The Achievement of Columbus

Monday

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Christopher Columbus (31 October 1451 – 20 May 1506)

There is a list on Wikipedia of seventy European and American voyages of scientific exploration from the French Geodesic Mission of 1735-1739 to the Valdivia mission of 1898-1899. This list does not include the voyages of exploration during the Age of Discovery, but these voyages of exploration, while not organized for strictly scientific purposes, did constitute, among other things, a form of scientific research. One could say that exploration is a form of experimentation, or one could say that experimentation is a form of exploration; in a sense, the two activities are mutually convertible.

Late medieval and early modern voyages of discovery were undertaken with mixed motives. Among these motives were the motives to explore and to discover and to understand, but there were also motives to win new lands for Christendom and to convert any peoples discovered to Christianity, to find riches (mainly gold and spices), to obtain titles of nobility, and to seize political power. Columbus sought all of these things, but it is notable that, while he did open up the New World to Christian conversion, economic exploitation, and the unending quest for power, he achieved virtually none of these things for himself or for his heirs, despite his intentions and his efforts. Columbus’ lasting contribution was to navigation and discovery and cartography, while others exploited the discoveries of Columbus to receive riches, glory, and titles.

Although I can attempt to assimilate the voyages of Columbus to the scientific revolution, there is no question that Columbus conceptualized his own life and his voyages in providential terms, and his motives were only incidentally scientific if scientific at all. Certainly Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and others also had mixed motives, and indeed a mixed mindset arising from the collision of a medieval conceptual framework with early modern discoveries that added to this conceptual framework while challenging it, and eventually destroying it. Of these early modern pioneers, Columbus had the greatest sense of mission — the idea that he was a man of a great destiny — and perhaps it was this sense of mission that prompted him to extract such spectacular concessions from the Spanish crown: the title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea and Governor General of islands discovered and these titles to be inherited in perpetuity by his heirs. If Columbus’ plan had unfolded according to his design, the entirety of the Americas today would still be ruled by the descendants of Columbus.

The Age of Discovery was part of the Scientific Revolution, the leading edge of the scientific revolution, as it were, thus part of the origins story of a still-nascent scientific civilization. Today we still fall far short of being a properly scientific civilization, and how much further the European civilization of the time of Columbus fell short of this is obvious when we read Columbus’ own account of his explorations and discoveries, in which he insists that he found the route to India and China, and he insists equally on the large amount of gold that he found, when he had, in fact, discovered very little gold. Despite this, Columbus is, or deserves to be, one of the culture heroes of a scientific-civilization-yet-to-be no matter how completely he failed to understand what he accomplished.

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To celebrate Columbus Day I visited one of my favorite beaches on the Oregon coast, Cape Meares. While yesterday, Sunday, was stormy all day, with strong winds and heavy rain, today was beautiful — warm with no wind, a blue sky, and even the ocean was not as cold as I expected when I walked in the surf. When I arrived there were only three people on the beach besides myself; when I left, there were about ten people on the beach.

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Happy Columbus Day!

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When a Civilization Retreats

Thursday

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A Case Study of Norse Civilization

Summer in the Greenland coast circa year 1000 by Jens Erik Carl Rasmussen (1841–1893)

And Some Reflections on the Methodology of the Study of Civilization

Usually when a civilization goes into decline, its geographical extent contracts at the same time as its social and political institutions lose complexity, so that contraction and loss of complexity are correlated for causal reasons. One could distinguish the cases in which territorial contraction (perhaps caused by aggression by a neighboring power) causes loss of institutional complexity, and those cases in which the loss of institutional complexity causes the loss of territory.

Viking exploration in the North Atlantic.

While the correlation of institutional collapse and territorial contraction is a common one of decline, there may be cases in which geographical contraction can be isolated from loss of institutional complexity, so that a civilization might experience geographical contraction without loss of institutional complexity, or loss of institutional complexity without experiencing geographical contraction. In the latter case of a loss of complexity without geographical contraction, the sudden, catastrophic failure of a civilization would fulfill this condition, as such a sudden and catastrophic failure would leave no time for the civilization to contract. The former case of geographical contraction without loss of institutional complexity is what I have in mind in invoking the idea of civilization in retreat.

Odin riding the eight-legged horse Sleipnir from an 18th century Icelandic manuscript.

If I can further invoke Norse civilization as a distinct historical entity, more comprehensive than Viking civilization, as it would have spanned both the Viking period and the period of early Christian Scandinavia, before the Scandinavian kingdoms were more closely integrated into continental European civilization, we could then speak of a period of civilization in northern Europe comprising almost a thousand years of largely autonomous civilizational development. The construct of Nordic civilization would also span the difference between the partially nomadic Viking civilization, with its central project to be found in voyaging, raiding, and trading, and the later more settled, Christian iteration, in which the distinctive mythology of Scandinavia was abandoned, as was the voyaging, raiding, and trading for the most part.

Norse civilization during the Viking period expanded west across the North Atlantic during the period that we now call the Medieval Warm Period (or the Medieval Climate Optimum), from about 950 to 1250 AD. These unusual conditions allowed Norse longships to cross the North Atlantic and to established colonies in Greenland and L’Anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland, thus making it all the way to North America. The Norse presence on Greenland and Newfoundland was never large — we could say that it was not demographically significant, unlike, e.g., the Norse presence in Iceland — but the Norse settlements on Greenland endured for hundreds of years (from about 980 to 1409 AD), with several thousand residents and about four hundred farms identified by archaeologists. While the earlier warm period made travel and agriculture in the North Atlantic possible, the subsequent cooling known as the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850) made both more difficult.

Viking ruins on Greenland.

We can imagine an alternative history in which the climate optimum endured for a longer period of time, and Norse settlements in Greenland and Newfoundland grew into cities and eventually into an outpost of Norse civilization capable of surviving through adverse climate conditions, and which could work its way down the coast to the bulk of the Americas, in the same way that the Spanish, and later the Dutch, British, French, and Portuguese explored north and south from Columbus’ first landings in the Caribbean. Norse civilization continued on Iceland, and one could argue that it entered its most brilliant period even as the territorial extent of Norse civilization was contracting, as most of the Icelandic saga literature was written during the 13^th and 14^th centuries, after the end of the Medieval Warm Period, when we can infer that life on Iceland became more difficult than it had been in preceding centuries.

An early map of Iceland.

As with the later Homeric account of heroes during the Greek dark ages, the Icelandic saga literature was written hundreds of years after the fact to celebrate the deeds of earlier men, though the Viking protagonists of many of these sagas are only distantly related (in a literary sense) to the heroic paradigm among the Greeks. What is consistent is that the deeds and achievements of men during a period of marginal literacy were later recounted during an age of more established literacy, and that deeds of Norse warriors were celebrated in Skaldic poetry as the deeds of Greek warriors were celebrated in Homeric poetry.

A portal at the Urnes stavkirke decorated in the Viking style.

The history of Norse civilization taken whole involves the submergence of its earlier form — we could say that the Christianization of the Scandinavians was a process of submergence that unfolded over almost five hundred years, and, after that process was complete, Scandinavia was fully incorporated into continental European civilization and no longer represented a distinct civilization. In other words, Norse civilization underwent a complete institutional transformation — the transformation of its economic infrastructure (from raiding and trading to manorial agriculture), its conceptual framework (from a framework inherited from iron age paganism to the template provided by post-Axial Christendom), and its central project (from Norse mythology to Christian mythology) — and, by the time that transformation was complete, Norse civilization had vanished. Either Norse civilization was then extinct, or it had become permanently submerged.

There is considerable evidence of the period during which ideas of Viking mythology and Christianity were both found in Norse society (i.e., the period of institutional transformation). There is a casting mould with spaces for two crosses and one Thor’s hammer (above), so that an enterprising manufacturer of jewelry could serve both the pagan and Christian markets (cf. Christianity comes to Denmark). Both headstones and grave goods have both pagan and Christian symbols. The earliest Christian art in Scandinavia is Viking in character, as in the Jelling stone depiction of Christ surrounded by elaborate woven motifs found in Viking art; such patterns are also found in the carved decoration of Stave churches in Norway, especially at Urnes. It has also been observed that some jewelry of the period can pass as either a cross or Thor’s hammer (cf. Thor’s Hammers Disguised as Crucifixes), which could constitute a subtle form of resistance against imposed Christianity (below).

The conceptual framework of Christendom that Viking civilization took over with Christianization was more complex than the conceptual framework of the Vikings themselves, so that the transformation within Norse society involved an increase in complexity of the conceptual framework. Christianity by this time already possessed a millennium of Christian-specific scholarship, as well as possessing a growing network of universities in continental Europe that were in the process of assimilating the intellectual heritage of classical antiquity, and synthesizing this with the Christian tradition.

Christ as depicted on the Runestone erected by Harald Bluetooth.

The economic infrastructure of the Vikings was complex, with trade networks extending from Greenland to Constantinople; no trading network of this scope and scale could have survived over hundreds of years without considerable intelligent management. Whether the transition to manorial agriculture represented a decrease in economic complexity, once the Norse were no longer free to plunder from other Christian peoples, is a question that could only be answered by a detailed survey and comparisons of the economic institutions of these two phases of Norse civilization. However, it should be observed that, shortly after Christianization, Scandinavians were drawn into the trading network of the Hanseatic League, so that it is likely that native commercial talent and any remnant of trading expertise from the Viking period would have been funneled into this outlet with little loss of complexity. (We do not at present have a method for assessing the economic complexity of historical societies, though there are many possible measures that might be adopted; considerable research would be involved in the application of any metric chosen as a proxy for economic complexity.)

The author with another side of the runic stone in Jelling, Denmark, May 1988.

The central project of Viking mythology and Christian mythology are probably within the same order of magnitude of complexity. The considerable advantage that Christianity had in terms of an explicitly elaborated theology belongs to the conceptual framework rather than to the central project proper. That great distinction between the two is qualitative, rather than quantitative. Christianity belongs to the class of post-Axial Age religious traditions (like Buddhism before and Islam after) that emphasized the transformation of the individual moral consciousness upon conversion, and which actively invested resources in proselytization, in order to more effectively and widely attain that transformation of the individual moral consciousness, achieving a networking of the faithful through shared personal experience. Viking mythology belongs to a tradition of belief still continuous from the Neolithic, and, before that, continuous with the Paleolithic and indeed with the origins of humanity, in which the ordinary business of life is rendered sacred through ancient rituals of unknown origin. There is no conception of the transformation of the individual moral consciousness, and virtually no conversion or proselytization. The argument could be made that these traditions are incommensurable, but by objective measures it would be difficult to say that one mythological tradition is more complex than the other (though it could be argued that post-Axial traditions involve greater moral complexity).

