Civilization

The concept of “civilization” presages the ascent of global modernity while also challenging its apparent universality because it is bounded by both history (temporality) and place (culture). Civilization indeed once stood for world-historical progress and domination. Encounters and conflicts between civilizations acted as spurs toward processes of internationalization that prefigured the present vogue for spatial categories—the notion of the globe.

The term civilization stems from civilize, that is, to make civil that which implicitly is unruly or barbaric, hence, also implying an existing nature of some kind. A common term used broadly, civilization often elides proper definition and understanding, representing variously projected images of who we are and what we have become in different epochs. Its etymology gives some clue to its historical force and relevance, particularly as its genealogy is inextricably bound up with Europe and its imperial colonial expansions. To civilize a person or people, a phenomenon related to the earlier civilité (and civil), meant to institute a form of life that is closely associated with the political structure of the city or a settled complex society that the Latin civitatum once represented. This entry discusses several important features that characterize this type of existence that has been variously discussed by historians, anthropologists, social scientists, and thinkers.

One predominant characteristic of its trajectory is its inexorable unintentional encompassment of oppositions or contradictions, for example, civilized and “savage,” refined and vulgar, domesticated and wild, fraternal unity and estranged otherness, and advanced and primitive. Hence, under its canopy of complexity, there lie internal tensions and boundary delineations that forever attest to the essential contestability of the concept. Its inevitable contestability has once more prompted forms of resistance and self-assertion in the combat against perceived cultural grievances perpetrated largely by dominant Western (secular) philosophies and institutions.

Before 1750, civilization was associated with the practice of cultivating—derived from organic tilling and husbandry—carrying all the connotations of the Latin Cultura. (Kultura in German later becomes distinct from Zivilization as exemplified by the works of Immanuel Kant.) To cultivate is a deed involving nature, and this would later be extended, importantly, to the nature of civil life itself where human sociability (sociabilité) was enhanced by means of the rule of law, science, and the arts. Yet religion was pivotal to its conception from the beginning because sociability had to be preserved from the “false civilization” or evil that would inevitably develop. It is no coincidence that along with the Marquis de Mirabeau, Issac Newton, Benedict de Spinoza, and Immanuel Kant conceived their task of explaining the world in either philosophical or scientific ways as activity grounded in the religious worldview. After circa 1750, the bifurcation of civilization misleadingly led to the proposition that Cultura was something higher and superior to the base, materialist crudity of civilization. Letters, language, poetics, drama, theology, music, and mathematics were elevated in status to that which sustains and elevates the “spirit” of humankind—elements that were also previously encompassed by the older connation of civilization. Each of these elements was considered fitting for the task of refining or polishing what nature had endowed humans with. The dominion over other creatures, like the lower instincts and passions of humans, was integral to [Page 210]the formation of a civilized (or humanized) human animal; and the mark of such an achievement was the degree to which one seemed polished and refined (thus also educated) in the company of others.

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