Brief Outline of Civilizational History

Discussion

Michel Bauwens:

A brief outline of civilizational history

First we have to establish whether there is such a thing as civilization.

Arnold Toynbee in his ‘Study of History’, makes a cogent argument that you cannot explain societal evolution from a pure place-based or nation-based point of view; they are always embedded in a larger entity of similar societies which are themselves contending with other blocks. That interconnected entity of a block of nations that tend towards a similar culture and societal organization is what a civilization is. A second distinction is to reserve ‘civilization’ for societies that have writing, a caste or caste system with explicit division of labor, and an army or repressive apparatus that is separate from the people. This distinguishes the concept of civilization from tribal or indigenous forms of social organization, that are still clan- or kinship based. I find Keith Chandler’s summary of the Characteristics of Civilization, in the book Beyond Civilization to be an excellent summary of these features. Chandler shows how each civilization makes very particular metaphysical choices that are related to distinct socio-political structures and mentalities. This point of view is also that of Oswald Spengler in his landmark Decline of the West, which is mis-titled as its topic is the growth and decline of every civilization, according to a particular dynamic that he defines as that of a living organism. Spengler is contentious, but he started a century long debate that is still ongoing, so his book is foundational to ‘civilizational analysis’. Arnold Toynbee challenged this view of separate civilizations that do not learn from each other, and showed their interconnectedness. For Toynbee, there are indeed, ‘generations of civilizations’. He recognized three forms, which will allow us to posit a Fourth Generation Civilization.

Briefly, the First Generation is the Sumeric-Egyptian, Indian and Chinese responses to the great deglacialization of 12000 BC and a collective decision to master and regulate nature.

These types of civilizations were organized around “power Gods”, superhuman beings that represented natural forces and human emotions, and for which the ruling classes were the conduit, protecting the societies that sacrificed to them.

These imperial types of social organization were interrupted by the Axial Age reformation of human thought and spirituality. The Gods, sometimes reduced to a single transcendent God, became moral, and responded to the need for ethical choice-making in complexifying urban societies. Counted as such Axial movements are the contemporary global or civilizational religions such as Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism, Judaism and Islam, but also the Greek Philosophers.

Amongst the effects of the Axial Age are the coming to dominance of more separate rational thought, helped in its effects by the invention of the alphabet, a more abstract form of writing.

So this introduced the Second Generation of Civilizations, of which the Hellenic with the weight of philosophy may be symptomatic. Some authors, like Ken Wilber, would add that the ‘Imperial Form’ was replaced by the Traditional Form which subordinates power to the ethics of the new religious communities. If you are familiar with Spiral Dynamics, you will notice that it is an interpretation of psychological development that can be extrapolated to social systems, i.e. psychogenesis equals sociogenesis.

Civilizations indeed go through cycles, consisting of ascending and descending phases, and often going through transitional eras (‘Times of Trouble’, aka Toynbee), and they eventually decay and disappear. But they also learn .. . This means that despite the cyclic nature of societal development, there is also an accumulation taking place, of technical knowledge, an evolution of ethics, new subjectivities, etc … One of the expressions of this ‘spiral development’ is that the focus of societies can shift from the individual, for example the total and unimpeded power of the warlords, kings, and emperors, to social systems that are more embedded in ethical and religious values, as embedded in these community practices, and represented in the priesthood, which acts as checks and balances on individual power.

In this interpretation, human history evolved from its animal basis (individual struggle for survival), to the collective tribalism of animistic/shamanistic communities, to a re-individualization in aggressive conquering chiefdoms, to its moralization in the established Axial religions, back to the individual ‘entrepreneurship’ of post-Enlightenment capitalism, giving rise to new egalitarian movements to counteract it, etc …

So once we arrive at the Traditional organic societies organized around the principles of the Axial religions and ethical systems, we will see that they are interrupted by a kind of Second Axial Age, the “Age of the Enlightenment”. This is the civilizational revolution that will lead to modernity, industrialism, science, etc … It set in motion the modern world, which also created a world civilization.

Bear in mind here the theory of David Wilkinson, a world-systems analyst of the ‘materialist’ historical school, which posits the existence of a Central Civilization, consisting first of the Sumeric-Egyptian duopoly. This central civilization, as an interconnected network of cities, never disappeared. It moved from Mesopotamia to the West, and through colonization, capitalism and western imperialism, became the basis of a World Civilization, dominated by various European hegemons first (the Dutch, the British and the Americans).

Now of course, today, there remain very important cultural differences, rooted in the various separate civilizational histories, but despite that, the world civilization forms of nation-states and capitalism, have become universal.

Furthermore, the hegemonic domination of the US is challenged by China, and various scenarios can be envisaged, but the most likely one in my opinion is multipolarity.

There is an important ‘Eurasian’ background to this. Civilization has often taken the form of Empires, but also of maritime trading blocks, think of the Phoenicians, the Venitians, the Baltic Hanseatic League.

Michael Hudson brings a believable twist to this:

The Eurasian continent has seen a millennial rivalry between the imperial form, in which a ‘father-emperor’ with a divine mandate, protects the people and maintains solidarity mechanisms for the whole society, in particular, protecting the people against the power of the merchants. These are continental, more conservative societies with a ideology of harmony.

But in Ancient Greece, the creditor class came to power, it abolished the Jubilees and Clean Slate Legislations of the ancient empires, i.e. limits on monetary slavery. But this created conflict, and the ‘Democratic’ revolution in Athens was a revolt against this creditor class. Thus, Hellenism, and later the West, created a antagonistic and conflict based social form, with institutions defending the people (The Roman Tribunate, Parliamentarism, the welfare state), but also based on maritime power, mercantilism, rentier capitalism, etc…

The creation of the modern polity has been riven by these tensions:

WWI eliminated the imperial forms (Ottomans, Austria-Hungary) WWII was a rivalry for the right ‘management’ of the industrial nation-state: parliamentary capitalis vs fascism vs Soviet ‘communism’ WWIII, aka the conflict in Ukraine, pits the western rentier capitalist and democratic model against the state-sovereignist axis of Russia and China.

Modernity was also interrupted by a spiritual and cognitive revolution, that of post-modernity, which could best be seen as a relative deconstruction of the Enlightenment paradigm, just as the Enlightenment was a relative deconstruction of the Axial paradigm.