The Meaning of Civilization

by SIR RICHARD LIVINGSTONE

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THE title of this article is “The Meaning of Civilization,”but other questions have beentitle of this but article other is questions “The Meaning have been in my mind as I wrote it — such questions as: What will the future say of our civilization? How does it compare with other civilizations? What are its weaknesses, and what, are its virtues? To answer these questions, we must know what we mean by the word, and civilization is not easy to define. It is used apparently in different senses and applied to very different things. We speak for instance of the civilization of the Mayas, of ancient Greece, of modern America. But what have these three very different phenomena in common?

If we wish to find out the meaning of an idea, it is not a bad thing to study the history of the word that describes it. Words are like coins. After years of use they get worn and defaced, and the inscription on them becomes illegible. But when they are first minted, it is clean and clear. Civilisation for instance. It is a comparatively modern word. Dr. Johnson in 1776 declined to admit it in his Dictionary, preferring the old word civility. The word civility is Latin; so is the idea which it expresses; it is a metaphor; civilitas-, the character of people who are citizens, who live in cities, in organized slates and societies, as opposed to primitive, barbarous peoples who do not. The civilized man is the man who lives in a society with its richer, fuller life and who has the gifts that enable him to live in this life, which demands certain qualities of mind and character, and gives opportunities for development that the isolated life of the savage, living in a family or in a wandering tribe, cannot give. We, by the way, should not use this metaphor to describe civilization. Or, at any rate, should not make so emphatic a contrast between town and country, for in the last 1.50 years communications, radio, printing, have bridged the gulf which once separated them. In Britain and in the United States and in most parts of Europe there is today as much civilitas in the country as in the city.

Still, that definition throws some light on what civilization is, but we get further Light if we observe the words used to describe it earlier still. For civilization existed long before the Romans coined the word civilitas. The Greeks, who did more to make modern civilization possible than any people before or since, and who themselves had one of the greatest civilizations in history, had the thing, though they had not the name. They described it by the word tame. In their eyes a civilized man was tame, a tame creature as opposed to a wild or savage one. The Romans used a rather different term with the same idea behind it. When they wanted to express that idea, they used the word cultivation; the metaphor is from soil which is not left wild or barren.

There we have three metaphors, which are a guide to the nature of civilization. We are civilized in so far as we are tame rather than savage, cultivated soil rather than wild nature, the sort of people who can live in societies rather than the sort that, do not and cannot. (Note, by the way, that all these metaphors apply rather to the human being than to the circumstances in which he lives; to the quality of his life, not to its comfort. This is an important point to which I shall return later.)

Perhaps the most suggestive of these metaphors is that from cultivation — the idea of civilization as a garden contrasted with wild woodland or barren heath — because it allows for the various meanings in which the word civilization is used. For civilization has many aspects, and in judging a civilization one takes into account a variety of phenomena, such as intellectual and scientific achievement, artistic quality, material well-being, and social organization. Civilizations are like gardens; some have few flowers, some many; here there is a magnificent show of roses or of orchids but little else, and here is a brilliant blaze of varied blossoms.

We talk of the civilization of the Mayas in Central America, though we know little of them beyond the fact that they had remarkable architecture and art; we do not know what was their intellectual level or their moral standards or their social organization. Yet we call them civilized. So again we should call the world revealed in the Norse and Icelandic sagas civilized, though it had neither art nor architecture nor science. It had, however, a remarkable literature and it had an organized social system. Civilization is always cultivation, the creation of a garden, but people put very different things in their gardens. Ancient Egypt had its garden, the Mayas had theirs; fifth century Athens had one idea, the Chinese a rather different one. All civilizations are gardens, but the flowers they contain differ, according to the natural powers and tastes of their creators.

What is the perfect civilization? What does the ideal garden grow? What tests should we apply if we wish to judge a civilization? I suggest that we should observe what it makes of the savage animal, the wild nature, which it tries to tame and cultivate— Man. It is concerned especially with three sides of him: first with man as a being with an intellect, capable of knowing and understanding, able to create philosophy and science and all that we compendiously call thought; and civilization takes the savage in hand and produces Plato and Aristotle, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Whitehead, Archimedes, Newton, Faraday, Darwin, Pasteur, Einstein. Secondly it is concerned with man as a being possessing imagination and the gift of creating art; again it takes the savage and in due time produces Raphael and Michelangelo and Leonardo, Homer and Dante and Shakespeare: this being, who once was a half-naked wanderer in the forest or by the lakeside, builds the Parthenon or St. Paul’s, paints the Sistine Chapel, writes the Iliad or King Lear. Third, it is interested in man as a being with the gift of creating states and communities-hence the metaphor which appears in the word civilization— and civilization finds man living a savage life and teaches him how to make city-states, nations, empires, to knit continents together with organized transport and trade, to create these vast organizations, political, social, commercial, financial, which we take as matter of course, but whose intricate complexity the savage could neither conceive nor achieve.