A carved stone grave marker outside the ruins of Lindisfarne Priory depicts a row of Viking raiders.

Viking civilization was expansionary from at least 789 (with the Viking attack on the Isle of Portland) through the early years of the 11th century, when Christianization began the transformation of Viking civilization into Norse Christian civilization. Arguably, Christian civilization was expansionary from 312 AD (the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, when Constantine the Great came into complete control of the Roman Empire, until the late 19^th or early 20^th century (with the final efflorescence of expansionary Christianity being the “muscular Christianity” of the British Empire). While it is relatively easy to understand how the exhausted paganism of late antiquity gave way before a youthful and energetic Christianity, it is more difficult to understand the conversion of the Vikings by a faith already a thousand years old. The longer expansionary trajectory of a larger and more complex Christian civilization may explain why the vigorous paganism of the Vikings gave way to Christian conversion.

Viking civilization ceased to be expansionary at some time in the 11th century, and with the onset of the Little Ice Age the territorial extent of that civilization, now transformed into Norse Christian civilization, contracted. The final date we have for the Norse on Greenland is 1409, though it is believed that some of the settlements may have continued to about 1500 (cf. McGovern, T. H. 1980. Cows, harp seals, and churchbells: Adaptation and extinction in Norse Greenland. Human Ecology, 8(3), 245–275. doi:10.1007/bf01561026). In other words, records of the Norse in Greenland suggest that there were Norse still living in Greenland up to the time that Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World, inaugurating a new period in human history. I find it a remarkable reflection that as one era of European settlement of the New World was coming to an end, another era of European settlement of the New World was only beginning.

When Columbus sailed for the New World there are probably still Norse settlers living on Greenland.

But there is more that can be gleaned from the experience of Norse civilization (if we allow such a construction) than its contraction simultaneous with Iberian expansion. I began this essay with the idea of using the example of the Norse retreat from Greenland and Newfoundland as an example of the retreat of a civilization from its territorial maximum, without loss of institutional complexity, but the history of the expansion and contraction of Norse civilization suggests lessons for the method of the study of civilization overall.

Of methods for the study of civilization Johann P. Aranson wrote:

“No representative author has ever suggested that civilizational analysis should develop a methodology of its own. There are no good grounds for attempting anything of the kind.”

“Making Contact and Mapping the Terrain” by Johann P. Arnason, in Anthropology and Civilizational Analysis: Eurasian Explorations, edited by Johann P. Arnason and Chris Hann, Albany: SUNY Press, 2018, p. xvi

Aranson’s point is not that we shouldn’t study civilization on its own merits, but the study of civilization is intrinsically inter-disciplinary and therefore no methods unique to the study of civilization need be formulated. I reject this claim. The most obvious example of a methodology specific to the study of civilization is the comparative method. Philip Bagby subtitled his Culture and History, “Prolegomena to the Comparative Study of Civilization.” Indeed, there is a journal specifically devoted to this, the Comparative Civilizations Review published by The International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (ISCSC). A 1996 paper in this journal, “Methodological Considerations for the Comparative Study of Civilizations” by John Mears (Mears, John. 1996. “Methodological Considerations for the Comparative Study of Civilization,” Comparative Civilizations Review: Vol. 34: No. 34, Article 2), highlights the concern for methodology. This would seem to be a paradigm case of civilizational analysis developing a methodology of its own, but the fact that there is so little communication between ISCSC and scholars who now use the term “civilizational analysis” to describe their work is typical of the extreme Balkanization of the study of civilization. The historians don’t read the sociologists, the sociologists don’t read the anthropologists, and the anthropologists only read those archaeologists who are counted as part of the “four-field approach” to anthropology.

One could argue that there is nothing about the comparative method that is distinctive about civilization; taxonomists have been discussing comparative anatomy for centuries. This is true. One also could make the claim that what is distinctive is that the object of comparison is civilization, and not some other object of knowledge. This is true also. But perhaps this is not a fruitful line of inquiry, so we will leave it for now, marked for possible consideration at a later date.

Whether or not the comparative method in the study of civilization is a distinctive methodology, and whether or not it is a distinctive methodology for the study of civilization in particular, and, as a distinctive methodology, constitutes a methodology specific to the study of civilization, my above exposition of the concept of Norse civilization, which is comprised of both Viking civilization and distinctively Norse Christian civilization, does suggest a methodology peculiar to the study of civilization.

We can distinguish two movements of thought in the attempt to capture the picture of a civilization, which I will call upward construction and downward analysis (not the best terminology, I will acknowledge, but hopefully the meanings will be intuitively obvious once explained). In upward construction, we ascend from the historical particularity of a given civilization to more comprehensive civilizational formations of which the civilization from which we started is a part, or an expression. In downward analysis, we descend from the formation of civilization with which we began to some civilizational minimum that represents one expression (usually one among many) of the formation with which we began.

In the spirit of upward construction, we have already brought together Viking civilization and Norse Christian civilization into a larger whole of Norse civilization of which both were a part. Continuing the constructive ascent, we would show Norse civilization as a part of European civilization, European civilization as a part of western civilization, and western civilization as a part of planetary civilization. At our present stage of development, upward construction terminates at the planetary scale, although if humanity becomes a spacefaring multi-planetary species, upward construction will expand into more comprehensive formations of civilization beyond the planetary.

Reconstruction of a Viking settlement at L’Anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland.

In the spirit of downward analysis, we descend to the smallest units of civilization within Norse civilization (or any civilization so subjected to analysis), so that we might identify a Newfoundland Norse civilization or a Greenland Norse civilization. The Secrets of the Dead episode “The Lost Vikings” called the Norse settlements on Greenland a “once prosperous civilization,” so this is not unprecedented. While few would be likely to individuate a distinctive Newfoundland Norse civilization, probably there would be little objection to identifying a distinctive Icelandic Norse civilization. The details of our definition of civilization — specifically, the quantification of institutions — would determine the civilizational minimum by which we would individuate a distinctive civilization.

Formulating the ideas of upward construction and downward analysis within what I have called orders of civilization, constructive ascent is the passage from civilization of the zeroeth order to civilization of the fourth order (or some fragment of this passage, say, from civilization of the first order to civilization of the second order), while analytic descent is the passage from civilization of the fourth order to civilization of the zeroeth order (or some fragment of this passage, say, from civilization of the third order to civilization of the second order). The first movement of thought, upward construction, brings us to more comprehensive formulations of civilization, while the second movement of thought, downward analysis, brings us to less comprehensive formulations, and ultimately to formations below the threshold of civilization and therefore what I have called civilization of the zeroeth order.

These methods of upward construction and downward analysis, when formulated in terms of the orders of civilization (which is a conceptual framework unique to the study of civilization), constitutes a methodology distinctive to the study of civilization, and the grounds for this methodology are that we need a way to explicitly and systematically discuss hierarchies with any taxonomy of civilization.

In the Mears paper noted above, Mears begins: “Any discussion of comparative approaches to the study of civilizations should begin with the problem of taxonomy.” I have implicitly followed this imperative, but I have also recognized that we cannot construct a systematic taxonomy without a consistent definition of civilization. I have defined a civilization as an economic infrastructure joined to a conceptual framework by a central project. Given this definition, I can produce a taxonomy of civilizations, and, given a taxonomy of civilizations, we can work our way up or down the taxonomy by means of upward construction or downward analysis. I have employed these methods to distinguish formations of civilization as it has appeared and developed among the Scandinavian peoples, from Neolithic proto-civilization through Viking civilization, Norse Christian civilization, and its eventual submergence within western civilization. The submergence of Norse civilization within western civilization could be called Norse para-civilization (which serves to give further content to the idea of para-civilization). This conceptual framework and its associated methods can be similarly employed in the analysis of other traditions of civilization.

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Case Studies in Civilization

1. The Seriation of Western Civilization

2. Riparian Civilizations

3. Civilizations of the Tropical Rainforest Biome

4. When a Civilization Retreats: A Case Study in Norse Civilization

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Orders of Civilization

Tuesday

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Yax Nuun Ahiin I, installed as king of Tikal by Siyaj Kʼakʼ in 379 AD.

Some time ago in a grab-bag post, Thinking about Civilization, I introduced a number of ideas I had been entertaining about civilization. One of these ideas was a distinction among what I called orders of civilization, and although I was a bit hesitant about this, I have subsequently used this idea in several posts, including Suboptimal Civilizations, Addendum on Suboptimal Civilizations, and Self-Transcendence and Developmental Stages of Civilization.

Here is now I initially laid out my orders of civilization:

● Civilization of the Zeroth Order is the order of prehistory and of all human life and activity and comes before civilization in the strict sense.

● Civilization of the First Order are those socioeconomic systems of large-scale organization that supply the matter upon which history works; in other words, the synchronic milieu of a given civilization, a snapshot in time. (Iterated, civilization of the first order is a cluster, where the civilizations of the cluster exist simultaneously.)

● Civilization of the Second Order is an entire cycle of civilization, from birth through growth to maturity and senescence unto death, taken whole. (Iterated, civilization of the second order is a series, where the civilizations in the series exist sequentially.)

● Civilization of the Third Order is the whole structure of developmental stages of civilization such that any particular civilization passes through, but taken comprehensively and embracing all civilizations within this structure and their interactions with each other as the result of these structures. (Clusters and series are part of the overall structure of civilization of the third order.)

I have continued to have misgivings about whether this is a useful analytical tool in the study of civilization up until a couple of days ago, when I suddenly saw how it can be used to unwind an old problem — at least, an old problem for me. The problem in question is that of comparing civilizations so that the comparison is apples-to-apples and not apples-to-oranges. Once given a definition of civilization (which I formulate in terms of the institutional structure of large-scale social organization), all civilizations so defined have the definiens in common, and so any comparison among them is, in this sense, an apples-to-apples comparison. But the class of all civilizations can be decomposed in many ways, yielding subclasses of civilizations, and some of these can be importantly different so that we need to take account of them. What is the best way to decompose the class of all civilizations into subclasses? What decomposition yields the greatest analytical clarity?

