Civilization and Beyond: Learning from History Part 6

Another aspect of man's aggressions against nature is the wanton destruction of wildlife--like the American bison and the wood pigeon.

Still another example is the extraction from the earth's crust of minerals and metals acc.u.mulated through ages and used to turn out frivolous gadgets or, more disastrously, the materials and machines of civilized warfare. Instead of conserving natural wealth, rationing it and thus extending its use to succeeding generations, western man has burnt it up in the firestorms deliberately kindled during the seven disaster years from 1939 to 1945.

In the course of its existence western civilization has replaced food gatherers, cultivators and artisans by hucksters and professional destroyers of mankind and ravagers of the living s.p.a.ce afforded by the earth's land ma.s.s.

Western civilization has done its most far-reaching disservice to mankind by separating and estranging man from nature. For ages man lived with nature as one aspect of an evolving ecological balance.

Civilization's basic unit--the city--as it sprawls, cuts off man from more and more contacts with the earth and its mult.i.tudinous life forms; with fresh air, sunshine, starshine; with nature's sequences--day and night, the procession of the seasons; with the birth, growth, death animating so many of nature's aspects. The city is man-made. Well planned, properly built and organized, it might have become an ornament beautifying and exalting nature. Page the cities of the West one by one--they are monotonous, ungainly, ugly slums and rookeries set off by an occasional bit of creative architecture.

Western civilization has differed in certain respects from the long line of its predecessors, stretching back through the centuries. In one sense it has matured, ripened, taking its ideas and practices from its nearest of kin. In the course of its life cycle it has already made distinctive contributions:

1. It has become more nearly planet-wide than any of its known forerunners.

2. It has developed unique approaches and controls through its science and its technology, inaugurating the power age by making riotous use of nature's energy sources.

3. It has extended man's conquest of the planet and begun his adventures into s.p.a.ce.

4. It has enlarged the field of human creativity by increasing the number and proportion of men and women trained and experienced in productive and creative enterprises.

5. It has opened the door to study and experimentation in extrasensory perception--man's "sixth" sense.

6. It has made possible an unprecedented increase in the human population of the planet.

7. It has raised its potential for destruction far above and beyond its potential for production and construction.

8. It has brought together, cla.s.sified and indexed the ideas, materials, techniques and generalizations which made possible this study of civilization, its appearances, disappearances and reappearances.

9. Europeans have carried the burdens of western civilization and inherited its disintegrative consequences for so long a period that the fate of western civilization and the fate of present day Europe are closely interwoven.

Western civilization seems to have reached and pa.s.sed the zenith of its lifecycle without achieving the political integration, the stability or the unified authority attained by the Romans and the Egyptians at the high points in their lifecycles.

CHAPTER FIVE

FEATURES COMMON TO CIVILIZATIONS

Each civilization that has left legible records or significant traditions during the past five or six thousand years has made distinctive contributions that modified the culture pattern of its predecessors and its contemporaries. At the same time all of the civilizations have had certain common features that are the characteristic aspects which justify the general definition of civilization presented in the Introduction to this study.

Civilization is the most comprehensive, extensive and inclusive life pattern achieved by terrestrial humanity. Starting locally and following the three basic principles of urbanization, expansion and exploitation, each civilization has charted a course that led from tentative local beginnings through a cycle of growth, maturity, decline, decay and dissolution.

The civilizing process is essentially collective, subordinating the interests of each part to the interests of the whole, while allowing sufficient home rule to enable each part to have the political, economic and cultural advantages enjoyed by the other parts, always excepting the privileged position occupied by the civilization's dominant empire and its nucleus.

Necessarily a civilization is composed of more or less disparate segments, each one (before its inclusion in the collective whole) maintaining a large measure of sovereign independence. Utilizing advanced techniques of communication, exchange, and transportation, the separate sovereign units are coordinated, consolidated, unified and universalized. The result is an aggregate of parts, differing in many local respects, but acknowledging the authority of the power center and contributing material goods and manpower to its support and defense. The main sociological purpose of each civilization has been to impose central authority and universality upon political, economic and ideological diversity.

Every civilization has been confronted with the advantages of unity over diversity. Every civilization has professed its devotion to unity. Every civilization at one or another stage in its development has subordinated unity to the increasingly insistent demands of diversity.

For at least six thousand years one civilization after another has sought to achieve centralization and universality. In every instance of which history provides a legible record, centralized, universalized inst.i.tutions and practices have fragmented into diversity and stubborn localism.

Western civilization is part and parcel of this generalization.

