“Advanced” Civilization

When Xenophon marched through the ancient world with his ten thousand, fleeing from the disastrous Persian civil war and making his way back to his homeland, he camped in the shadows of ruined civilizations thousands of years old, which rose to heights his own could hardly imagine only to fall into legend before Xenophon’s time.  It’s an image that I keep returning to as I consider the modern world and look at our own civilization.  According to the metrics by which “progress” and “advancement” are usually defined in our modern cultural consciousness, there is nowhere we can go to achieve the same experience.  We look upon the wonders of the ancient world, the remnants of civilizations that rose and fell long before ours, and we study them, learn about them, but always as that which came before, which was lesser.  There is a narrative of monodirectional and universal human civilizational progress which permeates our entire study of history and our reflection upon our own, modern world; it is pernicious and nearly impossible to entirely excise from our thinking.  It gives rise to a dangerous hubris, and I often wish that I could sit in the lee of some ruin and marvel to what unimaginable heights that civilization rose, only to fall.

How do we define “advancement” of a civilization?  Their technical ability?  Their scientific understanding?  Their cultural complexity?  Their living standards?  Their economic vitality?  Their individual rights and freedoms?  Their average capacity for individual fulfillment?  Their life expectancies?  An underlying assumption of superiority means that we consider little of these metrics when we examine older civilizations; we barely consider them with regards to our own, and we largely do not bother defining what we mean by “advanced.”  After all, our civilization is surely unimaginable to any ancient one.  In the narrative of monodirectional progress, we must be more advanced, because we come after, just like the mighty oak arises from the tiny acorn.  Except that acorn once came from a mighty oak.

In one of the Hardcore History podcasts, Carlin mentions how London after Rome’s retreat cannibalized the statues, roads, and other materials left behind by the Roman civilization’s high tide to build their city and form new infrastructure.  He goes on to observe that although this was traditionally viewed by historians as a sign of decay, inferiority to the Roman civilization that came before, that perspective presupposes a cultural system that values the same things as the Romans and has the same civilizational needs, which conceivably the Londoners did not.  In other words, theirs was a different civilization, not necessarily an inferior one.  It is a sign of societal arrogance to compare every civilization to our own and declare that if they do not align with our modern standards then they must be inferior.  So, what does it really mean to be advanced?  Can such a vague standard even be useful in comparing civilizations, and is comparing civilizations even a worthwhile exercise in the first place?  Certainly, it is a tempting one, but it may be more worthwhile to compare elements than entire civilizations.

Consider the Greeks, a civilization whose philosophy endures to the present and forms the foundation of nearly every modern serious study of thought.  They were a civilization with ideas of freedom and human fulfillment to rival the modern world, and an understanding of the natural world which some say could have seen them with the capacity for space travel by the tenth century CE had they endured…except that they did not prioritize technology and technical progress as we do.  In fact, they took their vast understanding of the physical world, their ability to make advanced technology, and looked down upon it as crass, unnecessary, and mere curiosity to be used as set dressing at temples.  Technological progress, even understanding of what we today would call physics, was far less important to them than the advancement of the human being in both mind and body.  Answering questions was, in a sense, less important to the Greeks than asking them.

Communist philosophy demands a narrative of monodirectional human progress, an inevitable movement through history towards a utopic end state, and perhaps part of what makes that concept more acceptable to people is the historical narrative we already have of monodirectional progress.  We look at our modern “world” civilization and see a linear progression from about the eleventh century to now of greater and greater “advancement.”  We do not walk through the world and see evidence of civilizations greater than our own, perhaps not so much because they are absent, but because we do not define them as such.  Our ancestors may not have built skyscrapers or landed on the moon, but that does not make them inferior.  It makes them different.  If history teaches us anything, it is that the changes of humanity are not monodirectional, that civilizations rise and fall.  The various dynasties of China, the Roman Empire, the Greeks, the Aztecs, the Persians, the Egyptians, the Inca, the Pueblo, the Navajo, the Mayans, the Babylonians, the Arabs, the Harappans, the Sumerians…these are only a fraction of all the civilizations which have existed and achieved a measure of greatness during their times.  Can we honestly compare ourselves to them and say there is nothing in which they exceeded us?

Progress is not monodirectional, it is not predetermined, and it is certainly not inevitable (well, except for the ultimate increase in entropy).  By many metrics, perhaps, ours is the most advanced civilization, but that presupposes the rightness of the metrics and their calibration.  We might be more technically advanced than the ancient Greeks, but they would laugh and discuss their thinking that has endured for thousands of years beyond their civilization.  We might have a higher standard of living, or better medical results, or a more robust economy, but to another culture, those might be incidental.  No, we are not truly more advanced, except by the metrics which we define to be so.  Rather, we are simply different.  And, if in some things we exceed the civilizations which preceded us, it may well be that we are dwarves standing tall upon the shoulders of giants.