Civilization with Andrew

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Did you have a favorite ancient civilization that you were learning about, Corona?

Oh, man.

So many. I guess I enjoyed Celtic things because that's part of the world I'm from.

What was the name of that Celtic? I think she was Celtic, like a Celtic warrior, queen, Bobo Disha.

Bobo Disha is happy we used to say it, but Boudica, I think is more accurate.

That's speed. Like she was someone who had resisted the Roman invasions, right?

Yeah, that's right. When my dad lives, it's like where the Romans built their border wall, called Hadrian's Wall.

And it's just kind of cool to be like, you know, the Romans bought their colonialism to all of Europe,

and they got here and they can't fucking do it.

It might have been they got to that part of the world.

They were like, it's raining so fucking much. I want to go back to Italy.

But yeah, obviously, it was always interesting to me to think of like, you know, the amount of our modern world that's still impacted by Roman colonization.

And then these people who were able to resist it.

Yeah, I remember as a child, I was a really big fan of Egypt.

Of course, I think it's classic.

Of course.

I was a great priest. You can't go wrong.

Yeah. And Babylon, big fan. I like the bids.

Yeah.

You know, very cool.

Yeah.

As someone who, you know, I grew up like with a really just appetite for those living long ago,

how people living the past like historical books, how people dressed, what they eat, how they lived it today.

And a lot of those ancient civilizations were presented to me as humanities, great achievements.

You know, the magnificent architecture, the advances in agriculture, their remarkable works of art, and so on.

But as I got older and I started reading more history from below rather than history through the lens of kings and empires.

I learned more about life before civilization and outside of empire.

And I really became less interested in civilization as something to be held up as the pinnacle of what you want to keep below.

Although I am still very much interested in it as an idea and how we think about and talk about it as an idea.

And so this is it could happen here. I am Andrew Sage or Andrewsum on YouTube joined again by...

Chains. People have already heard me sounding off, but yeah, it's nice to be here again.

Yes. In case you didn't recognize the voice.

Yeah.

And I want to talk about the meaning of civilization.

If I were to ask you if you were civilized, how would you respond?

I think I aspire not to be, but like I have been raised in a society which very much proposed this binary between like the civilized and the unsililized right?

I guess savage is a word you could use if you were looking at how that society portrayed it right.

And like even though I think British education and stuff wouldn't use that word anymore, it says a lot about like the state and its desire to shape narratives in its favor.

So I think I would aspire to decimalize myself, I guess. I'm not like anti-siv in the like big skewer things better.

I think in the way that it's often used to describe Indigenous peoples or peoples who are not on the control of the state.

I don't like that very much.

Yeah, it's interesting to me because if you ask most people, they would probably just be like, yes, they would say yes, thought hesitation.

Sure.

You know, obviously we're not most people.

Yeah, yeah.

But you know, as you mentioned, like the alternative being, you know, the savage, that is something that has kind of fallen out of fashion.

You know, that exact binary of civilized and savage is not involved, you know, it's not treated as something that you see.

And yet we maintain one half of the binary as something to uphold.

So we still see, you know, we are civilized and civilization, but you wouldn't as much see descriptions of the alternative of the barbarian, the unsvilized, the savage, the primitive.

I think you can ask people like, what is civilization, what do you mean by being civilized and it's a bit shaky.

You know, it's one of those concepts that is so familiar, so used to being referenced that not many people stop to interrogate it.

You know, we throw the word around all the time when it can mean cities or technology or modernity, or law or culture or the state or simply not being barbaric.

Historically, it's also been a way of dividing humanity. The Greeks, I believe, were the ones who referred to basically anyone who didn't speak Greek as a barbarian.

Yeah. You know, China infamously treated everything outside of China as the barbarian.

Yeah, isn't it like literally an ornamental pair, like people are saying like, ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba.

I think I've heard that story as well, yeah. Have I show how true it is?

Yeah, I'm not super familiar with the like, the, the like sourcing on that one, I guess.

Yeah, but you know, the distinction of the civilized and barbarian is something that has been weaponized across history to justify conquest and colonization and hierarchical taxonomies of the human race.

