A civilization comes into being whenever a large number of people begin to feel visceral shock whenever they are confronted with the state of savagery.
Harris, p. 71
To Harris, civilization is a psychological phenomenon -- a product of imagination. Yet, it is not the imagining of possibilities that creates civilization, rather the limitation of imaginable possibilities that allows us to interact. Shame keeps us from thinking of the possibility of certain violent conduct and, therefore, assures peaceable interaction among members of the community (p. 71-72). For Harris, this is the "first and foremost" producer of human civilization that is forgotten by those engaged in the controversy of defining civilization.
The validity of this assertion is important because, through it, Harris argues that, "The limited definition of civilization being used here has nothing to do with high or low culture but only with the way people get along with one another... This definition of civilization offers a completely objective way of determining which of two cultures is more civilized..." While it may be true that this definition offers an objective measure
, the question is whether we are truly measuring civilization at all. To give an analogy, if we measure the weight of two different people we have an objective measure
, but that objective measurement is useless if we are trying to determine which person is taller. Therefore, it is important to determine if Harris' non-violent/civility measurement is a measurement of civilization at all.
To give a counter example to Harris' thesis, let's look at the example he gives on page 74. Harris gives us Rousseau's Discourse on the Progress of the Arts and Science
as an example of someone arguing the benefits of living in a less civilized society. Here, Harris says that Rousseau argued that a society that pushes "civilized values" too far loses vigor. Harris sees that as an example of why someone might "prefer living in a nation that was less civilized." This is a misreading of Rousseau and one with important implications.
Harris sees that one might want to live in a less "civilized" nation because, "Getting people to practice sociability and to abstain from violence, while beneficial to the cause of civilization, if too successful, may weaken other important elements of character." These "important elements of character" to Harris is the ability and willingness to use force or violence in contexts that it is the best response, as illustrated by his example of the red-neck versus the cultured gentleman in dealing with someone like Ted Bundy.
Harris has completely misread Rousseau. This is surprising because what Rousseau was arguing is given right in the title of the work: Discourse on the Progress of the Arts and Science
. Rousseau's primary interest is exactly that: the progress of art and science. This is where he sees that vigor is necessary in a society. For Rousseau, the level of the development of the arts and science are the measures of which culture is more civilized. So, Rousseau would disagree vehemently with Harris' statement that the more sociable and polite a people are is "beneficial to the cause of civilization". (An example would be the continual technological and artistic drive in Europe as compared to other civilizations that may have stagnated due to security, stability, and overall peacefulness.)
The question of concern is not which one of these two competing views is correct, just whether Harris, and his resultant objective measure
, is correct. For that, we can look at his theory in isolation.
The mistake in Harris' theory is illustrated in his example on pages 74-75 of Eskimo and Tibetan politeness. It shows how he confuses the term 'civility' (i.e., politeness) with 'civilization' and 'civilized' (a quick look-up in the dictionary will show the difference). While it definitely is the case that a certain level of non-violent social interaction is necessary for the advent of civilization, is it this quality that produces civilization?
In his section "Defining Civilization", Harris says:
Throughout this book the word civilization is used to mean not this or that culture but rather a quality of all cultures that have obtained to a standard of civilization... By civilization what I mean is a standard like this: one that can be applied across cultures and across history.
For Harris that quality is a sociability, tolerance, and hatred of violence within the social interactions of the community. If this is the case, then all communities that have this quality should develop a civilization or, at least, once this quality is shown in the development of homo sapiens we should see civilizations developing in some parts of the world. Yet, this is not the case.
As early as 10,000 B.C. we see archaeological evidence of villages as large as four to six hundred people (Jericho numbers in the thousands by 6000 B.C.); yet, it is not until approximately 3500 B.C. that something develops that anyone would call civilization
. And then the change is fast: ~3500, Mesopotamia; ~3100, Egypt; ~2500, India; ~2000, Minoan; ~1700, China. So, why, if people have been living sociably for so long, did not civilization develop sooner? In fact, it appears that many pre-historic communities where more peaceable than many full fledged civilizations. If Harris is right, then how can this be?
The problem is that Harris' definition of civilization doesn't describe the important historical change that occurs in the organization of people that we call 'civilization'. Under Harris' definition, we would have to call those pre-historic ten thousand year old communities civilizations. But that's not what any of us mean by 'civilization' nor, if it was, would it be useful. To quote from my Webster's, civilization is, "any human society having an advanced stage of development in the arts and sciences and social, political, and cultural complexity." This is why we call the Egyptians, Chinese, Incas, or Aztecs civilizations but not the plains Indian tribes of North America. A civilization occurs when a certain level of complexity has been reached that allows totally new, and much more varied, level of human interaction and experience than even the most well-off primitive community. This does not mean I'd rather live in certain civilizations than that primitive community, as it is often more sociable and tolerant, just that sociability and hatred of violence does not equal civilization.
