# Civilization and Beyond/2

1975

## CHAPTER SIX: THE POLITICS OF CIVILIZATION

Several thousand years ago humankind began experimenting with the life style which we are now calling civilization. Presumably it was not thought out and blueprinted in advance but worked out by trial and error, episode by episode, step by step--perhaps, also, leap by leap.
Historical and contemporary experiments with this lifestyle supply a fund of valuable information, some of which has been covered in the earlier chapters of this book. Our next task is to analyze and classify this information under four headings: the politics, the economics, the sociology and the ideology of civilization. (When the information is properly arranged, we can do something with it and about it.)
Politics is the part of social science and engineering which is concerned with the organization, direction and administration of human communities. We use the word to cover the conduct of public affairs in any social group more extensive than a family. Hence we refer to village politics, town politics, national politics, international politics and, in the present instance, to the politics of civilization as a way of life.
Each sample, referred to in our examination of typical civilizations, was built around a center, nucleus or homeland consisting of one or more cities with their adjacent hinterlands. The nucleus of the developing civilization was also the nucleus of an empire. Each nucleus was a center of planned production; accumulating wealth, growing population and expanding authority. Certain locations are better suited than others to provide the essentials of a civilization nucleus.
The first requirement for a nucleus is a tolerable climate, primarily a satisfactory balance between heat and cold. Before the general use of fire as a source of warmth human populations were concentrated at or near the tropics. With the increasing use of artificial heating and lighting human beings were able to cluster farther and farther away from concentrated equatorial sunlight.
The second requirement of such a location is a strategic position in a crossroads, in a network of transportation and communication.
The third requirement is a readily available source of the food and building materials necessary to feed, house, and clothe a community and provide it with some of the niceties of daily living.
The fourth requirement is the presence of sufficient man-power to operate the nucleus and provide a surplus for defense and for its extension and expansion.
The fifth requirement is defensibility against aggression or invasion.
The sixth essential is the availability of sufficient raw materials to meet the requirements of the nucleus, provide the exports needed to maintain a favorable trade balance for the nucleus and permit of its expansion, advancement and enrichment.
Seventh, and in some ways, the most important requirement for the establishing of an empire or a civilization nucleus, is the presence of a will to live, a will to grow, a will to advance, competence in management, and a dogged persistence that will remain constant through generations or centuries of adversity, and still more demanding, through long periods of security, comfort and affluence.
Eighth, and by no means least important, is the capacity to fight and win the aggressive trade and military wars incidental to the defense and expansion of the nucleus, of the empire, and eventually of the civilization.
The ninth requirement is tolerance, receptivity to new ideas and practices, the capacity to adapt and to assimilate the outside elements which are constantly incorporated into the growing, expanding empire or the civilization.
Finally, as we read the history and observe the development of nuclei, empires and civilizations, we are impressed by the role of outstanding individuals who occupy positions of responsibility over sufficiently long periods or with sufficient intensity to leave a lasting impression on the ideas, practices and institutions of their times. This requirement covers the practice of effective leadership.
Our concern, at this point, lies primarily with the first eight of these requirements for survival and success in building up empires and civilizations.
Empires and civilizations are established during periods of social expansion when the up-building and out-going urges are widely felt. The surge produces not a single center of growth and expansion but dozens or scores of competitors, each aiming to win and keep a position well in advance of its rivals. The resulting up-surge and free-for-all, which usually lasts for centuries, is a characteristic and recurring feature in the political life of every civilization.
This statement is less a requirement for success in organizing the nucleus of a civilization, than a generalization about the natural and social milieu out of which competing nuclei arise. Success of one among the many competitors is a characteristic feature of the struggle for nuclear survival, development and perhaps for eventual supremacy.
From earliest times waterways have provided the readiest means of getting about. All that was needed was a hollow log, a raft, a primitive canoe. Movement by land was impeded by mountains, deserts, forests, swamps, water courses. Movement by water was a natural.
More and bigger boats required shelter against storms and protection against destruction by enemies. A good harbor with an adjacent walled town or city was the answer to this need.
Good harbors and navigable waterways are notably absent along the west coast of South America and notably present in the Eastern Mediterranean. Consequently, the South American West Coast line is sparsely settled to this day, while the Eastern Mediterranean has been crowded with peoples, teemed with trade and commerce, carried largely by sea, between cities that occupied the best access to waterways.
Safe harbors and navigable waterways made trade and transport easy and cheap. As each wave of human advance turned from animal husbandry and agriculture to bourgeois practices of industry, commerce and finance, locations at strategic points along trade routes were first occupied by occasional markets and fairs and eventually by trading towns and cities. Geography was a decisive factor.
Fertility was equally important. In the early stages of social development transportation was difficult, dangerous and expensive. Sources of food and building materials were found within a short distance of the growing trade center. Again geography played a decisive role. A deep, sheltered harbor backed by a desert could not attract and support a thriving trade center. Food and raw materials are indispensable to concentrations of human beings.
The Nile Valley, like that of the Ganges and the Yellow River, provided the fertility and transport, the food and raw materials that have sustained concentrated human populations for many thousands of years, forming part of the base for Egyptian, Indian and Chinese civilizations. Animal husbandry and grain farming, coupled with fishing and forestry, made possible the growth of cities and laid the foundations for the nuclei of these civilizations.
Temples, tombs and other public constructs provided the centers around which Egyptian civilization was built. The stone, wood and other raw materials used in the building of these unique examples of human handiwork were floated up and down the Nile from their sources of origin. Annual Nile floods provided silt deposits necessary to fertilize farms and gardens. Nile water, impounded during floods, irrigated the land during the long dry seasons. Banked by deserts, the Nile was a ribbon of fertility running through a largely uninhabited wilderness. The upper reaches of the Nile lay in the mountains of Central Africa. The Nile delta, built up through ages by silt deposits, provided a meeting place where African, European and Asian traders could exchange their wares and lay the foundations for the civilization of lower Egypt. The Nile also provided the means of communication which connected Lower Egypt with Upper Egypt and led, finally, to the unification of the two areas in a long enduring and prestigious Egyptian civilization. Once again geography was laying down the guide lines within which civilizations have been built up and liquidated.
Thus far we have noted the role of physiographic factors that have led to building the nuclei of empires and civilizations. They have been parallelled by social factors as men took advantage of natural opportunities to concentrate, feed and house ever larger human aggregates.
Empires and civilizations have been built up by comparatively large numbers of human beings concentrated in relatively small spaces. Wandering food gatherers and herdsmen ranged widely in search of game and grass. Cultivators settled in villages from which they could work the land. If crops were scanty, population was sparse. Only abundant crops, dependable, season after season, provided the basis for large settled populations.
Large, settled populations, adequately supplied with the essentials of life, enabled human beings to organize social centers in which a comparatively few people, tending their animals and working the land, could release a comparatively large part of the population to devote its time and energy to trade and commerce, to industry and transport, to the arts and sciences and to the organization, direction and administration of large scale enterprises such as government, the military, construction and the mobilization of sufficient labor power to carry on and enlarge their enterprises. In its simplest essence this was politics.
Egyptian government, in its broad sense, rested on a class structured society: the aristocracy, the priesthood, officialdom, businessmen, highly trained scientists and engineers, skilled craftsmen and an immense proletariat consisting of tenant farmers, peons, slaves and war captives.
At the top of the political structure was an absolute monarch who wielded power that was limited only by the ambition, tolerance and loyalty of his associates--nobles, priests, soldiers, businessmen and political advisers, and by the willingness of the rural and urban masses to work and fight for their overlords. A number of the monarchs (Pharaohs) ruled for long periods--up to sixty years. It was during these long reigns that the Egyptian Kingdom was organized, strengthened and unified, the rule of the monarch was safeguarded; ambitious nobles were placated or destroyed; and the leadership succession was determined and assured.
The nucleus of the Egyptian Empire was a dictatorship by a self-perpetuated elite, headed by lords spiritual and temporal. Both groups held land, accumulated wealth and exercised authority. It was a government combining the theory of absolutism with the practice of public responsibility. It was sufficiently arbitrary to get things done. It was sufficiently inclusive to recognize and utilize special ability. It was sufficiently structured to carry on from dynasty to dynasty. It was sufficiently flexible to consolidate scattered communities into the Old Kingdom, to unite Lower and Upper Egypt, to extend its authority into Central Africa, the Near and Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe, thus laying the foundations for history's most extensive and long-lasting civilization during the period 3500 to 500 B.C.
I have used the Egyptian example of nucleus organization because of the phenomenal successes achieved by the Egyptians in maintaining an empire for at least 3,000 years. For a considerable part of those thirty centuries Egypt was top dog in the strategic area where Africa joins Eurasia.
The nucleus is the hub from which the spokes of empire and of civilization radiate. The radius of authority and the vast stretches of occupied, exploited territory constitute the circumference of the wheel. The nucleus is the center of wealth and power surrounded by a cluster of associates and dependencies. The control, direction and administration of the nucleus is parallelled by the control, direction and administration of the total complex--the empire and/or the civilization.
The development from nucleus to empire and from empire to civilization creates three sets of political problems: those arising from the administration of the nucleus; those arising out of contacts between the nucleus and the circumference, between the associates and dependencies and the nucleus, and those arising out of the determination of the associates and dependencies to sever their connections with the nucleus, win their independence, and take part in the unceasing efforts to establish new nuclei, win the unending power struggle and shift the power center.
Relationship between nucleus and periphery are the normal outcome of the expansion of a nucleus into an empire. Each growing urban center reaches out for an extension of its territory; for the food and raw materials required by a growing population; for markets that can absorb the goods and services exported by the urban center to pay for its necessary imports of food and raw materials.
Politically speaking, the essential problem is to maintain a relationship that will keep the imports coming in and keep the exports going out. Imports may take the form of plunder seized by the strong in contacts and conflicts with weaker neighbors; tribute paid by the weak to the strong at the insistence of the strong, or trade in which each side gains something. Empire building involves all three methods.
In virtually all instances the nucleus is richer and stronger; the periphery is poorer and weaker. In virtually all instances these relative positions have been the outcome of military operations in which each party has tried to impose its will upon its rivals. In each case the spoils went to the victor, who forced defeated rivals to cede territory, to pay tribute, to give hostages or in some other fashion to agree upon a settlement that left the victor richer and stronger and the vanquished poorer and weaker.
Politically speaking, the relation of nucleus to periphery was that of superior to inferior. Where the discrepancy was very great it resulted in a relation of master and vassal or even master and slave.
An empire or a civilization, consisting of a wealth-power center and a periphery of associated and dependent territories and peoples, led to a living-standard differential in favor of the center. It also involved the establishment of a political apparatus strong enough to perpetuate the relationship by collecting tribute and taxes from the weak and depositing them in the treasure chests of the strong. The outcome was a civil bureaucracy backed by a military or police strong enough to defend and perpetuate an unpalatable superior-inferior position.
Once established, both the civilian bureaucracy and the military apparatus tended to maintain themselves, to extend their privileges and strengthen their positions. Since controversial issues, domestic and foreign, are generally decided by force or the threat of force, the military became the strong right arm of authority.
These confrontations and contradictions created three sets of political problems: centralism versus localism; established central authority versus provincial rights and self-determination; the concentration or centralization of authority in the hands of a select few civilian and/or military leaders, responsible to the central authority, who made on the spot decisions and took action.
Under the institutions and practices of civilized society, the select few were in a position to call in the military which was organized for emergency action and was constantly standing-by. The military was trained, disciplined and held a monopoly of weapons.
Civilizations frequently begin as commonwealths or federations forged in the course of survival struggle. In any such struggle the military will of necessity play a major role. As the competitive survival struggle develops, one of the contending parties establishes its superiority by winning military victory. In the course of this struggle the commonwealth, a cluster of equals, yields place to the pattern of empire--a center of wealth and authority with its associates, subordinates and dependencies.
The strong right arm of politics includes man-power, money and weapons. The politics of civilization faces a simple mandate: establish, stabilize and perpetuate a nucleus of wealth and authority; build around the nucleus a periphery of associates and dependencies.
Historically, the process was a long one extending through generations and probably centuries. Throughout the struggle individuals must have the necessities of daily life. Community activities must be housed, equipped, staffed, supported.
Pastoral and village life were based on a use economy. People produced what they needed and consumed their own products. Each tribe, family, village was a more or less self-sufficient unit. When they were threatened or invaded people defended themselves as best they could. At worst they abandoned their homes to the invaders and fled into the forests, mountains or deserts.
Towns and cities, with their industries, trade, commerce, their permanent housing and capital equipment faced a radically different situation. Since they could not carry their wealth on their backs they must stay put and defend themselves or face irreparable losses. Defense required careful, extensive, expensive preparations: walls, equipment, stored food, personnel. Unless the city was sacked and burned during survival struggles it remained as a vantage point to be held at all costs. If surrendered and occupied by assailants, it was equally valuable to invaders who were prepared to settle down, take advantage of the site, the capital equipment and exploit the available manpower.
Whether occupied by friend or enemy, towns and cities were centers of actual or potential wealth and power. They were also consumers of goods and services many of which could not be home-produced. Food must come from herdsmen or farmers. Building materials must come from forests or mines. Such raw materials, the essentials of daily life, must be brought into urban centers when and as wanted.
Food and raw materials could be secured occasionally by plunder. A regular supply depended on trade and commerce, or on tribute levied and collected periodically from associated or dependent peoples. In the long run trade and commerce proved to be more reliable and more productive than plunder.
As urban centers grew and developed, they established regular channels of trade and communication, by land and water. Along these channels needed imports moved into the urban centers and exports in exchange moved from the urban centers into the back country or the provinces. At every stage in the process care must be taken to prevent intervention by thieves, robbers or envious rivals. Two devices were used to meet this situation: money to facilitate exchange and a defense organization to deal with intruders.
