Work in Progress: A Thought Experiment on Planetary Civilization
Friday 04 February 2022
One of the problems in the theory of civilization that I have changed my mind on most significantly over the past few years is the idea of planetary civilization. I formerly would assert that, although our civilization was not politically or legally unified at a planetary scale, trade and communication networks meant that civilization was de facto unified at a planetary scale economically and culturally. I still feel the force of this argument, but I would no longer make use of it because I have come to see contemporary civilization on Earth as a number of geographically regional civilizations that have grown to the limits possible given the fact that other geographically regional civilizations have also grown, so that now we are like multiple cell cultures in a single Petri dish, the limits of each defining the limits of its neighbors.
Because a number of civilizations of distinct origins are all jostling each other on a crowded planet, it gives the appearance of a single, planetary-scale civilization, but this is civilizational appearance, not civilizational reality. Certainly, there is movement of goods and people and ideas among civilizations, and these movements have shaped these civilizations in important ways. In particular, western science, technology, and engineering have spread to other civilizations, so that the industrial and commercial infrastructure of all economically developed parts of the world looks much the same — enormous cities with populations in the millions, sprawling suburbs, systems of mass transportation to serve these millions, instantaneous electronic communications, consumer-spending driven economies, mass entertainment, and so on. All of these things are only different in detail from one continent to another. There is a numbing sameness of homogeneity of the cities of the industrial era.
One way of thinking about this in the context of my model of civilization is to observe that the industrialized economic infrastructure, which first appeared in Western Europe, has been adopted around the world, to the extent that any part of the world was capable of adopting it. In this way the economic infrastructure of the world has become unified, even while the contemporary representatives of formerly isolated geographically regional civilizations largely retain their distinctive central projects and conceptual frameworks.
In all cases where written language and communications technology have been adopted, which is almost everywhere today, the conceptual frameworks have become absolutely larger in the sense that I discussed in last week’s newsletter no. 169, as recording technologies allow for conceptual frameworks to indefinitely expand beyond the natural limit that was set by the capacity of the human mind prior to the advent of recording technologies.
However, in the expansion of conceptual frameworks, the expansion builds on an ancient core conceptual framework that ultimately derives from the conceptual framework prevalent in a region prior to the advent of recording technologies. In western civilization, where the developments in technology and the economy resulted in the endogenous development of industrialization, the native conceptual framework had organically grown to this point, which meant that a lot of traditional conceptions of the conceptual framework had been abandoned long before. This process I have identified with what I call the Replacement Thesis: newly formulated concepts that are more efficient or more effective than traditional concepts displace the traditional concept. This process of replacement has gone farthest in the conceptual framework of westerners, and farther in some parts of the western world than in other parts.
In the non-western world, the concepts necessary to industrialization appeared in the midst of a conceptual framework that was still largely traditional, which had not, and often still has not, undergone the kind of gradual replacement that occurred with the organic replacement of traditional concepts that came about as the result of the development of philosophy, science, technology, and industry. These concepts were adopted, but they were awkwardly imposed over the top of a largely intact traditionalist conceptual framework, so that there is much more tension built into the expanded conceptual frameworks of non-western peoples, though in those non-western peoples like the Japanese, who have most completely adopted the framework of industrialized civilization, there is probably more replacement than the mere imposition of a modern template on top of a traditional template.
In any case, conceptual frameworks still vary significantly among formerly isolated geographically regional civilizations, as do what remains of traditionalist central projects. In some cases, the rapid growth of industrialization and a modern economic infrastructure has called traditional central projects into question, and there is a sense of hopelessness (followed by detachment) as the traditional central project continues to exist in an ineffective “rump” form while the uptake of the central project that drives industrialization in the West — the Enlightenment — has been shallow, and has no organic roots in the regional conceptual framework.
Thus while my model of the institutional structure of civilization is consistent with the idea of a de facto planetary civilization, it can also be used as a tool for the analysis of the crazy quilt of civilizations that we now have abutting each other on Earth. The sense that I now attach to planetary civilization is the simple fact that we call civilization planetary because the institutions of one civilization or another have been expanded until they fill all the habitable parts of Earth. That is to say, we are a “planetary” civilization in this sense merely in virtue of having covered the planet with the artifacts of civilization. This is a contingent and de facto planetary civilization that is not translated into planetary unity in anything except the economic infrastructure — and even here the unification is shallow.