White man's, but in court, in court was to bring civilization to the less advanced people.

Yeah. Civilization being, of course, the most advanced stage of human social and cultural development, which to me is itself a hubris because I think that presumption that we made it, you know, we reach where we go in, you know, what we figured out here, this is it.

Yeah, you know, I think that is a very damaging way of thinking.

Definitely.

And it's something that I think is embedded into a very popular perception of what civilization is.

You know, usually historically civilization has also been tied to cities, writing, large populations, agriculture, social stratification of some kind, specialized labor, monumental architecture, and of course, the state.

Yeah.

Buried in many of these associations is the assumption that hierarchy is advanced, that this way of structuring human society is the destination we will always headed to.

You know, we have this term in anthropology, state less.

The presumption being that lacking a state is itself, you know, something that perhaps needs to be rectified.

I'm not saying that every anthropologist takes a perspective, but you know, the words we use carry certain connotations.

And I think that for some people, particularly people raise in a civilization context, it's like, oh, yeah, they haven't reached where we have reached yet.

They haven't gotten there yet.

They haven't evolved to a point where they've developed a state yet, but that is the trajectory that they are on or are supposed to be on.

The more bureaucracy and rule and classes and institutions, the society has the more advanced, it is presumed to be.

And then of course, you have people like Samuel Huntington, who used civilization in this very broad census cultural identity.

Yeah. I have a pretty negative impression of Samuel Huntington as a human being and as theorist, but...

As do I, I mean...

I think we all do.

To give you the Listman indication, he treats Islam as a civilization, Hinduism as a civilization, Orthodoxy as a civilization.

And then everything sold to the Sahara in Africa is just one civilization to him.

Yeah. I love that Islam is civilization and also, like, south of the Sahara is civilization.

As if never the two shall meet, right? Like, famously, there were no Muslims in Africa.

Yeah.

It's just like that.

The maps that I've seen he does have Islam in Africa as well with the...

If you ever look at the map, the map is awful. The map is just awful.

Yeah. The map gives me fucking... Yeah.

It's been a long time since I've engaged.

Yeah. Muslim and African. And it gets... Yeah, he includes a horn of Africa in Muslim.

Fucking unbelievable. Yeah. Confusion.

Japan just exists just like a...

Like, every other culture is like massively homogenized and then Japanese is completely unique and it's a little...

In this little bubble.

Yeah. Yeah. This is not such...

Like, I'm sorry. Like, that's so weeb coded to me.

Yeah. It's incredibly white dude who hasn't fucking really engaged with the world coded.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh yeah, the entire continent of Africa. Sure. Fine. Whatever.

That's Africa.

Japan though. Like, there's Japan is distinct from Korea, from China, from Philippines, from all of Asia.

Japan is its own thing.

Yeah. From these places it's had exchange with for centuries.

And then like, the entirety of North America, Greenland, Western Europe and Australasia is just Western.

The indigenous peoples there don't exist, right? Like, the differences in those cultures.

Yeah, well, Western is called for white. So... Yeah.

It's not surprising.

Yeah, that's definitely what he's doing there.

His famous argument was that future conflicts would be predicated on clashes between these civilizations.

Clashes of civilizations be in the title of his book.

Yeah.

I don't find it very convincing. I don't think you do either.

Yeah. No, I'm not buying it, to be honest.

Yeah. It treats these big cultural blobs as if they're unified entities and discrete entities.

When history has been a long story of exchange, borrowing, overlap, divergence, migration and transformation.

Yeah.

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Finally for another perspective.

I want to share on the subject of civilization we have David Wengru, who many of you may know has the core author of the dawn of everything.

And for him, he's he argued that if we're going to keep using the word civilization, we should think of it as a product of interaction between societies.

So through trade and conflict and aggression and imitation collaboration, civilization is like an imagined phenomenon of that interconnectedness.

I think that is a somewhat eduasing critic, but still compelling and somewhat familiar approach to the idea.

Typically people do think of civilizations as discrete entities though.

