I have tried in this book to accomplish the 1st part of a pleasant assignment which I rashly laid upon myself some 20 years ago: to write a history of civilization.
I have long felt that our usual method of writing history in separate longitudinal sections — economic history, political history, religious history, the history of philosophy, the history of literature — does injustice to the unity of human life; that history should be written collaterally as well as lineally, synthetically as well as analytically; and that the ideal historiography would seek to portray in each period the total complex of a nation’s culture, institutions, adventures and ways. But the accumulation of knowledge has divided history, like science, into a thousand isolated specialities; and prudent scholars have refrained from attempting any view of the whole.
Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.
Every chapter, every paragraph in this book will offend or amuse some patriotic or esoteric soul: the Orthodox Jew will need all his ancient patience to forgive the pages on Yahveh; the metaphysical Hindu will mourn this superficial scratching of Indian philosophy; and the Chinese or Japanese sage will smile indulgently at these brief and inadequate selections from the wealth of Far Eastern literature and thought.
Civilization is social order promoting cultural creation. 4 elements constitute it: economic provision, political organization, moral traditions, and the pursuit of knowledge and the arts. It begins where chaos and insecurity ends. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.
The heat of the tropics, and the innumerable parasites that infest them, are hostile to civilization; lethargy and disease, and a precocious maturity and decay, divert the energies from those inessentials of life that make civilization, and absorb them in hunger and reproduction; nothing is life for the play of the arts and the mind.
A nomad stock, like the Bedouins of Arabia, may be exceptionally intelligent and vigorous, it may display high qualities of character like courage, generosity and nobility; but without that simple sine qua non of culture, a continuity of food, its intelligence will be lavished on the perils of the hunt and the tricks of trade, and nothing will remain for the laces and frills, the curtsies and amenities, the arts and comforts, of civilization.
Civility is the refinement which townsmen, who made the word, thought possible only in the civitas or city. For in the city are gathered, rightly or wrongly, the wealth and brains produced in the countryside; in the city invention and industry multiply comforts, luxuries and leisure; in the city traders meet, and barter goods and ideas; in that cross-fertilization of minds at the crossroads of trade intelligence is sharpened and stimulated to creative power. In the city some men are set aside from the making of material things, and produce science and philosophy, literature and art. Civilization begins in the peasant’s hut, but it comes to flower only in the towns.
Japan reproduces in the 20th century the history of England in the 19th.
Subtle psychological factors must enter into play. There must be political order, even if it so near to chaos as in Renaissance Florence or Rome; men must feel, by and large, that they need not look for death or taxes at every turn. There must be some unity of language to serve as a medium of mental exchange. Through church, or family, or school, or otherwise, there must be a unifying moral code, some rules of the game of life acknowledged, even by those who violate them, and giving to conduct some order and regularity, some direction and stimulus. Perhaps there must also be some unity of basic belief, some faith, supernatural or utopian, that lifts morality from calculation to devotion, and gives life nobility and significance despite our mortal brevity. And finally there must be education — some technique, however primitive, for the transmission of culture.
3 meals a day are a highly advanced institution. Savages gorge themselves or fast. The wilder tribes among the American Indians considered it weak-kneed and unseemly to preserve food for the next day. With the Bushmen of Africa it is always “either a feast or a famine.” There is a mute wisdom in this improvidence, as in many “savage” ways. The moment man begins to take thought of the morrow he passes out of the Garden of Eden into the vale of anxiety; the pale cast of worry settles down upon him, greed is sharpened, property begins, and the good cheer of the “thoughtless” native disappears.
In the last analysis civilization is based upon the food supply. The cathedral and the capitol, the museum and the concert chamber, the library and the university are the facade; in the rear are the shambles.
To live by hunting was not original; if man had confined himself to that he would have been just another carnivore. He began to be human when out of the uncertain hunt he developed the greater security and continuity of the pastoral life.
Cooking broke down the cellulose and starch of a thousand plants indigestible in their raw state, and man turned more to cereals and vegetables as his chief reliance.
Cannibalism was at one time practically universal; it has been found in nearly all primitive tribes.
Everywhere among nature peoples blood is regarded as a delicacy — never with horror; even primitive vegetarians take to it with gusto. No shame was felt in preferring human flesh; primitive man seems to have recognized no distinction in morals between eating men and eating other animals.