Introduction to World Civilization Dersi 1. Ünite Özet

Defining a civilization

In the study of human development, several scientific disciplines took part. The scientific tendency in historiography is more toward analyzing than synthesizing. In Oriental historiography one of the earliest researchers of civilization were:

• Fukuzawa Yukichi (1835-1901) in Japan, who defined it as follows: “civilization comforts man physically and elevates him spiritually…
• Masaki Miyaki (2004) argued that in the 21st century that in “the Knowledge Society,” people look mostly for artificial intelligence in profit-driven data mining and robotics, and they neglect moral values of natural intelligence.
  In Western historiography, six attempts were undertaken to define a grand model of human development history.
• Oswald Spengler , a German philosopher (1880-1936) published a book on The Decline of the West, 1918-22, Spengler maintained that history has a natural development. He predicted a phase of “Caesarism” in the future development of Western Culture, which he believed was in its last stage.
• Arnold Toynbee , an English historian (1889-1975) published his greatest work A Study of History (1934- 1961). He compared the history of twenty-six different civilizations. He believed that societies thrive best in response to challenges and that a society’s most important task is to create a religion.
• Feliks Koneczny , a Polish historian wrote three books on the theory of civilizations: On the Plurality of Civilizations, For an Order in History, and History Laws). He was an empirical theoretician who discovered (in contrast to Spengler’s a priori model) that there is no one linear history of Mankind. A civilization for him is a method of collective life’s regime. His main inquiry was to find factors differentiating civilizations. They are named Quincunx: Truth, Goodness, Beauty, Health, and Prosperity. Also, according to him, the Triple Law differentiates civilizations;
  • The first law; each civilization has a cause and purpose.
  • The second law; to endure, each civilization must harmonize interrelations among categories of existence and laws. Otherwise, a civilization may vanish.
  • The third law; mergers between civilizations lead to chaos, disintegration, and decay.
• Pitirim Sorokin , a Russian-American professor at Harvard, in his Social and Culture Dynamics, he quantified all conceivable components of a culture from Greco-Roman to Western. He collected data spanning a period of 2,500 years and discovered a pattern of recurrent fluctuation between “sensate” and “ideational” value systems:
  • During the sensate period, life is controlled by a materialistic worldview
  • During the ideational period, life is controlled by spirituality
  • Occasionally, there may occur a harmonious combination of the best elements of both types. Sorokin calls these happy periods “idealistic,” and they are characterized by a balance of faith, reason, and empiricism
  • These fluctuations of value systems, according to Sorokin are controlled by two principles:
    • The principle of “immanent selfdetermination,” which means that a sociocultural system unfolds according to its inherited potentialities.
    • The principle of “limits,” which states that growth cannot last forever since eventually it exhausts its creativity and begins to wane.
• Alfred Louis Kroeber , an American anthropologist. The basis of Kroeber’s point of view is about the natural history of culture, with strong emphasis on;
  • Humanistic factors, particularly silent ones,
  • Classification of cultures,
  • Cultural phenomenon.
• Fernand Braudel, a French historian, was a “structuralist” who perceived human development to occur in three historical structures (“measures of time”):
• the quasi-immobile structure (la longue durée), the intermediate scale of “conjectures,” (rarely longer than a few generations), and the rapid time-scale of events. In his book, A History of Civilizations, he assumes that the history of human development is the history of civilization.
• Rushton Coulbourne reserved the term “civilized” for the large societies and the term “civilization” for their high culture considered abstractly He found the first seven primary civilized societies in river valleys (Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Indian, Andean Society, Chinese Society), one in a small island (Cretan Society) and another in a tropical forest (Middle American Society).
• Carroll Quigley criticizes approaches to periodization of history, offering seven stages of human development in times of 950-1950 (gestation, expansion, conflict, expansion, conflict, expansion, conflict. Each stage divides into seven levels; intellectual, religious outlook, social group, economic control, economic organization, political, and military).
• Matthew Melko thinks that civilizations are large and complex cultures, which can control their environments.
• David Wilkinson roposes to analyze only one Central Civilization, not several ones. For him, civilizations are not cultural groups but rather sociopolitical groups or polycultures. His civilizations are social units, larger than states integrated by political interest.
• Lee D. Snyder’s basic unit of study is the Historic Cycle of 300 to 400 years, when macro and micro-history can be analyzed within a framework of five dimensions: economic, socio-political, intellectual (insight, spiritual aspect, subjective side, ideas, “culture”), geographic, and expressive (art, literature, and music).
• Felipe Fernández-Armesto (2001) defines “a civilization” as an area or as a period distinguished, in the mind of the person using the term, by striking continuities in ways of life and thought and feelings. He recognizes “barbaric,” or “savage” or primitive” societies. Societies, which have achieved self-differentiation can be called “civilized.”
• Immanuel Wallerstein , offered a tool on how to recognize the most useful interpretation of what happened historically in his book In The Modern World-System (1974). In his interpretation, “units of analysis” are “world-systems,” which mean something other than the modern nation-state, something larger than the nationstate, and something that was defined by the boundaries of an effective, ongoing division of labor.
• William McGaughey’s book on electronic civilization (2001), which shows how civilization has moved from print to electronic culture, and its ideals have changed from the classic “truth, beauty, and good” to an elusive element called rhythm (the energy and control of the individual and of human society); and how selfconsciousness (concentrating on ourselves), enemy of rhythm, underlies the complexity of modern life.
• Neil Postman insists that we live in “technopoly”, which surrounds culture with technology. A good sign of it is a statement that “distance is dead” (Cairncross, 1997), because geography, borders, time zones are becoming irrelevant to the way we conduct our business and personal lives, courtesy of the info-communication revolution, which allows us to travel less to achieve the same results.
• Levy perceives the situation about the number of the computers and chips embedded leading to the emergence of the Global Digital Nervous System as he birth of “collective intelligence” which develops a new world of Mankind, which is based on cyberspace.
  Sensor networks such as the emerging Internet of Things have already begun to track everything from weather to inventory, stirring fears of government and corporate intrusion.
• Arthur and Marylouise Kroker focused on what is gained and what is lost by being digital in their fascinating book under a very meaningful title “Digital Delirium.”
• Grossman (1995) thinks that we are even building the Electronic Republic, where democracy is being redefined by the info-communication processes.
• Lewis Mumford (1966) was one of first who understood the role of technology very well.

