[lbo-talk] civilized

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed May 12 12:26:49 PDT 2004


I have in the past indicated my liking for the phrase someone used for Chomsky, "A National Resource," and regardless of both my real political disagreements with him and (as expressed here the other day) slight annoyance with one of his phrases, I still continue to so regard him.

I also of course agree and agreed with the substance of his remarks about the gains we have won over the last 40 years, especially since I participated vigorously in winning those gains (and threw away a career in the process).

I also agree with Travis's last post on "civilization," but I do not quite understand why Doug and Liza have their undies in such a gyre over this. No one was attacking them. And I still do remember vividly the use to which students _regularly_ put the words "civilized" and "civilization" -- almost without exception it was for the purpose of unfavorably comparing non-western cultures (and implicitly the people of those cultures) with the civilization of the United States. I taught a course in ancient greek & roman literature for years, and always made it a point to underline the loaded uses of the word.(And I never suggested that anyone on this list, let alone Doug or Liza, so used the term.)

If Doug wants to base the struggle against imperialism on a linguistic crusade to rehabilitate the word "civilization" that is o.k. with me. Gandhi tried that with his famous answer to the question as to what he thought about western civilization. It might even work in some contexts. The history of the word is, incidentally, tied up with such opposite terms as "heathen, "peasant" and "villain" [villein]. Cities were (tautologically) civilized. Non-urban populations were (tautologically) peasants or heathen.

A bit of family lore. Berrien County Michigan was in the past a fruit-growing region. (Its nearness to Lake Michigan gave it a longer growing season.) It was fairly flat, and since fruit farms were smaller than grain farms, more thickly populated than, just a bit inland, was Cass County (from where my father came); also, Cass County rural roads were almost all gravel; Berrien county rural roads were almost all crushed stone; there were more deserted homes in Cass County, more untilled land. Once shortly after their marriage, returning from a visit to my grandmother's, my mother exclaimed as they drew closer to home, "Ah, back in civilization." She probably was not being ironic or humorous; it would have been a spontaneous expression of actual feeling, though later she would laugh at herself in retelling the incident.

Carrol



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