ir Kenneth Clark began his famous television series on art history with the comment: "I can't define [civilization] in abstract terms yet. But I think I can recognize it when I see it; and I am looking at it now "
He is speaking of the classical architecture visible from the Pont des Arts over the Seine, where it flows through the middle of Paris. He goes on to contrast the magnificent buildings on either side of the bridge with the hideous dragon's head carved on the prow of a Viking ship that might have sailed up the river some time during the 9th century. His point is that French architecture bespeaks a humanistic self-control and self-assurance in stark contrast to the wild vitality of the carving.
The distinction being drawn here goes to the heart of the relationship between society and government. The barbarian Viking culture has one kind of government. The civilized (literally, adapted-for-city-life) society of late-medieval France had government of quite a different kind. Specifically, the relationship of wealth to power was entirely different.
The Vikings went everywhere and took what their long ships could carry. The French lords squatted on the land, took their names from its counties and organized a system of plunder to shame the Vikings. By regularizing their demands, cloaking them in the forms of law, giving some value for value extracted, they were able to take more, more often and for much longer than the Vikings at their fiercest. Taxation is preferable to plunder for warriors and peasants alike. With its invention, theft became domesticated, as it were, and civilization appeared.
If we think of society as a network of relationships an extended conversation and of culture as a structure of cognitive and material facilities that expedite and give shape to the social conversation, then civilization is the pattern woven by the interaction of a great many competing and complementary cultures and sub-cultures constrained to live in relative peace.
The element of constraint seems tobe necessary. Without it, no public good (beginning with security against violence) can be produced and life becomes, as Hobbes said, "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." From this perspective, the graceful art and architecture of high civilization is a form of propaganda. The regime assures everyone and reassures itself, that all is serene and orderly and beautiful, and that its demands (like the dimensions of its buildings) are measured and proportionate to the public goods created.
Still, the very idea of civilization has irony to it. Civilizations necessarily are built on kleptocratic foundations - expropriation of wealth from its immediate producers. The problem, in every case, is to divert a surplus to the production of public goods. Inevitably, a portion of the wealth adheres to the elites who collect and manage this surplus wealth.
Hopefully, their portion is not excessive, as compared with the public benefits made possible by the remaining funds. And yet corrupting forces are always at work, because the lords, or politicians and senior officials, who control the allocation of public revenues do not become pure custodians of the public interest once their personal appetites are satisfied. Rather, they are entrepreneurs of a sort, who hope to see their enterprises grow in wealth and power, not all that differently from venture capitalists and senior executives in the private sector.
Several myths conceal the real position of any government (however "democratic") with respect to the society it governs: The first of these is that governments have no institutional interests of their own, other than to respond as best they can to the political pressures brought to bear upon them. A second is that civil servants are and ought to be passive instruments of their political masters. A third is that government and business, the public and the private sectors, stand toward each other in a relationship that is primarily adversarial. I'll expand on these claims, and justify them, in future articles.