Chapter 12
What Is a Civilization?
What Is a Civilization?
“A civilization is not measured by what it can produce.
A civilization is measured by what it refuses to leave behind.”
We have used the word civilization many times in the chapters so far without defining it. This was deliberate. The word is one of those words whose meaning has been so abused, in so many directions, that it must be earned slowly through the course of an argument rather than asserted in a definition at the outset. I want now, in this chapter that opens Part IV, to attempt the definition.
The question — what is a civilization? — has been answered, throughout history, in many different ways. Some have answered it materially: a civilization is what produces cities, agriculture, writing, and metallurgy. Some have answered it institutionally: a civilization is what produces durable forms of governance, law, and collective decision-making. Some have answered it culturally: a civilization is what produces art, philosophy, religion, and literature that outlasts the lives of their makers. Some have answered it technologically: a civilization is what produces tools whose use compounds across generations. All of these answers are partly correct, and all of them are insufficient.
I want to propose a different definition — one that I believe is more appropriate to the conditions of the twenty-first century and one that organizes the rest of the policy proposals in this book.
A civilization is the organized refusal to leave any human being behind.
This is not a sentimental definition. It is a structural one. A civilization, in this definition, is not the snapshot of a society’s accomplishments. It is the commitment of a society to the inclusion of all its members in the benefits of its accomplishments. A society can build pyramids on the backs of slaves and still not be a civilization. A society can launch satellites while its rural poor lack clean water and still not be a civilization. A society can produce universities of global rank while its prisoners are warehoused without rehabilitation and still not be a civilization. The accomplishments are necessary, but they are not sufficient. The sufficiency is in the organized refusal — the willingness to bend the architecture of the society such that its abundance reaches its margins.
By this definition, no society currently alive on earth has fully earned the word civilization. Some are closer than others. The Nordic welfare states, in their better moments, come close. Certain pre-modern Buddhist and Islamic polities, in their better moments, came close. Certain small-scale African and indigenous American societies, before their disruption, came close. But no large modern polity has yet built, at population scale, the organized refusal that the definition requires. We are all, in this sense, aspirants to civilization. The renaissance this book argues for is the project of becoming what the word claims.
If civilization is the organized refusal to leave any human being behind, then the diagnostic tool for measuring civilizational progress is straightforward: who, in this society, is currently being left behind, and by what mechanism?
In the wealthy world, as the previous chapters have argued, those being left behind include the lonely, the alienated, the elderly without families, the young without purpose, the long-term unemployed, the chronically ill in healthcare systems that have lost the time to listen, and — crucially — the migrants whose arrival has been received but whose integration has been refused.
In the developing world, those being left behind include the rural poor in regions where the chain of because has collapsed, the young whose education does not connect to employment, the women whose talents are systematically discounted, the small farmers whose markets have been hollowed out by global trade asymmetries, and — crucially — the would-be migrants whose dignified mobility has been refused.
In both worlds, those being left behind include the prisoners, the addicts, the homeless, the marginalized minorities, and the unrepresented. In both worlds, those being left behind include — increasingly — the natural systems on which all human civilizations depend, which have, in the contemporary economic accounting, been treated as externalities rather than as members of the polity.
The cumulative observation is that every contemporary society, without exception, has identifiable populations that it is leaving behind. The question for any society that wishes to earn the word civilization is not whether such populations exist — they exist everywhere — but what the society is organizing to do about them.
This is the crucial point. The organization is the test. A society that does not even measure who is being left behind has, by the test of this chapter, no claim to the word. A society that measures but does not act has, at best, a partial claim. A society that measures, acts, and adjusts based on the outcomes of its actions has begun to construct the architecture of civilization in the sense this book uses the word.
I want to propose, in this chapter, three concrete diagnostic metrics by which any society can begin to evaluate its civilizational standing. These metrics are not exhaustive — the Index of Dignity, which I will develop in the next chapter, will be a more complete tool — but they are useful starting points.
Metric one: the visibility of the abandoned.
In a civilization properly so called, the populations being left behind are visible. They are named in public statistics, addressed in public policy, debated in public discourse. The visibility itself is the precondition of correction. A society that has hidden its abandoned — through statistical exclusion, through residential segregation, through political marginalization, through media inattention — has, by that act of hiding, removed the abandoned from the conscience of the polity. Visibility is the first reform. It costs almost nothing. It is, in many cases, the most resisted reform, because what becomes visible can be politically demanded.
