What Is Civilization?
And What Isn’t?
While this article is broadly about international relationships, I talk briefly about some sensitive topics, specifically anti-Arab racism as it’s inextricably linked with discussions of “western civilization.” Be kind to yourself and feel free to skip if this will bother you.
Matthias : These are the marks, Mr. Neville. The punishment which you and those like you brought upon us. In the beginning, we tried to help one another, those that were left. We tried to clean things up, set things straight. We buried things and burned. Then it came to me and we were chosen. Chosen for just this work: To bury what was dead. To burn what was evil. To destroy what was dangerous.
Neville : You’re barbarians.
Matthias : Barbarians? You call us barbarians? Well… it is an honorable name. We mean to cancel the world you civilized people made. We will simply erase history from the time that machinery and weapons threaten more than they offered. And when you die, the last living reminder of hell will be gone. Gone!
The Omega Man poses Charlton Heston’s character, Neville as the last bastion of a prelapsarian civilization who is seeking to restore said civilization and, in the process, civilize Matthias and his group of Christian-coded and deformed mutants called The Family.
While the movie is nothing to write home about, it is incredibly quotable and the narrative is surprisingly subversive for a movie featuring Heston. Counter to the common western trope of civilization being the introduction of christianity to the barbarians, this movie places the barbarians as the fascistic book-burning christians.
As you can see, this discussion of what is and isn’t civilization isn’t a new one. It has been a common theme in media since well before Heston played Neville and has been addressed many times since.
So what was happening here?
When we talk about civilization, it is a common struggle to understand the edges of the term. What is civilization, really? Rosa Luxemburg wrote in 1915,
Today, we face the choice exactly as [Karl Kautsky] (misattributed to Friedrich Engels) foresaw it a generation ago: either the triumph of imperialism and the collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration — a great cemetery. Or the victory of socialism, that means the conscious active struggle of the international proletariat against imperialism and its method of war.
-Luxemburg “The Junius Pamphlet”
While Luxemburg wasn’t defining the term, we can glean something of the sort. Luxemburg saw the continued march of imperialism as presaging a civilizational collapse as had occurred in ancient Rome. She believed the path to progress was socialism and through it an end to imperialism and war.
Meanwhile, the fascists and the liberals of Weimar Germany, the backdrop for this quote, held very different views of what made a civilization. All of them fought and died for their conception of civilization.
The classical modernist conception of history is a line graph drawn from base savagery (the essential barbarian) to the stage of human social and cultural development and organization that is considered most advanced. (the essential civilization)
The classical liberal would claim that this peak of civilization is the liberal democracy with a competitive capitalist free market. The communist would claim this apex would be manifested as communism via socialism. The anti-modern fascist, in a tremendous subversion, believes that the peak of civilization was in the past! They flip the line graph!
Can you see the problem?
Luxemburg defined Socialism as being in opposition to “depopulation, desolation, degeneration” and even cites the collapse of Rome! Engels made similar motions towards this view of society.
isolated cases of conquest, in which the more barbarian conquerors exterminated or drove out the population of a country and laid waste or allowed to go to ruin productive forces which they did not know how to use.
-Engels, “Anti-Durhing”
This is not to criticize Luxemburg or Engels overly much, but rather to attack the common problem of reified civilization and the reliance on concepts like degeneration. As useful as these grand narratives are for propaganda, they are necessarily reductive and gloss over the messiness of reality.
To further elucidate the concept, I find it helps to look at some related terms and the history around them.
The Citizen and Civilization
While the modern citizen was not formalized in the west until fairly recently, the concept of citizenship is not new. The ancient Greeks called the free people (but not the slaves) who lived under the protection of their city-states “polítis.” The Greek polítis is roughly defined as citizen in contemporary English.
The Romans called their proto-citizens “civis.” The French word “Civilisé,” derived from the Latin “civis,” later inspired the modern concept of “civilization” circa 1760.
While the linguistic reliance of civilization on the citizen is obvious, the construction is also material. Civilization is created by and co-perpetuates itself with the citizen.
Civilization is the ideology of the citizen.
What is Civilization?
If Civilization is the stage of human social and cultural development and organization that is considered most advanced, we can start to get at the root of civilization’s problem of definition. Who is doing the considering?
The stripped down definition given above highlights, through absence, the problem of subjectivity. Civilization is highly contextual. It is the US claiming a moral superiority while bombing civilians in “uncivilized” countries. It is also the IS violence done to establish a new caliphate. It is also China’s treatment of Uyghers. It is also Russia invading Ukraine. AND it is Ukraine defending itself. AND it’s Ukraine’s treatment of the Donbas before the invasion.
All of these things are civilization to someone. Civilization leverages difference to promote and protect itself.
