On "civilization"

After the fall of the Roman Empire came a period history refers to as The Dark Ages.  The area and people formerly under the yoke of Rome dissolved into smaller organizational units, while the technological achievements of the empire decayed; roads, aqueducts, etc that allowed Roman society and culture to flourish.  The label of this period of dissolution betrays some paradigms--calling it "dark" implies that what came before was light; that the loss of an oppressive centralized plutocracy was bad, while "local control" was somehow a step backward culturally or technologically.  History seems to have the opinion that the period beyond Roman rule in Europe was a loss of civilization, a return or regression to barbarism.

This makes me wonder what "civilization" as an historic label is exactly. The period following the gradual decline (rather than the historically preferred word "fall") of Rome is rather marked by a realignment of political structures.  The strong, centralized political force of the Emperor and aristocratic plutocracy run from a single European city dissolved into something almost tribal in nature.  Through competition for resorces these many parts congealed into the kingdoms that would dominate the Middle Ages, but did so largely along the cultural lines that Rome was supposed to have erased.  These kingdoms, in turn, looked geographically similar to the nation-states of Europe today, even after several political experiments tried to forge smaller areas into larger political structures (the Holy Roman Empire, Napoleon, the first and second World Wars).  The Roman labels of areas such as Gaul and Germania are largely France and Germany, with border areas fractured into smaller nation-states such as Belgium, Switzerland and Austria.  It is these border areas that have been cause for conflict throughout European history.

So if the cultures of these areas have been able to remain largely distinct despite attempts to merge them into larger political structures over centuries, what civilization was Rome offering that didn't already exist, and what was lost when Rome declined?

The key may be in the political structures.  While cultural norms were maintained within regions controlled by the Roman Empire, Rome imposed political norms on conquered territory.  What are these political norms? A standardization of political structures.  This standardization of political structures allowed the dissemination of Rome's political will, but also of how "the state" provides for its citizens.  This required Rome's standard answers; technological achievements, entertainment, judiciary, coinage, and so forth which influenced but did not, or could not, supplant cultural aspects and ties.  At its core, the Roman system offered standardization.  The period that followed Rome's influence was decidedly unstandardized, politically speaking, but not culturally.  So what is "civilization?"  Political standardization, simply put.

This raises the question about the many smaller political units that emerged as Europe found its own way; did these smaller units, almost tribal in nature, not have internal standardized political structures as well?  And given this standardization, were they not civilization?  Historians would argue they were not, due to paradigms about size and complexity of societies, but where the line is drawn to define what is big and complex versus small and simple is another arbitrary distinction.  As I've demonstrated in many posts, arbitrary markers are signs that no marker exists at all, functionally
speaking.

At best, civilization is the ability to impose political standardization on a society, regardless of cultural distinctions, size, or complexity.  At best.  At worst, it is a meaningless label full of arbitrary distinctions that are meaningless in themselves, and does nothing to further our understanding of human organizations, past or present.

Confirmation

I have written about the need to embrace complexity and the limitation of labels, and how so much of our world refuses to be bound in discrete categories but rather occurs as a spectrum, or a continuum. The December issues of Scientific American and Wired contain articles that support this contention.  Wired demonstrates the problem of defining a species as needed to save it under the Endangered Species Act, while Scientific American writes about how the quantum world is not quantum (not discrete particles) but a continuum of wave action.

The Scientific American article author even uses my example of Pluto to make his point that nature is continuous and that where we draw distinctions in science is arbitrary.  Some interesting highlights: if we break a "particle" into three component smaller pieces, was the original "particle" a discrete parent particle, or was it always those three smaller pieces? The author describes a particular fermion that if you could hold it and turn it 360 degrees would find it was something completely different.  To get back to the original fermion, you would in fact have to turn it 720 degrees, meaning that the fermion doesnt exist in just 3 dimensional space as we define it.

