It Could Happen Here - Civilization with Andrew
Episode Date: September 3, 2026Andrew talks with James about the concept of civilization and how we can use it to understand our shared past and future. Sources: Against the Grain by James C. Scott Civilized to Death b...y Christopher Ryan Wild Thought by Claude Lévi-Strauss Ishmael by Daniel Quinn The Botany of Desire by Michael PollanSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Did you have a favorite ancient civilization that you were learning about growing up?
Oh, man.
So many.
I guess I enjoyed, like, Celtic things because that's, like, part of the world I'm from.
Wasn't even without Celtic.
I think she was Celtic.
a Celtic warrior, queen, Bodicea.
Bodecia is how people used to say.
Budica, I think, is more accurate.
That speed.
Like, she was someone who had resisted the Roman invasions, right?
Yeah, that's right.
Where my dad lives is like where the Romans built their border wall,
called Hadrian's wall.
And it's just kind of cool to be like, you know,
the Romans brought their colonialism to all of Europe and they got here and that and I can't
fucking do it.
It might have been they got to that part of the world
and they were like, it's raining so fucking much
I want to go back to Italy.
But yeah, it was always interesting to me
to think of like, you know,
the amount of a modern world
that's still impacted by Roman colonization
and then these people who were able to resist it.
Yeah, I remember as a child,
I was a really big fan of Egypt, of course,
I guess classic.
Of course.
Greece, you can't go wrong.
Babylon, big fan.
I like the bards.
Yeah.
You know, very cool.
Yeah.
As someone who, you know, I grew up, like, with a voracious appetite for those living long ago, how people live in the past, like, historical books, how people dressed, what they eat, how they live day to day.
And a lot of those ancient civilizations were presented to me as humanity's great achievements.
You know, the American deficit.
architecture, the advances in agriculture, the remarkable works of art, and so on. But as I got
older and I started reading more history from below rather than history through the lens of
kings and empires, I learned more about life before civilization and outside of empire, and I
really became less interested in civilization as something to be held up at.
as the pinnacle of what he won't Saki-Bulov,
although I am still very much interested in it as an idea
and how we think about and talk about it as an idea.
And so this is It Could Happen here.
I'm Andrew Sage or Andrewism on YouTube,
joined again by...
James. People have already heard be sounding off,
but yeah, it's nice to be here again.
Yes, in case you didn't recognize the voice.
Yeah.
And I want to talk about the meanings.
of civilization.
If I were to ask you if you were civilized, how would you respond?
I think I aspire not to be, but like I have been raised in a society which very much
proposed this binary between like the civilized and the uncivilized, right?
I guess savage is a word you could use if you were looking at how that society portrayed
it, right?
And like, even though I think British education and stuff wouldn't use that word any more.
more, it says a lot about like the state and its desire to shape narratives in its favor.
So I think I would aspire to decimilize myself, I guess.
I'm not like anti-siv in like big scheme of things, but I think in the in the way that it's
often used to describe indigenous peoples or people who are not under control of the state.
I don't like that very much.
Yeah, it's interesting to me because if you ask most people, they'll probably just be like, yes.
They would say yes, without hesitation.
You know, obviously we're not most people.
Yeah, yeah.
But, you know, as you mentioned, like the alternative being, you know, the savage, that is something that has kind of fallen out of fashion.
You know, that exact binary of civilized and savage is not in vogue.
You know, it's not treated as something that you see.
And yet we maintain one half of the binary as something to uphold.
So we still say, you know, we are civilized, and it's a civilization, but you wouldn't as much see descriptions of the alternative, of the barbarian, the uncivilized, the savage, the primitive.
I think you can ask people like, what is civilization, what do you mean by being civilized, and it's a bit shaky.
You know, it's one of those concepts that is so familiar, so used to being referenced, that not many people stop to interrogation.
You know, we throw the word around all the time when it can mean cities or technology or modernity or law or culture or the state or simply not being barbaric.
Historically, it's also been a way of dividing humanity.
The Greeks, I believe, were the ones who referred to basically anyone who didn't speak Greek as a barbarian.
Yeah.
You know, China infamously treated everything.
outside of China as the barbarian.
Yeah, isn't it like a literally onomatopoeia?
Like people are saying like bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar.
I think I've heard that story as well, yeah.
I'm not sure how true it is.
