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The simplest way to define civilization is that it consists of life in cities, and the word “civilization” wears its etymological relation to urban life on its metaphorical sleeve. One of the definitions of civilization that I employ—what I call my informal definition of civilization—is that civilization consists of a network of cities connected by relations of cooperation, competition, and conflict. Just a few days ago I was listening to the first of Craig Benjamin’s lectures “The Big History of Civilizations” and noticed that he briefly and without any ado defined civilization as, “…the advanced level of human social development and collective learning that could arise only once cities were established.” (In the historiography of big history, “collective learning” is used to indicate the social transmission of knowledge among human beings made possible by language.)
Prehistorian V. Gordon Childe posited an urban revolution following upon the agricultural revolution, and Childe’s classic paper on the urban revolution (V. Gordon Childe, “The Urban Revolution,” The Town Planning Review, Vol. 21, No. 1, Apr., 1950, pp. 3-17.) has furnished the most widely employed diagnostic criteria for civilization, subject to numerous permutations and variations as scholars have elaborated and modified Childe’s schema over the subsequent decades. (I wrote about Childe on cities and civilization in my Centauri Dreams post Martian Civilization.)
We tend to think of the origins of civilization on Earth as a simple before/after dichotomy in time, so that human life was the life of nomadic hunter-gatherers prior to civilization, and then civilizations appeared, and human life thereafter was civilized life. This simplistic picture is misleading. That much is obvious, but what is less obvious is that if we think more carefully about the origins and spread of civilization, the resulting picture shows us civilized life as small islands of urbanization, set in a vast wilderness, that have incrementally expanded over historical time until cities now dominate human history.
When “civilization” first appeared on Earth in the form of cities, there were only a handful of cities in various parts of the world—Jericho, Çatalhöyük, Jarmo, Ganj Dareh, Mehrgarh, Nanzhuangtou (some of which may have been more like extensive agricultural villages than cities, but the division between the two is a gray area)—which meant that “civilization” consisted of a few isolated cities surrounded by a much larger uncivilized hinterland. It literally took thousands and thousands of years before cities became relatively common, when regions of the world later boasted networks of cities actively engaged with each other (as I noted above, in relations of cooperation, competition, and conflict).
We see this pattern of regional networks of cities clearly in Mesopotamia, in the Indus Valley, in Mesoamerica, in Egypt, in Anatolia, and elsewhere. It took time for the idea of the city to spread and to grow and to mature, but already by six thousand years before present there were networks of cities as in the Indus Valley civilization, and it has been the tradition in historiography to reserve the term “civilization” for societies at this level of development, which usually also included written language (the written language of the Indus Valley civilization has not yet been deciphered), so I depart from traditional historiography by recognizing a rudimentary form of civilization existing from the time of the appearance of the first cities about ten thousand years ago.
However, even when urbanization rises to the level of regional networks of cities, urbanization is still an isolated island of high culture—what American anthropologist Robert Redfield called the “Great Tradition” (and which Barbara Ann Kipfer used to define civilization in her Encyclopedic Dictionary of Archaeology as, “Complex sociopolitical form defined by the institution of the state and the existence of a distinctive great tradition”)—surrounded by a large hinterland of agricultural villages, and a larger wilderness that really was a pristine wilderness still peopled by nomadic hunter-gatherers, where little resembling what we think of as high culture was to be found. The villages and the nomads were caretakers of the “Little Tradition” in contradistinction to the “Great Tradition” cultivated in cities.
For thousands of years, substantial populations of hunter-gatherers existed side-by-side with villagers and urbanized city dwellers, and, of course, at first the hunter-gatherers far outnumbered the urbanized minority of humanity. One can speculate that the hunter-gatherers and the settled city dwellers traded, with the hunter-gatherers offering fresh game and resources not available locally (like obsidian) and the city dwellers offering in exchange the distinctive products of urban craftsmanship: pottery, metallurgy, basketry, and the like. It may even have been the hunter-gatherers who unwittingly engaged in idea diffusion by spreading tales of urban life to regions and peoples who had never heard of nor had seen such a thing. Perhaps some hunter-gatherers witnessed urban life first hand, and then went off to establish their own urban centers.
This process of urbanization (which is also the process of civilization,
i.e., of being made civilized) is to be understood as one of the grand
narratives of the human condition over the past ten thousand years, and it is a
grand narrative that holds cross-culturally and down through time—a grand
narrative greater than any one civilization and which has characterized
civilization on a planetary scale, like Karl Jasper’s ambition to define an
Axial Age in terms of, “a common frame of historical
self-comprehension for all peoples for the West, for Asia, and for all men on earth,
without regard to particular articles of faith.” Temporary reversals in the trend of
urbanization—say, the collapse of the Indus
Valley civilization (about 3,300 years before present) or the widespread
failure of Roman cities (about 1,600 years before present)—interrupted the
trend but did not end it.
A graph of human urbanization over the past ten thousand years would be jagged, but it would always be tending upward. While Roman cities were failing, Islamic cities were growing, and then when Islamic cities entered into decline, European cities began growing. Throughout it all, urbanization increased overall, and the industrial revolution further accelerated the growth of cities, so that the largest cities increased from about a million people to tens of millions of people.
Indeed, it was not until the first decade of the twenty-first century
that the human population passed the symbolic demographic turning point of
being majority urban (cf. The
Rural-Urban Divide), i.e., since about 2006, more human beings have been
living in urban areas than are living in rural areas, so that humanity is now a
majority urbanized species. This, then, is a civilizational metric and grand
narrative that began ten thousand years ago and is still playing itself out in
the present. I expect to see major conurbations—the megalopolis, as it were—continue
to grow in scale, with human populations increasingly concentrated in cities
over the coming thousands of years, just as human beings have been
concentrating themselves in cities more and more over the past ten thousand
years. At some point in the future we will see the first city of a hundred
million population, and then several such cities, as today we have many cities
of more than ten million population.
Needless to say, the structure of human history has been profoundly shaped by this increasing urbanization, and this will continue to be one of the grand narratives of human history. Human beings may so concentrate themselves in cities that we relinquish parts of the surface of the planet once dominated by human beings back to nature, allowing the planet to heal itself, as we become more concentrated (and more efficient in our use of resources) in our urbanized centers of civilization. This might be taken as one interpretation of Doxiadis’ idea of Ecumenopolis, the world-city, and this might also unintentionally bring about E. O. Wilson’s proposal that we set aside half of the planet for wilderness—not because we planned to do so, but just because this turned out to be the trajectory of human history, though we didn’t realize that that is where we are going. This is the invisible hand of urbanization, which has already repeatedly defined the human condition in unexpected ways.
We might also unintentionally return to a condition (at least on our
homeworld) in which hunter-gatherer nomads live in the wilderness abandoned by
increasingly urbanized humanity, and once again, just as thousands of years
ago, hunter-gatherers would live side-by-side with urbanized city dwellers. I
have called this latter scenario pastoralization
and discussed it in Pastoralization,
The
Argument for Pastoralization, and Invariant
Civilizational Properties in Futurist Scenarios, inter alia.
We do not yet know the overall shape of human history and civilization, not what exactly the future holds for us, but we can project into the future this trend of urbanization that has held true for ten thousand years, and we can make some rudimentary observations about humanity that continues to urbanize as well as to concentrate its paradigmatically civilized activities within urban centers. And while we could experience another urbanization reversal, as has already occurred many times in human history, I would expect that the reversal would be followed by the resumption of the same urbanization trend that we have seen since the origins of civilization.