The Crisis of Civilization

and Cultural Criticism

Human reason so delights in constructions, that it has several times built up a tower, and then razed it to examine the nature of the foundation.  It is never too late to become wise; but if the change comes too late, there is always more difficulty in starting a reform.

                                  [Kant: Prolegomena/Metaphysics]

It can be said, with good reason, that Western civilization has reached a major crisis or turning point in its history.  Yet, we in the West have always assumed that our culture, our way of life, could not fail to survive such challenges.  We feel that our history clearly validates this belief as we examine the records of the past. 

Critics have said that those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it.  So, we are constantly looking back over our shoulder to historical events of epochs past trying to draw conclusions about how to avoid the pitfalls of former times and nations.  We strive in this manner to keep our trajectory on track, moving forward to a brighter future.  But, perhaps the most important error – and what may have led indirectly to our current global crisis – is not what we failed to learn from history, but that which was forgotten by our predecessors at the very dawn of historical consciousness.

Certainly, history is the story of civilization, the rise and fall of empires and nation states, and the memorable personalities and dramatic events creating the fabric of historical narrative.  But this history emerges out of a set of assumptions about how things work, how the world is constituted, the logic of historical narrative, about acting in the world, and about the nature of language.  These assumptions ground our understanding of the world, including our own personal histories, while inhibiting us from remembering what was forgotten with the emergence of history, civilization, and its stories.  

Of course, scholars will tell us that humankind lived a primitive and brutish pre-civilized existence with no written records prior to the emergence of historical consciousness and the recording of events in the ancient Near East, Sumer in particular: the big event.  They may even tell us that such peoples lived with myths that are nonsensical from our modern, rational, historical perspective.

But, modern Homo sapiens appeared almost 200,000 years ago, and the earliest species of our genus, Homo habilis, two million years back; they lived in relative harmony with nature and with one another; and they lived without history or the terror of historical consciousness until its eruption with the birth of civilization.  What the scholars will not tell us is that there was something substantial lost with the emergence of this new consciousness and the subsequent construction of historical thought approximately 5,500 years ago.

As culture critics, we seek to develop a set of tools and a footpath to help grasp this ancient transition, allowing us to recollect that genetic memory trace which was lost (forgotten) at the shadowy origins of our history.  We need to devise a unique vocabulary for breaking out of our univocal and unilinear historical perspective, a foundation razing critique of the development of civilization, history, and what M. Bram calls “the curriculum of the West.”  Was the transition to this new urban world an inevitability of evolution or simply a pathological accident?  

And so, any good critique of culture needs to remind us about the end of kinship and the beginnings of kingship; about the origins of hierarchy and political institutions, of law and calculative thinking; about the origins of work, education, competition, violence, warfare, slavery, and modern urban alienation; about the origins of greed, about winners and losers, and the historic context of our current cultural crisis; about the loss of freedom and play, about the loss of polysemy and of a “humane society.”

By recollecting all of this, perhaps we may overcome the forced “erasure” of our pre-civilized past, allowing us to recover the “memory of another, perhaps more compelling way to live.” [Bram]  But, to Kant’s earlier point, is it perhaps too late for “reform?”