story of any civilization is the story of the rise of city-states, which means it is the story of the funneling of resources toward these centers (in order to sustain them and cause them to grow), which means it is the story of an increasing region of unsustainability surrounded by an increasingly exploited countryside."
-from - Civilization | The official Derrick Jensen site
If Jensen is basically right to define civilization in this way, the very concept of an ecological civilization may be oxymoronic, in which case we should perhaps consider using "ecological culture" (or eco-culture) instead.
Anyway, what does the word 'civilization' mean to you?
Yeah, really. You can type your response below.