A civilization or civilisation (see English
spelling differences) is any complex society
characterized by urban development, social
stratification imposed by a cultural elite,
symbolic systems of communication (for example,
writing systems), and a perceived separation
from and domination over the natural environment.Civilizations
are intimately associated with and often further
defined by other socio-politico-economic characteristics,
including centralization, the domestication
of both humans and other organisms, specialization
of labour, culturally ingrained ideologies
of progress and supremacism, monumental architecture,
taxation, societal dependence upon farming
and expansionism.
Historically, civilization has often been
understood as a larger and "more advanced"
culture, in contrast to smaller, supposedly
primitive cultures.
Similarly, some scholars have described civilization
as being necessarily multicultural.
In this broad sense, a civilization contrasts
with non-centralized tribal societies, including
the cultures of nomadic pastoralists, Neolithic
societies or hunter-gatherers, but it also
contrasts with the cultures found within civilizations
themselves.
As an uncountable noun, "civilization" also
refers to the process of a society developing
into a centralized, urbanized, stratified
structure.
Civilizations are organized in densely populated
settlements divided into hierarchical social
classes with a ruling elite and subordinate
urban and rural populations, which engage
in intensive agriculture, mining, small-scale
manufacture and trade.
Civilization concentrates power, extending
human control over the rest of nature, including
over other human beings.Civilization, as its
etymology (below) suggests, is a concept originally
linked to towns and cities.
The earliest emergence of civilizations is
generally associated with the final stages
of the Neolithic Revolution, culminating in
the relatively rapid process of urban revolution
and state formation, a political development
associated with the appearance of a governing
elite.
== History of the concept ==
The English word civilization comes from the
16th-century French civilisé ("civilized"),
from Latin civilis ("civil"), related to civis
("citizen") and civitas ("city").
The fundamental treatise is Norbert Elias's
The Civilizing Process (1939), which traces
social mores from medieval courtly society
to the Early Modern period.
In The Philosophy of Civilization (1923),
Albert Schweitzer outlines two opinions: one
purely material and the other material and
ethical.
He said that the world crisis was from humanity
losing the ethical idea of civilization, "the
sum total of all progress made by man in every
sphere of action and from every point of view
in so far as the progress helps towards the
spiritual perfecting of individuals as the
progress of all progress".Adjectives like
"civility" developed in the mid-16th century.
The abstract noun "civilization", meaning
"civilized condition", came in the 1760s,
again from French.
The first known use in French is in 1757,
by Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau,
and the first use in English is attributed
to Adam Ferguson, who in his 1767 Essay on
the History of Civil Society wrote, "Not only
the individual advances from infancy to manhood,
but the species itself from rudeness to civilisation".
The word was therefore opposed to barbarism
or rudeness, in the active pursuit of progress
characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment.
In the late 1700s and early 1800s, during
the French Revolution, "civilization" was
used in the singular, never in the plural,
and meant the progress of humanity as a whole.
This is still the case in French.
The use of "civilizations" as a countable
noun was in occasional use in the 19th century,
but has become much more common in the later
20th century, sometimes just meaning culture
(itself in origin an uncountable noun, made
countable in the context of ethnography).
Only in this generalized sense does it become
possible to speak of a "medieval civilization",
which in Elias's sense would have been an
oxymoron.
Already in the 18th century, civilization
was not always seen as an improvement.
One historically important distinction between
culture and civilization is from the writings
of Rousseau, particularly his work about education,
Emile.
Here, civilization, being more rational and
socially driven, is not fully in accord with
human nature, and "human wholeness is achievable
only through the recovery of or approximation
to an original prediscursive or prerational
natural unity" (see noble savage).
From this, a new approach was developed, especially
in Germany, first by Johann Gottfried Herder,
and later by philosophers such as Kierkegaard
and Nietzsche.
This sees cultures as natural organisms, not
defined by "conscious, rational, deliberative
acts", but a kind of pre-rational "folk spirit".
Civilization, in contrast, though more rational
and more successful in material progress,
is unnatural and leads to "vices of social
life" such as guile, hypocrisy, envy and avarice.
In World War II, Leo Strauss, having fled
Germany, argued in New York that this opinion
of civilization was behind Nazism and German
militarism and nihilism.