About 40,000-50,000 years ago, humans underwent a very important genetic mutation, when the DRD4 gene was developed that encodes the dopamine neurotransmitter. It is this neurotransmitter which is responsible for human personality traits (Ding et al).

BCE stands for “Before Common Era,” or “Before Current Era.”

The climate changes that occurred around 40,000-30,000 BCE helped humans demonstrate their more developed societies, allowing them to migrate across continents and form the beginnings of infrastructure.

About 7,500 BCE, villages were growing in nearby Anatolia (contemporary Turkey).

About 4,000 BCE citystates were formed in the Mesopotamia Valley; one of those was Uruk, where several thousand people lived who knew crafts, architecture, and writing. These city-states were united under power keeping dynasties and led to the creation of the Mesopotamian Civilization, the first historic civilization.

Types of Civilizations

There is only one world civilization yet there are about 26 to 29 main autonomous civilizations (according to different authors) that have been developed in the last 6,000 years. The world civilization as a continuum never dies - only evolves from one stage to another. This evolution takes place through the life cycle of autonomous civilizations. The first autonomous civilization was the Mesopotamian Civilization (including Sumerian) .

• Societal civilizations: Autonomous civilizations rose in a response to physical challenges of nature (ecosystem). Humans began to organize themselves into a society, which provided exchangeable and specialized services, such as food hunting, food production, house building, road construction, transportation, health care, entertainment, and so forth. These services and growing human communication led towards the formation of cities.
• Cultural civilization: The societal civilization has been threatened by its own internal structure involving power, wealth creation, beliefs enforcement, family formation, leadership, and so forth. As societal civilizations evolved into more complex entities, cultural manipulation managed them. The cultural civilization has applied religion as the main tool of cultural control.
• Infrastructural civilization: The cultural civilization evolves into a civilization with challenges generated by intra-civilizational and inter-civilizational issues of war and peace. These types of issues have been managed by technological means of domination. Technology drives the development of infrastructural civilizations.

In most autonomous civilizations one can differentiate more than one culture, except for the Egyptian, Hittite, and Japanese Civilizations, which are monocultural.

Civilization is an info-material structure developed by humans to effectively cope with themselves, nature, and their creator. The mission of a civilization is to improve human existence. The Universe system is composed of three subsystems: humans, nature (ecosystem), and civilization. The internal system of civilization recognizesthe following elements (dimensions):

• Society
• Culture
• Infrastructure

There are 49 empirical components of civilization (on pg. 13, in figure 1.10)

Civilizing Society and The Types of Human Entities

A society is a human entity which is a set of structured relationships among a group of humans that can be organized under several types, ranging from less to more flexible ones.

