Dr. V.K.Maheshwari, M.A. (Socio, Phil) B.Sc. M. Ed, Ph.D.
Former Principal, K.L.D.A.V.(P.G) College, Roorkee, India
Mrs Sudha Rani Maheshwari, M.Sc (Zoology), B.Ed.
Former Principal. A.K.P.I.College, Roorkee, India
Civilizations are the generations of the racial soul. As family-rearing, and then writing, bound the generations together, handing down the lore of the dying to the young, so print and commerce and a thousand ways of communication may bind the civilizations together, and preserve for future cultures all that is of value for them in our own. Let us, before we die, gather up our heritage, and offer it to our children.
Will Durant
CIVILIZATION is social order promoting cultural creation. Four elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.
Without analysing four thousand years of history, of the richest civilizations of the largest continent, it is impossible to understood these civilizations, or done them justice; for how can one mind, in one lifetime, comprehend or appraise the heritage of a race? The institutions, customs, arts and morals of a people represent the natural selection of its countless trial-and-error experiments, the accumulated and un-formidable wisdom of all its generations; and neither the intelligence of a philosopher nor the intellect of a sophomore can suffice to compass them understandingly, much less to judge them with justice.
Europe and America are the spoiled child and grandchild of Asia, and have never quite realized the wealth of their pre-classical inheritance. But if, now, we sum up those arts and ways which the West has derived from the East, or which, to our current and limited knowledge, appear first in the Orient, we shall find ourselves drawing up unconsciously an outline of civilization.
The first clement of civilization is labour tillage, industry, transport and trade
The first clement of civilization is labour tillage, industry, transport and trade. IN one important sense the “savage,” too, is civilized, for he carefully transmits to his children the heritage of the tribe that complex of economic, political, mental and moral habits and institutions which it has developed in its efforts to maintain and enjoy itself on the earth. It is impossible to be scientific here; for in calling other human beings “savage” or “barbarous” we may be expressing no objective fact, but only our fierce fondness for ourselves, and our timid shyness in the presence of alien ways. Doubtless we underestimate these simple peoples, who have so much to teach us in hospitality and morals; if we list the bases and constituents of civilization we shall find that the naked nations invented or arrived at all but one of them, and left nothing for us to add except embellishments and writing. Perhaps they, too, were once civilized, and desisted from it as a nuisance. We must make sparing use of such terms as “savage” and “barbarous” in referring to our “contemporaneous ancestry.” Preferably we shall call “primitive” all tribes that make little or no provision for unproductive days, and little or no use of writing. In contrast, the civilized may be defined as literate providers.
In Egypt and Asia we meet with the oldest known cultivation of the soil,(It is possible that agriculture and the domestication of animals are as ancient in Neolithic Europe as in Neolithic Asia; but it seems more likely that the New Stone Age cultures of Europe were younger than those of Africa and Asia.) the oldest irrigation systems, and the first production of those encouraging beverages without which, apparently, modern civilization could hardly exist beer and wine and tea. Handicrafts and engineering were as highly developed in Egypt before Mosesi as in Europe before Voltaire; building with bricks has a history at least as old as Sargon I; the potter’s wheel and the wagon wheel appear first in Elam, linen and glass in Egypt, silk and gunpowder in China. The horse rides out of Central Asia into Mesopotamia, Egypt and Europe; Phoenician vessels circum- navigate Africa before the age of Pericles; the compass comes from China and produces a commercial revolution in Europe. Sumeria shows us the first business contracts, the first credit system, the first use of gold and silver as standards of value; and China first accomplishes the miracle of having paper accepted in place of silver or gold.
The second element of civilization is government
The second element of civilization is government the organization and protection of life and society through the clan and the family, law and the state. Man is not willingly a political animal. The human male associates with his fellows less by desire than by habit, imitation, and the compulsion of circumstance; he does not love society so much as he fears solitude. He combines with other men because isolation endangers him, and because there are many things that can be done better together than alone; in his heart he is a solitary individual, pitted heroically against the world. If the average man had had his way there would probably never have been any state. Even today he resents it, classes death with taxes, and yearns for that government which governs least. If he asksfor many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbour needs them; privately he is an un-philosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.
