Theories of Civilization

Typology

The Biological Theory of Civilization

Oswald Spengler’s theory of civilization became famous and gave rise to many discussions in the twentieth century. Spengler’s thought had an important influence on political actions in Germany during Nazi times. In his work Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West), under the influence of the theories of Friedrich Nietzsche, Hegel, and Gnosticism, Spengler stated that culture and civilization are manifestations of one biological process of life, which is subject to the cosmic and universal law of generation and corruption, birth and death, violent quantitative and qualitative changes. Hence, all the events of the history of humanity are organically and structurally connected; they are a manifestation of one biological life process; humanity is a zoological category. The historical events of humanity (i.e., the process of the development of cultures) pass through stages analogous to the stages in the development of an organism, that is, youth, maturity, and old age. Culture is a stage of maturity in the development of historical events, whereas civilization is a stage aiming at death, that is, the state of the loss of life, a time of regress, decline, lameness, and inefficiency in the history of mankind.

For Spengler, civilization appears as a stage of the end of life, twilight (Untergang), and at the same time, the stage of completion (Vollendung). Spengler, like Giambattista Vico in his work Scienza nuova (The New Science), believed in the cyclicity of occurring changes, births and deaths. While Vico saw in history the manifestation and action of divine providence, and history itself passed through the stages of myths (the poetical-religious imagination), heroes (the will), and the reason, Spengler believed that the transformations that occur are irrational, pessimistic, and catastrophic in character (there is no cause for coming into-being or decline, and no purpose for transformations).

Transformations of culture into civilization occur spontaneously, caused by an inner “irrational and blind” instinct. Spengler distinguished eight civilizations: Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mexican, ancient, Western European, and Russian, which is still being born. Each of the cultures has its own profile, including fine arts, mathematics, physics, philosophy, music, and technology. According to Spengler, Western culture had entered a time of twilight and completion, and thereby was becoming a civilization. The people of the West faced the task of completing the ultimate possibilities of their culture. The Germans (the “Romans of the culture of the West”)—the Prussian socialists represented by an authoritarian state with a Faustian culture—had a special mission here. They were the ones who—after ridding themselves of sentiments, and living boisterously, hard, actively, with will and power—should complete the destiny of cosmic necessary law (death)."

The Historical Theory of Civilization

"The English historian Arnold J. Toynbee created an original theory of civilization (A Study of History and Civilization on Trial). He distinguished over twenty different civilizations; they are not forms of life separate from one another, but between them there is the possibility of contact and rivalry, which is the reason for the development of civilization. Europe, conceived in geographic terms, is not uniform in its civilization, which explains the many armed conflicts appearing over its history. Western civilization is threatened by Byzantine civilization, represented by Russia. Civilizations arise as the result of the interaction of man and the natural environment. Each civilization—in Toynbee, “the smallest unit of historical study”2—is an organized form of human group life, the result of a challenge posed to man and his society by the natural environment. Unless he meets this challenge, man and his society cannot exist; to meet the challenge requires creative solutions and the efficient organization of group life, which leads to the existence of the civilization. The more difficult, richer, and varied the challenge, the richer is the civilization. When human societies lose the ability to react effectively to challenges from the environment, or when the environment stops presenting challenges, or they change into something completely new, then civilizations must fall. A civilization can be leaning toward a fall even over hundreds of years, but by its nature a civilization is not mortal and by creative thoughts it can lift itself from a fall. The development of a civilization cannot be reduced to man’s interference in the natural environment or to the development of technology, but it is fundamentally visible in the increasing consolidation of human society. Social elites who are capable of creating and undertaking creative thoughts, of putting together internal solidarity and of alleviating social conflicts play an important role here.

The Sociological Theory of Civilization

"Alvin Toffler took up the topic of civilization in his works: The Third Wave, Creating a New Civilization, and Future Shock. According to him, civilizations arise as the result of violent transformations (waves) that include the life of individuals, families, societies, political communities, and the states. The first wave of transformations arose together with the spread of agrarian culture, and thereby led to the existence of the first civilization, which was connected with land; in this civilization, religion, tradition, and the multi-generational family played an important role. It lasted on the Earth for over 10,000 years. In the seventeenth century, industrial civilization began to take shape, called into existence by the wave of technological and scientific transformations which caused a shift of life to cities and industrial centers, and thereby it waged war against the agrarian civilization. The friction between two different civilizations became a conflict which occurred fundamental for history. In practice, such conflicts took the form of wars, revolutions, rebellions, or social crises. In the beginnings of industrial civilization, a new model of the family as a small cell was formed, and new ideas of social life appeared, such as progress, the rights of the individual, the theory of the social contract, the idea of separation of religion (the Church) and the state, and the election of rulers by the populace; this was accompanied by mass production and consumption, universal education and information, leading to the creation of a new culture called mass culture; other features of this culture were cheap labor, predatory colonial policies, and the unchecked exploitation of natural resources. Beginning in the 1970s, a new wave of transformations appears, connected with computer technology, leading to the rise of a new civilization that is globalist and information-based. The foundation of this form of civilization is knowledge and the rapid flow of information. Its universal characteristic is mobility, especially with respect to economic life. It eliminates the existence of independent and sovereign nation states, which are the product of the agrarian and industrial civilizations, and it proposes globalization. It eliminates the family based on indissoluble marriage for business partnerships, and it leads to non-religion. According to Toffler, the ideas of a “borderless world” and “planetary consciousness” should animate the culture of the “third-wave” civilization."

The Political-Science Theory of Civilization

"Toward the end of the twentieth century, the theory of the clash of civilizations developed by the American political scientist and sociologist Samuel P. Huntington resounded throughout the world.3 According to him, worldwide conflicts in the past and present have their source in clashes and rivalries between civilizations, which in fact play the role of the subjects of political actions in the world. By reason of the different goals that civilizations set for themselves, political actions have a multi-polar character, and the history of the world is the history of civilizations, which include a material and a spiritual heritage. Huntington distinguishes seven existing civilizations (Chinese, Japanese,4 Hindu, Islamic, Orthodox,5 Western,6 Latin American7) and African civilization, which is still being created. According to him, the foundation of a civilization is not a language, race, or religion, but culture conceived in a broad sense. He emphasizes that the reception of technical skills and technology by non-Western cultures does not lead to their westernization or to the creation of a single world civilization; on the contrary, it leads to a threat to Western civilization, since there is a permanent rivalry between civilizations. We are witnesses to the weakening of Western culture, being a result of artificial attempts to universalize it (making out of it a global and dominant civilization), which in practice lead to its loss of cultural identity and power, and also to conflicts and clashes of civilizations. The chief threat to Western civilization, according to Huntington, lies in Islamic and Chinese civilizations, while he sees the chief cause of the political setbacks of Western civilization in a failure to perceive differences in civilizations or to take them into account."

(https://cejsh.icm.edu.pl/cejsh/element/bwmeta1.element.desklight-e2441807-f609-4886-bb22-23cf3e671199/c/665-687-Skrzydlewski.pdf)

Source

• "This article is a part of The Universal Encyclopedia of Philosophy to be published by the Polish Society of Thomas Aquinas. It is a revised and translated version of the encyclopedia entry originally published in Polish as: Paweł Skrzydlewski, “Cywilizacja,” in Powszechna encyklopedia filozofii, vol. 2, ed. Andrzej Maryniarczyk (Lublin: PTTA, 2001)." [1]

More information

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