Civilisation
29 March 2002

This is a sketch of RDN's notion of civilistion and development. It is very much a work in progress.

1 Civilisation is a skin deep matter of accumulated habits and a store of knowledge which produces a human being who behaves in a certain way, but whose behaviour is as it were overlain on an unreformed, atavistic barbarian who may erupt at any time (N Ireland, Africa, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan).

2 Civilisation is step-by-step progress with stages which must be gone through, like ticking off an agenda.

3 Some peoples and places seem to get stuck in an early phase and never move beyond (N America before Columbus, Australiasia, Africa before Arab and European invasions), the Arctic regions).

3. Some peoples and places achieve a pre-modern phase of development in which they have order, art, intellectual activity, trade, some technology - but do not to move into capitalistic democracy. ("pre-Classical" and Classical Civilisations, Pre-20th century Arab world and Russia, China, Japan, India.)

4. Various European countries in the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries democratise and capitalise their societies at varying speeds and degrees. The process is transplanted to N and to some extent S America, and Australasia, which join Europe and then overtake Europe in developing democratised capitalism and technological sophistication.

5 Colonising adventures take elements of the Western model to the tropics, where - by and large - the economic and technological developments catch on quicker than the political dimensions. In Africa, neither really catch on, accept that there are individuals who become technically or intellectually sophisticated. In many places (N America) the indigenous peoples remain outside the civilisation, except for some individuals who integrate.

6 The globalised world represents one in which the Western model is on offer to any country, region or individual to adopt, in part or in whole.

7 Though the West has absorbed much from the Classical world and much of its maths and language and some of its medicine and technology was either borrowed from or paralleled in the Arab world and Asia, the fact remains that in its distinctively dominant modern form, "civilisation" (technology, intellectual inquiry, government, economic relations) is an enterprise whose models and techniques are Western.