In 1975, I had an ear finely tuned for evidence of “ethnocentrism,” the readiness to judge matters by the standards of one’s own culture. I had just finished my undergraduate degree in anthropology and was struggling to find some footing in a world that was indifferent to my exquisite sense of whose culture should prevail in the search for truth, and whether truth itself was an ethnocentric concept.

More than 50 years have passed, and I find myself on the eve of a visit to Brussels and then Budapest to talk about Western civilization and, among other things, intellectual freedom. My younger self would have pushed these aside as ethnocentricities for sure. What is Western civilization to the people of highland New Guinea? How does “intellectual freedom” translate for Iranian clerics?

My older self, however, takes these matters in stride. 

You strive to find the best and most defensible standards available, and the chances are pretty good that Western civilization is more likely to provide them than the spirits of the Haus Tambaran in a New Guinea village or the cogitations of a murderous hierophant in a mosque. 

That said, I am confronted by this impending conference with the question of whether America and Europe are in the midst of civilizational divorce. The question assumes I know what a civilization is. And an echo of my 1975 self is warning me to be careful. I spent a good portion of my life immersed in ethnographies: detailed descriptions written by anthropologists of what people all over the world do with their time. Often, what they do is think up complex stories, rules of daily living, vendettas against their neighbors, and implausible explanations of stuff. 

In today’s politically correct parlance, these are all “First Peoples,” and we owe their beliefs the utmost respect, because they too are bearers of “civilization.”

That, of course, stretches the word “civilization” to the breaking point. If everything people do is evidence of civilization, the word means nothing beyond something people sometimes do. If the word “civilization” has value, it comes from drawing a distinction. These folks have a written language, historical records, and the ability to build hypersonic missiles. These other folks, by contrast, have only some oral traditions and are handy with bows and arrows. 

That particular way of drawing the distinction falls short, but it gets the general sense that the term “civilization” implies a bundle of collective accomplishments that have a deep sense of history behind them. You don’t get to hypersonic missiles without advanced mathematics, engineering, and the institutions that foster them. 

But my 1975 self replies, “Well, you don’t get to bows and arrows without a self-sustaining social order that has thrived over tens of thousands of years in challenging circumstances. The oral traditions of Pleistocene tribes probably had a lot to do with their success in hunting woolly mammoths.”

In other words, it probably isn’t wise to conflate advanced technology with “civilization.” Maybe we should make a better distinction between what counts as civilized and what isn’t.

Anthropologists once gave a lot of thought to this, and so have others. One school of thought emphasized the ability to sustain a large population. Domesticating animals and plants is key to this, and so too is exercising sufficient control over the environment, for example, through irrigation. Those are handy rules of thumb for archaeologists, but it means we enlist the bloodthirsty Aztecs on the roll of the civilized and relegate the peaceful hunting and gathering Pygmies of central Africa to the depths of savagery. Something seems not quite right.

Another approach is to emphasize moral enlightenment as the core of civilization. Those people who call on one another to abide by the Golden Rule are admitted to the club. Those who treat the “other” as legitimate prey are not. I think there is considerable merit to this approach, but making benevolence the hallmark of civilization introduces new problems. Civilizations don’t survive without the assistance of hard men trained to do dark deeds. The world is a dangerous place, and most of what we consider “civilized” is grounded not far beneath the surface of blood-soaked battlefields. The Iliad is the foundational text of Greek civilization. 

I am not giving up on the word. Civilization means something to me. But I confess that I don’t see a clear path ahead. 

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