Uygarlık

(medeniyet, İng. civilization)

Göndermeler

Diğer

Both orientalism and Western civilization begin in the textualist position that civilizations have essences, and that these essences are best seen in the Great Books they have produced. (Who decides what's a Great Book, or what connection it might have to the lived lives of men and women in particular places and times is never satisfactorily explained.) The textualist position foreshortens history, annihilates change, and levels difference the better to represent an image of the past in dramatic form – either as tragedy, as in the case of Islamic civilization, or as triumph, as in the case of the rise of the West. In either case, it is a story whose rhythms are guided by the ineluctable working out of civilizational essences allegedly encoded in foundation texts. Thus we get the history of the West as the story of freedom and rationality, or the history of the East (pick an East, any East) as the story of despotism and cultural stasis.

An important aspect of Hodgson's reevaluation of modernity is his insistence that in historical time it is the discontinuities and not the continuities of Western history which are most striking. He notes that the ascending curve which runs from ancient Greece, to the Renaissance, to modern times is an optical illusion. In fact, he argues, for most of history Europe was an insignificant outlier of mainland Asia. Furthermore, he notes, the Renaissance did not inaugurate modernity. Instead, it brought Europe up to the cultural level of the other major civilizations of the Oikoumene. It did so in some measure by assimilating the advances of the other Asian civilizations. The list of inventions which developed elsewhere and diffused subsequently to Europe is a long one. It includes gunpowder firearms, the compass, the sternpost rudder, decimal notation, and the university, among others. Seen in this light, the European experience looks much less original. This is not to deny that there were original European developments. But in the context of three millennia of agrarianate citied life in the Afro-Eurasian Oikoumene, there was a tendency for civilizations to achieve a rough parity with one another as cultural innovations diffused throughout the Oikoumene.

As innovations accumulated, especially in the West, the result was a qualitative change in the level and kind of human social organization. This shift he likens to that which civilization underwent at Sumer in the emergence of agrarianate citied life. It was this new cultural attitude, and not industrialization, which was the hallmark of the modern age. (Denmark, he explains, is indubitably modern, yet predominantly agricultural.)

In many Near Eastern cultures, kingship was considered to be the very basis of civilisation. According to such beliefs, it was only the uncivilised which lived without a king to provide them with security, freedom, peace, prosperity and justice.