Civilisation analysis: I am unpersuaded yet bothered

Civilisations emerge from what people do.

I recently read historian Carroll Quigley’s book The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis. I was underwhelmed.

There are various famous theorists of civilisation: Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, Carroll Quigley, Samuel Huntingdon. Their theories of civilisation all have something in common: they never lead anywhere much. Their framings are not adopted by historians or social scientists. They have become part of the general intellectual architecture, but as individual ideas or phrasings (e.g. Toynbee’s “challenge and response”) that are referred to, but are rarely, if ever, incorporated into wider analysis.

This is not a good sign. Yes, there are absolutely biases and failings in the humanities and social sciences: some very strong and pernicious ones, particularly in recent decades. Nevertheless, this failure to lead anywhere much analytically has been a pattern for a century or so and provides strong indications that such theories are not analytically useful.

The problem is that civilisation is not a useful unit of analysis. Yes, we can absolutely identify civilisations, even if their boundaries can be somewhat fuzzy. When I say “the Roman Empire is where Classical Civilisation went to die” I am referring to something.

Tikal National Park, Florian Delee, Unsplash.

The concept of Western Civilisation is not an empty concept. Just as referring to Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia as Indic and Vietnam and Korea (even Japan) as Sinic is not an empty statement. Though it is also reasonable to argue that Japan is a separate civilisation from China when Korea and Vietnam seem part of Sinic Civilisation—a case of the fuzzy boundary problem. Latin America seems a different, though related, civilisation to Western Civilisation.

The problem is not that civilisations do not exist, it is they are not units of action. Civilisations do not “do” anything. Yes, they arise, grow, decline, disappear but it is what makes up a civilisation that does those things.

The problem with analysing civilisations is the same as analysing cultures. It is a set of human social mechanisms operating in various ways by and through humans. The culture is not an acting unit, nor is a civilisation an acting unit, no more than a forest is an acting unit.

Forests do what civilisations (and cultures) do. Forests arise, grow, decline, disappear but it is the biological organisms, and their interactions, which do these things. The forest arising, growing, declining, disappearing is a result of all those actions and interactions by organisms. All those are doings by biological agents of which the forest is not one, nor is a culture, nor is a civilisation.

One can certainly describe patterns of a civilisation. But those are not patterns that the civilisation itself “did” as some historical agent. They are patterns it manifests due to what the historical agents within and without it did. A civilisation is an emergent set of phenomena that do not themselves cohere as an historical actor or agent.

So, what is a civilisation? Quigley at first defines civilisation as a producing—i.e., farming or herding—society that has writing and cities (p.76). He adds that it operates in space (a territory) across time (has a history) and across six levels of culture (intellectual, religious, social, economic, political, and military) (Pp99-100).

A civilisation is a pattern of interactions, of information flows, of institutional arrangements, of shared framings/patterns of belief (schemas) and patterns of action (scripts). These are reinforced by what registers as success in the interacting cultures that make up a civilisation, by the various normative social technologies—customs, conventions, social norms—the importance and types of various social connections, and so on.

A civilisation is very meta: it is a series of threads of commonality. Which is why theories of civilisation are so unlikely to lead anywhere analytically useful: one is theorising way too far from actual social mechanisms and actual historical agents. Quigley’s schema of civilisation is one of categories, not mechanisms.

When people worry about the health of Western civilisation, what they are worried about it is the institutions, the culture, the social schema and scripts, the sense of connections to the past, the way folk view the future. These are perfectly reasonable things to worry about.

For instance, it is clear that Post-Enlightenment Progressivism aka Critical Social Constructionism aka “wokery” has moved into the institutional social space—indeed, the meaning space—that used to be occupied by Christian schemas and scripts. It is also clear that it acts as a Christian heresy, which makes it easier for it to so move.

This is why the analogy with the Christianisation of the Roman Empire is so resonant. “Wokery” is a motivated and networked minority taking over the institutions of highly bureaucratised societies. The analogy is even stronger as universities aspire more and more to act as the “Church” of their societies—as the generators of systems of moralised meaning. That Roman critics of Christianity—such as Celsus—denounced Christians’ lack of connection to, and rejection and subversion of, received traditions, strengthens the analogy. Elevating commitment over family is another point in common.

