Sep 6, 2024 8 min read

What’s the Meaning of (Our) Civilization?

I’m Umair Haque, and this is The Issue: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported publication. Our job is to give you the freshest, deepest, no-holds-barred insight about the issues that matter most.

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Today we’re going to talk about a topic that many of you have been asking to me to discuss. And by the way, in the comments, or by getting in touch, you should and must tell me what you want me to write about. This is a community. And I need your input. There’s so much going on that sometimes it’s hard for me to choose.

The meaning of a civilization. That’s today’s topic. It’s a subtle idea, a difficult and challenging one. Let me try to explain.

We’re all feeling jittery these days. About the state and future of this thing called civilization. The trajectory ours is on.

It’s one thing that unites us, in fact. The right and left are both concerned, although their solutions and answers of course differ. The elemental appeal of demagogues spreading around the globe is, too, that civilization in some sense is under threat, and their answer is what it’s always been, purification, violence, hate.

So we’re all thinking civilizationally these days. And it’s strange that our media won’t broach this topic. But understandable: pundits don’t think this way.

The Meaning of a Civilization

When I think about the past and future of civilizations, I come to the notion of meaning.

And to me, increasingly, the meaning of a civilization contains its trajectory. Its possibilities. It holds the future within it.

What am I trying to express?

Think of what civilizations have meant.

If we go back, civilizations meant many things. The conquest of nature, safety, protection, theology. And those meanings held true, to the people in them, who lived and died in them. We can think of course of ancient Greece, and how its theology still shapes our mythologies and aspirations today, a meaning echoing down the millennia.

But if I ask you what the meaning of, for example, ancient Rome was, the waters become muddier. War? Power? Conquest?

Let’s advance through time. What about the Age of Empires? I think that its meaning was contained in that very phrase. Powerful nations built empires, colonized others, and built what were then complex, tightly controlled, mercantilist trading economies, usually on the backs of slavery.

So sugar, or whatever crop or resource you like, was grown and harvested by the slaves of this empire, its bounty belonged to that empire, which traded it for, for example, textiles, grown and harvested by the slaves of another empire. You can see the problem here, to our modern eyes, which was that while those inside the empires benefited, the slaves remained slaves, and so this form of progress to us remains questionable.

Should we say that the meaning of civilization itself in this age was slavery? Surely to call it “plenty” or “abundance” doesn’t capture the fullness of history. Meanings in this sense are complex, and often contested, too—it wasn’t until recently that people were allowed to point this much out, history washed away clean of these sings.

Those are a few examples of the meanings of civilization, but we can think of still more. The most ancient civilizations of all, learning to build emerging cities of stone and mud for the first time—conquering humankind’s loneliness and fragility, perhaps. Looking to the stars and seeing gods, conquering nature, trying to grasp for, develop, an explanation for our existence, giving rise to philosophy, art, literature, and science.

I’m not giving you answers. I’m just highlighting the depth of this topic, which cuts to the biggest questions of all. Why are we here? How are we to live together? What sense of meaning is allowed for our lives?

The Meaning of a Life and the Meaning of a Civilization

Because ultimately, the meanings we give our lives are shaped by the meanings of civilizations.

I’m a warrior. This is the meaning of me. We’re a civilization of conquest.

I’m a shepherd. This is the meaning of my kind. We’re a civilization of cultivators.

Let’s advance through time again.

I’m a scientist. I’m a writer. This is the meaning of my life. I’ve spent a lifetime accumulating knowledge, mastering theories, discovering.

We’re a literate civilization, this set of meanings only possible after the creation not just of the alphabet, really, but of the printing press, mass education, leisure time, resources to invest in the scientific method, and much more.

So you see that the meanings we’re able to give our lives are bounded by the meanings of a civilization.

It’s true that we’re mothers and fathers and children and husbands and wives. Those meanings remain timeless, but even those meanings have changed dramatically over time. To be a “wife” in Afghanistan today means something very different than in much of the rest of the world. So these social roles are themselves of course things that evolve and change and grow, right in line with the meanings of a civilization.

What’s the Meaning of Us?

I wrote all that not just to muse. But to raise a question. A difficult and problematic one. Now let me ask it of you.

What’s the meaning of our civilization?

That’s not a rhetorical question. Nor is it something that I, or anyone else, has some kind of simplistic answer to.

But it’s one that we’re all beginning to wrestle with, whether we know it or not, as we contend with these jitters racing through the heart of everything, including our very own selves.

To some people, the meaning of our civilization is something like planetary ruin.

To others, perhaps, it’s capitalism run amok.