That is the work of civilization — this taming and cultivation of raw human nature: it comes slowly, each generation making its contribution, drawn onward partly by selfish interests, the pursuit of wealth, comfort, power, but much more by a perception and pursuit of the first-rate in all those three fields — the field of the intellect, of creative art, of social organization. The highest civilization is the one which reaches the highest point in each of them — a perfect civilization of the human garden. Where none of them are present, there is no civilization.

It is no substitute for certain qualities of the human spirit —above all for vital energy, life. No doubt mere vitality, mere energy, is an animal thing, often destructive. But civilize it and you have something really great. It is the material from which great civilizations are made. It is not enough merely to cultivate; the soil must have a natural richness and vigor. If it gets exhausted, the yield is disappointing, however much it is dug and planted. We talk sometimes of people becoming overcivilized: the garden is cultivated but it produces sickly flowers, poor in quality. That apparently is what happened to the Roman Empire -a failure of the vital power in the soil. One of the encouraging things about, the modern world is that it is full of vitality.

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LET me now glance at an important question: Does civilization cover the whole of life? What is its relation to religion and to morals? I do not have space to deal adequately with these big problems and I will only say that history shows no instance of any civilization surviving long without a religion, or unless its existence is directed by something higher than the desire to satisfy material needs and to enjoy material comfort. As to morality, obviously men cannot live at all in societies without some virtues; and those who cannot live in a society are not civilized. But it is possible to have civilization with a quite modest supply’ of some important virtues. The Renaissance in Italy was one of the great ages of civilization, but it was not a notably religious age, nor was it remarkable for morals. There are some things, and very important ones, with which civilization has little or nothing to do. Were the disciples of Christ civilized— Peter, the sons of Zebedee, the fishermen of Galilee? Civilization is not the word which the thought of them brings to the mind.

St. Paul no doubt was a highly educated man, but many people in the audience to which he spoke at Athens would be regarded as more highly civilized than he was. And what of the majority of those congregations in Ephesus, Philippi, and Corinth to whom his letters were written? He himself says of them: “You see your calling, brethren, how not many wise men after the flesh . . . are called . . . but God chose the foolish things of the world that He might put to shame them that are wise.”And all of us have known poor, uneducated people who have qualities by the side of whieh civilization with all its artistic, scientific, and intellectual interests seems a lesser thing.

My own view is that civilization is the development of the purely human capacities in mangreat capacities, but less great than the religious experience which opens to him an even ampler world, even greater issues. Tolstoy defined religion as “a relation accordant with reason and knowledge which man establishes with the infinite life about him and is such as binds his life to that infinity and guides his conduct.” Religion in this sense, though it is entirely consistent with civilization, seems to be different from it; and it can be and has been found apart from civilization.

Yet in all civilizations, except purely material ones, there is an element which is allied to religion -the element of disinterestedness. By disinterestedness I mean the frame of mind in which a person subordinates his personal interests and himself to something outside him whose superior claim he recognizes. Religion is the supreme example of it, but it appears in all the higher forms of civilizalion. The thinker, the scientist, does his work not for the sake of money or fame-if he thinks of them at all, they are not. the force which drives his energies and which he might find it difficult to define. The same is often true in business. Certainly it is true of all art, music, and literature. They may bring their creators money; often they do not. Milton received 10 pounds for Paradise Lost, Mozart was buried in a pauper’s grave, Cervantes died in great poverty. But all artists (using that word in a wide sense) are moved by an ideal, an inner vision, which has nothing material about it, which is disinterested. For, like religion, it comes from some force of the spirit outside man but working through him. Take the following lines, which at first reading one might suppose to be a religious poem, but which actually describe the emotions of Kipling reflecting on his work: —

These lines illustrate how narrow can be the boundary between religion and art —if indeed it exists at all.

