Civilization
[2][3][4][5][6] Civilizations are organized around densely-populated settlements (as with city-states), divided into more or less rigid hierarchical social classes of division of labour, often with a ruling elite and a subordinate urban and rural populations, which engage in intensive agriculture, mining, small-scale manufacture and trade.
[7] Civilizations are characterized with elaborate agriculture, architecture, infrastructure, technological advancement, currency, taxation, regulation, and specialization of labour.
[14] The fundamental treatise is Norbert Elias's The Civilizing Process (1939), which traces social mores from medieval courtly society to the early modern period.
This sees cultures as natural organisms, not defined by "conscious, rational, deliberative acts", but a kind of pre-rational "folk spirit".
[18] In World War II, Leo Strauss, having fled Germany, argued in New York that this opinion of civilization was behind Nazism and German militarism and nihilism.
[24][25] 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.
It took the energy of slaves to plant crops, clothe emperors, and build cities" and considers slavery to be a common feature of pre-modern civilizations.
Suitability of highly productive roots and tubers was in fact a curse of plenty, which prevented the emergence of states and impeded economic development.
A surplus of food results in a division of labour and a more diverse range of human activity, a defining trait of civilizations.
It is possible that food surpluses and relatively large scale social organization and division of labour predates plant and animal domestication.
[41] 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".
[43] The term "primitive," though once used in anthropology, has now been largely condemned by anthropologists because of its derogatory connotations and because it implies that the cultures it refers to are relics of a past time that do not change or progress.
For example, in Australia, British settlers justified the displacement of Indigenous Australians by observing that the land appeared uncultivated and wild, which to them reflected that the inhabitants were not civilized enough to "improve" it.
[43] The behaviours and modes of subsistence that characterize civilization have been spread by colonization, invasion, religious conversion, the extension of bureaucratic control and trade, and by the introduction of new technologies to cultures that did not previously have them.
Civilizations tend to develop intricate cultures, including a state-based decision-making apparatus, a literature, professional art, architecture, organized religion and complex customs of education, coercion and control associated with maintaining the elite.
According to Karl von Habsburg, President of Blue Shield International, the destruction of cultural assets is also part of psychological warfare.
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.
In the European Age of Discovery, emerging Modernity was put into stark contrast with the Neolithic and Mesolithic stage of the cultures of many of the peoples they encountered.
[60][61] The Natufian culture in the Levantine corridor provides the earliest case of a Neolithic Revolution, with the planting of cereal crops attested from c. 11,000 BCE.
[64] Similar pre-civilized "neolithic revolutions" also began independently from 7,000 BCE in northwestern South America (the Caral-Supe civilization)[65] and in Mesoamerica.
[72] This "urban revolution"—a term introduced by Childe in the 1930s—from the 4th millennium BCE,[73] marked the beginning of the accumulation of transferable economic surpluses, which helped economies and cities develop.
The transition from complex cultures to civilizations, while still disputed, seems to be associated with the development of state structures, in which power was further monopolized by an elite ruling class[76] who practiced human sacrifice.
However, this viewpoint been strongly challenged by others such as Edward Said, Muhammed Asadi and Amartya Sen.[94] Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris have argued that the "true clash of civilizations" between the Muslim world and the West is caused by the Muslim rejection of the West's more liberal sexual values, rather than a difference in political ideology, although they note that this lack of tolerance is likely to lead to an eventual rejection of (true) democracy.
[95] In Identity and Violence Sen questions if people should be divided along the lines of a supposed "civilization", defined by religion and culture only.
[96] Although developed in much more depth, Berman's thesis is similar in some ways to that of Urban Planner, Jane Jacobs who argues that the five pillars of United States culture are in serious decay: community and family; higher education; the effective practice of science; taxation and government; and the self-regulation of the learned professions.
The corrosion of these pillars, Jacobs argues, is linked to societal ills such as environmental crisis, racism and the growing gulf between rich and poor.
[97] Cultural critic and author Derrick Jensen argues that modern civilization is directed towards the domination of the environment and humanity itself in an intrinsically harmful, unsustainable, and self-destructive fashion.
Therefore, civilizations inherently adopt imperialist and expansionist policies and, to maintain these, highly militarized, hierarchically structured, and coercion-based cultures and lifestyles.
The current scientific consensus is that human beings are the only animal species with the cognitive ability to create civilizations that has emerged on Earth.
[102] The proposed proto-scientific field "xenoarchaeology" is concerned with the study of artifact remains of non-human civilizations to reconstruct and interpret past lives of alien societies if such get discovered and confirmed scientifically.
