The Myth of Increasing Violence

[leo9]

In my view, civilization is, quite simply, people learning to get along with one another. People accepting their differences from one another. People realizing that skin color, or religious beliefs, or sexual orientation do not in and of themselves make people bad.

I think that's too narrow a definition, though it's complicated by the fact that we use "civilisation" in two senses, one practical, one moral.

Sticking strictly to the practical, I would define civilisation as any system of social mechanisms that allow people to co-operate on a larger scale than the clan or tribe. The great success strategy of humans is co-operation plus variability. Plenty of species co-operate at all doing the same thing, but humans achieved something greater by co-operating while doing a load of different things - hunting, gathering, making tools, preparing food, minding childen etc, all co-ordinated by a level of social communication so detailed that it needed a special kind of brain to handle it.

But there's a limit to the number of people that can be organised that way. It has been observed that hunter-gatherer clans, once they get past a certain size, will split and some of them move on. It's assumed that this is because their territory won't support more people, but I suspect it's more that the social structure breaks down when there are too many people, and subgroups form spontaneously.

But we know from the Neolithic farming towns that at some point people learnt to hold a bigger group together. They developed structures, ways of organising that didn't depend on everyone knowing everyone else, so that a community could go on co-ordinating its efforts while growing beyond the limits of a tribe and spreading beyond a closed group. The benefit was to enlarge the power of co-ordination plus variability. The bigger the group, the more different specialists it can support, and the better they can get at their specialty; the wider the group's territory, the more different natural resources it can exploit at once. Cultural natural selection favoured the groups that could find ways to stay co-ordinated while growing even bigger and wider spread, from village to town, from town to city with its hinterland of towns, from city-state to nation (and, if the gods spare us, from nation to world.) And those methods of co-ordination are what we call civilisation.

As I said at the start, this is a strictly pragmatic definition and says nothing about whether those methods are good or bad. In practice, they have ranged from democracy to tyranny. But the verdict of history is that tyrannies, though they look superficially more efficient, do not make the best use of human potential, and therefore eventually either fall to or evolve into systems that leave more space for individual growth and initiative.

[Thorne]

we know from the Neolithic farming towns that at some point people learnt to hold a bigger group together. They developed structures, ways of organising that didn't depend on everyone knowing everyone else, so that a community could go on co-ordinating its efforts while growing beyond the limits of a tribe and spreading beyond a closed group.

Which deflates your suspicion that the hunter/gatherers broke up more due to population pressure than because of the amount of food they could extract from an area. The biggest difference was that the farming communities could support larger groups of people on a comparatively smaller territory.

And those methods of co-ordination are what we call civilisation.

Which is basically the point I was making when I said, "people learning to get along with one another." I think that morality evolves from these mechanisms, gradually changing the way people think. Of course, technology plays a big roll, too. Better technology means more and more people can live together as a community, while demanding a higher level of education of the people in order to utilize the technology.

Is there an upper limit to how many people can form an effective community? I don't know. But I think if we can look past our cultural and (yes, I will say it) religious differences, I think it's possible that the world-wide community might be possible. Better education and better communications will help make that possible, as the Internet is showing us already. When you can chat with someone halfway around the world you quickly learn that he is not the demon you've been told he was. And that leads to tolerance and understanding.

[thir]

I think that's too narrow a definition, though it's complicated by the fact that we use "civilisation" in two senses, one practical, one moral.

You have a very important point here. I believe that most people actually use the expression in the moral sense.

Throughout history, many countries have used 'teaching others to be civlized' - meaning 'like us' - as an excuse for conquest. People who consider themselves civilized feel superior to people they consider uncivilized and this is - even in recent times - still an excuse to run them over.

Civilized as in our moral, our religion, our technology, our complex societies.

But it was always about power and resources and money.

There is still this idea today that humans progress towards something better automatically - in spite of Darwin, it is seen as if there is some master plan behind it all. And of course it is our culture that is the superior one - whoever 'we' are - our culture that we must at all costs and with all methods bring to others.

In this discussion we start talking about the kind of society we would like to have, or which we think will come. Much better.

I agree with Thorne about tolerance between humans, and would add respect for other living creatures and for the earth we must all feed off. I would consider civilized a society where fear, greed and hate can only be an individual thing, not something that can for instance make leaders take a country to war. Most wars are based on greed, and some on fear or hate.

I also do not consider the extent of or absent of technology a measure of civilization or of lack of it. It is how we are with each other that will determine the future.
I consider a too technology-dependant society a society heading towards collaps. With all its advantages it also makes us much too weak and vulnerable. A civilized society is a stable society.

Freedom is all important. Without sufficient influence on our own lives we have no human dignity and life has no meaning. Too strong central control makes a society uncivilized, IMO.

But cilivizations tend to be complex, and the more complex, the less freedom. The bigger, the less personal, and the less effect of our natural tribe co-operation. So, as I see it civilizations cannot be too big without without becoming meaningless or falling apart.

Sticking strictly to the practical, I would define civilisation as any system of social mechanisms that allow people to co-operate on a larger scale than the clan or tribe.

Defined like that, are civilizations good or bad?

But we know from the Neolithic farming towns that at some point people learnt to hold a bigger group together. They developed structures, ways of organising that didn't depend on everyone knowing everyone else, so that a community could go on co-ordinating its efforts while growing beyond the limits of a tribe and spreading beyond a closed group. The benefit was to enlarge the power of co-ordination plus variability. The bigger the group, the more different specialists it can support, and the better they can get at their specialty; the wider the group's territory, the more different natural resources it can exploit at once. Cultural natural selection favoured the groups that could find ways to stay co-ordinated while growing even bigger and wider spread, from village to town, from town to city with its hinterland of towns, from city-state to nation (and, if the gods spare us, from nation to world.) And those methods of co-ordination are what we call civilisation.

As I see it, there is a limit to how far this developement should be allowed to go. You end up with using resources faster than they can be regrown, or use them up, and you end up loosing far too much individual freedom and meaning with life.

Money is probably seen as a function of civilization. Yet now that we no longer catch or grow our own individual food, money means that the economical ups and downs determine whether we live or die. Factors now so complicated that noone can overview them, and over which we have little influence, even if our politicians think we do.

As I said at the start, this is a strictly pragmatic definition and says nothing about whether those methods are good or bad. In practice, they have ranged from democracy to tyranny.

How would you characterize the Western societies?