While there is little to defend in the famously racist episode of Star Trek, Code of Honor, this line always stuck out to me. Throughout the episode, the famously civil members of Starfleet make gesture again and again to taking a needed vaccine from the Ligonians forcefully and decrying the limitations of their prime directive, an ideology their civilization is built around. The only self-aware moment of the episode comes at the end.
As you can see, Captain, you may excel in technology, but not in civilized behavior.
-Hagon, Star Trek: TNG “Code of Honor”
Who is civilized here? and who isn’t?
The Barbarian and Civilization
The Ancient Greek Polítis were often defined in opposition to an other .To an ancient Greek, “bar bar bar” was an onomatopoeia of babbling. The derived term bárbaros was used to describe people who talked differently than the speaker.
Bárbaros was considered an antonym of polítis. While usually aimed at non-greeks, at times the word was used to describe other greeks or even local political rivals when it suited the speaker. The term’s English descendent, barbarian, is still used in much the same way to describe an other.
The terms citizen and barbarian still maintain their antonymic relationship to this day. Both of these concepts deeply relate to the idea of civilization.
When the fascists of Identity Evropa deployed their campaign drawing a through line of “Western Culture,” many found it confounding. What did the Ancient Greeks have in common with the Crusaders? What did the Empire of Rome share with the United States? How the hell did Vikings fit into any of this mess?
Since fascist ideology is focused on the other, they lionize groups that they *perceive* as oppositional to an “other.” In western fascism typically the civil citizen that is defined by the barbarian others beyond their walls.
A perfect example of this comes from an Anderson Cooper interview with Bill Maher in 2011,
They bring that desert stuff to our world … We don’t threaten each other, we sue each other. That’s the sign of civilized people … People who want to gloss over the difference between western culture and Islamic culture and forget about the fact that the Islamic culture is 600 years younger and that they are going through the equivalent of what the west went through with our middle ages, our dark ages when religion had way too much power.
- Bill Maher
Without using the explicit term barbarian, you can see how broadly applied this civilizational thinking is in our world. Of course, this quote didn’t come from nowhere.
In the wake of 9/11, while hate crimes increased against muslims in the west and war was brought to Iraq and Afghanistan, a rhetoric of islamophobia ramped up in social and news media. Sometimes, mostly but not exclusively in more reactionary spaces, muslims were being called barbarians/barbaric, but mostly the term terrorist was substituted. The difference was being leveraged to propagandize the war on terror.
Notably, while some of the organizations had used explicitly terrorist tactics, the word was quickly stripped of it’s original meaning and filled with a new definition that hangs on still today. In most cases Terrorist came to mean a Middle Eastern Other, a classical barbarian. It’s no wonder 300 was such a popular movie five years after 9/11.
Of course this was a massive propaganda victory for Israel, which was and is often looked at as a bastion of western values and civilization among the eastern hordes. This barbaric othering is why it was considered acceptable among many Americans to dehumanize Arabs. Maher was far from alone in this cause.
The barbaric othering was constantly televised. It came from many politicians, news anchors, pundits, and even comedians. From South Park, Bill Maher, and Jeff Dunham.
While Americans of middle-eastern descent were still legally citizens in the US, their allegiances and American-ness were being questioned by large sectors of the American citizenry. The lines defining who is citizen and who is barbarian are not fixed, but there are certain groups that are central to the civilization’s ideology and can’t be labeled barbarian. In America, that is the White Straight Christian Man.
Whether it is the “lone wolf” attacks of incels and white supremacists, or attempted coups like January 6th, or the armed occupation of Malheur, most mediato this day struggles to apply the term terrorist to White Straight Christian Men. The more adjectives one shares with this American Kyriarchal Ideal, the harder it is to become barbaric to this civilization. These descriptors are central to the American Ideology. Considering this, it’s no wonder that the many domestic terrorist groups in the US rarely face the charge of barbary or terrorism.
Final Thoughts
In a grand stroke of irony or misdirection, most of these criticisms of civilizational thinking are frequently misapplied to an imagined tribalism. Tribalism, of course, is another barbaric othering.
Civilization, the Citizen, and the Barbarian are concepts that have fundamentally changed little in centuries. Where many see these terms as a way of conceptualizing progress, this ignores the dark side of this kind of thinking. In common use, the inextricably linked ideas of civilization, citizenship, and barbarism exist to express national, cultural, and other ideological chauvinism.
The two main strands of contemporary civilizational thinking, those of multipolar imperialism and monopolar imperialism, both rely on an implied subjugation of an uncivilized or barbarian other by conversion or exploitation. I believe these are both untenable ideas going forward.
If our lives are to become free, we will have to leave the multiple millennia old ghosts of citizenship and civilization. Not towards barbarism, or towards tradition, but to something liberatory and social.
