The Civilizing Coincidence

What role now for the 'spirit of civilisation'?

A coincidence of import is currently occuring: civilization is seriously questioning itself while entrenching its most adamant paradigms. Civilization, usually simple at first, is a great idea, but like so many great ideas is abused as soon as it gets out of the starting gate. The wild-eyed horse bucks its rider, runs up into the stands and tramples those who came to see it win. They would have had the winning ticket had it stayed on track, but now the ticket lies desolate in the stands next to the blood stains. No one would have bet on that.


Civilization—one of the proudest words ever spoken—conjures up images of high attainment and lets a well of self-congratulation swell, as a puffed-up person walks on a thin-iced pond in March and preens himself that he walks on water. Civilization is indeed a magnet for pride and a magnet for people when advertised. Civilization establishes and promotes a relatively high level of culture, accompanied by a relatively high level of technological development, and these seem good at first. But which outpaces the other, the letter of the civilization or the spirit? Does its over-extravagance and scholarship keep in step? Does greatness begin to override the initial idea of a better life? It would be good for any tribe to stand outside the walls, look at the civilization, and ask again: What is to be magnified there?


Justice is the core of all real civilized life, in a civilization or a primitive culture. And it is almost always as a center for justice and religion that a civilization is founded. The first cities in Mesopotamia, or Iraq, were set up as such. Is justice yet defined? Has civilization usurped the definition?


The "settled life and the achievement of luxury," as one Arab historian said, is the offer civilization holds out to the individual. However, that is only part of what's proffered, or received as proffered. Freedom, justice, a larger religious fellowship, and all the ideals "robed in an enduring light" catch the spirit of the men and women who consent, as they know well that without those ideals, lived every day, all things crumble. But what do those "ideals," only half-conceived, do both to the possibility of natural man or to the tranquility of unsullied nature? Civilization, it must be said, does not want to hear this question. A civilization—what an individual calls "the world"—instead, and with increasing stridency, says: What if a man gain his soul but lose the world? But of course the world has it backwards.