Society and Civilization

Richard Ostrofsky
(March, 2001)
Today we are seeing the beginnings of a global society comprised of
innumerable cultures, but we are still very far from a global civilization. In
this article, I want to address the confusion surrounding these three words,
and try to use them to say something interesting about the state of the world
today.
As anthropologists first used the word, and as we still tend to use it,
the term culture referred to the totality of artifacts – material, institutional or
purely cognitive – within the repertoire of a given society. A tribal society,
in turn, meant the extended family of individuals who lived by some
particular culture. This unavoidable circularity lay at the roots of their
discipline and did no harm there, but it would not do for sociologists who
wished to study the much more complicated, urbanized societies of the 19th
and 20th centuries. These, clearly, were comprised of a great many cultures
(in the anthropologist’s sense) living cheek by jowl. Accordingly, for the
sociologist, and increasingly for the contemporary anthropologist as well,
culture tends to mean the formative acquisition of a single individual – the
repertoire that he or she has picked up in the course of a particular
biography. The propensity for culture (in this sense) is an aspect of human
biology that takes the place of instinct. It is responsible for human
malleability, adaptability and collective learning. It is the way an individual
brain comes to be wired up to produce English words rather than French or
Chinese ones, to have particular acquired skills, to prefer certain foods and
styles of clothing and music – in general, to confront the world with a
personal outlook (however incoherent and context-dependent), and with a
personal toolkit of acquired capabilities. For the 19 th century anthropologist,
culture was what all the members of a certain tribe had in common. Today,
individuals growing up in almost any large city will be exposed to so many
different traditions that no two will have been formed with identical cultural
patterning.
Sociologists tend to think of society on a national scale, because only
nations compile the statistics their discipline requires. Yet, for an
understanding of the world today, this is plainly too narrow: nations trade
with each other and learn from each other; and many cultural and business
enterprises spill over national frontiers. Many encircle the globe. Thus, if
we think of society as the largest collectivity of individuals linked to each
other by commercial and/or cultural relationships, then today’s society is
global. Of its civilization, this cannot be said. A global society is certainly
coming to pass, but no one has yet remarked the advent of a global
civilization.
What is lacking? The concept of a civilization seems to differ from
that of “complex, urbanized society” in only one respect that I can see: It
seems to entail a transcendent stylistic and spiritual unity (cultural unity in
a spiritual domain) that societies as such need not possess. Thus we speak
naturally of Islamic, Hindi, Sino-Japanese and European civilizations. All
these have built world-cities, and all are visibly struggling to preserve their
ancient identities in a new world order that overflows the spiritual banks of
their old traditions without having as yet cut new ones. Indeed, the premise
of the commercial, civic culture that makes our global society possible is
precisely that it refrain from spiritual prescriptions. Even its negative
doctrines of pluralism and toleration are intolerable in some circles, and
likely to remain so. We might say, the pre-condition of our global society
today is that it refrain from asserting itself as a civilization. Nor does there
yet exist political machinery through which such an assertion could be
mounted. The United Nations and a few treaty organizations are as much as
we have in that direction; and weak as these are, they are already too much
for many people. The fact is, we are not yet ready for global civilization, but
our global society continues to be unstable without one – unable to kindle
much positive affection from anyone. Accordingly, what we witness on the
news every evening is an appalling global barbarism.