Do Humans need Civilisation to get “civilised”? When, why and how this idea was born.
CIVILISATION
Our species Homo sapiens (sapiens= who knows, who is aware) shows a wide repertoire of behaviours and skills held to be unique : speaking, writing, cooking, building, burying the deads, hunting, farming, painting, creating, praying but also moral sense, social organisation, education of the offspring… A repertoire that many would be tempted to consider as the landmark of civilisation. Is this an assumption? or a fact? What is civilisation exactly?
From the 18th century, the idea was propagated that Humans are given this unique repertoire of behaviours by the “civilisation”, a certain type of socio-political organisation. This idea originated from the Contractualism, also known as the Social Contract theory: a stream in political philosophy born mainly in the 17th century that has become the foundation of modern political state in Western countries. It consisted in a reflexion on why and how politically centralised states emerged from an hypothetical “natural state” that is only defined in terms of absence of civilisation. In particular, in this hypothetical "state of nature” (first mentioned in the mid 17th century by Hobbes, Leviathan), Human beings are nothing more than solitary animals:
“In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
So was born the assumption that being Human equals being “civilised” because without “civilisation” Humans would remain rude and brutal animals, unable to cooperate, to respect their conspecifics, driven by their short term instincts.
The idea of “state of nature” was kept by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in 1762, who formulated what it is now considered as the most advanced and completed version of the Social Contract theory. As mentioned earlier, this theoretical framework was meant to account for and legitimate the existence and the nature of the centralised political power. Note that it still is the foundation of most modern political states, that hold the “monopoly of the legitimate violence” in virtue of a putative social contract.
The terms of this contract are simple: individuals cede a part of their freedom to the State, that in exchange, protect them against their brutal conspecifics. Interestingly, Rousseau was the only one to mention that many misbehaviours and evils (theft, aggression trickery..) attributed to this supposed “state of nature” reported by Hobbes and others were more likely caused by the civilisation and the modern way of life - but this detail, for some reason, has been completely ignored.
What do we mean by “civilised” exactly?
Derived from the latin civis, civitas (citizen, city), the term of civilisation is recent and its definition not that clear. Its first use appears to be by the French Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau in 1757 and later by the Scot Adam Ferguson in 1767, who wrote “Not only the individual advances from infancy to manhood but the species itself from rudeness to civilisation”. Exactly as the Social Contract theory that explains us how we are animals who need a centralised, possibly violent, political power to become Humans, the idea of “civilisation” was born in a context of Enlightenment Age, Industrial Revolution and especially in countries (England and France) prone to slavery trade that was operating at that time, distinguishing themselves from the supposed “rudeness” of the primitive Human species and that would soon become the Greatest colonial States, until today.
In the definition provided by Wikipedia, you can read that Civilisation refers to a “ complex society characterised by urban development, social stratification, a form of government, symbolic systems of communication (such as writing)" (…) and that concentrates power, extending human control over the rest of nature, including over other human beings”.
This is quite vague and easily allows to play with definitions of urban development or writing systems to exclude some societies from being civilised, based on the fact that their writing system is ideographic or their urban environment is deliberately ecological and minimalist.
When asked, many of us would deny that Enlightenment vision of Humanity and civilisation has prevailed until today., because we are aware that all Humans were born equal..
But as a matter of fact, in the common language, “not being civilised” means being rude, uneducated, antisocial, illiterate, and somehow inferior, reduced to an animal deprived from culture. Calling someone a population (such as Native Americans or Aka in Cameroon) “not civilised” sounds very pejorative, insulting. Is it because civilisation sounds superior? or because the “state of nature” sounds inferior and brutal?
Behind this implicit vision we all have inherited, there are at least two assumptions that are proved to be wrong:
(i) one is about this so called “state of nature” and
(ii) another is about the actual effects of the “civilisation” on Humanity
On the very first place, the so called “state of nature” is purely hypothetical and does not correspond to any reality, not only Human but of any species.
Moral sense, number sense, off spring teaching, social organisation, building or technical behaviours - that we thought to be cultural inventions and unique to Humans - are actually observed in many species including primates, birds and many mammals. See Franz de Waal’s works for instance, that have shown that collaboration, moral sense, empathy, prosocial choices or aversion for unequity do exist in animals (here).
At the individual scale, evidence from psychology, neurosciences, genetics, ethology and cognitive sciences demonstrate that babies, despite an immature brain and prefrontal cortex in particular, turn out to be able to discriminate phonemes of any language, to manipulate or sense analogical quantities, show empathy and are actively learning without any prior teaching. At birth, babies already have the innate skills and potentials that define homo sapiens. Interaction with social and physical environments trigger and drive the expression of these (genetically inherited) potentials.
At the global scale of Humanity, although the date of appearance of language related genes in evolution is unclear, archaeological and genetics evidence converge to demonstrate that Homo sapiens, who was born in Africa (see Nature, 2008 or Nature, 2019) did not wait to be “civilised” — in the sense of Enlightenment Age — to speak, to write, to paint, to bury the deceased ones, to build, to cook and even to get out of Africa and coming back. Homo sapiens had his full repertoire of behaviours well before living in a way that we acknowledge as “civilised”.
This hypothetical “state of nature” as imagined by the Enlightenment philosophers, is simply fallacious and has nothing to do with biological and anthropological reality. Humans, and other species, were born social and keen to learn. Language, morals, social behaviour have biological roots and are not brought by civilisation. It even seems to be the exact contrary: civilisation is built and made possible because these features are already present at the “natural state”.As such, the term of civilisation seems to refer more to a specific type of socio-political organisation, centralised and hierarchical, that appeared progressively before being diffused and imposed globally.
This type of political organisation of course offers many advantages, but does not necessarily facilitate the full development of (all) Human potentials. Because of the stratified social structure, and the important cost of the creation and maintenance of the infrastructures, a major of the population may not benefit of the advantages of the civilisation.
Civilisation may thus be also associated with social inequalities, extreme poverty, social isolation or discrimination, psychiatric disorders, medical conditions, criminality, selfish or competitive behaviours, environmental catastrophes, political corruption. For a reflexion on the subject, see this chapter.
The concept of “civilised” or “Civilisation”, as emphasized by Jock M. Agai, is a political or politicised notion. The fact of systematically using or adapting its definition is driven by, or gives rise to, the same expected outcomes: defending, maintaining or inverting a hierarchy between states, Humans or racial categories.
