World Civilization is the study of human activity over its duration on this planet. It aims for a "big picture" of human societies, ideas, behaviors, and cultural contributions. In functioning on a large scale, World Civilization sacrifices specifics and local differences and gains a sense of the commonality of the human experience. This is definitely a trade-off. World Civilization can furnish an introductory familiarity with the major world civilizations, religions, and cultures.
The term "civilization" can have many meanings, and is by no means innocent. For the purposes of this course, "civilization" can mean either of two things (plus the gradations in between): either the "classical" definition of a complex society, characterized by a varied division of labor, excess wealth, specialization, cities, writing, monumental structures, recorded history, and so on; or the demonstration of basic literate, intellectual, and social skills by a community. Under definition # 1, native communities with a tribal form of social organization, but which produce complex artworks and have elaborate moral systems, may not qualify for "civilization." Under definition # 2, such cultures do.
"Primitive" cultures are in no way more simple-minded than advanced ones. They are merely more limited by the materials and tools at hand, whether these be physical or intellectual. "Primitive" explanations of the world are intuitive and homemade; they do not benefit from the detachment and abstraction furnished by scientific method. As Lévi-Strauss demonstrates, the intellectual feats of classification and social organization performed by "primitives" are not only adequate; they are prodigious. The historical and archaeological evidence suggests that there are important similarities between the way in which prehistoric communities developed technology, cosmology, agriculture, and social organization and the science and culture prevailing in indigenous cultures located in "undeveloped" sections of the contemporary world.
History is never objective. There are too many biases built into the process of recounting the human story. Some biases are cultural (the national, ethnic, or religious background of the observer); some are individual (pertaining to the observer's social class, gender, political affiliation, etc.). Historical objectivity is less an elimination of bias than a compensation for acknowledged biases. Yet ever since the beginnings of recorded history, some historians have proven themselves of getting a story right: of looking at the picture from the Other's point of view; of connecting, to the degree possible, the inevitable prejudices that initially color one's point of view. (Correcting biases is hard work! It's one reason we have universities!)
The past, as represented by history, is a construct, an invention, not a scientifically-proven fact. When Lew Wallace, in 1880, writes about the times and influence of Jesus Christ, he invariably exports the interests and attitudes of his own society and moment. When Hollywood, in 1926 and 1959, produces film-versions of "Ben-Hur," it in turn imposes its own timely fascinations on the historical moment. History is the invention of prior moments by later ones. To interpret history is to understand the constructions that the later moments impose on the prior ones.
Ideology is the conceptual justification that a community gives for its beliefs and practices. Beneath every ideology is idealism, the employment of abstraction in thinking; the sacrifice of the actual to some generality or principle. Every ongoing community develops an ideology or ideologies; every attempt at science, religion, or ethics involves the processes of idealism.
In terms of our course, we can say-generally-that Western societies, those evolving from Greek philosophy, Judeo-Christianity, Roman society, and Islam, relied more heavily and persistently on idealism than the cultures of Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, China, and indigenous peoples all over the world, even though these civilizations developed their full share of idealism. These communities have also left room for a great deal besides idealism: for a notion of health as a balance between creative and destructive energies, a continuum between mind and body, an intense engagement between life and death, a cyclical (as opposed to linear) notion of time, a play between the counterforces grouped under the headings "yin" and "yang."
Historical communities that have encountered each other have tended to be quite judgmental. Bigotry is not a universal quality of people, but history is filled with instances of it. Ethnocentrism is the name for the very human tendency of one community's tendency to judge another according to its own beliefs and customs. Travel literature is filled with ethnocentric observations. It is also filled with heart-warming encounters and acceptances of true Otherness. Interestingly, travel literature is filled with instances of male travelers' judging the moral quality of a foreign culture according to the behavior they attribute to its female members.
There are two timeframes in which we can interpret history: the diachronic and the synchronic. The diachronic refers to those aspects of human life that are time-bound and change in the development of history. Technology, diet, medicine, clothing, and architecture would all be good instances of the diachronic. The synchronic incorporates those aspects of human capability and behavior that are "hard-wired" and more-or-less constant: memory, vision, the sexual and other instincts, human aggression. Clarity is often brought to the study of history when we keep a good perspective on whether we are considering the synchronic or diachronic dimension of human experience.
