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What is Civilization?

The old master Will Durant begins: "Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation." He goes on to describe four elements that constitute it, one of which is economic activity. I'm bothered by Durant's attempt to answer his question, What is Civilization? Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee also annoyed a lot of people with their verbosity on the subject.

Toynbee described what he called "nomadic civilization" as having failed. Some of us would respond with Durant's question, what is civilization, and also question Toynbee's assertion concerning failure.

Durant writes that civilization "begins where chaos and insecurity end." This has a peculiar ring to it. In places insecurity increased when people became dependent on agriculture for their nutritional sustenance. And with civilization, rather than a guarantee of the social order that Durant associates with civilization, there was a frequent break down of order, in addition to the insecurity regarding invasion by foreigners.

Can we settle on the idea that civilization appeared after people created permanent settlements and started relying on growing food? The word "civilization" derives from the word "cities." This is about cities that today would be considered small towns. At any rate, cities appeared in ancient times accompanied by a growth in population and a greater density in population compared to hunter-gatherer societies. Perhaps we can say that these are the ingredients that make civilization.

As for Durant describing civilization as promoting culture, there has been that among the so-called civilized. But with civilization also came cultural diffusions and a greater diversity of opinion within societies. Promoting aspects of one's culture, rather than a necessary ingredient for civilization, was merely a conservative endeavor. What civilized societies came to need in order to maintain the order that Durant spoke of was tolerance, and this often did not exist.

Some intellectuals in Durant's generation joined Spengler and Toynbee in thinking of civilization as divided among various ethnicities and races. Durant spoke of a Chinese civilization, and he thought of an Indic civilization, although I can't find his use of those exact words. And let us skip exactly how he delineates civilization for the rest of the world. Toynbee, in addition to his nomadic civilization, divided the world into Western, Islamic, Hindu, and Far Eastern civilizations. How useful was this? A century ago there were white people who viewed the world with a Social Darwinistic interest in Westerners succeeding over Asians and Africans. Today we have Islamists concerned about Western influences and who consider themselves at war with the West. They might think of Islamic civilization. And so too do Westerners who believe that a war of civilizations is in the making. Anyone can argue that there is something called an Islamic civilization, but we can rate it as a poor description of what has been happening in the world and, for those who do not want a war of civilizations, what we should want to happen. If one is a believer in an entity called Islamic civilization, where is it uncolored by Western influences?

Like Toynbee, Durant saw various civilizations, and he suggested that civilizations fail. Writing about his own civilization, he claimed that "it must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption in its financing or its transmission may bring it to an end. This idea of that civilizations fail is dubious. Empires had disintegrated, but should we equate that with civilizations declining. Demise of empires, I submit, were improvements. Also across the millennia, political failure has ended dynasties. China suffered political failures across millennia, but if one wants to speak of Chinese civilization, well, it's still with us, big in population big economically, and rising in military strength.

Durant wrote that, "Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul." We might wish to think of civilizations as something else. Durant wrote of morality as a requisite for civilization, that there must be "some unity of basic belief, some faith -- supernatural or utopian -- that lifts morality from calculation to devotion, and gives life nobility and significance despite our mortal brevity." Some of us see in the long history of thriving civilization a lot of moral failure.

Concerning morality, Durant writes: "Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children." This suggests that we older people should instill in the young our values." To the contrary, it should be the hope of older people that the young do it better than they did, and younger people can do this by not imitating the habits of thought of the generations before them. What the younger generation needs is to be able to think for themselves.

Go to Will Durant's What is Civilization?