Generation by generation and century by century it has professed and proclaimed the advantages of universality while it yielded to the persistent demands of nationalism, regionalism and localism. Throughout the latter years of the nineteenth century the will to unify gained much ground. The tide turned with the turn of the century. For the first half of the present century the forces of unity and of diversity seemed stalemated. War's end in 1945 saw the shadow of a universal state flicker across the screen of history. With the adjournment of the Bandung Conference in 1955 the shadow dissolved and was replaced by the strident nationalisms that have become an outstanding feature of planetary politics, economics and social organization.

Despite the insistence of reason and experience that strength and stability are the result of unity,--tradition, custom and habit have held human society at the level of political, economic and ideological diversity. Nowhere in history is this generalization more emphatic than in the failure of the European standard-bearers of western civilization to replace a millennium of diversity, discord and conflict by a unified, coordinated, co-existing, cooperating European community.

At its best a civilization is insecure and even unstable, disturbed and upset by an increasing domestic struggle for preferment and power that includes rivalry, compet.i.tion, revolt, rebellion, civil war and wars of self-determination carried on by una.s.similated regional, provincial and colonial elements. From beyond their frontiers civilizations have been a.s.sailed by rival aspirants for power, by armed bands in search of plunder or by migrating peoples seeking greener pastures. All of these forces have held the ground for diversity and barred the way to universality.

Another factor of great consequence leading to the instability of civilizations has been the concentration of wealth, power, privilege, comfort and security in the hands of a minority, in sharp contrast with poverty and insecurity among the less well-placed majority. Generally, the privileged minority has been relatively small and the exploited majority overwhelmingly large.

Still another disturbing factor in each civilization is the transformation of its military arm from a means of defense against external enemies into a major factor in the direction of domestic affairs. The professional military build-up has frequently usurped the state power and became king-maker by virtue of its monopoly of weapons, organization, and its highly trained personnel of professional destroyers and killers.

Upset by one or another of these disturbing and disruptive forces, civilized populations have panicked and retreated from their collectiveness toward more localized, more fragmented, less social and more individual life patterns. Such a retreat rounds out the later phases of a cycle of civilization--the phases of decline and final dissolution.

Civilizations perish in the first instance because of internal contradictions and conflicts, the struggle to grab, monopolize, and keep wealth, status, power.

They perish because of the division of the nucleus and its a.s.sociates and dependencies between those who work for a living, those who have an unearned income and those parasites who scrounge for a living. They perish because of the hard cla.s.s and caste lines that grow out of economic contradictions; because of the development of a social pyramid, layer above layer, until the summit is reached where there is standing room for only a few. Competent, talented persons may rise from level to level in this pyramid. A political and social bureaucracy develops which feeds at the public trough. Then comes a bitter struggle to get both feet in the trough and keep them there side by side with an equally determined effort to exclude outsiders and other intruders. An army of volunteers and novices is converted into a military establishment which becomes a state within the state, extending its control until it makes policy, selects top leaderships and carries on its internal feuds and wars of succession dividing the defense forces and using them for partisan purposes. Overhead costs rise; deficits in the public treasury grow; so does public debt. Inflation follows, and the debas.e.m.e.nt of the currency. Levies are made on private wealth for public purposes. There is expropriation of the property of political enemies. Espionage, secret agents, the growth of informers become part of the society, along with the use of a.s.sa.s.sination as a political weapon, the increase of violence and crime, and eventually, a flight from the cities.

This tragic enumeration only skims the surface of the many and various aspects of a situation that reaches its breaking point in civil war, famine, pestilence and eventually in depopulation.

Social dissolution is accelerated by provincial revolts against central authority; by survival struggle between the empires which were coordinated and consolidated into the civilization; by revolt in the subordinate and dependent segments of the civilization; by rivalry and conflict between racial, cultural and political sub-groups forced into the civilization, held there by coercion, policed by armed force and taking the first opportunity to win political independence and self determination.

While the momentum for expansion lasted, the civilization grew in wealth and power. When it waned, disintegration set in. Changelessness seems to be impossible in a social group. A civilization either expands or withers, builds up or falls to pieces.

Starting from one or more local groups, each civilization has reached out "to conquer the world", occupy it, organize it, dominate it, exploit it, perpetuate itself. In each case expansion, occupation, domination and exploitation are limited by human capacity (human nature); by the relative brevity of a single human life; by the extreme variations in the capacity of successive leaders. It is limited by geography; by the means of transportation and communication; by overhead costs that increase geometrically as the civilization expands arithmetically; by the means of delegating responsibility; by accounting devices, available raw materials and labor power; by power struggles inside the ruling oligarchies; by the failure to maintain a balance between centerism and localism; by growing local demands for self-determination; by the invasion of nomads seeking to plunder the tempting honey pot at the nucleus of the civilization.

