There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
David Foster Wallace, as part of his 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College
Triple Threats for the Human Future: Will Civilization Arrive?
L. David Roper is professor emeritus of physics at Virginia Tech and the following was excerpted from the preface to his book, Triple Threats for the Human Future: Will Civilization Arrive?
Wikipedia defines “civilization” as follows:
By the most minimal, literal definition, a civilization is a complex society. Technically, anthropologists distinguish civilizations in which many of the people live in cities and get their food from agriculture, from band and tribal societies in which people live in small settlements or nomadic groups and subsist by foraging, hunting, or working small horticultural gardens. When used in this sense, civilization is an exclusive term, applied to some human groups and not others.
The second definition is widely used; for example, as in the title of the book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order by Samuel P. Huntington.
I would transfer the conventional definition for “civilization” to be part of the definitions for
“industrialization” and “urbanization.”
I prefer a loftier simpler definition of “civilization” not mentioned in Wikipedia:
A civilization is a society in which the basic needs (shelter, sustenance and meaningful contributing work) of all its members are achieved through cooperation among its members.
The smallest unit of a civilized society is a household (often called a family) working together for the good of all members of the family. The next smallest unit of civilization is a local community with its members cooperating for the good of all, then regional communities, then continental communities and, finally, a cooperating planetary community. For the World to be “civilized” by my definition cooperation for mutual benefit among humans would have to occur at all of these geographical scales. It appears that being civilized becomes more difficult the larger the geographic region involved. Words that also describe a civilized society are a “nurturing community.”
By my definition no truly “civilized” society has ever existed in the World. Proto-civilizations have existed to varying degrees of being civilized.
Many books have been written with the theme “Can Civilization Survive?” For example: Global Warming: Can Civilization Survive? by Paul Brown. Since by my definition no civilization has ever existed, I think a better question to ask is “Will civilization arrive?”
So, the question this book addresses is “Will civilization arrive?” as human societies try to cope with the extreme stresses that they will undergo as the end of the Petroleum Age, increasing Anthropological Global Warming and the next Major Ice Age occur.
An uncivilized world
From the DRRS MOOCs – Lakota Medicine Man John Fire Lame Deer offers one poignant contrast between the world he grew up in and the world of “the white man”:
Before our white brothers came to civilize us we had no jails. Therefore we had no criminals. You can’t have criminals without a jail. We had no locks or keys, and so we had no thieves. If a man was so poor that he had no horse, tipi or blanket, someone gave him these things. We were too uncivilized to set much value on personal belongings. We wanted to have things only in order to give them away. We had no money, and therefore a man’s worth couldn’t be measured by it. We had no written law, no attorneys or politicians, therefore we couldn’t cheat. We really were in a bad way before the white men came, and I don’t know how we managed to get along without these basic things which, we are told, are absolutely necessary to make a civilized society.
Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, p. 70
Will we even see it?
I like the setup and the shock of “Will civilization arrive?”, but would disagree that no civilized society has ever existed (that’s a bold claim). Contrast it to Lame Deer’s quote: indigenous cultures would argue they achieved civilization, and the colonizing white man brought uncivilization worldwide. I think the better question is: When we encounter “civilization” will we even see it?