There is not a “God-shaped” hole in Western civilisation—it is perfectly possible to have a functioning and vibrant civilisation without being monotheist. There is, however, a religion-shaped hole. For part of what evolved to for us to high levels of robust cooperation as self-conscious beings was a sense of the divine—of ultimate authority—and a sense of the sacred—of what cannot be traded-off against. It is very much a recurring feature of civilisations to have an embedded set of religious underpinnings.

Psychologist Paul Graham defines “wokeness” as:

An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

Well, yes, but that is not all it is. Political scientist Eric Kaufmann gets at a crucial aspect in his definition of ‘woke’ as:

… making sacred of historically marginalised race gender and sexual minorities.

The imagined future becomes the source of divine authority—unimpeachable, as there is no information from the future and the imagined future can be as perfect as one wants. The declared marginalised/oppressed become the sacred victims against whose (approved or alleged) claims no trade-offs are permitted.

As universities operate to drive out dissent from such substitute-religion politics, they become the new Church, with DEI officers (and intimacy consultants, bias response teams, sensitivity readers) their inquisitors. As substitute-religion politics, dissent becomes illegitimate, indeed blasphemous—hence the denunciations of linguistic sins, the excoriation of heretics and the search for infidels. French political economist Thomas Piketty’s term Brahmin Left is apposite at so many levels.

As substitute-religion politics, it seeks to impose itself in all realms of life. Hence, it becomes—networked, rather than centrally-directed—totalitarian politics. For that is what totalitarian politics are: the denial of the legitimacy of dissent plus extension into all realms of life—comedy, advertising, workplaces, schools, universities, professional associations, media, journals, sport, fiction, entertainment, games, hobbies.

The essence of “wokery”—of contemporary left-progressivism—is the insertion of the professional-managerial class into as many resource flows as possible. A networked version of the dictatorship of (activist) bureaucracy that was such a feature of all the Marxist revolutions.

The activist professional-managerial class’s relentless attempts to insert itself into all realms of life as the superior deciders is an authority claim incompatible with the past patterns of Western societies. Hence the—very legitimate—feeling that the very continuation of Western civilisation is at stake.

A key feature of Christianity is that it is a congregational religion. The disappearance of Christian observance from Western societies is the disappearance of congregations.

Those regular physical meetings and connections provided considerable normative resilience to Christian societies, that extended beyond just the religious. One way in which modern societies become atomised is from the lack of replacements for the connections of congregations. When one looks at where Christianity is thriving around the globe, it is precisely via the power of congregations and their embedded connections.

Then there are the vast technological changes we are experiencing and their social implications. Social analyst and commentator Gurwunder Bhogal provides a revealing analysis of implications of the fragmentation of narrative with information overload and retreat from reality tests involved in abstract work and being online.

So, yes, there are absolutely reasons to be concerned about the health and prospects of Western civilisation. But that is due to processes within the civilisation, not from the something “the” civilisation is doing.

China as CCP dreamland

The CCP, especially under Chairman Xi, worrying about the health of Chinese civilisation—of the Chinese dream—involves the same contradictions that Xi grapples with in all his policies. His central aim is to preserve the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), yet it is the CCP itself, and its rule, which most gets in the way of the flourishing of China.

Taiwan would be far more likely to join a democratic China than a CCP-ruled China. Even apart from the costs of any conquest itself, it is blindingly obvious that rule by the CCP would be much worse for the Taiwanese than the continuation of their democracy.

The CCP gets far more credit than it should for the post-1978 economic growth of China. Yes, the CCP got sufficiently out of the way for commerce—which had been arising spontaneously as the Cultural Revolution disrupted the CCP’s control over the villages—to flourish. Yes, that was unusual for a ruling Communist Party to permit, but the CCP no longer screwing up the Chinese economy as desperately badly as it had been is a very limited achievement.

Xi and the CCP clearly resent the American-dominated maritime order, yet China has become by far the greatest beneficiary of that order. It is not China that is threatened by that order being dominated by democracies, it is the CCP that is so threatened.