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AND now we come to our own civilization. In order to judge it, consider it under the various aspects which I mentioned earlier: intellectual and artistic achievement, civilitas or the quality of its social life, material well-being; and first take the last of these, material well-being, in which we far surpass all earlier ages. If this made civilization, we would be the most civilized people who have existed on the earth. But whatever its value in other respects, its importance to civilization can be exaggerated. Athens, the Roman Empire, the city-states of medieval Italy, ancient China, had never heard of steam or electricity and were without conveniences which today any workingman can command: yet these peoples are justly regarded as high point of civilization.

I am not arguing against the value of material progress, but it has two faces. Think of an air raid, Could anything be more completely a product of modern civilization? In the air those wonderful birds of metal flying at hundreds of miles an hour under human control, carrying small iron containers which can set a city on fire and kill thousands of its inhabitants, while on the ground other men, sweeping the night and the wide spaces of the sky with searchlight and gun, detect and destroy their enemy. What miracles of human intellect made both the attack and the defense possible? It is eminently part of that material civilization which we justly admire. But it is clear that material civilization can be a danger as well as a benefit to its possessors.

Nor is it merely that, airplanes and explosives and atomic energy may destroy us; a less spectacular but more imminent risk is that they may bewilder, distract, and barbarize us. I have mentioned one unfortunate use of the internal-combustion engine; let me call attention to another, lesser, and less obvious evil for which it is responsible and which can be seen on any highway in Europe or America when a car or motor coach passes with tourists. They are bent on seeing the scenery. But you can no more see scenery at 20 or 30 or 40 miles an hour than you could see a picture gallery by running through it. Beauty cannot be seen in bulk; to run one’s eye over it is not to see it; it needs time and leisure to absorb and be absorbed by it. Wordsworth, wandering “lonely as a cloud,” saw more in an afternoon walk than we see in a journey from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In so far, we have actually lost by the opportunities for locomotion which progress has given us, and Horace’s sarcastic comment on his age, written 1900 years ago, applies to us with infinitely more force: Navibus atque quadrigis petimus bene vivere — “We look to cars and yachts for the good life.”

What is the relation of material progress to civilization? Is it a friend or an enemy ? I should reply that it is a friend which, if we are not careful, may become an enemy. Clearly it is a good thing to have material conveniences—quick communications, cheap production, printing, plumbing, and the rest. That point is too obvious to require stressing.

And apart from the uses of material inventions to ourselves, they bring civilization within the reach of those who, without them, would be excluded from it. Printing has brought knowledge and wisdom (and some less desirable gifts) to millions who, before its discovery, were without access to it. Compare the life of the masses before and after machinery came. Contrast the coolie drawing a rickshaw for sixteen hours a day with a taxi driver. In the age before the machine the life of the poor was a drudgery which left little time or energy for anything beyond; then civilization was the perquisite of a small class; today it is a possibility within the reach of all.

And there is a further point about these material instruments and equipment of our life. They help to make our civilization, but at the same time the making of them is part of the making of the human garden. It is an advantage to have radio and refrigeration and bathrooms and telephones and the rest, and we are sometimes proud of them as if they were fine flowers of our life. That of course is not so. The possession of them is no credit to us; it shows no more than that we have enough money to buy them. But they are a credit to those whose intelligence and skill created them; they are an inanimate witness to the powers of man.

Who could go into a big factory without reflecting how much human intelligence is embodied both in its machines and its organization? Who can go down to a shipyard when a liner is ready for launching and sec the men in the yard busy with the final preparations, looking like ants beside this vast creation towering above on its slips, without admiration for the pigmy humans that yet are able to build and control something so enormous and complicated? This is the miraculous achievement of beings who five thousand years ago were the savage inhabitants of caves and woods. The greatness of a ship is not merely that she will carry us safely and quickly across the oceans, but that she is human intelligence embodied. Her existence is more remarkable than her uses. She is a fine flower which the human garden has grown.

I have dwelt so long on the material aspect of our civilization because it is responsible for our greatest problems and because we are liable to hold one of two mistaken views about it. There is the view of those who are so dazzled by its achievements that they identify it with civilization and suppose that we are civilized because of our material progress and advantages. Then there is the opposite view of those who, noticing some of its results and some of the uses to which it is put, go, like Ruskin or William Morris or Edward Carpenter, to the opposite extreme and wish they could be rid of the whole thing. I do not know which of these views is more mistaken. Probably the first — the confusing of civilization with material progress. The right view is that material civilization is of value both in itself and because it represents a great human achievement — a part of the cultivation of the human garden. But it has its dangers and we have not always avoided them.

