Civilizations and World religions

1. Civilizations and World religions 3rd Lecture. Classical and Contemporary Theories on Civilizations

2. Stages of development toward a civilization • We call „civilization” a highly developed, complex and stratified society, which presupposes a longer period of history of evolution. The four main stages of this development are: • 1. Hunter-gatherer bands, which are generally egalitarian. • 2. Horticultural/pastoral societies in which there are generally two inherited social classes; chief and commoner. • 3. Highly stratified structures, or chiefdoms, with several inherited social classes: king, noble, freemen, serf and slave. • 4. Civilizations, with complex social hierarchies and organized, institutional governments. • Sources: 1. DeVore, Irven, and Lee, Richard (1999) "Man the Hunter" (Aldine). 2. Beck, Roger B.; Linda Black, Larry S. Krieger, Phillip C. Naylor, Dahia Ibo Shabaka, (1999). World History: Patterns of Interaction. Evanston, IL: McDougal Littell.

3. Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) was a historian, philosopher, who presented his classical, overall modell about the development of civilizations, though in a highly constructive, speculative way, in his two volumes main work: „The Decline of the West”, („Untergang des Abendlandes”), 1918, 1922. • According to his interpretation civilizations are just like living organisms, which are born, which grow up, get old and finally die. • He listed eight major civilizations: Babylonian, Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Mexican (Mayan/Aztec), Classical (Greek/Roman), Arabian, Western or "European-American". In a metaphoric manner he spoke about the „spring”, „summer” and „winter” phases of a civilization.

4. Classical theories 1b. Oswald Spengler „The Decline of the West” 2. • „Cultures are organisms, and world-history is their collective biography”, (Spengler, 1996: 104). „In the destinies of the several Cultures that follow upon one another, grow up with one another, touch, overshadow, and suppress one another, is compressed the whole content of human history.”, (loc. cit.). • „Culture is the prime-phenomenon of all past and future world-history”, (op. cit. 105). „Every Culture passes through the age-phases of the individual man Each has its childhood, youth, manhood and old age”, (op. cit. 107). • „Looked at in this way, the ‘Decline of the West’ comprises nothing less than the problem of Civilisation. We have before us one of the fundamental questions of all higher history. What is Civilization, understood as the organiclogical sequel, fulfilment and finale of a culture?”, (op. cit. 31).

5. Classical theories 1c. Oswald Spengler „The Decline of the West” 3. „For every Culture has its own Civilization. In this work, for the first time the two words, hitherto used to express an indefinite, more or less ethical, distinction, are used in a periodic sense, to express a strict and necessary organic succession. The Civilization is the inevitable destiny of the Culture, and in this rinciple we obtain the viewpoint from which the deepest and gravest problems of historical morphology become capable of solution. Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thingbecoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again.”, (loc. cit.).

6. Classical theories 2a. Arnold J. Toynbee.The challange-answer theory 1. • Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975) was a Brittish historian, on whom Spengler’s ideas had a great influence, but who rejected Spengler’s biologist view on civilizations, and his conception about the unavoidable destiny of them. • „In 1934-1954, Toynbee's ten-volume A Study of History came out in three separate installments. He followed Oswald Spengler in taking a comparative topical approach to independent civilizations. Toynbee's said they displayed striking parallels in their origin, growth, and decay. Toynbee rejected Spengler's biological model of civilizations as organisms with a typical life span of 1,000 years. • Of the 21 civilizations Toynbee identified, sixteen were dead by 1940 and four of the remaining five were under severe pressure from the one named Western Christendom - or simply The West. He explained breakdowns of civilizations as a failure of creative power in the creative minority, which henceforth becomes a merely 'dominant' minority; that is followed by an answering withdrawal of allegiance and mimesis on the part of the majority; finally there is a consequent loss of social unity in the society as a whole. • Toynbee explained decline as due to their moral failure. Many readers, especially in America, rejoiced in his implication (in vols. 1-6) that only a return to some form of Christianity could halt the breakdown of western civilization which began with the Reformation. Volumes 7-10, published in 1954 abandoned the religious message and his popular audience slipped away, while scholars gleefully picked apart his mistakes.”, (Source: Wikipedia).

7. Classical theories 2b. Arnold J. Toynbee.The challange-answer theory 2. • „Toynbee's ideas and approach to history may be said to fall into the discipline of Comparativehistory. While they may be compared to those used by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West, he rejected Spengler's deterministic view that civilizations rise and fall according to a natural and inevitable cycle. For Toynbee, a civilization might or might not continue to thrive, depending on the challenges it faced and its responses to them. • Toynbee presented history as the rise and fall of civilizations, rather than the history of nation-states or of ethnic groups. He identified his civilizations according to cultural or religious rather than national criteria. Thus, the ‘Western Civilization’, comprising all the nations that have existed in Western Europe since the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, was treated as a whole, and distinguished from both the ‘Orthodox’ civilization of Russia and the Balkans, and from the Greco-Roman civilization that preceded it.”, (loc.cit.).