We can here invoke a test, which must remain for the time being a thought experiment: if two or more formerly isolated civilizations, now apparently grown together into an organic unity, were to be separated, would these newly re-isolated civilizations remain viable? This question is, of course, complex when we get into the details. How is the isolation to be effected? Well, it’s a thought experiment, so we can imagine any scenario we like that would provide a reasonable approximation of isolation. A more detailed formulation of the thought experiment could specify some mechanism. And what is meant by the civilization remaining viable? Recurring to my model, I would say that viability would mean that a region once unified by a geographically regional civilization would, if separated and isolated (from planetary civilization, such as it is) has a viable economic infrastructure, a viable conceptual framework, and a viable central project, all of which function adequately in isolation.
Obviously, the mechanism of isolation is going to make a big difference here, as if we posit any kind of violent separation, there is going to be a period of readjustment necessary to absorbing this shock, so either the mechanism of isolation (say, a quasi-magical transportation to an identical geographical situation on another planet, or the gritty reality of building enormous walls between regions of civilization) must be so subtle as to minimize a violent readjustment, or a time must be allotted allowing the civilization to find its feet again, before we can fairly judge whether a civilization remains viable in isolation.
Enacting this thought experiment, one could imagine a variety of civilizational failures that would occur post-isolation, so that some might fail on account of the failure of the economic infrastructure having become existentially dependent upon a planetary scale economic infrastructure, and some might fail on account of the conceptual framework failing — essentially, a failure of imagination — while some would fail due to their pre-planetary civilization central project having become too degraded to hold that civilization together. But, since I have proposed this thought experiment, and I have already suggested here that our planetary civilization is little more than appearance, the reader will already have guessed that I think most civilizations would eventually do just fine if re-isolated.
Putting the idea of planetary civilization to the question, and formulating this thought experiment, provides an opportunity for thinking more analytically and critically about what planetary civilization is or could be. I haven’t been thinking about this long enough to have a clear idea of all the possibilities, but in recently making up a list I wrote down these possibilities for emergence of a planetary civilization:
1. Concrescence: this is the classic idea of civilizations growing together until they lose their individuality and are existentially dependent upon one another.
2. Voluntary takeover: a leading civilization becomes the focus of unification as other civilizations voluntarily surrender their autonomy to it. One could call this the Roman model, as when Rome was at the height of its powers, there were cases of dying kings who willed their kingdoms to Rome, who then voluntarily came into possession of these kingdoms.
3. Involuntary takeover: a leading civilization imposes its rule, including its civilizational institutions, on other less powerful civilizations, thus unifying civilization on a planetary scale by force and coercion.
4. Preemption: a new kind of civilization appears in the midst of a multiplicity of civilizations grown together physically on a planetary surface (but not grown together institutionally), and all individual civilizations are then absorbed into this new civilization, which is distinct from each and every past civilization, making the new planetary civilization distinct from the past history of civilization on the planet in question. (I wrote about the preemption of civilizations in a couple of blog posts, The Preemption Hypothesis and Late-Adopter Spacefaring Civilization: The Preemption that Didn’t Happen)
I do not consider these possibilities to be exhaustive. As I said, I have only recently starting making these ideas explicit, and they demand much more development and clarification.
In each scenario of planetary-scale integration of civilization, there is a risk that the unification and integration is shallow, superficial, and incomplete. One way to define shallow, superficial, or incomplete planetary integration of civilization would be by way of the above thought experiment: if you separated the civilizations again, would they be viable in isolation?
In the case of a shallow, superficial, or incomplete planetary civilization, we have what may be called an ersatz planetary civilization, following my use of ersatz civilization in newsletter no. 95. In that newsletter I suggested that we can use “ersatz civilization” for the attempted imposition of civilization by political or military fiat. Here, the civilization functions after a fashion, but it is not organically developed, and it is therefore a brittle institution that easily falls apart.
Following my above suggestions for mechanisms of the planetary unification of civilization, we can identify at least four forms of ersatz planetary civilization:
1. Ersatz concrescence
2. Ersatz voluntary takeover
3. Ersatz involuntary takeover
4. Ersatz preemption
Any of these regimes might be imposed by political or military fiat, but I see now that I should expand this concept in order to account for other forms of ersatz imposition of civilization, such as economic fiat — which is more-or-less what Marx had in mind when he talked about the cheap prices of commodities being the cannons that knock down the walls of traditional civilizations, in which hatred of foreigners had hitherto been the norm.