The village community appears in India, and the city-state in Sumeria and Assyria. Egypt takes a census, levies an income tax, and maintains internal peace through many centuries with a model minimum of force. Ur-Engur and Hammurabi formulate great codes of law, and Darius organizes, with imperial army and post, one of the best administered empires in the annals of government.
The third element of civilization is morality customs and manners
The third element of civilization is morality customs and manners, conscience and charity; a law built into the spirit, and generating at last that sense of right and wrong, that order and discipline of desire, without which a society disintegrates into individuals, and falls forfeit to some coherent state. Since no society can exist without order, and no order without regulation, we may take it as a rule of history that the power of custom varies inversely as the multiplicity of laws, much as the power of instinct varies inversely as the multiplicity of thoughts. Some rules are necessary for the game of life; they may differ in different groups, but within the group they must be essentially the same. These rules may be conventions, customs, morals, or laws. Conventions are forms of behaviour found expedient by a people; customs are conventions accepted by successive generations, after natural selection through trial and error and elimination; morals are such customs as the group considers vital to its welfare and development. In primitive societies, where there is no written law, these vital customs or morals regulate every sphere of human existence, and give stability and continuity to the social order. Through the slow magic of time such customs, by long repetition, become a second nature in the individual; if he violates them he feels a certain fear, discomfort or shame; this is the origin of that conscience, or moral sense, which Darwin chose as the most impressive distinction between animals and men. In its higher development conscience is social consciousness the feeling of the individual that he belongs to a group, and owes it some measure of loyalty and consideration. Morality is the cooperation of the part with the whole, and of each group with some larger whole. Civilization, of course, would be impossible without it.
Courtesy came out of the ancient courts of Egypt, Meso- potamia and Persia; even today the Far East might teach manners and dignity to the brusque and impatient West. Monogamy appeared in Egypt, and began a long struggle to prove itself and survive in competition with the inequitable but eugenic polygamy of Asia. Out of Egypt came the first cry for social justice; out of Judea the first pica for human brotherhood, the first formulation of the moral consciousness of mankind.
The fourth element of civilization is religion
The fourth element of civilization is religion the use of man’s super-natural beliefs for the consolation of suffering, the elevation of character, and the strengthening of social instincts and order. If we define religion as the worship of supernatural forces, we must observe at the outset that some peoples have apparently no religion at all. Certain Pygmy tribes of Africa had no observable cult or rites; they had no totem, no fetishes, and no gods; they buried their dead without cere- mony, and seem to have paid no further attention to them; they lacked even superstitions, From Sumeria, Babylonia and Judea the most cherished myths and traditions of Europe were derived; in the soil of the Orient grew the stories of the Creation and the Flood, the Fall and Redemption of man; and out of many mother goddesses came at last “the fairest flower of all poesy,” as Heine called Mary, the Mother of God. Out of Palestine came monotheism, and the fairest songs of love and praise in literature, and the loneliest, lowliest, and most impressive figure in history.
The fifth element in civilization is science
The fifth element in civilization is science clear seeing, exact recording, impartial testing, and the slow accumulation of a knowledge objective enough to generate prediction and control. In the opinion of Herbert Spencer, that supreme expert in the collection of evidence post judicium, science, like letters, began with the priests, originated in astronomic observations, governing religious festivals, and was preserved in the temples and transmitted across the generations as part of the clerical heritage.” We cannot say, for here again beginnings elude us, and we may only surmise. Perhaps science, like civilization in general, began with agriculture; geometry, as its name indicates, was the measurement of the soil; and the calculation of crops and seasons, necessitating the observation of the stars and the construction of a calendar, may have generated astronomy. Navigation advanced astronomy, trade developed mathematics, and the industrial arts laid the bases of physics and chemistry. Egypt develops arithmetic and geometry, and establishes the calendar; Egyptian priests and physicians practise medicine, explore diseases enigmatically, perform a hundred varieties of surgical operation, and anticipate something of the Hippocratic oath. Babylonia studies the stars, charts the zodiac, and gives us our division of the month into four weeks, of the clock into twelve hours, of the hour into sixty minutes, of the minute into sixty seconds. India transmits through the Arabs her simple numerals and magical decimals, and teaches Europe the subtleties of hypnotism and the technique of vaccination.