The decomposition of the class of all civilizations that yields the greatest analytical clarity is that decomposition that allows us to give a systematic account of the inter-relationships among diverse civilizations in a way that employs a unified and coherent conceptual framework. What constitutes a unified and coherent conceptual framework is the topic for a treatise on the philosophy of science, but, intuitively, we know that we want clear, unambiguous concepts, a reasonable degree of parsimony, and classes defined by concepts that overlap very little or not at all, so that the decomposed class is exhaustively divided into its subclasses, with nothing left over and nothing that falls under two or more classes. The conceptual framework should also clearly exhibit the relationships among subclasses; when we employ the conceptual framework in question, we should know why and how the classified entities are in the classifications that they are in.

With the above in mind, I will revise my orders of civilization as follows:

● Civilization of the Zeroth Order Non-civilizations in the sense of being proto-civilizations or para-civilizations.

● Civilization of the First Order Civilization understood synchronically.

● Civilization of the Second Order Civilization understood diachronically.

● Civilization of the Third Order The development of civilization within a geographical region that involves both series and clusters in interaction.

● Civilization of the Fourth Order The development of civilization on a planetary scale.

These four orders of civilization could be further extended to five or more orders in the event of a spacefaring civilization that transcends planetary history.

The above revision isn’t all that different from my first formulation, but I needed to clean it up (and may need to further clean it up) in order to make the following point, which is primarily what I want to communicate: the institutional structure of civilization can be found at and within each order of civilization, and these institutional structures are distinct at each level, but directly related to the institutional structures at lower or higher orders. What this means is that there is an economic infrastructure, a conceptual framework, and a central project that inheres in the 0^th, 1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th orders of civilization, each of these institutional structures is distinct from the institutional structures at the other orders, and each institutional structure is related to the institutional structures of the other orders.

What this means is that, in a sufficiently complex historical milieu of civilizations, there could be a nascent central project of civilization of the 0^th order, a synchronically understood central project of a single civilization of the 1^st order, a diachronically understood central project of a single civilization of the 2^nd order, undergoing development and manifesting itself differently in distinct synchronic milieu, a central project of the 3^rd order relevant to multiple related civilizations, whether two or more civilizations within a geographical cluster, two more civilizations in a series, or more complex historical patterns of cluster/series or series/cluster (clusters of civilizations evolve over time, a series of civilizations may diverge into a cluster of civilizations, or a cluster may coalesce into a single civilization), and a central project of the 4^th order that describes the totality of planetary-scale civilization over the totality of its lifespan. These same considerations hold true for the other institutional structures of civilization, meaning they hold true also for the economic infrastructure and the conceptual framework.

Now, some examples, so I’m not just dealing in abstractions. If we take a snapshot of some civilization at a moment in time, say, the Mayan early classic period, or, even more narrowly, the arrival of Siyaj Kʼakʼ at Tikal in 378 AD, we can analyze the institutional structures at this snapshot in time and delineate the economic infrastructure, conceptual framework, and the central project. This is civilization of the 1^st order. If we take the entire history of Mayan civilization, from the earliest pre-classic period to the Spanish conquest, this is civilization of the 2^nd order, which can be sequenced with the Mayan archaic period (its proto-civilization, i.e., civilization of the 0^th order) and with Mayan cultural continuity after the Spanish conquest (its para-civilization, i.e., also civilization of the 0^th order). The central project as it is exhibited over this historical development is distinct from the central project of the early classic period when Siyaj Kʼakʼ arrived at Tikal.

Mayan civilization did not appear (or disappear) in a vacuum. Mayan civilization is part of what I call the Mesoamerican cluster, which is a cluster of multiple civilizations from the earliest civilization of the cluster, the Olmecs, to the last pre-Columbian civilization of the cluster, the Aztecs. This is where my expanded framework described above really comes into play. We can identify a Mesoamerican civilization that is the civilization of the cluster, and not of any one of the individual civilizations that together constitute the cluster. That is to say, we can analyze the institutional structure of the Mesoamerican cluster and note its common elements that appear in all of the civilizations of this cluster, such as the Mesoamerican ball game, ritual bloodletting, related languages, and related agricultural practices and staple crops.

With the Spanish conquest, the heritage of Mesoamerican civilization is integrated into expanding western civilization, which at this time was establishing a civilization of planetary-scale. We are all still part of this process, which is not yet complete, nor do we have any assurance that it will be completed, as the nascent planetary civilization of our time could still fall apart into geographically regional civilizations. Another way to state this is that we are now living through proto-civilization of the 4^th, and if this proto-civilization congeals into a planetary civilization, that civilization will be civilization of the 4^th order and its economic infrastructure, conceptual framework, and central project will be distinct from these institutional structures as they are exhibited at other orders of civilization.

The concepts that I have described and illustrated above are scientific abstractions, which means that they cover many different instances, none of which instances are identical in detail. They may be no perfect exemplars of any of these conceptions, but the point here is to formulate a framework on concepts within which civilizations can be analyzed and compared. If the conceptual framework clarifies our knowledge, then it is worth adopting even if only provisionally.

Let us consider some complex historical circumstances to underline the abstractness of my framework, but which also underlines its utility. Western civilization is clearly civilization of the 3^rd, moving in space, developing over time, and shifting its ideals and priorities. It has conquered and assimilated numerous other civilizations in its long history, and has been involved in relationships of cooperation, competition, and conflict with many more civilizations. The development of western civilization has always been under pressure of interaction with other civilizations, from the Greeks’ defiance of the larger Persian Empire to the Cold War division of our entire homeworld during the twentieth century. This is as complex as a civilization gets without being a planetary-scale civilization and thus a civilization of the 4^th order. We could call contemporary western civilization a civilization of the 4^th order, but this would be a weak claim to make.

Chinese civilization has had a different history. It has been largely, though not entirely, isolated by mountains, deserts, and an ocean. Western civilization was shaped in the Mediterranean Basin by influences from Asia, Africa, and Europe in a continual exchange of persons, goods, and ideas. China was not without interaction, but these interactions were much less significant than the commerce of the Mediterranean Basin. Chinese civilization has, since its inception, been dominated by the Han ethnic group; other ethnic groups have been important — the Mongols, the Hakka, the Miao, the Tibetans, etc. — but apart from the Mongols no ethnic minority has challenged the role of the Han people in Chinese civilization. We can cite the example of the Silk Road as evidence of commerce with other civilizations, but this was a mere trickle of luxury goods. We can cite the voyages of Admiral Zheng He as evidence of exploration and discovery, but this was a comparatively short period of Chinese history. In other words, China is closer to exemplifying civilization of the 2^nd order than civilization of the 3^rd order, and so a direct comparison with western civilization is misleading; Chinese civilization should be compared to other civilizations of the 2^nd order.

Indian civilization lies somewhere between the level of interaction that shaped western civilization and the level of isolation that shaped Chinese civilization. India has long had commercial shipping relationships throughout the Indian Ocean, in classical antiquity Alexander the Great made it as far as India, and in the early modern period Muslims conquered India and ruled as the Mogul Emperors. The Taj Mahal represents the level of syncretism of Hindu and Muslim civilization in the Indian subcontinent. But India has, to a lesser extent than China, been isolated by the Himalayas. Thus India is more difficult to classify according to my scheme, but at least with the scheme we can indicate the relative positions of western, Chinese, and Indian civilizations in regard to the geographical region in which they developed.

Islamic civilization, like western civilization (the two closely resemble each other), is a civilization of the 3^rd order. Again like western civilization, it is very close to being a civilization of the 4^th order, but it is still geographically concentrated in the Arabian Peninsula, North Africa, south Asia, and the Malay archipelago. One could say that the Arabian Peninsula was the cluster of origin for Islamic civilization, but it has now grown beyond that cluster of origin (in the same way that one could say that Europe was the cluster of origin for western civilization). Islam tends toward dominating the conceptual framework of the regions where it is influential, while western civilization tends toward dominating the economic infrastructure of the regions where it is influential, but neither of these tendencies is exclusive of the contrary influence.

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Para-Civilization

Sunday

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Pre-civilization non-civilization

Civilization between Non-Civilizations

Some time ago (almost ten years ago) I wrote a post about what I call proto-civilization, which I use to indicate those social and economic institutions that were the immediate precursors of actual civilization. A proto-civilization is something less than civilization, but at the same time it is something more than hunter-gatherer nomadism. Now I would like to introduce a complementary conception, which is that which follows after but which is distinct from civilization sensu stricto, and which I will call para-civilization. I find the need to introduce the concept of para-civilization as I continue my analysis of civilization and refine my formulations. In order to introduce further ideas to follow this post soon (hopefully) I now need to talk about para-civilization, as I am increasingly using this term in my other writings on civilization.

Proto-civilization

In some earlier work I had the occasion to refer to post-civilizational institutions (e.g., in Civilization Beyond the Prediction Wall, inter alia). This is essentially the same idea as a para-civilization. A para-civilization is not quite a civilization, but it appears in the aftermath of civilization. Whether a para-civilization is more than civilization or less than civilization depends on the historical context in which the para-civilization appears. The only proto-civilizations that have existed on Earth to date have been the remnants of former civilizations that have collapsed or failed, have been conquered and submerged under another civilization, or have otherwise been reduced from a functional civilization to something less than a functional civilization. For example, in the wake of the Spanish conquest of pre-Columbian civilizations of the New World, and later collapse of the pristine civilizations of North America (more from Old World diseases than by conquest), many institutions of these civilizations continued in vestigial form, and some continue to the present day. The Mayan daykeepers are vestiges of Mayan civilization. But since Mayan civilization is now long defunct, these vestiges cannot be considered civilization proper, so they can be called para-civilization. In this historical case, para-civilization is less than civilization.

Civilization in the strict sense

When we consider the possibilities for and fate of civilization in the future, para-civilization might be something less than civilization sensu stricto or something more than civilization. If civilization as we have known it is overtaken and pre-empted by some post-civilizational institution, or by some kind of non-civilization that is more powerful than civilization (say, an intelligence explosion and technological singularity, which is not a social institution at all, but a post-biological replacement of all social institutions), then para-civilization may be something more than civilization, and not less, as has been the case with historical examples of para-civilization.

