The Critique of Civilisation

Ever since the anthropologists’ sense of the word ‘culture’ overtook the conventional use, the adjective ‘cultured’ likewise has fallen into disuse, 1 and the usage of the term civilisation has no less undergone a sea-change. The paradigm of Greco-Roman civilisation had the longest run for its money, those interested in art and archaeology looking to Egypt, China or Japan by way of contrast, or, another way in which some scholars examined these civilisations, generalising about them in the course of a largely speculative view of history. Travellers’ tales brought evidence of ‘other’ civilisations whose essential traits still persisted, and imperial expansion discovered in them intransigencies and resistances to be overcome as far as possible and, in any case, looked down on. The extraordinary, and in the ‘long view’ highly unlikely, combination of Greco-Roman institutions and Christian ideology that produced what came to be known as Christendom, perpetuated a distinction between the civilised and the barbarian/heathen that continued into near contemporary times. The construction of ‘otherness’ was boosted by a shift in Christian theologising from ‘All have sinned’, which provided a species of unifying model even though a rather discouraging one, to the distinction between saved and unsaved, which in its earlier religious sense and its later secularised form of advanced and backward provided warrant for forcing others to be free, for embarking on civilising missions whose basis was after all the denial that there could be more than one civilisation. Your genuine scholar of the antique world did not make this mistake, but the tendency to regard what was discovered as an ‘other’ to one’s own, a counterpart to be measured against the yardstick of the civilised, died hard. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Antique · Archaeology · Art · Barbarian · Civilization · Ideology · Literature · Mistake · Political science · Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Law · Philosophy