Yeah, I'm not super familiar with, like, the, like, sourcing on that one, I guess.
Yeah, but, you know, the distinction of the civilized in barbarian is something that has been
weaponized across history to justify conquest and,
colonization and hierarchical taxonomies of the human race.
White man's burden, quote, and quote, was to bring civilization to the less advanced people.
Civilization being, of course, the most advanced stage of human social and cultural development,
which to me is itself a hubris because I think that presumption that we made it,
you know, we reach where we go and, you know, what we figured out here, this is it.
Yeah.
You know, I think that is a very damaging way of thinking.
Definitely.
And it's something that I think is embedded into a very popular perception of what civilization is.
You know, usually historically civilization has also been tied to cities, writing, large populations, agriculture, social stratification of some kind, specialized labor, monumental architecture.
and of course the state.
Buried in many of these associations
is the assumption that hierarchy
is advanced,
that this way of structure
in human society
is the destination we will always
headed to.
We have this term in anthropology,
stateless,
the presumption being that
lacking a state is itself,
something that perhaps needs to be rectified.
I'm not saying that every anthropologist
takes its perspective,
but, you know, the words that we use carries in connotations.
And I think that for some people, particularly people,
raise in a civilization context, it's like, oh, yeah, they haven't reached where we have
reached yet.
They haven't gotten there yet.
They haven't evolved to a point where they've developed a state yet.
But that is the trajectory that they are on or are supposed to be on.
Yeah.
The more bureaucracy and rule and classes and institutions your society has, the more advanced
it is presumed to be.
And then of course, you have people like Samuel Huntington,
who used civilization in this very broad sense as cultural identity.
Yeah, I have a pretty negative impression of Samuel Huntington as a human being and as theorist.
As do I, I mean.
I think we all do.
To give you the listener an indication, he treats Islam as a civilization.
Hinduism as a civilization, orthodoxy as a civilization.
And then everything south of the Sahara in Africa is just one civilization, Tim.
Yeah.
I love that, like, Islam is a civilization and also, like, south of the Sahara is a civilization as if never the two shall meet, right?
Like, famously, there are no Muslims in Africa.
Yeah.
The maps that I've seen, he does have, like, Islam in Africa as well.
If you ever look at the map, the map is awful.
The map is just awful.
Yeah, the map gives me fucking, yeah, like,
it admittedly has been a long time since I have engaged.
Yeah, Muslim and African.
I guess, yeah, he includes a horn of Africa in Muslim.
Fucking unbelievable.
Yeah, Confucian.
Japan just exists as like a,
like, every other culture is, like, massively homogenized,
and then Japanese is, like, completely unique
in this little bubble.
Yeah, yeah. This is such like, I'm sorry, like, that's so weeb coded to me.
Yeah. It's incredibly white dude who hasn't fucking really engaged with the world coded, you know?
Yeah, yeah. It's like, oh yeah, the entire continent of Africa, sure, fine, whatever. That's Africa.
Japan, though, like, Japan is distinct from Korea, from China, from the Philippines, from all of Asia. Japan is its own thing.
from these places it's had exchange with for centuries.
Yeah, and then like the entirety of North America,
Greenland, Western Europe, and Australasia is just Western.
The indigenous peoples there don't exist, right?
Like, the differences in those cultures.
Yeah, well, Western is called for white, so...
Yeah.
It's not surprising.
Yeah, that's definitely what he's doing there.
His famous argument was that future conflicts would be predicated
on clashes between the civilizations,
hence clashes of civilizations being the title of his book.
Yeah.
I don't find it very convincing.
I don't think you do either.
Yeah, no, I'm not buying it, to be honest.
Yeah, it treats these big cultural blobs as if they're unified entities
and discrete entities when, you know, history has been a long story of exchange,
borrowing, overlap, divergence by green,
and transformation.
Yeah.
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Finally, for another perspective, I want to share on the subject of civilization.
We have David Wengru, who many of you may know as the co-author of The Dawn of Everything.
And for him, he argued that if we're going to keep using the word civilization, we should think of it as a product of interaction between
societies. So through trade and conflict and migration and imitation collaboration, civilization
is like an emergent phenomenon of that interconnectedness. I think that is a somewhat
idiosyncratic, but still compelling and somewhat familiar approach to the idea. Typically,
people do think of civilizations as discrete entities, though. Yeah. At least in Lehman's perspective,
but the field of anthropology and historical research I know is rife with comparative studies
and, you know, investigations of those very exchanges between societies.