Para-civilization

Given the definition of civilization that I employ — an economic infrastructure joined to a conceptual framework by a central project — I can then define a para-civilization as an institution following after a civilization, which latter fulfills my definition, but which former possesses an institutional structure distinct from that of civilization that fulfills my definition. In other words, a para-civilization is an institution with a simpler institutional structure, a changed institutional structure, or a more complex institutional structure than that of civilization. A simpler institutional structure could result from any of the constituent institutions that compromise civilization failing while one or some of the other constituent institutions continue in existence after a fashion. A changed institutional structure could result from one of the constituent elements of civilization being replaced by some other institution. A more complex institutional structure could result from the addition of a novel institution to the existing institutions that comprise civilization.

Post-civilization non-civilization

The above qualifications are made because civilization has repeatedly mutated over its history, in some cases changing so dramatically that one could plausibly argue that civilization as such had come to an end and a post-civilizational order was now a fact of life. This is most obviously the case with the industrial revolution, which transformed agricultural civilization, and is still transforming civilization today as I write this. However, as I analyze contemporary industrial civilization I still see the institutional structure of economic infrastructure, conceptual framework, and central project. It could be argued that the replacement of an agricultural infrastructure by an industrial infrastructure is an instance of a changed institutional structure such as described in the above paragraph, but from a sufficiently abstract point of view, both agricultural and industrial infrastructures are engaged in extracting energy from the biosphere for human ends, so that this civilizational function is invariant over time.

Civilization in an extended sense, including civilization, its precursor proto-civilization, and its subsequent para-civilization

The institutions themselves have changed — the economic infrastructure has changed most dramatically, and it has dragged the other constituent institutions of civilization along with it — but the institutional structure, and the inter-relationships among these structures, has remained essentially invariant. Therefore I argue that civilization is continuous from its earliest appearance on Earth up through the present day of industrialized civilization. However, something could conceivably occur in the future, even in the near future, that would so transform one or several of the constituent institutions of civilization, or add to these institutions, that we could no longer call the resulting social institution a civilization. It would then be a para-civilization.

Civilization between non-civilizations

The historical periodization consisting of the sequence proto-civilization–civilization–para-civilization constitutes an historical idealization not likely reflected in any actual historical civilizations, because it is an intentionally simplified abstraction for the study of civilization. A further idealized periodization would be constituted by recognizing the historical periods before and after any large scale social institutions whatever: non-civilization–proto-civilization–civilization simpliciter–para-civilization–non-civilization. The two cases in which non-civilization before and after civilization are identical and in which they are different can be distinguished, though I will not discuss this at the moment.

As non-civilizations, proto-civilization and para-civilization are distinct from suboptimal civilizations. These terms describe conditions that obtain prior to the advent of, or after the extinction of, civilization sensu stricto, and must therefore be analyzed in terms of the distinct institutional structures that they may exhibit. Therefore we distinguish between non-civilizations that are similar to civilizations, being either the precursor to civilization or the descendant of civilization, and suboptimal civilizations, having passed at least the initial threshold of civilization before experiencing conditions detrimental to the development of civilization. Suboptimal civilizations are civilization, though ruined, fallen, flawed, thwarted, or otherwise falling short of flourishing.

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Fifty Years of Civilisation

Tuesday

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Kenneth Clark, 1903-1983

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

Fifty years ago, in 1969, Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation: A Personal View was first broadcast on television, and the book based on the series was published in the same year. In my Centauri Dreams post of last Friday, Bound In Shallows: Space Exploration and Institutional Drift, I pointed out that the same year in which Clark’s documentary first aired, the Space Race reached its culmination in the Apollo moon landing: “In his Civilisation: A Personal View, Kenneth Clarke noted that, ‘Great movements in the arts, like revolutions, don’t last for more than about fifteen years.’ In so saying, he might well have been speaking of the Founding Era of space exploration, a revolution through which he had just lived as he spoke these lines.”

Clark’s Civilisation was never intended to be a scholarly study or to break new ground, theoretically speaking. In the first few minutes of the first episode Clark says he doesn’t know what civilization is or how to define it — but he does apparently know it when it sees it, and Exhibit A is Notre Dame de Paris. And Clark’s background as an art historian meant that his focus was on the masterpieces of the art of western civilization, which is a more narrow focus than civilization itself. Nevertheless, as readers of my blog are likely to know, Clark’s television series and book have had an outsized influence on my thought concerning civilization, and I find myself returning time and again to Clark’s deceptively simple formulations, which conceal a great deal of wisdom often lacking in more academic treatments.

Clark’s art historical conception of western civilization unsurprisingly entailed his dismissing scientific historiography with a wave of the hand (so to speak), but I can’t fault him for this. It’s not my approach, but Clark’s perspective is still worth listening to despite this. Sometimes a narrowly focused perspective reveals to us aspects of a phenomenon that we would not have noticed otherwise. So it is with Clark and civilization: the focus on art as the manifestation of civilization makes us aware of historical processes we might otherwise have neglected or even rejected.

My own thought over the past year in particular has re-focused my interest on art, as I have come to see aesthetics as playing a central role in western civilization. I made this argument in Science and the Hero’s Journey, in which I wrote:

“The philosophical presuppositions about beauty have given art a distinctive role in western civilization. Art is about appearances, which made art profoundly problematic for Plato (and others), but western civilization converged upon a compromise solution such that the beautiful is a revelation of the truth by way of appearance. It is not the case that any appearance whatsoever is revelatory of the truth, but specifically it is the beautiful that is the revelation of a deeper truth. If we make the effort to transcend appearances and to gaze on reality in itself — to look upon beauty bare, as Edna St. Vincent Millay said of Euclid — this is the highest form of beauty. This is also the beauty that Plato ascribed to seeing the Forms in and of themselves, not through an imitation of an imitation.”

I have planned to expand upon this at some point in an exposition of the central project of western civilization — the kind of inquiry that Clark made possible for me. I suspect that Clark will remain important to me, however far afield I take the ideas that began to develop in me as a consequence of Clark’s work. Not everyone today shares my view of Clark’s Civilisation.

If you simply do a search on “Kenneth Clark Civilisation” you will find online any number of opinions about Clark’s series and book — some of them in praise of, some of them critical, some of them downright petty, little more than individuals who want to demonstrate their confidence in their own cleverness by irony, sarcasm, and iconoclasm — from all the major newspapers and magazines of our time. None these can match Clark’s own self-criticisms in the Forward to the book. After acknowledging the many limitations of his presentation, he asked himself if he should have dropped “Civilisation” as the title, given that his was no comprehensive survey of civilization:

“Should I then have dropped the title Civilisation? I didn’t want to, because the word had triggered me off, and remained a kind of stimulus; and I didn’t suppose that anyone would be so obtuse as to think that I had forgotten about the great civilisations of the pre-Christian era and the East. However, I confess that the title has worried me. It would have been easy in the eighteenth century: Speculations on the Nature of Civilization as illustrated by the Changing Phases of Civilised Life in Western Europe from the Dark Ages to the Present Day. Unfortunately, this is no longer practicable.”

Clark, Kenneth, Civilisation, Forward

Clark’s Enlightenment era title — Speculations on the Nature of Civilization as illustrated by the Changing Phases of Civilised Life in Western Europe from the Dark Ages to the Present Day — would have been the perfect title for the unwritten seminal work on a science of civilization that I suggested as a thought experiment in Thought Experiment on a Science of Civilization.

Given the tenor of contemporary opinion on Clark’s Civilisation, this is a series that could not and would not be made today. Similarly, intimations of a spacefaring future implicit in the Apollo program as it landed human beings on the moon in 1969 could not and would not be realized today. But at this moment in time fifty years ago, we could look back in gratitude and look forward in hope and anticipation. As we all know, 1969 was also a turbulent time politically and militarily. No doubt fifty years ago it felt like the world was in chaos, that modern times had little in the way of gratitude or hope, and that the lucky ones were those safely in the past when the certainties of life went unchallenged. It can only be seen as I have portrayed it in hindsight.

There is a sense in which 1969 is a pivot point of recent history. Clark was able to look behind us at where western civilization has been, and the Apollo moon landings seemed to look ahead toward the direction that western civilization seemed to be taking. During what I have called the Founding Era of space exploration — Sputnik to Apollo — the future seemed as open to us as history opens the past to us. Space exploration gave us a clear direction and populated a future history for humanity in a way that was eminently comprehensible despite its utter novelty in comparison to all that we have known on Earth. Poised at that crucial year, the whole of history opened up all around, as past and future were simultaneously manifested themselves to us.

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Five Ways to Think about Civilization

Sunday

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Twelve months down on the farm. An illustration from Liber ruralium commodorum, by Pietro de’ Crescenzi; for a description of the tasks illustrated cf. http://www.medievalists.net/2014/06/03/year-medieval-farm/

On the Reflexive Self-Awareness of Civilizations (or the Lack Thereof)

For all the faults and failings of agrarian civilizations, there is a sense in which the self-awareness of agrarian civilizations exceeded the self-awareness of industrialized civilizations. Almost all agrarian civilizations were rigidly hierarchical and stratified, but from the bottom to the top of the feudal hierarchy of agrarian civilizations everyone understood that agriculture was the source of the wealth and productivity of their society. Wealth was measured in land and in the number of peasants working the land. Income was formulated in terms of the annual produce of the land, which, over time, became more formalized as part of a commercial economy. It is due to this background that we read in nineteenth century novels that so-and-so had an income of so many pounds per year: this is the survival of the accounting of agricultural civilization into the early developmental stages of industrialized civilization.

This reflexive self-awareness on the part of agrarian civilizations of the economy that sustained that civilization is not shared by industrialized civilization. Very few today seem to understand that the source of our wealth and productivity is science. This is a failure of collective self-knowledge, and a failure that may have consequences for our very young industrialized civilization. Even the putative “leaders” of contemporary society seem to have little awareness of the centrality of science to the economy, but if the scientific method had not been systematically applied to industry, we would not have progressed more than incrementally beyond the technology and engineering of earlier civilizations. That we have outstripped these earlier civilizations many times over in terms of wealth and productivity is a measure by which the scientific method and the cultivation of scientific knowledge can transform an economy.

How should we define scientific civilization?