== Characteristics ==
Social scientists such as V. Gordon Childe
have named a number of traits that distinguish
a civilization from other kinds of society.
Civilizations have been distinguished by their
means of subsistence, types of livelihood,
settlement patterns, forms of government,
social stratification, economic systems, literacy
and other cultural traits.
Andrew Nikiforuk argues that "civilizations
relied on shackled human muscle.
It took the energy of slaves to plant crops,
clothe emperors, and build cities" and considers
slavery to be a common feature of pre-modern
civilizations.All civilizations have depended
on agriculture for subsistence, with the possible
exception of some early civilizations in Peru
which may have depended upon maritime resources.
Grain farms can result in accumulated storage
and a surplus of food, particularly when people
use intensive agricultural techniques such
as artificial fertilization, irrigation and
crop rotation.
It is possible but more difficult to accumulate
horticultural production, and so civilizations
based on horticultural gardening have been
very rare.
Grain surpluses have been especially important
because grain can be stored for a long time.
A surplus of food permits some people to do
things besides produce food for a living:
early civilizations included soldiers, artisans,
priests and priestesses, and other people
with specialized careers.
A surplus of food results in a division of
labour and a more diverse range of human activity,
a defining trait of civilizations.
However, in some places hunter-gatherers have
had access to food surpluses, such as among
some of the indigenous peoples of the Pacific
Northwest and perhaps during the Mesolithic
Natufian culture.
It is possible that food surpluses and relatively
large scale social organization and division
of labour predates plant and animal domestication.Civilizations
have distinctly different settlement patterns
from other societies.
The word "civilization" is sometimes simply
defined as "'living in cities'".
Non-farmers tend to gather in cities to work
and to trade.
Compared with other societies, civilizations
have a more complex political structure, namely
the state.
State societies are more stratified than other
societies; there is a greater difference among
the social classes.
The ruling class, normally concentrated in
the cities, has control over much of the surplus
and exercises its will through the actions
of a government or bureaucracy.
Morton Fried, a conflict theorist and Elman
Service, an integration theorist, have classified
human cultures based on political systems
and social inequality.
This system of classification contains four
categories
Hunter-gatherer bands, which are generally
egalitarian.
Horticultural/pastoral societies in which
there are generally two inherited social classes;
chief and commoner.
Highly stratified structures, or chiefdoms,
with several inherited social classes: king,
noble, freemen, serf and slave.
Civilizations, with complex social hierarchies
and organized, institutional governments.Economically,
civilizations display more complex patterns
of ownership and exchange than less organized
societies.
Living in one place allows people to accumulate
more personal possessions than nomadic people.
Some people also acquire landed property,
or private ownership of the land.
Because a percentage of people in civilizations
do not grow their own food, they must trade
their goods and services for food in a market
system, or receive food through the levy of
tribute, redistributive taxation, tariffs
or tithes from the food producing segment
of the population.
Early human cultures functioned through a
gift economy supplemented by limited barter
systems.
By the early Iron Age, contemporary civilizations
developed money as a medium of exchange for
increasingly complex transactions.
In a village, the potter makes a pot for the
brewer and the brewer compensates the potter
by giving him a certain amount of beer.
In a city, the potter may need a new roof,
the roofer may need new shoes, the cobbler
may need new horseshoes, the blacksmith may
need a new coat and the tanner may need a
new pot.
These people may not be personally acquainted
with one another and their needs may not occur
all at the same time.
A monetary system is a way of organizing these
obligations to ensure that they are fulfilled.
From the days of the earliest monetarized
civilizations, monopolistic controls of monetary
systems have benefited the social and political
elites.
Writing, developed first by people in Sumer,
is considered a hallmark of civilization and
"appears to accompany the rise of complex
administrative bureaucracies or the conquest
state".
Traders and bureaucrats relied on writing
to keep accurate records.
Like money, writing was necessitated by the
size of the population of a city and the complexity
of its commerce among people who are not all
personally acquainted with each other.
However, writing is not always necessary for
civilization, as shown the Inca civilization
of the Andes, which did not use writing at
all except from a complex recording system
consisting of cords and nodes instead: the
"Quipus", whose still functioned as a civilized
society.
Aided by their division of labour and central
government planning, civilizations have developed
many other diverse cultural traits.