So as he is speaking from an anthropological perspective, I see why he would want to put forward
that reframing.
And the thing more definitions of words and connotations and stuff is none of it is really objectively
correct.
The orders point into different things and the way that we use,
language is always going to be subject to debate. I think the fact that we can't even agree on
what civilization exactly is should probably make us a bit more cautious in how we make sweeping
claims about it. And really, I feel like I hear about many of the words that we throw around
so casually. But one consistency I've seen across most definitions of civilization is this
packaging with, of course, the city, but also with ideas of advancement and development.
which of course begs the question advanced according to whom?
You know, measured by what standard?
How do you actually quantify how much more advanced one society is compared to another?
You know, if the benchmark is skyscrapers and bureaucracies and standing armies or industrial output?
Then, yeah, sure, modern states score very highly in terms of advancement.
But then we can ask, you know, why should those be the specific metrics we use?
Why not measure the advancement of a society according to how much.
leisure its members enjoy, or by how equal they are, or by how sustainable they engage with
the ecosystem that they're embedded in, or by how much freedom regular people have over their own
lives. You know, we can pick different measure and sticks and get different winners and losers
in this competition of advancement. But the measure and stick we're working with when we speak
a civilization clearly isn't very helpful for many of us. All societies are not working
with the same measure and stick, despite the efforts to impose this capitalist, neoliberal
measure and stick on everybody. You know, we have countless experiments and examples of different
ways of organizing life across history. Some lasting for centuries, others millennia, some expanding
into empires, others staying small, some prioritizing equality, others prioritizing hierarchy,
accumulation versus mobility. You know, we can't assume that all of humanity is trying to reach the same
predetermined destination. So the whole language of more and less civilized doesn't really cut it
for me. But the language of civilization does work for the people that it serves. The people who see
their society as the highest stage of human development, which must be imposed on others by
evangelism and conquest and so on to bring development. And same attitude, which is extended to people
by European colonial powers to invade these lands for wealth and territory, to conquer them,
to treat them as a lesser on the ladder of human development.
That very same attitude extends beyond people to nature itself as something wild and unproductive
and waiting to be mastered by civilization.
But one thing is really stuck with me in reading, for instance, James Scott,
which it talks about this and against the green,
it's just how fragile
and not inevitable
this civilization development was,
you know?
These early states
very often collapsed,
very often fragmented,
and for many people,
in those contexts,
the collapse, quote and quote,
was an escape to freedom.
You know, it was
something that gave them an opportunity
to disperse and to create,
smaller communities and to have greater autonomy and fewer obligations to rulers.
And so with all that history in mind, I find the concert of civilization, you know, something to
think about, but certainly not something to idealize.
Yeah.
Something that just came to my mind is a speech that Derruti gave to the cops on the eve of
the Catalan Revolution, right?
So 19th of July.
So the cops have been sent, right?
They know that the military is going to rise up against them, right?
They know that in the coming days, that they will either have to fight their own military
or accept the end of this like liberal democracy in Spain, right?
This republic in Spain.
The Catholic government has still sent the police to seize weapons from the anarchists, right?
Who are the most capable people of fighting this coup?
They would rather state than no state, I guess, right?
Like the state's always going to have more solidarity with the state than it's
its constituents. And he says to the COBS, sometimes when we're given an order, we have to
disobey it. And even if the order comes from a very big and important person to translate,
obviously, and paraphrase to, we civilize ourselves with disobedience. It's a really interesting
phrase, right? Like to him, I guess, the concept of civilization is dignity and, like, autonomy.
the person who is given up their autonomy to the state is not civilized
because they have given up that autonomy
and allowed the state to be the one that makes their decisions for them, right?
Like, it's an alternative use.
It's like an inversion, basically.
Exactly, yeah, yeah.
Like, he's taken that term and said,
like, it's fundamentally uncivilized of you
to allow the state to be the one that makes the choices for you.
It's just a really interesting, yeah, inversion of the terminology.
Yeah, yeah.
I think it's curious because when I look at, for instance,
there's this book Civilized Death by Christopher Ryan,
and he uses this concept of human domestication.
Okay.
