Quote Originally Posted by Thorne View Post
In my view, civilization is, quite simply, people learning to get along with one another. People accepting their differences from one another. People realizing that skin color, or religious beliefs, or sexual orientation do not in and of themselves make people bad.
I think that's too narrow a definition, though it's complicated by the fact that we use "civilisation" in two senses, one practical, one moral.

Sticking strictly to the practical, I would define civilisation as any system of social mechanisms that allow people to co-operate on a larger scale than the clan or tribe. The great success strategy of humans is co-operation plus variability. Plenty of species co-operate at all doing the same thing, but humans achieved something greater by co-operating while doing a load of different things - hunting, gathering, making tools, preparing food, minding childen etc, all co-ordinated by a level of social communication so detailed that it needed a special kind of brain to handle it.

But there's a limit to the number of people that can be organised that way. It has been observed that hunter-gatherer clans, once they get past a certain size, will split and some of them move on. It's assumed that this is because their territory won't support more people, but I suspect it's more that the social structure breaks down when there are too many people, and subgroups form spontaneously.

But we know from the Neolithic farming towns that at some point people learnt to hold a bigger group together. They developed structures, ways of organising that didn't depend on everyone knowing everyone else, so that a community could go on co-ordinating its efforts while growing beyond the limits of a tribe and spreading beyond a closed group. The benefit was to enlarge the power of co-ordination plus variability. The bigger the group, the more different specialists it can support, and the better they can get at their specialty; the wider the group's territory, the more different natural resources it can exploit at once. Cultural natural selection favoured the groups that could find ways to stay co-ordinated while growing even bigger and wider spread, from village to town, from town to city with its hinterland of towns, from city-state to nation (and, if the gods spare us, from nation to world.) And those methods of co-ordination are what we call civilisation.

As I said at the start, this is a strictly pragmatic definition and says nothing about whether those methods are good or bad. In practice, they have ranged from democracy to tyranny. But the verdict of history is that tyrannies, though they look superficially more efficient, do not make the best use of human potential, and therefore eventually either fall to or evolve into systems that leave more space for individual growth and initiative.