Civilization and Beyond: Learning from History Part 1

Civilization and Beyond.

by Scott Nearing.

PREFACE

LEARNING FROM HISTORY

Human history may be viewed from various angles. The easiest history to write concerns the doings of a few well known people and their involvement in some memorable events. History may also concern itself with inventions and discoveries: the use of fire, of the wheel or smelting metals. It may center around sources of food, means of shelter, or the making of records. It may be concerned with the construction and decoration of cities, kingdoms and empires.

Social history enters the picture with travel, transportation, communication, trade. Human beings group themselves in families, clans and tribes, in voluntary a.s.sociations; they compete, plunder, conquer, enslave, exploit; they co-operate for construction and destruction.

Political history is but one aspect of man's group contacts and group projects.

There have been histories of particular civilizations and of civilization as a field of historical research. With minor exceptions none of the authors that I have consulted has attempted an a.n.a.lytical treatment of civilization as a sociological phenemenon.

Scientists start from hunches, examine available data, advance tentative conclusions, test them in the light of wider observations, and round out their research by formulating general principles or "laws." This scientific approach has been used in many fields of observation and study. I am applying the formula to one aspect of social history: the appearance, development, maturity, decline and disappearance of the vast co-ordinations of collective, experimental human effort called civilizations.

"a.s.syria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, where are they?" asked Byron. He might have added: "What were they? How did they come into being? What was the nature of their experience? Why did they rise from small beginnings, develop into wide-spread colossal complexes of wealth and power, and then, after longer or shorter periods of existence, break up and disappear from the stage of social history?"

Such questions are far removed from the lives of people who are busy with everyday affairs. In one sense they _are_ remote; in the larger picture, however, they are of vital concern to anyone and everyone now living in civilized communities. If a.s.syrians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans and Carthaginians built extensive empires and ma.s.sive civilizations that flourished for a time, then broke up and disappeared, are we to follow blindly and unthinkingly in their footsteps? Or do we study their experiences, benefit from their successes and learn from their mistakes?

Can we not take lessons out of their voluminous notebooks, avoid their blunders and direct our own feet along paths that fulfil our lives at the same time that they meet the widespread demand for survival and well-being?

Civilization has been extensively experimental. Several thousand years, during which civilizations have appeared, disappeared and reappeared, have been too brief to establish and stabilize a hard and fast social pattern. As the complexity of civilizations has increased, variations and deviations have grown in number and intensity. With the advent of western civilization a culture pattern is being put together which differs widely from its predecessors.

All civilized peoples seem to have developed from simple beginnings and experimented with broader and more complicated life styles. In western civilization the number of experiments has increased and the span of their deviations seems to have broadened. Under the circ.u.mstances an a.n.a.lysis of civilization must take for granted not only social change but the development of, human society along lines which link up the outstanding structural and functional ideas, inst.i.tutions and practices of successive civilizations.

I propose in this inquiry to state certain accepted facts from the history of civilizations and of contemporary experience. I also propose to a.n.a.lyze the facts and generalize them in such a way that the results of the study may provide an understanding of the human social past, together with some guide-lines that will prove useful in the formulation and implementation of the present-day policy and procedure of civilized peoples, nations, empires and of the western civilization.

This book is not a popular treatise, nor is it a textbook. Rather. it is an attempt to summarize an area of critical human concern. Academia may not use such material: nevertheless it should be available to students and administrators who must plan and direct the social future of humankind.

_Civilization and Beyond_ rounds out a series of studies that I began in 1928 with _Where Is Civilization Going_? The series has extended through _The Twilight of Empire_ (1930), _War_ (1931) and _The Tragedy of Empire_ (1946). Up to 1914 my field of study was confined largely to the economics of distribution. The war of 1914-18 pushed me rudely and decisively into the broader field. I have described the process in my political autobiography: _Making of a Radical_ (1971).

I hope that this study will provide a useful link in the chain of material dealing with the structure and function of man's social environment, leading directly into an action program that will conclude the preservation and loving economical use of nature's rich gifts and the dedication of thousands of young aspiring men and women to the good life here, now and indefinitely, into a bright, productive and creative future.

As of this date seven publishers have examined the ma.n.u.script of this work and declined to publish it. All felt that it would not find any considerable reading public. Nevertheless, I feel that the work should be printed and distributed because it carries a message that may be of first rate importance to the future of my fellow humans.

Scott Nearing.

Harborside, Maine May 5, 1975

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 relations.h.i.+p (and difference) between the words "culture" and "civilization".

Human culture is the sum total of ideas, relations.h.i.+ps, artifacts, inst.i.tutions, 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 inst.i.tutions 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 a.s.sociations, activities, inst.i.tutions and ideas designed to promote, develop and defend the particular life pattern.

A civilization is a cl.u.s.ter of peoples, nations and empires so related in time and s.p.a.ce that they share certain ideas, practices, inst.i.tutions 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 compet.i.tive 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-cla.s.s 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 inst.i.tutions 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 const.i.tuent 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 n.o.ble 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 partic.i.p.ate. 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 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 relations.h.i.+ps, altered sequentially in the course of its life cycle.

These thoughts about culture and civilization should be supplemented by noting the relations.h.i.+p between civilizations and empires. An empire is a center of wealth and power a.s.sociated with its economic and political dependencies. A civilization is a cl.u.s.ter or a succession of empires and/or former empires, co-ordinated and directed by one of their number which has established its leaders.h.i.+p in the course of survival struggle.