Money and its uses developed money changers, money lenders and banks. Bankers and banks exchanged currency at a profit and extended credit.
Weapons in the hands of trained personnel evolved into locally employed police and centrally organized armed services, performing police functions and fighting wars, domestic and foreign.
Politics, local, regional or national, developed with the growth of population, the profits of expanding urban life, production, technology. As its scope broadened geographically city survival depended increasingly on wealth and power (money and weapons).
During periods of peace and stability the civil authorities controlled public affairs. In emergencies, such as natural disasters, invasion, civil or international wars, the military authorities took command.
Military authority is an institutional feature of every civilization. In periods of public danger it enjoys complete ascendancy. Like civil authority, the military is a permanent and frequently the dominant feature of each civilization. It is assured of ample income and entrusted with the installations and implements of war making. Both in income and in prestige the military holds a preferred position.
Since military functions center about destroying the person and property of the "enemy"--domestic or foreign--public funds are made available or are pre-empted by the military during periods of martial law. As a civilization becomes more complex and extensive, the funds at the disposal of the military tend to increase. The same factors of extent and complexity lead to larger and larger numbers of confrontations and conflicts in which the military is called upon to play the leading role. Increasingly, therefore, the military is at the center of policy making. Finally a point is reached at which war, civil, colonial or international is always in progress somewhere within the territories occupied by the civilization. At such periods civil law slumbers and military authority is more or less dominant and permanent.
Under the slogan "defense of civilization," military necessity and military adventurism shape public policy, empty the public treasury, bankrupt and eventually destroy the superstructure of a civilization.
The nucleus which lies at the heart of an empire or a civilization has a political life cycle that runs from the unstructured or little structured aggregation of confederation or self-determining local groups to a highly centralized political absolutism holding and exercising its authority by the use of the military. The steps in this process have been clearly marked in earlier civilizations. They are playing a decisive role in the day-to-day life of western civilization. They extend from early forms of government under leaders selected or elected by popular acclaim or at least by popular consent, to more or less permanent leadership enjoying many political privileges, including the selection of its successors.
Under the pressure of social emergency, engendered within the social group or imposed from outside the group by migration, intrusion or invasion, leadership takes the measures which it considers necessary to preserve and/or extend its authority. Each emergency offers leadership an opportunity or an excuse to by-pass custom and/or law, overlook whatever public opinion may exist and proceed to the measures needed to meet the emergency. In each organized social group the exercise of authority has provided the leadership with a near-monopoly of money and weapons in the hands of a permanent military elite. The use of this elite to deal with the emergency is accepted by civil authority as a matter of course.
When social division of function has produced and armed a military elite, leadership turns to this elite in any emergency arising from natural disaster or social crisis. The outcome is a community directed by a military arm seeking to perpetuate and enlarge its own role in the determination and exercise of public authority, using any means which seems likely to produce the desired results.
Politically, therefore, any expanding empire or civilization reaches a point at which absolute monarchy, exercising unquestioned authority, makes and enforces public policy by the use of the military or with its help.
Many commentators write as though the essence of civilization was its art galleries, concert halls, its universities and its libraries. Such agencies are the trappings, decorations and fringes of a civilization. There is no justification for such a selective approach. The strong right-arm of every civilization has been its wealth (money) and its martial equipment (its guns).
Success in politics has been described as the art of selecting the possible and bringing it to fruition. Every community is more or less fragmented by deviations, contradictions, confrontations and conflicts. These fragmentations begin in the personality and extend through the entire social structure--from the individual, through the family, such voluntary associations as the sports club, the trade union, the merchants' association, the educational system, the political party, the municipal or the national government.
Unrestrained and undirected social fragmentation leads to conflict, destruction, perhaps to chaos. Success in politics rests on an understanding of the chaos and its causes and an integration of conflicting forces behind specific programs and around charismatic personalities.
One aspect of the problem is especially disturbing and baffling to the uninitiated. Compared with the brief adulthood of an individual the life span of communities is immensely long. The individual is at his or her best for a few years or decades. Communities and their institutions endure for hundreds and in some cases for thousands of years. Under the most favorable conditions an individual can hope to play a part in community affairs for a decade or two. Before he comes on the stage of public affairs and after he leaves it, social life stretches indefinitely.
Politics is one aspect of that more or less extensive social experience. Its immediate objective is to bring order out of chaos and replace randomness by purpose and if possible by plan.
In the wake of the bourgeois revolution, which was directed particularly against monarchy and generally against absolutism, the most obvious and attractive social pattern was a republic, ruled by the citizens in a manner which in their opinion was best calculated to promote their safety and happiness.
Under a republican government public affairs would be openly and freely discussed by the citizens at a time or place of their choice by word of mouth, through a free press or in public gatherings. At stated intervals elections would be held at which all citizens of proper age would select representatives and a legislature or parliament where questions of public concern could be debated and appropriate measures adopted. Implementation or execution of these measures would be placed in the hands of executive officers responsible to the parliament. As a safeguard against any miscarriage of the public will, the right of petition was guaranteed. In some instances the right of referendum and recall was provided. To obviate any miscarriage of justice, provision was made for courts, responsible to the citizenry, as an independent arm of government competent to protect and assert popular rights.
Overall, citizens of the republic, through duly elected representatives, would draw up and proclaim a constitution containing a general plan of the governmental machinery. When adopted by the legislature or parliament this constitution became the law of the land. Governmental activities were carried out and laws were enacted in conformity with constitutional provisions. In practice the citizens of the freest republic were face to face with one of the oldest political dilemmas confronting mankind: the question of leadership and followership.
In almost any social situation, from trivial to grave and critical, some one woman or man volunteers advice and often initiates action. If no one approves, the initiative falls flat. If there is a chorus of approval, the crowd follows the lead of its spokesman. If some approve while others disapprove or remain silent, a show of hands is in order. If there are real differences in the group, some taking one side, some another side with no chance of common action, the group may divide into several factions, some remaining in the assemblage, others departing, with their spokesmen leading the way.
In such confrontations there are many determining factors, the experience and wisdom of the leadership; the urgency of the subject under discussion; the depth of the separation between opposing factions; the experience of the citizenry and their willingness to compromise on divisive issues; the willingness of the factionalists to abide by a majority decision.
Experienced leadership, which has enjoyed a period of public approval long enough to build up not only a group of devoted followers, but a group of place-men and office-holders who owe their positions to the leader, can assemble a bureaucratic or political machine, adopt measures and take the steps necessary to keep its chosen leader in a life job, with the possibility of naming a successor.
Republics have adopted various measures to prevent the establishment of a self-perpetuating dynasty, by limiting public office-holding to a stated number of years; by providing that the office holder may not succeed himself. Political leaders may avoid such provisions by staying in the background, having their closest associates elected to office, and when their term is ended, secure the selection of other associates upon whose personal fidelity they can rely.
All such measures require that the leader keep the favor of a considerable number of his constituents. To avoid this often difficult or disagreeable task the leader and his close associates may persuade their constituency to by-pass both constitution and parliament, enlist the support of the military, seize power and establish an arbitrary dictatorship of admirals and generals or establish a committee of military leaders who will pick out civilian office holders willing to follow the political line laid down by the military leaders.
As republics gain in wealth, increase their power and broaden their geographical base by bringing outside peoples under their sway, their dependence upon military means of resolving public controversies becomes greater. This is particularly true where outsiders brought under the republic's authority have mature political institutions including their own leaders and their own ways of dealing with public relations.
Given such a situation, the control by the republic over the policy-making apparatus of dependencies is likely to have been established by force of arms. In such a case it is only a matter of time and occasion when the dependency will demand the right of self-determination and be prepared to fight for independence of "foreign tyrants, oppressors and exploiters."
Minor inexpensive military operations for the suppression of colonial revolt which are quickly and successfully ended may add to the stature of empire-building leaders. But major operations, long continued, expensive and inconclusive, will undermine the prestige and weaken the position of the most firmly seated imperialist. The Boer War against the British and the wars waged by the Koreans and the Vietnamese against a series of occupiers and exploiters are excellent examples of the operation of this principle.
As empire building proceeds under its inescapable expansionist drive, a point will be reached at which the overhead costs of maintaining the empire will exceed the income. As that point is approached in one after another of the empires comprising the civilization, the central authority will be successfully challenged by the dependent, colonial periphery. Ordinarily, such challenges will coincide with the inter-imperial wars which have periodically disrupted every civilization known to history. When such a coincidence does occur, as it did in western civilization from 1914 to 1945, the bell is likely to toll loudly for the civilization in question.
Measures usually adopted to prevent such a catastrophe--martial law, military dictatorship, self-perpetuating monarchy, divine authority, are more than likely to heap fuel on the flames of rebellion and lead into a social revolution.
An unstructured social group operating under the competitive principle "Let him take who has the power" tends to develop into absolutism. At any stage in the history of a civilization this development can take place.
Civilization, therefore, comes into being with this built-in contradiction: the strong and predatory exploit the weak, but at a certain point protect the weak and nurture the defenseless. Exploitation by the rich and powerful is recognized and accepted as a prerogative enjoyed by the rich and powerful. At the same time limitations are placed on the character and intensity of the exploitation.
This dichotomy is perpetuated by agreements, laws and constitutions which guarantee the property rights and social privileges by which the rich and powerful safeguard and increase their wealth and power. Under the same agreements, laws and constitutions, the privileges and rights of the defenseless and weak, are specified.
Political institutions in every civilization, including that of the West, have accepted and adopted a regulatory structure under which limits are imposed on profiteering. The domestic life of a civilization consists of an establishment within which exploitation can continue in a manner which the constitution makers and legislators consider to be as efficient as possible and as fair as possible to all of the parties concerned.
As a civilization matures, wealth and power (the means of exploitation) are increased in volume and concentrated in fewer hands. The resulting absolutism with its immense structure of wealth production and its well-organized military arm, imposes conformity to its decrees, servility, peonage and even slavery on the working masses. The masses, in their turn, organize, agitate, demonstrate, strike, sabotage, and periodically take up, arms in defense of their lives and their livelihood.
We are describing certain political aspects of a process of social selection which has dominated one civilization after another. At the present moment it has reached a critical stage in the West. We apply the term "social selection" to the result of this process because there is a parallel between the natural selection of the biologists and the social selection which sociologists observe in the rapid and extensive changes presently taking place in the centers of western civilization.
Natural selection is a process in the course of which many compete and contend while only a few survive and mature.
Social selection is a similar knock-down and drag-out struggle in which peoples, nations, empires and civilizations take part. Many enter the contest but only a few live to write their story in the long and complex history of civilizations.
At the outset of such a contest, the European-Asian-African cradle of the coming western culture contained numerous political fragments--kingdoms, principalities, cities, city states, inert peasant masses, migrating tribes--struggling locally and regionally for a place in the sun, or for additional territory and extended authority. These struggles reached the military level in local wars, regional wars, general wars. In the course of this survival struggle, the weakest and least effective contestants were defeated, dismembered and gobbled up by their stronger and more efficient opponents.
Local struggles--in the Near and Middle East, in North Africa, in eastern, central and western Europe--were trial heats in the course of which many contestants were eliminated, while the survivors continued the process of city, nation and empire building at higher and broader levels. It was only after five hundred years of such conflicts that the outlines of western civilization took definite political form:--a group of battle-hardened contestants, centered in Europe, heavily armed and equipped, intent on protecting and enlarging their home territory and extending their authority over dependencies and colonies in various parts of the planet.
This survival struggle continued for another three hundred years, down to the beginning of the present century, reaching its highest level of intensity between 1914 and 1945, with contestants from all of the continents taking an active part. In this present round the contestants are nations and empires, organized in ever-changing alliances. Some of the contestants are old, scarred and battle weary. Others are young and vigorous, recent entrants in the planet-wide contest for pelf, possessions and power.
During the later years of the struggle, after war's end in 1945, erstwhile dependencies and colonies of the disintegrating European empires declared their independence, joined the United Nations as sovereign states and played active parts in the battle for survival.
African development typifies the process during the later phases of western civilization. When voyaging and discovery became a leading activity of European nations around 1450 A.D. northern Africa was directly involved, but the bulk of the continent--Equatorial Africa--remained almost entirely untouched. After 1870 the pattern was dramatically altered as British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Italian forces moved inland, staking out their claims.
Division of Africa among the great powers reached its culmination when this process was completed, about 1910, when the whole vast continent of Africa excepting Ethiopia, Egypt and South Africa had been parcelled out among the rival European empires. In terms of geography and population, Africa was still African. Politically it was pre-empted, occupied, dominated and exploited by European empire builders, who used the over, all trade name of western civilization.
Excessive costs of empire building, including the disastrous losses of military struggle from 1914 to 1945, impoverished and weakened the European overlords to such an extent that they could no longer maintain their footholds in Africa. At the same time African minorities in various parts of the continent launched independence movements under the slogan of self-determination, drove out the European occupiers, organized political states and declared that Africa must be governed by and for Africans.
Much of Africa, at the time, was organized along tribal lines, which cut across the boundaries drawn by the European imperialists between their colonial territories. The resulting chaos temporarily removed Africa from any meaningful role in the planet-wide contest for pelf and power. Africans are politically sovereign. Economically and culturally they remain dependent on their former European masters.
Politically, western civilization is in a state of flux. Its European homeland is basically divided by potent fears, ambitions, feuds and conflicts, and separated geographically from North America and Asia. Despite several attempts to unify the continent politically, Europe was disrupted, fragmented and weakened by two general wars in a single generation. The European empires were politically and economically upset by widespread colonial revolt in Asia and Africa. Spectacular achievements of socialism-communism, particularly in East Europe and Asia, added to the previous fragmentation a new line of division between capitalist West Europe and socialist East Europe. This process of fragmentation is giving separatist forces ascendancy over the forces of integration and unification.
