What is civilization?

John Armstrong, a Scot who was educated at Oxford University, is currently Philosopher in Residence at the Melbourne Business School. This job description suggests that he is managing to live out in his daily life one of the major preoccupations of his book: how to bring cultural enrichment to daily living. "Business" has the smack of the material world; "philosophy" conjures up the life of the mind; happy the man who can marry the two.

His book is a large subject, which he frankly acknowledges in this thoughtful, brief and very readable discussion. In it he includes several very personal anecdotes as a way of illustrating his own intellectual journey. "Civilization", for Armstrong, has four key features: it requires belonging to a society that combines aspects of "grace, dignity, good order and security"; it needs a certain level of material development; it concerns the art of living; and -- most important of all -- it demands "spiritual prosperity".

Within these four general headings the author shapes and refines his theme, examining popular conceptions -- and misconceptions -- of civilization and teasing out their implications. We might think of ancient Greece and Rome as civilized societies -- yet they assumed slavery and low status for women. We might reasonably point out that it can only flourish within advanced economic and political societies -- yet who is to say that the Christian hermits clinging to their lonely and inhospitable rocks during the Dark Ages after the fall of the Roman Empire were uncivilized?

Sybarites might plead for the inclusion of fine wine, good food, beautiful furniture and landscaped gardens within the definition, bringing to mind the great age of the English country house -- yet this co-existed with punitive laws that hanged children for stealing a loaf of bread. Yet again, aesthetes point to Michelangelo and Mozart as examples of the high level of artistic excellence that should define civilization, even though they lived within often cruel and ignorant societies.

Armstrong picks his way carefully through these contradictions to provide his own definition: "Civilization is constituted by high-quality relationships to ideas, objects and people." Readers acquainted with the posted comments to Mercatornet articles will recognise the intense, even violent, arguments that ensue whenever general statements of this kind are made: who is this author to define high-quality relationships, my opinion is as valid as his -- Beethoven and Britney Spears (to use the author’s own example) cater for different tastes, neither superior nor inferior… and so on.

The author recognises that the modern democratic, rather than the past hierarchical and deferential, society will lead to this kind of intellectual anarchy. In effect, he is appealing to like-minded (high minded?) readers and as a reader I am very sympathetic to his thesis, even as I recall countless arguments with highly educated friends who completely reject anything that presupposes shared or objective truths. ("History is bunk", stated Henry Ford. "Religion is bunk" I was recently informed by a friend).

"Love", Armstrong continues, is the one-word version of the phrase ‘high quality of relationship’." The aim of civilization should be to make us love goodness, beauty and truth -- and the greater the freedom of ideas and behaviour in a society the greater our need for civilization. Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy, with its definition of "the best that has been thought and said", is quoted, as is Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, which first stated that a high degree of national wealth was necessary for a civilized society. Yet wealth alone is not enough: the core problem of the West, according to the author, is that "material prosperity has increased while spiritual prosperity hasn’t". What is this prosperity of the soul? A somewhat circular argument: the love of goodness, beauty and truth and their integration into our daily lives. He concludes: civilization occurs when a "high degree of material prosperity and a high degree of spiritual prosperity come together to mutually enhance one another."

As I pointed out in my example of the hermit, praying and toiling under conditions of severe material privation, material prosperity is less important than its spiritual counterpart. I am thinking of those early monks in their beehive stone huts on the Skelligs, tiny rocky islands in the Atlantic, off the Irish coast. My thoughts are prompted by Armstrong’s reference to Kenneth Clark’s great television series in the 1960s, "Civilization", as Clark begins with the Skelligs. And mention of Clark shows how far we have travelled along the road of intellectual democracy -- one man one opinion -- between his day and this book. Clark spoke with supreme confidence in his ideas, assuming that they would "civilize" the tastes of his television audience; Armstrong’s sub-title is "Re-making a tarnished idea".

His book is a brave enterprise -- but does it go far enough? In his introduction to his series, Clark describes the "exhaustion, the feeling of hopelessness which can overtake people even with a high degree of material prosperity" when they lose confidence in their way of life. In my country, the UK, I sense this hopelessness, or spiritual bankruptcy, all around me. My Irish grandmother used to speak of England as "the most civilized country in the world"; she was probably thinking of a mixture of Churchill’s wartime speeches, a respect for queuing, shopping at Harrods and an unarmed police force. My mother, her daughter, aged 85, now asks, "How can England call itself a civilized country when abortion is legal and euthanasia of the elderly soon will be?"

Armstrong is not writing from an ivory tower, unlike the Harvard art historians he meets in Bernard Berenson’s Florentine villa, I Tatti. Like Abbot Suger, born in 1081 and clearly one of his heroes, a man who, among many other energetic enterprises, built the Gothic cathedral of Saint Denis, he would like to "raise people from mass to an elite culture" through a revival of this "tarnished idea": the quality of our capacity to love. Is it possible to conduct this argument without reference to religious belief -- indeed, to Christianity, the supreme religion of love? I rather doubt it.

Francis Phillips writes from Buckinghamshire in the UK.