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Civilization (Talk)

For other uses, see Civilization (disambiguation).

Civilization (British English also civilisation) is a kind of human society or culture; specifically, a civilization is usually a complex society characterized by the practice of agriculture and settlement in cities. Compared with less complex cultures, members of a civilization are organized into a diverse division of labour and an intricate social hierarchy. The term civilization is often used as a synonym for culture in both popular and academic circles. ^[1] Every human being participates in a culture, defined as "the arts, customs, habits... beliefs, values, behavior and material habits that constitute a people's way of life. ^[2] Civilizations can be distinguished from other cultures by their high level of social complexity and organization, and by their diverse economic and cultural activities.

The term civilization has been defined and understood in a number of ways different from the standard definition. Sometimes it is used synonymously with the broader term culture. Civilization can also refer to society as a whole. To nineteenth-century English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, for example, civilization was "the total social heredity of mankind;" ^[3] in other words, civilization was the totality of human knowledge and culture as represented by the most "advanced" society at a given time. ^[4] Civilization can be used in a normative sense as well: if complex and urban cultures are assumed to be superior to other "savage" or "barbarian" cultures, then "civilization" is used as a synonym for "superiority of certain groups." In a similar sense, civilization can mean "refinement of thought, manners, or taste". ^[5] However, in its most widely used definition, civilization is a descriptive term for a relatively complex agricultural and urban culture.

Contents 1 Etymology 2 Characterizing civilization 3 History of civilization 3.1 Origins 3.2 Growth of other ancient civilizations 3.3 Spread of civilization 4 Theories 4.1 Unilineal evolution 4.1.1 Social darwinism 4.1.2 Marxism 4.2 Multilineal evolution 4.3 Diffusionism 4.4 Systems theory 4.5 Postmodernism 4.6 Other views 4.7 Criticism of civilization 4.7.1 Romanticist criticism 4.7.2 Anarchist criticism 4.7.3 Environmentalist and Green criticism 5 The future of civilization 5.1 Space civilization 5.2 Societal collapse 6 References 7 Further reading

[edit] Etymology

The word civilization comes from the Latin word civilis, the adjective form of civis, meaning a "citizen" or "townsman" governed by the law of his city.

In the 6th century, the Roman Emperor Justinian oversaw the consolidation of Roman civil law. The resulting collection is called the Corpus Juris Civilis. In the 11th century, professors at the University of Bologna, Western Europe's first university, rediscovered Corpus Juris Civilis, and its influence began to be felt across Western Europe. In 1388, the word civil appeared in English meaning "of or related to citizens".^[6] In 1704, civilisation began to mean "a law which makes a criminal process into a civil case." In 1722, deriving probably from the French language, civilisation came to mean "the opposite of barbarism."

[edit] Characterizing civilization

Social scientists have named a number of traits that distinguish a civilization from other kinds of society.^[7] Civilizations have been distinguished by their means of subsistence, types of livelihood, settlement patterns, forms of government, social stratification, economic systems, literacy, and other cultural traits.

All human civilizations have depended on agriculture for subsistence. Growing food on farms results in a surplus of food, particularly when people use intensive agricultural techniques such as irrigation and crop rotation. Grain surpluses have been especially important because they can be stored for a long time. A surplus of food permits some people to do things besides produce food for a living: early civilizations included artisans,priests and priestesses, and other people with specialized careers. A surplus of food results in a division of labour and a more diverse range of human activity, a defining trait of civilizations.

Civilizations have distinctly different settlement patterns from other societies. The word civilization is sometimes defined as "a word that simply means 'living in cities'".^[8] Non-farmers gather in cities to work and to trade.

Compared with other societies, civilizations have a more complex political structure, namely the state. State societies are more stratified than other societies; there is a greater difference among the social classes. The ruling class, normally concentrated in the cities, has control over much of the surplus and exercises its will through the actions of a government or bureaucracy. Morton Fried, a conflict theorist, and Elman Service, an integration theorist, have classified human cultures based on political systems and social inequality. This system of classification contains four categories:

• Hunter-gatherer bands, which are generally egalitarian.
• Horticultural/pastoral societies in which there are generally two inherited social classes;chief and commoner.
• Highly stratified structures, or chiefdoms, with several inherited social classes: king, noble, freemen, serf and slave.
• Civilizations, with complex social hierarchies and organized, institutional governments.^{[citation needed]}

Economically, civilizations display more complex patterns of ownership and exchange than less organized societies. Living in one place allows people to accumulate personal possessions to a greater extent than nomadic people. The development of landed property, or private ownership of the land, is another characteristic of civilizations. Since some people earn a living by doing something other than farming, they must trade their goods and services for food in a market system. Early civilizations developed money as a universal medium of exchange for increasingly complex transactions.