The sixth element of civilization is philosophy
The sixth element of civilization is philosophy the attempt of man to capture something of that total perspective which in his modest intervals he knows that only Infinity can possess; the brave and hopeless inquiry into the first causes of things, and their final significance; the consideration of truth and beauty, of virtue and justice, of ideal men and states. All this appears in the Orient a little sooner than in Europe: the Egyptians and the Babylonians ponder human nature and destiny, and the Jews write immortal comments on life and death, while Europe tarries in barbarism; the Hindus play with logic and epistemology at least as early as Parmenides and Zeno of Elea; the Upanishads delve into metaphysics, and Buddha propounds a very modern psychology some centuries before Socrates is born. And if India drowns philosophy in religion, and fails to emancipate reason from hope, China resolutely secularizes her thought, and produces, again before Socrates, a thinker whose sober wisdom needs hardly any change to be a guide to our contemporary life, and an inspiration to those who would honourably govern states.
The seventh clement of civilization is letters the transmission of language
The seventh clement of civilization is letters the transmission of language, the education of youth, the development of writing, the creation of poetry and drama, the stimulus of romance, and the written remembrance of things past. IN the beginning was the word, for with it man became man. Without those strange noises called common nouns, thought was limited to individual objects or experiences sensorial for the most part visually remembered or conceived; presumably it could not think of classes as distinct from individual things, nor of qualities as distinct from objects, nor of objects as distinct from their qualities. Without words as class names one might think of this man, or that man, or that man; one could not think of Man, for the eye sees not Man but only men, not classes but particular things. The beginning of humanity came when some freak or crank, half animal and half man, squatted in a cave or in a tree, cracking his brain to invent the first common noun, the first sound-sign that would signify a group of like objects: house that would mean all houses, man that would mean all men, light that would mean every light that ever shone on land or sea. From that moment the mental development of the race opened upon a new and endless road. For words are to thought what tools are to work; the product depends largely on the growth of the tools.
Since all origins are guesses, and de fontibus non disputandum, the imagination has free play in picturing the beginnings of speech. Perhaps the first form of language which may be defined as communication through signs was the love-call of one animal to another. In this sense the jungle, the woods and the prairie are alive with speech. Cries of warning or of terror, the call of the mother to the brood, the cluck and cackle of euphoric or reproductive ecstasy, the parliament of chatter from tree to tree, indicate the busy preparations made by the animal kingdom for the august speech of man. The oldest schools known to us are those of Egypt and Mesopotamia; even the oldest schools of government are Egyptian. Out of Asia, apparently, came writing; out of Egypt the alphabet, paper and ink; out of China, print. The Babylonians seem to have compiled the oldest grammars and dictionaries, and to have collected the first libraries; and it may well be that the universities of India preceded Plato’s Academy. The Assyrians polished chronicles into history, the Egyptians puffed up history into the epic, and the Far East gave to the modern world those delicate forms of poetry that rest all their excellence on subtle insights phrased in a moment’s imagery. Nabonidus and Ashurbanipal, whose relics are exhumed by archaeologists, were archaeologists; and some of the fables that amuse our children go back to ancient India.