As we have seen, ideology consists of the concepts and terms by which a community justifies and advances its past, its traditions, its present conditions, and its aspirations. Mythology, religion, visual images, literature, and historical records are some of the forms in which ideology may be advanced. But no artifact may be reduced to its ideology. The difficulties of communication and the ambiguities of language always undercut the assertion of ideology.
The most important revolutions often take place on the page rather than in the battlefield. The history of religion may be read as a succession of attempts to correct old theologies with new ones. The New Testament literally writes itself into the margins of the Old. The Koran writes itself in the margins of both Testaments and between them. This process is common to all major World Religions.
Western Civilization comes sharply into focus early on through the close parallelism between Judaic monotheism and the idealism espoused by Greek philosophy. Western Idealism tends toward the sacrifice and overlooking of the actual in favor of the ideal and the transcendental, the bigger (or better)-than-life. The practices and attitudes of idealism are not limited to the West. But in no other culture do the divisions between real and ideal, between body and mind, play such a dominant role.
"Bad" science (one based on humors or analogies) can produce good medicine or engineering. If it is based on hundreds of years of trial-and-error, medical science can cure people, even if its method seems much quirkier than our own. Rigid scientific methodology is a Western creation and a branch of Western idealism.
One form that Western Idealism assumes is a relentless exploration, whether for new experience, the truth, or uncharted territory. The impulses toward navigation and discovery that were felt by Alexander the Great, the Romans, and Renaissance European nations had a deep foundation in Western Civilization. Whereas this expansive impulse was withdrawn at certain strategic moments in Chinese and Indian history (notably in 1424 by the Chinese Ming Emperor). It is intriguing to imagine the alternative world history that would have emerged had the West not taken the clear lead in exploration.
One way of looking at human history, as William McNeill does, is as a series of takeovers of mainstream cultures by nomads or barbarians. Implicit in this scenario is the sense that the insiders maintain structured societies while the barbarians live amid and spread chaos. Of course, yesterday's nomadic despot is tomorrow's established insider, and so the cycle continues. Crucial to this notion is the idea that margins, violence, and disorder are as important to the make-up of civilization as is civil order. History is fundamentally interactive: no civilization reaches any notable development in isolation, without the interruptions of attack, disorder, and disease. For McNeill, trade emerges as the most significant interaction between different world-civilizations.
Cities may not define civilization, but urbanity, with its array of goods and diverse people and activities, epitomizes civilized achievement. One could argue that fully-developed cities, when and wherever, offer "instant modernity"-- that classical Athens and Rome, Chang-An during the Han and Tang dynasties, and Kyoto during the Heian period already provided the senses of personal freedom and experiential richness which did not become established until the European late Middle Ages.
One way of gaining an overview on World Civilization is to look at the evolving relationships between church and state. The Muslim theocracy is an intensification of a partnership between politics and religion that Jesus initiates in the New Testament. After the year 1000 C.E., in many parts of the world, there is a progressive split between the interests of government and the dictates of organized religion. Cities, which may be thought of as free-trade zones, governed more by the laws of supply and demand than canonical texts, are the primary sites for the removal of Church from the operations of State.
Nations, as we know them, are products of the late Middle Ages and beyond (though China and India set the record as sites of coherent, continuous civilizations).
Tribalism has often impeded the development of objective, i.e., democratic political institutions.
It made a great difference whether nations developed as centralized societies, usually organized around a central capital city (e.g. France, England, Spain) or as loose confederations of city-states (Germany, Italy). Paradoxically, democratic forms of government evolved more quickly in the centrally organized nation-states than in the fragmented ones. This may be because the struggles over authority and rights in the centrally organized ones were explicit and worked themselves out over time. It was particularly hard for democracy to evolve where tribalism, government determined by clans or families, persisted.
The Middle Ages in Europe may be considered the time when Western Idealism achieved its fullest social and political realization. Church, state, agriculture, and army were all organized as an idealistic machine, in which power, truth, and knowledge trickled down from the top.
Until the European Renaissance that ends our course, the individualism at the heart of Modernity is not an ongoing possibility for many (though it has been encountered in the Roman Empire and the great cities of China, Japan, and elsewhere). Modernity may be described in several different ways: as being subjected to conflicting sources of authority; as being exposed to urbane experience; as encountering personal freedom and (sexual) desire. Our course ends on the threshold of a generalized Modernity, but one that has been encountered, in special environments, before.