Writing, developed first by people in Sumer, is considered a hallmark of civilization and "appears to accompany the rise of complex administrative bureaucracies or the conquest state."^[9] Traders and bureaucrats relied on writing to keep accurate records. Aided by their division of labor and central government planning, civilizations have developed many other diverse cultural achievements. These include organized religion, development in the arts, and countless new advances in science and technology.

[edit] History of civilization

[edit] Origins

People first practiced agriculture in the Fertile Crescent region ten to twelve thousand years ago during a period called the Neolithic Revolution. People in the first farming villages planted crops, raised domestic animals, and accumulated possessions. This represented a radical change from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle practiced by humans for millenia. As farming became more intensive through activities such as irrigation, settlements grew larger and so did accumulated food surpluses, which were stored in communal storehouses. In Mesopotamia, the storehouses and the surplus food gradually came under the control of administrator-priests, who lived off the stored food and used it to pay others to build communal projects such as irrigation systems and buildings.^[10]

Civilization emerged for the first time during the Uruk period in the Mesopotamian region of Sumer, beginning around 4000 BCE, when Sumerian people expanded their villages and built the first cities. Accompanying this urban revolution were many other innovations which would be mirrored in many later civilizations.

[edit] Growth of other ancient civilizations

[edit] Spread of civilization

[edit] Theories

[edit] Unilineal evolution

[edit] Social darwinism

[edit] Marxism

[edit] Multilineal evolution

[edit] Diffusionism

Even before the close of the nineteenth century, some anthropologists proposed that the main reason for the growth of civilization was not evolution, but cultural diffusion. Unlike the unilineal evolutionists, who saw civilization as a natural stage toward which all societies aspire, the diffusionists saw civilization as a set of ideas that spread from group to group. Cultural traits spread from civilized centers to less urbanized areas through migration, trade, invasion, and religious proselytism, sometimes by force and other times by imitation. Over time civilizations become large culture regions containing many nations and regions but sharing many culture traits. One example isChinese civilization and its influence on Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and other areas. These regions share Confucianism, Mahayana Buddhism, a "Mandarin" class, an educated understanding of Chinese characters, and other traits.

Early diffusionists included German anthropologists Fritz Graebner and Wilhelm Schmidt. They theorized that all human cultures originated from a small number of Kulturkreise or culture circles. As each Kulturkreis interacted with the others, ideas were exchanged and mixed and new cultures arose. This theory is known as culture circles diffusionism.

English anthropologists such as Grafton Elliot Smith and William James Perry, and American William Graham Sumner, proposed a diffusionist model in which ancient Egypt was the source of all civilization. According to this theory, called Heliocentric diffusionism, all civilized ideas spread outward from Egypt.

Like the diffusionists, American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington has treated civilizations as large culture groups. He defines a civilization as "the highest cultural grouping of people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species."]]^[11] Huntington argues that in the twenty-first century, these civilizations will increasingly come into conflict, a theory he calls the clash of civilizations.

Early twentieth-century German philosopher Oswald Spengler,^[12] used the German term Kultur, "culture," to refer to a civilization or culture sphere. He said that a civilization's coherence is based around a single primary cultural symbol. He was especially interested in civilizations' life cycles, which he compared with the birth, life, decline and death or organisms. After one civilization declines, in Spengler's view, it is supplanted by a new civilization with a potent new culture, formed around a compelling new cultural symbol.

In the mid-twentieth century, historian Arnold J. Toynbee also looked at civilizations as broad culture spheres. In his multi-volume work A Study of History, he traced the rise and, in most cases, the decline of 21 civilizations and five "arrested civilizations." Civilizations generally declined and fell, according to Toynbee, because of moral or religious decline, rather than economic or environmental causes.

[edit] Systems theory

Main articles: Genesis of a civilisation and Cradle of civilization

Another group of theorists, making use of systems theory, look at civilizations as complex systems or networks of cities that emerge from pre-urban cultures, and are defined by the economic, political, military, diplomatic, and cultural interactions between them.

For example, urbanist Jane Jacobs defines cities as the economic engines that work to create large networks of people. The main process that creates these city networks, she says, is "import replacement". Import replacement is the process by which peripheral cities begin to replace goods and services that were formerly imported from more advanced cities. Successful import replacement creates economic growth in these peripheral cities, and allows these cities to then export their goods to less developed cities in their own hinterlands, creating new economic networks. So Jacobs explores economic development across wide networks instead of treating each society as an isolated cultural sphere.

