The rise of a civilization?

[rkade8583]

I have a historical question: In your opinion, can a legitimate civilization thrive and survive without warring, oppressing, or generally being underhanded to at least one group of people/other civilization (America/UK/China for example).

I was listening to my local morning talk show and they were talking about how James Cameron hates America with his new movie and how it's saying that we're evil because we took over and oppressed and all that. I don't care about the movie but the premise interested me enough to write this up.

So what do you guys think?

 

[LightSpectra]

You need to be very specific in regards to what the term "civilization" means for this question to be meaningful.

 

[attackfighter]

If the civilization was isolated, yes I think it could prosper (in a sense). I wouldn't expect it to advance technologically or anything, but I can see an agricultural society living peacefully and happily, so long as they don't deal with the outside world.

It would be vulnerable though.

 

[BananaLee]

Avatar was actually just a rehashed version of Disney's Pocahantas.

 

[Omega124]

Well, Japan was an isolationist country from the relative start of the Tokugawa (Isayu (sp?), the Toku you play as in Civ, didn't not support the idea of isolating) Shogunate to around the 1800s, survived without warfare. So, yes, I agree it can if they aviod contact with any other persons.

 

[LightSpectra]

Forgive me for the tangent, but man, is Pocahantas one of the most grievously whitewashed movies to show to kids or what? Imagine if Disney made a musical about the Holocaust which ended with the Nazis and Jews getting along and singing a song together after deposing the mean ol' Führer.

 

[Plotinus]

What kind of radio show is it where people say that someone "hates" a country because he makes a film attacking the exploitation of native peoples? Sounds pretty weird to me.

I agree with LightSpectra that a definition of "civilisation" is needed for the question to be answerable. The Thirty Missions of the Jesuits in Paraguay were pretty enlightened, and might count as a civilisation by some criteria, but clearly not by others. And if you go back far enough, any culture originally came into being only through violence of some kind: no matter how enlightened a group may be at some point in history, they're only there because one group of ancestral paleolithic savages won a turf war against another. So the question is not only what you mean by "civilisation" but when you are counting the period of ideal non-aggression to begin.

Well, Japan was an isolationist country from the relative start of the Tokugawa (Isayu (sp?), the Toku you play as in Civ, didn't not support the idea of isolating) Shogunate to around the 1800s, survived without warfare. So, yes, I agree it can if they aviod contact with any other persons.

Of course that period of Japanese history began with an immense persecution of Christians, both Japanese and foreign, and Christians remained proscribed and under threat right into the nineteenth century. So while Japan may have survived without warfare, it did not manage to avoid oppressing or maltreating a group of people. Which also raises the further question of clarification to the OP: does the oppression of internal groups count, or are we only interested in external ones? And if the latter, how does one distinguish between internal and external groups anyway?

 

[rkade8583]

I'm talking internal and external (such as slavery in America) and I'm definitely not talking about the movie because, like I said, I didn't see it nor do I care about it. They said it and then posed the question and I thought "Wow, what an interesting question."

I guess... I would count a Civ as a country in modern days...

 

[innonimatu]

I guess... I would count a Civ as a country in modern days...

A "political unit", then? Any form of polity? Well, given enough time all must choose between war or falling to conquest. At least that has been true in the past. I guess that the one nearest to what you're mentioning is Switzerland, which officially has kept apart from the wars around it and only got kicked around since the middle ages by revolutionary France (afaik).
Plenty (...actually, not so many ) of recent countries which have existed without involvement in wars, but I doubt that the age-old human tendency towards warring is really done with.

Now throw no internal oppression into the list of requirements, and even the vast majority of those recent countries get disqualified. A few micro-states would remain. but I hardly consider those valid polities, much less civilizations in any possible meaning of that word.

And then there's also the meddling into other countries' affairs, which even neutral states practice or at least condone - again, think how the swiss supplied so many mercenaries for Europe's wars. In fact a "civilization", understood as a country, cannot both be internally free and suppress meddling from some of its groups into foreign affairs (in this case, if any form of swiss government forbid some of its citizens from contracting out as mercenaries, it would be oppressing them). Only a totally isolationist state could carry this out, and even during the isolationist phases of Japan and China (state-enforced!) some of its people would defy the government and trade (goods and ideas) with strangers (and sometimes be repressed accordingly).

So, answering the OP's question: could it happen? No. Where there is contact between "civilizations" there is interchange and it won't always be nice and peaceful. It's not just the economic consequences of trade, the mere exchange of different ideas causes that, as new ideas disrupt existing power structures within each civilization. Every polity must also have some degree of internal oppression (at least I don't know or any anarchist state). If you limit your question to oppressing people on other countries... well, then mostly yes, there are some centuries old countries which have not attacked others for some centuries now.