Such limitations are political, economic and sociological. Psychological forces are also at work. The vigor and vitality of the early builders gradually spends itself. The will to austerity and the sense of loyalty and social responsibility are diffused and diluted. Bureaucracy degenerates into a rat race. The paralysis of parasitism replaces the will to power. Physical gratification gains priority over the service of the G.o.ds. Consistently, through its entire written history, civilization has been built upon what the civil law of all nations calls "robbery with violence". In every instance when the robbers have grabbed everything in sight, and gorged to the point of physical satiety, they fall to quarreling among themselves or turn with boredom and disgust from the whole sodden mess of discord, disorder and degeneration.

Each step, from the establishment of an urban nucleus of expansion, through the building of rival empires to the final struggle for supreme power, involves the violent subordination of lesser interests to the interests of one supreme authority. Violence takes precedence over persuasion and negotiation. In each case the final appeal is to armed combat using the most sophisticated weapons available.

During the "time of troubles" which overtakes each civilization, war and the threat of war become normal aspects of domestic and international relations. A specialized war-making bureaucracy is organized; war plans are made; war games (rehearsals) are carried on, and wars are fought as a means of determining which nation or combination of nations shall have access to raw materials and markets, dominate the trade routes, control the weaker peoples, own and exploit the colonies.

To the victor, war is the means of extending national or imperial frontiers and legalizing expansion at the expense of the vanquished.

Defeat in war leads to the imposition of indemnities, the payment of tribute, the transfer of territory to the victor and in extreme cases the extermination of the defeated nations or empires.

Settlements imposed by violence and policed by victors lead to resentment, antagonism, hatred and the build-up of a desire for revenge, including the restoration to the vanquished of lost territories. The logical outcome of such a situation is preparation for a war of independence by the vanquished, countered by military occupation, rigid suppression, and exploitation by the victors in the previous struggle.

War is taken for granted as an instrument of policy. It is employed by civilized nations and empires as a means of expansion. Wars of independence and rest.i.tution follow conquest, dismemberment and annexation. Civilized nations and empires prepare for war and wage war as a normal aspect of civilized life.

Civilization, and in particular western civilization, is a time-bomb, built to detonate and scatter its fragments far and wide. It is a type of b.o.o.by trap in which humanity has been caught periodically and horribly mangled. Without exception, each civilization has contained the forces and equipment needed for its own annihilation. At no time reported by history has this formulation been more obvious than during the decades immediately following war's end in 1945. Destructivity was lifted to new levels of efficiency by electronic communication, the tank and the airplane. It was further escalated by atomic fission and nuclear fusion. Advances in science and technology had made dramatic increases in the tempo of production and construction. Utilization of atomic energy had stepped up destructivity to the nth power.

Based on a.s.sumptions that oft-repeated experience has proved to be false and misleading, civilization in the 1970's is unstable and insecure.

Most civilizations are strangled in their cradles or plundered and demolished in the course of the never-ending political, economic and military conflicts which have marked and marred civilizations since the dawn of history. The national and imperial survivors of these struggles in every known instance have been largely or wholly led by military adventurers and plunderers in search of booty, fame and power. With professional plunderers, destroyers and murderers occupying the seats of power, it is only a question of time and occasion before rising overhead costs and the misfortunes of war result in their overthrow and replacement by better organized, better armed invaders who slaughter and enslave their predecessors and usurp and abuse their power. Of necessity, civilizations are self-destructive, built as they are on the ebb and flow of power struggle.

Successive conflicts involve an indefinite volume of overhead costs, which grow with the intensity and extent of the expansive survival struggle, creating a series of crises along a path that leads to self-destruction and the return of the experimenters to a condition of pre-civilized self-containment.

We in the West, looking back on our own immediate history, refer to this pre-civilized status as the Dark Ages. Actually, such Dark Ages are the transition stages between two periods of experiments with the building of civilizations. In view of this oft-repeated experience, modern man must look upon an epoch of civilization not as a way of life, but an adventure of suicidal self-degradation and ultimate self-destruction.

Each cycle of civilization has had its peculiarities, determined by the geographical and historical factors surrounding its origin and development. Yet all have had features in common. Among the common features we would list:

1. A revolutionary movement within the societies under consideration. In each experiment with civilization the culture pattern was transformed from pastoral and/or agricultural to a culture based on trade, commerce and finance; from rural to urban; from simple to complex; from local toward universal.