Systems theorists look at many types of relations between cities, including economic relations, cultural exchanges, and political/diplomatic/military relations. These spheres often occur on different scales. For example, trade networks were, until the nineteenth century, much larger than either cultural spheres or political spheres. Extensive trade routes, including the Silk Road through Central Asia and Indian Ocean sea routes linking the Roman Empire, Persian Empire, India, and China, were well established 2000 years ago, when these civilizations scarcely shared any political, diplomatic, military, or cultural relations. The first evidence of such long distance trade is in the ancient world. During the Uruk phase Guillermo Algaze has argued that trade relations connected Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran and Afghanistan.^[13] Resin found later in the Royal Tombs of Ur it is suggested was traded northwards from Mozambique.

Many theorists argue that the entire world has already become integrated into a single "world system", a process known as globalization. Different civilizations and societies all over the globe are economically, politically, and even culturally interdependent in many ways. There is debate over when this integration began, and what sort of integration – cultural, technological, economic, political, or military-diplomatic – is the key indicator in determining the extent of a civilization. David Wilkinson has proposed that economic and military-diplomatic integration of the Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations resulted in the creation of what he calls the "Central Civilization" around 1500 BC.^[14] Central Civilization later expanded to include the entire Middle East and Europe, and then expanded to a global scale with European colonization, integrating the Americas, Australia, China and Japan by the nineteenth century. According to Wilkinson, civilizations can be culturally heterogeneous, like the Central Civilization, or relatively homogeneous, like the Japanese civilization. What Huntington calls the "clash of civilizations" might be characterized by Wilkinson as a clash of cultural spheres within a single global civilization. Others point to the Crusades as the first step in globalization. The more conventional viewpoint is that networks of societies have expanded and shrunk since ancient times, and that the current globalized economy and culture is a product of recent European colonialism.

Additionally, it is used in this sense to refer to the global civilization. Such a usage is often found in the context of discussions about globalisation, again often used in a normative sense. Critics of globalisation reject such a coupling of the terms, saying that what is called globalisation is in fact a form of "global corporatisation" and that other forms of globalisation are possible. The descriptive sense of "global civilization" would consider, with William McNeill's thesis of "the Rise of the West," that at least since the age of the great voyages of discovery of Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan, that the world comprises a single socio-economic and political system (see "World Systems Theory"). Recently it has been suggested that there are in fact three waves of the globalisation of civilization.

The First Wave: was associated with technologies of "Wind and Water" energies. Leadership of this phase passed from Spain and Portugal to the Netherlands, and then Britain, in what Lewis Mumford calls the Eotechnic phase.

The Second Wave: was associated with technologies of coal, iron, steel and steam power. (See "Industrial Revolution." Lewis Mumford refers to this as a "Paleotechnic" phase. Leadership was contested between England and France in the first half of this period in the Napoleonic and Revolutionary Wars, linked in part to the contest between old and new technological and social systems.

The Third Wave^[15](of which we are approaching the end), is based upon the technologies of oil, electricity, plastics, chemicals, and the automobile. Mumford refers to this as the age of "Neotechnic" civilization. Like earlier phases, world leadership of this phase was contested, initially by Germany and Britain, then by Japan, the United States, and the Soviet Union.

In each case, the transition between one technology and the next has required an often revolutionary reorganization of society, and these revolutions have had social, economic and political dimensions as well as technological ones.

It is argued that contemporary global civilization is beginning to undergo another transition, beyond the dependence on oil (See "Peak oil") once again towards sustainable or renewable technologies without dependence upon fossil fuels. The current War on Terrorism in this context has been claimed by a number of writers^[16][17][18] to be a part of such a transitional pattern, where existing great powers first try to monopolise the declining stock of depleting strategic resources.

All civilizations, as sedentary cultures, have a problem in that they deplete important local resources in the vicinity of their first settlements. As a result civilizations, if they are to survive, are inherently expansive, as they require to draw resources essential to their survival from progressively further and further away from their core. This leads World Systems Theorists like Immanuel Wallerstein^[19] to propose that civilizations can be geographically divided between a "core," a hinterland or "semi-periphery" and a "periphery," in which the core draws upon the resource base of the other two areas.

According to the World Systems Theorists, the evolution of most civilizations has been summarized as follows:

1. All civilizations start small, establishing their genesis with the creation of state systems for maintaining the elite.
2. Successful civilizations then flourish and grow, becoming larger and larger in an accelerating fashion.
3. They then reach a limiting maximum extent, perhaps managing to hold a degree of stability for a length of time.
4. Competition between states in a civilization may result in one achieving predominance over the others.
5. Dominance may be indirect, or may formalize into the structure of single multi-ethnic empires.
6. Over the long term, civilizations either collapse or get replaced by a larger, more dynamic civilization.

[edit] Postmodernism

[edit] Other views

[edit] Criticism of civilization

[edit] Romanticist criticism

[edit] Anarchist criticism

[edit] Environmentalist and Green criticism

[edit] The future of civilization

[edit] Space civilization

[edit] Societal collapse

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

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