People fall into 2 camps when talking about civilization. Either they speak of 1 global civilization, or of distinct civilizations as politico-cultural units. Huntington is perhaps the best expression of this latter confused conceptualization (is it cultural ? ideological ? religious ? ethnic ? all of the above for Huntington it would seem ...)
I would propose civilization as a multi-layered network of overlapping distinct politico-cultural units, sharing in a broader common culture.
On a material level, we are one giant interconnected global network. Money, technology, data, energy, supply chains, are all part of the same grid. Problems in one area of the world (like a chip shortage or an energy shock) can ripple everywhere, extremely fast. Lets call this the "Planetary age". Great Powers must think globally, as their actions have repercussions in all regions of the planet; Intermediate & Lesser Powers are either greatly constrained by the actions of Great Powers & cannot help but take them into account, aspire to their own hegemony some day (whatever form that may take, not necessarily implying the same form that the US currently holds), or solely exist in their current form because they are continuously propped up by Western aid & money.
However, both culturally & ideologically, there seem to be distinct major civilizational players. One thing the Huntingtonian approach misses is the distinct qualitative difference between these players. When one looks at his map, civilizations are flattened, as if they carried the same weight & meaning. As one peers behind the words this seems to be less true. There are few units worthy of being called civilization, & I don't think simply speaking of civilization in the singular is very helpful.
Obviously there is something like the Western Civilization. There is some clear continuity with a historical European core, various vying powers with their own distinct forms, yet of a similar substance (or soul, outlook, weltbild) sharing in a common transnational culture & co-evolving along similar lines at various speeds. The weight of this core has shifted. We can speak of a broad Western-Atlantic unit.
Sinic civilization is its own distinct unit. Broadly, China constitutes (constituted ?) its core, & there may have been a break with whatever came before & a rebirth in 1949 of something new, a techno-marxist Confucian Statism. Its broader periphery rides on a hybrid of vestiges of the old Sinic core as well as a newer western expansion. Japan is an interesting case where there seems to be overlap as well as deep continuity as its own civilizational unit wearing western forms but participating in the broader transnational Sinic sphere.
Russia is another interesting edge case. It sits on the peripheries of Europe, Asia, & the Middle East, & has thus been shaped by a strange mix of forces, being not quite Western in the proper sense (though European at times), & obviously still suffering from its tragic 20th century. There are some bizarre Third Worldist tendencies (invoked polemically against the West) mixed with Boomer Soviet nostalgia. Demographically, & in terms of social trends, in many ways Russia seems to be ahead of the West in its decay. This is linked to the broader convergence of the global demographic collapse & associated social pathologies.
India has been a major topic in recent years, both due to the massive flux of immigration from its 1.4 billion population & recent access to the internet. The Indic civilization overlaps strongly with Third Worldism (which I will get to in a moment) & its own bio-cultural ethno-narcissism/nationalism & extreme nepotism.
Third Worldism is the result of demographic explosion & proliferation of tech. Generic urban population, mostly scrolling cheap Chinese phones, milling around, working gig jobs or siphoning the Welfare State. One cannot call it a proper civilization. The West is turning into this.
The Islamicate is a virulent type of Third Worldism, with a stronger militant ideological core, stronger dysgenics.
>>3106 Different dimensions of civilization clearly have different scale and boundaries, so the essentialist discrete "civilizations" thing always sat a bit awkwardly with me. It's like asking how many ecosystems or biomes or races there are. There are divisions and clusters, but the underlying reality is continuous, not really organized into wholes. Even within a single multi-ethnic state like the USA or the EU, there are multiple distinguishable "civilizations".
I don't think the discrete civilizations (spengler, huntington) view is all that scientific, though still a useful framework to hang more scientific observations on (like different cultures having different views of space and time). That said, some such clusters are quite useful. Japan is a distinct thing from China and this really matters in practical terms. The anglosphere likewise, or europe. But even so no grand theory of commonalities or essence seems needed to explain these things and their distinctions apart from general history and anthropology.
But as an aspirational fiction, "civilization" is useful. Civilization is when all our inventiveness and commerce adds up into great works of self-transcendence, things worthy of being remembered in the future or by God. "Western civilization" is an idealization of who we are and were, the best we have done, and the direction we want to grow in. Glorious.
But does it even work for that purpose? The term "western civilization" wasn't even invented until various continental minorities wanted to draw commonalities with and be accepted by Anglo civilization. What's the evidence that "civilization" ever motivated civilization?
If the concept is really useful, it is in the hands of great men of vision who take the civilization they are given, imagine a greater one, and lay its foundations, molding reality around them in a great act of artistry. We live in the world created by such artists, or created in reaction to them. A civilization is the accumulated work of a small number of such men. "Civilization" otherwise feels like a false collective essentialism somehow, or even a way to avoid talking about race.
I guess I'm more interested in continuing the work of some of those great visionaries, and cultivating ourselves, than in whether the result is "western civilization".
