Western Civilisation?

Description: The arguably most significant view of the modern world sees the battle between Civilisation and Barbarism. It is all over the news all the time as people and societies are dismissed as barbaric, and the World year on year celebrates apparent progress. I want to argue this is a myth and propose there is no fundamental battle between Civilisation and Barbarism.

General note: I'm learning to write blogs. So far the millions of words here have been just a mental notepad for my own future consumption and "Thesian thread" to replot my wanderings in the Labyrinth. On the off chance this will ever be read by anyone else, I should perhaps give some thought to the reader. To that end I will summarise the point in future at the outset and then expand which inevitably will be complex, non-paradigmatic and polemical. My purpose is to push thinking, my own and others, never to present an off the shelf closed box.

Summary: the international world has been for millennia seen as composed from advanced, progressive civilisations and static, backward barbaric communities. The assumption is that the civilised have a duty to civilise the barbaric. It is very much evident in British and American thinking that they are civilised, and the rest of the world looks forward to being civilised. But is this really true is the question. The proposed answer is that this is only true if you look at the world in a particular way. The Civilisation/Barbarism dichotomy is like a length or weight measurement. Once we have chosen our measurement e.g. weight, length it is easy to get a number and decide who is heavier or longer. But what measurement do you chose? And that is the point you must chose. So when people speak of a Civilisation they are choosing certain traits that score well, and when they speak of a Barbarism they are choosing certain traits that score poorly.

Continuation of Argument: The obvious challenge to this is that surely there must be some absolutes. A civilisation for example that commits child sacrifice is Barbaric, while one like our own which promotes life for all even while in the womb (although there are still arguments about abortion) is Civilised.

Whats need to be introduced here is the idea of Normalisation. In the West it is quite normal to eat meat. When you walk down the meat isle of the supermarket you don't see anything especially unusual here. But walk down a market in the far east and suddenly you might take notice of things. Suppose we see a cat in a cage ready for slaughter. In the West we have a very special place for cats often around the home as family members. We do not Normalise eating them. Yet when you think further what is different between eating a very intelligent pig, and eating an less sentient cat? Now we can see how Aztecs were able to live in a society where priests committed gruesome sacrifices to the gods, once normalised no-one notices.

But it can still be argued, Normalising something doesn't make it right or go away it just hides it from notice. This is true, but it leads deeper into the philosophy of the Absolute.

Consider current trends in Western society. End to racism, liberation of women, end to sexual and domestic abuse, end to prejudice against all genders and sexual variations, continual struggle to end slavery etc. Why did it take so long? It is because all these were Normalised, but now society has progressed and become more civilised (or so the argument goes). So what remains that we currently normalise that in the future we will look back on as barbaric. For me eating meat is barbaric. I walk down the meat isle of the supermarket seeing slaughtered animals that may as well be dogs and cats since it doesn't matter: it looks very primitive and barbaric. Equally I look at armed forces and think their methods are very primitive and barbaric. I look at society split into rich and poor and I see this as very barbaric and uncivilised. So we have a very long way to go to become fully civilised.

But now look at societies that haven't made the "progress" we have, where for example women are still subordinate to men, and homosexuality is rejected. Measured this way they have even further to go to become civilised. But we might look a different way and see that everyone belongs to a tribe and has a tribal area that they can farm. There is no such thing as homelessness or unemployment here because everyone belongs somewhere. Suddenly measured this way they look very advanced and our society looks primitive.

It turns out that you can always select measures to make any society look advanced or primitive.

The proof of this lies in 'sunyata' or emptiness. This itself is a proof of the point. Western Civilisation never arrived at this idea, although pre-Platonic thinkers appear to me to be speaking of the same thing when they spoke of 'logos.' Man is the measure of all things, says Protagoras. Heraclitus even more relativistically says that the world is in endless flux, never arriving at anything but always been a work in progress. The man who messed it all up was Plato who tried to say that the world has a perfect "form" somewhere, which is imperfectly copied again and again in the existing things of the world. They all grasp that the world is imperfect, but for Plato that imperfection is paired with the eternal Perfection of the form that left its stamp in the world. While for Heraclitus it is a conveyor belt of imperfect things each morphing into the next and never having a definitive moment of existence.

Heraclitus and Protagoras cause a peculiarly destructive problem for 'Progress' and 'Civilisation.' Protagoras suggests, even more deeply than with Normalisation, that the people in a society are the only measure of their society. Protagoras is not saying that there is a Perfect Platonic Man who is the measure of all society, who can walk around the Earth and make absolute judgements of each person civilisation. He is saying that our standard of civilisation are based upon us, and then how can you separate the people from their civilisation? As Kierkegaard asked, how can you separate the dancer from the dance?