 

[rkade8583]

That was awesome and I agree with it. Wow, man.

A point someone brought up was... let me see here...

"You'd be hard pressed to find someone that has an ounce of legitimate education and doesn't hate the instances of a technologically and militarily superior power suppressing an indigenous population in Earth's history."

To which I responded that I don't have a problem with a superior power suppressing an indigenous population because I believe strife is a breeding ground for innovation, change, and adaptability. If we hadn't been oppressed (as an American), we wouldn't be a country. Like I said in the other forum though, I believe in honorable war and, like "true" communism, such a thing can never exist in a world of greed and avarice.

 

[attackfighter]

That was awesome and I agree with it. Wow, man.

A point someone brought up was... let me see here...



To which I responded that I don't have a problem with a superior power suppressing an indigenous population because I believe strife is a breeding ground for innovation, change, and adaptability. If we hadn't been oppressed (as an American), we wouldn't be a country. Like I said in the other forum though, I believe in honorable war and, like "true" communism, such a thing can never exist in a world of greed and avarice.

the 13 colonies were less opressed than europe, however europe did not form any successful democracies until way later. I don't think oppression was what gave Americans the strive for their own country, I think it was more just because they thought it would be benificial and they had their heads in the clouds. it was mainly France that even made their revolution successful, so I wouldn't praise the colonial Americans as being exceptionally adaptive or innovative

 

[BananaLee]

If we hadn't been oppressed (as an American), we wouldn't be a country.

Wat?
I'm sorry, but the "oppression" that the colonial Americans underwent was close enough to nothing to not matter. I refer you to Ferguson's Empire
and about a million other non-jingoistic history books you can find.

 

[Agent327]

I have a historical question: In your opinion, can a legitimate civilization thrive and survive without warring, oppressing, or generally being underhanded to at least one group of people/other civilization (America/UK/China for example).

I was listening to my local morning talk show and they were talking about how James Cameron hates America with his new movie and how it's saying that we're evil because we took over and oppressed and all that. I don't care about the movie but the premise interested me enough to write this up.

So what do you guys think?

I'm not sure what you mean by "legitimate civilization", but generally speaking a civilization will be doomed if it cannot properly defend itself - unless it allies with one that can defend both. That said, there are plenty of historical examples of civilizations surviving - as long as they're isolated enough, as mentioned; but as soon as this isolation is lifted, such civilizations will be doomed - especially when confronted with a technologically more advanced civilization, as was the case with the colonization of the Americas in particular (which does not necessarily mean that their cultures are doomed). Continuing with the Americas as an example, there have also been civilizations that ended without external aggression, such as the Olmecs and Mayas.

(As far as the Avatar "anti-americanism" goes, I personally don't see the connection - apart from the obvious fact that it was made in America -, but generally people will see what they want to see.)

 

[Omega124]

What about Switzerland? Ever since its founding, the country haven't been to war once, even in the World Wars. (Unless you count the Air Skirmishes it did in WWII when both the Axis AND the Allies violated their airspace (They shot at both sides!). Then, in that case, ignore the rest of this post). It doesn't persecute any persons to my knowledge, and it has a low crime rate. Of course, the entire founding of the country in 1815 was due to the Napoleonic Wars and the resulting Congress of Vienna, but you have to give it some credit.

 

[innonimatu]

To which I responded that I don't have a problem with a superior power suppressing an indigenous population because I believe strife is a breeding ground for innovation, change, and adaptability. If we hadn't been oppressed (as an American), we wouldn't be a country. Like I said in the other forum though, I believe in honorable war and, like "true" communism, such a thing can never exist in a world of greed and avarice.

Well, the conquest of the americas wasn't immediately inevitable. And even if you as an observer were to notice that it was inevitable on the long-term, that would still leave open the question of whether it was a good or a bad thing. Bad for some, good for others - in any change there are losers and winners.

The one thing I believe we can learn from history is that history never ends. By which I mean that changes in human societies never end - I don't believe that there will ever be a stable, final political or cultural system. In the meanwhile wars will happen, but so will peace. Feudalism, capitalism, communism (whatever form you pick), socialism, anarchy, and whatever we live with now which fits neither of those descriptions - all can happen, they just won't last forever. Even for the most stable systems there are few decades between major changes, It seems. So long as humans reproduce and die, and new generations replace others, history will continue.

