Civilization

I have not yet defined civilization; but perhaps I have made definition superfluous. Anyone, I fancy, who has done me the honour of reading so far will by now understand pretty well what I mean. Civilization is a characteristic which differentiates what anthropologists call 'advanced, from what they call 'low' or 'backward' societies. So soon, as savages begin to apply reason to instinct, so soon, as they acquire a rudimentary sense of values -so soon, that is, as they begin to distinguish between ends and means, or between direct means to good and remote – they have taken the first step upward. The first step towards civilization is the correcting of instinct by reason. The second, the deliberate rejection of immediate satisfactions with a view to obtaining subtler advantages. The hungry savage, when he catches a rabbit, eats it there and then, or instinctively takes it home, as a fox might, to be eaten raw by his cubs; the first who, all hungry though he was, took it home and cooked it was on the road to Athens. He was a pioneer, who with equal justice may be described as the first decadent. The fact is significant. Civilization is something artificial and unnatural. Progress and Decadence are interchangeable terms. All who have merely increased material sensibility, and most of those even who have merely increased material comfort, have been hailed by contemporaries capable of profiting by their discoveries as benefactors, and denounced by all whom age, stupidity, or jealousy rendered incapable, as degenerates. It is silly to quarrel about words: let us agree that the habit of cooking one's victuals may with equal propriety be considered a step towards civilization or a falling away from the primitive perfection of the upstanding

From these primary qualities, reasonableness and a sense of value, may spring a host of secondaries; a taste for truth and beauty, tolerance, intellectual honesty, fastidiousness, a sense of humour, good manners, curiosity, a dislike of vulgarity, brutality, and over-emphasis, freedom from superstition and prudery, a fearless acceptance of the good things of life, a desire for complete self-expression and for a liberal education, a contempt for utilitarianism and philistinism, in two words - sweetness and light. Not all societies that struggle out of barbarism grasp all or even most of these, and fewer still grasp any of them firmly. That is why we find a considerable number of civilized societies and very few highly civilized, for only by grasping a good handful of civilized qualities and holding them tight does a society become that.

But can an entity so vague as a society be said to have or to hold qualities so subtle? Only in the vaguest sense. Societies express themselves in certain more or less permanent and more or less legible forms which become for anthropologists and historians monuments of their civility. They express themselves in manners, customs and conventions, in law and in social and economic organisation; above all in the literature, science and art they have been appreciated and encouraged: less surely they tell us something about themselves through the literature, science and art, which they mayor may not have appreciated, but which was created by artists and thinkers whom they produced. All these taken together may be reckoned - none too confidently – to compose a legible symbol of a prevailing attitude of life. And it is this attitude, made manifest in these more or less public and permanent forms, which we call civilization.