Civilization and Beyond - Scott Nearing

Скачать книгу

… is human society so organized in all of its constituent groups that each shall yield the best possible service to each one and thereby to mankind as a whole, (producing) the perfect organization of humanity." (page 3).

      Such thoughts may be noble and inspired; they are not related to history. We know more or less about a score of civilizations that have occupied portions of the earth during several thousand years. We know a great deal about the western civilization which we observe and in which we participate. Professor Morse's florid words apply to none of the civilizations known to history. Certainly they are poles away from an accurate characterization of our own varient of this social pattern.

      We are writing this introduction in an effort to make our word pictures of mankind and its doings correspond with the facts of social history. With the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, it is high time for us to exchange the clouds of fancy and the flowers of rhetoric for the solid ground of historical reality. The word "civilization" must generalize what has been and what is, as nearly as the past and present can be embodied in language.

      Civilization is a level or phase of culture which has been attained and lost repeatedly in the course of social history. The epochs of civilization have not been distributed evenly, either in time or on the earth's surface. A combination of circumstances, political, economic, ideological, sociological, resulted in the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Roman civilizations. One of these was centered in North Africa, the second in Asia, the third in eastern Europe. All three spilled over into adjacent continents.

      No two civilizations are exactly alike at any stage of their development. Each civilization is at least a partial experiment, a process or sequence of causal relationships, altered sequentially in the course of its life cycle.

      These thoughts about culture and civilization should be supplemented by noting the relationship between civilizations and empires. An empire is a center of wealth and power associated with its economic and political dependencies. A civilization is a cluster or a succession of empires and/or former empires, co-ordinated and directed by one of their number which has established its leadership in the course of survival struggle.

      The total body of historical evidence bearing on human experiments with civilization is extensive and impressive. It covers a large portion of the Earth's land surface, includes parts of Asia, Africa and Europe and extends sketchily to the Americas. In time it covers many thousands of years.

      Experiments with civilization have been conducted in highly selective surroundings possessing the volume and range of natural resources and the isolation and remoteness necessary to build and maintain a high level of culture over substantial periods of time. In these special areas it was possible to provide for subsistence, produce an economic surplus large enough to permit experimentation and ensure protection against human and other predators. Egypt and the Fertile Crescent were surrounded by deserts and high mountains. Crete was an island, extensive but isolated. Productive river valleys like the Yang-tse, the Ganges and the Mekong have afforded natural bases for experiments with civilization. Similar opportunities have been provided by strategic locations near bodies of water, mineral deposits and the intersections of trade-routes. Others, less permanent, were located in the high Andes, on the Mexican Plateau, in the Central American jungles.

      Histories of civilizations, some of them ancient or classical, have been written during the past two centuries. There have been general histories in many languages. There have been scholarly reports on particular civilizations. Prof. A.J. Toynbee's massive ten volume Study of History is a good example. Still more extensive is the thirty volume history of civilization under the general editorship of C.K. Ogden. These writings have brought together many facts bearing chiefly on the lives of spectacular individuals and episodes, with all too little data on the life of the silent human majority.

      At the end of this volume the reader will find a list, selected from the many books that I have consulted in preparation for writing this study. Most of these authorities are concerned with the facts of civilization, with far less emphasis on their political, economic and sociological aspects.

      In this study I have tried to unite theory with practice. On the one hand I have reviewed briefly and as accurately as possible some outstanding experiments with civilization, including our own western variant. (Part I. The Pageant of Experiments with Civilization.) In Part II I have undertaken a social analysis of civilization as a past and present life style. In Part III, Civilization Is Becoming Obsolete, I have tried to check our thinking about civilization with the sweep of present day historical trends. Part IV, Steps Beyond Civilization, is an attempt to list some of the alternatives and opportunities presently available to civilized man.

      Any reader who has the interest and persistence to read through the entire volume and to browse through some of its references will have had the equivalent of a university extension course dealing with one of the most critical issues confronting the present generation of humanity.

       Part I

      The Pageant of Experiment With Civilization

       Table of Contents

      EXPERIMENTS IN EGYPT AND EURASIA

      Thousands of years before the city of Rome was ringed with its six miles of stone wall, other peoples in Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa were building civilizations. New techniques of excavation, identification and preservation, subsidized by an increasingly affluent human society, and developed during the past two centuries of archeological research have provided the needed means and manpower. The result is an imposing number of long buried building sites with their accompanying artifacts. Still more important are the records written in long forgotten languages on stone, clay tablets, metal, wood and paper. These remnants and records, left by extinguished civilizations, do not tell us all we wish to know, but they do provide the materials which enable us to reconstruct, at least in part, the lives of our civilized predecessors.

      Extensive in time and massive in the volume of their architecture are the remains of Egyptian civilization. The earliest of these fragments date back for more than six thousand years.

      The seat of Egyptian civilization was the Nile Valley and its estuary built out into the Mediterranean Sea from the debris of disintegrating African mountains. Annual floods left their silt deposits to deepen the soil along the lower reaches of the river. River water, impounded for the purpose, provided the means of irrigating an all but rainless desert countryside. Skillful engineering drained the swamps, adding to the cultivable area of a narrow valley cut by the river through jagged barren hills. Deserts on both sides of the Nile protected the valley against aggressors and migrants. Within this sanctuary the Egyptians built a civilization that lasted, with a minor break, for some 3,000 years.

      Egyptian temples and tombs carry records chiseled and painted on hard stone, which throw light on the life and times of upper-class Egyptians, including emperors, provincial governors, courtiers, generals, merchants, provincial organizers. In a humid, temperate climate these stone-cut and painted records would have been eroded, overgrown and obliterated long ago. In the dry desert air of North Africa they have preserved their identity through the centuries.

      Since the Egyptians had a few draft animals, and little if any power-driven machinery, energy needed to build massive stone temples, tombs and other public structures must have been supplied by the forced labor of Egyptians, their serfs and slaves.

      Egypt's history dawns on a well-organized society: The Old Kingdom, based on the productivity of the narrow, lush Nile Valley. The products of the Valley were sufficient to maintain a large population of cultivators: some slave, some forced labor, about which we have little knowledge; a bureaucracy, headed by a supreme ruler whose declared divinity was one of the chief stabilizing forces of the society. Between its agricultural base and its ruling monarch, the Old Kingdom had a substantial middle class which procured the wood, stone, metals and other materials needed in construction; a corps of engineers, technicians and skilled workers, and a substantial mass of humanity which

Скачать книгу