8. Classical theories 2c. Arnold J. Toynbee.The challange-answer theory 3. • „With the civilizations as units identified, he presented the history of each in terms of challenge-and-response. Civilizations arose in response to some set of challenges of extreme difficulty, when ‘creative minorities’ devised solutions that reoriented their entire society. • Challenges and responses were physical, as when the Sumerians exploited the intractable swamps of southern Iraq by organizing the Neolithic inhabitants into a society capable of carrying out large-scale irrigation projects; or social, as when the Catholic Church resolved the chaos of post-Roman Europe by enrolling the new Germanic kingdoms in a single religious community. • When a civilization responds to challenges, it grows. Civilizations declined when their leaders stopped responding creatively, and the civilizations then sank owing to nationalism, militarism, and the tyranny of a despotic minority. Toynbee argued that ‘Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.’ For Toynbee, civilizations were not intangible or unalterable machines but a network of social relationships within the border and therefore subject to both wise and unwise decisions they made.”, (loc.cit.).

9. Classical theories 3a. Norbert Elias, „The Civilizing Process” 1. • Norbert Elias (1897-1990) was a German-born sociologist and historian, who had to flee in 1933 because of his Jewish origin, and later became a British citizen. His main work is „The Civilizing Process”, 1939, („Über den Prozeß der Zivilization”), in two volumes. • Norbert Elias described „the process of civilization” as a slow and very long change and development of the structures of personality, which he traced back to the changes of social structures. • It is important to mention that he formulated his model of development first of all concerning the history of Western Europe between cca. 800 and 1900. • Factors of social changes, according to him, are on the one hand the continual technical, technological development and the differentiation and stratification of societies, and on the other hand the permanent competition and elimination contest among men and groups.

10. Classical theories 3b. Norbert Elias, „The Civilizing Process” 2. • „The first volume, The History of Manners, traces the historical developments of the European habitus, or ‘second nature,’ the particular individual psychic structures molded by social attitudes. Elias traced how post-medieval European standards regarding violence, sexual behaviour, bodily functions, table manners and forms of speech were gradually transformed by increasing thresholds of shame and repugnance, working outward from a nucleus in court etiquette. The internalized ‘self-restraint’ imposed by increasingly complex networks of social connections developed the ‘psychological’ self-perceptions that Freud recognized as the ‘super-ego.’” • „The second volume, State Formation and Civilization, looks into the causes of these processes and finds them in the increasingly centralized Early Modern state and the increasingly differentiated and interconnected web of society. ”, (Source: Wikipedia).

11. Modern Theories 1. Fukuyama and the End of History • Francis Fukuyama (1952-) is an American political scientist, political economist and historian. He is best known for his book „The End of History and the Last Man”, 1992. • „I argued that liberal democracy may constitute the ‘end point of mankind's ideological evolution’ and the ‘final form of human government,’ and as such constituted the ‘end of history.’ That is, while earlier forms of government were characterized by grave defects and irrationalities that led to their eventual collapse, liberal democracy was arguably free from such fundamental internal contradictions.” • Our future will not be characterized by inspiring and magnifique fights for ideas anymore, but by earth-bound technological and economic questions. Our future will be peaceful, but somehow boring.

12. Modern Theories 2a. Huntington and the Clash of Civilizations 1. • Samuel P. Huntington (1927-2008) was a political scientist, historian, the Phd-supervisor of Fukuyama on Yale University. He wrote a polemic book with the title „The Clash of Civilizations” in 1993 as an answer to the work of his former student, Francis Fukuyama. • „Huntington began his thinking by surveying the diverse theories about the nature of global politics in the post-Cold War period. Some theorists and writers argued that human rights, liberal democracy and capitalist free market economy had become the only remaining ideological alternative for nations in the post-Cold War world. Specifically, Francis Fukuyama argued that the world had reached the 'end of history' in a Hegelian sense.”, (Source: Wikipedia).

13. Modern Theories 2b. Huntington and the Clash of Civilizations 2. • „Huntington believed that while the age of ideology had ended, the world had only reverted to a normal state of affairs characterized by cultural conflict. In his thesis, he argued that the primary axis of conflict in the future will be along cultural and religious lines. • As an extension, he posits that the concept of different civilizations, as the highest rank of cultural identity, will become increasingly useful in analyzing the potential for conflict.”, (loc.cit.).

14. Modern Theories 2c. Huntington and the Clash of Civilizations 3. • „Russia, Japan, and India are what Huntington terms 'swing civilizations' and may favor either side. Russia, for example, clashes with the many Muslim ethnic groups on its southern border (such as Chechnya) but—according to Huntington—cooperates with Iran to avoid further Muslim-Orthodox violence in Southern Russia, and to help continue the flow of oil. Huntington argues that a "Sino-Islamic connection" is emerging in which China will cooperate more closely with Iran, Pakistan, and other states to augment its international position.” • „Huntington also argues that civilizational conflicts are ‘particularly prevalent between Muslims and non-Muslims’, identifying the ‘bloody borders’ between Islamic and non-Islamic civilizations. This conflict dates back as far as the initial thrust of Islam into Europe, its eventual expulsion in the Iberian reconquest, the attacks of the Ottoman Turks on Eastern Europe and Vienna, and the European imperial division of the Islamic nations in the 1800s and 1900s.”, (loc.cit).

