Civilization and Beyond by Scott Nearing
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Scott Nearing >> Civilization and Beyond
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Western civilization has opened the doors wide to aspirants eager to win
out in the game of grab-and-keep. It has been equally kind to their
chief executives, organizers and managers who rank second or third in
the chain of command. These individuals come from widely different
backgrounds. The social mobility of a bourgeois society gives them
opportunity to climb high on the ladder of preferment.
Many of those who fall into line, adapt themselves to the civilizing
process, accept with alacrity the chances that come their way, but do
not reach the top of the success ladder. They have the health, energy
and assertiveness necessary to keep climbing. They accept their
assignments and carry them out with modest success. They are the lesser
executives who work themselves out by the time they are fifty and find
some sinecure or safe position near the top of the social pyramid.
Below the high command posts there is a wide range of handymen and
specialists who fill particular positions and place their time, energy,
experience and expertise at the disposal of the high command. Among them
are scientists, engineers, technicians. Equally important are their
spokesmen, advisers and apologists: lawyers, preachers, teachers,
writers, speakers, publicists, carefully chosen for their ability to
apologize, passify, justify and reassure. On the political side are the
diplomats and politicians. Protection for their persons and property is
provided by the police and the armed forces, composed of highly paid,
well-trained, well-armed destroyers and killers.
Social stability and mass support come from an extensive middle class
composed of public servants and body servants, small tradesmen,
self-employed craftsmen, rentiers and retired persons who are assured
body comforts, social recognition and preferment for themselves, their
relatives and dependants. Members of this middle class are recognized on
occasion, pampered, amused, diverted, bored, frustrated and eventually
corrupted by the soft living which their middle class status makes
possible.
Close to the middle class come the white collar workers and the better
paid blue collar workers. Their lives are cluttered with gadgets and
fringe benefits. Their homes are paid for or bought on credit.
Below these more or less regularly employed workers on salaries and
wages come the semi-employed, racial or class underlings living in
poverty at or near the subsistence level.
Associated with this range of bourgeois occupations and often closely
identified with it are owners of family farms, tenants and hired hands.
Outside of the employment range, but dependent upon the economy are the
defectives and delinquents, the parasites who live on cake and the
parasites who live out of garbage cans.
Beyond these categories, in the American Empire, there are the colonial
compradors and handymen who enjoy standards of living comparable to
their opposite members in the North America nucleus. Below them are the
colonial masses who live their entire lives under conditions of
uncertainty and insecurity.
Millions of young people across the planet, born into the complicated
and bewildering social network of western civilization after war's end
in 1945 and graduated from school after the onset of the Vietnam War in
1965, find themselves in a complex, frustrating jungle. Should they fit
in or drop out? Those who are more conventional and adaptable fit in as
best they can, although the recent high unemployment rate among the
youth indicates that the adjustment is often difficult. Millions of the
less adaptable drop out.
Such a situation could have been foreseen by the initiated. Preparations
could have been made in advance to deal with it when it arose. In the
absence of adequate preparation the result is the chaos incident to
every downturn of the private enterprise business cycle, magnified in
this case by the regressive forces released during the disintegration of
the entire social fabric.
Two other areas require a word of comment. Among human faculties are
ambition, imagination, ingenuity, inventiveness, creativity. Human
beings are, to a greater or lesser degree, cosmically aware. In the
physical field western civilization handsomely rewards initiative. In
the social field it has been far less generous. Imagination and cosmic
consciousness have been quite generally listed among the undesirable
endowments of mankind.
Western civilization, in the early years of the present century,
produced a generation of insecure, unsettled, anxious, worried, harried
people. This is generally true of young, middle aged and old, of rich
and poor. Rapid social transition from expansion and advance to
contraction and retreat is a traumatic, hectic experience for any human
being.
Western civilization in the early years of its decline has not brought
out the more generous aspects of human nature. In the best of times a
materialistically oriented society appeals to the more material and less
spiritual aspects of human beings. A period of social decline leads away
from principled conduct toward unashamed opportunism.