And he argues that, you know,
just as humans selectively bred and conditioned animals to fit into environments
that we designed for all on purposes,
civilization shaped us to fit the needs of these large hierarchical systems.
Okay. You know, we told routines and obedience and punctuality for activity,
dependence on these institutions. And so it's kind of interesting to me that,
you know, by Duryouty's Freeman, the domestication of civilization is precisely what
makes us uncivilized. Yeah, like the forced pacidism, I don't know how to say it,
Like, it is what makes us uncivilized.
It makes us undignified.
Yeah.
And I guess that is another use or connotation
associated with civilization that he's utilised in there,
which is civilization as dignity.
Right.
As being upright or dignified as a person,
to be civilized is to be, you know,
a certain standard or caliber of person.
Yeah, exactly that.
Yeah.
And so he's kind of pointing to civilization
as corrupting that caliber
by making us slavishly dependent
on the institutions
over which we have very little control over.
Yeah, it's like, is it interesting, like inversion?
I'm not sure how useful it is.
Like, I'm not sure if it's a term
that anyone needs to recapture,
but it's interesting, you know.
First thing, even if I find that an invasion
is not necessarily practical
in terms of day-to-day communication,
I think playing with concepts.
You know, tinkering with concepts,
invuting them, I think it's still useful in better grasping them.
Yes.
In better formulating our sense of what they are and what they are not.
Yeah, definitely.
Like, the meaning of a word is something we co-create over time, right?
It's not like a fixed thing.
And obviously, we have these dictionaries and they have the meanings of words.
But, like, language is just a way of communicating concepts.
And so, like, we co-create that.
meaning as we redefine those concepts.
Exactly.
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Those are moving south.
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College football will hijack your weekend, ruin your sleep, and break your heart.
And that's why we make the Solid Verbal College Football Show.
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How's it going?
Every week we preview the games that matter,
sort through the biggest storylines,
and tell you what to watch before kickoff.
There's a lot to keep track of.
Who's for real?
Which upset is hiding in plain sight and which storyline is about to take over your group chat.
And when the games are over, join us in the aftermath too.
We're going to react to what happened, talk about the biggest results.
Of course, we'll cover the playoff picture and all the little details you might have missed while flipping between like 12 games at once.
Whether you know every coach and coordinator or just want to understand why everybody is yelling,
we're here to help make sense of the madness.
Listen to the Solid Verbal College Football Show on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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So much of modern civilized life clearly isn't good for us.
I say that after stretching my back with great futility as I spent most of my day sitting.
Yeah.
Working at a desk.
You know, a lot of people are working jobs they find meaningless,
simply because they need the income to survive.
You know, they are spending most of their waking hours indoors,
are exposed to fresh air.
Yeah.
If they even have fresh air outdoors,
because many of us live in urban environments
where the standards of air quality are not the best.
Could also speak of the rates of stress and loneliness
and anxiety and depression and burnout
that have continued to rise even as our material wealth
as societies, not necessarily as individuals,
but as societies and our technological capabilities.
have both increased.
I don't think you have to be a primitivist and advocate for some return to prehistory
to recognize the negatives, the race here.
And while I think many technological developments associated with civilization
have genuinely improved people's lives, you know, antibiotics, dentistry, planes,
the internet, especially for disabled people in those medical conditions.
They would otherwise be untreatable.
Yeah.
You know, these are very beneficial innovations.
Yeah.
I just don't think that civilization, as we have structured it and conceived of it, has a monopoly on innovation.
In his book, Wild Thoughts, Claude Levy Strauss had made the point that many of humanity's greatest technological breakthroughs in agriculture, weaving, pottery, animal domestication.
They were developed long before we conventionally think of as civilization.
human beings have always been creative, we've always experimented, we've always invented, and we always will.
Nothing we can or should go back, because I mean there are billions of us now, mostly in cities that are far from ecologically sustainable.
But I think if we keep the history of our diverse social forms in mind, then as we go forward, we can try to preserve what genuinely enriches human life while leaving behind the Institute.
and assumptions that no longer do.
By the way, do you by chance have a blueprint
for the future of our species?
No, I don't think I do other than working it out together.
Yeah, I mean, either.
Hoping someone might, I guess we'll have to figure that out together, exactly.
Yeah.
Maybe that is a blueprint.
Exactly.
I'm really not interested in seeing
that there's like one correct society.
that everybody has to adopt.