As for that quote: I also don't like the suppression of a civilization by another, because so much is lost on the process. You start with two, end with one! Ok, most likely some degree of mixing, but I believe you can understand the point: to use the Americas example, a world with aztecs, incas, spaniards, etc, is more interesting to read about that one with spaniards only (likewise for north america and the indians there). So the aztecs were not nice, what with their warmongering and human sacrifices ... still, there's a sense of loss of diversity after their fall. And this is even a case where I personally dislike the losing side and the final conclusion is "good riddance".
The fall of some makes room for others, that's also true - each new civilization is an evolution or replacement of other. And I can also appreciate the new ones, and know that for a new one to exist another had to disappear. So it may not be rational to be sorry for what was lost on the process, but feelings need not be rational.

 

[Plotinus]

To which I responded that I don't have a problem with a superior power suppressing an indigenous population because I believe strife is a breeding ground for innovation, change, and adaptability.

That's a terrible thing to say - you could justify pretty much anything using that logic. I can't imagine any example of where the suppression of an indigenous people has left them better off - can you?

 

[North King]

Continuing with the Americas as an example, there have also been civilizations that ended without external aggression, such as the Olmecs and Mayas.

Neither of these entities were unified in any sense of the word, so while there might not have been that many people attacking the Olmecs, the strife between Olmecs qualifies as external conflict by most definitions.

And in fact, the Maya started their long road to "collapse" (in a sense, anyway; Mayan towns remained as functioning polities until the Spanish conquest, and there are still a lot of Mayans around in the present day) due to external aggression: the city of Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico attempted to take over Tikal as a tributary, managed to succeed in installing their own ruler, and caused Calakmul and an number of allied/vassal states to invade and start a war that lasted roughly a century. Only later did the population and "stability" decline to to the point where ecological collapse started taking place -- the latter being extremely overhyped by many historians.



Sorry for the long tangent. As to the question, I'd say humans are aggressive enough that violence is more or less inherent, regardless of the level of "civilization".

 

[Dachs]

What about Switzerland? Ever since its founding, the country haven't been to war once, even in the World Wars. (Unless you count the Air Skirmishes it did in WWII when both the Axis AND the Allies violated their airspace (They shot at both sides!). Then, in that case, ignore the rest of this post). It doesn't persecute any persons to my knowledge, and it has a low crime rate. Of course, the entire founding of the country in 1815 was due to the Napoleonic Wars and the resulting Congress of Vienna, but you have to give it some credit.

Switzerland was founded long before 1815. Several of the Swiss cantons formed confederacies in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, maintained and expanded despite the power of the Holy Roman Emperors through war - perhaps more than any other "civilization" or "polity" or "people" or whatever, the Swiss demonstrate the point made in the OP. (Of course, the OP's point is kind of silly like NK pointed out, and asks a loaded question to boot. I mean, like JEELEN said, "legitimate" civilization? What doesn't count as "legitimate"?) Swiss mercs were their most well known export, and one of the key reasons they were so damn good at fighting was cause they spent so much time doing it, for both paying customers and their home cantons. The Swiss played a huge role in the Italian Wars and in one of the major flashpoints of the Thirty Years' War, the Valtellina crises. And the Helvetian Republic of the Revolutionary era was the scene of not one but two important campaigns, one in 1799 and the other in 1813-4.

 

[Chieftess]

I would say theoretically, yes. (Did Sumeria rise peacefully at first?) If a settlement gets large enough that it has to split off into seperate settlements, then trade can begin. With trade will undoubtedly come disputes. Records would have to be kept, and even maps of trade destinations (primitive form of writing). Granted, peace time advancements (pottery, writing, literature, early masonry) would outnumber wartime advancements (stronger fortifications, stronger metals, etc.).

Things like bronze and iron would still develop in a peaceful society, but at a much slower rate, since there's no competition to immediately develop a better spear/sword/shield.

 

[rkade8583]

That's a terrible thing to say - you could justify pretty much anything using that logic. I can't imagine any example of where the suppression of an indigenous people has left them better off - can you?

This is from my crazy, Irish obsessed wife.

What about the Irish and Negros being suppressed by the English/Europeans? What about the Native Americans who were suppressed by American settlers? Did we EVER say that the initial suppression of another people was easy, or immediately beneficial? No. What we're saying is that in the long run all three of those were better off, and that's just a small example. Now in some cases, there are still things that could be improved, as in the case of the Native Americans, but they have the same access to all the modern benefits that the rest of us enjoy, and how is that not a good thing?

And as for the Irish, they're now seen as one of the artistic and cultural capitals of the world, how is that bad? Most of the artwork and designs we see from them come from times of intense conflict with other peoples. And as to the Negros, many of them have proven to be every bit as (and sometimes more) adaptable to change than us "stuck in a rut" white people. All three of them have proven the point, and I'm sure there are more cultures out there that can do the same.

I repeat my point, suppression and conflict is HARD. It can lead to good things later on, but the main point is that it is necessary for change and innovation.