The current generation, born and reared in a disintegrating civilization
has been sorely tested and tried. From such tests the strong and
purposeful are likely to emerge stronger and more determined. For the
weak and vacillating the consequences are likely to prove disastrous.
The individual born into western society during its current "time of
troubles" has not had an easy row to hoe.
What has western civilization done to human society as such?
Western civilization has urbanized its society. Until recently in
Europe and until very recently in North America, the majority of people
were living outside of cities, in villages or on the land. From their
flocks and herds or from their cultivated land they fed themselves and
the cities. Mechanization reduced the demand for labor power in the
countryside. At the same time the growth of industry, trade, commerce
and "services" increased the demand for labor power in the cities.
Relatively the countryside was poor while the cities were rich. The high
prizes were in the cities, bright lights, crowds and the seductive
excitements of seething mass life. Incessant human contacts were part
and parcel of city life. City landlords collected high rents, city
merchants found many customers. City manufacturers could pick and choose
their wage and salary underlings among throngs of young and not so young
jobseekers.
Western civilization grew in and around its cities. Both in form and
function it was urban rather than rural.
Western civilization specialized its society, mechanized it and later
computerized it, making social relationships depend less and less on
personality and more on the position of the individual in a working team
or on an assembly line. Human beings ceased to have names. Instead they
acquired numbers on the payroll, on their homes, on their identity
cards.
Specialization and division of labor, plus power-driven machines
increase productivity, income, surplus. In the countryside goods and
services often are scarce. In the city they are likely to be
super-abundant.
Growth of wealth and income provide support for an increase in
population. Hence the population explosions in cities and in centers of
developing industry, trade and commerce. Countries passing through the
industrial revolution expanded their populations. Recently, the
population of some countries has doubled each twenty-five years.
Western civilization has been militarized as it was mechanized. Every
tool is a potential weapon. The truck becomes a tank, the airplane a
bomber. War making, like other aspects of western civilization, was
mechanized. Formerly war had pitted man against man. Mechanized war
pitted machines and their attendants against other machines and their
human attachments. The same mechanical forces that built cities,
factories and ships converted these agencies of production into
instruments of destruction. Each country in the civilized West fortified
its frontiers, trained officers in special schools, mobilized young men
and women for military service, stockpiled weapons, multiplied
fire-power, making western civilization an armed camp, with guns
pointing in every direction.
Regimentation of city life, of industry and commerce, of war, of
education and public health followed one after another as the individual
human became more and more a cog in a vast social mechanism. This
regimentation dulled imagination at the same time that it deified greed,
with "gimme, gimme;" "more, more;" as its watch words.
At certain points in its development western civilization has lifted
itself temporarily above the material forces that hemmed in the life of
primitive man. The Renaissance was one such period. The Enlightenment
was another. A third was the scientific breakthrough from Darwin and
Marx to the research and experiments which split the atom and
inaugurated the space age. These gains were offset by the growing
planet-wide chasm between wealth and poverty, the plunder and pollution
of man's natural and social environment and the terrifying growth of
destructive power revealed during two prolonged general wars in one
generation.
Mechanized war demonstrated its destructivity, physically, socially,
psychologically. Prolonged war accustomed an entire generation of
mankind to unnecessary suffering and the deliberate twisting, maiming
and destroying which are characteristic features of the war-waging
civilized state.
Exposure of an entire generation to wholesale destruction and mass
murder as a way of life had two quite divergent effects. It converted
sensitive introverts into pacifists. It produced millions of trained
destroyers and killers, experienced in the science and art of
mechanized warfare. Pacifists opposed, denounced and resisted the
warfare state and its progeny. Masses of trained destroyers and killers,
the "new barbarians," gained experience and improved their
qualifications by taking part in conventional warfare and in the
innumerable guerrilla adventures and operations that accompanied and
followed conventional wars.