In Roman and Egyptian civilizations, the period of survival conflict led to the centralization of wealth and authority. After five centuries of suicidal competitive struggle, the European homeland of western civilization is criss-crossed by sharp lines of division. Furthermore, the shift of production and military power from Europe to North America and Asia reduces the probability of speedy European integration.
In the more important centers of western civilization the chief item of public expenditure is preparation for a war of air, water and land machines that may extend technologically into a nuclear war. While we have no precedent that would enable us to gauge the consequences of an extensive nuclear war it seems reasonable to assume that it would further fragment an already fragmented European continent.
The heavy burdens of militarism which western civilization is presently carrying, have unbalanced budgets, which lead to inflation and to onerous burdens of debt and taxes. It seems unlikely that a group of warfare states like the top western European powers can escape the economic contraction which presently threatens them and regain solvency and stability through fiscal reforms or readjustments in tariffs and trade.
Our analysis of the politics of civilization may be summarized in four general statements:

## CHAPTER SEVEN: THE ECONOMICS OF CIVILIZATION

Politics involves the exercise of authority--the policy making, planning, control, direction and administration of a community. Economic forces provide the wealth, income and livelihood--the wherewithal upon which a community depends for its physical existence, its survival, its geographical extension, the continuance of its life cycle.
There is no sharp line separating economics from politics. While the two fields are different in character and scope, they are so interrelated and interwoven that any successful attempt to separate them would leave the inquirer with two segments of a lifeless social cadaver. In the course of this exposition it will become increasingly evident, as the political and economic lines cross and re-cross, that the two fields are inseparable parts of a total body social.
One civilization after another has begun with a predominantly rural economy that has become increasingly urban as it matured. Food gathering, pastoral life and small scale agriculture were rural. Trade, commerce, manufacturing and finance, concentrated populations, increased division of labor, specialization, inter-communication and interdependence produced the trade center, the commercial metropolis and the general purpose city.
Herdsmen and land workers, dependent on grass and rainfall, lived close to the subsistence margin and were at the mercy of forces they could not control. Traders and money changers, with an eye for business in a growing marketplace made a more ample living. At the same time the more successful among them accumulated capital which they loaned or invested in stocks of goods, shops, warehouses, caravans, ships. By hiring labor-power they multiplied their own limited physical capacities. By investing in varied enterprises they assured themselves against possible loss in any one of them. They also multiplied the possibilities of profit.
Trade, finance and commerce, by producing a regular flow of abundant income, brought into existence a new field of occupations and a new class--business and the businessmen. Herdsmen and farmers depended for their livelihood on nature, her niggardliness or generosity. The businessmen required only the presence of a group large enough to purchase goods and services, pay rent and interest, work for wages and leave the profits to the enterpriser. Each profit beyond the subsistence level enabled the businessmen to expand, buying more goods, hiring more labor, making still greater profits.
Communities of businessmen pooled their profits, extended their markets, built fleets, enlarged cities. Through joint action they engaged in plundering expeditions and collected tribute from their victims. Organized fabrication turned out the goods and services which were marketed for profits. The resulting wealth enabled the successful businessmen to build houses, stock them with consumer goods and art treasures, hire servants, live sumptuously. Productivity, wealth, prosperity filled their honey pot to overflowing.
Honey pots provide the "good things" of life for their owners. They also tempt outsiders. Honey-pot owners fear pilfering by their servants; fear sponging by their relatives, friends, neighbors; fear robbers and kidnappers; fear migrating hordes on the lookout for plunder. Defense is a necessary aspect of each rich household, neighborhood, city, nation, empire, civilization.
The sequence from productivity, through prosperity, wealth accumulation, abundance and the measures needed to defend and safeguard the accumulations, leads to an affluent community or society. It also calls into being new and distinctive class forces.
Every civilization has maintained a greater or lesser degree of mobility between the classes. Mobility makes it possible for those with greater ability and energy to leave the countryside, settle near the market-place and climb the ladder of success. It has also made it possible for policy makers to dump those whose services are no longer needed or wanted by the ruling oligarchy.
Among the driving economic forces in a civilization are hunger, fear, greed, ambition. In practice these forces have proved far more effective than whips and clubs in the hand of slave drivers. They animate the rat-race for pelf, power, "success", which attracts idealism, energy, ability and throws out the carcases of those no longer able to make a contribution to the wealth and power of the oligarchy and its establishment.
Hunters, herdsmen, cultivators, craftsmen, mariners, miners perform services that maintain the solvency of any economy in which they play a leading role. Fast talkers, adventurers, promoters, manipulators, gamblers add little or nothing to the income of the communities in which they operate. Often, however, as gargantuan consumers, they play an important role in building up the deficits which finally wreck an economy.
Accumulations of wealth in market centers tempts the ambitious and the adventurous to enter the rat-race and grab more than their pro-rata share of the honey. The most obvious way to do this is to secure possession of the honey pot.
Far away, in the tribal past of a civilization, lay a period of scarcity in which the members of the community shared the scarce income or starved. As the tribal wealth increased, the leaders, their families and retainers got more than a fair share of the available goods, services, preferment, privileges. At a very early stage the "ants" stored away what they could spare, while the "grasshoppers" had a "good time". Investing their stored wealth in land or productive enterprises the "ants" added unearned income to their normal earnings from productive labor.
Because the "ants" held the wealth of the community they were able to exercise authority and determine community policy. One result of their decisions was the creation of titles to land and stored wealth. A second result was the institution of property-custom and later of property-law under which those who owned property enjoyed special privileges which gave them still larger shares of the community wealth and income.
Wealth ownership and the exercise of authority, concentrated in one person or family, created a basic division in the community between those whose livelihood depended on their labor and those whose income was determined by their ownership of property and their exercise of authority. In the course of time this development divided the community into a property-owning, governing minority which was wealthy, and a property-poor majority whose livelihood depended upon the willingness of the property holding minority to use their land and productive implements in operations that turned out goods and services.
Property ownership and income were protected by law. Labor income depended on the bargaining power of the property-less majority. Property income yielded wealth to the property owners. Labor income, under the pressure of competition in the labor market, yielded only subsistence. Thus the community was divided into owners and workers. The owners controlled and spent or invested the income. The workers were provided with the necessaries and a few crumbs of comfort.
Private property and property law supported by state power institutionalized a basic division in every civilization. One segment of a civilized community enjoyed wealth and power; other segments produced goods and performed services. The owners were rich; the producers were poor. Riches side by side with poverty are characteristic features of a civilized society.
Exploitation has been the economic backbone of every civilization from earliest times to the present day. Each civilization has exploited and used up its natural resources. In every civilization individuals, groups, classes and sometimes castes have exploited or used up fellow humans and fellow creatures to suit their own purposes and advance their own interests.
Abraham Lincoln gave a classical definition of human exploitation in a simple sentence: "It is the principal that says you work and toil and earn bread and I will eat it."
Exploitation of nature and of fellow beings by man began long before written history. During periods of civilization, and notably in present-day civilization, exploitation has determined social relationships. It has also become one of the pillars of every civilized community.
Civilized peoples use up natural resources as a matter of course. The more advanced technically have stripped their environments of replaceable and irreplaceable resources. They have also perfected techniques for using the productive power of their fellow creatures. One way to do this is by owning the body. Another way is ownership of land, capital and consumer goods which enable the owner to live without labor on the products resulting from the labor of others.
Owners of property and wealth receive an income because they are owners. They may be very young or very old, able-bodied or helpless. Their livelihood comes to them not because of anything they do, but because of the property titles which they own.
The owner of land may collect rent. The owner of capital may collect interest. The owner of an enterprise may collect profits. Each lives by owning.
Workers produce goods and services. They are paid an income proportioned to their production.
Owners of land, capital and consumer goods are paid incomes proportioned to their ownership.
Workers work for a living. Owners live by ownership, chiefly of land and the implements of production.
Owners of property frequently are rich. Workers, by comparison, are poor. The line separating owners from workers also separates riches from poverty.
Income from services rendered, from work, is earned income. Income from property ownership, by contrast, is unearned income.
The relation between earned and unearned income is not confined to one generation. Under laws passed by the owners and their retainers the owners of private property may give or bequeath this property to their descendants. In the course of time a community is divided between workers who are poor and owners who are rich. Since the rich need not work in order to live, they and those associated with them may live on the unearned income derived from property ownership. In a word, they may become parasitic.
Parasitism may lead to social decay. Generation after generation, the owners and their dependants may live in comfort or even in luxury while those who work and their dependents may lack simple necessities. This is the confrontation of riches and poverty which has played so large a role in every civilization.
Through the ages, in one civilization after another, the glaring contrast between riches and poverty has appeared, dividing the community and laying the foundation for class struggle and class war, both of which decrease social efficiency, intensify class antagonism.
In the early stages of any culture cycle, barter is replaced by a money economy. Money is a medium of exchange, usually issued by a public authority and used in daily transactions, to pay tribute or taxes and to meet other general expenses. In its earlier forms it is made of relatively scarce materials that are in general demand, limited in supply and easily divisible into smaller units. Gold, silver and other metals meet these requirements and have been used as money through the ages.
Cash money and promises to pay speed up wholesale and retail exchanges in the market place. They fill the bill in normal times. But there are emergencies and other exceptions. One of the commonest of the emergencies is war.
In a previous chapter we pointed out that war is a characteristic feature of a civilization that has passed the top-point of its expansion and begun to decline. Then the chickens come home to roost. Civil war, colonial wars and wars between imperial rivals follow each other, creating emergencies in which demand for certain strategic goods and services rises steeply, with no corresponding increase in supply. Prices increase. The common defense requires immediate purchase of supplies. The public treasury is exhausted. The government borrows from money lenders (bankers). It also prints paper money and puts it in circulation.
If the credit of the government is good, if the emergency is of short duration, matters right themselves and the economy survives without serious derangements. But war-emergency disrupts and sometimes destroys an economy. This outcome often results from military defeat.
Another exception to normal economic transactions is buying on credit--buying today and paying tomorrow. The temporary gap between purchase and payment is filled by credit--a promise of the purchaser to pay later and the confidence of the seller that the bill will be paid. Such credit transactions are covered by notes, bonds and mortgages made out by the buyer and accepted by the seller. Until the debt is settled, the borrower pays the seller interest at an agreed rate. Bankers enter the picture, providing capital and collecting interest on their loans.
Where credit is abundant and relatively cheap, borrowers spend beyond their incomes, hoping to pay later when the loan falls due. Borrowing and over-spending are among human frailties. They are also forms of risk-taking or gambling. Who knows whether the banker who promises to pay on demand will be alive and doing business next week when his promise to pay is presented for settlement? When the promise to pay is issued by a government which decides the value of currency, and accepted by that government as payment for taxes and other obligations, it is more readily acceptable than paper issued and guaranteed by an individual money lender or banker.
Each civilization has had a background of simple use economy--food gathering, animal husbandry, agriculture--in which most of the people produced what they needed and consumed what they produced. Such an economy employs money rarely.
In a money economy those who have cash use it to pay their bills or settle their accounts.
Those who buy on credit pay interest to money lenders. The money lenders, later the bankers, make their profits by helping others to spend beyond their own means. The money-lender also accepted loans from others, promising to pay them back at a later date, and giving the lender a piece of paper, specifying the amount of the loan. The paper promise to pay became a bank-note, passed from hand to hand. It had no intrinsic value, but as the money lender promised to pay cash for the note on demand, it was accepted in payment of debts or for the purchase of commodities.
When a shirt-maker turns out a product and exchanges it for a pair of shoes made by a shoemaker there are no overhead costs. Each producer adds to his wardrobe an item that makes his life more satisfactory.
Examples of simple barter are seldom found in market economies. Civilized society assembles quantities and varieties of goods and services in the market place, invites consumers to choose among the wares and provides money to make transactions quick and easy. Civilized society supplements money with credit on the principle: buy and use today; pay tomorrow. Civilization goes beyond these bare essentials of merchandizing by furnishing transportation and communication, making long term loans at interest, writing insurance, developing the techniques of accounting and management. Customers who visit the market have basic human needs--the necessities of life. Beyond these necessaries, there are conveniences, comforts, luxuries. The markets of civilization cover the entire range of human needs and human wants from necessaries to luxuries.
Civilized merchandizers take two other steps aimed to activate consumption. They develop new lines of merchandise that will have more customer appeal, leading to new wants. They also advertise new wares that will create new wants, bring back old customers and attract new ones.
For the foot-weary customer who has shopped away his energy and enthusiasm for buying more and more, a civilized marketplace furnishes food and shelter, recreation, entertainment and culture--beer, libraries, concert halls and circuses as well as food, clothing and shelter.
These multiple functions of a civilized economy are part and parcel of the changes which have converted the simple barter deal of exchanging a pair of shoes for a shirt into a specialized, civilized market place. They also cause civilized economies to devote far more time and money to marketing goods and services than they spend in their manufacture. In a broad sense, these supplementary costs are "overhead."
Shirt makers and shoemakers convert raw materials and partly finished goods into shirts and shoes. Operating costs of manufacture are minimal in a civilized economy. The major items that go into the final price of the product are overhead costs.
Current accounting practices include in overhead: taxes, interest, insurance and general items. Actually the price of goods and services in a civilized economy includes minimal charges for raw materials and labor and maximum charges for overhead.
There is another phase of overhead which pyramids with each advance in the extent and complexity of a civilization--taxes to cover the costs of government. As the civilization expands and specializes, governmental services multiply. The number of government workers grows in proportion and often out of proportion to the total production costs. Expenses of government rise and with them the corresponding need to increase taxes.
Overhead costs in the village or small town are low. Much of the "public service" is done by citizens who volunteer their time and energy. In the centers of civilization public service is a profession, often well paid and usually quite permanent.
