How Civilised is Civilisation?

When you hear or read the word 'civilisation' or 'civilised' what does it make you think? While there is no single definition it's generally seen as a good thing to be civilised. It gives peaceful connotations and the idea of working together well while the flip side is barbarism which hints at violence and incohesion. Civilisation is usually seen as prosperous while barbarians plunder and steal to survive. But if we scratch below the surface is there more to it than that?

^{Image courtesy of @toffer}

The price of civilisation

I was listening to a historian talking about the rise and fall of the Mesopotamian city of Uruk and something he said got me thinking: civilisations rely on slavery and/or the exploitation of an under priviledged working class to function. I really can't refute this. For some to live in comfort compared to everyone having to pitch in as we would in tribal situations, someone else needs to take on a larger share of the labour. Even in the wealthier countries today where slavery has been abolished and most of the population lives relatively well we have merely outsourced that labour exploitation to other countries, so it's just less obvious to us in our day to day lives. We saw an exploited labour force and implented a minimum wage, so companies moved production to countries that were less concerned about exploiting a workforce. We get things cheaper and cheaper while mostly not being aware that the cost of this is is often slave and child labour in other countries.

Surely it's still better than living as barbarians, though? I guess that would depend on how they were living. The definition of barbarians was basically any people not living in what was considered as civilised at the time, for example during the Roman Empire.

Here's an interesting thought experiment. In the early Roman Empire, pre 300 AD, a practice known as 'exposure' was used to control family size. Basically if you had a child you didn't think you could afford to raise you left them out in the elements, usually at the local tip. They either died or were collected by slave traders. For a long time this was considered not only as acceptable, it was considered what civilised people did. Trying to raise every viable child as the barbarians did was considered uncivilised. So who were being civilised and who were being barbaric at this point? After all, trying to raise every viable child could result in the deaths of all of them if scarcity or famine hit, but surely they should at least be given the chance?

Fighting, war mongering and violence would probably be considered barbaric while being peaceable would be considered civilised, but is it as simple as that? Many civilised populations maintain armies to protect themselves, but often also to expand and conquer or absorb the barbarian populations around them. The Romans expanded their empire mostly by offering citizenship to those who joined them, but they would also conquer by force if that offer was turned down. Similarly when Ghenis Khan was forming the Mongol Empire many of the Steppe tribe leaders pledged to follow him due to the strength of his leadership and military. Usually because anyone who didn't had an example made of them when he had everyone in a village slaughtered except for the artisans.

We often complain of the evils of colonialism today, yet the world as we know it has come from people doing this for thousands of years. Empires have risen and fallen for millennia and we know about them because of the collecting and pooling of knowledge that they enable has allowed them to pass knowledge down through the ages and leave behind records and archeological evidence. The Ottomans made libraries of documented information on cultures and knowledge of the people they conquered, assimilated and modified as they expanded their empire. It's hard to dispute that this collation of knowledge isn't a positive thing. After all combining knowledge and skills from multiple cultures has allowed for advances in technology and living conditions for a lot of people. Recording and sharing knowledge also means it's less likely to be lost when disasters strike. The plagues in the period of the Roman Empire wiped out entire families of artisans and some skills, like glass window making, were lost for over a hundred years.

Civilising missions

Around the 15th or 16th century the concept of the civilising mission seemed to come into use as justification for colonising weaker nations. This could come in the form converting the populous to Christianity, particularly in earlier times, or raising their standard of living. When we think of these instances usually what Europeans did in Africa, the Americas and Australia come to mind, but did you know that this was also the excuse used by the Japanese leadership during their occupation of Korea which ended with the second world war? The full scope of what the Koreans endured during this colonisation is posdibly still being brought to light.

Often we cite good or bad aspects from history to argue whether what transpired ultimately led to more positives or negatives, but the reality is that they often go hand in hand. When someone sees only the bad then they use that to give justification to hatred of an entire country or ethnicity of people when the reality is that it it was the actions of their leaders not necessarily the people themselves. Then this justification can be used to commit the same atrocities again to a different ethnicity.

While some might agree with what their leaders are doing, plenty won't and evidence shows that this isn't just a modern phenomenon. People have questioned the justness of war and dehumanising others for thousands of years. I recently saw someone arguing that you can't judge people in history by our standards because they may as well be aliens as they are just so different to modern people. While I agree that they can't be held to the same moral standards as us now I actually believe that they were exactly the same reasoning and emotional people we are today just with a completely different environment, experience and background knowledge base. Even today people from different cultures will do things differently and it may not make any sense to others, but makes perfect sense to them. We still see one another as human, however, and with the same reasoning abilities.

However we look at it, it's a fact that the actions of people in the past, for better or worse, that have culminated in the present. Our actions in the present, for better or worse, will shape the world of the future and we will become a part of history ourselves. Meanwhile, the present me sits here wondering how civilsed civilisation actually is. How about you?