These include organized religion, development
in the arts, and countless new advances in
science and technology.
Through history, successful civilizations
have spread, taking over more and more territory,
and assimilating more and more previously-uncivilized
people.
Nevertheless, some tribes or people remain
uncivilized even to this day.
These cultures are called by some "primitive",
a term that is regarded by others as pejorative.
"Primitive" implies in some way that a culture
is "first" (Latin = primus), that it has not
changed since the dawn of humanity, though
this has been demonstrated not to be true.
Specifically, as all of today's cultures are
contemporaries, today's so-called primitive
cultures are in no way antecedent to those
we consider civilized.
Anthropologists today use the term "non-literate"
to describe these peoples.
Civilization has been spread by colonization,
invasion, religious conversion, the extension
of bureaucratic control and trade, and by
introducing agriculture and writing to non-literate
peoples.
Some non-civilized people may willingly adapt
to civilized behaviour.
But civilization is also spread by the technical,
material and social dominance that civilization
engenders.
Assessments of what level of civilization
a polity has reached are based on comparisons
of the relative importance of agricultural
as opposed to trade or manufacturing capacities,
the territorial extensions of its power, the
complexity of its division of labour, and
the carrying capacity of its urban centres.
Secondary elements include a developed transportation
system, writing, standardized measurement,
currency, contractual and tort-based legal
systems, art, architecture, mathematics, scientific
understanding, metallurgy, political structures
and organized religion.
Traditionally, polities that managed to achieve
notable military, ideological and economic
power defined themselves as "civilized" as
opposed to other societies or human groupings
outside their sphere of influence – calling
the latter barbarians, savages, and primitives.
In a modern-day context, "civilized people"
have been contrasted with indigenous people
or tribal societies.
== Cultural identity ==
"Civilization" can also refer to the culture
of a complex society, not just the society
itself.
Every society, civilization or not, has a
specific set of ideas and customs, and a certain
set of manufactures and arts that make it
unique.
Civilizations tend to develop intricate cultures,
including a state-based decision making apparatus,
a literature, professional art, architecture,
organized religion and complex customs of
education, coercion and control associated
with maintaining the elite.
The intricate culture associated with civilization
has a tendency to spread to and influence
other cultures, sometimes assimilating them
into the civilization (a classic example being
Chinese civilization and its influence on
nearby civilizations such as Korea, Japan
and Vietnam).
Many civilizations are actually large cultural
spheres containing many nations and regions.
The civilization in which someone lives is
that person's broadest cultural identity.
Many historians have focused on these broad
cultural spheres and have treated civilizations
as discrete units.
Early twentieth-century philosopher Oswald
Spengler, uses the German word Kultur, "culture",
for what many call a "civilization".
Spengler believed a civilization's coherence
is based on a single primary cultural symbol.
Cultures experience cycles of birth, life,
decline and death, often supplanted by a potent
new culture, formed around a compelling new
cultural symbol.
Spengler states civilization is the beginning
of the decline of a culture as "the most external
and artificial states of which a species of
developed humanity is capable".This "unified
culture" concept of civilization also influenced
the theories of historian Arnold J. Toynbee
in the mid-twentieth century.
Toynbee explored civilization processes in
his multi-volume A Study of History, which
traced the rise and, in most cases, the decline
of 21 civilizations and five "arrested civilizations".
Civilizations generally declined and fell,
according to Toynbee, because of the failure
of a "creative minority", through moral or
religious decline, to meet some important
challenge, rather than mere economic or environmental
causes.
Samuel P. Huntington defines civilization
as "the highest cultural grouping of people
and the broadest level of cultural identity
people have short of that which distinguishes
humans from other species".
Huntington's theories about civilizations
are discussed below.
== Complex systems ==
Another group of theorists, making use of
systems theory, looks at a civilization as
a complex system, i.e., a framework by which
a group of objects can be analysed that work
in concert to produce some result.
Civilizations can be seen as networks of cities
that emerge from pre-urban cultures and are
defined by the economic, political, military,
diplomatic, social and cultural interactions
among them.
Any organization is a complex social system
and a civilization is a large organization.
Systems theory helps guard against superficial
but misleading analogies in the study and
description of civilizations.
Systems theorists look at many types of relations
between cities, including economic relations,
cultural exchanges and political/diplomatic/military
relations.