Expansion is a basic feature in the life of every civilization. Expansion increases overhead costs. When American Indians made their silent way through the forests or roamed the plains there was no overhead. Each provided his own means of locomotion. With roads came bridges. With roads and bridges came capital costs. As dirt roads gave way to macadam and macadam to asphalt and concrete, as country roads, winding over hill and through dale were replaced by graded superhighways cut straight through or built over all obstacles, the cost per mile rose fantastically. All of these added costs appeared somewhere in the tax bills which citizens were required to pay.
In any enterprise overhead costs rise in direct proportion to the extent and complexity of the social order. As they rise, they increase the prices of the goods and services which citizens (or consumers) must pay for their livelihood. A good illustration of this principle is the price of an identical acre of land: in the remote countryside; on an improved highway; in the suburbs of a growing city and at the city center.
Increasing wealth brings greater risks. Wealthy cities like wealthy individuals and families must pay for their protection against robbery and piracy; against extortion and expropriation. Among important business enterprises insurance ranks high. The costs and profits of insurance are suggested by elaborate insurance company buildings and the high salaries paid to their officials.
Insurance, usually a private overhead, comes high. Public insurance: maintenance of law and order, crime and punishment, the secret and open police, the armed forces, (land and sea and air) are vastly more expensive. If, to these limited costs of overhead are added the costs of militarism as a public enterprise and the ruinous costs of military adventurism and its inevitable wars, the mounting costs lead to insolvency and eventual economic and social ruin.
Another overhead cost which plays havoc with civilized nations and peoples is the support of a bureaucracy. Increased extent and complexity exhaust the community capacity for voluntary service and lead into an era where the volunteers who carried on the limited public activities of a village are supplemented and eventually replaced by a constantly growing body of public servants. Growing extent and complexity plus the need for finding safe places for those who are useful to the rich and powerful, widens and deepens the public crib. In large enterprises, private as well as public, paper work employs a small army, which must be fed and housed at a level worthy of "a great nation." Business machines reduce the personnel necessary for a given social enterprise, but their high capital and operational costs increase overhead.
Another aspect of overhead costs is the multiplication of parasitic professions. In simple villages, there are few body servants, no able-bodied individuals who fetch and carry at the word of command, or who only stand and wait for the moment when some whim, fancy or real need may call for their services.
Village life, with its limited area and still more limited resources, has little economic surplus upon which parasitism can feed. There is landlordism, of course, but the margin of surplus is small. The city, the province, the nation, the empire present a different picture. Parasitic professions abound and proliferate: money changers, money lenders, realtors, confidence men, gamblers, fortune tellers, priests, entertainers, artists, thieves, robbers, and prostitutes abound, consume more than their share of the community income, without making an equivalent return in production or service. Their support adds to the social overhead.
Another source of social overhead are the numerous followers of the "something for nothing" cult who receive unearned income--an income derived from civilization in its mature and its final stages.
Broadly there are two types of income--earned income and unearned income. Earned income is something for something--or return for goods provided or service rendered. Unearned income is something for nothing--an income derived from some monopoly, privilege, sinecure or form of property ownership.
Property in persons or things has been a characteristic feature of all civilizations. Property owners, receiving rents, interest, dividends, in proportion to the amount of property which they own are not called upon to make equivalent return in exchange for their property--based income. This personal parasitism of property owners is aggravated by provisions of property law under which the owners of property can give, sell or bequeath these sources of unearned income to family members, friends, associates.
Eventually, unearned income, handed on through generations, creates a class or even a caste of citizens who live without rendering an equivalent of services, on the labor of their fellows, adding a significant amount to the total of overhead costs.
Wealth ownership, the exercise of power, living in luxury on unearned income, add to overhead costs, but are accepted as respectable in civilized communities. Another and far less respectable form of social parasitism is the manipulation of social forces in a way that will bring the operator more than a fair share of social income with no equivalent in service. Such is "politics" or "politicising." "Politics" as a source of livelihood takes many forms, some less legitimate than others.
The most usual source of office-holding is the humble work of the clerk, handyman or messenger, responsible for carrying out the nagging routine of government. Beyond this common labor of public service are public servants skilled in their several professions. Beyond and above them are department heads and still higher are the appointed or elected officials responsible for the success or failure of a given public policy.
Who are the occupants of town, city, state, and national positions of authority and responsibility? Preferably they are elected or appointed because of their popularity or are the successful product of civil service examinations. At worst they are appointed as a return for favors or else because they are relatives or friends of successful politicians or their backers.
Whatever its source and however efficient or inefficient its performance, the body of paid public servants increases with the expanding life of locality, region, province, state, nation and empire. With its growth goes corresponding accommodations in wages and salaries, office space and equipment and other routine outlays. Frequently the increase of the emoluments of bureaucrats, especially at the higher levels of authority and responsibility, creates sinecures which are filled by parasites or by individuals who are engaged in shoring up the bureaucracy rather than rendering a public service. The outlays necessary to finance such a top-heavy bureaucratic fabric grow in direct proportion to the age and rigidity of the bureaucracy, draining off public funds into private coffers and adding uncompensated elements to overhead costs. If inflation is a problem, at or beyond the apex of an imperial epoch or cycle of civilization, financial costs rise correspondingly.
The chief overhead cost in every civilization is and has been war. Examine the budget of the United States or any other leading civilized power. From two-thirds to three-quarters of central government outlays are for war in the past and preparation for war in the future.
The net result of rising overhead costs appears in the history of all previous civilizations. They are eating out the vitals of western civilization while we write and read these words.

## CHAPTER EIGHT: THE SOCIOLOGY OF CIVILIZATION

Sociology is the science and art of association.
Human associations range from kinship groups like the family, tribe and clan to larger more complex groups like villages, towns, cities, nations, empires, to still more inclusive leagues, federations and civilizations.
In a broad view, sociology includes politics, economics and ideology. For the purposes of our social analysis, we have divided the field into four separate categories, beginning with politics, continuing through economics and drawing our study together under the general headings of sociology and ideology.
No civilization that we have studied can be regarded as an intentional or projected or planned enterprise. On the contrary, civilizations have developed and matured in true pragmatic fashion, taking one step after another because their predecessors had followed this course or because, given the human urges and the available natural and social opportunities, the next step seemed to be determined by previous steps plus the momentum of the enterprise. In the course of this development an ideology was built up and modified in such a way as to justify and strengthen the entire project.
When William Penn received a grant of land from the English Crown, he was already committed, ideologically, by the Quaker faith to Quaker methods. Without ever seeing his proposed home across the Atlantic he drew up a plan for his City of Brotherly Love (Philadelphia), and for the organization and conduct of his enterprise. The entire project was formulated in Penn's mind and put on paper. This is a good example of an intentional community.
No civilization so far as I know, has followed such a sequence. Certainly in the civilizations with which we are most familiar, political and economic forces, the principles of necessity and availability have led to the formulation of an ideology that would justify and promote the interests of the social group which was controlling and directing the community or communities in which the civilization was maturing.
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that each of the component elements making up the expanding civilization--each people, city, state, nation, empire--developed its own total culture pattern, subject to the pressures mutually exerted by neighboring communities. The aggregate of these culture patterns, separately and often antagonistically matured, comprised a lesser totality called an empire and a larger totality called a civilization. It is with this larger totality that we are concerned.
We propose to analyse the sociology of civilization under the following headings: (1) the structure or anatomy; (2) the function, physiology, or process; (3) motive forces in civilization; (4) contradictions and conflicts, with a final section on the life cycle of civilization.
The structure of human society consists of specialized economic, political, administrative and cultural groupings assembled and maintained in relationships that supply necessities, conveniences, comforts, luxuries for the individuals, together with capital goods and services for the social groups composing the civilization.
In terms of social history the growth of structure has proceeded from the horde, tribe and clan to the family, village, city, city-state, nation, empire, civilization. These steps are not necessarily sequential. Under varying social conditions they have been determined and modified by particular historical situations. The smallest and most intimate building block of human society has been the family. The largest and most inclusive has been the civilization. The family as a social group has existed for long periods, over wide areas, in immense numbers. Civilizations have been few and often far between. They have arisen out of particular historical situations, played distinctive roles, written their own histories and made varying contributions to the sum total of human culture. In the long time intervals and the wide geographical distances that have separated civilizations human beings have lived within more local and less complex social structures.
Civilized human society is distinctive in structure. While it varies in detail from one civilization to another, its broad outline is unmistakable. Each civilization has been built, defended and perpetuated in and around cities.
Between civilizations, in time and space, most human communities have been self-sufficient. Whether as food gatherers, pastoral people or cultivators of the soil they have produced and consumed the food, shelter, clothing, implements and weaponry required for their survival.
The city, whether a political capital or a center of trade and commerce, was sharply separated from the self-sufficient countryside. The city, by its very nature, could not be self-sufficient. Food, building supplies and raw materials were not produced inside the city limits, but must be produced in the hinterland from which they were transported to the cities. City dwellers devised means of paying for the production, transportation and marketing of these necessary imports. The countryside can and does exist independently of the city because it can provide the goods and services on which its existence depends. The city, on the contrary, cannot exist without the supplies produced in the hinterland and transported to the city.
Urban centers of civilization have for their background a pastoral and agricultural source of food supplemented by fabrication, merchandising and financing. Instead of the occupational uniformity of the countryside, the city offers a wide range of occupations, increased productivity, quick and substantial profits resulting in a build-up of capital on one side and enlarged consumer spending on the other. Consequently the successful competitor in the race for supremacy develops productivity, accumulates wealth, expands capital spending, enlarges the scope of the arts, thereby augmenting the city's attractiveness to business enterprise and migrants from the hinterland.
As the capital city grows in wealth and opportunity it requires larger imports of food, raw materials, building supplies, manpower. Growing internal need leads to greater external expansion. Economic, political, administrative and cultural needs not only increase the demands of the city on its existing hinterland, but they lead to a demand for a more widely extended hinterland.
The countryside is the goose that lays the golden eggs. The city gathers, guards and eventually consumes the eggs or converts them into capital forms and lives in part on this unearned income.
The city is the mecca which attracts by its wide ranging opportunities. It is also the center in which policies are made and offered to the countryside as normal facts of life. The countryside accepts city leadership including a higher wealth-power per capita ratio for the city.
Cities, with their accumulations of population and wealth, are walled or otherwise defended. When danger threatens, countrymen often move inside the walls until the danger abates.
Cities and city life increase and expand with the growth and expansion of civilization. Cities are the centers from which civilization grows and expands. Historically, a number of cities or city-states have competed for survival and supremacy. One by one they have dropped out of the race or have been out-classed, defeated and/or absorbed by the victors in the competitive struggle. One location proved to be more advantageous than others. The inhabitants of one locality were more skillful, more far sighted than those of rival localities. Many competed. Eventually one survived the final round of struggle, emerging as the nucleus of an expanding empire and a maturing civilization. A protracted conflict raging first in Italy and later in the entire Mediterranean basin, resulted in the Roman Empire and eventually in Roman civilization. A similar series of struggles, this time planet-wide, gave the British a taste of planetary supremacy in the nineteenth century and opened the door wide enough to give the United States oligarchy a glimpse of an American Twentieth century, which never eventuated.
Occupational differences within the city led to a differentiated class structure. As the trading city developed, businessmen eventually played a dominant role because they were able to command larger incomes, accumulate more wealth and offer more aggressive leadership.
Nuclei of both empire and civilization were associated with a cluster of allies, client states, dependencies and colonies related to the center by economic interests and by diplomatic bargains or political controls. They paid tribute or taxes as the price of living within the defense perimeter of the ruling elite, conforming to the chief aspects of its culture and in emergencies taking refuge inside the city defenses.
The city center made and implemented policy and provided local leadership in emergencies. Inhabitants of the city enjoyed a superior status and had a higher standard of consumer-living than most of those who inhabited the countryside and the hinterland.
A structured society based on division of labor and/or function enjoys a competitive superiority over a classless community. The structured city was not only richer than the countryside, but it was in a position to provide leadership, to plan and implement policy and act more effectively.
A civilization consists of a cluster of associated allies, clients, dependencies, and colonies bound together by economic, political and cultural ties. Since armed force has been the chief instrument for bringing these elements together, the agency responsible for exercising armed force enjoys priority in a listing of the structural institutions of civilization.
Land owners, often acting as military chieftains, dominated the hinterland of a civilization. The city was dominated by businessmen. The unification of city and hinterland and the complex of cities and hinterlands composing a civilization established a governmental apparatus in which all ruling elements were represented. In the earlier stages of a civilization there may have been assemblies or parliaments composed of representatives of various interests. As the civilization was unified by war, representation was replaced by some form of monarchy in which one supreme commander, emperor or pharoah was the final judge and arbiter. The monarch set up a network of public authority, regional as well as universal, provincial as well as central, and garrisoned it with professional soldiers and sailors paid by the monarch and responsible to him.
Corresponding with this political structure was an economic structure consisting of a central treasury, a uniform system of weights, measures and values, a system of spending priorities, decided by the central authority, a source of income: taxes, tribute, booty, sufficient to cover expenditures.
A civilization which ran a chronic deficit--over-spending its income--moved year by year, through debt, inflation, currency degradation, and repudiation toward its own disintegration and ultimate bankruptcy. The historical record is very clear on this point, especially in Roman civilization and in western civilization after 1870.
Most civilizations have had a body of religious institutions staffed by a priestcraft, which has shared power with the economic overlords. During certain periods in the long history of Egyptian civilization the priestcraft held the balance of power. So great was its ascendancy that the spoils of war and the gains of peace were shared by the temple treasury and the royal treasury. In some cases the temple treasuries had priority.
