Comparative Civilizations 12

Transcription

1 Comparative Civilizations 12 Comparative Civilizations 12 is not an easy course to describe succinctly because its aims are not cut and dried. It is an ambitious course which covers a tremendous amount of ground. If I had to sum up it in one sentence I would describe it like this: Comparative Civilizations 12 explores the implications of the journey of the human race from a state of nature to a state of culture. Before we do anything else, we should talk about this word civilization. What does it mean? What is a civilization? And, for that matter, what does it mean to be civilized? And are the two terms synonymous? Can you have one without the other? (For example, is everyone within a civilization civilized? And can a person be civilized outside of civilization?). In class we will discuss this word in a systematic way; but for now, I d like you to consider a few things written about civilization by people much smarter than me. The American historian Barbara Tuchman once described books like this: Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. Without books, the development of civilization would have been impossible. They are engines of change (as the poet said), windows on the world and lighthouses erected in the sea of time. They are companions, teachers, magicians, bankers of the treasures of the mind. Books are humanity in print. You will notice that in addition to books, Tuchman also suggests that history, literature, science, and thought and speculation (what we can probably call philosophy) are central civilization, that these are the essential content of books, those engines of change. 1

2 Here s something else to think about. In his novel Stargirl, author Jerry Spinelli has one of his characters make the following observation: It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then we open our eyes and we become ourselves. I think Spinelli is on to something there. By this description, civilization is something that is not only outside and around us, but within us; and it exists side-by-side with a more primitive self. Perhaps less poetically, but just as effectively, the fantasy writer Robert E. Howard (famous for his novels about Conan the Barbarian), observed: Break the skin of civilization and you find the ape, roaring and red-handed. The Russian emperor Peter the Great put it even more bluntly than Howard: Every man has a wild animal in him. 2

3 Both Spinelli and Peter the Great seem to be talking about a kind of dualism, which in the English language was probably best expressed by the nineteenth-century English novelist Robert Louis Stevenson with his famous character Dr. Jekyll and his sinister alter-ego Mr. Hyde. Civilization is partially a system of restraint, a way of keeping Mr. Hyde under control. Civilization also seems to have something to do with technology, and contrary to what you might think, the word technology does not simply refer to computers or smartphones. There are all kinds of technologies that have shaped and changed human life, from fire-building to nuclear reactors; from scribing symbols on clay tablets to space stations. Look at what the famous physicist Freeman Dyson said about technology and human civilization: The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grass in the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter. All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe. Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages. According to the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe. The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze. North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay. So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York. If I had asked you to name one of the most important technologies of medieval Europe you probably wouldn t have thought to say hay. It s intriguing there is a profound chain reaction that takes place when even a simple technology is introduced to a culture. 3

4 Of course, sophisticated technologies cannot exist without science. The astrophysicist Carl Sagan summed it up perfectly when he made the following observation: We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. If anything, this is an understatement. Without medicine, without mechanized transportation (automobiles, airplanes, etc.), without electricity, without computers, we would not have a civilization anymore. We would quickly fall into a kind of post-apocalyptic chaos. And yet, it is a big mistake to simply think of science as a set of discoveries which have given us air conditioning and penicillin. Look at what else Carl Sagan had to say: Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of this kind of thinking. It works. It s an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change. Our task is not just to train more scientists but also to deepen public understanding of science. This, I think, is an absolutely essential point in describing what distinguishes contemporary civilization from ancient civilization (this is the beginning of the comparative part of this course). Ancient civilizations, for all their achievements, were still dominated by primitive superstition. What science gave us is an entirely new kind of mind. Although the scientific mind didn t start with science itself it actually began much earlier, with philosophy. But I m getting ahead of myself. Civilization also has something to do with religion. Religion is one of humanity s oldest institutions; it has been central to all of the great civilizations of human history. Religion presents us with a strange paradox; at once a civilizing force, yet also a source of conflict. It seems to bring out humanity s best and worst impulses. 4

5 In spite of the predictions of some people that the age of science would erode religious faith, this has simply not happened, and as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century at least eighty percent of the world s population identify with a religion of some sort. To understand human civilization at all, we have to come to terms with religion. The underlying motivation of both religion and science is to try and explain the world. Yet before science, which is a relatively recent phenomenon in human history, and even before religion, which is ancient, human beings have attempted to explain the world around them. The oldest and most primal way we have done this is through storytelling. Long before the invention of writing people were telling stories by word of mouth, huddled in a cave for warmth as wolves howled outside in the darkness. These stories are called folktales, and one kind of folktale is a story that explains the origin of the world, the history of a people, or the reason for some natural event. These kinds of folktales are called myths. Myths are deeply embedded in every human culture. 5

6 One of the most important things that myths can offer us is wisdom, a term that seems archaic, outdated to many people. The writer and scholar Joseph Campbell, who, in his lifetime, was one of the world s foremost experts on mythology, made the following observation: What we're learning in our schools is not the wisdom of life. We're learning technologies, we're getting information. There's a curious reluctance on the part of faculties to indicate the life values of their subjects. The most striking thing about this statement? Campbell wrote it in Even in the mid-fifties it was apparent that schools were spending far too much time with technology and information, and far too little time with what Campbell calls the wisdom of life. Campbell died in What would he say about schools today? 6

7 We ve talked about civilization. Now let s talk about comparisons. After all, this course is not called Civilizations 12 ; it is Comparative Civilizations 12. What, exactly, are we comparing? Among other things, the following: Civilization and barbarism Superstition and skepticism Ancient and contemporary thought Wealth/affluence and poverty/deprivation Science and religion Law and chaos Government and anarchy Spirituality and materialism Technology and nature Knowledge and belief Tradition and novelty Conformity and innovation Faith and reason Instinct and self-awareness Meaning and nihilism Perhaps you can think of others. As far as how the course is structured, I can tell you that it is divided into six major topics (the comparisons listed above will run throughout all six of these topics). Each involves a great deal of exploration and as we begin each section of the course we will talk in detail about what is involved. I will list them here to give you a general sense of what to expect: Part 1: Defining Civilization and its Precursors and Foundations Part 2: Mythology, Folklore, and the Primal Religious Experience Part 3: The Abrahamic Religions Part 4: The Ancient Greeks and Western Philosophy Part 5: Eastern Religions and Philosophy Part 6: The Enlightenment, the Scientific Mind, the Technological Mind Imagine that collapse of human civilization. Our electricity, our computers, our cities, What have we lost? What will be left behind? 7

8 Let s wrap this up with a little thought experiment. Imagine that all human beings are gone. It doesn t matter how or why; perhaps global war, or global warming, or worldwide plague. But for whatever reason, there is no one left. One hundred years pass by. Earth is then visited by a alien species with impossibly advanced technology. These interstellar explorers land on our planet and begin the painfully slow process of exploration and discovery. They begin to explore our cities, our landscapes, our monuments, our ruins. They study our art, our machines, our books, our inventions. In short, they spend years puzzling over everything we left behind. What would they conclude about the human race? This course is an attempt at answering that question. Let s find out. 8