Modern civilization

The concept of the modern world as distinct from an ancient world of historical and outmoded
artifacts rests on a sense that the modern world is primarily the product of relatively recent and
revolutionary change. Advances in all areas of human activity —politics, industry, economics,
commerce, transport, communication, science, medicine, technology, and culture—appear to
have transformed an "Old World" into the "Modern or New World."

Politics

In European politics, the transition from feudal institutions to modern states has been marked by
a series of revolutions. The English Glorious Revolution of 1688 marked the end of feudalism in
Great Britain, creating a modern constitutional monarchy. The American and French Revolutions
ended the powers of absolute monarchs.

Leaders such as Napoleon introduced new codes of law in Europe based on merit and
achievement, rather than on a social class system rooted in feudalism. The power of elected
bodies supplanted traditional rule by royal decree.

The new republic of the United States of America attempted to place reins on government based
on the new Constitution, creating a system of checks and balances between the three different
branches of government, the legislature, judiciary, and executive headed by a President who was
chosen via a national election.

Science and technology

Revolutions in science and technology have been no less influential than political revolutions in
changing the shape of the modern world. The "scientific revolution," beginning with the
discoveries of Johannes Kepler and Galileo, and culminating with Isaac Newton's Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), changed the way in which educated people looked at
the natural world. Twentieth-century advances in physics revolutionized our understanding of the
universe. New theories such as evolution and psychoanalysis changed humanity's views of itself.

However, not all scientific advances have been positive. Warfare was changed with the advent of
new varieties of weapons. Weapons of mass destruction, such as the atomic bomb, along with
chemical weapons and biological weapons, have actually made possible the devastation of the
entire planet Earth.

Inventions

Mechanical and scientific inventions changed the way in which goods were produced and
marketed. The telephone, radio, X rays, microscopes, and electricity all contributed to rapid
changes in life-styles. The newly invented engine powered the car, train, ship, and eventually the
airplane, revolutionizing the way people traveled. Discoveries of antibiotics such as penicillin
brought new ways of combating diseases. Surgery and medications made progressive
improvements in medical care, hospitals, and nursing.
Industry

The Industrial Revolution that commenced in eighteenth-century Great Britain transformed the
world. Machines sped up the manufacture of commodities such as cloth and iron. The horse and
ox were no longer needed as beasts of burden. Artificially-created energy powered any motor
that drove any machine that was invented. Raw goods could be transported in huge quantities
over vast distances; products could be manufactured quickly and then marketed all over the
world.

Culture

New attitudes towards religion, with the decline of traditional churches, and a desire for personal
freedoms, induced desires for sexual freedoms, which were ultimately accepted by large sectors
of the Western World.

Equality of the sexes in politics and economics, the women's liberation movement, and the
freedom afforded by contraception greatly changed the role of women in all aspects of society.

Modern art is typified by self-awareness, and by the manipulation of form or medium as an

integral part of the work itself. Whereas pre-modern Western art merely sought to represent a
form of reality, modern art tends to encourage the audience to question its perceptions, and
thereby, the fundamental nature of art itself. Key movements in modern art include cubist
painting, typified by Pablo Picasso, modernist literature such as that written by James Joyce,
Virginia Woolf and Gertrude Stein, and the "new poetry" headed by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot.

Expansion of civilization
The nature of civilization is that it seeks to spread, and to expand, and it has the means by which
to do so. Civilization has been spread by introducing agriculture, writing systems, and religion to
uncivilized tribes. The uncivilized people then adapt to civilized behavior. Civilization has also
been spread by force, often using religion to justify its actions.

Nevertheless, some tribes or peoples still remained uncivilized. Known as primitive cultures,
they do not have hierarchical governments, organized religion, writing systems or controlled
economic exchange. The little hierarchy that exists, for example respect for the elderly, is by
mutual agreement not enforced by any ruling authority.

Growth and decline of civilizations

Historically, civilizations have experienced cycles of birth, life, decline and death, similar to the
life cycle of all living things, including human beings. The old is often supplanted by a new
civilization with a potent new culture, or character, based on a different worldview bringing
different answers to questions of ultimate concern. While this observation is generally not
disputed, a variety of reasons for the growth and decline of civilizations have been proposed.
Many nineteenth-century anthropologists backed a theory called cultural evolution. They
believed that people naturally progressed from a simple to a superior, civilized state. John
Wesley Powell, for example, classified all societies as "Savage," "Barbarian," and "Civilized"—
the first two of which would shock most anthropologists today.

Today, most social scientists believe, at least to some extent, in cultural relativism: the view that
complex societies are not by nature superior, more humane, or more sophisticated than less
complex or technologically advanced groups. This view has its roots in the early twentieth-
century writings of Franz Boas. Boas claimed that development of any particular civilization
cannot be understood without understanding the whole history of that civilization. Thus each
civilization has its own unique birth, peak, and decline, and cannot be compared to any other
civilization.

English biologist John Baker, in his 1974 book Race, challenged this view. His highly
controversial work explored the nature of civilizations, presenting 23 criteria that characterize
civilizations as superior to non-civilizations. He tried to show a relationship between cultures and
the biological disposition of their creators, claiming that some races were just biologically and
evolutionarily predisposed for greater cultural development. In this way, some races were more
creative than others, while others were more adaptive to new ideas.

