Civilization and Beyond | Page 3

around these urban centers there grows up a complex of associations, activities, institutions and ideas designed to promote, develop and defend the particular life pattern.
A civilization is a cluster of peoples, nations and empires so related in time and space that they share certain ideas, practices, institutions and means of procedure and survival. Among these features of a civilized community we may list:
(1) means of communication, record-keeping, transportation and trade. This would include a spoken language, a method of enumeration, writing in pictographs or symbols; an alphabet, a written language, inscribed on stone, bone, wood, parchment, paper; means of preserving the records of successive generations; paths, roads, bridges; a system for educating successive generations; meeting places and trading points; means for barter or exchange;
(2) an interdependent urban-oriented economy based on division of labor and specialization; on private property in the essential means of production and in consumer goods and services; on a competitive survival struggle for wealth, prestige and power between individuals and social groups; and on the exploitation of man, society and nature for the material benefit of the privileged few who occupy the summit of the social pyramid;
(3) a unified, centralized political apparatus or bureaucracy that attempts to plan, direct and administer the political, economic, ideological and sociological structure;
(4) a self-selected and self-perpetuating oligarchy that owns the wealth, holds the power and pulls the strings;
(5) an adequate labor force for farming, transport, industry, mining;
(6) large middle-class elements: professionals, technicians, craftsmen, tradesmen, lesser bureaucrats, and a semi-parasitic fringe of camp-followers;
(7) a highly professional, well-trained, amply-financed apparatus for defense and offense;
(8) a complex of institutions and social practices which will indoctrinate, persuade and when necessary limit deviation and maintain social conformity;
(9) agreed religious practices and other cultural features.
This description of civilization covers the essential features of western civilization and the sequence of predecessor civilizations for which adequate records exist.
Successive civilizations have introduced new culture traits and abandoned old ones as the pageant of history moved from one stage to the next, or advanced and retreated through cycles. Using this description as a working formula, it is possible to understand the development followed in the past by western civilization, to estimate its current status and to indicate its probable outcome.
Long-established thought-habits cry aloud in protest against such a description of civilization. Until quite recently the word "civilization" has been used in academic circles to symbolize a social idea or ideal. Professor of History Anson D. Morse of Amherst College presents such a view in his Civilization and the World War (Boston: Ginn 1919). For him, civilization is "the sum of things in which the heritage of the child of the twentieth century is better than that of the child of the Stone Age. As a process it is the perfection of man and mankind. As an end, it is the realization of the highest ideal which men are capable of forming.... The goal of civilization ... is human society so organized in all of its constituent groups that each shall yield the best possible service to each one and thereby to mankind as a whole, (producing) the perfect organization of humanity." (page 3).
Such thoughts may be noble and inspired; they are not related to history. We know more or less about a score of civilizations that have occupied portions of the earth during several thousand years. We know a great deal about the western civilization which we observe and in which we participate. Professor Morse's florid words apply to none of the civilizations known to history. Certainly they are poles away from an accurate characterization of our own varient of this social pattern.
We are writing this introduction in an effort to make our word pictures of mankind and its doings correspond with the facts of social history. With the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, it is high time for us to exchange the clouds of fancy and the flowers of rhetoric for the solid ground of historical reality. The word "civilization" must generalize what has been and what is, as nearly as the past and present can be embodied in language.
Civilization is a level or phase of culture which has been attained and lost repeatedly in the course of social history. The epochs of civilization have not been distributed evenly, either in time or on the earth's surface. A combination of circumstances, political, economic, ideological, sociological, resulted in the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Roman civilizations. One of these was centered in North Africa, the second in Asia, the third in eastern Europe. All three spilled over into adjacent continents.
No two civilizations are exactly alike at any stage of their development. Each civilization is at least a partial experiment, a process or sequence of causal relationships, altered sequentially in the course of its life cycle.
These thoughts about culture and