These spheres often occur on different scales.
For example, trade networks were, until the
nineteenth century, much larger than either
cultural spheres or political spheres.
Extensive trade routes, including the Silk
Road through Central Asia and Indian Ocean
sea routes linking the Roman Empire, Persian
Empire, India and China, were well established
2000 years ago, when these civilizations scarcely
shared any political, diplomatic, military,
or cultural relations.
The first evidence of such long distance trade
is in the ancient world.
During the Uruk period, Guillermo Algaze has
argued that trade relations connected Egypt,
Mesopotamia, Iran and Afghanistan.
Resin found later in the Royal Cemetery at
Ur is suggested was traded northwards from
Mozambique.
Many theorists argue that the entire world
has already become integrated into a single
"world system", a process known as globalization.
Different civilizations and societies all
over the globe are economically, politically,
and even culturally interdependent in many
ways.
There is debate over when this integration
began, and what sort of integration – cultural,
technological, economic, political, or military-diplomatic
– is the key indicator in determining the
extent of a civilization.
David Wilkinson has proposed that economic
and military-diplomatic integration of the
Mesopotamian and Egyptian civilizations resulted
in the creation of what he calls the "Central
Civilization" around 1500 BCE.
Central Civilization later expanded to include
the entire Middle East and Europe, and then
expanded to a global scale with European colonization,
integrating the Americas, Australia, China
and Japan by the nineteenth century.
According to Wilkinson, civilizations can
be culturally heterogeneous, like the Central
Civilization, or homogeneous, like the Japanese
civilization.
What Huntington calls the "clash of civilizations"
might be characterized by Wilkinson as a clash
of cultural spheres within a single global
civilization.
Others point to the Crusades as the first
step in globalization.
The more conventional viewpoint is that networks
of societies have expanded and shrunk since
ancient times, and that the current globalized
economy and culture is a product of recent
European colonialism.
== History ==
The notion of world history as a succession
of "civilizations" is an entirely modern one.
In the European Age of Discovery, emerging
Modernity was put into stark contrast with
the
Neolithic and Mesolithic stage of the cultures
of the New World, suggesting
that the complex states had emerged at some
time in prehistory.
The term "civilization" as it is now most
commonly understood, a complex state with
centralisation, social stratification and
specialization of labour, corresponds to early
empires that arise in the Fertile Crescent
in the Early Bronze Age, around roughly 3000
BC.
Gordon Childe defined the emergence of civilization
as the result of two successive revolutions:
the Neolithic Revolution, triggering the development
of settled communities, and the Urban Revolution.
=== Urban Revolution ===
At first, the Neolithic was associated with
shifting subsistence cultivation, where continuous
farming led to the depletion of soil fertility
resulting in the requirement to cultivate
fields further and further removed from the
settlement, eventually compelling the settlement
itself to move.
In major semi-arid river valleys, annual flooding
renewed soil fertility every year, with the
result that population densities could rise
significantly.
This encouraged a secondary products revolution
in which people used domesticated animals
not just for meat, but also for milk, wool,
manure and pulling ploughs and carts – a
development that spread through the Eurasian
Oecumene.
The earlier neolithic technology and lifestyle
was established first in Western Asia (for
example at Göbekli Tepe, from about 9,130
BCE), and later in the Yellow River and Yangtze
basins in China (for example the Pengtoushan
culture from 7,500 BCE), and later spread.
Mesopotamia is the site of the earliest developments
of the Neolithic Revolution from around 10,000
BCE, with civilizations developing from 6,500
years ago.
This area has been identified as having "inspired
some of the most important developments in
human history including the invention of the
wheel, the development of cuneiform script,
mathematics, astronomy and agriculture."
Similar pre-civilized "neolithic revolutions"
also began independently from 7,000 BCE in
northwestern South America (the Norte Chico
civilization) and Mesoamerica.The 8.2 Kiloyear
Arid Event and the 5.9 Kiloyear Interpluvial
saw the drying out of semiarid regions and
a major spread of deserts.
This climate change shifted the cost-benefit
ratio of endemic violence between communities,
which saw the abandonment of unwalled village
communities and the appearance of walled cities,
associated with the first civilizations.
