What is a civilization?

Civilization is literally "the building of cities" and that remains a good and useful definition. The essence of village life was the fact that people lived only among those they were personally acquainted with and/or related to, and as a pack-social species we have an instinct to trust and care for them. The essence of civilization was for people to learn to live in harmony and cooperation among strangers, the people who their instincts tell them are competitors for scarce resources. The history of civilization has been the conflict between our primitive instincts and the reasoned and learned behaviors made possible by our uniquely enormous brains. Although we have not completed the transition, reason and learning have steadily prevailed.

Civil liberties are a need that arose as civilizations became larger and assimilated tribes whose traditions, beliefs and customs were increasingly diverse and caused conflict, and as their organization became so large and complex that a professional governing class became a power unto itself. Freedom from persecution for being different from the majority, freedom from punishment for suggesting that there are flaws in the system, and freedom from persecution for being in the way of a power grab by friends of the ruling class are essential to the success and progress of civilization.

 

They are not "steadily increasing." They have been going up and down in vague cycles ever since we started charting them and you have the curmudgeon's favorite vantage point of the bad side of a cycle. The crime rate in the USA has in fact been slowly falling in fits and starts as the Baby Boomers drag the average age of the population upward, since--duh--it's invariably young people who commit the most crimes and there used to be so dadgum many of the little buggers. The majority of inmates of American prisons are there for non-violent drug offenses, which are not even properly offenses since the laws under which they were prosecuted are blatantly unconstitutional. If you normalize out the effect of the stupidity of the Religious Redneck Retards that have been gaining control of the government since they stole our flag during the Vietnam War, there is no crime "epidemic."

In your storybook-perfect era of nomadic hunter-gatherers, the per-capita GDP of the human race was so low that people had only the food they could wrest from the wild, the clothes they could make from the hides left from their meals, and a pocketful of wood-and-stone trinkets they could carry with them as they traveled without so much as draft animals. It is now so high that almost the entire population have permanent dwellings and the technologies of agriculture and animal husbandry, most have running water, access to motorized transportation, electronic communication and a formal educational system, and something like half of us have ranges, refrigerators, cars and stereos. Poverty and hunger have been on the decrease for more than ten thousand years and you can only make your point because the decrease is not monotonic and you can point so angrily to a temporary setback that you expect to distract your listeners from seeing the overall optimistic trend.

A mere five hundred years ago the middle class was so small that it was an almost insignificant factor in the numbers of the economy, despite its power as an economic engine. Today there are vast swaths of contiguous nations in which the middle class constitutes something like three fourths of the population. If you're taking the difference between Bill Gates and the poster child in Darfur as your measure, then you're simply exploiting the innumeracy of the American public.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the entire civilizations of two non-Christian, non-European populations were obliterated. The reduction of their populations in the same campaign is not known with accuracy but a median estimate is about fifty percent, which would be at least forty million people--around eight percent of the total world population. The campaigns of the Ottomans, the Nazis, the Stalinists and the Maoists have not come close to that order of magnitude. WWII's death toll of 20 million was barely one percent of the much larger world population of the time and no civilizations have been wiped from the face of the earth since the demise of the Aztecs and Incas.

Who gives a shit? No nation stays on top forever and maybe America's ride is over. The number of people throughout the world who will lament that decreases every year. The universities of China and India have become bona fide institutions of higher learning and the day will come when names like Oxford, Harvard, and Sorbonne are known only by historians. Literacy has been spreading since the invention of printing and public education is the norm in most places. I have to agree with you that reason and learning are on the wane in America--again because of the influence of the RRRs--but the long-term worldwide trend is in the opposite direction. This too shall pass--either America's fashionable ignorance or America's world leadership.

I think I just did, dude. It's your look that is short and shallow. Everyone can look at their own place in their own time and identify its shortcomings. But it's the long run and the whole planet that count and in that context we're doing just fine.

For the goddess's sake Max, do you only think about the era in which you personally live, or do you care at all about the entire human race including those who will come after you?

Civilization has not progressed steadily, or even monotonically. There have been many setbacks. The Dark Ages in particular were a blight on our history caused by the cancer of patriarchal monotheism that keeps metastasizing out of the Middle East. There were many periods before and since then when misanthropic Barons felt certain that the decline they observed during their lifetime was an irreversible trend. But they were always wrong.

Pick ten widely distributed places on Earth and take a snapshot every thousand years going back to the Dawn of Civilization in that particular spot. That will give you something like fifty data points. I'll bet you won't have ten data points that represent a net decrease in quality of life over a thousand-year span and probably not two in the same place.

 

Baron, why do you retreat into a tone of disgusted resignation just at the point where someone gives you the response you seem to ask for?

I have stipulated that if you pick ten points on earth that are in as culturally and ethnically diverse locations as can be reasonably chosen, you will not be able to find a thousand-year period in more than a couple of them during which the quality of life decreased overall, and never two such periods in one place. That will be a proper scientific measurement. I'm letting you pick the spots and I already gave you a freebie on another thread: Europe between, say, 300CE and 1300CE, the Dark Ages, Christianity at its all-time worst.

And I'm still confident that I'll be proven right, that in the long run civilization has been a success.

On the other thread I have pointed out that in most cases those who are too poor to get drunk and celebrate are still far more prosperous than their forebears. And that in the exceptional cases the downturn in quality of life can be seen in perspective as something that happens periodically but always returns to an even higher level. I admit that the advance of civilization has not been monotonic but that the advances have always outbalanced the declines.

Why do you choose not to respond to this but instead act like I'm speaking in woo-woo?

 

Still not actually responding to any of my relatively straightforward statements and questions, I see.

This is SciForums, after all. We try to stick to the scientific method. A major part of that is the principle that extraordinary assertions require extraordinary substantiation. After ten centuries of steadily advancing civilization, during which people have overwhelmingly chosen to live in it when given the choice, it is an extraordinary assertion to say it's not working. I think you can do better than this.

Give us a clue to what it is you find so intolerable about civilization that in order to be rid of it you'd give up instrumental music, written language, cats, plumbing, antibiotics, hundreds of acquaintances from diverse cultures, intellectual stimulation, not worrying about your neighbors hurting or cheating you, and...

... the highest probability in all history of being born in a place where A. You'll live into your 70s in good health and B. The absolute worst thing that ever happens to you is being fired from your job or having the woman you love walk out on you.

 

Actually, alcohol production was one of the early technologies that Stone Age people were able to develop.

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They also discovered tea, tobacco, coca, and, if I'm not mistaken, hemp. So take solace in the fact that if we somehow manage to destroy civilization, we'll still be able to get high.