Inventing Western Civilization

Thomas C. Patterson

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781583674086
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

"In this wonderful book, Thomas Patterson effectively dethrones the concept of 'civilization' as an abstract good, transcending human society."
--Martin Bernal

Drawing on his extensive knowledge of early societies, Thomas C. Patterson shows how class, sexism, and racism have been integral to the appearance of "civilized" societies in Western Europe. He lays out clearly and simply how civilization, with its designs of "civilizing" and "being civilized," has been closely tied to the rise of capitalism in Western Europe and the development of social classes.

1
INVENTING CIVILIZATION

The word civilization evokes powerful images and understandings. We in the United States have been taught, from elementary school onward, that a few ancient peoples—like the Egyptians or Greeks—were “civilized” and that civilization achieved its highest level of development here and in other Western countries. Civilization, we are told, is beneficial, desirable—and definitely preferable to being uncivilized. The idea of civilization thus always implicitly involves a comparison: the existence of civilized people implies that there are uncivilized folk who are inferior because they are not civilized. Uncivilized peoples, for their part, have either been told that they can never become civilized or that they should become civilized as soon as possible; many of those who have tried or been forced to do so—such as the inhabitants of Bikini Atoll who were displaced from their homes so the United States could explode atom bombs in their lagoon after World War II—have suffered greatly as a result of the advance of civilization.

Civilization is an idea that we learned in school. Further, it is an elitist idea, one that is defined by creating hierarchies—of societies, of classes, of cultures, or of races. For the elites that coined the idea, civilizations are always class-stratified, state-based societies, and civilized peoples always belong to the those classes whose privileged existences are guaranteed by the institutions and practices of the state. Uncivilized peoples, in this view, do not belong to those classes, or else they live on the margins of civilization, where the ability of the state to control their lives is weak or episodic.

The word civilization is probably used more frequently in the media today than at any time since the years immediately following World War II. Media experts simultaneously extol the virtues of civilization and warn us of threats to its existence. They remind us again and again that it is good to be civilized. After all, civilization is marked by technological progress, greater productivity, and higher standards of living. Moreover, civilized people are polished and refined, wealthier and happier than their predecessors. But, the media experts warn, crime, violence, declining test scores in public schools, and the disintegration of “Values” either threaten civilization, or else they are already signs of its decline.

For Newt Gingrich, the current speaker of the House of Representatives, the latter are evidence of a monumental crisis in American civilization. In fact, civilization is one of Gingrich’s favorite topics. He uses the word in almost every speech or pronouncement. He does not mean civilization in any vague sense; he does not even mean Western civilization. He means American civilization. The United States is a civilization whose founding principles—personal strength, free enterprise, a spirit of invention and discovery, and the uniqueness of the American experience—have set it on a different trajectory from that of, for instance, Europe.¹

Gingrich believes that the crisis in American civilization is in part the result of the failure of the institutions and programs that underpinned the Great Society programs of the mid-1960s. As he puts it, these “ruined the poor” and “created a culture of poverty and a culture of violence which is destructive of this civilization.”² For Gingrich, these cultures of violence and poverty threaten the future of American civilization because they embody habits and values that are the opposite of those needed if the new information-based civilization of the twenty-first century is to unfold. He has put this very crudely: “It is impossible to maintain civilization with twelve-year-olds having babies, fifteen-year-olds killing each other, seventeen-year-olds dying of AIDS, and with eighteen-year-olds ending up with diplomas they can barely read.”³

Newt Gingrich gives his views on welfare reform to a single mother in Powder Springs, Georgia, 1995. [Bill Clark/Impact Visulais]

Gingrich also believes that American civilization is threatened by the cultural diversity found in the United States in the late twentieth century. He believes that this diversity was in part as a result of massive in-migration since the 1960s, as well as the civil rights movement, which demanded equal treatment and rights, and affirmative action programs, which provided a few economic opportunities to women and minorities. Gingrich believes that the state must control this diversity in order to preserve what is quintessentially American:

For America to survive as a civilization, English has to be our common language.… If we allow the multicultural model of a multilingual America to become dominant, this society will disintegrate.⁴

For Gingrich and those who think as he does, the Spanish-speaking enclaves in metropolitan Miami and Los Angeles, French-speaking neighborhoods in small New England towns like Waterville, Maine, or Haitian Creole-speaking neighborhoods in Brooklyn, all threaten American civilization by their very existence.