All civilizations for at least five thousand years have had a professional military of sufficient consequence to play a leading role in policy making and to claim a lion's share of the spoils of military victory. In some cases civil and military authority were merged in one supreme commander--emperor, pharoah. At other times, notably in Rome, after the fall of the Republic, the Pretorian Guard nominated and appointed its emperors.
Well up toward the summit of each known civilization, four groups have shared authority and competed for supremacy: land-lords, wealth-lords, war-lords and priests. Where these four major shapers of public policy and directors of public administration were of like mind, they shared wealth and power. When they differed, one or another enjoyed priority and exercised some measure of control over the other three.
Less personal, but of major concern among the institutions of civilization were the channels of communication and transportation that have played so decisive a role in the life of every civilization. Top ranking among the means of communication were common language, spoken and written on metal, papyrus, paper; a unified system of accounting and cost keeping; permanent records. Among the means of transport were waterways, including canals, viaducts, roads, bridges skillfully built and kept in good repair.
Another significant institution of civilization is the idea of ownership, the division of property into public property and private property and the right of the private property owner to do what he will with his property, subject always to the over-riding principle of eminent domain: the right of the community to expropriate private property for public uses, with or without compensation.
Another institution of civilization is the provision of public services in addition to means of communication and transportation. These public services include a water supply; the disposal of waste; public defense of life and property; food and diversion (bread and circuses) for the needy; fire prevention and fire fighting apparatus; educational facilities, including libraries and reading rooms; outside recreational facilities such as parks and play-grounds. All of these facilities could be provided by the rich and powerful for themselves and members of their families. They could be supplied more effectively and apportioned more justly when they were public services open to all.
The countryside lacks the financial and the administrative means of providing a wide range of public services. Indeed, countryside dwellers pride themselves on being able to provide necessary services on a family, household or village basis. City dwellers learn to regard such public services as a matter of public right. Their existence is a magnet which draws a steady stream of migrants from the countryside into the cities.
Civilizations are dominated by business interests. It is for them to provide facilities for the transaction of business, cash money, credit instruments, installment buying, means for changing money, insurance, discounting facilities. As a civilization grows in wealth and population the political apparatus becomes a major employer, a major producer of goods and services, a major purchaser of producer and consumer goods, a major agency for borrowing, lending, insuring, in short a major factor in the multitudinous activities of a commercial, industrial community.
Classes, class interests and class lines are a part and parcel of all civilizations. They are less rigid and more flexible than similar lines existing in an agrarian community where land ownership plays so large a role in determining social forms and social functions. In a static agrarian community dominated by landlords, war-lords and the clergy, rigid class lines help to hold the community together. In a community dominated by business interests, both labor power and purchasing power must be free to respond to demand and supply. This is as true in a planned public economy as it is in a private enterprise economy. In accordance with the same principle, facilities are provided for the movement of individuals back and forth across class lines.
The specialized, interdependent structure of civilization with its city control of the hinterland, its products and inhabitants, enabled the city-centered oligarchy to accumulate and concentrate wealth and monopolize power, to skim the cream from the available milk, monopolize the cream, distribute the skimmed milk judiciously and thus perpetuate its ascendancy through generations and centuries. During periods of expansion civilized communities develop a dynamism which maintains their ascendancy. In subsequent periods of contraction form takes over, imposing conformity on the status quo.
During their periods of expansion civilizations are dynamic. Their history records growth at home, expansion abroad, exploitation, domestic and foreign under the pressure of effective motivating forces. The resulting dynamism leads to the contradictions, confrontations and conflicts which have studded the internal and external life story of every civilization.
Perhaps the most outstanding aspect of the dynamic functioning of civilization is its growth in magnitude. It might be more accurate to describe the process as an explosive expansion--explosive because rapid and spectacular.
Form limits function. At the same time function modifies and ultimately determines form. The two factors are omnipresent and complementary. Except for purposes of analysis they are two inseparable aspects of every human society. Where form predominates, social status results. Where function predominates fluidity, flexibility and dynamism are the outcome. Rapid change occurs on the home front at the same time that it is taking place abroad.
Growth at home takes place in two fields. The first is the extension of the homeland frontiers, broadening the geographical area of the nucleus around which the civilization is being built. The second aspect of growth involves an increase in multiplicity, variety and complexity and perhaps also a higher level of quality. Increase in quality is an optional feature of growth and expansion. Toward the end of a cycle of civilization quality declines.
For the record we list fourteen aspects of the domestic growth of civilization: (1) population; (2) production of goods and services; (3) trade, commerce, finance; (4)wealth, capital, income, capital construction; (5) the defense establishment; (6) growth in numbers and in variety of consumer goods and services; (7) specialization; (8) formal education, literacy, learning; (9) advances in science and technology; (10) growth in the arts; (11) rising standards of luxury for the oligarchy and growth in the volume of the professional and technical middle class and their living standards; (12) growth of the state bureaucratic apparatus in its complexity and in the number of its personnel; (13) growth of the sources of unearned income and especially in the number of persons living on unearned income; (14) growth of dependents, delinquents, criminals and other outlaws. This list is not exhaustive, but it is indicative of the wide area in which domestic growth takes place.
Paralleling their domestic expansion, civilizations expand geographically up to the point of diminishing returns, determined by the growth of overhead costs. This process has taken the civilization, its personnel, its institutions and practices into territory not heretofore occupied, sometimes with the consent of the "foreigners", but more often in the teeth of their determined and long-continued opposition.
Expansion of a civilization is of necessity a movement from an urban center and beyond the urban center. Each civilization has been built around one or more urban nuclei which accepted and practiced expansion as the primary law of their beings.
Expansion takes many forms. It may be peaceful, as travel is peaceful. It may be competitive, as trade is competitive. It may be economically aggressive; the search for markets, for raw materials, for investment opportunities carried on simultaneously by representatives of long time rival cities, states, empires. It may be a movement for a place in the sun; mass migration, colonization. It may take the form of planned military invasion having as its purpose the conquest and occupation of foreign territory; the subjugation of the citizenry of the conquered lands; the establishment of an alien government in the conquered territory; the reduction of the "natives" to the status of second class citizens in their own homelands; exploitation of the natural resources; the levying of tribute; the imposition of taxes and the expropriation of moveable articles such as bullion, works of art and other treasure by the invaders, conquerors and occupiers.
Policies of expansion, conquest and occupation rely upon weaponry and war-making as essential instruments. Historically their role has been frankly recognized by builders of every empire and the leaders of every civilization. All civilizations known to history prepared for war and utilized war as the final arbiter in their pursuit of expansionist policy. Empire builders and civilizers have taken it for granted that might made right. The mighty, in terms of military striking power and killing power, have fought over and inherited the earth.
The practices of every civilization have centered about exploitation--of natural resources, of labor power, of rivals in the race for supremacy, of weaker and less aggressive peoples. Expansion gives the ruling oligarchy of the expanding nation, empire or civilization command of the strategic vantage points from which the principle of exploitation can be made continuously operative.
We have dealt with exploitation in connection with the economics of civilization (Chapter 7). Its central concept is the "you work--I eat" formula. In sociological terms it extends far beyond livelihood, into the relations of man with the natural environment (ecology); the management and direction of labor power and policy making; social administration and policy implementation, including policing of the territories lying within the frontiers of the nation, empire or civilization, plus contacts and relationships with territories lying outside the frontiers: in short, with the success or failure, the domination or subordination of the territory under consideration.
Structurally and functionally a civilization cannot remain static. It must expand or contract. If it expands, crossing frontiers and penetrating areas heretofore considered foreign or alien, and proposes to remain in those alien territories, it must have sufficient means at its disposal to continue the administration of its home territory and at the same time to take on the administration of the newly acquired foreign territory.
Home territory administration has as its broad purpose the utilization of available means to attain its ends and serve its interests. Administration of areas into which the home forces are penetrating must attain the same ends and serve the same interests on the "you work--I eat" axiom. Unless the newly acquired territory can attain those ends and serve those interests it is a liability, not an asset, and its continued existence will pose a threat to the expansionist venture.
Natural resources, plus labor power, plus effective management and direction must be integrated in the interests of the entire enterprise. Self determination is of secondary consequence, coming into play only after the interests of the whole have been assured and safeguarded.
There is of course the collective principle under which the interests of the whole can be best served through the cooperation of its component elements. But this is a horse of quite another color. It presupposes the willingness of the respective parts to enter voluntarily into a cooperative relationship. Sociologically speaking this is the antithesis of the situation we have been considering: expansion and exploitation in the interests and for the purposes of the expanding forces. So long as expansion and exploitation are accepted and practiced as the basic principles of any community, so long independence and self-determination will be irrelevant and inimical to the dominant elements in the nation, empire or civilization under consideration.
Under the "you work--I eat" formula natural resources will be utilized in the manner best calculated to advance the interests of the ruling oligarchy. Who will be the judge, jury and executioner in the case? Who else but the concerned ruling oligarchy?
In the history of civilization this principle has been followed systematically. The forests have been cleared away, the land has been overgrazed, cultivated and exposed to the erosive attacks of sunlight, air, water and frost. Wood from the forests has been hauled to the cities and burned, has been used to construct palaces and temples, houses and ships, with no recognition of the principles of priority or renewal. If wood was available where must it go? The oligarchy decided the issue in terms of ostentation and expediency. Rarely during recorded human history have there been oligarchs who said: "Irreplaceable resources like minerals must be used with extreme economy. Replaceable resources like forests or top-soil must be used and at the same time replaced and if possible augmented."
Decision making in the civilizations reported by history has been chiefly in the hands of specially privileged minorities. The purpose of these minorities has revolved around the provision of comforts and luxuries for the decision makers and their dependents and the increase of their wealth and power. Rarely has any ruling oligarchy said: "The continuance of our privileges and our barest existence is the result of labor power applied to natures gifts. We must safeguard nature and improve the health and vitality of those who do the world's work. If, due to unforeseen circumstances, over which we have failed to exercise adequate control, there is some shortage, let the idler and the wastrel suffer. Under all circumstances the producers must have all those goods and services needed to preserve their productive efficiency."
Through the entire course of written history the shrewdest, the strongest, the best fed and most comfortably housed have gained wealth and power, kept them and added to them. This has been the central sociological principle followed by the wealth-owning, power-wielding oligarchs of one civilization after another. Nature has been polluted, despoiled, pillaged. Society has been exploited and plundered. Most civilizations, during most of their history, have been led and ruled by the rich and powerful, who have used their wealth and power to advance their own interests, with scant respect for the hewers of wood, the drawers of water and the tillers of the soil. Those at the imperial center have milked the periphery. Cooperation has been occasional and confined largely to pre-civilized communities. In all civilizations exploitation has been the rule; the exploitation of nature, of labor power and of the social fabric.
The record of natural resources exploitation is well known. Paul Sears' _Deserts on the March_; Fairfield Osborn's _Our Plundered Planet_; William Vogt's _Road to Survival_, and Rachel Carson's _Silent Spring_ tell the story of the misuse and the extravagant abuse of nature. The record of labor power exploitation is less publicized.
Food gatherers like the North American Indians had no machinery and a minimum of implements or weapons. They migrated with the weather and the available game, traveling with their possessions. Herdsmen also moved about in search of pasture. Land workers faced four new problems. They must stay with their land and make a weather-proof habitat in dwellings and villages. They must make the implements needed for farming, building and defense against marauders. They must accumulate and preserve enough food to carry them from one harvest to the next. They must improve and beautify their artifacts and constructs. Traders added a fifth must--they must produce and accumulate stocks to meet the needs of various customers as well as their own greed for profits.
Successive stages, from food gathering to trading and manufacturing, required more energy--human energy, animal energy, and eventually mechanical energy. Part of this energy enabled humans to survive, another part enabled them to multiply. Still another part made it possible for one portion of the population to live without productive work on the work output of their fellow creatures. This exploiting minority was headed by land owners, soldiers and priests.
Landowners built themselves and their dependents strong houses and castles. Much of the labor power that went into this construction was "forced." The laborer gave the landlord labor time in exchange for the privilege of working part of the land for his own support. Soldiers defended the landlord and joined plundering forays on the territory of neighbors. The priests, in exchange for sustenance, mollified "higher powers" and built temples in which the people could gather, worship and be admonished.
Farsighted, energetic, resourceful men (and women), using mass productive energy, built themselves castles, built their priests temples and mobilized serfs, war captives and slaves who worked in gangs for generations and centuries to assemble the raw materials, construct and decorate the buildings, and perform the services needed to operate the enterprises and to provide their owners and masters with the necessaries, comforts, luxuries.
As centers of civilization grew richer and more powerful they defeated neighboring peoples, brought some of them home as war captives and exacted from their defeated rivals promises to pay yearly tribute in the form of timber, metals, food and often of slaves.
Mobilization of energy resources had been proceeding on a small scale for ages. Successful civilizers made this one of their chief tasks, mobilizing energy forces and materials and using them to build palaces, temples, mausoleums and whole city complexes with appropriate defenses against marauders and other enemies.
Administrative networks, adequate to produce such results, planned and directed the construction and administered and policed the operations. Using elaborate techniques of communication, transportation, fabrication, beautification, accounting, planning, initiative, leadership, mobilization, maintenance and replacement of labor power, imposition and sharing of authority, discipline, adjustment to deviation and opposition, means for dealing with revolt and rebellion, the builders of civilization performed their necessary tasks.
As civilizations have matured they have grown at the nucleus, expanded abroad and experimented more or less successfully with various means of exploiting nature, man and human society. Most of the competitors for survival and supremacy dropped out or were forced out in the course of continuous survival struggles.
Survivors of the obstacle race dealt successively with personal rivalries; class conflicts; civil wars; dictatorships; tyrannies; with overhead costs that grew more rapidly than income; with empty treasuries, inflation, depression, economic stagnation; with increases in top-heavy bureaucracies; with parasitism; with hooliganism; with the growing role of the military in decision making and administration; sharing the honey-pot with migrants and invaders; with rivalry and power struggle at home and abroad; with division, fragmentation and eventual dissolution.