15. Modern Theories 2d. Huntington and the Clash of Civilizations 4. • Huntington also believes that some of the factors contributing to this conflict are that both Christianity (which has influenced Western civilization) and Islam are: • Missionary religions, seeking conversion of others • Universal, "all-or-nothing" religions, in the sense that it is believed by both sides that only their faith is the correct one • Teleological religions, that is, that their values and beliefs represent the goals of existence and purpose in human existence. • Irreligious people who violate the base principles of those religions are perceived to be furthering their own pointless aims, which leads to violent interactions.

16. Modern Theories 2e. Huntington and the Clash of Civilizations 5. • According to Huntington the deepest and most dangerous conflicts in the Post-Socialist world will not be between different social classes or between the riches and poors, but between different cultural entities. • The actual questions of daily politics could be traced back to cultural differences. The importance of Western Civilization will decrease in the future, and that of the non-Western Civilizations will increase. The global politics will be multicultural and mulilateral.

17. Modern Theories 3a. Niall Ferguson: the „Six Killer Apps” of the West 1. • Niall Ferguson (1964) is a British historian. According to his theory, six essential factors made Western cultures and societies. He called these six factors „the killer apps of the West”. • 1. Competition. Europe was politically fragmented into multiple monarchies and republics, which were in turn internally divided into competing corporate entities, among them the ancestors of modern business corporations. • 2.The Scientific Revolution. All the major 17th-century breakthroughs in mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, and biology happened in Western Europe. • 3.The Rule of Law and Representative Government. An optimal system of social and political order emerged in the English-speaking world, based on private-property rights and the representation of property owners in elected legislatures. • 4.Modern Medicine. Nearly all the major 19th- and 20th-century breakthroughs in health care were made by Western Europeans and North Americans. • 5.The Consumer Society. The Industrial Revolution took place where there was both a supply of productivity-enhancing technologies and a demand for more, better, and cheaper goods, beginning with cotton garments. • 6.The Work Ethic. Westerners were the first people in the world to combine more extensive and intensive labor with higher savings rates, permitting sustained capital accumulation.

18. Modern Theories 3b. Niall Ferguson: the „Six Killer Apps” of the West 2. • But Ferguson also shared his doubts with the public that the West could easily lose these advantages if it became „lazy”, and did not concentrate permanently on maintaining and even enhancing these achievements. • „For hundreds of years, these killer apps were essentially monopolized by Europeans and their cousins who settled in North America and Australasia. They are the best explanation for what economic historians call "the great divergence": the astonishing gap that arose between Western standards of living and those in the rest of the world. In 1500 the average Chinese was richer than the average North American. By the late 1970s the American was more than 20 times richer than the Chinese.” • „I am not one of those people filled with angst at the thought of a world in which the average American is no longer vastly richer than the average Chinese. I welcome the escape of hundreds of millions of Asians from poverty, not to mention the improvements we are seeing in South America and parts of Africa. But there is a second, more insidious cause of the "great reconvergence," which I do deplore—and that is the tendency of Western societies to delete their own killer apps.”

19. Modern Theories 4a. Jared Diamond, „Guns, Germs and Steel” 1. • Jared Mason Diamond (1937) is an American anthropologist, physiologist, biologist, geographer who is best known, for his books: The Third Chimpanzee (1991/2004), Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (2005). • He derived the major differences in economic and technological development between societies from geographic, environmental and agricultural peculiarities of the homeland of the peoples.

20. Modern Theories 4b. Jared Diamond, „Guns, Germs and Steel” 2. • „The prologue opens with an account of Diamond's conversation with Yali, a New Guinean politician. The conversation turned to the obvious differences in power and technology between Yali's people and the Europeans who dominated the land for 200 years, differences that neither of them considered due to any genetic superiority of Europeans. Yali asked, using the local term "cargo" for inventions and manufactured goods, "Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?" (p. 14).” • „Diamond realized the same question seemed to apply elsewhere: "People of Eurasian origin... dominate the world in wealth and power." Other peoples, after having thrown off colonial domination, still lag in wealth and power. Still others, he says, "have been decimated, subjugated, and in some cases even exterminated by European colonialists." (p. 15) ”

21. Modern Theories 4c. Jared Diamond, „Guns, Germs and Steel” 3. • „The peoples of other continents (Sub-Saharan Africans, Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians and New Guineans, and the original inhabitants of tropical Southeast Asia) have been largely conquered, displaced and in some extreme cases – referring to Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians and South Africa's indigenous Khoisan peoples – largely exterminated by farm-based societies such as Eurasians and Bantu. • He believes this is due to the societies' military and political advantages, stemming from the early rise of agriculture after the last Ice Age. He proposes explanations to account for such disproportionate distributions of power and achievements.”, (Source: Wikipedia)