>>3107 >Different dimensions of civilization clearly have different scale and boundaries, so the essentialist discrete "civilizations" thing always sat a bit awkwardly with me. It's like asking how many ecosystems or biomes or races there are. There are divisions and clusters, but the underlying reality is continuous, not really organized into wholes. Even within a single multi-ethnic state like the USA or the EU, there are multiple distinguishable "civilizations".
In my model I was envisioning civilizations-as-fractals.
>I don't think the discrete civilizations (spengler, huntington) view is all that scientific, though still a useful framework to hang more scientific observations on (like different cultures having different views of space and time). That said, some such clusters are quite useful. Japan is a distinct thing from China and this really matters in practical terms. The anglosphere likewise, or europe. But even so no grand theory of commonalities or essence seems needed to explain these things and their distinctions apart from general history and anthropology.
I think it is a useful conceptual tool for us wordcels. High culture is a rarity in human history. Spengler calls the ahistorical people the “Fellaheen” (from Arabic fellāḥīn). By this he means the great mass of peasants who outlive one Culture/Civilization and drift into the next without ever forming part of any high Culture--living, in his phrase, a merely “zoological” fate, outside of world-historical consciousness. They never develop that inward sense of participating in a grand historical destiny, and merely follow a “zoological fate”, living and dying like biological populations without ever “making” history. Third Worldism overlaps with this conception. I think the great mass of LatAm is already in this state. No matter how much their population is increased, we won't get any exciting visionaries, artistry, grand politics. This can be generalized to most of the world. This has obvious policy implications.
>I guess I'm more interested in continuing the work of some of those great visionaries, and cultivating ourselves, than in whether the result is "western civilization".
Agreed. I think there is a common fetishization of the "West" especially among the rw as a reaction to anti-whiteness. This often turns into Christ-cucking, Conserva-cucking, etc. This is still stuck in the resentment framework. We must take what was best in the West and leave the rest, and create the living space for new visionaries to seize the reigns of destiny. It is time for grand experimentation.
Interesting post. If we analyze how we actually use the term 'civilization' it ultimately describes a huge range of different traits & observations, and even naming the component variables (let alone determining their weighting) is completely impractical, not least because there is so much room for individual discretion and opinion. In this sense I don't think civilization is different from any other categorization of a bundle of multiple continuous variables - we can't neatly derive and describe a platonic form, but the term is still intelligible and useful. Phenotype is structurally analogous; someone can have a particular phenotype despite some trait alleles not matching the broad classification, and individuals can argue about edge-case classification, but common understanding of the term exists and it is useful in the world.
Of course, we could come up with a very specific academic definitional framework of civilization, just as we could arbitrarily define any word to mean anything, but that simply isn't how the term is used (this sort of academic redefinition forms the basis for many linguistic tricks, eg the redefinition of racism into a very particular type of bias arising from a power imbalance, then applying the academic term without clarifying and thus connoting the colloquial meaning of irrational racial hatred. Classic motte and bailey).
Anyway, quibbling about definitions isn't super important, because the real substance of your post (and the concept) is its utility in inspiring transcendent and aspirational action. To this point, there is nothing inherent to 'The West' which creates these sorts of desirable outcomes - there isn't some sort of magical structure guiding behaviour, except perhaps institutional and cultural inertia originating from the competence of previous generations. This soft culture is ephemeral, and it naturally arises where greatness is present while receding where it is not. Of course competence, ambition, and so on (the components of greatness) are all mostly genetic traits, so a drastic change in population genetics (mass migration) means any sort of greatness-enhancing civilizational superstructure is going to rapidly deteriorate and disappear.
Moving to 'The West' isn't going to turn a subsaharan African genetically capped at 75 IQ into a legendary space explorer, but a related question is whether belonging to an abstract civilizational collective is enough to compel the diminishing share of the population with a capacity for greatness to actually risk pursuing it. Is the admiration of and benefit to Nbungu and his 15 children sufficient motivation for Charles to forgo material comfort or having a family and instead risk his life exploring distant planets for critical minerals? This idea of belonging to a civilization as inspiring self-transcendence reminds me of some excerpts from Alfredo Rocco's political doctrine of fascism.
“It is evident therefore that as the human species is not the total of the living human beings of the world, so the various social groups which compose it are not the sum of the several individuals which at a given moment belong to it, but rather the infinite series of the past, present, and future generations constituting it. And as the ends of the human species are not those of the several individuals living at a certain moment, being occasionally in direct opposition to them, so the ends of the various social groups are not necessarily those of the individuals that belong to the groups but may even possibly be in conflict with such ends, as one sees clearly whenever the preservation and the development of the species demand the sacrifice of the individual, to wit, in times of war.”
…
“At this juncture the antithesis between the two theories must appear complete and absolute. Liberalism, Democracy, and Socialism look upon social groups as aggregates of living individuals; for Fascism they are the recapitulating unity of the indefinite series of generations. For Liberalism, society has no purposes other than those of the members living at a given moment. For Fascism, society has historical and immanent ends of preservation, expansion, improvement, quite distinct from those of the individuals which at a given moment compose it; so distinct in fact that they may even be in opposition.”