Let us stop for a moment to consider precisely what Gingrich means when he uses the word civilization. For one thing, in a civilized society, the state should enact legislation to achieve certain goals. One goal should be to ensure technological progress at a steadily accelerating pace, since the key to the future of American civilization is the development of a high-tech information economy. Thus, the government, in its role as consumer of high-tech goods, should stimulate technological innovation, which will then trickle down to broader markets.

The advanced, high-tech civilization that Gingrich envisages is also a society rooted in inequalities of various kinds. For instance, he wants the state to pass laws that redistribute income upward. And since civilization involves culture and values, the state should also pass laws that promote certain kinds of values and behavior. For example, it should require that only English be spoken in public places. Practices that aid women or members of minority groups should either be placed under the control of men, restricted, or criminalized. Civilized people, according to Gingrich, are those who cultivate the beliefs, values, and goals that encourage “refined” behavior. Those who will not or cannot subscribe to such standards are by definition the barbarians, or the underclasses, whose existence is a threat to civilization.

Gingrich’s fears are echoed by Roger Kimball’s commentary a few years ago on the dangers of multiculturalism—a perspective which recognizes that different communities have different cultural practices and values. Kimball wrote:

The choice facing us today is not between a “repressive” Western culture and a multicultural paradise, but between culture and barbarism. Civilization is not a gift, it is an achievement—a fragile achievement that needs constantly to be shored up and defended from besiegers inside and out⁵

Gingrich’s claims about the loss of standards are also buttressed by the arguments of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the authors of The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), even though they build on a different logic. Herrnstein and Murray assert that the growing income differential between high school and college graduates indicates that cognitive ability and, by extension, the ability to recognize these “objective standards” are more commonly found among highly educated individuals with high socioeconomic status, most of whom are white. In their view, the IQ gap between whites and Asians, on the one hand, and blacks, on the other, is largely immutable, even though it closes in the higher socioeconomic status groups.⁶ The reason for this, they suggest, is that the old social Darwinist and eugenics arguments were basically correct: that about 60 percent of human intelligence is inherited—even though the genes for cognitive ability still have not been found after a well-funded, century-long search. They further argue that the picture has been complicated by affirmative action programs, and suggest that planners take these hereditary racial differences in cognitive ability into account and devise policies which will allow everyone to be a “morally autonomous human being.”⁷

Gingrich’s views about civilization also resonate with those of Samuel Huntington, the Harvard political scientist whose policy research over the years has supported large budgets for the Pentagon. In the mid-1970s, Huntington gained a certain notoriety when he suggested that too much democracy was dangerous, and that states should be led by properly educated elites.⁸ In his view, there are seven or eight competing civilizations in the world today: Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American, and possibly African. The real danger results from the fact that they are locked in a potentially life-and-death struggle, a clash of civilizations. While the major struggles from the 1890s through the end of the cold war were conflicts within Western civilization, the clash looming on the horizon is a struggle between Western civilization and the non-Western world, parts of which are also civilized.

Civilizations, for Huntington, are cultural entities that will become increasingly important in current and future conflicts. A civilization is

the highest cultural grouping of a people and the broadest level of cultural identity people have short of that which distinguishes humans from other species. It is defined both by objective elements, such as language, history, religion, customs, institutions, and by the subjective self-identification of people. People have levels of identity: a resident of Rome may define himself as a Roman, an Italian, a Catholic, a Christian, a European, a Westerner. The civilization to which he belongs is the broadest level of identification with which he intensely identifies.⁹

Huntington believes that Western civilization is “the universal civilization,” while the others are still regional. Since he defines civilization on the basis of cultural differences, his list reflects real differences of language, culture, and tradition, and, most importantly, religion, which in his view is really the most important feature distinguishing one civilization from another. As a result,

the people of different civilizations have different views about the relations between God and man, the individual and the group, the citizen and the state, parents and children, husband and wife, as well as differing views of the relative importance of rights and responsibilities, liberty and authority, equality and hierarchy. These differences are the product of centuries. They will not soon disappear.¹⁰

While the trappings of Western civilization have been adopted throughout the world at a superficial level, its more basic concepts, which are fundamentally different from those of other civilizations, have not.

Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state, often have little resonance in Islamic, Confucian, Japanese, Hindu, Buddhist or Orthodox cultures.¹¹

The interactions between diverse peoples have intensified as the world has become smaller; this has increased everyone’s awareness of both the differences between civilizations and the commonalities within them. Huntington claims this increased familiarity has bred contempt and rekindled centuries-old animosities. He also claims that increased civilizational consciousness in the former colonies has led to a decline in Western influence, as the Western-educated elites of these countries seek their own ancient roots and as the masses increasingly reject Western cultural styles and commodities.

Since the cultural forms of the civilizations underpinning the former colonies are so persistent, they are much less easily changed than the economic characteristics these countries acquired in recent times. Consequently, civilizational consciousness is particularly important during this period of economic transformation, because it provides the cultural foundations for the emergence of new economic regions. In his view, the common culture shared by Taiwan, the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and the overseas Chinese has facilitated the rapid expansion of economic interconnections.¹²

The greatest problems, according to Huntington, exist in multicultural or multicivilizational countries—like Mexico and the successor states that emerged after the disintegration of the USSR and Yugoslavia. These “torn” countries were composed of large numbers of peoples from different civilizations: that is, their citizens spoke different languages and practiced different religions. They were, Huntington argues, unstable mosaics of Western, Slavic-Orthodox, and Islamic civilizations held together by communism—an imported Western ideology. When that ideology was discredited in the waning years of the cold war, they fell apart, and the different civilizations were able to reassert their identities and claim political autonomy. Implicitly, those countries which are torn by inter-civilizational rivalries point to the real dangers of multiculturalism: class struggle and civil war.

In Huntington’s view, the residents of a country can voluntarily redefine their civilizational identities. Three conditions are necessary for this to happen:

First, its political and economic elites have to be generally supportive of and enthusiastic about this move. Second, its public has to be willing to acquiesce in the redefinition. Third, the dominant groups in the recipient civilization have to be willing to embrace the convert.¹³

It is clear, however, that not all of the torn countries will redefine their identities as Western and adopt a value system which proclaims the political hegemony of the United States and Western Europe. To become Western means that they might, in fact, find themselves in direct competition with the West rather than attached to them in some subordinate role. Thus, in Huntington’s view,

The obstacles to non-Western countries joining the West vary considerably. They are least for Latin American and Eastern European countries. They are greater for the Orthodox countries of the former Soviet Union. They are still greater for Muslim, Confucian, Hindu, and Buddhist societies. Japan has established a unique position.… [I]t is in the West in some respects but clearly not of the West in important dimensions.¹⁴

While the Western countries and Russia were reducing their military power, claims Huntington, a number of states—China, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Libya, and Algeria-—expanded their military capabilities by importing arms from various Western and non-Western sources or by developing their own arms industries. These non-Western “weapons states” threaten both the existing balance of forces and the West’s post-cold war objective to prevent the spread of arms that would threaten its hegemony. The Confucian-Islamic connection which now challenges Western interests and power is defined largely in civilizational terms. Huntington’s remedy, like that of the modernization theorists in the 1950s and 1960s, is to maintain the military superiority of the West, especially in East and Southwest Asia;

to exploit differences and conflicts among Confucian and Islamic states; to support in other civilizations groups sympathetic to Western values and interests; to strengthen international institutions that reflect and legitimate Western interests and values and to promote the involvement of non-Western states in those institutions.¹⁵

To achieve these goals, the West must recognize that, for the foreseeable future, the world will be one in which different civilizations coexist. It must also

develop a more profound understanding of the basic religious and philosophical assumptions underlying those civilizations and the ways in which people in those civilizations see their interests. It will require an effort to identify elements of commonality between Western and other civilizations.¹⁶

Huntington’s discussion captures other dimensions of the idea of civilization. Civilizations involve the construction of identity under particular historical and social circumstances. They often cross the boundaries of modern states, so that Western civilization, for example, is found both in the United States and the countries of Western Europe. Some states, like Mexico or the former USSR, are multicultural or multi-civilizational but not Western, and their social fabrics are fragile because of the potential for co...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Inventing Civilization
• 2. Civilization and Its Boosters
• 3. Civilization and Its Critics
• 4. Inventing Barbarians and Other Uncivilized Peoples
• 5. Uncivilized Peoples Speak
• Notes
• Index