Are We Losing Civilization Itself?

According to Roman historian Livy, the Roman Republic fell because of a degredation of moral character. “Capriccio with ruins of the Roman Forum,” circa 1634, by Claude Lorrain. Art Gallery of South Australia. Public Domain

Commentary

If you live in a community in which retailers don’t fear roving bands of thieves swarming stores and pillaging the place, count yourself lucky. Not everyone in this country can say that. More and more, street-level retailers face daily threats of having their products stolen right off the shelves, either all at once or just a bit at a time.

Dick’s Sporting Goods has explained a miss in second-quarter profitability by a reference to “elevated inventory shrink.” This means that customers, employees, or both are stealing stuff. And this is hardly the only company that faces this problem. Stores in large cities around the country are closing because of theft. The problem is so bad that police have largely given up trying to prosecute the crimes.

The whole phenomenon is a reminder that there’s no substitute for a baseline population-wide ethic of respect for property rights. All of the security cameras, locks, police, and guns can’t stop a rampage of immorality once it takes hold. Civilization itself requires a common trust that the rights of others will be respected. There’s nothing that can substitute for that.

Those living in urban centers in the Northeast and the West Coast should take a visit to any small town in rural Texas. They all have hardware stores, farmers markets, and various other retail shops that leave their goods on the sidewalk overnight. Feed stores will stack bags of stuff everywhere, completely open and unguarded. There’s zero risk of theft. That’s because everyone in the community has a well-formed conscience, that inner moral compass that dictates the right and wrong of our actions.

This is true in large parts of the country. Contrary to what New York City dwellers might think, most of the country is devoid of wandering vagabonds, stoners, and armies of thieves, to say nothing of muggers and murderers. Most of the country can still brag about having a civilization.

Which raises an interesting question: What precisely is civilization? Let’s visit a wonderful late work by Sigmund Freud called “Civilization and Its Discontents.” His thesis is that civilization is built from maturity, which itself is the product of the sublimation of primal instincts to take whatever isn’t nailed down, pillage, rape, and otherwise rampage against human rights. This requires a social code of ethics and presents itself as a common ritual of norms and manners. The discontents in society, he theorized, haven’t obtained that maturity because of some psychological shattering.

If that’s true, something is fundamentally broken in our culture.

In the course of his argument, Freud laid out for us what are the marks of civilization.

First, the natural world is tamed for the benefit of human beings. Rivers are regulated and protected for travel and trade. The soil is “cultivated and planted with the vegetation suited to it.” Mineral wealth is “brought up assiduously from the depths and wrought into the implements and utensils that are required.” Communications between people “are frequent, rapid, and reliable.”

“Wild and dangerous animals have been exterminated, the breeding of tamed and domesticated ones prospers,” Freud said.

Comment: Our governments today are urging the opposite: no more taming, drilling, and communicating and meanwhile pretending to control nature by controlling us!

Second, in a civilization, “the industry of the inhabitants is applied as well to things which are not in the least useful and, on the contrary seem to be useless, e.g., when the parks and gardens in a town, which are necessary as playgrounds and air-reservoirs, also bear flowering plants, or when the windows of dwellings are adorned with flowers.” We can add to that museums and churches, which aren’t essential to survival but are glorious for the cultivation of the highest ambitions of human life.

Comment: Governments shut down parks and playgrounds only three years ago, while museums are closing and parks are falling into disrepair in many spots of the country.

Third, a civilization is marked by the exaltation of beauty.

“We expect a cultured people to revere beauty where it is found in nature and to create it in their handiwork so far as they are able,” Freud said. “Beauty is an instance which plainly shows that culture is not simply utilitarian in its aims, for the lack of beauty is a thing we cannot tolerate in civilization.”

Comment: Seen any civic sculptures lately? Do we even know what beauty is anymore?

Fourth, in a civilization, “we expect to see the signs of cleanliness and order,” according to Freud.