Yeah.

At least in the layman's perspective, but the field of anthropology and historical research I know is right with comparative studies.

And you know, investigations of those very exchanges between societies.

So as he is speaking from an anthropological perspective, I see why he would want to put forward that reframing.

And the more definitions of words and connotations and stuff, it's not if it is really objectively correct.

The orders point into different things.

And the way that we use language is always going to be subject to debate.

I think the fact that we can even agree on what civilization exactly is should properly make us a bit more cautious in how we make sweeping claims about it.

And really, I feel every about many of the words that we threw around so casually.

But one consistency I've seen across most definitions of civilization is this packaging with, of course, the city, but also with ideas of advancement and development, which of course begs the question advanced according to whom.

You know, measured by what standard, how do you actually quantify how much more advanced one society is compared to another?

In order to benchmark his skyscrapers and bureaucracies and standing armies or industrial output, then yeah, sure modern states score very highly in too much of advancement.

But then we can ask, you know, why should those with specific metrics we use, why I'd measure the advancement of a society according to how much leisure its members enjoy.

Or by how equal they are or by how sustainable they engage with the ecosystem of them better than why how much freedom regular people are for their own lives.

You know, we can pick different measure and sticks and get different winners and losers in this competition of advancement.

But the measure and still we're working with when we speak of civilization clearly isn't very helpful for many of us.

Or societies are not working with the same measure and stick despite the efforts to impose this capitalist neoliberal measure and stick on everybody.

You know, we have countless experiments and examples of different ways of organizing life across history.

Some lesson for centuries, others millennia, some experiments empires are those staying small, some parties and equality are those parties and hierarchy accumulation versus mobility.

You know, we can't assume that all of humanity is trying to reach the same predetermined destination.

So the whole language of more and less civilized doesn't really cut it for me.

But the language of civilization does work for the people that it's used.

The people who see their society as the highest stage of human development, which must be imposed on others by evangelism and conquest and so on to bring in development.

And same attitudes as extended to people by European colonial powers to invade these lands for wealth and territory, to conquer them, to treat them as a lesser on the ladder of human development that very same attitude extends beyond people to nature itself as something while an unproductive and waiting to be mastered by civilization.

But one thing is really stuck with me in reading, for instance, James E. Scott, which talks about this in against the green, it's just how fragile and not inevitable this civilized, shall develop and towards, you know, these early states very often collapsed, very often fragmented.

And for many people in those contexts, the collapse, quote, and quote, was an escape to freedom.

You know, it was something that gave them an opportunity to dispose and to create smaller communities and to have greater autonomy and fewer obligations through laws.

And so with all that history in mind, I find the concept of civilization, you know, something to think about, but certainly not something to idealize.

Yeah, something that just came to my mind is a speech that Derroti gave to a cops on the eve of the Catalan revolution, right? So 19th of July.

So the cops have been sent, right? They know that the military is going to rise up against them, right? They know that in the coming days that they will either have to fight their own military or accept the end of this like liberal democracy in Spain, right?

This Republican Spain, the Catalan government has still sent the police to seize weapons from the anarchists, right? Who are the most capable people of fighting this coup?

They would rather state than no state, I guess, right? The state's always going to have more solidarity with the state than its constituents.

And he says to the cops, sometimes when we're given an order, we have to disobey it. And even if the order comes from a very big and important person to translate, obviously, in paraphrase to

we civilize ourselves with disobedience. It's a really interesting phrase, right? Like to him, I guess the concept of civilization is dignity and leg autonomy.

The person who is given up their autonomy to the state is not civilized because they have given up that autonomy and allowed the state to be the one that makes their decisions for them, right? Like it's an alternative use.

It's like an inversion basically. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, like he's taken that term and said like it's fundamentally unsabilized of you to allow the state to be the one that makes the choices for you. It's just a really interesting, yeah, inversion of the terminology.

Yeah, yeah, I think it's curious because when I look at, for instance, this is book civilized death by Christopher Ryan and he uses this concept of human domestication.