Any student of the sociology of civilization must turn from this analysis of function with the conviction that whatever the advantages of civilization as opposed to earlier phases of human association, the pattern of civilization in action is workable only to a very limited extent. Civilization is not an example of perpetual motion. Rather it is a social life cycle, with a beginning and an end, and a peck of troublesome contradictions and conflicts in between.
Civilization is an integrative process. During the course of its competitive survival struggle, potential building units of an expanding civilization are tested out and included or rejected in much the same way that a stone-mason checks and tests the individual stones of which his wall is being built. The analogy is not entirely accurate. A wall becomes a completed part of a total structure. A civilization is a process of existence from conception and birth to dissolution and death. At any point in the process there is a delicate balance between integration and disintegration. As a matter of fact, both integration and disintegration exist and act, constantly, side by side. If the integrative forces are in the ascendant, form is built and function is accelerated. If the disintegrative forces are dominant, form breaks down and function stagnates.
This shifting balance and/or imbalance with its resulting build-up and/or break-down exists geographically, biologically, sociologically. It can perhaps be best described as successive change. It cannot be referred to as evolution except in its integrative aspect. Disintegratively it becomes devolution.
Civilization is a result of sociological build-up at a certain cultural level. It has not been universal in all human societies, but exceptional, both in time and in geographical space.
What has caused the pattern of civilization to appear, disappear and reappear again and again during the period of written history?
There have been many answers. The most general answer is divine intervention by beings above and beyond mankind. Whether such intervention has taken place or is taking place, human beings are unable to say with finality, but several thousand years of recorded history, plus our own daily experience provides convincing proof that the political, economic, ideological and sociological constructs which have appeared and disappeared in the course of social history are, at least in large part, the products of human brains and human hands. They are man-made.
The social pattern of civilization, like other social patterns which preceded civilization and which continue to exist side by side with civilized communities, is the result of human ingenuity and human energy, of human inertia, ineptitude, and the human urges to build, decorate and destroy.
Variety in human culture is caused by the variety in the human natural environment, the human social environment and in man himself.
Natural advantages exist and vary from place to place. There are fertile valleys; there are also mountains and deserts. There are a few fine harbors, but for the most part landings are difficult and dangerous. Certain islands have become the bases of civilizations, but this is true of only a very small number of many existing islands.
Civilizations have flourished in certain climatic zones and not elsewhere. At one historical period civilizations were established in the tropics and semi-tropics. In the present period they are located chiefly in temperate climatic belts.
Another source of differences between civilizations is the variation and the adaptability of certain peoples to the peculiar conditions out of which civilization grows.
Still another explanation of the presence or absence of civilization in particular times and places is the "great man" theory of history. All human communities, pre-civilized and civilized, have had gifted leaders whose thoughts and actions have brought about social changes. These "greats" were the divinely, ideologically or sociologically inspired. Divine inspiration or revelation led to the founding of religious faiths. Ideological and sociological inspiration resulted in domestic cultural changes and the extension of economic, cultural and ideological activities into foreign lands, thus pushing the frontiers of nations, empires, and civilizations farther from the chief wealth-power centers.
Thomas Carlyle wrote that history is the lengthened shadows of a few great men. Arnold Toynbee concluded from his _Study of History_ that religion has been a prime motive force in the building and preservation of civilizations.
Technology has been a motive force of hard-to-define importance in revitalizing, changing, expanding and perpetuating civilizations. Increased productivity, expressing itself as increases in income, accumulated wealth and various forms of capital investment, have provided the economic basis for population growth and the more effective exploitation of natural resources and labor power, advances in the means for transportation and communication, accounting, planning management and "defense."
Among the social motive forces responsible for the development of civilization is the accumulation of wealth in an impoverished world. The most important single factor in this connection was the development of a class of businessmen in a society dominated by landlords, churchmen and soldiers. Landlords, churchmen and soldiers lived during periods of animal husbandry and primitive agriculture on the very narrow margins produced during bountiful harvests. When harvests were bad, husbandmen and farmers were reduced to starvation levels. Lacking means of storage and refrigeration as well as facilities for transporting heavy materials such as food, fuel and building materials, pre-civilized society accumulated wealth slowly in mobile forms (precious metals and jewels) and made few productive investments.
The advent of trade (business) and the trading class created a small but potentially powerful class whose income and wealth were not derived from direct contact with nature but came from trade, money changing, lending, insuring and other activities associated with the accumulation and investment of wealth in profit-yielding enterprises. Only in a secondary sense did business depend on animal husbandry or agriculture. As their primary task businessmen devoted themselves to the exploitation of labor power and the storage and merchandising of the products turned out by herdsmen, farmers, craftsmen. Part of their profits went into more elaborate standards of feeding, clothing and housing themselves and their dependents. Another, and a more crucial part of their profits went into ships, warehouses, and the implements used in converting raw materials into consumer goods and services, transporting them to the markets, displaying them and persuading consumers to diversify their needs, purchase a greater variety of goods and services and thus increase the number and profitability of business transactions.
As this process mushroomed with the expansion of civilization, consumers demanded a greater number of more expensive artifacts and consumer capital goods, from housing and house furnishings such as bathrooms and well-stocked kitchens to refrigerators, washing machines, air conditioners, telephones, television sets, bicycles, automobiles and elaborate recreation facilities and equipment. The expansion of mass production and the mass market paced one another, constantly raising the ante.
Mass production, mass marketing and pyramiding profits resulted, first and foremost in the enrichment of businessmen. Their riches automatically pushed them into a position of pre-eminent importance from which they were able to make public policy and utilize public authority for the protection and advancement of their own class interests. It also called into being a vast array of new professionals; teachers, engineers, scientists, technicians, social workers and propagandists, converting the "middle class" from a shadowy remnant of feudal society into the largest class numerically and the most influential class politically in the entire modern community.
At the same time, economic enrichment and expansion increased the importance of the war-making apparatus. The expansion of civilization has involved a competitive struggle carried on constantly along several fronts, economic, political, cultural, ideological. The means of struggle in every civilization has included the military as a political force and as a final arbiter in deciding who should win and who should lose civil and inter-group wars. Victory and defeat determined the fate of land and natural resources, populations, capital installations, taxing facilities, domestic policing. This deterministic role of the war machine has never been more dramatically in the foreground than during the crucial years from 1910 to the present day, when war apparatus costs have topped the list of government expenditures.
Growth of state functions with the expansion of the economy has resulted in the creation of a vast state bureaucratic apparatus. Heading this bureaucracy are the ministers of state, each with a separate department. Under the department heads are sub-departments, sub-divided in their turn into bureaus or separate offices. At each level, functions are assigned and salaries are fixed. Entrance into this anthill is sometimes by personal favor, sometimes by examination. Once in, however, barring misbehavior, or some catastrophe like the abolition of a particular bureau, the office holder is in for life with a pension when he is retired for age.
Inside the bureaucracy there is a slow movement determined by seniority. There is also some skipping, as when new bureaus are formed or when death or retirement offer opportunities for the favored few to move forward or skip upward. As we read the record, the bureaucracy existed in the days of Egypt's Amenhotep, or in those of Rome's Augustus Caesar, as it exists today--locally in every municipality, province, nation and empire and generally throughout western civilization.
Every civilization known to history has had its priestcraft as well as its statecraft. Statecraft spawned its bureaucracy. Priestcraft spawned its theocracy. Both patterns have inter-penetrated entire civilizations. Each locality, region and district has had its representatives of state and of church. In some instances the church took precedence. In others the state was supreme. As the civilization matured, using war as the chief instrument of policy, the state in the person of military dictators has tended to predominate. In every civilization the state has collected its taxes and the church has collected its tithes.
The net result, in every civilization, has been a ruling oligarchy, self-appointed and self-perpetuating, which has shaped policy, planned and directed administration, exercised authority and lived comfortably and at least semi-parasitically on the backs of the underlying urban and rural masses, sharing its sinecure with its middle class handymen. In some times and in certain localities the oligarchy has maintained a representative front. Elsewhere it has functioned arbitrarily. In extreme cases one man has ruled for a brief period. Generally the oligarchy has held the reins of authority.
Each phase of human society has had its oppositions, its confrontations, its conflicts, proportioned to its magnitude, its specialization and the interdependence of its component parts, its ratio of change to stability and its foresight, plans and preparations for dealing with changes when they occur. Since civilization, of all known forms of human association, is the largest, most specialized and most interdependent, it is in civilization that we should expect to find the most intensive and extensive contradictions, confrontations and conflicts.
Among the many oppositions of civilized association five are outstanding: the we-they relationship; rural versus urban life; subsistence versus acquisition and accumulation; hard work versus ease, luxury and parasitism; poverty versus wealth.
Civilization is not only complex and interdependent in form, it is avowedly competitive in its functioning. Politically, nation building, empire building and the establishment and maintenance of each civilization is a competitive struggle between declared rivals to gain and keep place and power. Economically, the efforts to get and keep natural resources and labor power and to use them to _Our_ advantage and _Their_ disadvantage dominates the field of livelihood. Ideologically _We_ are right, while _They_ are wrong. Culturally _We_ are superior. _They_ are inferior.
The _We-They_ relationship developed very early in the history of the human family. Individuals and small, more advanced groups have reached a level of understanding and living based on the cooperative inclusive formula of _"We, Ours, Us",_ but every civilization known to history has accepted and adopted the competitive, divisive formula and poured energy and wealth into the political, economic, ideological and cultural struggle to take and keep for individual, local or class advantage.
Resulting oppositions fragmented civilization: (1) urban vs. rural life, city vs. hinterland; (2) cooperation vs. competition; (3) acquisition and accumulation vs. sharing; (4) riches vs. poverty; (5) the individual vs. the group; (6) status vs. change.
These fragmenting forces have been accepted, adopted and given priority by civilizations as they developed predominance. As they grew in magnitude they limited or subordinated the forces of integration and unification.
Opposites and oppositions lead to confrontations along class lines, geographic lines, cultural lines, color lines, racial lines. The traditional confrontation of rural vs. urban life is doubly underlined by two factors: first, the countryside operates generally on a use economy with pay for services largely in kind or by barter. The city operates under a market economy with payment for services usually in money. Second, the standards of life and work are more primitive in the countryside than in the city. Third, as the civilization advances toward maturity, city population increases while it declines in the countryside. Consequently vigorous, energetic, adventurous people leave the deteriorating countryside.
Increasingly the owners of land and capital live in the cities, visiting the countryside for holidays and recreation, leaving rural areas to servants, peons, serfs and slaves. Small owning farmers are bought out or expropriated. Unable to make a living in the countryside they move to the city. Lacking city skills they work as casual labor or are unemployed. The city is divided between enterprisers, their subordinates, owners of country estates and members of the state bureaucracy on one side and vassals, servants, serfs, and slaves and the unemployed on the other. The rich and powerful become richer and more powerful. The poor and dependent grow in numbers--protest, demonstrate, riot, revolt.
This class struggle dominates public life in the urban centers of every civilization. The rich offer petty reforms and minor benefits to the impoverished, semi-employed city masses. At the same time the urban oligarchy breaks up into rival factions: the Ins and the Outs. The Ins hold public jobs, spend public money, award contracts and pass around favors. The Outs wait and maneuver for their turn at the public pie-counter. Both Ins and Outs appeal for mass support.
Oppositions and confrontations lead to conflicts which have studded the life of every civilization. Conflicts include wars which may be divided into six groups: (1) Wars of expansion, conquest, colonization directed toward the enlargement of the territories included in the civilization. (2) Wars of survival among adjacent nations and empires. (3) Wars fought to suppress unrest and revolt in the colonies and dependencies of an empire or civilization. (4) Wars fought to repel the invasion of migrating peoples attempting to occupy territory over which an empire or a civilization claims jurisdiction. (5) Peasant, serf and slave revolts and rebellions against the authority of empires or civilizations. (6) Civil wars to determine the leadership of particular empires; wars of leadership succession; conflicts and power seizures within particular oligarchies.
In every civilization final decisions regarding domestic and foreign issues have been made by an appeal to arms. There were laws and legal institutions in many civilizations under which confrontations might have been prevented and armed conflict avoided. Where these legal means failed to provide solutions, contestants turned to armed force as the final arbiter.
Competitive survival struggle has played a prominent role in the life of every civilization known to history. Competition at its highest level employs armed force as its instrument of policy. War, domestic and foreign has, therefore, dominated the history of every civilization. Walter Bagehot called war a state maker. In the same context, war may be referred to as a civilization maker.
Conflict, including war, has played a major role, often a determining role in building and maintaining civilizations. It has also been a major and perhaps _the_ major factor in undermining and destroying civilizations. Arnold Toynbee contends that war has been a "proximate cause" of the overthrow of one civilization after another. No observer of current western civilization can fail to note the determining part played by war during the first half of the present century.
Every completed civilization known to historians has passed through a sociological life cycle: origin, growth, expansion, maturity, violent premature dismemberment and death in the competitive survival struggle or gradual decline and eventual dissolution.
Every completed civilization has had small, local beginnings, on an island like Crete, or a group of islands like the Japanese Archipelago, or a tiny spot like Latium on the Tiber River, or an isolated area like the desert-surrounded Nile River Valley in Africa. The seed ground or nucleus of each civilization has been a small, well-knit group of vigorous, energetic people, well-led, living in an easily defended, limited area, enjoying relative isolation, but also having ready access to the outside world.
