Civilization is the main ouvre of humanity, our greatest achievement. It sets us apart from animals and primitive savages who don’t even have nuclear bombs or electric dog brushes. The word ‘civilization’ comes from Latin civis, meaning city. We have written about this great institution a while ago. As a rule of thumb, the more urban something is, the more civilized it is.
According to Hungarian Wikipedia, “Civilization is the highest stage of social development or material culture (in any age) in which a socio-economic formation selectively modifies the achievements of previous ages according to its needs, perfecting and further developing.” Being the highest stage of development, civilization certainly aims for the sky!
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Cities are populated by many people, and indeed, crowds are an important part of civilization. A rainforest tribe of thirty can never be as civilized as the Roman plebs in the amphitheatre, calling for the death of a fallen gladiator. Sporting events that draw in large crowds of spectators, such as football matches, are particularly civilized.
Large numbers of Homo sapiens are not, in themselves, enough to make a society fully civilized, however. A truly developed society requires centralized institutions. Opening a window in an office building, the bastion of our civilization, is not a civilized act and often not even possible as the building is equipped with a modern air conditioning system. Drawing water from your own well in a village is similarly undeveloped and unhygienic as there may even be frogs in the well. The civilized way is to install plastic pipes for the wole community and pour a lot of fine-smelling chlorine in the water. Of course, one cannot wish for all this to be free.
Civilization has therefore developed money to function efficiently. Does this mean that those with more money are more civilized? In any case, capital is the driving force of progress. Colossal dams and mega-ports are major features of civilization. In addition to boosting world trade, displaced natives can then build shantytowns, joining urban life, the bloodstream of civilization.
Another important feature of civilization is the division of labour. Áron, an old handyman from rural Transylvania, being skilled in eight trades, is somewhat backward. After finishing a minor electrical job he’d actually fix the walls and tidy up after himself. In contrast, your contractor, Mr. Kovács, employs a bricklayer, a painter and a janitor for the appropriate tasks. Even though you pay him twice as much as Áron, you can rest assured that the work has been done in a civilized manner.
One of the most important features of civilization is technology. The Australian Aborigines were sorely backward, as they could only communicate telephatically with their tribesfolk. Today, they can simply call them on their cell phones. At this point this is only possible from a city but the forest of thousands of cell towers will eventually be extended into the desert, so they will be able to call from home. It’s so easy and convenient. All you need is lithium mines, factories on a few continents, power stations, highways, cargo ships, etc. All the consumer needs is a phone, electricity, a subscription, service and money. When hunting kangaroos, Aboriginees now don’t have to run around like wild men; they can measure their blood pressure and other important physiological variables with a phone strapped to their arm. Which makes possible to check satellite maps everywhere, even in a dark forest. Not to mention the fact that the authorities will always know where you are.
Source: AURELIE LUYLIER, Pixabay
Some people are worried because their every move is being watched by the masters of our civilization, but that’s just paranoia. Giant corporations always look out for our interests, just like political parties. The only exceptions are undemocratic, i.e. uncivilized countries, such as China. Although China is one of the oldest civilizations, in the modern age it lags behind Europe and America in terms of technological development. True, China has built more high-speed railways in twenty years than there are in the rest of the world put together, but that’s only because they want to catch up with us.
Along with many other conveniences, wearing clothes is a necessary part of civilized life. Only backward savages are naked, and, of course, the upper classes at sex parties. The latter deserve it because of all the ways they have assisted in progress. Of course, proper dress changes with the times; at one time, for example, top hats were an indispensable part of civilized attire. Top hats are now considered obsolete, as many of the gentlemen who wore them also owned slaves, which is not politically correct today. The lower classes are now therefore called a work force. This also shows that civilization is evolving and getting better.
Advanced civilizations can be identified not merely by their material culture but also by their institutions. Bedouins are uncivilized not only because they live in the desert, but also because they have no tax inspector. Tax collectors make the machinery of society run more efficiently, as taxes collected from peasants can be used to buy more spy satellites and tanks to protect our peasants from the peasants of the neighboring country. The same is true for the peasants in the neighboring country, so a civilized equilibrium is thus established, with a welcome increase in the number of weapons produced and the profits for the industry.
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Uncivilized tribes had no tax inspectors, police, sanitary inspectors, prison guards, not even a miserable parking ticket man. What kind of society is one where everything is public space and people behave decently on their own? This surely couldn’t have been true. Lest there be any doubt, those savages have been all but wiped out. These primitive people were not only unsophisticated, but also dangerous, occasionally engaging in skirmishes with other tribes, where innocent lives could be lost. In civilization, however, we separate the population into soldiers and civilians. The former can be reduced through “special military operations” while the overpopulation of the latter can be prevented by carpet-bombing open-air concentration camps.
Ok, maybe civilization isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly better than the stone age where there was no netflix or McDonalds!
The argument has been put forth that civilization is actually an evolutionary trap, like the enormous ornamental tail of the peacock. Peahens will not mate with a peacock that doesn’t have one, while this burden consumes unnecessary resources and leaves its owner vulnerable to predators. According to this theory, no human society can compete with the violence of the current civilization, while civilization destroys nature and thus will eventually perish. Others complain that civilization cuts us off from elemental sensations, from sources of pleasure such as walking barefoot in dew grass, the silence of forests, clean air and so on. These Rousseau-type romantics actually assert that we were better off in the wilderness. Well, if they like it so much, they can go back!
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You mean there aren’t any undisturbed places left? Civilization has invaded even the most remote corners of this planet? Even I don’t know the answers to everything.