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Word Gems 

exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity


 

Will & Ariel Durant

Story Of Civilization

 


 

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"I want to know what were the steps by which men passed from barbarism to civilization." Voltaire

 
 

  • Editor's note: the following excerpts from the Durants' massive work offer insight into the nature and meaning of civilization.

 

 

Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts.

It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life...

A people may possess ordered institutions, a lofty moral code, and even a flair for the minor forms of art, like the American Indians; and yet if it remains in the hunting stage, if it depends for its existence upon the precarious fortunes of the chase, it will never quite pass from barbarism to civilization.

A nomad stock, like the Bedouins of Arabia, may be exceptionally intelligent and vigorous, it may display high qualities of character like courage... but without that simple sine qua non of culture, a continuity of food, its intelligence will be lavished on the perils of the hunt and the tricks of trade, and nothing will remain for the laces and frills, the curtsies and amenities, the arts and comforts, of civilization.

The first form of culture is agriculture. It is when man settles down to till the soil and lay up provisions for the uncertain future that he finds time and reason to be civilized. Within that little circle of security -- a reliable supply of water and food -- he builds huts, his temples and his schools; he invents productive tools, and domesticates the dog... at last himself. He learns to work with regularity and order, maintains a longer tenure of life, and transmits more completely than before the mental and moral heritage of his race.

Culture suggests agriculture, but civilization suggests the city.
In one aspect civilization is the habit of civility; and civility is the refinement which townsmen, who made the word, thought possible only in the civitas or city
. For in the city are gathered, rightly or wrongly, the wealth and brains produced in the countryside; in the city invention and industry multiply comforts, luxuries and leisure; in the city traders meet, and barter goods and ideas; in that cross-fertilization of minds at the cross-roads of trade intelligence is sharpened and stimulated to creative power.

In the city some men are set aside from the making of material things, and produce science and philosophy, literature and art. Civilization begins in the peasant's hut, but it comes to flower only in the towns.

For civilization is not something inborn or imperishable; it must be acquired anew by every generation, and any serious interruption in its ... transmission may bring it to an end. Man differs from the beast only by education, which may be defined as the technique of transmitting civilization...

Three meals a day are a highly advanced institution. Savages gorge themselves or fast." The wilder tribes among the American Indians considered it weak-kneed and unseemly to preserve food for the next day. The natives of Australia are incapable of any labor whose reward is not immediate... There is a mute wisdom in this improvidence... The moment man begins to take thought of the morrow he passes out of the Garden of Eden into the vale of anxiety; the pale cast of worry settles down upon him, greed is sharpened, property begins, and the good cheer of the "thoughtless" native disappears... "Of what are you thinking?" Peary asked one of his Eskimo guides. "I do not have to think," was the answer; "I have plenty of meat." ...

In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply. The cathedral and the capitol, the museum and the concert chamber, the library and the university are the facade; in the rear are the shambles. [Editor's note: the "shambles" were a kind of meat market in the rear of certain ancient-world buildings. The apostle Paul refers to this in his letter to the Corinthians.]

There are no racial conditions to civilization … It is not the great race that makes the civilization, it is the great civilization that makes the people.

Agriculture … led not only to private property but to slavery… [led to] inequality and class divisions… the state arose for the regulation of classes and the protection of property… [Man] associates with
his fellows less by desire than by [necessity]; he does not love society so much as he fears solitude [as] isolation endangers him."

The individual was hardly recognized as a separate entity in natural society; what existed was the family and the clan, the tribe… Only with the coming of private property, which gave him legal status
[see "estate in land, i.e. "standing," a legal status!] did the individual begin to stand out as a distinct reality. [In an egoic world] rights do not come from nature, which knows no rights except cunning
and strength; they are privileges [offered] by the community [to secure] the common good. Liberty is a luxury of security; the free individual is a product and mark of civilization.

Civilization is a temporary interruption of the jungle... it is almost a law… that the wealth that generates a civilization announces its decay. For wealth produces ease as well as art; it softens a
people to the way of luxury and peace, and invites invasion from stronger arms and hungrier mouths
.