Yeah.
I think we can learn something from the incredible diversity of human societies that have existed.
And we can use that not for mimicry, but for inspiration, you know, to realize that we too
can pursue these uncharted territories and develop something new or to take old concepts
and stretch them into new forms.
Yeah, definitely.
The author Daniel Quinn in his book Ishmael-Win, in his book Ishmael
had made a point that tribes can be defined not by hunting and gathering or ethnicity,
but as a social organization that allows people to make a living together.
And so by this definition, you know, people still today create tribal forms of organization all the time,
whether it be mutual aid networks, affinity groups, intentional communities,
wherever people freely organize themselves around shared needs and shared purposes.
But one thing quite emphasizes is that these kinds of societies can be very flexible.
You know, when these arrangements are no longer working for us, we can change them, we can walk away from them.
We're not tied to them in the way that we are basically bound by an enormous bureaucracy that we're supposedly in social contract with today.
And so really for me, that's what I want to focus on, a world where people have greater control over their lives, more decentralized, more cooperation,
a world where organizations are things that people can freely join at reshape and split and leave
and they no longer saving their needs. I really care about GDP metrics and, you know,
mega city concentrations. I just want to know, you know, how we get from here to there together.
And to me, that is something that requires, as I said many times before on this podcast,
and on my YouTube channel,
it requires opposition to systems of domination,
through confrontation and non-cooperation,
through things like strikes and boycotts
and other forms of resistance.
And it also requires, on the other end of that equation,
that we prefigure the world we want to live in
by promoting certain ideas and philosophies,
but more so by building the actual relationships and institutions,
we want to live.
in and be a part of.
And I think that these are two processes that will reinforce each other.
You know, people will see and in experience different ways of organizing their lives,
and that informs their ideology.
They become more confident that these alternatives are possible,
and it drives them to push them in new directions.
So I see a lot to say that the idea of civilization had its place and has had its time,
but I think that we can let go of that old idea,
you know, that we don't have to assume that there is no other alternative.
And I think that requires not just a rejection, but an active replacement.
To make the cracks of the old order apparent,
and to make the idea, the omni idea of,
liberalism, capitalism, and civilization, unconvincent by the presentation of this other alternative.
I know some people might call that next thing a better civilization, but I would prefer to be, you know,
didn't bind ourselves to that old terminology.
At least that's how I try to approach it.
And what about you?
Yeah.
I don't think we should be beholden to these things that can hold us back, right?
And as you say, we should be more focused in, like, building the world that we want to live in.
And not so much of building the world we've been told we should want to live in.
Language can turn into a way of seeing the world.
And I think we need to be careful of letting language determine how we see the world
in a way that inherently limits our ability to create a better one.
And I think this is a concept that we need to be very careful of when it comes to that.
And just like the inherent bigotry,
that came with a lot of civilization narratives, right?
Sometimes I do like the idea.
Scott talks about this a little bit, right?
But in fact, it is people in states who were domesticated
and they were domesticated by grain crops.
Grain crops brought those people in,
forced them to live in a certain place,
force them to live in a certain way,
or so they could tend and care for grain crops, right?
Yeah.
Like, I think maybe it's flipping that around
might help people understand a little bit.
Yeah, I think there's a, I forget the name of the book,
It's a botany of desire?
Yeah, I haven't read that.
I've been recommended that book before.
Yeah, I read that couple years ago.
And I think it was on that very subject.
The idea that the plans that we've raised have in some ways domesticated us.
Right.
Just as we have domesticated them, it's been a reciprocal process.
Yeah, I like that idea.
That, I think, was like, a theme or an element of that book, if I remember correctly.
Okay, nice, yeah.
or maybe it's a theme that I read into it.
Right, either way.
I think it's a use, sometimes a useful way of seeing the world.
And yeah, I guess that's one of my takeaways as well.
Play around with concepts.
Tinker with them, flip them upside down.
And I think that is also how we innovate, how we create new things, new meaning.
You know, there is this, I think it's a proverb or it might be in Ecclesiastes,
but it's like, there's nothing new under the sun.
Yeah.
So it's like creativity is just the ways that we repoop us, what already exists.
We build upon everything that Kimi for.
And we have to be willing to play around with it if we want to get to that point of innovator.
Yeah.
That's pretty much what I have for today.
All about all the people.
Peace.
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