At the beginning the growth cycle has moved slowly, from victory to victory, as competing neighboring peoples have been brought under the authority of the victor in local wars. After generations or centuries of struggle a point is reached at which the nucleus of the growing empire begins to expand, through trade, colonization, diplomatic alliances, conquest, into an era of survival struggle in which rival cities reach out for the same piece of fertile land, the same markets, the same mineral deposits. Again the life and death survival struggle tests out the people, their leaders, their ambitions, determination, tenacity.
Earlier struggles were local. Now the struggle area has become regional. At the outset the peoples were amateurs in the science and art of expansion, occupation, consolidation, exploitation. Through the hard school of struggle they became professionals. From victory to victory they gained in territory, in wealth, in administrative skill. One by one, rivals were eliminated, annexed or associated with the nascent empire which was by way of becoming the central empire of a maturing civilization.
Generations of effort and centuries of time have gone into the empire building process. The farther the civilization has expanded, the greater the necessary input of manpower, wealth, enterprise and administrative talent needed to keep the enterprise strong, solvent, masterful.
Eventually the expanding civilization reaches a point at which the costs of further expansion are greater than the income derived from further extension of its authority. Up to this point expansion had paid its own way. Beyond this point it is a losing proposition--politically, economically, sociologically. At this point begin times of troubles; bad harvests; colonial or provincial revolts; power struggles between individuals or classes in the homeland; new rivals moving in to share in the prospective plunder of the mother-city.
From this time of troubles the civilization enters a new phase of its lifecycle. Up to this point victory has brought plunder and prosperity which have financed new foreign adventures and led to new victories. Beyond this point lies stalemate, economic stagnation, military defeat. Building an empire and establishing it as the central force in a civilization is a long and arduous process. Once the process is reversed, the decline may move quickly or slowly, but as it proceeds the civilization is fragmented and eventually dissolved or taken over by a more vigorous rival.
At all stages of this cycle there have been life and death survival struggles. Peoples, nations and empires entered the contest, played their parts, made their contribution to the up-building process. There were ups and downs, advances and withdrawals, victories and defeats. There were many contenders for survival and supremacy. Usually there was one survivor which gave its name to the civilization.
The period of ascendancy of any civilization has been historically brief. The struggle to the summit was long and exhausting; the descent from the summit more rapid than the ascent. Literally, like the bear that went over the mountain to see what he could find, and who found the other side of the mountain, the civilizations that have reached the summit of wealth and power have found on the other side of the summit a steep downward sloping time of troubles that ended in dissolution and liquidation.
Civilization, as a sociological life pattern, has proved to be seductive and alluring in prospect, but in retrospect unsatisfactory and frustrating. Civilization has proved to be not an opportunity for the ambitious, but a trap for the ignorant, inexperienced and unwary. For the many contestants who set out to conquer the world the experience has been disappointing and on the whole disastrous. For the few who have reached the summit the experience has been frustrating.
Civilization as a way of life is like any other contest. The struggle is good for those who are able to benefit from it by learning its lessons. Whether they win or lose is a matter of no great consequence. For the losers the experience often is heart breaking and death-dealing.
Students of social history have been tempted to draw a parallel between the biological life cycle of an individual and the sociological lifecycle of a civilization. There are elements of likeness between biological birth, growth, maturity, old age and death of human individuals and of human civilizations. All of the individuals and civilizations that we know have passed or are passing through such a lifecycle. The same thing may be true of the larger universe of which we are a minute fragment. However exact or inexact it may prove to be, the parallel certainly is unmistakable, alluring. It may also be seductive and mortal.

## CHAPTER NINE: IDEOLOGIES OF CIVILIZATION

This study was laid out along inductive lines: an examination of the facts with such generalizations as the facts suggest or justify. We began our social analysis of civilization by presenting noteworthy facts concerning the politics, economics, and sociology of various civilizations. In the present chapter we deal with their ideologies.
We are accepting and following the fourth variant definition of "ideology" presented by Webster's New World Dictionary: "The doctrines, opinions or way of thinking of an individual, class, etc." In this case we are reporting on the doctrines, opinions, thought forms and action patterns of entire civilizations.
Our concern is not with the doctrines, opinions and ways of thinking and acting advanced by elite minorities. Such an approach would involve a study of comparative ideologies. Rather we are asking what civilized peoples were trying to do, as measured by their political, economic and sociological activities, programs and purposes.
It may be presumptuous for an individual to generalize about civilizations of which he knows so little. On the other hand, if we recognize the limitations under which all assumptions and generalizations operate it is possible and often helpful to assume and generalize, although the generalizations may be no more than interim reports, subject to later amendment, correction or rejection.
What were the prevailing ideas of civilizations and what ideas were put into practice? What purposes dominated and directed the lives of civilized peoples? How successful have civilized peoples been in achieving their objectives?
At the outset we must realize that in any complex society there are wide ranges of ideology, from the body of ideas held by small uninfluential sects to the purposes, ideas, policy declarations and actions of governing oligarchies. We do not wish to defend or attack the ideas, but to summarize them and understand them in a way that will give a group picture of the purposes, ideas, policies and day-to-day activities of the civilizations in question. For convenience in our discussion we will take up, first, civilized societies as collectives, and then the operation of civilized ideology as expressed in the lives of individuals.
Presumably the most immediate purpose of all civilized peoples has been survival, getting on as a collective or group from day to day, through summer and winter, under normal conditions, and/or in periods of stress and emergency. If the group cannot survive it loses its identity, breaking up into the self-determining parts of which it is composed.
Survival means continued existence as a group--in the face of disruption from within or attack and invasion from without. The group which survives continues to exist and to act as a group that maintains the common defense and promotes the general welfare.
Each social group competing for survival has a sense of its own identity and a belief in its capacity to survive. This ideology is strengthened by the belief that the group has special qualities and is protected by powerful entities that will guarantee its success in the survival struggle. The group considers itself better qualified to survive than neighbor groups. Such ideas, carried to their logical conclusion, make the group in question superior to its neighbors in survival qualities and a people chosen by its gods.
A superior people, chosen by its gods, is in a class by itself. Other people, by comparison, are inferior. It is the destiny of the superior people to take the lands of their inferior neighbors, and, whenever opportunity offers, to defeat the neighbors in battle, capture them and force them to do the bidding of the captors.
Cults of ideological superiority are widespread. Put into successful practice by a victorious tribe, nation or empire, they develop into cults of superiority which assert: "We, the victors, are stronger, better people than our weaker neighbors." As one victory follows another the belief in superiority grows. People in an expanding empire or burgeoning civilization are obviously better survivors than their less successful competitors.
Competitive survival struggle modifies the cultures of both victors and vanquished. The dispersal and adoption of culture traits, supplemented by negotiation and accommodation, broaden the geographical area of the victors, increasing the population and adding to the material resources, the wealth and income of the enlarged group. It may also involve the corresponding decrease of the geographical area, population, wealth and income of the vanquished.
In order to protect itself, preserve itself, to enlarge itself and, where possible, to improve itself, each competing groups aims to set up standards of ideas and conduct to which all living members of the group are presumed to agree and to which they must adhere. When new members enter the group, by birth or adoption, they are duly indoctrinated with the group ideology. Early in their history the individuals and sub-groups composing every civilization adopted such standards and promulgated them by the decree of a leader or by the common consent of associated groups, as the outcome of negotiation, discussion, give and take. During the history of every civilization such agreements were reached and recorded in compacts, treaties, laws, constitutions, specifying the nature and limits of the collective cultural uniformity at which the community aimed.
The struggle for collective uniformity was long and often bitter. Individuals and factions resented and resisted the imposition of group authority. Internal conflict led to civil wars in the course of which the group was divided or the solidarity of the group was reaffirmed despite hardships imposed on disagreeing, divergent minorities.
Closely paralleling the group need for survival and uniformity (solidarity) was the need for group expansion, or extension. In the competitive struggle for survival which played such an important role in the life of pre-civilized communities, strategic geographic location was often decisive. Soil fertility, mineral deposits, timber reserves, access to waterways, location on trade routes all played a part in community survival, stability and growth.
Such geographical advantages are few and far between. Often they are already occupied and defended by stable communities. Their control and utilization are basic in determining the survival or elimination of rivals in the competitive struggle.
Above and beyond the need to occupy the "corner lots" of the planetary land mass was the urge of civilized peoples to advance from littleness to bigness as a goal in itself. Confined by limitations on communication and transportation, pre-civilized man was circumscribed and localized. With the advent of cultivation, land workers were tied to a particular piece of real estate on which they lived and worked. When asked whether the village across the valley was Sunrise Mountain the local peasant could reply: "How should I know? I live here."
Reacting against restricted living and pressed by curiosity and the spirit of adventure, the imaginative and adventurous members of each generation pressed outward from the homeland toward wider horizons. Many traveled. Some migrated. Others pursued the will o' the wisp of expansion by adding field to field. The grass always looked greener on the other side of the mountain. The ambitious expansionist therefore tried to control both sides.
"Move on! Move on!" became the watchword, without any particular emphasis on quality. In one civilization after another bigness (magnitude) was accepted as a symbol of success, because "the more you get and keep, the happier you will be."
Mastery of strategic advantages, plus the illusion of mere bigness, without any specification to quality, became keys to survival and success.
Civilized man exploited natural advantages and augmented his power over nature and society by increasing his wealth and multiplying the population. At the outset of the struggle strategic geographical advantages were occupied and utilized by local groups. Through survival struggle, one of the groups, better organized, better led, more determined and productive, succeeded in securing possession of one strong point after another, until an entire region, like the Nile Valley or the Mediterranean Basin had been conquered and occupied by a single great power. The measure of success in the power struggle is the occupation of strategic strong points. Natural resources, including land and labor power, are among the chief spoils of victory.
Seven basic goals or principles were involved in the building of civilizations: group survival; propitiating the gods; recognizing and following aesthetic principles; achieving and stabilizing property and class relations; expansion (bigness); individual conformity to the collective pattern; and collective uniformity in a united world of human brotherhood. At times and in places the basic propositions were accepted, rejected, fought over. Each civilization which followed them successfully was able to establish itself, maintain itself, and up to a certain point add to its prestige, wealth and power.
The first goal was success in the struggle for survival. Collective uniformity and expansion opened the path to wealth and power, in the city, state, the empire, the civilization. From a multitude of local beginnings the struggle for expansion and consolidation led to ever larger aggregations of land, population, capital and wealth concentrated in the hands of an increasingly rich, powerful oligarchy, protected and defended by a military elite pushing itself ceaselessly toward a position from which it could make and enforce domestic policy and order.
A second collective goal has been propitiating and wooing the unseen forces of the universe: holding their attention; keeping them on "our" side; relying on their influence for defense against enemies, mortal and immortal, and help in providing water in case of drought, fertility, assistance in healing the sick, comfort for the dying, consolation for the bereaved and success in business deals. These multiple aspects of ideology are summed up under the term "religion".
Each civilization has had its religious ideas and ideals, its religious practices and institutions. Many civilizations have divided their attention between civil ideology and religious ideology. In some cases religious ideology took precedence, resulting in a theocratic society under the leadership of religious devotees. In other cases, notably Roman civilization and western civilization, religious ideology was subordinated to secular interests.
In the early stages of western civilization, religious ideology took precedence over secular ideology. With the rise of the bourgeoisie, secular ideology moved into the foreground, making loud religious professions, but also making sure that business-for-profit had the last word in the determination of public policy.
A third collective ideological goal of civilization has been aesthetic; the yen for symmetry and balance; the love of beauty; the desire for harmony; the quest for excellence; the lure of magnificence; the search for truth. Out of these urges have arisen the pictorial and plastic arts, architecture, music, the dance, science, and philosophy, providing outlets, occupations and professions that have colored and shaped many aspects of civilized living.
A fourth collective goal of civilization has been the establishment and maintenance of social structure, including classes and/or caste lines based partly upon tradition, partly on function and partly upon proximity to the honey-pot, the wellspring of wealth, income, prestige and power.
Since the principle of private property has been implicit in every known civilization, the ownership of land, capital and consumer goods and services has been a prerogative of the ruling oligarchies, shared by them with their associates and dependents and used as their chief means of establishing and maintaining the "you work, I eat" principal of economic relationships.
Private property, and its derivative, unearned or property income, has enabled the ruling oligarchies of civilized communities to receive the first fruits of every enterprise. They have also enabled the oligarchs to establish a priority scale of income distribution under which those who held property and its derivatives could have first choice among available consumer goods and services. Second choice went to the associates, retainers and defenders of the oligarchs. Third choice went to the preferred, professional experts who spoke for and represented the oligarchy. Fourth choice went to the artisans--skilled designers, builders, fabricators. What remained went to hewers of wood and drawers of water, the workers, women and men, who provided the necessaries, comforts, luxuries upon which physical survival and social status depended. Generally this proletarian mass, including chattel slaves, serfs, tenant farmers and war captives, were outside the pale of respectability. In a caste-divided community they were scavengers and untouchables, living a life close to that of domestic animals.
Most civilizations have permitted gifted individuals to move vertically, from the bottom toward the top levels of the social pyramid. Vertical movement was severely restricted, however. Generally people lived, served and died on the class or caste level into which they were born.
Members of classes and castes are not free agents. They have privileges and rights. They also have obligations and duties. Classes and castes are functioning parts of an interdependent social whole which can maintain balanced order only so long as each segment recognizes its obligations and performs its duties.
Social balance therefore depended on class collaboration. Successful collaboration, in its turn, is the outcome of a general acceptance of class and caste and general willingness to go on living and functioning in a class divided society.
A fifth collective goal of civilization has been expansion from the nucleus outward, with final authority exercised by and from the nucleus. At the outset of the survival struggle which led to the establishment of one language, one religion, one law, one authority, one loyalty, each among the many contestants had its own language, its own religion, its own law, its own authority.
