If there is one word that describes the conceptual landscape of the modern, digital, smart-everything lifestyle, it’s the word sophistication, a word commonly used to describe things that are intricate and complex, or people who are highly cultured and in possession of worldly wisdom and refinement.
Sophistication has another, somewhat older meaning, however, relating to sophistry, which involves the use of ingenuous or fallacious argumentation meant to deceive or mislead. Both meanings seem to apply to the ways that modern, digital, smart-everything people understand themselves.
Life has become increasingly complex and our daily interactions with technology have become increasingly finely calibrated. And our access to information is such that the most obscure details about the farthest reaches of the world are just a screen-tap away. But our knowledge is also littered throughout with misinformation and intentionally-crafted falsehoods that serve the interests of people and entities that do not have our best interests at heart—to the point that almost everything we think we know about ourselves is either flat-out wrong, or so distorted that it barely resembles the realities of our situation.
Quite often civilization is spoken of as if it is an evolved feature of human nature, something that emerged as a natural and perhaps inevitable consequence of our technical and social proclivities as a species. One problem with this way of thinking is that no other species does anything at all like civilization. Not even close. Civilization is evolutionarily without precedent.
Evolution occurs through the alteration of a species’ existing characteristics. As a result, there is an observable continuity in physical features and behavioral tendencies across species. But civilization has no obvious precursor. It is something more than just a series of adaptations and alterations to the lifestyles that preceded it. It involves a whole new way of doing things. Although civilization emerged and developed—evolved—over time, the timeframe from its earliest inklings to its full-blown presence is far too short to fit within a strictly Darwinian natural selection framework. And, despite the irresistible temptation to anthropomorphize, there is zero continuity between many of the principal features of human civilization and anything that our closest primate relatives do.
Some (for example, Raymond Tallis[i]) claim that this fact, the fact that civilization is unique in the animal world, provides incontrovertible evidence that humans are special as a species, really something quite extraordinary. These folks are right about the singular uniqueness of civilization, but they are wrong in treating civilization as if it is a delimiting attribute of our species, a defining feature of “humanity.” To do so ignores the continued presence of the uncivilized, and implies that existing indigenous and aboriginal people are not entirely human in the way that the civilized are. Or they are not quite human yet; they are unenlightened or uninformed or uneducated in the ways of civilization—or worse: they are less-evolved, subhuman. A quick glance at European colonial history (or what is happening today in the Amazon) shows how this way of thinking plays out.
The appearance, diffusion, and expansion of civilization is not a natural phenomenon in the way that, say, the emergence of spoken language is. Or the evolution of symbolic thought. Or even the appearance, diffusion, and expansion of tool manufacture or the use of fire. All of these things existed in full flower for hundreds of thousands of years before the first invasive spores of civilization fell upon the river valleys of Northern Africa and Western Asia.
At its base, civilization is a technological phenomenon. It is a result of applying a technological frame to the human social world. Prior to (and outside of) civilization, all human relationships involved the organic interactions of autonomous and irreducibly unique beings. Since civilization appeared, relationships among people have become more and more mechanical and systematic, more systematized. Intimate organic interrelations have been replaced by superficial transactional contacts and engineered connections among standardized servomechanisms. Or, if you prefer a more contemporary vocabulary: humans in civilization are reduced to redundant nodal points of interface in an ever-expanding informational network. Irreducible and multidimensional uniqueness has been replaced with category membership. We are “citizens” and “consumers” and “employees” and “administrators” and “investors” and any of a number of additional hollow abstractions depending on the context. And it is precisely this artificial social structuring, this forced technologizing of human relations, that places civilization outside of the realm of the natural.
The story of the emergence and proliferation of civilization does not fit neatly as a chapter in the ancient and ongoing saga of the natural history of planet Earth. The consequences of civilization, however, do belong there, and several volumes worth: civilization as a colossal mass extinction event, civilization as the trigger for ruinous climate disruption, civilization as ecological holocaust. The impact of civilization has been like a world-shattering asteroid strike in slow motion. A mere ten thousand years of civilization has rewritten the text of future natural history for tens of millions of years to come.
But this is not the story that most civilized humans tell to their children.
[i] See, for example, his 2016 book: Aping Mankind