Five Ways of Conceptualizing Scientific Civilization

This reflection on the lack of self-knowledge on the part of our would-be scientific civilization suggests a way in which scientific civilization might be defined, specifically, that a scientific civilization is a civilization that knows itself to be a scientific civilization, and in which all sectors of society know that the wealth and productivity of their society is derived from science, and from technology and engineering made possible by science. In previous posts I have suggested several other ways in which scientific civilization might be defined. For example:

● In Scientific Civilization: The Economic Perspective I suggested that a scientific civilization could be defined as, “a civilization that invests a significant portion of its economic activity in science.”

● In Scientific Civilization: The Central Project I implied that a scientific civilization is a civilization that has science, or the pursuit of scientific knowledge, as its central project. (A view that I later elaborated in more detail in Properly Scientific Civilization and The Central Project of Properly Scientific Civilizations.)

● In Sciences Hard and Soft I suggested that a scientific civilization is a civilization in which science has come to full maturity, by analogy with Nick Bostrom’s use of the term “technological maturity” — but how scientific maturity can be defined may be more difficult to say.

● In The Conditions of Scientific Progress I said that we could define a mature scientific civilization as one in which science could be conducted in complete openness, both in the technical terminology of the discipline in question as well as in the intuitive terms according to which idea flow functions in a social context. This is the kind of intellectual context in which it would be possible for everyone to imbibe the spirit of science, and, rather than accepting any results as a new orthodoxy, press forward with extending scientific inquiry so that we not only have idea flow but the acceleration of idea flow and even idea proliferation.

In my notebooks I have several additional ways in which scientific civilization might be defined, though I have not yet given an exposition of these other ideas for defining scientific civilization. For example, skimming a notebook from few years ago I find this entry on 11 June 2016:

● Science communication is only a problem in a non-scientific civilization in which there is a disconnect between science and the non-scientific public. One way to define a scientific civilization is as a civilization in which there is no disconnect between scientific research and popular knowledge, as scientific knowledge is pervasively present in the general public. (There would still be disagreements, and different scientific research programs would find differing degrees of support in different sectors of society, but it would be understood that these disagreements will be resolved by further research even as new scientific problems appear on the horizon.)

This idea could be assimilated to the last of the four ideas above, as both are concerned with science communication and scientific literacy, which presumably would be greatly facilitated in a truly scientific civilization, but which suffer in a suboptimal scientific civilization, or in a non-scientific civilization (as in agrarian-ecclesiastical civilization).

The four itemized ideas above from previous posts (with the last of these four ideas assimilated to the idea from my old notebook), plus the idea above incorporating reflexive self-knowledge, gives us five ways to think about scientific civilization:

1. A scientific civilization is a civilization that knows itself to be a scientific civilization.

2. A scientific civilization is a civilization that invests a significant portion of its economic activity in science.

3. A scientific civilization is a civilization that has science, or the pursuit of scientific knowledge, as its central project.

4. A scientific civilization is a civilization in which science, or scientific knowledge, has come to full maturity.

5. A scientific civilization is a civilization in which there is no disconnect between scientific research and popular knowledge.

None of these ideas are as yet definitively formulated. I could easily point out ambiguities in any of these formulations. For example, in No. 3, concerned with the economic definition of scientific civilization, there is considerable ambiguity involved in what it would mean for a civilization to invest a significant portion of its economic activity in science. Does this mean that, as a matter of fact, that science constitutes a major economic sector, like agriculture or transportation? Or does this means that a highly productive industrialized civilization chooses to plow a significant portion of its surplus value into scientific research? There are other ways to interpret this beyond these two alternatives. I beg the reader’s indulgence to take these imperfect formulations charitably, extracting whatever value there is in them, and setting aside what is incoherent or poorly expressed.

Different definitions of scientific civilization would yield different civilizations identified as a scientific civilization, though some of the above definitions may overlap or coincide. For example, it is entirely possible that, in a civilization that has the pursuit of science as its central project, all sectors of the populace would understand the centrality of science to that civilization, so these two definitions of scientific civilization may coincide. However, I think that the idea of scientific maturity is much further off even than the possibility of a civilization with science as its central project, if scientific maturity is attainable at all, so that these definitions do not coincide, but they might coincide at some point in the distant future. Indeed, it may require a civilization that takes science as its central project to drive the development of science to scientific maturity.

Ideally, given a multitude of possible definitions of scientific civilization, it would be possible to reduce all the definitions to one, or to single out one definition that is, in principle, preferable to all others, or to have the various non-coinciding definitions of scientific civilization systematically related in some essential way, as in the degrees of continuum, or as stages in the development of scientific civilization.

It may be that only a fully scientific civilization could understand what definition of scientific civilization is adequate, and, if the Hegelian principle holds good, that the owl of Minerva takes flight only with the setting of the sun, it would not be possible to adequately define scientific civilization until a scientific civilization was already senescent.

Defining Agrarian Civilizations in Hindsight

Generalizing a Definition of Civilization Derived from one Class of Civilizations

Can we, then, apply these conceptions retroactively, mutatis mutandis, to some civilization, or, better, to some kind of civilization, that has already passed out of history? Do these characterizations of scientific civilization admit of formulations of sufficient generality that they can be applied to other civilizations, non-scientific civilizations? Let us take these five ways of characterizing scientific civilization and apply them to agrarian civilizations, and see how they fare in this context.

Consider these reformulations of the above five conceptualizations of scientific civilization, here stated in terms of agricultural civilization:

1. An agrarian civilization is a civilization that knows itself to be An agrarian civilization, and in which all sectors of society know that the wealth and productivity of their society is derived from agriculture, and activities related to agriculture.

2. An agrarian civilization is a civilization that invests a significant portion of its economic activity in agriculture.

3. An agrarian civilization is a civilization that has agriculture, or the pursuit of agricultural production, as its central project.

4. An agrarian civilization is a civilization in which agriculture has come to full maturity.

5. An agrarian civilization is a civilization in which there is no disconnect between agronomy and popular knowledge, as agronomy is pervasively present in the general public.

All of these formulations are highly suggestive, but the parallelism is not always perfect between agrarian and scientific civilizations, and, viewed from the perspective of agrarian civilization, we can see how these conceptualizations are beholden to our ideas of the relationship of science to society today. Let us consider each in turn:

1. Here the parallelism is at its strongest, because I began with this reflection on agricultural civilizations being aware that their wealth flowed from working the land, and applied it to scientific civilization to see how well it worked in that context. But what is reflexive self-awareness at a civilizational scale? Must this awareness be represented throughout society, or is it sufficient that some sector of society, or some sector of the economy, knows what kind of civilization they have and subsequently act efficaciously upon this knowledge? Above I have specified all sectors of society, and arguably this was the case for agrarian civilizations, in which even the mythology of the central project reflected the crops and the agricultural calendar of the civilization in question. However, it is also arguable that the awareness of the agricultural basis of agricultural civilization was sufficiently distant from the mythological central projects of agrarian civilizations that many individuals in the society were so invested in the mythology that they were unaware of agriculture as the driving economic force of their society. Indeed, religious rituals intended to ensure good harvests might be said to invert any valuation placing agriculture at the central of agricultural civilization, as it implies that the agriculture engine of the civilization is fueled by supernaturalistic processes, which are the true drivers of civilization.

2. We have seen above that there are obvious ambiguities with any claim of a society’s investment in some given sector. Moreover, any such “investment” in pre-modern civilization takes a radically different form than what we think of today as investment in some sector of the economy of some sector of society. From our industrialized point of view, investment in a sector means taking surplus value generated by economic activity on the whole and literally using this capital to further some sector by investment in capital equipment or better working conditions in the sector, etc. Most of all, we would conceive of investing in a sector of the economy as funding major research and development projects that would expand and improve the sector, hopefully resulting in major innovations that contribute to increases in productivity and efficiency. This sort of investment in agriculture began to appear during the British Agricultural Revolution, but this was already after the scientific revolution (it was the scientific revolution applied to agriculture) so after western civilization was already beginning the developments that would lead it to industrialization. Even then, investment into basic research didn’t appear until the 19^th century, and didn’t become consequential until the 20^th century. Nevertheless, agrarian civilizations prior to the scientific revolution of necessity poured resources into agriculture, because if it failed to do so, starvation would result. The elite culture of the period that we now value, and visit museums in order to see, was the result of a small fraction of the wealth of the agricultural economy skimmed off by elites and employed for their own purposes (e.g., prestige projects). In this sense, 2. seems to hold for agrarian as for scientific civilization, but the sense in which it holds is not exactly in the spirit in which it holds for scientific civilization.

3. I have elsewhere used the binomial nomenclature “agrarian-ecclesiastical civilizations” to describe most agrarian civilizations, because these civilizations almost without exception (I can’t think of a counterexample) do not have agriculture as the central project, but rather religion as the central project, or some close religious surrogate as a central project. The economic infrastructure is almost entirely agricultural, but the intellectual superstructure is almost always derived from a religion, and this intellectual superstructure tells us that the central project of the civilization in question is the fulfillment of the requirements of religious doctrine. This fulfillment might take a popular form, as in the demand that all souls be saved, which entailed both the salvation of the agricultural laborer as well as expansionist warfare to enable the salvation of peoples outside the civilization, or this fulfillment might take on an elite form, as when Mesoamerican elites engaged in ritualized bloodletting. Of course, it would be possible to imagine, as a thought experiment, an agrarian civilization in which agriculture was the central project; perhaps such civilizations have existed, perhaps they could still exist, but this has not been the paradigmatic form of agrarian civilization. It may be this disconnect between central project and economic infrastructure in agrarian civilizations that inspired Marx to make the distinction between economic base and ideological superstructure, as this distinction is less in evidence in contemporary industrialized civilization.

4. It is a very interesting question whether agricultural civilization came to full maturity before it yielded its place as the central form of civilization to industrialized civilizations. It is entirely possible that a civilization might endure for a significant period of time and then go extinct, without ever achieving full maturity. This is the case with what Nick Bostrom calls permanent stagnation: a civilization that never comes to maturity. Agricultural civilizations tend to stagnation, so it may be in the nature of agricultural civilizations to converge on permanent stagnation, and, when they do transcend this stagnation, they do it at the cost of being transformed into another kind of civilization, in which case the consequence is no longer an agrarian civilization. It could be argued that agricultural civilization has not yet reached full maturity at the present time, because the techniques of scientific agriculture that began to transform agriculture during the British Agricultural Revolution continue to be revolutionized by scientific discovery. The latest techniques of gene-editing can be used to create new crops, so that agricultural technology is as open-ended as any industrial technology. Does it follow that agricultural civilization as agricultural civilization can never achieve maturity, and that it can only achieve maturity by the means of industrialized civilization?