Previous civilizations have been harried, hectored and undermined by
migrating "barbarians" who had heard of accumulated wealth and had come
to share or perhaps to take over the "honey-pot" and lick up the honey.
Western civilization has faced the problem of migration, intensified by
population explosion. But the "barbarians" who are tearing the social
body of western civilization limb from limb are not outsiders, invading
a civilization in order to plunder and sack it, but the offspring of
well-to-do civilized affluent communities who have repudiated the
acquisition and accumulation of material goods and services, turning,
instead to the satiation of body hungers and the freedom of social
irresponsibility.
Western man has spent ten centuries in building a civilization aimed at
economic stability and social security for the privileged. The "new
barbarian" progeny have rejected this civilization of affluence and are
busily engaged in fragmenting the social apparatus that has made
affluence possible. In a word, western civilization has organized and
coordinated, but in the process it has sowed the seeds of
disorganization and chaos.
One last word about the effect of western civilization on human society.
The West has littered and cluttered the planet with an immense variety
and with enormous quantities of gimmicks and gadgets from tin cans to
airplanes that fly faster than sound, and rockets that carry their
occupants to the moon. Western productivity has multiplied greatly. Too
often it has by-passed utility, ignored quality and outraged beauty.
More often than not its goods, services, institutions, practices and
ideas have remained at the surface without reaching down to life's
essentials.
If life can be fragmented into "physical," "mental," "emotional,"
"energetic," "spiritual," and "creative" it must be evident that the
western way has smothered life's more significant aspects under a
blanket of trivialities, non-essentials and inconsequentials.
Western civilization has stressed competition, aimed at the acquisition
and accumulation of material goods and services. The competitive
struggle, in its civilian and military aspects, has played fast and
loose with the contents of nature's storehouse.
Through uncounted ages Mother Nature has set up a knife-edge balance
among the multitude of aspects and differentiated forms that have
existed and still exist on the planet. Humanity has increasingly upset
this balance of nature, ignorantly and often stupidly, without pausing
to determine the resultant changes. Nowhere is this upset more in
evidence than the changes in climate and animal life and their
possibilities of survival brought about by the erosion of topsoil. Paul
Sears, in his _Deserts on the March_, has told the story. It can be
summed up in four words: deforestation, overgrazing, erosion, drifting
sands.
Another aspect of man's aggressions against nature is the wanton
destruction of wildlife--like the American bison and the wood pigeon.
Still another example is the extraction from the earth's crust of
minerals and metals accumulated through ages and used to turn out
frivolous gadgets or, more disastrously, the materials and machines of
civilized warfare. Instead of conserving natural wealth, rationing it
and thus extending its use to succeeding generations, western man has
burnt it up in the firestorms deliberately kindled during the seven
disaster years from 1939 to 1945.
In the course of its existence western civilization has replaced food
gatherers, cultivators and artisans by hucksters and professional
destroyers of mankind and ravagers of the living space afforded by the
earth's land mass.
Western civilization has done its most far-reaching disservice to
mankind by separating and estranging man from nature. For ages man lived
with nature as one aspect of an evolving ecological balance.
Civilization's basic unit--the city--as it sprawls, cuts off man from
more and more contacts with the earth and its multitudinous life forms;
with fresh air, sunshine, starshine; with nature's sequences--day and
night, the procession of the seasons; with the birth, growth, death
animating so many of nature's aspects. The city is man-made. Well
planned, properly built and organized, it might have become an ornament
beautifying and exalting nature. Page the cities of the West one by
one--they are monotonous, ungainly, ugly slums and rookeries set off by
an occasional bit of creative architecture.
Western civilization has differed in certain respects from the long line
of its predecessors, stretching back through the centuries. In one sense
it has matured, ripened, taking its ideas and practices from its nearest
of kin. In the course of its life cycle it has already made distinctive
contributions:
1. It has become more nearly planet-wide than any of its
known forerunners.
