Evolutions 2/5

We also have to consider the necessary relationship with others. It is not incidental that the concept of ‘civilization’ re-emerges and takes on new connotations during the Age of Enlightenment. In his research on the modern usage of the concept of ‘civilization’, Emile Benveniste points out that Adam Ferguson uses it in English as early as 1759 to suggest the idea that, like human beings, civilizations move from childhood to adulthood: ‘civilization’ is an expression of the view that societies reach maturity.^[1] We find the same idea in Mirabeau (1749–91), who appears to have been the first to use the notion in French to describe the process or dynamic that allows a society to become civilized by ‘softening its manners’. The shift from the conception of the state of a ‘civilized’ society to that of a process of ‘civilization’ (in the sense of progress) is closely bound up with the rationalism of the Enlightenment and linked to self-image and the view of others. There was a historical evolution of societies and, consequently, a hierarchy between more advanced, more ‘adult’, more developed and more ‘civilized’ societies and primitive or ‘infantile’ social organizations that must of necessity mature and develop. The concept is not, then, neutral (and was never really neutral), but in the eighteenth century it takes on more voluntaristic connotations and acquires a self-conscious status. There is a new certainty of being ahead, or being in the forefront of progress and of showing that way for all other civilizations.

Accordingly, the term ‘civilization’ was henceforth invested with a value judgement about the ‘degree’ to which societies are organized, about the ‘nature’ of their beliefs, about their ‘type’ of relationship with reason and the sciences and even about the ‘justification’ for their hierarchies. The parameter used to make these judgements is of course of the European societies that were rapidly moving through the stages of their scientific and industrial revolutions. Those societies were, by definition and essentially, the very embodiment of the civilizational process and of access to a higher form of civility. These considerations, later completed by some aspects of nineteenth-century theories about the evolution and selection of species and societies, provided the philosophical and scientific justification for ‘civilizing’ operations in the most literal of senses. The goal was to ‘civilize’ ‘infantile’ and backward peoples, and to colonize them in order to free them from their own alienation, or in other words to help them grow up at last. They had to follow the march of history. This was what Kipling described as the heavy ‘white man’s burden’ who ‘had to’ colonize the Philippines, Asia, Africa and, of course, South America. Whilst the white man sometimes had to use violence (or even resort to slavery, though ‘whites’ did not have a monopoly on slavery by any means), that was ‘justified’ in historical terms. From the discoveries of Columbus to the colonization of the nineteenth century, humanist, economic and missionary considerations overlapped and reinforced one another. ‘Higher’ values were imposed, economic profits were definitely made, and populations were Christianized: the irreversible process of civilization (in the sense of civilizing) was under way, and the possibility of regression, and still less decline, was unimaginable.

It took a long time for these messianic visions, or even the concept of ‘civilization’, to be critically reconsidered. Even in the nineteenth century, there were critical voices that expressed doubts about the benefits of progress and civilizing missions, and it is mainly in the Marxist critique of imperialism that we find in-depth analyses of the ideological and economic mechanisms behind the processes of colonization. According to Marx and Engels, colonization takes us to the very heart of the capitalist system of exploitation and expansion. The goal was to enslave and to exploit, and not to civilize. Over a century later, Edward Said, who adopts a different approach that is more philosophical and cultural than economic, tries to uncover the ideological mechanisms behind the Orientalism that constructs civilizations of the other in order to distinguish itself from them and to subdue them. The outcome is the same: the reference to ‘civilization’ seems in all cases to conceal the real terms of the relationship, and to distract our attention from a relationship of philosophical, cultural, political and/or economic domination.

It took the two ‘world’ wars of the twentieth century, the rise of fascism and the economic crises of the 1920s and 1930s to raise certain doubts about Western civilization’s ‘definite superiority’ over all other civilizations. Communist protests and then communist revolution and the increasingly widespread and organized resistance of the peoples of the South undermined certain beliefs and certainties. The process began in the nineteenth century in South America and then intensified in Africa and Asia. It was not just that ‘Western civilization’ was characterized by frequent failures, wars, crises and regressions; the way it treated and ‘civilized’ the human beings it had colonized revealed temptations that were scarcely ‘humanist’, somewhat ‘barbarous’ and very often inhuman and dehumanized. The ‘colonial exhibitions’ that were shown in Europe until the Second World War were real ‘human zoos’ in which ‘civilized Europeans’ could stare at flesh-and-blood ‘exotic’, ‘colonized’ and ‘primitive’ men and women who had been deliberately displaced and exported from the colonies.