5. This formulation doesn’t work at all when a straight-forward substitution of agriculture for science is made. One of the reasons for the failure of this substitution is that agriculture was the dominant activity under agrarian civilizations, and so agricultural knowledge was “popular” (but, of course, it is misleading to call anything “popular” at a time before popular sovereignty). However, a slightly altered formulation would give essentially the same idea: an agricultural civilization is a civilization in which there is no disconnect between agricultural producers and consumers. While this formulation makes sense, judging its validity is another matter. Certainly the various sectors of society in agrarian civilization knew that agricultural productivity was the source of their wealth, but the rigidly hierarchical structures of feudal society meant that there was a profound disconnect between consumers and producers, who almost belonged to different worlds. So, what we learn from this is that the idea of a “disconnect” between members of the same society needs to be clarified. Individuals and classes within agrarian civilizations can be at once both tightly coupled and yet more distant from each other than any two individuals or classes in industrialized civilization; this needs to be understood in greater detail. When the elite sectors of society did begin to concern themselves with agricultural knowledge, not merely leaving this to farm laborers, the British agricultural revolution was the result. Many eminent country gentlemen became enthusiasts of agriculture and threw themselves into the betterment of their estates. While this behavior does not strike us as odd today, in a social context in which working with one’s hands was believed to be demeaning, demonstrating an enthusiasm for agriculture was to place one’s social status at risk. This development progressed so far that it eventually found its way into the fine arts, with the result being paintings like Benjamin Marshall’s “Portraits of Cattle of the Improved Short-Horned Breed, the Property of J. Wilkinson Esq. of Lenton, near Nottingham” (see below), which is, essentially, a portrait of a head of livestock.

The above disconnects are of particular interest to me because of what I wrote about disconnects in A Philosophical Disconnect and Another Disconnect and A Metaphysical Disconnect, inter alia. That contemporary industrialized civilization is marked by a disconnect between political philosophy and philosophy of law is especially significant in this connection: different kinds of civilization may be subject to different internal structural disconnects. Different structural disconnects within one and the same civilization imply different areas of reflexive self-knowledge as well as different areas where self-knowledge fails, which brings us back to where we began this post.

Portraits of Cattle of the Improved Short-Horned Breed, the Property of J. Wilkinson Esq. of Lenton, near Nottingham 1816, Benjamin Marshall 1768-1835, Bequeathed by Mrs F. Ambrose Clark through the British Sporting Art Trust 1982

From Generalization to Formalization

Now that we have applied these five ways of thinking about civilization to scientific civilization and to agricultural civilization, can we formalize these ideas so that they are applicable to any civilization whatever? Consider the following:

● F(civ) knows itself to be F(civ).

● The economic infrastructure of F(civ) is disproportionately invested in F.

● F(civ) has F as its central project.

● F(civ) such that F is mature.

● In F(civ) there is no disconnect between individuals directly involved in F and individuals not directly involved in F.

In the above, F(civ) means “a civilization with the property F” which, in the particular case of scientific civilization might be expressed: “there is a civilization civ such that civ has the property of being scientific.” If we attempt to formulate this in terms of quantification theory we get something like, “There exists an x such that x is a civilization and x is scientific” or ∃x.C(x)F(x), and then any other property annexed to that civilization is simply another predicated G(x), thus 1. above becomes ∃x.C(x)F(x)G(x). Where the property of being scientific is modified by the definition we face quantifying over properties and thus shifting from first order logic to second order logic.

I’m not satisfied with any of these formulations, but that is why I titled this post “Five Ways of Thinking about Civilization.” Nothing here is definitive. These are ways of thinking about civilization, and we can employ these ways of thinking about civilization if they prove fruitful, in which case we would attempt to extend, expand, and further formalize the approach, and if they prove to be unfruitful we would not be likely to invest any more time in the approach, unless we have some nagging intuitive sense that there is something important here that has not yet been made explicit.

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Addendum on the Elizabethan Conception of Civilization

Monday

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Akhenaten (formerly Amenhotep IV) worshipping Aten.

In The Elizabethan Conception of Civilization I examined some of the nomothetic elements of the otherwise idiosyncratic character of Elizabethan civilization. In that post I emphasized that the large-scale political structure of European civilization in the medieval and modern periods entails an ideology of kingship in which the monarch himself or herself becomes the reproducible pattern for his or her subjects to follow.

There is another source of nomothetic stability in the case of idiographic Elizabethan civilization, and that is the long medieval inheritance that was still a living presence in early modern society. The classic exposition of the Elizabethan epistēmē (as perhaps Foucault would have called it) is E. M. W. Tillyard’s book The Elizabethan World Picture, which emphasizes the medieval heritage of Elizabethan society. The elements of the medieval world view that Tillyard rightly finds surviving into the conceptual framework of Elizabethan England could be understood as the invariant and continuous elements that constitute the nomothetic basis of Elizabathan civilization.

Peter Saccio in his lectures Comedy, Tragedy, History: The Live Drama and Vital Truth of William Shakespeare (this was the first set of lectures that I acquired from The Teaching Company, which has since changed their name to The Great Courses, but it was as The Teaching Company that these lectures were first made available) briefly discussed Tillyard’s book and its influence, which he characterized as primarily conservative. Saccio noted that recent Shakespeare scholarship has focused to a much greater extent on the radical interpretations of Shakespeare. As goes for Shakespearean theater, so it goes for Elizabethan society. We could give a conservative Tillyardian exposition of Elizabethan society that portrays that society primarily in terms of its medieval inheritance, or we can give a more radical exposition of Elizabethan society that portrays that society in terms of the rapid changes and innovations in society at this time.

While Elizabethan civilization retained many deeply conservative elements drawn from the medieval past, the underlying theme of Elizabethan civilization — the consolidation of the Anglican Church as a state institution — was in fact among the most radical changes possible to a social structure within the early modern context of civilization, and may be compared to Akhenaten’s attempt to replace traditional Egyptian mythology with a quasi-monotheistic solar cult. But whereas Akhenaten’s religious innovations did not endure, with the kingdom reverting to traditional religious practices after Akhenaten’s death (i.e., the central project of Egyptian civilization survived Akhenaten), the religious innovations of Elizabeth I did endure.

Up until the Enlightenment, almost all civilizations had, as their central project, or integral with their central project, a religion (or, more generally, a spiritual tradition). If we regard the Enlightenment as a secularized ersatz religion (or, if you prefer, a surrogate religion), then this has not changed to the present day. Regardless, changing the religion that is identical with, or is integral to, the central project of one’s civilization, is akin to making changes to the center of the web of belief (to employ a Quinean motif) rather than merely making changes at the outer edges of the web.

The Protestant Reformation in England, then, can be understood as the opening of Pandora’s Box. While retaining the forms of tradition to the extent possible, the establishment of the Anglican Church demonstrated that even the central project of a civilization can be changed out at the whim of a monarch, and this was as much as to demonstrate that everything hereafter was up for grabs. Subsequent history was to bear this out. One might even say that regicide was implicit in the fungibility of early modern England’s central project, but it took a hundred years for that to play out (on civilizational time scales, a hundred years is a reasonable lead time for causality). If you can change your church, why not cashier your king?

Many years ago in the early history of his blog, I wrote some posts about Christopher Hill’s book The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (in The Agricultural Paradigm and The World Turned Right-Side Up; cf. also the links embedded in these posts), which book is a somewhat sympathetic history of the radical movements in early modern England represented by groups like the Ranters, the Diggers, the Levelers, and the True Levelers. Hill imagined that a much more radical revolution might have emerged from Elizabethan England and the revolutionary movements that followed. Now, in the spirit of what I wrote above, I can ask whether, if you can change the central project of your civilization, cannot you also go down the path of the kind of radical revolution that Hill imagined, toward communal property, disestablishing the state church, and rejecting the Protestant Ethic?

This question points to something important, I think, but I will not attempt at this time to give an exposition of what all is involved, because it has only just now occurred to me while writing this. While I have come to see the Protestant Reformation as opening Pandora’s Box in England, I think there is also a limit to the amount of revolution that a population can stomach. As wrenching as it is to replace the central project of your civilization, or to execute your king, it would be even more wrenching to attempt to uproot the whole of the ordinary business of life. Certainly you wouldn’t want to attempt to do both at the same time. If I am right about this, how then would be draw a line between the ordinary business of life, that is to remain largely undisturbed, and the extraordinary business of life, in which a population can tolerate violent punctuations and periods of instability?

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The Elizabethan Conception of Civilization

Saturday

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Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603)
The Armada Portrait, c.1588. Attributed to George Gower (c.1546-1596).

In his book and television series Civilisation, Kenneth Clark cast doubt whether there was anything that could be legitimately called an Elizabethan civilization, hence, I assume also, any possibility of an Elizabethan conception of civilization:

“I suppose it is debatable how far Elizabethan England can be called civilised. Certainly it does not provide a reproducible pattern of civilisation as does, for example, eighteenth-century France. It was brutal, unscrupulous and disorderly. But if the first requisites of civilisation are intellectual energy, freedom of mind, a sense of beauty and a craving for immortality, then the age of Marlowe and Spenser, of Dowland and Byrd, was a kind of civilisation.”

Kenneth Clark, Civilisation: A Personal View, Chapter 6, “Protest and Communication”

This might seem like a rather trivial passage to pluck out of a larger work and to use as a lens to focus on the concept of civilization, but there is much of interest here, so hear me out.

Firstly, let’s start with the implicit distinction with which I began between a civilization and a concept of civilization. It is entirely possible that the Elizabethans had a concept of civilization, even if they themselves did not measure up to this concept, but it is highly unlikely that this is the case despite the possibility. The term “civilization” was not explicitly introduced until much later — significantly for Clark’s observation, by a French writer, Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, in 1757 — and we will assume that the terminology was introduced to meet a need that was felt to express an idea for which there was, as yet, no terminology. Again, it is possible that the concept of civilization existed in Elizabethan England before the term was introduced, but, if so, that would be a separate inquiry, though what we will have to say here would be relevant to that inquiry.