That primitive communities exhibited more peaceful interactions and "hatred of violence" than some civilizations demonstrates that this is nether a prerequisite nor defining characterization of civilization. The best that can be said about some cross-cultural quality shared by all civilizations is that they all required a certain level of technological advancement and resultant economic surplus that allowed them to release some cultural potential. No matter what, Harris' "civilized values" measurement does not appear to be useful in determining which culture is more civilized.
Nor does his reference to Gobineau's tribalism bolster his argument. Civilizations originating along tribal lines, or because of tribal domination, disprove Gobineanu (Chinese civilization under the Shang should be sufficient to cite). While it may be the case, as Harris says, that, "...those societies that have been able to transcend the tribal us-versus-them stage... have clearly been the big winners of history", it does not mean that this is a quality shared by all civilizations. Which brings Harris to the "Legacy of Sparta", where he seems to start to ignore or misrepresent history altogether.
Harris feels that Sparta invented a new social order based upon the "spirit of the team" which broke man's natural loyalty to kinship and replaced it with loyalty towards the common wealth. For Harris this was unique of Sparta and it revolutionized the world.
The first place to start is Harris' assertion of Sparta claiming an inheritance to their human
lawgiver Lycurgus. His conclusions of the affects of having a human versus god-given law are very true, but this was in no way unique to Sparta. The majority of Greek city-states had a similar legend of a wise, ancient, human lawgiver. So why chose Sparta? This is especially confounding since, of all the Greek city-states, Sparta was the one that took the potential lessons of this myth -- that law was the "product of human reflection and deliberation" and therefore presumably changeable with time -- least to heart. The Spartans were horribly conservative in their laws and social structure (so much so that they would not even allow their laws to be written down). This conservatism, and refusal to adapt to an obviously changing world, is what eventually spelled the doom of their society.
In lauding Spartan achievement, Harris says that they are the only society that can claim to have never been conquered, ruled by a tyrant, or embroiled in a civil war for a period of nearly 500 years. But here, Harris is exaggerating, if not completely misrepresenting, the historical record. First look at Harris' claim that Sparta was never conquered or ruled by a tyrant until the 3rd century B.C. Harris wants us to forget Sparta's call for Persian help during the Peloponnesian War and their subjection to Persian policy in its aftermath. Harris also neglects to mention Macedonian hegemony over all of the Peloponnese starting about 337 B.C. But, while this might be nit-picking, Harris is simply misrepresenting historical fact in his claim that Sparta never suffered from civil war.
This is extremely poor history. From history, we know that the Spartiates numbered somewhere between five to six thousand. This makes them an elite minority. They were an aristocracy that governed the majority of there people -- serf-like helots. The helots were the one big obstacle that fettered Spartan foreign policy. Their fear of helot revolt became so extreme that they feared to put their army abroad for even a short period due to not having enough forces at home to quench helot revolt. To claim this is not civil war because the helots were not granted rights as citizens is like saying that the French did not suffer a civil war because the peasants were not part of the monarchy.
It gets worse as Harris starts to just make stuff up:
Their [Sparta's] sense of loyalty to their own city-state transcended and trumped all other types of affiliation -- kinship, class, party. No one else in the ancient world managed to pull off this trick. The Athenians, with whom we prefer to affiliate ourselves, did not, nor did any of the other societies whose cultural and artistic achievements were infinitely greater than the Spartans'.
I guess we have to take this one at a time. Harris says, "This is why the case of Sparta is so critical, for it was here, for the first time, that the family was defeated." Well, let's look at Spartan government. Spartan government was shared between a council of elders (sounds kind of like a familial structure) and five magistrates, the ephors
. This included the two kings, that had special military powers, in their dual kingship system. This dual kingship was HEREDITARY
. These oligarchs were in the end responsible to the assembly of Spartiates which, as previously pointed out, only numbered a few thousand (loyalty to the Spartan citizen is loyalty to aristocratic CLASS
). Now, let's look at Athens.
At it's height, Athens had a citizenship (those adult males granted the right of citizen) of approximately 50,000. In the 6th century, constitutional changes replaced kinship with locality as the organizing principle (although, this was rather general throughout all of Greece). By the mid 5th century all citizens could participate equally within the assembly, and class or family prestige was not an impediment to a rise in political power (e.g. the rise to power of Kleon) but was based on one's ability to persuade others. And let's not forget that it was the Athenians that invented the word demokratia
, which translates into the sovereign power (kratos
) of the citizen body as a whole (demos
Harris' argument that the concept of the individual was not part of the world that Sparta was a part of does not hold up. One only need to look at the dialogs of Socrates and other Greek literature to see that the concept of the individual existed. Of course, Plato and Socrates were Athenians.
One final point to show that Harris is out of his depth. Harris says:
The team is what Plutarch's translator John Dryden called "the commonwealth," the Greeks called polis, the Roman res publica, and what we call the common good or general welfare.
means city, whereas koinonia
translates into 'commonwealth' or 'community' (koinos, 'common, shared').