The eighth element of civilization is art
The eighth element of civilization is art the embellishment of life with pleasing colour, rhythm and form. After fifty thousand years of art men still dispute as to its sources in instinct and in history. What is beauty? why do we admire it? why do we endeavour to create it? Since this is no place for psychological discourse we shall answer, briefly and precariously, that beauty is any quality by which an object or a form pleases a beholder. Primarily and originally the object does not please the beholder because it is beautiful, but rather he calls it beautiful because it pleases him. Any object that satisfies desire will seem beautiful: food is beautiful Thai’s is not beautiful to a starving man. The pleasing object may as like as not be the beholder himself; in our secret hearts no other form is quite so fair as ours, and art begins with the adornment of one’s own exquisite body. Or the pleasing object may be the desired mate; and then the aesthetic beauty-feeling sense takes on the intensity and creativeness of sex, and spreads the aura of beauty to every- thing that concerns the beloved one to all forms that resemble her, all colours that adorn her, please her or speak of her, all ornaments and garments that become her, all shapes and motions that recall her symmetry and grace. Or the pleasing form may be a desired male; and out of the attraction that here draws frailty to worship strength comes that sense of sublimate satisfaction in the presence of power which creates the loftiest art of all. Finally nature herself with our cooperation may become both sublime and beautiful; not only because it simulates and suggests all the tenderness of women and all the strength of men, but because we project into it our own feelings and fortunes, our love of others and of ourselves relishing in it the scenes of our youth, enjoying its quiet solitude as an escape from the storm of life, living with it through its almost human seasons of green youth, hot maturity, “mellow fruitfulness” and cold decay, and recognizing it vaguely as the mother that lent us life and will receive us in our death.
Art is the creation of beauty; it is the expression of thought or feeling in a form that seems beautiful or sublime, and therefore arouses in us some reverberation of that primordial delight which woman gives to man, or man to woman. The thought may be any capture of life’s significance, the feel- ing may be any arousal or release of life’s tensions. The form may satisfy us through rhythm, which falls in pleasantly with the alternations of our breath, the pulsation of our blood, and the majestic oscillations of winter and summer, ebb and flow, night and day; or the form may please us through symmetry, which is a static rhythm, standing for strength and recalling to us the ordered proportions of plants and animals, of women and men; or it may please us through colour, which brightens the spirit or intensifies life; or finally the form may please us through veracity because its lucid and transparent imitation of nature or reality catches some mortal loveliness of plant or animal, or some transient meaning of circumstance, and holds it still for our lingering enjoyment or leisurely understanding. From these many sources come those noble superfluities of life song and dance, music and drama, pottery and painting, sculpture and architecture, literature and philosophy. For what is philosophy but an art one more attempt to give “significant form” to the chaos of experience?
In its simplest aspect the adornment of the body we find elegant clothing, exquisite jewellery and scandalous cosmetics in the early ages of Egyptian, Sumerian and Indian civilization. Fine furniture, graceful pottery, and excellent carving in ivory and wood fill the Egyptian tombs. Surely the Greeks must have learned something of their skill in sculpture and architecture, in painting and bas-relief, not only from Asia and Crete, but from the masterpieces that in their day still gleamed in the mirror of the Nile. From Egypt and Mesopotamia Greece took the models for her Doric and Ionic columns; from those same lands came to us not merely the column but the arch, the vault, the clerestory and the dome; and the ziggurats of the ancient Near East have had some share in moulding the architecture of America today. Chinese painting and Japanese prints changed the tone and current of nineteenth century European an; and Chinese porcelain raised a new perfection for Europe to emulate. The sombre splendour of the Gregorian chant goes back age by age to the plaintive songs of exiled Jews gathering timidly in scattered synagogues.
Nevertheless much was left for the classic world to add to this rich inheritance. Crete would build a civilization almost as ancient as Egypt’s, and would serve as a bridge to bind the cultures of Asia, Africa and Greece. Greece would transform art by seeking not size but perfection; it would marry a feminine delicacy of form and finish to the masculine architecture and statuary of Egypt, and would provide the scene for the greatest age in the history of art. It would apply to all the realms of literature the creative exuberance of the free mind; it would contribute meandering epics, profound tragedies, hilarious comedies and fascinating histories to the store of European letters. It would organize universities, and establish for a brilliant interlude the secular independence of thought;
it would develop beyond any precedent the mathematics and astronomy, the physics and medicine, bequeathed it by Egypt and the East; it would originate the sciences of life, and the naturalistic view of man; it would bring philosophy to consciousness and order, and would consider with unaided rationality all the problems of our life; it would emancipate the educated classes from ecclesiasticism and superstition, and would attempt a morality independent of supernatural aid. It would conceive man as a citizen rather than as a subject; it would give him political liberty, civil rights, and an unparalleled measure of mental and moral freedom; it would create democracy and invent the individual.