What is the essence of civilization?
Wikipedia starts their article about the term “civilization” this way:
A civilization is any complex society characterized by urban development, symbolic communication forms (typically, writing systems), and a perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment.
Let’s break that down so we can understand it better:
Urban development
This involves people living close enough together so they can combine their efforts and accomplish much more than they could alone.
Symbolic communication forms
Typically this involves writing systems. We’ll get to this.
A perceived separation from and domination over the natural environment
This one is great because it includes that initial word, “perceived.” As climate change rocks our world more and more, all of us will learn a very hard lesson about what the meaning of “perceived” actually is. But this column is about communication.
If you think about these three criteria, the first and last are what we get from civilization but the second one is the main reason we were able to become civilized: We learned to talk to each other.
A civilization is any complex society characterized by … symbolic communication
All life communicates. I remember seeing primitive little black flatworms in a high school biology class. If you touch them, they recoil. That’s communication—very simple communication, but we have to start somewhere. As we move up the tree of life, the communication becomes more complex and meaningful. Honey bees tell each other where to find flowers and how far away they are. My dog and I communicate a lot. I think he knows how I’m feeling before I do. And he tells me about it.
Few animals other than people are capable of symbolic communication, however. Some primates can be taught a simplified version of sign language. Some can even form simple sentences in their own language. But being able to talk to each other and transfer a complex thought in one mind to another mind made civilization possible. Ogh could tell Ugh, “You pull on that end of the log and I’ll push on this end.” Together, they could move a log that neither could move alone. That made it possible to build cities—urban development—and keep houses warm during the winter—domination over the natural environment.
My point is that communication is such a fundamental part of being civilized that we should be critically aware of how, and whether, we are still communicating. A fundamental shift has taken place. We don’t talk anymore.
When I was a kid, my parents would drag me along when they decided to go to a friend’s house and talk. (Nobody hired a teenager to watch their kids back then.) It happened a lot. They would sit around the kitchen table and go on and on and on about stuff that was totally uninteresting. It was really a drag for a little kid. People don’t do that anymore. Now, we stay at home and watch TV. Or, for people in a younger generation, YouTube, video games, texting … but we don’t talk anymore.
I go to a book club every month, and we talk there. It’s great. Last month, all seven of us discussed a book by Willa Cather along with miscellaneous other things. I learned a lot about Willa Cather and a lot about my neighbors too. I think the glue that binds a community together comes from talking like that. I think that’s one reason why our communities are coming apart.
One thing I learned about Willa Cather, who lived in the late 1800s and early 1900s, was that she was a great letter writer. In that earlier age, people not only talked, they wrote. The hundreds of thoughtful letters that Cather wrote to her friends are as much a part of her literary legacy as her books are. Other people of that age were great letter writers too. The letters of people who founded America—including Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison—make a case that America wouldn’t exist if these people hadn’t been writing and talking to each other. (And, by the way, Adams and Jefferson didn’t agree on much of anything except their patriotism, but they still talked. We are the beneficiaries.)
You might be objecting, “We communicate! What is email? What is Facebook? What is Twitter? Comments to a controversial New York Times article can run to thousands of messages.”
… the glue that binds a community together comes from talking …
Good points, all of them. The seeds of some sort of replacement for the communication of the past might be taking form in some of these because a few people try to put real meaning into these new communication channels. But I’m not a believer yet. Twitter is limited to 140 characters. It is the poster child of the meaningless micro-thought. Facebook is close to the same thing. “Here I am with my dog. Here I am making a pizza for the big game on TV.” If it isn’t that, then it’s a commercial from some corporation. That kind of communication is like claiming that potato chips and cola are food.
(As a counterpoint, talking to each other is one of the greatest strengths of the Mormons. It’s a religious requirement, and it works for them. Their community is not coming apart. Full disclosure: I am not a Mormon.)
Newton Minow, who was chairman of the Federal Communications Commission fifty years ago, is remembered even now for his “vast wasteland” speech where he nailed the problem to the wall:
Keep your eyes glued to that [TV] set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.
Like bad money drives good money out of circulation (Gresham’s law in economics), bad TV has now driven good TV to complete extinction fifty years after Minow warned us it was happening. The new technologies based on the Internet have new bugs. Lots of them magnify the “echo chamber effect” and instead of binding us together, they are a force that is tearing us further apart. Redstate.com readers do not check out MotherJones.com, and vice versa. Both sides think the other side is insane.
In other new technologies, we’re talking to the wall, not each other. Who reads those thousands of messages to a New York Times forum? People from Addis Ababa to Zhengzhou might, but nobody around here seems to. We don’t talk to each other; we talk to strangers.
I don’t have the answer. I think this might be one of those trends where things just get worse. If you have the answer, let me know. I’ve been looking for years for the kind of pen pals that George Bernard Shaw or George Orwell had.
