Civilization and Beyond by Scott Nearing

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[Transcriber's note: The typographical errors of the original are
preserved in this etext.]

CIVILIZATION AND BEYOND

Learning From History

By Scott Nearing

This book is not copyrighted. It may be reproduced by anybody and
distributed in any quantity as a whole. It should not be summarized,
abbreviated, garbled or chopped into out-of-context fragments.

Social Science Institute, Harborside, Maine

August 1975

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface
INTRODUCTION: Thoughts about History and Civilization

PART I _The Pageant of Experiments with Civilization_
1. Experiments in Egypt and Eurasia
2. Rome's Outstanding Experiment
3. The Origins of Western Civilization
4. The Life Cycle of Western Civilization
5. Features Common to Civilizations

PART II _A Social Analysis of Civilization_
6. The Politics of Civilization
7. The Economics of Civilization
8. The Sociology of Civilization
9. Ideologies of Civilization

PART III _Civilization Is Becoming Obsolete_
10. World-wide Revolution Disrupts Civilization
11. Western Civilization Attempts Suicide
12. Talking Peace and Waging War

PART IV _Steps Beyond Civilization_
13. Ten Building Blocks for a New World
14. Moving Toward World Federation
15. Integrating a World Economy
16. Conserving our Natural Environment
17. Re-vamping the Social Life of the Planet
18. Man Could Change Human Nature
19. Man Could Break Out of the Age-Long Prison-House
of Civilization and Enter a New World

PREFACE

LEARNING FROM HISTORY

Human history may be viewed from various angles. The easiest history to
write concerns the doings of a few well known people and their
involvement in some memorable events. History may also concern itself
with inventions and discoveries: the use of fire, of the wheel or
smelting metals. It may center around sources of food, means of shelter,
or the making of records. It may be concerned with the construction and
decoration of cities, kingdoms and empires.

Social history enters the picture with travel, transportation,
communication, trade. Human beings group themselves in families, clans
and tribes, in voluntary associations; they compete, plunder, conquer,
enslave, exploit; they co-operate for construction and destruction.
Political history is but one aspect of man's group contacts and group
projects.

There have been histories of particular civilizations and of
civilization as a field of historical research. With minor exceptions
none of the authors that I have consulted has attempted an analytical
treatment of civilization as a sociological phenemenon.

Scientists start from hunches, examine available data, advance tentative
conclusions, test them in the light of wider observations, and round out
their research by formulating general principles or "laws." This
scientific approach has been used in many fields of observation and
study. I am applying the formula to one aspect of social history: the
appearance, development, maturity, decline and disappearance of the vast
co-ordinations of collective, experimental human effort called
civilizations.

"Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, where are they?" asked Byron. He might
have added: "What were they? How did they come into being? What was the
nature of their experience? Why did they rise from small beginnings,
develop into wide-spread colossal complexes of wealth and power, and
then, after longer or shorter periods of existence, break up and
disappear from the stage of social history?"

Such questions are far removed from the lives of people who are busy
with everyday affairs. In one sense they _are_ remote; in the larger
picture, however, they are of vital concern to anyone and everyone now
living in civilized communities. If Assyrians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans
and Carthaginians built extensive empires and massive civilizations that
flourished for a time, then broke up and disappeared, are we to follow
blindly and unthinkingly in their footsteps? Or do we study their
experiences, benefit from their successes and learn from their mistakes?
Can we not take lessons out of their voluminous notebooks, avoid their
blunders and direct our own feet along paths that fulfil our lives at
the same time that they meet the widespread demand for survival and
well-being?

Civilization has been extensively experimental. Several thousand years,
during which civilizations have appeared, disappeared and reappeared,
have been too brief to establish and stabilize a hard and fast social
pattern. As the complexity of civilizations has increased, variations
and deviations have grown in number and intensity. With the advent of
western civilization a culture pattern is being put together which
differs widely from its predecessors.