To another set of people, it’s a kind of triumphalism—everything’s fine, it’s never been better, and I think we can dismiss this meaning, because most of us don’t feel that way.

Foucault would have said: the meaning of our civilization is biopower. Power over biology, in the older sense of enslavement, and in the modern one of humankind dominating the planet for its own ends.

Baudrillard would have said: the meaning of our civilization is simulation. And in the rise of performative lifestyles, “influence.” AI, the way that social media depresses young people, who feel envious of artificially perfect people with millions of followers, you can see the resonance of that meaning.

My peers in economics would probably be bewildered at such a question, and perhaps by asking questions like these, I’m outgrowing my old identity. Yet to much of our social sciences, the question of meaning isn’t valid—it isn’t permitted, because science must be “value-free.” Still, I think social science that’s meaningless doesn’t shed light on much at all in the end, and you can see that in the recent scandals which have spread across it.

Dickens and Hugo would have said the meaning of their age was poverty and misery for the many, amidst unearned plenty for the few. Orwell would have said the meaning of his age was humankind gaining the power to control one another, and thus reaching a new horizon of possibility for evil.

What about Sartre and Camus? They would have said that the meaning of their age was the question of the existence humankind itself. Having gained the power to annihilate itself in World War, discovering what terrible atrocities it was capable of, humanity stood alone on the threshold of a nightmare. Nausea. That was Sartre felt at the sudden discovery of the loneliness and fragility of human existence. Camus, in despair, cried out at the absurdity of humankind’s plight.

So where are we now?

What Our Civilization Should Mean

Let me try to summarize.

The meanings of a civilization contain everything. The meanings of lives within it, and the possibilities it holds.

If a civilization’s meaning is war, slavery, conquest, and just that—it’s unlikely to grow towards a higher order of things. And we’ve seen that time and again in history, of course.

If a civilization’s meaning is control, domination, and power—it’s likely to end up trapped in the end, rigid, immoving, paralyzed.

So let me ask you again. What’s the meaning of our civilization?

Whatever your answer is, that’s OK. There’s no “right” answer.

But I think the question illuminates what the meaning is that our civilization has to develop. To become.

We know a few things about where civilization has to go if it wants to continue and endure as a project, versus lapsing into a new Dark Age made of anti-democratic ruin, economic stagnation, widespread despair, neofeudalism, and a neo-aristocracy made of some pretty noxious kinds of people.

Civilization is going to have mean things like:

Taking care of the rest of life
Tending to the planet’s wounds
Educating and nurturing every child, so that history’s errors, follies, tragedies don’t keep recurring
Giving humankind dignity and possibility, so that demagoguery and violence really do become history
Building economies that aren’t extractive
…And thus social structures that don’t end with the most predatory on top

That’s a small list. And yet it’s challenging enough that many of you will be shaking your heads and saying, “but we’ll never get there.”

Maybe. Maybe we won’t.

And that’s the point.

We need to begin thinking civilizationally. Again. What happened after the last World War? Something remarkable did, which was that for the first time, humankind did think civilizationally.

In an imperfect way, the only way, really, that could happen then. And still, while it was driven by the rich nations of the West, new institutions were created, to try, at least, to make peace and plenty more possible for all. And to a great extent, they began to work. Through the 20th century, democracy grew, and it’s true that billions were lifted out of dire, absolute, extreme poverty, while women joined the workforce, and children were educated, and so on.

Thinking civilizaitonally then worked.

And yet it was just a first step. Not even that, really. Let’s call it something even more preliminary. Just a thought, in the imagination of humankind.

Now, we need to learn to think civilizationally again. In a bigger sense. Faster. Truer. Better.

That won’t be easy. It will be very, very hard.

We don’t have leaders that excel at it.
We don’t have institutions that teach it.
We don’t have disciplines, really, that synthesize it.

So we need to cultivate a new set of capabilities to broach this problem at all. New fields, new degrees, new paradigms, new ideas, new expressions, new theories, all of it. New conversations and discussions and questions and answers.

All of this is called wisdom.

It is what we lack.

What’s the meaning of our civilization?

I told you that I didn’t have an answer. But I have the opposite of one. I’d say that history will look at us, and remark: they were unwise. They squandered their inheritance. They didn’t learn fast or well enough from the mistakes of those who came before them. They bickered and squabbled.

And so I think the meaning of our civilization should become something that it’s not right now. Wisdom, which must be transmitted through a thousand leaders and institutions, to reshape our world, so that it doesn’t remain the mess it is now.

The Meaning of a Civilization

The Meaning of a Life and the Meaning of a Civilization

What’s the Meaning of Us?

What Our Civilization Should Mean

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