Okay. And he argues that, you know, just as humans selectively, bread and conditioned animals, to fit into environments that we designed for all and purposes, civilization shaped us to fit the needs of these large hierarchical systems.

Okay. You know, it's all routines and obedience and punctuality for activity, dependence on these institutions.

And so it's kind of interesting to me that, you know, priorities, Freeman, the domestication of civilization is precisely what makes us unsabilized.

Yeah, like the false pastivism, I don't know how to say it, like it is what makes us unsabilized, it makes us undignified.

Yeah. And I guess that is another use or connotation or source easy with civilization that easy to lies in there, which is civilization as dignity.

Right. As being upright or dignified as a person to be civilized as to be, you know, a certain standard or caliber of person.

Yeah, exactly that. Yeah.

And so he's kind of pointing to civilization as corrupting that caliber by making us slavishly dependent on the institutions over which we have very little control over.

Yeah, it's like, is it interesting like conversion, I'm sure how useful it is, like I'm not sure if it's a term that anyone needs to recapture, but it's interesting.

I think even if I find that an invasion is not necessarily practical in terms of d2D communication, I think playing with concepts, you know, tinkering with concepts, invoiting them, I think it's still useful in better grasping them.

In better, for me, to not sense of what they are and what they are not.

Yeah, definitely. Like the meaning of a word is something we co-create over time, right? It's not like a fixed thing.

And obviously we have these dictionaries and they have the means of words, but like language is just a way of communicating concepts.

And so like we can we co-create that meaning as we redefine those concepts.

Exactly.

On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman.

I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B.

I'm Julie Bignero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first.

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Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people and they were like, you smiled at us, not a lot of people smile around here.

It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it.

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When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months.

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I just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything.

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I knew if he woke up, without a doubt he was going to hurt me.

I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming.

They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

But these aren't stories about what's taken from them.

Their story is about what it takes to make it out alive.

Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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I would expect Indians to age faster, but I did not expect it to be almost a 4-5 year acceleration.

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That doesn't work.

Make you look more defined.

They say it works.

I don't know.

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So much of modern civilized life clearly isn't good for us.

I see that after stretching my back with, you know, great futility as I spend most of my day sitting.

Working out of desk.

You know, a lot of people are working jobs.

They find meaningless.

Certainly because they need the income to survive.

You know, they are spending most of their working hours indoors on expose to fresh air.

Yeah.

If they even have fresh air, also doors because any of us live in urban environments where the standards of equality are not the best.

Good also speak of the rate of stress and loneliness and anxiety and depression and burnout.

So I've continued to rise even as our material wealth as societies, not necessarily as individuals, but as societies.

And our technological capabilities have both increased.

I don't think you have to be a primitiveist and advocate for some return to prehistory, to recognize the negatives, the real sea.

And while I think many technological developments associated with civilization have genuinely improved people's lives.

You know, antibiotics, dentistry, planes, the internet, especially for disabled people in those medical conditions,

otherwise be untreatable.

You know, these are very beneficial innovations.

Yeah.

I just don't think that civilization as we have structured and conceived of it has a monopoly on innovation.

In his book, Wild Thoughts, Claude Levy-Strow said mainly point that many of humanity's greatest technological breakthroughs in agriculture,

weaving, pottery, animal domestication, they would develop long before we conventionally think of as civilization.

Humans have always been creative, we've always experimented, we've always invented and we always will.

Nothing to be con or should it go back because I mean there are billions of us now mostly in cities that are far from equally sustainable.

But I think if we keep the history of our diverse social forms in mind, then as we go forward, we can try to preserve what generally enriches human life,

while leaving behind the institutions and assumptions that no longer do.

By the way, do you by chance have a blueprint for the future of our species?

No, I think I do either then working it out together.

Yeah, I mean either, hoping someone might, I guess we ought to figure that out together, exactly.

Yeah.

That is a blueprint.

Exactly.

I'm really not interested in seeing that there's like one correct society that everybody has to adopt.

I think we can learn something from the incredible diversity of human societies that have existed.

And we can use that not for mimicry but for inspiration.

