One of my interests has concerned how people think about “civilization.” In a discussion with a student, Margaret Mead once stipulated a definition that placed the beginning of civilization before the construction of settled edifices, whether as part of a civitas (the general Latin concept of a demarcated city, whether with a wall or sense of community) or polis (the general Greek concept of community often containing urban centers). The student asked Mead what was the first indication of civilization, and it is suggested that the student most likely expected the answer to be something like a tool or a clay pot. However, Mead said that the first sign would be a femur that had been broken and then healed, since it meant that other individuals cared for the injured person long enough for the individual to heal and to return to caring for herself/himself again (https://divinity.yale.edu/news/15000-year-old-bone-and-fall-2013-issue-reflections). This is a very attractive idea, but we have examples of wild or feral animals caring for injured partners (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=60suFxmr_Ks, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2L89b5RHME, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lQaMypcyqc,. There are others, but these are the ones that I’ve seen most often in social media). These examples mean that this idea does not separate humans from, say, feral cats, and we do not think about wild animals as having civilizations of their own.
“The Epic of Gilgamesh” contains one of the, if not the, oldest discussions of civilization. In the tale, the author(s) states that civilization resulted from the construction of walls around a collection of homes and other buildings. This point was important enough for the author(s) to state it at both the beginning and the end of the story. The Gilgamesh cycles were originally shared orally long before the Sumerians invented writing, so it is possible for this element of the stories to have survived from a period before the city-states grew large enough to become threats to each other. Since the author(s) talks about peoples who are not settled and does not mention other cities, the purpose of that wall was to protect settled, agrarian peoples from attacks by migratory hunter-gatherers. The wall establishes a barrier between those whom the author(s) considers uncivilized (migratory, dangerous, lacking government, etc.) and civilized (settled, fairly peaceful, having government, etc.). Although likely formed in oral versions, this element was first written by a Sumerian author while surrounded by city-states, but later interpreters retained it in the versions that they reworked in the age of Mesopotamian empires.
The Greeks share the Sumerian dichotomy between civilized and uncivilized, but the dividing line was not a physical barrier but the Greek cultural identity. Though not all Greeks lived within walled cities, they did share fairly similar cultural attitudes if not values. After all, the Greeks inhabited polities around the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas with a variety of political and cultural expressions, but they shared similar ideas about what it meant to be Greek. They expressed the demarcation of Greek/civilized and Not Greek/uncivilized in terms of language, the most evident aspect of their shared culture. By contrast, the Greeks characterized the non-Greek peoples as making “bar bar” sounds, from which we get the term “barbarian,” which is a synonym for “uncivilized.” This characterization is most evident in the Amazigh peoples of northern Africa but whom the Greeks and Romans named Berbers (from the sounds “bar bar”), an appellation that we continue to use.
One of the most radical arguments along these lines was most clearly—and most fully—elaborated in Augustine of Hippo’s “The City of God.” Augustine’s argument in this context is that the City of Man is full of sin and exhibited the worst in humans regardless of the state of civilization. By contrast, the City of God was open to the best in humanity regardless of whether or not the individuals were considered “civilized” by other humans so long as these people gave themselves over entirely to Christ. In this way, spiritual salvation through complete surrender of one’s body and soul to Christ permitted one to enter the superior spiritual civilization established by God.
These ancient usages of civilization have resonated with people into the modern era. We still make judgments as to what demarcates the civilized from the uncivilized. The definitions are often written from an idealized and sometimes righteous conceptions of the author’s perceptions that other observers don’t see a difference between the two groups under discussion. For example, it is a commonplace to describe the civilized as peaceful and the uncivilized as violent; however, such definitions overlook the fact that both groups provide abundant examples of being peaceful or violent.
Possibly the most intense articulation of rivalry between civilizations was the Cold War. The US stood for democracy, capitalism, and individual liberty, while the Soviet Union represented communism, authoritarian government, and anti-imperialism. However, the most recent that gained popular notoriety was Samuel P. Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations,” which pits the “civilized” values of the Christian West against the “uncivilized” values of the Muslim East. In brief, Huntington argued that civilizations are more prone to be in conflict with each other because of differing value systems. Huntington assertions stem from an ideological perspective and relied heavily on cherry-picked evidence. By ignoring ideology and looking at the evidence, Giacomo Chiozza refuted Huntington’s arguments in “Is There a Clash of Civilizations? Evidence from Patterns of International Conflict Involvement, 1946–97.” Chiozza notes that nations are more likely to be in conflict with bordering states regardless of its civilization designation or stated values. Moreover, conflict was less likely between nations of different civilizations when they did not share a border, which means that conflicting values was not an issue.
The spiritual variation was most widely disseminated in Hall Lindsey’s 1970 book, “The Late Great Planet Earth,” but whose ideas continue to reverberate within evangelic Christianity. Lindsey loosely conceptualized Augustine’s ideas and about 1600 years of changes in Christian theology within Cold War ideology. The book’s argument is that the confrontation between the US (fighting for Christ) and the Soviet Union (Satan’s champion) would lead to the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem. Its construction would usher in the last battle between Christ and Satan and the end of the physical world. God would then carry out the Last Judgement to separate the saved from the damned. Conversations with some evangelicals shows that this narrative has been updated within the War on Terrorism, with Islam replacing the Soviet Union as the great enemy.
The dichotomy between “uncivilized” and “civilized” is always used to different cultures, but it always does so be denigrating those characterized as “uncivilized.” While the Sumerians were settled agrarians and they maligned hunter-gatherers, humans continue to combine aspects of both cultures even if we rely more on growing our food. After all, how many of us have supplemented grocery shopping (which we are able to do through a highly developed system of domesticated food production) by hunting wild game or by picking such wild plants as berries, mushrooms, and so on? I know that I have.
Likewise, the comparison and contrast of civilizations is often performed to denigrate. Consider Huntington’s “The Clash of Civilizations,” in which he treats the civilization of which he is a part in positive terms and the civilization that he perceives as an enemy in negative ones. Indeed, a google search for definitions for “civilization” reveals that most of them setup that dichotomy between one that is superior and one that is inferior by using superlatives or loaded words like “advanced.” The most palatable definition shared by modern dictionaries avoids the loaded language and instead centers upon treating peoples within a given area or region in terms of their “society, culture, and way of life.”
Depite all of the above, it is important to bear in mind that the characterization of civilization belonging to the civilized, as if every person within its designated borders shares the same level of development, is inaccurate. In the fourteenth century, Ibn-Khaldun (1332–1406), who is considered to have created the discipline of sociology, observed that a civilization contains peoples at all levels of development: from uncivilized to civilized, no matter how one defines the terms. Notwithstanding how advanced (regardless of how one defines the word) a civilization (again no matter the definition) might be, its population will vary greatly in terms of how individuals do or do not embody, represent, of take advantage of that exposition of civilization.
In the end, I think of the difference between uncivilized and civilized as being whether or not an individual has joined with others within a civitas or polis style organization. This is not to say that agrarian-based societies are better than hunter-gatherer ones, as the Gilgamesh author(s) suggests but to emphasize the settled nature of the civitates/poleis and its emphasis on edifices for homes, religious observances, food storage, government, and so on. As for “civilization,” the definition would have to consider the relationships between and/or characteristics of peoples in some form of association with civitates/poleis regardless of whether or not the individuals participate in the civitates/poleis.
