Quote Originally Posted by leo9 View Post
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.
You have a very important point here. I believe that most people actually use the expression in the moral sense.

Throughout history, many countries have used 'teaching others to be civlized' - meaning 'like us' - as an excuse for conquest. People who consider themselves civilized feel superior to people they consider uncivilized and this is - even in recent times - still an excuse to run them over.

Civilized as in our moral, our religion, our technology, our complex societies.

But it was always about power and resources and money.

There is still this idea today that humans progress towards something better automatically - in spite of Darwin, it is seen as if there is some master plan behind it all. And of course it is our culture that is the superior one - whoever 'we' are - our culture that we must at all costs and with all methods bring to others.

In this discussion we start talking about the kind of society we would like to have, or which we think will come. Much better.

I agree with Thorne about tolerance between humans, and would add respect for other living creatures and for the earth we must all feed off. I would consider civilized a society where fear, greed and hate can only be an individual thing, not something that can for instance make leaders take a country to war. Most wars are based on greed, and some on fear or hate.

I also do not consider the extent of or absent of technology a measure of civilization or of lack of it. It is how we are with each other that will determine the future.
I consider a too technology-dependant society a society heading towards collaps. With all its advantages it also makes us much too weak and vulnerable. A civilized society is a stable society.

Freedom is all important. Without sufficient influence on our own lives we have no human dignity and life has no meaning. Too strong central control makes a society uncivilized, IMO.

But cilivizations tend to be complex, and the more complex, the less freedom. The bigger, the less personal, and the less effect of our natural tribe co-operation. So, as I see it civilizations cannot be too big without without becoming meaningless or falling apart.


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.
Defined like that, are civilizations good or bad?

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 see it, there is a limit to how far this developement should be allowed to go. You end up with using resources faster than they can be regrown, or use them up, and you end up loosing far too much individual freedom and meaning with life.

Money is probably seen as a function of civilization. Yet now that we no longer catch or grow our own individual food, money means that the economical ups and downs determine whether we live or die. Factors now so complicated that noone can overview them, and over which we have little influence, even if our politicians think we do.

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.
How would you characterize the Western societies?