• An Individual
• A family
• A band – a few dozen people who move continuously in the search for food.
• A tribe -a group of (especially primitive) families or communities, linked by social, economic, religious, or blood ties, and usually having common customs, dialect, and a recognized, informal leader. A tribe can be considered a segmented society devoted to horticulture or pastoralism rather than hunting and gathering.
• An ethnic group – a homogeneous community at an early stage of sharing the same culture and awareness of togetherness that strives for further civilizational development (for example, Incas).
• A chiefdom – an autonomous, sociopolitical unit comprising several villages or communities under the permanent controlof a paramount chief
• An advanced society: Along with the development of powerand economic infrastructures, the societytransforms into a people.
• A people is a politically and economicallyorganized society, where one can distinguisha hierarchy of subordinated folks.
• A proto-nation is an entity ruled mostly by an empire.
• A nation A nation is an entity which has a common language, culture, memory of historic events, and “national consciousness.”
• An empire
• A power is a state, which is militarily or economically strong
• A superpower is a state, which in its military arsenal has atomic bombs and is politically very influential.
• A hegemonic power is a state, which dominates the world politically, militarily, economically, and scientifically.
• A political society is a multi-ethnic entity which evolves from a nation.
• A transnational community is a regional entity, which organizes itself against the challenges of the global economy.
• A supra-national community is a crosswholenational entity, which removes states’ borders in a formal sense and in a sense of economic and political barriers.
• A spherical community is an entity of several nations from the same civilization.
• The global society or the society of postnations is the entity which emerges from the development of a global economy and global culture.
• The global political society is an entity that may emerge from the global society.
• Utopia is a society of calm and stagnation or perhaps even the beginning of civilization death. It seems at the first glance that utopia is the desired state of the world civilization; however, it may be just its end.

Perhaps it is time to combine early and contemporary definitions of civilizations (Targowski, 2009b) by emphasizing these following important attributes:

1. Large society
   a. Specializing in labor
   b. Self-differentiating
   c. Sharing the same knowledge system
2. Space and Time
   a. Autonomous fuzzy reification
   b. Distinguished and extended area or period
   c. Reification not a part of a larger entity
3. Cultural system, values and symbol driven
   a. Communication driven (e.g.: literate and electronic media)
   b. Religion, wealth, and power driven
4. Infrastructural system, technology-driven by, first, at least one of the following:
   a. Urban infrastructure
   b. Agricultural Infrastructure
   c. Other infrastructures (Industrial, Information and so forth)
5. Cycle-driven
   a. Rising, growing, declining, and falling over time

Based on these attributes, the composite definition of civilization is as follows: Civilization is a large society living in an autonomous, fuzzy reification (invisiblevisible) which is not a part of larger one and exists over an extended period. It specializes in labor and differentiates from other civilizations by developing its own advanced cultural system driven by communication, religion, wealth, power, and sharing the same knowledge/wisdom system within complex urban, agricultural infrastructures, and others such as industrial, information ones. It also progresses in a cycle or cycles of rising, growing, declining and falling.

A short definition of a specific civilization is as follows: A civilization is a complex societal organism of compatibly interactive entities of religion, society, culture(s) and infrastructure in a large frame of territory and time, usually embracing several nations and centuries/millennia. It has its past, present, and future states.

Grand Laws of the World Civilization

• The First Grand Law of the World Civilization is the Ability of Man to Develop: People have seen themselves as entering the world with a potential of many gifts, and they hope to fulfill these gifts in the development of their own lives (Bronowski and Mazlish, 1999).
• The Second Grand Law of the World Civilization is the Right of Man to Freedom and Reason. We formulate it as follows: People constantly aim for freedom; the range of this freedom and reason depends on the level of a nation’s knowledge, communication ability and the knowledge of the international community (Targowski 2009a, p. 35).
• The Third Grand Law of the World Civilization is the Law of Conscious Historical Evolution, which we formulate in the following way: Mankind consciously steers the development of civilization through the formulation of main ideas and values of a given epoch (Targowski 2009a, p. 35).
• The Fourth Grand Law of the World Civilization is the Historical Success of a Country’s Harmony, which develops in the following way: The historical degree of a country’s success is proportioned to the level of harmony among political, social, and economic domains (Targowski 2009a, p. 36).