Civilized?

I have been fascinated lately with the idea of civilization. It seems that societies have a tendency to determine for themselves what behaviors are or are not civilized and then make an assumption that that is necessarily a standard that can be applied to and imposed upon all civilizations, cultures, and institutions that do not conform to the standards of acceptable civility. Interestingly enough the only real thing that determines the primacy of one set of social and cultural values is inherently superior might, both militarily and economically. Lately I have spent a great deal of time ruminating over whether the modern Western ideal of civilization is actually all that great a thing, or at least the American version of it. I really don’t think I have any good answers yet.

One of the things I find most fascinating is the debate lately about the ability of “Christian” states to adapt to the modern (and inherently better????) and the failure of Muslim states to do so. I personally feel this is a tremendous case of cultural and spiritual blindness and completely disingenuous. Most of the successes of the West I would term to be scientific and economic. The scientific advances occurred, in many instances, in spite of Christianity, rather than because of it. The sectarians, both the leaders and the masses, have been at best antagonistic to scientific progress. True Galileo and Copernicus have been vindicated but the battle with Darwin is still raging. In Evangelical and fundamentalist Christian areas of the United States there is a great distrust of science, and I believe much of this is due to the fight over creationism vs. evolution. So the west has generally been able to accept technology and science, but in many cases it has been in a disregard to the bastions of Christianity. I do not believe that Christian culture inherently led to the great reforms and discoveries of the western world. The brave men and world who made real impact generally either did so in the dark, were forced to recant, were burned at the stake, or were somehow lucky to have been born and worked after the inquisitions and the intellectual purges.

To tie Western economic dominance to Christianity is a travesty. The West has been very successful at subverting some of Christ’s most basic teachings to fit its materialist/economic ends. I am sure if Jesus were to come around today he would definitely say that it is okay to do whatever is necessary to live a comfortable life of more than modest means. Forget the poor and the hungry. They are lazy and stupid anyway so it is their fault they are poor. It seems to me that many Westerners, Capitalists, and honest Churchgoers would put more stock in the words of Ebenezer Scrooge (“Are there no prisons, no workhouses”) than the words of Christ when it comes to our dealings with the poor. Ultimately something will trickle down anyway so everything will be alright. I fear that Western material success has come through extensive and selective forgetting of Jesus’ teachings.

Another thing that fascinates me about being civilized is the detached impersonality by which we kill. I think the motives for war have not really changed since the first hominid clubbed his buddy because he coveted his furs or woman or dog or magic rock or whatever. We tend to try to glorify it and make it look better but basically every war comes down to somebody trying to take something somebody else has or somebody trying to protect what he/she has from being taken. And there may be noble justifications for it. What is incredible though is the extent to which the “civilized” nations have taken war. I think in some ways the world was a much better place when people battled with sticks and knives and swords and shields and whatnot. You had to actually see the man or woman you were killing and get his or her blood on your face. You had to slip and slide and stumble in the limbs and the gore and the blood. But you had to be actively involved in the act of killing. I think it was especially significant that Kings and Lords used to fight along with everybody else. I do not see a superior civility or justness in a system where enemies are killed from afar with big explosions or little bullets or even bigger explosions and men and women completely detached from the reality of war and death make the decisions.

This gets me finally to the Death Penalty, which is what got me going on all this to begin with. I think that if we really have so much confidence on our justice system that it can justly administer death, then it should be done much more judiciously. A sentence of death should be passed by a jury, and carried out as quickly as possible after it is passed. Not only that, it should be such that a member of the jury will be randomly selected to carry out the sentence. If we have the confidence that we have the right and the responsibility to kill criminals, we should feel confident enough in our justice system that each citizen would be willing to pull the trigger him or herself, with no compunctions. It is evident to me that we do not have the confidence in our system to believe that the death penalty is fairly and justly administered, so we should not be doing it.

So these are some of my recent thoughts.