You know, to realize that we too can pursue these uncharted territories and develop something new or to take old concepts and stretch them into new forms.

Yeah, definitely.

The author, Daniel Quinn, in his book Ishmael, had made a point that tribes can be defined not by hunter and cathering or ethnicity,

but as a social organization that allows people to make a living together.

And so this definition, you know, people still today create tribal forms organization all the time,

whether it be mutual aid networks, affinity groups, intentional communities,

wherever people freely organize themselves around shared needs and shared purposes.

One thing for emphasizes is that these kinds of societies can be very flexible.

You know, when these arrangements are no longer working for us, we can change them.

We can walk away from them.

We're not tied to them in the way that we are basically bound by an enormous bureaucracy that we're supposedly in social contract with today.

And so really for me, that's what I want to focus on. I've lived where people have greater control over their lives, more decentralized, more cooperation.

I've lived where organizations are things that people can freely join at reshape and split and leave.

And they no longer serve in their needs.

I really care about GDP metrics and, you know, mega city concentrations.

I just want to know, you know, how we get from here to there together.

And to me, that is something that requires, as I said many times before on this podcast and on my YouTube channel,

it requires opposition to systems of domination through confrontation and non-cooperation through things like strikes and boycotts and other forms of resistance.

And it also requires, on the other end of that equation, that we prefigure the world we want to live in,

by promoting certain ideas and philosophies, but more so by building the actual relationships and institutions we want to live in and be a part of.

And I think these are two processes that will reinforce each other.

You know, people see and then experience different ways of organizing their lives and that informs their ideology.

They become more confident that these alternatives are possible.

I drive them to push them in new directions.

So I still have to say that the idea of civilization had its place and has had its time.

But I think that we can let go of that bold idea.

You know, that we don't have to assume that there is no other alternative.

And I think that requires not just a rejection, but an active replacement.

To make the cracks of the old order apparent and to make the idea, the only idea of liberalism, capitalism and civilization unconvincing by the presentation of this other alternative.

I know some people might call that next thing a better civilization, but I would prefer to be, you know, didn't bind ourselves to that old terminology.

At least that's how I try to approach it. And what about you?

Yeah, I don't think we should be beholden to these things that can hold us back, right?

And as you say, we should be more focused in building the world that we want to live in, not so much of building the world we've been told we should want to live in.

Language is turning to a way of seeing the world.

And I think we need to be careful of letting language determine how we see the world.

In a way that inherently limits our ability to create a better one.

And I think this is a concept that we need to be very careful of when it comes to that.

And just like the inherent bigotry that came came with a lot of civilization narratives, right?

Sometimes I do like the idea that Scott talks about this a little bit, right?

But like that, in fact, these people in states who are domesticated, they were domesticated by grain crops.

Grain crops brought those people in, for some to live in a certain place, for some to live in a certain way,

although so they could tend and care for grain crops, right?

Yeah.

I think maybe flipping that around might help people understand a little bit.

Yeah, I think that's, I forget the name of the book.

You said, botany of desire?

Yeah, I haven't read that. I've been recommended that book before.

Yeah, I've read that a couple years ago.

And I do think it was on that very subject, the idea that the plans that we've raised having in some ways domesticated us.

Right.

Just as we have domesticated them, it's been over a super cool process.

Yeah, I like that idea.

That I think was like a theme or element of that book, if I remember correctly.

Okay, nice. Yeah.

Or maybe it's a theme that I read in it.

Right. Either way, I think it's sometimes used for way of seeing the world.

And yeah, I guess that's one of my takeaways as well.

Play around with concepts, think with them, flip them upside down.

And I think that is also how we innovate, how we create new things, new meaning.

You know, there is this, I think it's a proverb, where it might be an ecclesiasties.

But it's like, there's nothing new under the sun.

Yeah.

So it's like creativity is just the ways that we repurpose, whatever it exists.

We build upon everything that came before.

And we have to be willing to play around with it if we want to get to that point of innovator.

Yeah.

That's pretty much what I have for today.

All the power to all the people.

Peace.

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