History then seemed to change direction as peoples began to resist in the name of their dignity, their beliefs, their independence and their own civilizations. Decolonization was under way, and it was bringing a new form of civilization with it. In the West, some intellectuals and politicians still think that colonization had ‘its positive side’ and that it was indeed a way of giving the peoples of the South some elements of civilization. The knowledge, progress and economic and social progress of the countries of the South owe, in their view, a great deal to the contributions of the countries that colonized them. Opinions can be either critical, positive or to a greater or lesser extent nuanced, but we are slowly coming around to a rather different idea of what is meant by the notion of ‘civilization’. That idea is not in itself new, but the circumstances of history are slowly normalizing it: the emphasis is no longer on a historical dynamic but on the intrinsic conditions that allow us to define what is meant by civilization. This approach is more normative, and takes the view that the characteristic features of any given society can explain its unity at the level of values, moral principles, intellectual points of reference, behavioural norms and artistic expressions. It is no longer a question of being ‘primitive’ or ‘civilized’ or of any other value judgements. There is no such thing as a series of stages that realize the historical process of civilization. There are a multitude of civilizations, each with its own points of reference and its own development. In the mid-twentieth century, the historian Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History (twelve volumes, 1934–61) lists twenty or twenty-five civilizations that have emerged, evolved and developed, and sometimes declined and disappeared. More recently, Samuel Huntingdon developed the same plural approach and integrated it into his theory of the ‘clash of civilizations’.

These recent developments and what appear to be more normative definitions do not necessarily signal the emergence of a more egalitarian idea of civilizations. And nor does the acceptance of diversity mean that the idea of superiority has vanished. In both North and South critiques of economic and cultural postcolonial imperialism and necolonialism have been directed against the logic of domination, which still predominates even though it no longer involves political control or an actual physical presence in the nations they control. Some in the alter-globalization movement (and elsewhere) see in the displacement of the debate on to ‘civilizations’ and ‘cultures’ at a global level the same strategy of displacement that we saw with socio-economic problems at the national level. The self-justifying rhetoric that emerges concentrates on the sustained and manipulated tensions of the ‘clash’ and ‘dialogue’ of civilizations and thus masks power relations whilst mobilizing populations by reviving their sense of belonging, stirring up fears and exacerbating the natural need for security. In the predominantly Muslim societies of the South, violent extremist movements and anti-Western Islamist currents play on the same register in order to galvanize crowds and use emotional reactions and popular frustrations to capitalize on their ability to give them a political representation. The polarization of the debate around questions of ‘civilizations’ and ‘religions’ finds objective allies on both sides of the potential clash of civilizations. At the same time, other and more reasonable minds are beginning to argue what is now the imperative case for dialogue.

In this dialectic process of ‘clash and dialogue’, concepts are vague, ‘civilizations’ are ill-defined or not defined at all, and feelings of superiority and logics of domination persist. An emergent ideology appears to assert that we are living in a new era characterized by the end, or absence, of ideologies, or even in a era of ‘non-ideology’ brought about by postmodernist globalization. Noam Chomsky has said ironically that he does not understand this inflation of terms and concepts, but it cleverly masks some very classic, and very old, issues to do with power relations. Fukuyama’s theory of the ‘end of history’ and his claim that history finds its apotheosis in the experience of the West is basically very revealing: we can readily accept that there are different civilizations, but there is one civilization that is ahead of all the rest and it is superior because of its ultimate political achievement – democracy – and its mastery of scientific knowledge and technological know-how. The theory does have its supporters, but it has also been heavily criticized: the West’s achievements are indeed remarkable, but it is impossible to understand them without subjecting them to a general assessment of relations between the ‘West’ and other civilizations. And besides, the development of the world economy is now seeing the rise of both contradictory economic forces (such as India and China), of politicoreligious resistance, and of elites and/or entire populations (and not just small groups of violent extremists) that are anything but resigned to the status quo. A fair, reasonable and lucid acknowledgement of diversity means that we have to change the way we see the world, ‘civilizations’ and relations between civilizations.

[1] Emile Benveniste, ‘Civilization: Contribution to the History of the Word’, in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek, Miami: Miami University Press, 1971.