What Does it Mean to Be Civilized? (A Look at Veblen's View of the Matter)

For most these days I suppose the words "civilization" and "barbarism" have a rather old-fashioned, even pretentious ring. Yet anyone looking very deeply at social science can hardly avoid older work which makes use of such terms, often in ways that I think can still be deemed relevant.

Certainly one sees such usage in the work of Thorstein Veblen, as with his classic The Theory of the Leisure Class, where the usage is all the more notable for not proceeding along the lines they might expect from our everyday speech and writing.

For example, looking at the court of a monarch such as that of England, with its orders of precedence and minute protocol and ostentation, those who understand "civilization" in its everyday sense may think all that the epitome of civilized behavior.

But for Veblen it is the extreme opposite. As he explains the term it is the barbarian who is obsessed with hierarchy and inequality, with some being above and some being below to such a degree that descent from those who were above means much; obsessed with intricate, ostentatious ways of living, and the "conspicuous consumption" they bespeak. By contrast the civilized are egalitarian and matter-of-fact.

This disparity in its turn this reflects other differences between the civilized and the barbaric. The outlook of the barbarian, Veblen explains, is defined by their living by predation--by the aggressive pursuit of dominance over others, over other humans in particular, and the personal prowess to which they attribute their acquisition of such dominance, all the way down to mystical notions of personal force, and advertise such pretensions to superiority with the wastefulness of their consumption. (The palace is absurdly large--and this shows that they can afford absurdly large expenditure, which in turn testifies to the prowess that enables them to get hold of so much, proving they are "more" than others, demigods, even.) By contrast the civilized person lives not by predation on others, but by industriousness--that is to say, productive work on nature, in which work they emphasize less prowess than diligence. That work is oriented to the maximization of the creation of utilities--making for a relatively peaceable and "practical" outlook to which the ruthless violence and wastefulness of the barbarian are anathema. And their work trains them to the explanation of the world in terms of impersonal, highly material cause-and-effect rather than what the rational would think of as mystical nonsense.

In short, think of the barbarian as the "warrior" come to pillage, the civilized as the farmers, artisans and others on whom they would prey as they would the animals they hunt or herd, with, of course, feudalistic aristocrats and monarchs the glamourized, gilt-encrusted version of those pillaging warriors (whose "houses," ultimately, originated in exactly such fashion).

As one might guess from such a conception Veblen had thought that, while the world was far from having wholly gotten over barbarism, the progress of technology, commerce, industry would strengthen the tendencies to civilized attitudes, and weaken the barbarian ones, because of how hard material reality shapes people's minds over time. However, in his critical book The Theory of Business Enterprise (my review of which got a lot of page views from people whom I suspect were looking for something else) he argued that there were forces conducing to the maintenance of old-time barbaric values. Among them was that where those involved with technology were required to think in materialistic, civilized, cause-and-effect terms by their very work, like the engineer and the factory manager, others further removed from it went on thinking in the old ways, the property- and contract-minded businessman or lawyer thought in terms of the old frameworks (with the businessman concerned with acquisition rather than production, the lawyer with "the interpretation of new facts in terms of accredited precedents, rather than a revision of the knowledge drawn from past experience in the matter of fact light of new phenomena," making "facts conform to law").

The result was that the outcome of the contest between these forces was uncertain--while today it seems the barbaric is very much alive, and not merely in latterday monarchism. Ours remains a world where people still identify wealth with individual prowess and mystical personal force, and still justify extreme inequality on the grounds of such a personal "it," saying that some are "better" than others simply because they have money--while showing off that they have "money to burn" whenever they get the chance. The result is that while the techno-industrial system underlying modern life would not have been remotely conceivable without an enormous amount of civilized thinking the conventional wisdom of the day-to-day life making use of it all, in a great many ways that count, remains unalloyed barbarity by Veblen's standard.