Foreign territories conquered and brought by force of arms within this imperium were subjects of a central authority which they never really accepted. Authority continued to be exercised from the imperial nucleus. The newly conquered territories were policed by professional soldiers whose primary loyalty was national but whose responsibility was to the aggregate composing the Roman or the Egyptian civilization.
The acid test of the expanding civilization was embodied in the degree of acceptance of wholeness as opposed to self-determination. Were the individual members—the provinces and colonies composing the whole—willing and able to sink their differences in an unquestioned wholeness, or were they prepared at the first opportunity to exercise their right to self-determination and declare their independence of the whole?
The resolution of this question constituted the sixth collective goal of civilization: to establish a whole in which the component members were able and willing to recognize the axiom that the interests of the whole come before the interests of any of its component parts.
The issue of central authority versus local self determination has been one of the basic issues of the present century because during the preceding period, the British, French, Dutch and Spanish Empires had been built up by the conquest and occupation of foreign lands. If the nineteenth century was an epoch of expanding imperial authority, the twentieth century has been an epoch of the dismemberment of empires by movements for independence and self-determination.
Seventh, and finally, among the collective goals of civilization, each has developed an ideology that justified empire building by conquest, exploitation, chattel slavery, peonage, wagery, the supremacy of the empire nucleus, the subordination of the periphery to the nucleus and other aspects of ascendancy and mastery including "divine" rights in politics and "natural" rights in economics.
Civilizations expect the individuals and groups of which they are composed to preserve the status quo, work as disciplined members of an effective team and be satisfied with the outcome. This brings us back to the goal with which we began this discussion of the collective goals of civilizations: The primary task of any civilization is to survive.
Each individual human being, living and working in a civilized community occupies a sphere of action, enjoys the advantages and disadvantages and accepts the responsibilities and duties which pertain to his sphere. Within his sphere the individual succeeds or fails in so far as he leads a rewarding personal life and contributes his share toward the collective life of the group to which she or he belongs.
If the individual in a civilized community is to live a good life, the first task is to maintain normal health, good spirits and a determination to get the most out of life and to contribute at least the equivalent of what he receives in service to his group.
As a civilization expands and extends its influence, the individual must contribute his mite to the entire enterprise while adding to his own store of goods and services. Acquisition and accumulation satisfy a human desire to have and to keep. They also add to the wealth and well being of the community on the widely accepted utilitarian formula: happiness comes in direct proportion to the extent and variety of ones possessions.
In most civilized communities the building unit is a family. It is this family unit, usually directed by a male or father figure, who acts for the family and represents it in the community.