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IF mastery of the material w:orld were civilization, ours would be the most civilized age in history. How will it rank if, passing from its material aspects, we consider the other elements which constitute a civilization: imaginative quality revealed in literature and art, intellectual activities, civilitas or social and political life? There is today a greater quantity of competent writing at a good level than in any preceding age — an extensive tableland without any great peaks breaking the skyline; but our literature, if we judge it by universal standards, does not rise into the first class: we have nothing comparable to the drama of fifth century Athens or of sixteenth century England or seventeenth century France; we have no novelists who can rank with Tolstoy or Dostoievsky or with Scott or Dickens; we have no great historians; and a hundred years hence will any of our poetry be read except in anthologies? Possibly our best imaginative work is in art, but even there we have no Phidias or Raphael or Michelangelo or Leonardo; nor have we anything to challenge the Parthenon or Santa Sophia or the medieval cathedral, unless it is those buildings on the western approaches to New York and on the lake front of Chicago which embody the spirit of the age in forms of majestic and austere beauty.

Turning to the purely intellectual aspect of our civilization, we have at the moment a philosophy of little importance even for its own time, and in pure science, as in literature, we have a remarkable diffusion of good work. But we also have and have had some creative minds of the highest quality, such as Max Planck, Rutherford, and Einstein. In applied science no age can compare with us, and in general one might say that the characteristic achievement of the modern world is the effective mobilization and organization of intellectual effort in every field. But in artistic and literary quality our civilization will, I believe, certainly rank below that of fifth and fourth century Athens, and of fourteenth and fifteenth century Italy.

That brings me to an important practical question. Can a democracy be civilized? I have deliberately put the question provocatively, but it is a real one; and all democracies need to consider it. Of course very few people can be creators in the field of art or of the intellect: our task, the task of the intelligent public, is to honor and appreciate what the few create; to know, or at least wish to know, what is really first-rate in literature, art, architecture, music, in science and the world of thought, in all the activities that make civilization. But are the masses capable of such discrimination? And if not, shall we not have a nation where an elite is civilized but the rest of the people is not? Have we not something of the sort today? Look at some of our popular newspapers. Or ask yourselves what idea an archaeologist would form of us if, a thousand years hence, he dug up our advertisements, which presumably give a fair idea of the tastes and interests of the ordinary man, and tried to form an idea of this age from them. Would it be a favorable idea?

Democracy is the highest form of political government, but on the cultural side it is exposed to grave weaknesses. Call the masses into power, and automatically you will find the national culture molded by their interests and tastes. They will expect, and plenty of people will be ready to supply, the kind of music and art and radio and films and reading which is to their taste, and there is at least a risk that standards will quickly decline to the secondand third-rate. I can mention one held in which this has happened in my own country in my lifetime. When I was a boy no daily paper was published in London of the level of those that are read by the great mass of the population today. In many points the modern cheap English papers are not so bad (I have seen worse in America), but I cannot think that they are papers which really civilized people would habitually read.

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How can we avoid this danger-that a democracy will find itself divided on the one hand into an elite, who know what is good literature, good music, good journalism, and so on-who appreciate excellence in the world of the intellect —and on the other hand a mass who do not, who in these fields have no judgment or discrimination and who see no difference between the first-rate and the third-rate? Must we accept it as inevitable and resign ourselves to the majority being in these respects uncivilized or half-civilized? That is substantially the position today. Plato thought it inevitable and divided his citizens into three classes -a small class, creative minds who know the meaning of excellence in all the forms and activities of life; a larger class, who follow their guidance and in so far share their knowledge; and a majority who have their function in the state as producers but who have no real idea what civilization in its full sense means.

I am sure that one should not resign oneself to so defeatist a view. Mere political equality is essential but it is not enough. Burke had the right conception of the state, when he said that it should be a partnership in all science, in all art, in every virtue and in every perfection.

But how are we to secure this? We have not secured it yet. Education should give the answer. But we have universal education and so far the answer has been dusty. That suggests that there is something wrong with our education — that it. has not addressed itself to this side of its task; and this I believe to be so. I cannot discuss in detail what we might, do about it. But I will suggest one thing. A fundamental principle of education should be to make the pupil realize the meaning of excellence, of the first-rate, and to send him out of school and college persuaded that it is his business to learn what is first-rate and to pursue it — not only in the job by which he earns his living but in all the great fields of life and above all in living itself. I would also try to give the pupil at school a better idea than he sometimes gets of what is first-rate in literature, architecture, music, art — and, above all, of what is first-rate in conduct and life. Then we might get nearer to creating a democracy which believes in, desires, and recognizes, where it cannot achieve, excellence in all the noblest activities.