2. It has developed unique approaches and controls through
its science and its technology, inaugurating the power age
by making riotous use of nature's energy sources.
3. It has extended man's conquest of the planet and begun
his adventures into space.
4. It has enlarged the field of human creativity by increasing
the number and proportion of men and women trained and
experienced in productive and creative enterprises.
5. It has opened the door to study and experimentation in
extrasensory perception--man's "sixth" sense.
6. It has made possible an unprecedented increase in the
human population of the planet.
7. It has raised its potential for destruction far above and
beyond its potential for production and construction.
8. It has brought together, classified and indexed the ideas,
materials, techniques and generalizations which made possible
this study of civilization, its appearances, disappearances
and reappearances.
9. Europeans have carried the burdens of western civilization
and inherited its disintegrative consequences for so long a
period that the fate of western civilization and the fate
of present day Europe are closely interwoven.
Western civilization seems to have reached and passed the
zenith of its lifecycle without achieving the political integration,
the stability or the unified authority attained by the Romans and
the Egyptians at the high points in their lifecycles.
CHAPTER FIVE
FEATURES COMMON TO CIVILIZATIONS
Each civilization that has left legible records or significant
traditions during the past five or six thousand years has made
distinctive contributions that modified the culture pattern of its
predecessors and its contemporaries. At the same time all of the
civilizations have had certain common features that are the
characteristic aspects which justify the general definition of
civilization presented in the Introduction to this study.
Civilization is the most comprehensive, extensive and inclusive life
pattern achieved by terrestrial humanity. Starting locally and following
the three basic principles of urbanization, expansion and exploitation,
each civilization has charted a course that led from tentative local
beginnings through a cycle of growth, maturity, decline, decay and
dissolution.
The civilizing process is essentially collective, subordinating the
interests of each part to the interests of the whole, while allowing
sufficient home rule to enable each part to have the political, economic
and cultural advantages enjoyed by the other parts, always excepting the
privileged position occupied by the civilization's dominant empire and
its nucleus.
Necessarily a civilization is composed of more or less disparate
segments, each one (before its inclusion in the collective whole)
maintaining a large measure of sovereign independence. Utilizing
advanced techniques of communication, exchange, and transportation, the
separate sovereign units are coordinated, consolidated, unified and
universalized. The result is an aggregate of parts, differing in many
local respects, but acknowledging the authority of the power center and
contributing material goods and manpower to its support and defense. The
main sociological purpose of each civilization has been to impose
central authority and universality upon political, economic and
ideological diversity.
Every civilization has been confronted with the advantages of unity over
diversity. Every civilization has professed its devotion to unity. Every
civilization at one or another stage in its development has subordinated
unity to the increasingly insistent demands of diversity.
For at least six thousand years one civilization after another has
sought to achieve centralization and universality. In every instance of
which history provides a legible record, centralized, universalized
institutions and practices have fragmented into diversity and stubborn
localism.
Western civilization is part and parcel of this generalization.
Generation by generation and century by century it has professed and
proclaimed the advantages of universality while it yielded to the
persistent demands of nationalism, regionalism and localism. Throughout
the latter years of the nineteenth century the will to unify gained much
ground. The tide turned with the turn of the century. For the first half
of the present century the forces of unity and of diversity seemed
stalemated. War's end in 1945 saw the shadow of a universal state
flicker across the screen of history. With the adjournment of the
Bandung Conference in 1955 the shadow dissolved and was replaced by the
strident nationalisms that have become an outstanding feature of
planetary politics, economics and social organization.
Despite the insistence of reason and experience that strength and
stability are the result of unity,--tradition, custom and habit have
held human society at the level of political, economic and ideological
diversity. Nowhere in history is this generalization more emphatic than
in the failure of the European standard-bearers of western civilization
to replace a millennium of diversity, discord and conflict by a unified,
coordinated, co-existing, cooperating European community.