Setting aside the concept of civilization for the Elizabethans, there is the simpler question of whether the Elizabethans themselves were civilized, and Clark allows that Elizabethan England was a kind of civilization (a kind of civilization perhaps, but not, it is implied, civilization proper). This remark in passing is worth noting. Clark himself seems to prefer his characterization of civilization as a reproducible pattern, but he also allows for the possibility that intellectual energy, freedom of mind, a sense of beauty and a craving for immortality may characterize a civilization even in the absence of a reproducible pattern. In other words, there may be several distinct kinds of civilization, such that Enlightenment France exemplifies one such kind, while Elizabethan England exemplifies another kind. This seems pretty sensible, and, moreover, I agree with it. But if there are several kinds of civilization, what are these kinds? In other words, what is, or what ought to be, the scheme of taxonomy for civilizations?

At this time I am not prepared to offer a taxonomy of civilizations (although this is implicit in my other writings on civilization — more on that another time), but I can make some observations relevant to a taxonomy of civilizations. Since Clark focuses on civilization as a reproducible pattern, let’s also focus on that for the moment. Here I am reminded of a passage that I quoted in Civilization and Uniformity from Sir Mortimer Wheeler’s classic work, The Indus Civilization:

“…the Harappans were, first and last, lowlanders, as befits a civilized folk. The diversity of the hill-divided village groups is in standing contrast to the widespread uniformity of the riverine civilization.”

Sir Mortimer Wheeler, The Indus Civilization, third edition, p. 2

For Wheeler, mountain peoples remained idiosyncratic in their isolation, while lowland agricultural peoples mingled and lost much of their uniqueness. The emergence of uniformity, hence a reproducible pattern, is a product of the evolution of certain societies, and once a society evolves in this direction the process reinforces itself. Uniformity lends itself to iteration, and iteration renders any idiosyncratic tradition uniform over time; uniformity is the chicken and reproducible pattern is the egg.

Other examples of reproducible patterns would be the Hellenistic civilization that dominated the Mediterranean Basin during classical antiquity and the industrialized civilization that has emerged since the industrial revolution. Later iterations of Hellenistic civilization were highly uniform, but this pattern had its origins in the earliest societies of classical antiquity, which were likely highly idiosyncratic the closer we approach to their origins. E. R. Dodd’s classic study, The Greeks and the Irrational, highlighted the idiosyncratic nature of ancient Greek society as against the prevalent perception of Greek rationalism. Probably, like most peoples, the Greeks began with highly idiosyncratic institutions and evolved toward reproducible patterns. That others also took up the Greek pattern of civilization and reproduced it themselves probably contributed to wearing away of what remained that was peculiarly Greek in Hellenistic civilization.

I have previously discussed this contrast between iterable models and the idiosyncratic in terms of The Iterative Conception of Civilization and The Heroic Conception of Civilization. In my post on The Iterative Conception of Civilization I also implicitly reference Kenneth Clark in relation to the civilization of classical antiquity in the Mediterranean Basin. My implicit reference to Clark was to this passage:

“The same architectural language, the same imagery, the same theatres, the same temples — at any time for five hundred years you could have found them all round the Mediterranean, in Greece, Italy, France, Asia Minor or North Africa. If you had gone into the square of any Mediterranean town in the first century you would hardly have known where you were, any more than you would in an airport today. The so-called Maison Carree at Nimes is a little Greek temple that might have been anywhere in the Graeco-Roman world.”

Kenneth Clark, Civilisation: A Personal View, Chapter 1, “By the Skin of Our Teeth”

That Clark mentions the comparison with an airport today shows the relevance of a reproducible pattern not only to Hellenistic civilization but also to our contemporary industrialized civilization.

It has only occurred to me now, after all these years, that the distinction between the iterative conception of civilization and the heroic conception of civilization can be assimilated to the familiar historiographical distinction between the nomothetic and the idiographic formulated by Wilhelm Windelband:

“…the empirical sciences either seek the general in the form of the law of nature or the particular in the form of the historically defined structure. On the one hand, they are concerned with the form which invariably remains constant. On the other hand, they are concerned with the unique, immanently defined content of the real event. The former disciplines are nomological sciences. The latter disciplines are sciences of process or sciences of the event. The nomological sciences are concerned with what is invariably the case. The sciences of process are concerned with what was once the case. If I may be permitted to introduce some new technical terms, scientific thought is nomothetic in the former case and idiographic in the latter case.”

Rectorial Address, Strasbourg 1894, Wilhelm Windelband, History and Theory, Vol. 19, No. 2 (Feb., 1980), p. 175

Following Windelband, when a civilization is constituted by a form which invariably remains constant, it is a nomothetic civilization; on the other hand, when a civilization is constituted by the particular in the form of an historically defined structure, it is an idiographic civilization. Given this distinction, Clark’s implicit distinction between French civilization of the Enlightenment, which is characterized by a reproducible pattern of civilization, and Elizabethan English civilization, which was brutal, unscrupulous and disorderly, corresponds to the distinction between nomothetic and idiographic civilization.

But I would not go so far as to assert that there was nothing idiosyncratic about French civilization during the Enlightenment, and nothing nomothetic about Elizabethan civilization; it is a matter of degree, and degree of separation, between the nomothetic and the idiographic. Other civilizations that tended toward the idiographic would include, by my reckoning, Viking, Polynesian, Mongol, and Turkic civilizations (I mentioned all of these in a recent newsletter as instances of semi-nomadic societies); we have already seen other examples of highly nomothetic civilizations, viz. Hellenistic and industrialized civilization.

There are certainly nomothetic features of Elizabethan England… so what are they? Let us take a passage from The Life of King Henry the Eighth as an indicator of nomothetic structures of Elizabethan civilization, when Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, says the following in regard to the infant Elizabeth:

She shall be loved and fear’d: her own shall bless her;
Her foes shake like a field of beaten corn,
And hang their heads with sorrow: good grows with her:
In her days every man shall eat in safety,
Under his own vine, what he plants; and sing
The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours:
God shall be truly known; and those about her
From her shall read the perfect ways of honour,
And by those claim their greatness, not by blood.

William Shakespeare, The Life of King Henry the Eighth, Act V, Scene v, lines 31-38

To reduce this passage to the skeleton of implied properties of a successful society, we get security, including food security, peace, religious truth, and moral edification. Just below this passage, in line 48, the above is reduced to the litany, “Peace, plenty, love, truth, terror…”

“Neighbours” in the above Shakespeare passage must be taken literally to mean neighbors in one’s immediate geographical vicinity, as the passage has already drawn a clear distinction between “her own” and “her foes.” It is only among her own that the happy picture of peace and plenty obtains; while no sketch is given of the condition of her foes, we can make an imaginative extrapolation that this was a life of conflict and hardship, in some measure imposed by the benevolent Elizabeth no less than the peace and prosperity of her subjects was bestowed as a kind of royal gift upon the people of England.

Even though England at the time was a monarchy (it is still a monarchy today, but a constitutional monarchy in which the queen reigns but does not rule), it is fascinating that there is in this passage an explicit renunciation of virtue claimed by inheritance, and, presumably, also by social position or condition. The passage opens with “her own” blessing their queen, so that the people of England have offered up blessings to their queen, and she, in turn, provides the model of virtue for her subjects to adopt and practice (in other words, the moral model provided by the Elizabeth I as a pattern reproducible by her subjects). This places the queen not only as the political and military leader of England and the English people, but also the moral leader of her people. Arguably, the moral unity of Elizabethan civilization being explicitly disconnected from inheritance (i.e., blood) is a device that allows for the iteration of the model beyond any narrow biological definition of civilization.

The moral unity of a civilization, as with religious truth and moral edification in the foregoing list of properties, is certainly among the most important reproducible patterns that transforms an undifferentiated mass into a coherent whole capable of carrying out great works in the realization on a civilization’s central project, as, for example, the defense of the realm against the Spanish Armada and the consolidation of the Anglican Church as a specifically English religious institution that has ever since defined the spiritual life of England.

Wherever or whenever an exemplar is raised to prominence and presented as an example for others to follow (as with the queen and the queen’s behavior) we know we are in the presence of an explicit model intended as reproducible pattern. Since the form that European civilization took after the collapse of the western Roman Empire was that of a multiplicity of small kingdoms, each idiosyncratic to some significant degree, the ideology of kingship (and queenship) played a crucial role in the iterative elements of medieval European civilization, of which Elizabethan England was one example. It is to be noted in this context that France was always the largest of the medieval European kingdoms, and therefore that kingdom that most nearly approximated the geographical extent and population size that could result in a more nomothetic civilization, as arose in France with the Enlightenment.

The Armada portrait of Elizabeth I, attributed to George Gower (reproduced above; there are several contemporaneous copies of this image — one might even say iterations of this image), presents the monarch as an idealized archetype in conformity with the ideology of kingship. Elizabeth I is shown in regal splendor, with paintings of the defeat of the Spanish Armada behind her, and her right hand on a globe of the world, covering North America as though protecting the personal property of the crown. Any number of allegorical elements of this painting could be characterized as exemplars for her subjects not merely to reproduce, but to extrapolate to the end of an imperial destiny for the English crown. This is no small invitation to the nomothetic elaboration of the Elizabethan English model.

The European model of geographically bound kingship was a personal appeal to the people of a given kingdom at a time when literacy was rare and the primary forms of conveying an ideology were through sermons and images. In so far as the subjects of the English crown could look to Elizabeth (or, rather, to images of Elizabeth) as an exemplar, the connection between monarch and subject was personal. This personal relationship to civilization might be considered a distinctive trait of idiographic civilizations, but we should not think of civilizations of this kind as somehow deviating from an ideal model, or as constituting a lesser form of civilization, but rather as an adaptation to particular conditions. Whereas the Hellenistic model was iterated throughout the Mediterranean Basin at a time when this geographical region had already been civilized for thousands of years, and the exemplars of this civilization therefore grew in fertile social soil, the civilizations of Europe were extending their conception of civilization into a wilderness where no previous knowledge of civilization could be assumed.

With this in mind, we should not wonder at the success of the early modern European powers in colonial expansion, since the conditions of European civilization entailed a model iterable under hostile conditions.

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A Strategic Pause in the Development of Spacefaring Civilization

Saturday

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The 50^th anniversary of what exactly?