Mid twentieth-century historian Arnold J. Toynbee explored civilizational processes in his multi-
volume A Study of History, which traced the rise and, in most cases, the decline of 21
civilizations and five "arrested civilizations." Toynbee viewed the whole of history as the rise
and fall of civilizations. "Western Civilization", for example, together with “Orthodox
civilization” (Russia and the Balkans) developed after the fall of the Roman Empire, thus
succeeding Greco-Roman civilization. According to Toynbee, civilizations develop in response
to some set of challenges in the environment, which require creative solutions that ultimately
reorient the entire society. Examples of this are the Sumerians' development of irrigation
techniques to grow crops in Iraq, or when the Catholic Church included pagan tribes into their
religious community. When civilizations utilize new, creative ideas, they overcome challenges
and grow. When they are rigid, failing to respond to challenges, they decline.

According to Toynbee, most civilizations declined and fell because of moral or religious decline,
which led to rigidity and the inability to be creative. Toynbee argued that as civilizations decay,
they experience a "schism in the soul," as the creative and spiritual impulse dies. In this
environment, a new prophet (such as Abraham, Moses, and Jesus) may experience extraordinary
spiritual insight. While these new spiritual insights allow for the birth of a new religion and
ultimately a new civilization, they are ultimately impermanent. This is due to their tendency to
deteriorate after being institutionalized, as men of God degenerate into successful businessmen
or men of politics.

It remains to be seen what will come of the four remaining civilizations of the twenty-first
century: Western civilization, Islamic society, Hindu society, and the Far East. Toynbee offered
two possibilities: they might all merge with Western civilization, or Western civilization might
decay and die. An alternative might be the emergence of a new prophet, with the spiritual insight
that could bring about a new, unified, world civilization, balancing the strengths of each of the
four civilizations.

Thus, there are many factors to be considered in understanding the course of any civilization.
These include both social, or internal, factors, such as the disposition of the people and the
structure of the society, and environmental, or external, factors, such as the availability of water
for agriculture and transportation. Whether a civilization declines or continues to develop also
depends on both internal and external factors, as they determine the response to the various
challenges that the civilization encounters.

Negative views of civilization

Members of civilizations have sometimes shunned them, believing that civilization restricts
people from living in their natural state. Religious ascetics have often attempted to curb the
influence of civilization over their lives in order to concentrate on spiritual matters. Monasticism
represents an effort by these ascetics to create a life somewhat apart from their mainstream
civilizations.

Environmentalists also criticize civilizations for their exploitation of the environment. Through
intensive agriculture and urban growth, civilizations tend to destroy natural settings and habitats.
Proponents of this view believe that traditional societies live in greater harmony with nature than
"civilized" societies. The "sustainable living" movement is a push from some members of
civilization to regain that harmony with nature.

Marxists have claimed, "that the beginning of civilization was the beginning of oppression."
They argue that as food production and material possessions increased, wealth became
concentrated in the hands of the powerful, and the communal way of life among tribal people
gave way to aristocracy and hierarchy.

"Primitivism" is a modern philosophy opposed to civilization for all of the above reasons,
accusing civilizations of restricting humans, oppressing the weak, and damaging the
environment.

The future of civilizations

The Kardashev scale, proposed by Russian astronomer Nikolai Kardashev, classifies civilizations
based on their level of technological advancement, specifically measured by the amount of
energy a civilization is able to harness. The Kardashev scale makes provisions for civilizations
far more technologically advanced than any currently known to exist.

Currently, world civilization is in a stage that may be characterized as an "industrial society,"

superseding the previous "agrarian society." Some believe that the world is undergoing another
transformation, in which civilizations are entering the stage of the "informational society."
Political scientist Samuel P. Huntington has argued that the defining characteristic of the twenty-
first century will be a "clash of civilizations." According to Huntington, conflicts between
civilizations will supplant the conflicts between nation-states and ideologies that characterized
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Many theorists argue that the entire world has already become integrated into a single "world
system," a process known as globalization. Different civilizations and societies all over the globe
are economically, politically, and even culturally interdependent in many ways. According to
David Wilkinson, civilizations can be culturally heterogeneous, like "Western Civilization," or
relatively homogeneous, like the Japanese civilization. What Huntington calls the "clash of
civilizations" might be characterized by Wilkinson as a clash of cultural spheres within a single
global civilization.

In the future, civilizations may be expected to increase in extent, leading to a single world
civilization, as well as to advance technologically. However, technological and other external
improvements may not be the most important aspect of future civilizations—growth on the
internal level (psychological, social, even spiritual) is also needed for any civilization to avoid
stagnation and decline.

Ultimately, the future of civilizations may depend on the answer to whether history progresses as
a series of random events, or whether it has design and purpose, known by religious people as
divine providence.

References
 Fernandez-Armesto, F. 2001. Civilizations, London: Free Press. ISBN 0743202481
 Huntington, S. 1993. "The Clash of Civilizations?" Foreign Affairs. 72 (3) (Summer
1993): 22-28.
 Wilkinson, D. 1987. “Central Civilization.” Comparative Civilizations Review 4: 31-59.
 Wilkinson, D. 1999. “Unipolarity without Hegemony.” International Studies Review 1
(2): 141-172.
 Winks, R.W., C. Brinton, J.B. Christopher, & R.L. Wolfe. 1995. A History of Civilization
Volume II: 1648 to the Present. 9th edition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. ISBN
0132283212