Progression, civilisation and cultural relativism

The following is a critique of two terms, one rather fashionable and one somewhat controversial, that are very much two sides of the same coin.

Civilisation is a highly problematic concept. It carries strong overtones of the superiority of a culture which has more "advanced" technology, and certain kinds of social organisation (what archaeology and anthropology call a "complex society"), involving, for example, urbanisation and a state system.

Of course, whether someone from your culture discovered electricity and whether your culture finds it expedient to conglomerate in towns is hardly a reasonable measure of whether a culture is morally better or worse.

Civilisation is a principle that has been used in the past to separate humans into a higher and lower strand of history with appalling consequences. People who were considered uncivilised - "savages" or "primitives" - were of lesser value, or indeed not even truly human at all: it was legitimate to oppress them, abuse them, or kill them by the thousands, and they were due no respect or equal treatment.

Even up until the mid twentieth century, this abuse of the idea of civilisation was still rampant. Britain was still the seat of an empire run on racial superiority, which was closely linked in people's minds with the kinds of cultural and technological differences that made Britain a civilised country and anything much outside Europe sub-civilised, inferior - conveniently ignoring or explaining away things that Europeans would have considered as markers of civilisation in places like Africa and South America as well.

Regardless of this, to the contemporary Westerner it is perfectly plain (I would hope) that a culture which is referred to as a civilisation on the basis of certain kinds of technology (e.g. agriculture, writing) and social organisation (e.g. urbanisation, laws) cannot be considered "superior" to one which is not; we may consider it more "advanced" if it has cities and writing and social hierarchy, but in fact none of these things make one culture better than any other - which the term "civilisation" implies. This is closely related to the idea of progress; indeed we may define civilisation as whatever is considered to be the most "advanced" or "developed" stage of human societal organisation along the timeline of human progress. Of course, in reality, taking a long-term perspective on the history of humanity, there is no single fixed progression from a horrible primordial condition to a superior present and future one in line with the evolutions of the organisation of human societies.

Given these problems, it is essential that this term is used with great precision and circumspection, if at all. If we define civilisation as "the most advanced level of human social organisation", then it should be used within societies that like to think of themselves as civilised to hold people to a higher standard of behaviour: to remind them of the values such as respect and tolerance that they associate with the "ultimate" (from a Latin word meaning final), "perfect" (from a Latin word meaning finished!) stage of human progress. I think that such values, rather than anything to do with technology or social complexity, may still be usefully described as civilisation, in association with the good or desirable things about Western culture.

Given the appeal to the same potentially dangerous idea of the "progress" of humanity, the term "progressive" is arguably in some ways almost as problematic as "civilised" and the like; "civilisation" at least is unable to hide from the history of the abuse of the concept. In both terms, there is an appeal to the idea of "progress" with application to humanity as a whole, which used to imply (and in many circles still does) that all cultures must proceed according to the pattern of the industrial revolution in Europe in order to achieve a superior moral state. The problem with this is that it is of course incorrect to assume that the past was a horrific and immoral or amoral Hobbesian state of nature: we really have very little idea how morally righteous (according to our own culture's morality) most societies were for the vast majority of the history of humanity, which is well beyond recorded history. This line of thought steers us towards some general reflections about archaeology: how little archaeological evidence there is for so many human societies, how interpreting it is rarely straightforward, and how representativeness is never guaranteed.

That said, the idea of progress is of course not in itself problematic, as long as the difference between moral development, on the one hand, and the presence of particular technologies or particular kinds of social organisation, on the other, is properly maintained. The idea that things should move from a present worse condition to a future aimed-for better one is surely nothing other than hope; and fighting for a future that is better than the present should surely be what politics is about.