All civilized peoples seem to have developed from simple beginnings and
experimented with broader and more complicated life styles. In western
civilization the number of experiments has increased and the span of
their deviations seems to have broadened. Under the circumstances an
analysis of civilization must take for granted not only social change
but the development of, human society along lines which link up the
outstanding structural and functional ideas, institutions and practices
of successive civilizations.

I propose in this inquiry to state certain accepted facts from the
history of civilizations and of contemporary experience. I also propose
to analyze the facts and generalize them in such a way that the results
of the study may provide an understanding of the human social past,
together with some guide-lines that will prove useful in the formulation
and implementation of the present-day policy and procedure of civilized
peoples, nations, empires and of the western civilization.

This book is not a popular treatise, nor is it a textbook. Rather. it is
an attempt to summarize an area of critical human concern. Academia may
not use such material: nevertheless it should be available to students
and administrators who must plan and direct the social future of
humankind.

_Civilization and Beyond_ rounds out a series of studies that I began in
1928 with _Where Is Civilization Going_? The series has extended through
_The Twilight of Empire_ (1930), _War_ (1931) and _The Tragedy of
Empire_ (1946). Up to 1914 my field of study was confined largely to the
economics of distribution. The war of 1914-18 pushed me rudely and
decisively into the broader field. I have described the process in my
political autobiography: _Making of a Radical_ (1971).

I hope that this study will provide a useful link in the chain of
material dealing with the structure and function of man's social
environment, leading directly into an action program that will conclude
the preservation and loving economical use of nature's rich gifts and
the dedication of thousands of young aspiring men and women to the good
life here, now and indefinitely, into a bright, productive and creative
future.

As of this date seven publishers have examined the manuscript of this
work and declined to publish it. All felt that it would not find any
considerable reading public. Nevertheless, I feel that the work should
be printed and distributed because it carries a message that may be of
first rate importance to the future of my fellow humans.

Scott Nearing.

Harborside, Maine May 5, 1975

INTRODUCTION

THOUGHTS ABOUT HISTORY AND CIVILIZATION

We may think and talk about civilization as one pattern or level of
culture, one stage through which human life flows and ebbs. In that
sense we may regard it abstractly and historically, as we regard the
most recent ice age or the long and painful record of large-scale
chattel slavery.

From quite another viewpoint we may think of civilization as a
technologically advanced way of life developed by various peoples
through ages of unrecorded experiment and experience, and followed by
millions during the period of written history. It is also the way of
life that the West has been trying to impose upon the entire human
family since European empires launched their crusade to westernize,
modernize and civilize the planet Earth.

A third approach would regard civilization as an evolving life style,
conceived before the earliest days of recorded human history and matured
through the series of experiments marking the development of
civilization as we have known it during the five centuries from 1450 to
1975.

Thinking in terms of this age-old experience, with six or more thousand
years of social history as a background, it is possible to give a fairly
exact meaning to the word "civilization" as it has been lived and is
being lived by the present-day West. It is also possible to understand
the history of previous civilizations in cycle after cycle of their
rise, their development, decline and extinction. At the same time it
will enable the reader to recognize the relationship (and difference)
between the words "culture" and "civilization".

Human culture is the sum total of ideas, relationships, artifacts,
institutions, purposes and ideals currently functioning in any
community. Three elements are present in each human society: man, nature
and the social structure. Human culture at any point in its history is
the social structure: the aggregate of existing culture traits, the
products of man's ingenuity, inventiveness and experimentation, set in
their natural environment.

Civilization is a level of culture built upon foundations laid down
through long periods of pre-civilized living. These foundations consist
of artifacts, implements, customs, habit patterns and institutions
produced and developed in numerous scattered localities by groups of
food-gatherers, migrating herdsmen, cultivators, hand craftsmen and
traders and eventually in urban communities built around centers of
wealth and power: the cities which are the nuclei of every civilization.

