Civilization
Some words are so imposing that they seem nothing so much as sticks for various powers to cudgel wayward humanity. Such an illustrious and daunting word is civilization. Visions of Mesopotamians building ziggurats and employing a code of law and irrigating the land speak to dozy, high school afternoons spent trying to attend to page one-hundred-nineteen while daydreaming about sex. However confused a word it may be—the Aztecs had a civilization but practiced human sacrifice while the imperial British had a civilization but thought nothing of squashing native peoples like so many bothersome bugs—some notion of something worthwhile clings to it. It may be hard to pin down that worthwhile quality but that gives the word even more importance. No one can pin down God either.
“We’re civilized but you aren’t” has been part of the cudgeling. The statement means that we have better weapons and gods. Not only does it welcome hypocrisy, it makes a virtue of it. Civilization is something that is owned and can be lorded over others. The uncivilized have no critique to offer the civilized. The very notion is ludicrous. All the pieces on the game board belong to one side.
The power and stature of the word are remnants of some largely long-ago past—the stuff of those textbooks propped up in front of bleary eyes. After World War I, it became hard for any nation to parade its “botched civilization,” to quote Ezra Pound. Nations could continue to see themselves as virtuous in some nationalist fashion. The numerous technological improvements that constituted material progress could be hailed as signs of advancing civilization but the word was bound to sound hollow. How civilized were the nations that used poison gas and butchered millions? Numerous practicalities offered themselves—reparations, treaties, boundaries—but the large ideal had more or less evaporated; a catchphrase to be summoned when a dignitary was garnishing an edifying speech. The discontents, as Freud noted, were legion.
As a more manageable rule of thumb, the damaged height of civilization was replaced by the level concourse of society. Societies did what they did. Some had a rule of law and some didn’t. Some allowed women rights and some didn’t. Some observed a siesta and some didn’t. Each society had a right to its proprieties, though they could be lethal. Some putatively civilized societies remained very keen (to name three behaviors) on capital punishment, vendettas and ritual shaming.
Primitive or primal or aboriginal societies (or whatever name the civilized chose) were, on occasion, deemed worthy, too. Since such societies’ conflicts seemed simpler, they may have been deemed even more worthy than so-called advanced societies. The claptrap of superiority was foreign to many of them. They had their stories about their origins and purposes and lived according to them, whereas civilization seemed a very complicated and recondite story, one that depended too much on who was doing the telling.
Value easily collapses in the goo of relativism. So does aspiration. If one sees through the failings of civilization, if one intones the litany of horrors of modern times, what stance is one left with? Smugness? Weariness? Indifference to any ideal about anything? All such attitudes are feasible. One of the ironic pleasures of the postmodern world has been seeing through everything so that no principles are left standing. In its relentless way this x-ray vision makes sense. How many grotesque ideals led to how many deaths?
Seeing through everything is a pose, however, not a way to live. The work that awaited the human race outside the gates of Eden has been constant; people need more to guide them than irony and theory. If one were to offer a figure for the predicament of the modern world, it would be the attempt to somehow wrestle linear progress into the shape of a circle that would connect modern men and women with the values of primal societies. These values varied from place to place over the face of the earth and without a doubt indicated much undiluted brutality (though so does the homicide rate of the USA) but what haunts the modern world beyond any romantic yearning is the feeling that simpler living is more sensible living.
Complication, the intense busyness of modern life, is not a value in and of itself. Revering the sources of life on a daily basis and making that reverence a part of daily life are explicit values. If civilization stands for some sense of fineness and achievement, there can be plenty of fineness and achievement in simple living. A handmade pot offers a whole world of discernment and feeling for the clay, the making, the decorating, and then the using. Craft is one of those nodes where the civilized and the primal come together. Genuineness of an object is a touchstone of genuineness of life. Objects meant to be thrown away speak to indifferent, self-involved lives. Carelessness breeds carelessness.
Civility makes civilization possible. Civility is based not on the new, which, almost as a matter of course, insists on its au courant manners nor is it based on slavish attention to the letter rather than the spirit. Civility is based on constant renewing, the process by which the present makes sense of the past and honors the dead. To renew is to perpetually rediscover the ties that link people to the earth and to their histories on the earth. Civilization is the active conversation with the past and the fruits of that conversation. At our human best, nothing is lost on us. That aim is the antidote to the oblivion that surrounds our days and works. Our being born into the world constitutes a degree of powerful originality. The task of civilizing is the task of integrating that originality with all that has come before it, by which I very much include the life of the earth and the creatures that have lived and live now on the earth. Without that task, human invention lacks any balance. Without that balance, we remain as D. H. Lawrence wrote a hundred or so years ago, having “new little hopes . . . no matter how many skies have fallen.”
"Civility is based on constant renewing, the process by which the present makes sense of the past and honors the dead,"
YES!
Thank you.
So many wise words in here. I really like the "attention" to the one word, 'civilization'. A mindful, zen like attention. Truly inspiring.