Civilization, Culture & Society

Philosophy Forums Society, Government, and Economics
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After reading Braudel for a short while, I started to think about the ambiguety of these terms. There are countless different approaches meaning to denote its value, often relying on points such as:

  • Civilization as opposed to barbarity
  • Civilization as technological reach
  • Civilization as complex society
  • Cultures defined geographically
  • Cultures defined economically
  • Cultures defines historically
  • Civilization, Culture & Society defined from collective linkage
  • Institutional/Enclosed societies (e.g. Oxford alumni, Sioux Red Indians)
  • Practical societies (e.g. metalheads, generation x, KKK, Jehova’s Witnesses)

Of course that’s a very incomplete list of possible outcomes and it’s not intended (at least by me) to be further explained at the moment. On the next paragraph(s), the bare bones of my insights:

Every human individual is the combination of thousands of small and apparently trivial features. You can take some random bloke and find out he “belongs” to many different subcultures:

  • Geographical subculture: Related to his locational upbringing, for instance, the people he met playing football at the park, the lad who delivered the post…

  • Educational subculture: Primary, secondary, tertiary… and everything and everyone having influence from there: professors, friends, crushes, enemies, institutional philosophy and affiliations (e.g. a Catholic school)

  • Familiar subculture: Parental figures (or lack of), brotherhood, home rules, traditions and joints (e.g. a long-established musical family)

  • Historical subculture: Folklore (or rejection to), language, learnt behaviours (e.g. kissing)

  • Philosophical and/or reflective subculture: Materlialist, positivist, comunist, etc.

  • Personal subculture: Never-repeated habits and manners.

Language’s got a crucial importance, since it’s both a cause and result of an individual personality. Every single aspect is significative there: vocabulary, pronunciation, accent, syntax, abstract terminology. This isn’t in reference to written and oral languages exclusively (e.g. English, Danish, Esperanto), but to any form of communication: the language of music, the language of friendship, the language of gestures, communication through painting, communication through silence and so on.

Another (quite debatable) theory is about the influence of biological aspects: effects of certain kind of food in a person’s mood, inherited tendency to depression, etc.

Having said that, we get to the conclusion that every single human being is exclusive and inside them there is one universe, as expressed by many philosophers in the past. Similarly to compounds being the result of thousands or millions of molecules (and therefore atoms), a society, a culture and a civilization can only be defined (imo) as the combination of those thousands and millions of people, each one contributing with one slice of it (even if it’s 0.00000000001% or much less), and therefore driving society, civilization and culture towards being in constant motion and transformation.

Still, I haven’t defined what does each of them mean. It’s imo an impossible task since, as expressed above, inside each individual there’s an entirely different world, inside which those three terms, for instance, can be completely different.

My personal insight is that society is a joint of theoretical unwritten laws in which many people try to fit in order to feel part of something bigger. After all, ‘society’, as a term, derives from Latin ‘socius’ (companion). For that matter, I think that each person tends to feel more secure by being included in certain kind of group, some of which are short-lived and small-numbered (e.g. a one-month interdisciplinary symposium, a one-year club of investigation, a two-hour riot), some of them are multi-national and long-lasting (e.g. political parties, religions).

Civilization is perhaps more related to the idea of a centred power, a political, social, demographical, cultural and economical establishment, in constant morph. For instance, when I worked in Tokyo I was impressed (and positively dissapointed) by the enormous influence from Yanks in there: the bloody city filled with McDonald’s, Starbucks, there’s even one Disneyland in there…

Culture can survive many civilisations, albeit with changes nicely reflected on the language, for instance. The ambiguous part is how can we mark the boundaries: we speak about Chinese culture, but what if tomorrow the country were divided in five parts? Would we then be speaking about Cantonese ancient culture, etc?

Any contribution or correction is welcome, as I said, those were merely the bare bones.

Thanks

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sebas,

Nicely done.

As you have so thoroughly pointed out, the possible definitions of what is civilization are almost infinite depending on any individual point of view.

It would probably be best to say E: All of the above. :slight_smile:

Still, we need to make sense of it, and to that end we group similarities together (roughly, very roughly) and apply labels. While this may be useful in describing large numbers of people, it says absolutely nothing about the individual.

The typical use of pigeon holes and labels is to create a static picture of a society. There is tacit acknowledgment that societies are dynamic and constantly changing, but we need that snapshot, that frozen iconoclastic picture that allows us to say was, is, and will be.

To answer your question, the boundaries of a society or culture are fluid and in constant change in reaction to events both natural and artificially created. One might ask what does a McDonalds on every corner in every city mean culturally? At the same time, what would a comet strike and the ensuing events mean to social disruption and reorganization?

Such questions can be answered, but only in the most ambiguous manner allowed by the ambiguity of the terms and definitions allowed.

From a completely pragmatic point of view, I would say that the only common denominator is repeatability over time. There are cultural events and attitudes that are short-lived and should be considered fads, and there are persistent patterns that can be considered the “fabric” of culture or civilization. The groupings and labels may be interesting and useful, but they are subject to the intent of the user, and reflect only a tiny part of the process we call civilization or culture.

JT