Urban centers, housing trade, commerce, fabrication and finance, with
their hinterlands of food-gatherers, herdsmen, cultivators, craftsmen
and transporters, are the nuclei around which and upon which recurring
civilizations are built. Within and around these urban centers there
grows up a complex of associations, activities, institutions and ideas
designed to promote, develop and defend the particular life pattern.

A civilization is a cluster of peoples, nations and empires so related
in time and space that they share certain ideas, practices, institutions
and means of procedure and survival. Among these features of a civilized
community we may list:

(1) means of communication, record-keeping, transportation
and trade. This would include a spoken language, a method
of enumeration, writing in pictographs or symbols; an
alphabet, a written language, inscribed on stone, bone,
wood, parchment, paper; means of preserving the records
of successive generations; paths, roads, bridges; a system
for educating successive generations; meeting places and
trading points; means for barter or exchange;

(2) an interdependent urban-oriented economy based on division
of labor and specialization; on private property in the
essential means of production and in consumer goods and
services; on a competitive survival struggle for wealth,
prestige and power between individuals and social groups;
and on the exploitation of man, society and nature for the
material benefit of the privileged few who occupy the summit
of the social pyramid;

(3) a unified, centralized political apparatus or bureaucracy
that attempts to plan, direct and administer the political,
economic, ideological and sociological structure;

(4) a self-selected and self-perpetuating oligarchy that owns
the wealth, holds the power and pulls the strings;

(5) an adequate labor force for farming, transport, industry,
mining;

(6) large middle-class elements: professionals, technicians,
craftsmen, tradesmen, lesser bureaucrats, and a semi-parasitic
fringe of camp-followers;

(7) a highly professional, well-trained, amply-financed apparatus
for defense and offense;

(8) a complex of institutions and social practices which will
indoctrinate, persuade and when necessary limit deviation
and maintain social conformity;

(9) agreed religious practices and other cultural features.

This description of civilization covers the essential features of
western civilization and the sequence of predecessor civilizations for
which adequate records exist.

Successive civilizations have introduced new culture traits and
abandoned old ones as the pageant of history moved from one stage to the
next, or advanced and retreated through cycles. Using this description
as a working formula, it is possible to understand the development
followed in the past by western civilization, to estimate its current
status and to indicate its probable outcome.

Long-established thought-habits cry aloud in protest against such a
description of civilization. Until quite recently the word
"civilization" has been used in academic circles to symbolize a social
idea or ideal. Professor of History Anson D. Morse of Amherst College
presents such a view in his _Civilization and the World War_ (Boston:
Ginn 1919). For him, civilization is "the sum of things in which the
heritage of the child of the twentieth century is better than that of
the child of the Stone Age. As a process it is the perfection of man and
mankind. As an end, it is the realization of the highest ideal which men
are capable of forming.... The goal of civilization ... is human society
so organized in all of its constituent groups that each shall yield the
best possible service to each one and thereby to mankind as a whole,
(producing) the perfect organization of humanity." (page 3).

Such thoughts may be noble and inspired; they are not related to
history. We know more or less about a score of civilizations that have
occupied portions of the earth during several thousand years. We know a
great deal about the western civilization which we observe and in which
we participate. Professor Morse's florid words apply to none of the
civilizations known to history. Certainly they are poles away from an
accurate characterization of our own varient of this social pattern.

We are writing this introduction in an effort to make our word pictures
of mankind and its doings correspond with the facts of social history.
With the nuclear sword of Damocles hanging over our heads, it is high
time for us to exchange the clouds of fancy and the flowers of rhetoric
for the solid ground of historical reality. The word "civilization" must
generalize what has been and what is, as nearly as the past and present
can be embodied in language.

Civilization is a level or phase of culture which has been attained and
lost repeatedly in the course of social history. The epochs of
civilization have not been distributed evenly, either in time or on the
earth's surface. A combination of circumstances, political, economic,
ideological, sociological, resulted in the Egyptian, the Chinese, the
Roman civilizations. One of these was centered in North Africa, the
second in Asia, the third in eastern Europe. All three spilled over into
adjacent continents.

