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The Role of Civilization in History

This document discusses the history of civilization and humanity's progress. It argues that while conquerors and soldiers are often glorified in history books, those who truly advanced civilization like early scientists and farmers are rarely mentioned. It also claims that being good at fighting and war does not equate to being civilized, as animals and savages fight too. The document places humanity's development in an evolutionary context, noting that civilization has really only existed for around 8,000 years, which is a very short time period given the nearly 4 billion year history of life on Earth. It concludes that humanity is still in its infancy and should not expect too much from ourselves, as our past has largely been about fighting, but progress will continue over

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254 views1 page

The Role of Civilization in History

This document discusses the history of civilization and humanity's progress. It argues that while conquerors and soldiers are often glorified in history books, those who truly advanced civilization like early scientists and farmers are rarely mentioned. It also claims that being good at fighting and war does not equate to being civilized, as animals and savages fight too. The document places humanity's development in an evolutionary context, noting that civilization has really only existed for around 8,000 years, which is a very short time period given the nearly 4 billion year history of life on Earth. It concludes that humanity is still in its infancy and should not expect too much from ourselves, as our past has largely been about fighting, but progress will continue over

Uploaded by

Yagyaj
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Civilization and History

Most of the people who appear most often and most gloriously in the history books are great
conquerors and generals and soldiers, whereas the people who really helped civilization forward
are often never mentioned at all. We do not know who first set a broken leg, or launched a
seaworthy boat, or calculated the length of the year, or manured a field; but we know all about
the killers and destroyers. People think a great deal of them, so much so that on all the highest
pillars in the great cities of the world you will find the figure of a conqueror or a general or a
soldier. And I think most people believe that the greatest countries are those that have beaten in
battle the greatest number of other countries and ruled over them as conquerors. It is just
possible they are, but they are not the most civilized. Animals fight; so do savages; hence to be
good at fighting is to be good in the way in which an animal or a savage is good, but it is not to
be civilized. Even being good at getting other people to fight for you and telling them how to do it
most efficiently - this, after all, is what conquerors and generals have done - is not being
civilized. People fight to settle quarrels. Fighting means killing, and civilized peoples ought to be
able to find some way of settling their disputes other than by seeing which side can kill off the
greater number of the other side, and then saying that that side which has killed most has won.
And not only has won, but, because it has won, has been in the right. For that is what going to
war means; it means saying that might is right.

That is what the story of mankind has on the whole been like. Even our own age has fought the
two greatest wars in history, in which millions of people were killed or mutilated. And while today
it is true that people do not fight and kill each other in the streets - while, that is to say, we have
got to the stage of keeping the rules and behaving properly to each other in daily life - nations
and countries have not learnt to do this yet, and still behave like savages.

But we must not expect too much. After all, the race of men has only just started. From the point
of view of evolution, human beings are very young children indeed, babies, in fact, of a few
months old. Scientists reckon that there has been life of some sort on the earth in the form of
jellyfish and that kind of creature for about twelve hundred million years; but there have been
men for only one million years, and there have been civilized men for about eight thousand
years at the outside. These figures are difficult to grasp; so let us scale them down. Suppose
that we reckon the whole past of living creatures on the earth as one hundred years; then the
whole past of man works out at about one month, and during that month there have been
civilizations for between seven and eight hours. So you see there has been little time to learn in,
but there will be oceans of time in which to learn better. Taking man's civilized past at about
seven or eight hours, we may estimate his future, that is to say, the whole period between now
and when the sun grows too cold to maintain life any longer on the earth, at about one hundred
thousand years. Thus mankind is only at the beginning of its civilized life, and as I say, we must
not expect too much. The past of man has been on the whole a pretty beastly business, a
business of fighting and bullying and gorging and grabbing and hurting. We must not expect
even civilized peoples not to have done these things. All we can ask is that they will sometimes
have done something else.

From The Story of Civilization by C. E. M. Joad (A. D. Peters & Co. 1962)

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