Civilisation is a word that gives us a sense of modernising, climbing to loftier heights and moving forward. But there is no concrete evidence to suggest that we are, or ever have. The invention of electricity, penicillin and certain artistic works are not evidence enough, and are nullified by things like nuclear energy, waste, the KKK, people like Hitler and George W. Bush (oh, and Paris Hilton and every other pseudo celebrity who adds nothing to existence).
To try and make the illusion seem a little more believable, humans invented law for the sake of achieving order. While some deviances are part of human nature, humans try to defy them to appear audacious or superior. The West, for example, likes to claim superiority due to its democratic models of governance, but they are immediately exposed when they justify war to achieve peace: some of us would call that an oxymoron and in no way proof of our development as Homo sapiens.
We can argue that an abundance of evidence exists to prove our civilisation by referring to the machinery that exists today, the buildings that have been erected, and even the people that have come and gone and the lasting impacts they have had upon our lives (I think of Sartre, Dali, Freud, Austen and the Pankhurst sisters), but I say we are taking to individuality, and forgetting our triumphs as citizens not only of a country but of the world. We are becoming driven by the now, and that sort of mindset is producing a social environment governed by ignorance. We are easily manipulated and used by governments, easily swayed and dictated to by media. Most of our opinions were read out in the news the morning before we headed to work, where our boss, no doubt dumber and more ignorant than ourselves, looks to take out his or her insecurities on us. And we put up with this to keep our jobs, which we depend on to buy shit we are told we need.
Just because a phone can hold 16 gigabytes of memory and we no longer have to toil the soil for food, doesn’t mean we have achieved a better life. Depression, obesity, suicide, poverty and other such burdensome things have not been obliterated. They are just as prevalent as they might have been if most of the world was made up of serfs.
Maybe we need to go back to the basics, and appreciate those basics, to become truly civilised.
LI
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2 Comments
I like the word outlaw, (not used much in Britain), since it conjures up notions of standing on the other side of the law. ie the ruling elite drew a line in the ground called THE LAW in order to protect their property from nasty old Hobbesian theft and appropriation, formed law-keepers such as police forces to patrol it and the rest is criminological history.
Civilisation has always been this veneer of etiquette, mores, manners and protocols, to make people know their place in the social hierarchy. The advances that you mnetion I like to attribute to culture, that restless drive, rather than the dandified and necrotic Civilisation.
Marxism is a dreary old ideology, long since discredited, both intellectually (scienctific materialism & Schumpeter on the economics) and in reality (those regimes now crumbled, erected in its name). But I did favour its tenet of all relationships owing their reciprocal status to the power underlying it. The problem is most cultural critics content themselves with criticising the hegemonic superstructure, the dumbing down, the celebrity culture, white goods envy etc which are only symptoms of a philosophical/spiritual (take your pick) emptiness.
What is the nature of pleasure in the 21st Century and how we as societies and cultures go about pursuing it?
It always makes me laugh when Britain and other 1st World countires, those who were the first to industrialise and pollute the planet 2/3 Centuries ago, no lecture China & Inida on not being able to do it their chosen way. We still had pollution fogs here in the UK until the clean air act in the 1960’s, so put that in our pipes and smoke it.
apologies for seeming dyslexia – am typing this in the dark (don’t ask)