On 20 July 1969 the Apollo 11 mission landed two men on the moon and Neil Armstrong became the first human being to set foot on another astronomical body in the solar system. I was alive for the moon landings, and remember watching them on a black and white television. It was a triumph of science and technology and human aspiration all rolled into one.

What does the 50^th anniversary of Apollo 11 mean? We cannot say, “Fifty Years of Lunar Voyages,” because fifty years of lunar voyages did not follow the Apollo program. Except for the handful of human beings who have been to the moon because of the Apollo program, no one else has been beyond low Earth orbit. We cannot say, “Fifty Years of Human Space Exploration Records,” because the achievement of reaching the moon was not followed by further achievements of human space exploration (except for long-duration stays on space stations — periods of time sufficient for exploration of the solar system, if only we had undertaken such missions). The human mission to the moon was not followed by a human mission to Mars and then further human missions to the farther reaches of the solar system.

I have heard it argued that there needed to be a pause in space exploration and development after Apollo, whether because the cost of the program was unsustainable (when people say this I remind them that the Apollo program didn’t tank the US economy; on the contrary, it stimulated the US economy) or because life on Earth simply had to “catch up” with the Space Age. Either we weren’t ready or (worse yet) weren’t worthy of following up on the Apollo Program with further and more ambitious programs. When I hear this I am reminded of Pascal’s following pensée:

“‘Why does God not show Himself?’ — ‘Are you worthy?’ — ‘Yes.’ — ‘You are very presumptuous, and thus unworthy.’ — ‘No.’ — ‘Then you are just unworthy.'”

This appears as no. 13 in the Penguin edition of the Pensées in the appendix, “Additional Pensées,” and attributed to Blaise Pascal, Textes inédits, Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1962 (i.e., you won’t find this in most editions of the Pensées.)

Regardless of your response, you’re going to be unworthy. There is always some reason that can be found that human beings don’t deserve any better than they have. This may sound like an eccentric point to make, but I believe it to be deeply rooted in human psychology, and we neglect this aspect of human psychology at our peril.

So if I ask, “Why do we not have a spacefaring civilization today?” Someone may respond, “Is humanity worthy of a spacefaring civilization?” I answer “Yes,” and I am told, “Humanity is very presumptuous, and therefore unworthy of it.” And if I answer “No,” I am told, “Then humanity is just unworthy.” Put in this context, we see that this is not really an observation about religion, as it appears in Pascal, but an observation about human self-perception. We have, if anything, seen this attitude grow significantly since 20 July 1969, so that there is a significant contingent of persons today who openly argue that humanity should not expand into the universe, but should remain, ought to remain, confined to its homeworld, and entertain no presumptions of greater things for itself.

It is easy to see how a long history of high-handed moral condemnations of the human condition, only just below the surface even today, even in the busy midst of our technological civilization, can be mobilized to shame us into inaction. In other words, this is about original sin, expiation, atonement, sacrifice, and purification — a litany that sounds strikingly similar to what Hume called the “monkish virtues”: celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, and solitude. Is this to be our future? Do we aspire to medieval ideals in the midst of modernity? Should we aspire to medieval ideals?

It is worth noting that this spacefaring inaction represents one particular implementation of what I have called the waiting gambit: things will be better eventually, so it is better to wait until conditions improve before undertaking some action. If we act now, we act precipitously, and this will mean acting suboptimally, and perhaps it will mean our ruin. Better to wait. That is to say, better to consign ourselves to silent meditation upon our sins than to exert ourselves with bold adventures. And this reminds me of one of Pascal’s most famous pensées:

Diversion. — When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves at court or in war, whence arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and often bad ventures, etc., I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. A man who has enough to live on, if he knew how to stay with pleasure at home, would not leave it to go to sea or to besiege a town. A commission in the army would not be bought so dearly, but that it is found insufferable not to budge from the town; and men only seek conversation and entering games, because they cannot remain with pleasure at home.

No. 136 in the Brunschvicg edition and no. 139 in the Lafuma edition

While there are some among us who are suited for this Pascalian quietude, for most of us, we are at our best when exposing ourselves to pain and peril, engaging in what William James called the “strenuous life.” As Hegel once said, nothing great in the world is accomplished without passion, and pain and peril are the inevitable companions of passionate engagement with the world.

The most charitable thing that can be said about the past fifty years of non-achievement in spacefaring development is that it constitutes a “strategic pause” in the development of spacefaring civilization. But fifty years could easily stretch into a hundred years, and after a hundred years a strategic pause in the development of spacefaring civilization takes on a different character, and we would have to ask ourselves if a century spent waiting to be worthy was a century well spent. Could we call a century of inaction a “pause”? I don’t think so. A century has a particular historical resonance for human beings; it represents a period of historical significance, and cannot be readily dismissed or waved away.

Though I am concerned about the human future and the eventual development of a spacefaring civilization, I also have reason to hope: recent years have seen the development of reusable rocket technology — by private industry, and not by the government run space programs that participated in the Space Race — and this may become a major player in space development. Moreover, my own study of civilization has made it clear to me that civilization today, despite pervasive declensionism in the western world, is more robust than ever before, and the ongoing prospect of civilization is hopeful in and of itself, because as long as technological civilization endures, and new technologies are developed, eventually the technology for a spacefaring breakout will be available at a sufficiently low cost that a small community interested in space exploration will eventually be able to engage in this exploration, even if the greater part of humanity prefers to remain quietly on our homeworld.

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Thirty Years Since Tiananmen

Tuesday

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In geostrategic circles it is common to speak of China as an island, even though China is very much a part of the Eurasian landmass. China is isolated from its civilizational neighbors by mountain ranges and deserts and an ocean. These barriers have not been absolute, but these have been effective in isolating China and limiting Chinese interaction with other Old World civilizations. The less often recognized flip side of an insular China surrounded by mountains, deserts, and an ocean is that of Chinese unity. Chinese insularity and Chinese unity are two sides of the same coin; China’s geographical barriers both isolate and unify the region.

The idea of Chinese unity has a deep history in geostrategic thought, both in China and elsewhere in Eurasia and the world. Chinese civilization seems to have had its origins in the Yellow River Valley during the Neolithic, and it has been continuously Chinese civilization more-or-less since that time. There is direct line of descent from these earliest origins of civilization in East Asia to the China of today. And while the idea diffusion of Chinese civilization populated East Asia with other civilizations, related to China by descent with modification, few of these other civilizations had a profound reflexive influence upon Chinese civilization, even as they came to maturity and become regional powers. Moreover, when China has not been unified — as during the period of Warring States or the Taiping Rebellion — this has been regarded as an historical aberration.

Chinese unity is a far greater and much older imperative than any one Chinese regime, including the communist iteration of China as the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Chinese communists are as keen on Chinese unity as any Chinese emperor of the past (much as general secretaries of the communist party in the Soviet Union were as keen on Russian imperialism as was any Tsar). Any great disruption within China threatens Chinese unity, and so is perceived as an existential threat to one of the core strategic imperatives of Chinese civilization. Another way of stating this is Martin Jacques’ contention that China is a “civilization-state” that derives its legitimacy from the continuity of its civilization (cf. Civilization-States and Their Attempted Extirpation).

At the recent 18^th Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, Chinese General Wei Fenghe, State Councilor and Minister of National Defense, PRC, gave a speech largely focused on Taiwan and the South China Sea. Taiwan perfectly exemplifies the Chinese concern for Chinese unity. It has been seventy years since the Chinese Nationalists fled to Taiwan, and Mao was forced to accept their control of Taiwan because he did not possess the resources to follow the Nationalists across the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan has been a de facto independent nation-state since that time, but China has not forgotten Taiwan, and remains intent on re-asserting political control over the island.

After General Wei Fenghe’s speech he was asked questions, and he surprised many in the audience by explicitly answering a question about Tiananmen — the “June Fourth Incident” (天安門事件) — of which he was quoted as saying:

“Everybody is concerned about Tiananmen after 30 years,” Wei said on Sunday. “Throughout the 30 years, China under the Communist Party has undergone many changes — do you think the government was wrong with the handling of June Fourth? There was a conclusion to that incident. The government was decisive in stopping the turbulence.”

Turbulence threatens Chinese unity and stability, and as such it constitutes not merely a threat to the PRC or the ruling communist party, it constitutes a threat to Chinese civilization. Contrast this to Thomas Jefferson’s well known claim that, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.” Jefferson descended from the tradition of European civilization, which was always at war with itself, and never unified. And if you trace western civilization to its origins in Mesopotamia and Anatolia (cf. The Seriation of Western Civilization) it is obvious that western civilization has a different relationship to its origins than does Chinese civilization.

China’s grand strategy is dictated by these core concerns for continuity, stability, and unity, and China is willing to play the long game in order to secure these grand strategic goals. China has been mostly content to employ persuasion to this end, and this was the motivation for the “one country, two systems” policy that was supposed to assuage concerns in Hong Kong about its reunification with the Chinese mainland. For optimists, the success of “one country, two systems” in Hong Kong would persuade Taiwan to voluntarily accept a similar deal for itself. But China also plays the long game in Hong Kong, and it has been steadily wearing away at the autonomy of Hong Kong, so that the “two systems” of the “one country” come ever closer to coinciding.

The Chinese mainland implicitly offers to Hong Kong and Taiwan the opportunity to hitch their wagons to a star, as the large and growing Chinese economy represents the possibility of great wealth for all who get on board (but at the cost of what Rufus Fears called “national freedom”). Now that China feels its growing strength, both economically and militarily, we hear much less about “one country, two systems” and much more about the core strategic concerns of continuity, stability, and unity. China can now afford to be more direct about its grand strategy.

Thirty years’ on, the Tiananmen Square massacre is now perceived as being safely distant in the past so that it can be acknowledged by Chinese military leaders, who have moved on to other concerns. There will be no official commemorations in mainland China, but the Chinese government may eventually become sufficiently confident of its position and its view of Chinese history that it can acknowledge the incident and place it in a context that they believe contributes to the narrative of the ability of the Chinese leadership class to ensure the strategic imperatives of Chinese continuity, stability, and unity.

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Previous posts on Tiananmen Anniversaries:

2009 Anniversary of a Massacre

2010 Twenty-one years since Tiananmen

2011 Was the Tiananmen massacre an atrocity?

2013 A Dream Deferred

2014 Tiananmen and the Right to be Forgotten

2015 Tiananmen and Chinese Grand Strategy

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