These rival forces were temporarily confederated against internal disruption or foreign invasion. ("Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable.") In the course of the survival struggle, the separate parts of which the civilization was composed began with the local autonomy permitted by confederation, and ended up with one among the many contestants donning the imperial purple and establishing itself as the master and supreme dictator--the Caesar or Pharoah of the conquered, unified world.
Foreign territories conquered and brought by force of arms within this imperium were subjects of a central authority which they never really accepted. Authority continued to be exercised from the imperial nucleus. The newly conquered territories were policed by professional soldiers whose primary loyalty was national but whose responsibility was to the aggregate composing the Roman or the Egyptian civilization.
The acid test of the expanding civilization was embodied in the degree of acceptance of wholeness as opposed to self-determination. Were the individual members--the provinces and colonies composing the whole--willing and able to sink their differences in an unquestioned wholeness, or were they prepared at the first opportunity to exercise their right to self-determination and declare their independence of the whole?
The resolution of this question constituted the sixth collective goal of civilization: to establish a whole in which the component members were able and willing to recognize the axiom that the interests of the whole come before the interests of any of its component parts.
The issue of central authority versus local self determination has been one of the basic issues of the present century because during the preceding period, the British, French, Dutch and Spanish Empires had been built up by the conquest and occupation of foreign lands. If the nineteenth century was an epoch of expanding imperial authority, the twentieth century has been an epoch of the dismemberment of empires by movements for independence and self-determination.
Seventh, and finally, among the collective goals of civilization, each has developed an ideology that justified empire building by conquest, exploitation, chattel slavery, peonage, wagery, the supremacy of the empire nucleus, the subordination of the periphery to the nucleus and other aspects of ascendancy and mastery including "divine" rights in politics and "natural" rights in economics.
Civilizations expect the individuals and groups of which they are composed to preserve the status quo, work as disciplined members of an effective team and be satisfied with the outcome. This brings us back to the goal with which we began this discussion of the collective goals of civilizations: The primary task of any civilization is to survive.
Each individual human being, living and working in a civilized community occupies a sphere of action, enjoys the advantages and disadvantages and accepts the responsibilities and duties which pertain to his sphere. Within his sphere the individual succeeds or fails in so far as he leads a rewarding personal life and contributes his share toward the collective life of the group to which she or he belongs.
If the individual in a civilized community is to live a good life, the first task is to maintain normal health, good spirits and a determination to get the most out of life and to contribute at least the equivalent of what he receives in service to his group.
As a civilization expands and extends its influence, the individual must contribute his mite to the entire enterprise while adding to his own store of goods and services. Acquisition and accumulation satisfy a human desire to have and to keep. They also add to the wealth and well being of the community on the widely accepted utilitarian formula: happiness comes in direct proportion to the extent and variety of ones possessions.
In most civilized communities the building unit is a family. It is this family unit, usually directed by a male or father figure, who acts for the family and represents it in the community.
In passing, the reader should note that the breakdown in family life now so prevalent in many parts of western civilization is a departure from the civilized norm. It is really a measure of the extent to which western civilization itself is disintegrating.
The revolution in science and technology, mass production and the distribution of goods and services through a mass market have put acquisition and accumulation of goods and services as a life-goal to a severe test. Until the early years of the present century no civilization had provided affluence for more than a small fraction of its population. The vast majority consisted of slaves, serfs, war captives, and tenant farmers. Only an exceptional few were in a position to live in comfort or luxury on unearned income. As each civilization matured, ownership of land and capital diverted the flow of consumer goods and services into the coffers of a diminishing proportion of the total population. The vast majority lived at or below the subsistence level. General affluence was a goal that was talked about and dreamed about, but there was no way to test its practical effects on the population as a whole.
Under conditions presently existing in many parts of the West, millions of individuals and families following the utilitarian principles of acquisition and accumulation have secured and kept an abundance of goods and services in strict accordance with utilitarian principles. Yet they have not been and are not happy.
Quite the contrary, in many cases they are unhappy, particularly in the second and third generations of affluent family life. This is notably true in the United States, Scandinavia, Switzerland and other parts of western Europe. It is true to a lesser degree in New Zealand and Australia.
Millions of families in these countries, with all their possessions, fail to enjoy peace and happiness. On the contrary, they are so acutely unhappy that many of them have come to regard acquisition and accumulation as a sterile rat-race. Consequently multitudes of people, young and old, have turned their backs on civilization, separating themselves from their affluent homes with their glut of consumer goods to live at non-civilized or pre-civilized levels. These individuals are avowedly anti-civilization in so far as its material incentives are concerned.
Similar attitudes were expressed in previous civilizations. Socrates went barefoot through the streets of Athens. Diogenes lived in a tub. Uncounted numbers of Indian holy men and early Christians rejected all affluence, embraced poverty, lived simply and austerely. Religious asceticism is no novelty. But the wholesale rejection of acquisition and accumulation as a way of life certainly marks a turning point in the popular attitude toward the utilitarian axiom that human happiness is directly proportioned to the quantity and variety of material possessions.
Civilization presupposes getting, keeping and exercising power over nature, society and man. Each civilization has added to man's utilization of nature. This has been a notorious aspect of western civilization since the inauguration of the scientific-technological revolution. After a century of intensified exploitation of the natural environment, entire communities are reacting with dismay and disgust against the resulting pollution of air, water and land, the wanton waste of soil fertility, forests and minerals, and extermination of various forms of "wilderness." Freedom to exploit nature's storehouse has not brought happiness. On the contrary, it threatens the existence of other life forms and even the continuance of human life on the planet.
Private enterprise and other forms of permissiveness have led to practices that circumscribe and hamper life. Their declared objective is the liberation and enlargement of human life and well being. Where they have been tested out they have proved themselves to be obstructive and destructive rather than creative and constructive.
Notable advances in science and technology have greatly increased the human capacity to transform nature and remake society. Designed and executed as a means of enhancing the general welfare, science and technology might have promoted human well-being. But employed as a means of exploiting nature and society for the benefit of a favored few, science and technology, whether directed by European and American promoters of the African slave trade, Spanish conquerors in Latin America, by Belgians in the African Congo, by European whites in their dealings with the North American Indians, by the Nazis in Europe, or by Americans in South East Asia, have involved merciless exploitation accompanied by revolting atrocities.
Never in recorded history was the capacity of man to modify nature and exploit society more publicly tested out than in the atom bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the purposeful devastation of jungle life and village life in large parts of Vietnam and Cambodia. Reported in the public press and pictured, live, over radio and television, these latest developments in the ugly record of man's exploitation of nature have become part of the record of the decline and dissolution of western civilization.
Exploitation of human society for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many is an old story that extends through the entire record of written history. Every civilization has produced a cluster of institutions and practices that enabled a few rich and privileged to live in affluence at the expense of the impoverished many. This juxtaposition of riches and poverty is the logical outcome of a system of social relations designed to provide the few with comfort and luxury while the many are forced to accept penury and hardship. Exploitation, carried to its logical conclusion, permits and requires a parasitic minority to live in abundance while the majority must content itself with scarcity, extending to death from malnutrition.
Another goal presented to individuals by the promoters and fashioners of civilization is individual perfection, physical, mental, emotional, moral. Every generation of human beings contains individuals who are beyond the average--bigger, stronger, more talented, seeing farther, searching more deeply, endowed with greater sensitivity, working more conscientiously, imbued with a love of their fellows and determination to serve them. Such individuals have genius in one or another form and offer themselves and their products as a gift to the general welfare of their generation. Scientists, poets, musicians, inventors, artists, teachers, healers, philosophers, statesmen have appeared in each civilization adding their mite to the sum-total of community culture.
Innovators, moralists and counselors of perfection have played a noteworthy part by advocating and often by living noteworthy lives. Reports of their sayings and doings are part of the folklore and the history of each civilization. If they did not set the tone of their generation, they provided it with a model toward which their less talented, less creative fellows might aspire. If they were creative artists their works provided models which were admired, copied and emulated by their successors. If they were moralists or philosophers their sayings were recorded, respected and repeated by successive generations.
Each civilization has adopted lines of thinking and codes of action which embody the best and most advantageous in theory and in practice. These codes of thought, feeling and action are attributed to some outstanding individual and passed on from generation to generation as codes of conduct to which all right-thinking individuals may or should aspire.
Human beings know everything about themselves except whence they came, what they should do and whither they will go. To compensate for this lack of knowledge and wisdom each civilization has established and maintained religious organizations and institutions whose duty it was to search out the truth, record it and teach it to successive generations.
In some civilizations the religious institutions have dominated the secular. At other times and in other places the secular has maintained its ascendancy over the religious. In still other cases the religious and the secular forces have maintained an uneasy balance leading to acrimonious bickering and sometimes to civil war.
Central to their discussions is the nature of life. Is it continuous, as it appears in vegetation and the animal kingdom, or is it discontinuous like the rocks on the mountainside or the grains of sand on the seashore? Those who live for the moment prefer discontinuity. Those who observe their natural environment are forced to the conclusion that life today is part of a sequence or progression which relates the life of yesterday to that of tomorrow.
Recorded history, from fossil and geological remains, to the books on library shelves assures us that man has had a past. Projecting this experience, it seems quite reasonable that barring accident or a purposed intervention, man will have at least some future. To prepare for that future, using the knowledge and wisdom at our disposal, seems to be a must for any reasoning creature.
Even for the short planetary life-span of the average human, the logic of this position seems inescapable, whether it applies to the next hour, day, year, or century. In terms of our children and grandchildren it is even more impressive. Today we find it desirable to live as well as possible. If there is any future, the same principle should apply to its implementation and utilization.
If the "hereafter" begins tomorrow and if those whose well-being concerns us will probably be "alive" tomorrow, the science and art of the future (futurology) takes its place beside other fields of theory and practice as a must for all responsible members of the human race.
If the conditions presently existing in human society affordment, skills and technical experience necessary to make significant changes, why wait? Why not proceed forthwith to live a better life?
This dilemma has confronted individuals and sub-groups in various civilizations. It has been particularly in evidence during periods of decline and social disintegration. It has led people of both sexes and all ages to uproot themselves from the old social order and reestablish themselves in a social order "nearer to the heart's desire."
Such efforts have been described as "intentional communities" to distinguish them from a traditional, currently existing social order which emerged from the past encumbered with vestigial remains and obsolete institutions and practices having little or no relation to the needs and wants of a changing world.
Pilgrim Fathers in New England, William Penn in Pennsylvania, Lord Baltimore in Maryland aimed to organize local intentional communities. Similar efforts were made by the Mennonites, the Dukhobors, the Hutterites, the Mormons in North America. The Christians during the decline of Roman civilization led a movement to convert a large geographical area to a new and better way of life. Followers of Mohammed, several centuries later, made a similar effort to convert the Eurasian-African world to their ways of thinking and acting.
Young people by the thousands, in the United States and other western countries, are turning their backs on western civilization and are organizing enlarged families and communes that provide their members with a modified social order which aims at improvements here and now.
Necessarily such social experiments are looked upon with suspicion by the Establishment. They are "new", "different", "subversive", "godless", "wicked." Hence, they are criticized, denounced, raided and often broken up as threats to existing law and order.
Intentional communities may grow out of consumers' cooperation. They may begin as farm collectives. Generally, however, they consist of the followers of outstanding leaders of religious or ethical sects. Many intentional communes spring up, mushroom-fashion, and disappear with equal rapidity. Others endure for generations and centuries.
In a very real sense they are pilot plants designed to correct individual or social maladjustments and substitute new ways for old ones. As pilot plants they experiment with deviations from existing social norms, acting as a social laboratory in which new ideas and practices are tested, modified, accepted, rejected.
Change is one of the essential aspects of every society. There are changes in personnel. In each generation individuals grow old and retire. Others grow up and take over the tasks of organizing the communities in which they live. Profound social changes result from discoveries and inventions: the wheel, the arch, steam and gas engines, electricity, atomic power. Cyclic changes occur in the economy. Social changes follow alterations in the weather. Nations, empires, civilizations are produced by the changing life forms.
During long periods, social changes are so gradual that they are unnoticed save by the more sensitive and perceptive. At other times, social changes tumble over one another in an overwhelming revolutionary flood which sweeps away the old, yielding place to new, "lest one good custom should corrupt the world".
Changes in society beget changes in ideology. Reciprocally, changes in ideology lead to changes in social structure and function. The more rigid the social order, the more stubborn its resistance to change. By the same token, more fluid societies lend themselves more readily to changes in practice and in theory.
It is not possible to discuss ideology without some reference to the closely related problems of means and ends. As we consider our existing social establishment, in the light of unceasing social change, we must deal with goals or objectives, with practicable modifications of social form and function and with the way in which changes can be, might be, will be brought about.
One fact is obvious. Whether social change is major or minor, local or general, it shifts the social balance. Any shift in the social balance involves reactionaries, conservatives, liberals, radicals, some of whom will gain, while others will lose in the course of each social transformation. All will be concerned and involved.
Since political change involves some alteration in the balance of social forces, it behooves those who advocate and those who oppose social change to maximize acceptance and minimize opposition in order to take advantage of the gains and cut down the losses incident to all change.
For present purposes we wish to make seven notes about means and ends.
As a matter of practical experience, proponents of all seven approaches to social problems and social change employ a wide range of techniques from persuasion to coercion. To support their projects they advance logical arguments, elaborate half-truths, make emotional appeal; employ trickery, deceit, preferment, privilege, flattery, soft living, bribery, coercion, physical and social violence--individual and collective extermination.
Civilization as reported in history and in its current practice is based on five faulty ideological assumptions:
Ideologies have played a role in determining the structure and function of every civilization. As civilization grows up, matures, and declines, ideologies change with the changing times. In its early history each civilization seeks acceptance for its picture of reality and its techniques for reaching individual and social goals. As each civilization declines and disintegrates, a multitude of counselors clamors for attention to a particular formula that will prove acceptable and workable in the existing emergent circumstances.