No two civilizations are exactly alike at any stage of their
development. Each civilization is at least a partial experiment, a
process or sequence of causal relationships, altered sequentially in the
course of its life cycle.

These thoughts about culture and civilization should be supplemented by
noting the relationship between civilizations and empires. An empire is
a center of wealth and power associated with its economic and political
dependencies. A civilization is a cluster or a succession of empires
and/or former empires, co-ordinated and directed by one of their number
which has established its leadership in the course of survival struggle.

The total body of historical evidence bearing on human experiments with
civilization is extensive and impressive. It covers a large portion of
the Earth's land surface, includes parts of Asia, Africa and Europe and
extends sketchily to the Americas. In time it covers many thousands of
years.

Experiments with civilization have been conducted in highly selective
surroundings possessing the volume and range of natural resources and
the isolation and remoteness necessary to build and maintain a high
level of culture over substantial periods of time. In these special
areas it was possible to provide for subsistence, produce an economic
surplus large enough to permit experimentation and ensure protection
against human and other predators. Egypt and the Fertile Crescent were
surrounded by deserts and high mountains. Crete was an island, extensive
but isolated. Productive river valleys like the Yang-tse, the Ganges and
the Mekong have afforded natural bases for experiments with
civilization. Similar opportunities have been provided by strategic
locations near bodies of water, mineral deposits and the intersections
of trade-routes. Others, less permanent, were located in the high Andes,
on the Mexican Plateau, in the Central American jungles.

Histories of civilizations, some of them ancient or classical, have
been written during the past two centuries. There have been general
histories in many languages. There have been scholarly reports on
particular civilizations. Prof. A.J. Toynbee's massive ten volume _Study
of History_ is a good example. Still more extensive is the thirty volume
history of civilization under the general editorship of C.K. Ogden.
These writings have brought together many facts bearing chiefly on the
lives of spectacular individuals and episodes, with all too little data
on the life of the silent human majority.

At the end of this volume the reader will find a list, selected from the
many books that I have consulted in preparation for writing this study.
Most of these authorities are concerned with the facts of civilization,
with far less emphasis on their political, economic and sociological
aspects.

In this study I have tried to unite theory with practice. On the one
hand I have reviewed briefly and as accurately as possible some
outstanding experiments with civilization, including our own western
variant. (Part I. The Pageant of Experiments with Civilization.) In Part
II I have undertaken a social analysis of civilization as a past and
present life style. In Part III, Civilization Is Becoming Obsolete, I
have tried to check our thinking about civilization with the sweep of
present day historical trends. Part IV, Steps Beyond Civilization, is an
attempt to list some of the alternatives and opportunities presently
available to civilized man.

Any reader who has the interest and persistence to read through the
entire volume and to browse through some of its references will have had
the equivalent of a university extension course dealing with one of the
most critical issues confronting the present generation of humanity.

_Part I_

The Pageant of Experiment With Civilization

CHAPTER ONE

EXPERIMENTS IN EGYPT AND EURASIA

Thousands of years before the city of Rome was ringed with its six miles
of stone wall, other peoples in Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa were
building civilizations. New techniques of excavation, identification and
preservation, subsidized by an increasingly affluent human society, and
developed during the past two centuries of archeological research have
provided the needed means and manpower. The result is an imposing number
of long buried building sites with their accompanying artifacts. Still
more important are the records written in long forgotten languages on
stone, clay tablets, metal, wood and paper. These remnants and records,
left by extinguished civilizations, do not tell us all we wish to know,
but they do provide the materials which enable us to reconstruct, at
least in part, the lives of our civilized predecessors.

Extensive in time and massive in the volume of their architecture are
the remains of Egyptian civilization. The earliest of these fragments
date back for more than six thousand years.