Eight years after Hammurabi's death, they inundated the land, plundered it… finally settled down in it as conquerors; this is the normal origin of aristocracies.

For barbarism is always around civilization … ready to engulf it by arms, mass migration, or unchecked fertility. Barbarism is like the jungle; it never admits defeat; waits for centuries to recover lost territory.

Historians have been prejudiced in favor of bloodshed; they found it, or thought their readers would find it more interesting than the quiet achievements of the mind.

A nation is born stoic, and dies epicurean… [early religion] gives men courage to bear pain… the gods are with them… wealth grows… pleasure and ease… seek refuge in every passing delight.

In the very word game "memories of the chase linger in the [egoically thrilling] pursuit of anything weak or fugitive."

Religion does not prosper under prosperity; the senses liberate themselves from pious restraints, and formulate philosophies that will justify their liberation.

The [Islamic] conquest of India … the bloodiest story in history… the Hindus allowed their strength to be wasted in internal division and war… adopted religions which unnerved them for the tasks of life.

Weakened by division, India succumbed to invaders; impoverished by invaders, it lost all power of resistence, and took refuge in supernatural consolations; it argued that both mastery and slavery were superficial delusions, and concluded that freedom … was hardly worth defending in so brief a life… eternal vigilance is the price of civilization. A nation must love peace, but keep its powder dry.

... our knowledge of the past is an occasional gap in our ignorance

Man became free when he recognized … law. That the Greeks, so far as our knowledge goes, were the first to achieve this … freedom in philosophy and government is the secret of their accomplishment.

The life of thought endangers every civilization that it adorns. In the earlier stages of a nation's history there is little thought; action flourishes; men are direct, uninhibited, frankly pugnacious and sexual. As civilization develops, as … laws and morals more and more restrict the operation of natural impulses, action gives way to thought, achievement to imagination … belief to doubt; the unity of character common to animals and primitive men passes away; behavior becomes fragmentary and hesitant, conscious and calculating; the willingness to fight subsides into a disposition [of diplomacy]. Few nations have been able to reach intellectual refinement and esthetic sensitivity without sacrificing so much in virility and unity that their wealth presents an irresistible temptation to impecunious barbarians. Around every Rome hover the Gauls; around every Athens some Macedon.

Undeserved fates come sometimes to individuals, but rarely to nations.

When liberty becomes license, dictatorship is near. The rich, afraid that democracy will bleed them, conspire to overthrow it; or some enterprizing individual seizes power, promises everything to the poor, surrounds himself with a personal army, kills first his enemies and then his friends until he has made a purgation of the state and establishes a dictatorship.

The class war had become bitter beyond control, and had turned democracy into a contest in legislative looting.

Individualism in the end destroys the group, but in the interim it stimulates personality, mental exploration, and artistic creation.

We shall not follow the record of his [Ptolemy III] wars, for though there is drama in the details of strife, there is a dreary eternity in its causes and results; such history becomes a menial attendance
upon the vicissitudes of power, in which victories and defeats cancel one another into a resounding zero
.

When Constatinople fell, Greek literature, philosophy and art reconquered Italy and Europe in the Rennaisance. This is the central stream in the history of European civilization; all other currents are tributaries. 'It was no little brook that flowed from Greece into our city,' said Cicero, 'but a mighty river of culture and learning.' … Said Horace: 'Conquered Greece took captive her barbarous conqueror.'

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it is destroyed from within… Rome was not conquered by barbarian invasion without but by barbarian multiplication within.

We have not fully recovered from the Dark Ages… the ignorance that begets credulity, superstition… the dogmatism that festers into intolerance and Inquisitions… modernity is a cloak put upon medievalism, which secretly remains; and in every generation civilization is the laborious product and precarious obligating privilege of an engulfed minority.

 

 
 

 

Editor's last word:

"Individualism in the end destroys the group, but in the interim it stimulates personality, mental exploration, and artistic creation." 

I am reminded here that the afterlife society of Summerland is a kind of loose confederation of absolutely free individuals, engaged in all manner of scientific and artistic effort, with no superintending government, as such.