Civilization

A highly controversial concept, the term civilization conveys the idea of progress, of advancement and therefore of superiority of one societal order over another. Would be civilized any social group which would have reached a level of development considered superior to that of societies or communities known as “savage” or “barbarian”. The savage societies, in the image of the accounts brought back by the European colonizers in Africa or in the Americas, gave an account of a state of development considered first or “primitive” and thus inferior.

According to this evolutionary representation of human societies, barbarian societies would mark an evolutionary stage superior to the “savage state”. In the barbaric societies, it would have been observed organizational and institutional forms more complex than those noted in the “first societies”, marking then an evolution considered positive.

Finally, the fact of having reached the status of “civilized” people, would be associated with the responsibility of civilizing, that is to say of transmitting to the “uncivilized” peoples the achievements of civilization in order to make them benefit from the so-called advances of civilization.

To this evolutionary, hierarchical and discriminatory posture corresponds another meaning to the word civilization. It makes it possible to qualify the form of the cultural development common to an example of societies and to allot a qualifier making it possible to group together, under the same features, societies sharing a complex set of cultural attributes.

There would be thus presence of civilizations since the prehistoric era. They would be qualified essentially with the help of archaeological data based mainly on the observable transformations in the development of technologies to work the stone. It was then possible to group the human cultures of prehistoric times according to the technologies of stone cutting or polishing. Three civilizational levels were then identified : those of the Paleolithic (ancient stone age), the Mesolithic (middle stone) and the Neolithic (new stone, in reference to the polished stone).

After the great periods of human prehistory, civilizations based on a mode of subsistence based on agriculture and livestock would follow. The civilizations take then a geographical qualifier — the civilizational area of Mesopotamia — or frankly identity-based : the Egyptian, Chinese, Indian, Greek civilizations…

Within the framework of the Manifesto, we retain the second sense attributed to the word civilization, namely, that which makes it possible to group under the same qualifier a whole of cultural attributes characterizing an economic, political, cultural and social formation. Such a formation generally groups together a set of societies that share the said attributes.

In a contemporary production, Samuel Huntington (1996), defines the current civilizational situation not as a unified whole around a civilization, but it would be constituted of multipolar space where eight civilizations coexist. He defines a civilization with the help of a strong and integrative cultural identity variable around which a set of societies is clustered. We do not share this point of view and consider our historical era as the first unified era of human history at the civilizational level. This unity can be observed by means of three indicators. The first is that there is now an established social order on a global scale, governed by a set of institutional arrangements governed by a variety of international organizations, such as the United Nations. The second is the presence of an economic and social formation that molds and orients the functioning of societies according to the same rationality. The third is that this order allows for a proliferation of cultures without the latter challenging either the overall rationality or the instituted order. We are thus in the presence of a globalized modernity.

To speak of a new civilizational order is part of a revolutionary proposal aiming at transforming the attributes of the current order, that of globalized modernity, in favor of a new order, that of the Awakening. To the modern globalized civilization we propose the civilization of the Awakening.