I think this would do something. But I would go further. In many ways I mistrust the state and I should scrutinize carefully any extension of its powers. But I should like to put under its supervision, or rather under t Ho supervision of independent public corporations, those cultural activities which have great educational importance. I would not leave them to chance or to exploitation for private profit.

To come to a practical point, I should like to see radio, TV, and the films controlled, not by the state directly, but by some public body. These three are today probably the most influential instruments of public education, for they are at work on most of us throughout our lives; the artists and technicians who produce them are gifted people who know their job thoroughly; they move us, as unfortunately education in school and college often does not; and their influence is the greater because for the most part we do not realize it. I do not think that forces of this kind should be directed in the last resort by motives of private gain.

I have suggested that in art and in literature other ages have reached higher levels than we. But there is one province of civilization in ‘which we may be found, when our history is written, to have achieved more than any other epoch, the province of civilitas in the narrow sense of the word — in our social and political ideals. I am not thinking of political democracy, which is as old as Athens, where the poorest and most humbly born citizen had political equality with the richest and most aristocratic, and where the Assembly in which all issues of peace and war were decided, and any member of the citizen body could hear the debate, take part in it, and give his vote, afforded a better political education than any since devised, though it did not lead to efficient government. But I believe that at no age of the world has the social conscience been so awake as now. That is not to say that it might not be more awake still. But we have got rid of the institution of slavery which defaced Greek civilization. This improvement was made possible by the machine, which has replaced the slave, but in part it is due to the growth of a social conscience. We have recognized the duty of giving equal opportunity to all — a notable instance is our nation-wide education-and we have attempted to maintain a minimum standard of living by the social services. In these points we have achieved far more than the Greeks or any other people of the past. We have a richer idea of civilitas, and in that province we have a higher civilization.

But an even greater advance is an extension of that idea. Today we see the dawn, the very faint dawn, of a new political conception, partly anticipated in the idea of the British Commonwealth of Nations, and developed since the war on different lines by the United States, which has adopted it. as a policy, and has in the Marshall Plan and in other ways made practical sacrifices for it. It is the conception of a world whose peoples, varying in language, traditions, culture, and political institutions, yet feel themselves fundamentally one, united, beneath all their differences, by a common humanity and coöperating in the pursuit of a common goal. That is something new.

UnmistKbly, the next great advance for humanity is international coöperation; not the casual flirtations or transient liaisons between states which have hitherto been our nearest approach to it, but something corresponding to that power of living together, that fundamental harmony, which holds England or America or any healthy nation together in spite of internal tensions and of differences of interest and opinion. Mankind has never undertaken a more formidable task. It will not be accomplished by setting up international machinery, though this is indispensable; still less by pious aspirations, pessimistic complaints, or edifying speeches. It is a preparation of the spirit, a remolding of the Inner man, that is required—not only in one or two nations, but in all.

The best preparation is to take seriously the second of Christ’s great commandments, to love our neighbors as ourselves and to define our neighbor as He defined him; or, as William Temple more explicitly put it, “My neighbour is anyone with whom I have anything to do, even by accident and even though he is the kind of person that I naturally hate and despise.”The vision of a new political order is fundamentally Christian. It is of course possible to base the ideal of a world society — which is something different from a world state — on utilitarian grounds; because without it civilization will be torn, and possibly destroyed, by war, or because it is the nearest road to the prosperity and peace of mankind. But utility is a plausible rather than a powerful motive, for the interests of the individual often diverge, or seem to diverge, from the interests of the whole. A surer basis, a more dynamic motive force, for its realization can be found in Christianity, of which it is the logical conclusion.

It is foreshadowed in the words of Christ: “You have heard that it was said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy; but I tell you, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, pray for those who persecute and insult you, that so you may be true sons of your Father in heaven, whose sun rises on the evil and equally on the good, whose rain falls on the just and equally on the unjust.” How easy to quote those words! How difficult even to approach practicing them!

We have far to go: the ideal has to be translated into practice. Nationalism, in its many forms, will oppose and retard progress, and many will still reiterate the question of Cain, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” The new conception of international relations has not penetrated into our normal way of thinking or become an automatic reaction to political problems. It involves a transformation of our natural outlook. But this is the way in which the world is destined to move; and the outlook of man has undergone more astonishing transformations since he first appeared on the earth. Anyhow the first shoots of a new plant in the human garden are visible above the soil. The age which brings it to flower will have done for civilization at least as much as any of its predecessors.