You ask about remedies. I will respond to that, here, only briefly.
The "parable of the tribes" shows the root of the problem to be the anarchy that obtains in the system of interacting ("sovereign") civilized societies. So an essential dimension of a remedy is to find ways to reduce and then eliminate that anarchy.
It should be said that some people have understood this problem of anarchy in the international system for a long time, and some intelligent efforts have been undertaken to deal with it. Clearly, we have a very long way to go. But it is important at least to envision what a world might look like where justice and law rather than force reliably prevails, and where societies have the choice to be weak but secure and viable.
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Forest Jones:
Using only 3800+ words, this is a succinct and yet comprehensive essay.
I think the essay would benefit from a review of the uses of the major terms "Civilized Society", "Civilization", "culture", "society", "cultural innovation", and "social evolution". Are these all synonymous? Is there a reason to use one over the other? Are there uncivilized societies with different dynamics? I would stick with Civilized Society in every location where the intent is to describe the population of humans making effort to organize and collaborate. I would then define and use culture as the shared agreements and molding force (and all behaviors that perform that molding) that pits the individual against the agreements. My definitions may not agree with yours, but my advice is that the current content may not isolate the notions appropriately and therefore inhibit the apprehension.
I think you should occasionally use the subtitle, "The Problem of Power in Social Evolution", wherever the parable of the tribes is mentioned. This helps reinforce the main teaching point: that there is in fact a problem of power and that we are influenced by and influencers of Social Evolution.
I notice that reading this makes me wonder how many readers actually believe that things evolve. Modern humans may have had over 150 years to introduce and digest the notion; however the resistance has been substantial. You may have defined evolving in a previous essay. I think it would be important to define it somewhere and comparing it to maturation.
In the "ONE BENEFIT OF THIS 'INTEGRATIVE VISION'" section I have this observation:
"Creating wholeness in the overall system of civilization, heir as it is to such a history of traumatic brokenness, will not be easy. And we can readily see it will not be quick. But it is no longer impossible." This introduces the term "traumatic brokenness". I do not think that many readers will have "traumatic brokenness" as a common phrase in their vocabulary. It might be helpful to have used it earlier in explaining the results of the use of power over others. I know that brokenness v. wholeness is a large part of your overall argument and it is my experience that broken minds cannot acknowledge or observe what is broken. This needs subtle allegorical and analogy treatment to convey. If I say "we are all broken", do you find your brokenness? No, not really.
Again, this essay is fantastic in the concise way that it conveys the intentions.
Andy Schmookler:
Thank you, Forest.
Perhaps you're right about the need for more defining of terms. I attended to such definitional tasks in the book, but here in this Series I sometimes make choices in favor of brevity and pace.
But let me provide this quick explication:
- "Society" is a form of collective life that is rightly applied also to the ants and the bees as well as the chimpanzees and the gorillas.
- "Culture" represents all the aspects of social life that are not given in the genes and that are transmitted by the group through time. Humans are not the only species with culture, but in human societies culture is so much more elaborate and powerful a component of social life than among other species that it is qualitatively practically a new ball game.
- "Civilization" is the one term that I use in a slightly unorthodox way. According to the parable of the tribes, the truly momentous point of discontinuity is not the emergence of culture -- controlling fire, using tools, development of language -- but that point at which the door gets opened up to transforming the basic structure of human life ("extricating ourselves from the niche in which we evolved biologically"). So, while "civilization" is not usually applied to human societies that are no longer just hunting-and-gathering until they evolve to the point where cities have developed. But for my purposes what was required was a single term to represent the whole sweep of the development of the new kind of life-form. And so I use "civilization" to mean all that occurs from that crucial point of departure, even though it took some thousands of years for the gradual unfolding of the inevitable consequences into full-blown "civilization," with cities, empires, etc.
Regarding your point that many people still resist the idea of "evolution," those people are not the intended audience for this Series. I do address people of that sort plenty -- for the past handful of years I do it weekly in my op/eds -- albeit I don't often get into "evolution." But in this Series, the people I wish to reach are intelligent, secular, and well-educated. Whether or not they will adopt my way of understanding "the evolution of civilization," I do not imagine them questioning evolution, the main organizing idea of modern biology.
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