This "urban revolution" marked the beginning
of the accumulation of transferrable surpluses,
which helped economies and cities develop.
It was associated with the state monopoly
of violence, the appearance of a soldier class
and endemic warfare, the rapid development
of hierarchies, and the appearance of human
sacrifice.The civilized urban revolution in
turn was dependent upon the development of
sedentism, the domestication of grains and
animals and development of lifestyles that
facilitated economies of scale and accumulation
of surplus production by certain social sectors.
The transition from complex cultures to civilizations,
while still disputed, seems to be associated
with the development of state structures,
in which power was further monopolized by
an elite ruling class who practised human
sacrifice.Towards the end of the Neolithic
period, various elitist Chalcolithic civilizations
began to rise in various "cradles" from around
3300 BCE, expanding into large-scale empires
in the course of the Bronze Age (Minoan Civilization,
Old Kingdom of Egypt, Akkadian Empire, Assyrian
Empire, Old Assyrian Empire, Phoenicia, Canaan,
Indus Valley, Maya, Neo-Sumerian Empire, Babylonian
Empire, Hittite Empire, Gojoseon, Shang Dynasty).
A parallel development took place independently
in the Pre-Columbian Americas, where the Mayans
began to be urbanised around 500 BCE, and
the fully fledged Aztec and Inca emerged by
the 15th century, briefly before European
contact.
=== Axial Age ===
The Bronze Age collapse was followed by the
Iron Age around 1200 BCE, during which a number
of new civilizations emerged, culminating
in a period from the 8th to the 3rd century
BCE which Karl Jaspers termed the Axial Age,
presented as a critical transitional phase
leading to classical civilization.William
Hardy McNeill proposed that this period of
history was one in which culture contact between
previously separate civilizations saw the
"closure of the oecumene" and led to accelerated
social change from China to the Mediterranean,
associated with the spread of coinage, larger
empires and new religions.
This view has recently been championed by
Christopher Chase-Dunn and other world systems
theorists.
=== Modernity ===
A major technological and cultural transition
to modernity began approximately 1500 CE in
Western Europe, and from this beginning new
approaches to science and law spread rapidly
around the world, incorporating earlier cultures
into the industrial and technological civilization
of the present.
== Fall of civilizations ==
Civilizations have generally ended in one
of two ways; either through being incorporated
into another expanding civilization (e.g.
As Ancient Egypt was incorporated into Hellenistic
Greek, and subsequently Roman civilizations),
or by collapse and reversion to a simpler
form, as happens in what are called Dark Ages.There
have been many explanations put forward for
the collapse of civilization.
Some focus on historical examples, and others
on general theory.
Ibn Khaldūn's Muqaddimah influenced theories
of the analysis, growth and decline of the
Islamic civilization.
He suggested repeated invasions from nomadic
peoples limited development and led to social
collapse.
Edward Gibbon's work The Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire was a well-known and detailed
analysis of the fall of Roman civilization.
Gibbon suggested the final act of the collapse
of Rome was the fall of Constantinople to
the Ottoman Turks in 1453 CE.
For Gibbon, "The decline of Rome was the natural
and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness.
Prosperity ripened the principle of decay;
the cause of the destruction multiplied with
the extent of conquest; and, as soon as time
or accident had removed the artificial supports,
the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure
of its own weight.
The story of the ruin is simple and obvious;
and instead of inquiring why the Roman Empire
was destroyed, we should rather be surprised
that it has subsisted for so long".
Theodor Mommsen in his History of Rome suggested
Rome collapsed with the collapse of the Western
Roman Empire in 476 CE and he also tended
towards a biological analogy of "genesis",
"growth", "senescence", "collapse" and "decay".
Oswald Spengler, in his Decline of the West
rejected Petrarch's chronological division,
and suggested that there had been only eight
"mature civilizations".
Growing cultures, he argued, tend to develop
into imperialistic civilizations, which expand
and ultimately collapse, with democratic forms
of government ushering in plutocracy and ultimately
imperialism.
Arnold J. Toynbee in his A Study of History
suggested that there had been a much larger
number of civilizations, including a small
number of arrested civilizations, and that
all civilizations tended to go through the
cycle identified by Mommsen.
The cause of the fall of a civilization occurred
when a cultural elite became a parasitic elite,
leading to the rise of internal and external
proletariats.
Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex
Societies suggested that there were diminishing
returns to complexity, due to which, as states
achieved a maximum permissible complexity,
they would decline when further increases
actually produced a negative return.
Tainter suggested that Rome achieved this
figure in the 2nd century CE.
Jared Diamond in his 2005 book Collapse: How
Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed suggests
five major reasons for the collapse of 41
studied cultures: environmental damage, such
as deforestation and soil erosion; climate
change; dependence upon long-distance trade
for needed resources; increasing levels of
internal and external violence, such as war
or invasion; and societal responses to internal
and environmental problems.
Peter Turchin in his Historical Dynamics and
Andrey Korotayev et al. in their Introduction
to Social Macrodynamics, Secular Cycles, and
Millennial Trends suggest a number of mathematical
models describing collapse of agrarian civilizations.
For example, the basic logic of Turchin's
"fiscal-demographic" model can be outlined
as follows: during the initial phase of a
sociodemographic cycle we observe relatively
high levels of per capita production and consumption,
which leads not only to relatively high population
growth rates, but also to relatively high
rates of surplus production.
As a result, during this phase the population
can afford to pay taxes without great problems,
the taxes are quite easily collectible, and
the population growth is accompanied by the
growth of state revenues.
During the intermediate phase, the increasing
overpopulation leads to the decrease of per
capita production and consumption levels,
it becomes more and more difficult to collect
taxes, and state revenues stop growing, whereas
the state expenditures grow due to the growth
of the population controlled by the state.
As a result, during this phase the state starts
experiencing considerable fiscal problems.
During the final pre-collapse phases the overpopulation
leads to further decrease of per capita production,
the surplus production further decreases,
state revenues shrink, but the state needs
more and more resources to control the growing
(though with lower and lower rates) population.
Eventually this leads to famines, epidemics,
state breakdown, and demographic and civilization
collapse (Peter Turchin.
Historical Dynamics.
Princeton University Press, 2003:121–127;
Andrey Korotayev et al.
Secular Cycles and Millennial Trends.
Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences, 2006).
Peter Heather argues in his book The Fall
of the Roman Empire: a New History of Rome
and the Barbarians that this civilization
did not end for moral or economic reasons,
but because centuries of contact with barbarians
across the frontier generated its own nemesis
by making them a much more sophisticated and
dangerous adversary.
The fact that Rome needed to generate ever
greater revenues to equip and re-equip armies
that were for the first time repeatedly defeated
in the field, led to the dismemberment of
the Empire.
Although this argument is specific to Rome,
it can also be applied to the Asiatic Empire
of the Egyptians, to the Han and Tang dynasties
of China, to the Muslim Abbasid Caliphate
and others.
Bryan Ward-Perkins, in his book The Fall of
Rome and the End of Civilization, shows the
real horrors associated with the collapse
of a civilization for the people who suffer
its effects, unlike many revisionist historians
who downplay this.
The collapse of complex society meant that
even basic plumbing disappeared from the continent
for 1,000 years.
Similar Dark Age collapses are seen with the
Late Bronze Age collapse in the Eastern Mediterranean,
the collapse of the Maya, on Easter Island
and elsewhere.
Arthur Demarest argues in Ancient Maya: The
Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization,
using a holistic perspective to the most recent
evidence from archaeology, paleoecology, and
epigraphy, that no one explanation is sufficient
but that a series of erratic, complex events,
including loss of soil fertility, drought
and rising levels of internal and external
violence led to the disintegration of the
courts of Mayan kingdoms, which began a spiral
of decline and decay.
He argues that the collapse of the Maya has
lessons for civilization today.
Jeffrey A. McNeely has recently suggested
that "a review of historical evidence shows
that past civilizations have tended to over-exploit
their forests, and that such abuse of important
resources has been a significant factor in
the decline of the over-exploiting society".
Thomas Homer-Dixon in The Upside of Down:
Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of
Civilization, where he considers that the
fall in the energy return on investments.
The energy expended to energy yield ratio
is central to limiting the survival of civilizations.
The degree of social complexity is associated
strongly, he suggests, with the amount of
disposable energy environmental, economic
and technological systems allow.
When this amount decreases civilizations either
have to access new energy sources or they
will collapse.