More damaging is Heraclitus who says that 'civilisation' is like a river, it has no start or end, and flows from one thing to the next.

The ultimate problem for anyone who wishes to define an absolute measure of civilisation is like Archimedes looking for a place outside the Earth to use as a vantage point to leaver the Earth. How do we know we are not our selves influenced by our own circumstances. This of course is the problem of objectivity. And the answer is you cannot escape being influenced by your own circumstance. But this is paradoxical anyway: anyone so divorced from their own circumstances is also unable to provide a relevant comment. Anthropology has long wrestled with this problem. Without embedding in society and knowing it intimately how are you to make sense of it? I realised this is the truth of tourism. As a tourist if you wish to get beyond the limitations of tourism and really get to know a foreign people, to say you have truly travelled to a place: you will know when you have arrived when they no longer seem foreign and you find yourself at home. Ironically this is where ever tourist was before embarking on their journey. This is also the great spiritual truth noted in The Alchemist and even in Zen Buddhism : before following Zen mountains are mountains, then mountains stop being mountains, then finally mountains become mountains again. For Paulo Coelho it is the shephard returning to where his quest started to find gold. The truth is right here and now within ourselves, but never-the-less we often have a huge journey through the world to travel to find it.

The solution to this is approaches like Phenomenology that assume that we start at the end, and work backwards. We are already fully embodied and influenced by our world, and we begin to dig down and examine what this means for us. Each person in each civilisation and each barbaric nation does the same, starting at different points, and we assume finding some commonality as they excavate deeper. Very hard now for people to present themselves as more advanced, civilised and progressed.

But like all my posts lets not go too far. There is some common ground that all humans share. But this is actually the hard part, and it is a much more fruitful discussion to start with this question, than make assumptions about what is Civilised and go around excluding uncivilised nations.

To begin with all societies whether civilised or uncivilised are made of people. That must be our starting point. Whether they sacrifice children or work hard to protect them we first acknowledge we are talking about people here. If we ever forget this we are becoming very much uncivilised. How much uncivilised behaviour has been caused by people believing they are the civilised ones. Civilisation itself makes people uncivilised.

But since I raised the extreme case of the Middle Eastern practice of child sacrifice let me do the unthinkable and defend it! If we go back 2000 years more than half of all children would have died in childbirth or within their first year. Malnutrition and disease would have made childbirth a very risky process. Within the mindset of people of that time, death was controlled by the gods of the afterlife. So logically to appease these blood thirsty gods you gave them blood. So it made sense then to give your first born child to the god so that the rest of your off spring would be blessed with good health. Embedding within the time and thinking suddenly what seems absurd makes sense. From this we can learn two things: (1) people actually wanted their children to live (2) they were logical and well meaning. So what looks like madness from the outside, is very human when looked at from the inside.

We can make the hypothesis then that on one hand all humans share a commonality, but on the other hand how they express this can be extremely diverse. So how do we measure civilisation, by the inside or the outside? If we measure by the inside, all humans are the same. So there is no civilisation. Yet to measure from the outside, we have the problem of what to measure. How do you compare a baby sacrificing culture and a Hypocratic scientific culture. They both want the same thing, but by drastically different approaches.

Suppose we arrived with our technology and started saving the lives of babies. Initially we would be worshipped as gods, since the gods are ones who have this power. By the time we have educated the tribe to apply medicines and understand disease they are already on the path to joining our society. We are not comparing societies we are simply changing one into the other. Once the gods have gone everything would change. In no time this tribe would find itself at the end of a Western dole queue looking for work, and wondering where they went wrong. I think of the Kalahari Bushmen who experienced exactly this transition and result.

Now to be fair transition the other way from Western society to baby-sacrifice is much harder. In this metric it is true that western society has infinitely better pre- and post- natal care and infant mortality is almost a thing of the past. Western society has definitely made progress in this direction. But when have we ever used 'infant mortality' as a measure of civilisation? It is certainly an excellent one, and perhaps a future measure should include it. But all of human history has not been a single line toward zero infant mortality. Humans have lived perfect lives even with quite high infant mortality. Everyone does die, and dealing with death is something that we must do. You could equally measure a societies ability to deal with death as a direction. Which is better: the society with zero infant mortality but with people who are neurotic and stressed by death, or a society with considerable infant mortality but with a deep understanding and acceptance of death? This is the point of the blog post: there is no absolute here. Human societies are multidimensional and win in some directions and lose in others. There is no perfect society, and there is no imperfect society. There is simply a society that is right for the people it embodies, and the natural infinite flow of progress that all societies experience.