Civilization and Beyond: Learning from History

by Scott Nearing

While the momentum for expansion lasted, the civilization grew in wealth and power. When it waned, disintegration set in. Changelessness seems to be impossible in a social group. A civilization either expands or withers, builds up or falls to pieces.

Starting from one or more local groups, each civilization has reached out "to conquer the world", occupy it, organize it, dominate it, exploit it, perpetuate itself. In each case expansion, occupation, domination and exploitation are limited by human capacity (human nature); by the relative brevity of a single human life; by the extreme variations in the capacity of successive leaders. It is limited by geography; by the means of transportation and communication; by overhead costs that increase geometrically as the civilization expands arithmetically; by the means of delegating responsibility; by accounting devices, available raw materials and labor power; by power struggles inside the ruling oligarchies; by the failure to maintain a balance between centerism and localism; by growing local demands for self-determination; by the invasion of nomads seeking to plunder the tempting honey pot at the nucleus of the civilization.

Such limitations are political, economic and sociological. Psychological forces are also at work. The vigor and vitality of the early builders gradually spends itself. The will to austerity and the sense of loyalty and social responsibility are diffused and diluted. Bureaucracy degenerates into a rat race. The paralysis of parasitism replaces the will to power. Physical gratification gains priority over the service of the gods. Consistently, through its entire written history, civilization has been built upon what the civil law of all nations calls "robbery with violence". In every instance when the robbers have grabbed everything in sight, and gorged to the point of physical satiety, they fall to quarreling among themselves or turn with boredom and disgust from the whole sodden mess of discord, disorder and degeneration.

Each step, from the establishment of an urban nucleus of expansion, through the building of rival empires to the final struggle for supreme power, involves the violent subordination of lesser interests to the interests of one supreme authority. Violence takes precedence over persuasion and negotiation. In each case the final appeal is to armed combat using the most sophisticated weapons available.

During the "time of troubles" which overtakes each civilization, war and the threat of war become normal aspects of domestic and international relations. A specialized war-making bureaucracy is organized; war plans are made; war games (rehearsals) are carried on, and wars are fought as a means of determining which nation or combination of nations shall have access to raw materials and markets, dominate the trade routes, control the weaker peoples, own and exploit the colonies.

To the victor, war is the means of extending national or imperial frontiers and legalizing expansion at the expense of the vanquished. Defeat in war leads to the imposition of indemnities, the payment of tribute, the transfer of territory to the victor and in extreme cases the extermination of the defeated nations or empires.

Settlements imposed by violence and policed by victors lead to resentment, antagonism, hatred and the build-up of a desire for revenge, including the restoration to the vanquished of lost territories. The logical outcome of such a situation is preparation for a war of independence by the vanquished, countered by military occupation, rigid suppression, and exploitation by the victors in the previous struggle.

War is taken for granted as an instrument of policy. It is employed by civilized nations and empires as a means of expansion. Wars of independence and restitution follow conquest, dismemberment and annexation. Civilized nations and empires prepare for war and wage war as a normal aspect of civilized life.

Civilization, and in particular western civilization, is a time-bomb, built to detonate and scatter its fragments far and wide. It is a type of booby trap in which humanity has been caught periodically and horribly mangled. Without exception, each civilization has contained the forces and equipment needed for its own annihilation. At no time reported by history has this formulation been more obvious than during the decades immediately following war's end in 1945. Destructivity was lifted to new levels of efficiency by electronic communication, the tank and the airplane. It was further escalated by atomic fission and nuclear fusion. Advances in science and technology had made dramatic increases in the tempo of production and construction. Utilization of atomic energy had stepped up destructivity to the nth power.

Based on assumptions that oft-repeated experience has proved to be false and misleading, civilization in the 1970's is unstable and insecure. Most civilizations are strangled in their cradles or plundered and demolished in the course of the never-ending political, economic and military conflicts which have marked and marred civilizations since the dawn of history. The national and imperial survivors of these struggles in every known instance have been largely or wholly led by military adventurers and plunderers in search of booty, fame and power. With professional plunderers, destroyers and murderers occupying the seats of power, it is only a question of time and occasion before rising overhead costs and the misfortunes of war result in their overthrow and replacement by better organized, better armed invaders who slaughter and enslave their predecessors and usurp and abuse their power. Of necessity, civilizations are self-destructive, built as they are on the ebb and flow of power struggle.