Even more profoundly, the CCP is threatened by commerce within China becoming too successful, too pervasive, and so is attempting to re-establish control over it. Yet that is undermining the very economic growth that the CCP relies upon for its domestic legitimacy and to have the resources to assert itself internationally.

These are not the dynamics “of” Chinese civilisation, except in a loose, metaphorical sense. They are dynamics within the civilisation. Indeed, to a large extent, they are the dynamics of a particular system of rule within that civilisation.

Yes, China has a long tradition of bureaucratised autocracy that has absolutely affected the evolution of its society, culture and so the (constituent elements) of its civilisation. Yes, we can see similarities between Mao and the First Emperor, Qin Shi Huang (r.221-210BC), or Mao and Hong Xiuqan (1814-1864), leader of the Taiping Rebellion.

Nevertheless, that the CCP is Marxist in official ideology and Leninist in structure very much matters. If the Nationalists (KMT) had not so mishandled their interactions with the peasantry, China could have gone on a very different path.

As it is, the disruptions of the Cultural Revolution largely destroyed the traditions of Chinese civility, so mainland Chinese are now notoriously rude and self-centred. The Cultural Revolution: (1) discredited the traditional, (2) atomised people through arbitrary fear and mobbing, (3) turned stigma into a highly political weapon with ever-new sins, with the consequence of (4) becoming a very low trust society, breaking even the filial bonds between parent and child.

As Critical Pedagogy came from the thought of Paulo Freire, an open admirer of Mao’s notion of “permanent revolution”, and has deeply influenced Education Faculties—and so the training of teachers and education administrators—for some decades now, the attempted Western cultural revolution of the “woke” has generated, in much milder form, many of the same—socially corrosive—patterns.

Politics matters

What happens within the political structures of a civilisation matters. When I say “the Roman Empire is where Classical Civilisation went to die” it is the dynamics of the Roman state itself that is the crucial factor. The highly bureaucratised Roman state of the Dominate, by strangling city self-government and then imposing Christianity—very much interactive processes—killed Classical Civilisation, reducing it to a memory well for what came after.

That memory well had, and still has, a great deal of power. Its power as a memory well has waxed and waned, depending on the cultural and institutional dynamics within what became Western Civilisation. Nevertheless, it was the actions and interactions of agents within that Civilisation that matters, not the dynamics “of” the Civilisation in some top-down sense.

Civilisations die when the common threads that hold folk together within a civilisation fray, decay and die. Or are swept aside by some triumphant intruding sets of peoples and cultures.

I am highly sceptical of attempting to analyse civilisations as if they are historical units. That is very different from saying there are no reasons to be concerned about the patterns and prospects of Western civilisation. There absolutely are.

Especially as our technology continues to outrun our evolved adaptations while our would-be new Churches and Believers organise around toxic nonsense whose only positive virtue is that it is effective in motivating and coordinating the take-over of institutions. But that is more than enough to destroy a civilisation, to degrade and destroy the things that make up a civilisation.

References

Scott Atran, ‘“Devoted Actor” versus “Rational Actor” Models for Understanding World Conflict,’ Briefing to the National Security Council, White House, Washington, DC, September 14, 2006. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/6801978.pdf

Ronald Coase & Ning Wang, How China Became Capitalist, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Chris D. Frith, ‘The role of metacognition in human social interactions,’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2012, 367, 2213–2223. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3385688/

Amory Gethin, Clara Mart´inez-Toledana, Thomas Piketty, ‘Brahmin Left Versus Merchant Right: Changing Political Cleavages In 21 Western Democracies, 1948–2020,’ The Quarterly Journal Of Economics, Vol. 137, 2022, Issue 1, 1-48. https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/137/1/1/6383014

Wouter J. Hanegraaff, Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge in Western Culture, Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Ferdinand Mount, The Subversive Family: An Alternative History of Love and Marriage, Free Press, [1982] 2010.

Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity & Paganism in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries, Yale University Press, 1997.

Carroll Quigley, The Evolution of Civilizations: An Introduction to Historical Analysis, Liberty Fund, [1961] 1979.

Stephen Smith, Pagans & Christian in the City: Culture Wars from the Tiber to the Potomac, Wm B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2018.

Edward J Watts, The Final Pagan Generation, University of California Press, 2015.