Feliks Koneczny in his work "On the Plurality
of Civilizations" calls his study the science
on civilizations.
Civilizations fall not because they must or
there exist some cyclical or a "biological"
life span.
There still exist two ancient civilizations
– Brahmin-Hindu and Chinese – which are
not ready to fall any time soon.
Koneczny claimed that civilizations cannot
be mixed into hybrids, an inferior civilization
when given equal rights within a highly developed
civilization will overcome it.
One of Koneczny's claims in his study on civilizations
is that "a person cannot be civilized in two
or more ways" without falling into what he
calls an "abcivilized state" (as in abnormal).
He also stated that when two or more civilizations
exist next to one another and as long as they
are vital, they will be in an existential
combat imposing its own "method of organizing
social life" upon the other.
Absorbing alien "method of organizing social
life" that is civilization and giving it equal
rights yields a process of decay and decomposition.
== Future ==
Political scientist Samuel Huntington, has
argued that the defining characteristic of
the 21st century will be a clash of civilizations.
According to Huntington, conflicts between
civilizations will supplant the conflicts
between nation-states and ideologies that
characterized the 19th and 20th centuries.
These views have been strongly challenged
by others like Edward Said, Muhammed Asadi
and Amartya Sen. Ronald Inglehart and Pippa
Norris have argued that the "true clash of
civilizations" between the Muslim world and
the West is caused by the Muslim rejection
of the West's more liberal sexual values,
rather than a difference in political ideology,
although they note that this lack of tolerance
is likely to lead to an eventual rejection
of (true) democracy.
In Identity and Violence Sen questions if
people should be divided along the lines of
a supposed "civilization", defined by religion
and culture only.
He argues that this ignores the many others
identities that make up people and leads to
a focus on differences.
Cultural Historian Morris Berman suggests
in Dark Ages America: the End of Empire that
in the corporate consumerist United States,
the very factors that once propelled it to
greatness―extreme individualism, territorial
and economic expansion, and the pursuit of
material wealth―have pushed the United States
across a critical threshold where collapse
is inevitable.
Politically associated with over-reach, and
as a result of the environmental exhaustion
and polarization of wealth between rich and
poor, he concludes the current system is fast
arriving at a situation where continuation
of the existing system saddled with huge deficits
and a hollowed-out economy is physically,
socially, economically and politically impossible.
Although developed in much more depth, Berman's
thesis is similar in some ways to that of
Urban Planner, Jane Jacobs who argues that
the five pillars of United States culture
are in serious decay: community and family;
higher education; the effective practice of
science; taxation and government; and the
self-regulation of the learned professions.
The corrosion of these pillars, Jacobs argues,
is linked to societal ills such as environmental
crisis, racism and the growing gulf between
rich and poor.Cultural critic and author Derrick
Jensen argues that modern civilization is
directed towards the domination of the environment
and humanity itself in an intrinsically harmful,
unsustainable, and self-destructive fashion.
Defending his definition both linguistically
and historically, he defines civilization
as "a culture... that both leads to and emerges
from the growth of cities", with "cities"
defined as "people living more or less permanently
in one place in densities high enough to require
the routine importation of food and other
necessities of life".
This need for civilizations to import ever
more resources, he argues, stems from their
over-exploitation and diminution of their
own local resources.
Therefore, civilizations inherently adopt
imperialist and expansionist policies and,
to maintain these, highly militarized, hierarchically
structured, and coercion-based cultures and
lifestyles.
The Kardashev scale classifies civilizations
based on their level of technological advancement,
specifically measured by the amount of energy
a civilization is able to harness.
The Kardashev scale makes provisions for civilizations
far more technologically advanced than any
currently known to exist (see also: Civilizations
and the Future and Space civilization).
Examples of civilizations
== Non-human civilizations ==
The current scientific consensus is that human
beings are the only animal species with the
cognitive ability to create civilizations.
A recent thought experiment, however, has
considered whether it would "be possible to
detect an industrial civilization in the geological
record" given the paucity of geological information
about eras before the quaternary.
== See also ==
== 
Notes and references ==
== Bibliography ==
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== External links ==
The dictionary definition of civilization
at Wiktionary
Quotations related to Civilization at Wikiquote
BBC on civilization
Top 10 oldest civilizations