At its best a civilization is insecure and even unstable, disturbed and
upset by an increasing domestic struggle for preferment and power that
includes rivalry, competition, revolt, rebellion, civil war and wars of
self-determination carried on by unassimilated regional, provincial and
colonial elements. From beyond their frontiers civilizations have been
assailed by rival aspirants for power, by armed bands in search of
plunder or by migrating peoples seeking greener pastures. All of these
forces have held the ground for diversity and barred the way to
universality.
Another factor of great consequence leading to the instability of
civilizations has been the concentration of wealth, power, privilege,
comfort and security in the hands of a minority, in sharp contrast with
poverty and insecurity among the less well-placed majority. Generally,
the privileged minority has been relatively small and the exploited
majority overwhelmingly large.
Still another disturbing factor in each civilization is the
transformation of its military arm from a means of defense against
external enemies into a major factor in the direction of domestic
affairs. The professional military build-up has frequently usurped the
state power and became king-maker by virtue of its monopoly of weapons,
organization, and its highly trained personnel of professional
destroyers and killers.
Upset by one or another of these disturbing and disruptive forces,
civilized populations have panicked and retreated from their
collectiveness toward more localized, more fragmented, less social and
more individual life patterns. Such a retreat rounds out the later
phases of a cycle of civilization--the phases of decline and final
dissolution.
Civilizations perish in the first instance because of internal
contradictions and conflicts, the struggle to grab, monopolize, and keep
wealth, status, power.
They perish because of the division of the nucleus and its associates
and dependencies between those who work for a living, those who have an
unearned income and those parasites who scrounge for a living. They
perish because of the hard class and caste lines that grow out of
economic contradictions; because of the development of a social
pyramid, layer above layer, until the summit is reached where there is
standing room for only a few. Competent, talented persons may rise from
level to level in this pyramid. A political and social bureaucracy
develops which feeds at the public trough. Then comes a bitter struggle
to get both feet in the trough and keep them there side by side with an
equally determined effort to exclude outsiders and other intruders. An
army of volunteers and novices is converted into a military
establishment which becomes a state within the state, extending its
control until it makes policy, selects top leaderships and carries on
its internal feuds and wars of succession dividing the defense forces
and using them for partisan purposes. Overhead costs rise; deficits in
the public treasury grow; so does public debt. Inflation follows, and
the debasement of the currency. Levies are made on private wealth for
public purposes. There is expropriation of the property of political
enemies. Espionage, secret agents, the growth of informers become part
of the society, along with the use of assassination as a political
weapon, the increase of violence and crime, and eventually, a flight
from the cities.
This tragic enumeration only skims the surface of the many and various
aspects of a situation that reaches its breaking point in civil war,
famine, pestilence and eventually in depopulation.
Social dissolution is accelerated by provincial revolts against central
authority; by survival struggle between the empires which were
coordinated and consolidated into the civilization; by revolt in the
subordinate and dependent segments of the civilization; by rivalry and
conflict between racial, cultural and political sub-groups forced into
the civilization, held there by coercion, policed by armed force and
taking the first opportunity to win political independence and self
determination.
While the momentum for expansion lasted, the civilization grew in wealth
and power. When it waned, disintegration set in. Changelessness seems to
be impossible in a social group. A civilization either expands or
withers, builds up or falls to pieces.
Starting from one or more local groups, each civilization has reached
out "to conquer the world", occupy it, organize it, dominate it, exploit
it, perpetuate itself. In each case expansion, occupation, domination
and exploitation are limited by human capacity (human nature); by the
relative brevity of a single human life; by the extreme variations in
the capacity of successive leaders. It is limited by geography; by the
means of transportation and communication; by overhead costs that
increase geometrically as the civilization expands arithmetically; by
the means of delegating responsibility; by accounting devices, available
raw materials and labor power; by power struggles inside the ruling
oligarchies; by the failure to maintain a balance between centerism and
localism; by growing local demands for self-determination; by the
invasion of nomads seeking to plunder the tempting honey pot at the
nucleus of the civilization.
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