We do not think highly of the cultural level of an English country town in the time of Shakespeare when we read that there was a tall dung-heap in front of his father’s house in Stratford; we are indignant and call it ‘barbarous,’ which is the opposite of civilized, when we find the paths in the Wiener Wald littered with paper,“ he said. ”Dirt of any kind seems to us incompatible with civilization; we extend our demands for cleanliness to the human body also, and are amazed to hear what an objectionable odor emanated from the person of the Roi Soleil; we shake our heads when we are shown the tiny washbasin on the Isola Bella which Napoleon used for his daily ablutions. Indeed, we are not surprised if anyone employs the use of soap as a direct measure of civilization. It is the same with order, which, like cleanliness, relates entirely to man’s handiwork.”

Comment: Government regulations have degraded so many home appliances now that not even washing machines and toilets work properly. Not even detergents work as they once did.

Fifth, civilization presumes order.

“The benefits of order are incontestable: it enables us to use space and time to the best advantage, while saving expenditure of mental energy,“ Freud said. ”One would be justified in expecting that it would have ingrained itself from the start and without opposition into all human activities; and one may well wonder that this has not happened, and that, on the contrary, human beings manifest an inborn tendency to negligence, irregularity, and untrustworthiness in their work, and have to be laboriously trained to imitate the example of their celestial models.

“[Therefore,] beauty, cleanliness, and order clearly occupy a peculiar position among the requirements of civilization. No one will maintain that they are as essential to life as the activities aimed at controlling the forces of nature and as other factors which we have yet to mention; and yet no one would willingly relegate them to the background as trivial matters.”

Comment: None necessary.

Sixth, civilization is marked by a high place for ideas in human life. Religion is part of that given their complicated evolution alongside social development. Next to religion comes “philosophical speculations.” Along with that comes man’s “conceptions of the perfection possible in an individual, in a people, in humanity as a whole, and the demands he makes on the basis of these conceptions.”

Freud noted that “these creations of his mind are not independent of each other; on the contrary, they are closely interwoven, and this complicates the attempt to describe them, as well as that to trace their psychological derivation.”

“If we assume as a general hypothesis that the force behind all human activities is a striving towards the two convergent aims of profit and pleasure, we must then acknowledge this as valid also for these other manifestations of culture, although it can be plainly recognized as true only in respect of science and art,” he said.

Comment: The intellectual world has been largely captured by woke charlatans these days.

Seventh, Freud said that in civilization “social relations, the relations of one man to another, are regulated, all that has to do with him as a neighbor, a source of help, a sexual object to others, a member of a family or of a state.” In this context, He discussed the idea of freedom itself, which he argued isn’t a product of civilization but rather its precondition. Indeed, the unmitigated freedom of individuals to do whatever they want without restraint—to pillage, abuse, lie, wreck, menace, and kill—can be a grave threat. It’s only freedom tamed by a cultivated moral sense that gives rise to creative and civilized culture.

Comment: Social breakdown is a huge feature of life today.

Freud ended his striking discussion with this: “A great part of the struggles of mankind centers around the single task of finding some expedient (i.e., satisfying) solution between these individual claims and those of the civilized community; it is one of the problems of man’s fate whether this solution can be arrived at in some particular form of culture or whether the conflict will prove irreconcilable.”

Yikes, but there it is. Other important thinkers have dissected this issue of what constitutes civilization, but Freud’s views are less well-known and nonetheless trenchant.

In the same book, Freud wrote that the more government fears revolt, the more it seeks to control the behavior, speech, and thoughts of the people. It actively seeks to decivilize, thus unleashing the same in the population.

So it’s no coincidence that the widespread unleashing of uncivilized behavior, especially in the form of “elevated inventory shrink,” came following the mass violation of property rights by government. After all, the federal government declared most of the stores currently dealing with criminality to be “nonessential.” What message does that send to the population?

We would do well to revisit the foundations of what we call civilization lest we risk losing it entirely.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.