What my forthcoming book is NOT about

Via negativa

‘The purpose of this book is threefold: to explain what makes civilization what it is; to show what we are in danger of losing in the event of collapse, and to point the way toward renewal.’

But what is In Defense of Civilization, NOT about?

I am most emphatically not flying the flag for one civilisation’s superiority over another. Nor am I trying to plead for the singular achievements of the West, or any other place, though I do suggest in many places that there are good examples everywhere that we might all learn from. There are also good examples of failures that we must try to avoid. But the twentieth-century failures of Western Civilisation that I denounce in the middle of the book should not be allowed to discredit the successes that came long before.

Although I wanted to come to grips with what civilisation is in general, I do not attempt to define it abstractly. I also reject any causal association between civilised life and any particular technological or economic system. I dismiss the old idea of an Agricultural Revolution, whereby farming and domestication of animals caused the development of settled life and the development of cities and states. The evidence which I present in the book points the other way: people began clustering round the earliest settlements before the full development of agriculture and before the first states, and farming and animal husbandry grew up as a result. To my mind, this means that we should associate civilisation not with a change in the ‘mode of production’ but with a change of attitude or outlook. In this connection, I emphasise the evidence from Göbekli Tepe, Çatalhöyük, Jericho, and other Neolithic sites, and I contrast it with what is known of the life of Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers which came before.

That contrast must necessarily be based on the evidence of material culture, since there are no texts to work with.

Accordingly, I generalise a good deal from Palaeolithic cave paintings and compare them to Neolithic art works, especially wall paintings from Çatalhöyük. Though I talk a lot throughout the book about beauty as a concept or value, I do not believe that human art became more beautiful, more aesthetically pleasing, or whatever, with the appearance of civilisation. In fact, I observe that Palaeolithic cave art is more obviously attractive than the images at Çatalhöyük. And so, what makes art civilised, or not, has to be something other than beauty on its own…

The story of civilisation is not a story of inexorable progress. I go out of my way to debunk the preference of 20th-century scholarship for evolution and transformation instead of decline and collapse. It may seem trite, but I think it is worth emphasising that civilisation is fragile and prone to dissolution. Many examples show this, perhaps most emphatically the so-called Late Bronze Age Collapse in about 1177. But civilisation can be renewed, even after long a long interval. The many collapses and recoveries of early Mesopotamian, Chinese, and Iranian states, as well as the general regrowth of civilisation in the early Iron Age prove this.

I devote a lot of space to what caused those recoveries, as well as to what did not cause them. The mechanism at work may seem surprising now. As I argue, civilisation regrows because people, looking to the past, deliberately imitate the cultural models and achievements of their predecessors. Contrary to what is still commonly believed, the theory of perpetual innovation and revolutionary social and technological change did not operate in the remote past. I invoke many relevant examples in the book, but take the Greeks of the Classical Age here. They are often thought of entirely original, free thinkers who imitated no one, but this is false. The more archaic Greeks after the Bronze Age Collapse were essentially savages, as shown in the early part of Thucydides’ history and the extraordinarily grim and violent tragedies of Aeschylus. The darkness of that time was only dispelled not by radical innovation but by the deliberate imitation of Near Eastern culture brought to them by the merchants of Phoenicia. But, as I say, there are many other relevant examples in the book.

Finally, there is a lot in the book about Confucianism and the contemporary Confucian revival within China. I think that this development is good — especially after the calamities of the so-called Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (a revolution which was, of course, neither great, nor proletarian, nor cultural). But this does not imply that I approve of the Chinese Communist Party.

Anyway, if you like the sound of what In Defense of Civilization is NOT about, maybe you will also like what it IS about. You can pre-order it here directly from the publisher Sutherland House. Or you can find it on Amazon.