As you can see, Rocco believes that it is generational continuity, a genetic duty to the group, which can overcome selfish hedonism and nihilism and inspire transcendent action. Even secular humanists agree that it is desirable to have visionaries striving for greatness, producing works and systems from which they will not personally benefit (and possibly perishing in the attempt). The question is, is the deracinated model of civilization or state, an abstract allegiance, sufficient to compel selfless action? Fundamentally this sort of structure must sublimate the individual to a collective, and I suspect that a collective like 'The West' (populated almost entirely by indian uber drivers, jihadis, and african street vendors) will not be sufficient to motivate those with the potential for greatness to make the requisite sacrifices. You may as well go and explore the stars for the glory of Mcdonalds and Walmart. Even if such a thing is possible, it is such a suboptimal motivational structure compared to the inherent motivator of genetic closeness and intergroup competition that it feels like a bandaid solution for those unwilling to talk about race.
>>3111 Mostly agreed but I think this goes beyond an academic exercise. I think there are universal structures that one can discover in history, and this applies to the concept of civilization (which I tried to draw out explicitly and implicitly), which can then be opposed to what is particular. The term civilization is used polemically in discourse. I believe having a proper conceptualization is important from an analytical point of view. The greater the understanding of the world the greater our capacity for action. Often comparisons are made to previous civilizations (like Rome) because they have entered our collective self-understanding in a particular way. I believe having a proper conceptualization allows one to discern which analogies are proper and which are inappropriate, for most reasoning is done analogically. Where can we draw parallels in decline, where are they wrong, what is unique about our situation, what will outlast us and is a in fact condition of possibility of history itself (anthropolgically understood). I did preface my post with the fact that I am expanding concepts for theorycels after all.
Re your second point, I think collective abstractions (beyond their analytical truth value) are also useful politically. I don't know how much you can get people motivated solely through the idea of genetic closeness (especially with the cultural and ideological baggage accumulated over the centuries). Perhaps civilization is a good tool as well.
>>3114 I think you are missing his more fundamental point. To (fittingly) put your point about "civilization" in analogous terms: Even though there isn't a single coherent definition of a term like "chair", it is still useful to try and whittle down a meaning of "chair" into components like "thing you sit on" or "has four legs" and so on that generally people would ascribe to a chair. And even if you don't get a definite answer out, your crude but now formalized model lets you operate with one degree more refinement than just accepting it as ill-defined and casting the question of its 'true definition' aside e.g. people will almost always say you have to sit on it for it to be a chair, but it being made of wood is a far more lenient condition, so that might give you some more conscious tools to assess if someone did or did not fulfil the terms of their agreement to bring you a "chair" when they bring you a wooden stump.
But while there is some validity to this whole procedure, its marginal utility comes about in the most convoluted way possible by abstracting the discussion through this higher-order, more nebulous term. When you write a contract that someone will make you a chair, you don't actually say that in the contract. You write out in specific details about what will be constructed, what materials will be used, what use it must reasonably hold up to, etc. Likewise, it's totally absurd to try and hold these discussions in terms of some grand theory of "civilizations". It's far clearer to ask individually how things like cultural unity, ethnic identity, economic relations and so on contribute to stability/prosperity/collective well-being or how specific combinations of those things have fared in particular circumstances historically. Trying to go the other way and pin down one specific weighted combination of those elements as defining "civilization" then talking about some historical case as "civilization-like but missing a cultural-cohesive element" or however you would talk about each individual society's deviation from this average "ideal" and trying to create theories in those terms is an absurdist procedure.
Yes people *do* talk this way. That doesn't make it the most efficient or coherent terms in which we ought to hold the discussion. In fact, it is actively obfuscatory because people will always for reasons emotive or otherwise disagree about the meaning of a charged term like "civilization", and you will always be holding not just a debate about the specific material facts you might disparately have in mind, but also a proxy war about what definition the term ought to take because of the flow on consequences of its ascription in broader society e.g. if Africa isn't a "civilization" and people were conditioned to assent to that, seizing their lands would be less instinctively horrific (I'm not arguing this doesn't have practical benefits). Thus, so far as the purpose of the discussion is to clearly communicate our ideas to each other, we are better off holding it as close as we can get to the grounded, material facts that vaguely underlie our abstract concepts - just as the contract for a chair is better written in terms of its specific dimensions and material compositions rather than trying to get at the true nature of "chairness".
>>3130 I don't think that I am missing the point nor do I disagree with you. It is necessary both to be abstract and concrete. You see pundits talking about high minded ideals like "defending Western civilization", making sure "Civilization doesn't collapse", predicting that future wars will be "civilizational wars". Developing adequate conceptual tools helps navigate this. How is civilization used ? What reality is the concept/word pointing to ? Is perhaps something else meant rather than what is being used polemically ? I maintain civilization is a useful concept. I am not saying that we must only remain in the domain of the highly abstract. But it can be a useful place to start, the way I attempted crudely in my original post.