The wired article describes efforts to save a small population of fish in an aquifer at the edge of Death Valley.  Due to shrinking populations which have nothing to do with human activity, but rather environmental pressures (as one would expect of a fish that makes its home at the edge of Death Valley), the population has reached a point where genetic diversity is so small that mutations will doom the fish to extinction.  The possibility of breeding the fish with larger populations of relatives from elsewhere would make that genetic line extinct, but save the notion of having fish in this particular aquifer.  The idea that the offspring of the two different fish populations would be a hybrid is challenged by the fact that the two populations are more genetically similar than I am with a person from Kenya.  Again, given the genetic similarity, the two populations may not actually be seperate species after all, in which case breeding them for the survival of one population isn't such a bad idea, but challenges their place on the Endangered Species List at all making saving them less a question of saving a species but rather preserving their location in this particular aquifer.  In short, we dont have a good definition of what constitutes a species, but the old Linnean system of counting scales and fins  is wholly insufficient given our understanding of genetics.  And using genetics, which offer so many places to draw arbitrary lines as to be useless, demonstate the continuous nature of animal life from single cells to complex organisms such as ourselves.

Interesting!

Why Caligula may have been Rome's greatest Emperor

No doubt this idea deserves a lengthier discussion than I can provide here.  Just based on a cursory read of Suetonius and a semester of Roman history in college, paired with a lifelong interest in modern politics, I think Caligula has suffered from a common problem; history is written by the winners.  He sought early to endear himself to the political establishment, but turned on them and sought to destroy the power and control structures he came to regard as oppressive.  That he was assassinated should make the fact that he was a threat to the establishment self-evident, but the victors were successfully able to spin his behavior as madness, cruelty, and wanton unprovoked violence.  Caligula's image as crafted by those who hated him (and killed every member of his family, for good measure) is hardly helped by the crappy pornographic movie made to illustrate his reign in the 1970s.

If one reads Suetonius as a skeptic, realizing how modern political opponents portray each other in the worst possible light, Caligula takes on the color of a profound reformer.  The historical record shows Caligula was his predecessor's plaything at any early age, and grew up in an environment where he was exposed to the worst of the Roman system and aristocratic oppression.  At some point he was taken under the wing of Tiberius, as opposed to simply being his toy, who then showed young Caligula the political ropes.  Upon the death of Tiberius, the Senate heaped titles and power on Caligula to ingratiate themselves with him.  Caligula probably believed the leading citizens of Rome thought well of him and truly embraced him, given the arc of his childhood abuse, and he returned their generosity.  Then he got sick.

No doubt without a chosen successor or heir, Caligula's family and political allies jostled for position while the rumors flew that he was near death.  The extended illness would have allowed plots to rise and fall, contingency plans made and broken.  When he unexpectedly recovered and took the lay of 
the land, he saw the sycophants, political opportunists and power hungry for what they were.  He may have even thought he'd been poisoned.  He saw that greed was what motivated the leading elite, and was disgusted.

In response to the collapse of the illusion he lashed out.  He made a political statement with the joke about appointing his horse Consul, he killed political enemies and took the source of their family power--inherited wealth.  He took on the military by humiliating them at the English channel, he took on the temples and religious authorities. Yet the average Roman citizen had nothing to fear from him.  he never pulled a poor person out of a crowd and had him killed just for pleasure; he instead often gave Romans large sums of money and held many entertaining and extravagant games to please them.  He surrounded himself not with slaves with whom he could do as he wished, nor rich elites, but freed slaves, men and women he had liberated from bondage.

As the plots against him grew, he realized the only way he could be free to remake the political, economic and social structures of Rome would be to move the Capitol off the Italian peninsula.  Alexandria, established as a center of knowledge in the ancient world by the Ptolemies, provided the answer; Roman Senators were forbidden by law to travel there, and the aristocratic elites would have to upset their political power structures and generations of tributes and favors to move there.  It was not madness but necessity that drove Caligula to want to move the Capitol of the Empire to Egypt.  It was less a symptom of Caligula's illness, more a sign of someone who wanted to destroy the establishment.  This threat was a step too far, and Caligula was assassinated for it.  And not just he but everyone else who could succeed him was killed, with the exception of one, who was named Emperor by the guard in a power grab in defiance of the aristocratic elites who plotted the attack.  As rumors of his death spread, rather than joy in the streets history records average Romans turned out in droves and held vigil at Caligula's palace.  This is not the sign of a man as hated by the public as he was by the aristocrats who profited from the inequities of the Roman system and were victims of his reign.

It was those aristocrats, and the puppet of the Praetorian Guard who succeeded him, who wrote the  historical record of that era.