The seat of Egyptian civilization was the Nile Valley and its estuary
built out into the Mediterranean Sea from the debris of disintegrating
African mountains. Annual floods left their silt deposits to deepen the
soil along the lower reaches of the river. River water, impounded for
the purpose, provided the means of irrigating an all but rainless desert
countryside. Skillful engineering drained the swamps, adding to the
cultivable area of a narrow valley cut by the river through jagged
barren hills. Deserts on both sides of the Nile protected the valley
against aggressors and migrants. Within this sanctuary the Egyptians
built a civilization that lasted, with a minor break, for some 3,000
years.

Egyptian temples and tombs carry records chiseled and painted on hard
stone, which throw light on the life and times of upper-class Egyptians,
including emperors, provincial governors, courtiers, generals,
merchants, provincial organizers. In a humid, temperate climate these
stone-cut and painted records would have been eroded, overgrown and
obliterated long ago. In the dry desert air of North Africa they have
preserved their identity through the centuries.

Since the Egyptians had a few draft animals, and little if any
power-driven machinery, energy needed to build massive stone temples,
tombs and other public structures must have been supplied by the forced
labor of Egyptians, their serfs and slaves.

Egypt's history dawns on a well-organized society: The Old Kingdom,
based on the productivity of the narrow, lush Nile Valley. The products
of the Valley were sufficient to maintain a large population of
cultivators: some slave, some forced labor, about which we have little
knowledge; a bureaucracy, headed by a supreme ruler whose declared
divinity was one of the chief stabilizing forces of the society. Between
its agricultural base and its ruling monarch, the Old Kingdom had a
substantial middle class which procured the wood, stone, metals and
other materials needed in construction; a corps of engineers,
technicians and skilled workers, and a substantial mass of humanity
which provided the energy needed to erect the temples, monuments and
other remains which testify to the political, economic, and cultural
competence of the ruling elements and the technical skills present in
the Old Kingdom.

Foremost among the factors responsible for the success of the Old
Kingdom was the close partnership between the "lords temporal" and the
"lords spiritual"--the state and the church. The state consisted of a
highly centralized monarchy ruled by a Pharoah who personified temporal
authority. This authority was strengthened because it represented a
consensus of the many gods recognized and worshiped by the Egyptians of
the Old Kingdom. The monarch was also looked upon as an embodiment of
divinity. Some Egyptian pharoahs had been priests who became rulers.
Others had been rulers who became priests. The two aspects of public
life--political and religious--were closely interrelated.

In theory the land of Egypt was the property of the Pharoah. Foreign
trade was a state monopoly. In practice the ownership and use of land
were shared with the temples and with those members of the nobility
closest to the ruling monarch. Hence there were state lands and state
income and temple lands and temple income. The use of state lands was
alloted to favorites. Each temple had land which it used for its own
purposes.

Political power in the Old Kingdom was a tight monopoly held by the
ruling dynasty of the period. During preceding epochs it seems likely
that rival groups or factions had gone through a period of
power-survival struggle which eliminated one rival after another until
economic ownership and political authority were both vested in the same
ruling oligarchs. This struggle for consolidation apparently reached its
climax when Menes, a pharoah who began his rule about 3,400 B.C., in the
south of Egypt, invaded and conquered the Delta and merged the two
kingdoms, South and North, into one nation which preserved its identity
and its sovereignty until the Persian Conquest of 525 B.C.

The unification of the northern kingdom with the South seems to have
been a slow process, interrupted by insurrections and rebellions in the
Delta and in Lybia. Inscriptions report the suppression of these
insurrections and give the number of war-captives brought to the south
as slaves. In one instance the captives numbered 120,000 in addition to
1,420 small cattle and 400,000 large cattle.

Using these war captives to supplement the home supply of forced and
free labor, successive dynasties built temples, palaces and tombs;
constructed new cities; drained and irrigated land; sent expeditions to
the Sinai peninsula to mine copper. Such enterprises indicate a
considerable economic surplus above that required to take care of a
growing population: the high degree of organization required to plan and
assemble such enterprises, and the considerable engineering and
technological capacity necessary for their execution.

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