What is civilization?

The term civilization, some will claim, is merely a bludgeon used by bigots and oppressors to demean the stranger. The word itself comes from the Latin civis, meaning “citizen”; etymologically speaking, civilization is that which binds you to a city, a political community. Of course, when a political community begins to speak of itself as a civilization, thoughts of exclusion already crouch at its door—whether in Athens, Shanghai, London, or Tenochtitlan, the home fires always burn the brightest. Can we distill some meaning from this overburdened word that is not merely arbitrary and exclusive?

In Book I of the Politics, Aristotle claims, “the city is a creation of nature, and man is by nature a political animal”; the city “originates in the bare needs of life, and continues in existence for the sake of a good life.” Citizenship is essential to a complete life; apart from a political community, man starves both physically and emotionally. Men must cooperate to survive, and converse to thrive.

In Book II of the Republic, Plato outlines the relationship between man’s soul and the development of the city, which first “comes into being because each of us isn’t self-sufficient, but in need of much.” So, farmers and herdsmen, tradesmen and merchants, artisans and laborers gather to divide their labor. However, the city is not complete at self-sufficiency for, as Plato notes, men want “their feast [with] relishes.” They want not merely to survive, but to savor rich food, to compose a psalm, to exult over the vanquished, to venerate the ancestor, to encounter the Divine. Thus, the city adds poets, actors, jewelers, cooks, servants, priests, and prophets, besides an army to protect its clamorous citizens from themselves and from outsiders, and a government to administer justice and garbage pickup.

Of course, Adam’s whispered, “Bone of my bones,” and Cain’s violence prove man had both poetry and murder in his heart long before he came to a city, but it is only in a city that his best and worst come to full light. The subsistence farmer cannot bother to compose an epic; a family can destroy itself in murder, but it cannot wage total war.

We can have none of the naïve modernist lisping about the perfection of mankind: if “primitives” lack certain virtues—monuments and shopping malls—they just as surely lack many of our more horrific vices—consider the Australian Aborigines, who, until their collision with the West, had not a single recorded instance of suicide. Perhaps a civilization is that social structure within which man is most fully himself, with all the good and evil implied therein.