civilization
what does it mean to have civilization? to be civilized? for millennia, that question would have gotten you a blank stare, and maybe a knife in the gut. what the hell was civilization? then about 5000 years ago, we invented it in Mesopotamia and maybe in China and Egypt, and maybe we invented it in the middle of Africa and spread its blessings from there. for Joseph Campbell, civilization included a king and an aristocracy and a military force and astrologers and priests and a city and a form of writing. oh! and a calendar, I think. (maybe that's implicit in having astrologers.) those seemed to have popped up in the Middle East all at once in several places. if I remember correctly, each one of these also arrived with a technology that required cooperation on a scale bigger than the city, for instance a way to grow the food a city requires, especially a city with a military force. (a funny coincidence: with the advent of civilization, human heads got smaller, human brains got smaller. civilized man didn't need to know so much, so homo ignoramus burgeoned.) okay, if this defines a civilization, does it give us a clue about what being civilized means? I claim it does indeed. first and foremost, being civilized means being arrogant - you cain't help but know that your group has solved a problem that others around you didn't even know they had, so your group is clearly superior, and therefore you are. secondly, having a military force means conducting wars and winning wars - otherwise you're a tributary to the civilization, not a civilization itself - so once again your group is obviously superior and so are you. being civilized means having manners, and not recognizing anyone else's manners as manners. being civilized means being a member of the leisure class, the people who don't have to work, for heaven's sake, so they can have important government jobs and run major businesses or serve in the army officer corps or be a bishop or a cardinal or learn something as arcane as astrology. okay, roll forward fifty centuries and what do we have? well, we may not have a king, but we have some form of government, and its important officials come from a leisure class. we may not have astrologers, or may not let them influence major decisions about a nation, for instance, but we have scientists, and we useta listen to them. calendars and budgets run our lives. we have cathedrals and religious officials. we clearly have a military force. we no longer have a city, but we have several to many cities. we have a distinctive technology, or several of them. we still have writing, but we are converting to using computers for our writing needs. so, yes, Joseph Campbell's idea of civilization still applies, and I suspect that "being civilized" hasn't changed much either. but I confess to appreciating "having civilization" or "being civilized". I will never be a member of the leisure class, but I admired Jacqueline Kennedy like most of the rest of us did. I don't have real manners, but I have make-believe manners that we common mortals use in imitation of our betters. I can read and know how to use a computer. I may not be civilized, but I appreciate people who are. I may mock them, but I'm kinda in awe of them too. so three cheers for civilization!
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