Metric two: the proportion of the public budget allocated to the conditions of the abandoned.
A society that says it cares about its margins, but allocates the vast majority of its public budget to the conditions of its centre, has communicated, in the only language that finally matters in modern governance, where its actual priorities lie. Budgets do not lie. They are the most honest documents any society produces. A civilizational claim that is not reflected in the budget is, in the strict sense, not a civilizational claim at all. It is a marketing slogan.
Metric three: the rate of change in the conditions of the abandoned over time.
A society’s civilizational trajectory is best measured not by the current condition of its margins but by the first derivative — the rate at which those conditions are changing. A wealthy society whose poorest decile is improving at one per cent per year is more civilizational, by this measure, than a wealthy society whose poorest decile is stagnant, even if the second society currently has a higher absolute standard at the margin. The trajectory is the test. The trajectory tells us whether the society is, in fact, organized for the inclusion of all its members, or merely organized for the comfort of its current beneficiaries.
By these three metrics, we can already begin to evaluate the contemporary world without controversy. Visibility, budget, trajectory. Apply them to any society. The honest results will be uncomfortable for almost every society currently alive. They will also be useful, because each metric suggests, by its own logic, the kind of reform that would improve the score.
A reader may object, at this point, that the definition I have proposed is too demanding. No society, the objection runs, can actually achieve the organized refusal to leave any human being behind. There will always be someone left behind. The definition is, in this view, an impossible ideal.
I take this objection seriously, and my response is the one I have been making in different forms throughout the book.
The point of the definition is not to be fully achieved. The point is to be honestly approached.
No civilization in history has ever fully achieved the organized refusal. The civilizations we now remember as great are remembered because they organized themselves to approach it, year after year, decade after decade, century after century. The American civic project, in its best decades, was a project of slow approach. The European post-war social democratic project, in its best decades, was a project of slow approach. The early Islamic ummah, in its best decades, was a project of slow approach. The pan-African anti-colonial movement, in its best decades, was a project of slow approach. Each of these falls short of the definition. Each of them is, by the same measure, more civilizational than the projects that did not even attempt the approach.
The honest engagement with the definition is, by itself, the work. The definition is not a finishing line. It is a compass. A society that uses the compass will, over time, drift toward more civilizational arrangements. A society that does not use the compass will, over time, drift toward less civilizational ones.
The contemporary world is in a moment of drift. The drift, in many wealthy societies, is in the direction of fortified prosperity — the consolidation of comfort behind walls, both literal and metaphorical, designed to keep the abandoned at a distance. The drift, in many developing societies, is in the direction of extracted opportunity — the capture of national resources by small elites whose interest in the inclusion of their fellow citizens is, at best, rhetorical.
The renaissance this book argues for is, at the deepest level, a reversal of drift. It is the deliberate re-orientation of the compass. It is the public conversation about what a civilization is for, conducted with sufficient seriousness that the design of housing, time, communication, attention, meaning, opportunity, governance, and technology comes to reflect the answer.
I will close this chapter with a small parable.
A monarch of an ancient city, the story goes, once asked his advisors how to know whether his city was prosperous. The advisors brought him ledgers, harvest reports, tax receipts, military rosters, and architectural surveys. The monarch reviewed them all, and remained dissatisfied. After several days, he sent his advisors away and walked, alone and unrecognized, to the gates of the city. He spent the entire day at the gates, watching the people who entered and the people who left. He spoke to the merchants, the travelers, the beggars, the children. By evening, he returned to the palace and said to his court: “The city is not prosperous. The city is wealthy. I have walked among them. The poor at the gates are bitter, and the rich at the centre are afraid. Prosperity is the absence of both.”
I do not know whether the parable is historically true. I suspect it is not. I quote it because it captures, more economically than any contemporary analysis, the definition of civilization I have tried to articulate in this chapter. Prosperity is not the abundance of the centre. Prosperity is the bitterness of no one at the gate and the fear of no one at the centre. A civilization is the slow, patient construction of neither bitter nor afraid.
This is the standard.
This is the work.
The remainder of this book is an attempt to specify the engineering of that work.