Cape £20 pp532
Strictly speaking, the word “civilisation” should be morally neutral. One should be able to discuss the Inca, Roman or Egyptian civilisations without judgment, and it should be possible to talk of communist or fascist civilisations without disqualifying them simply because of their tendency to slaughter their own people. All such systems represent advanced levels of organisation; not all, however, are to our taste.
In practice, however, the word has been moralised by its induction into the vernacular. We speak of binge drinkers and certain urban cyclists as not being “civilised” and, more broadly, we describe some types of human organisations as civilised and others as “barbaric”, “primitive” or whatever. Thus the collapse of the Roman Empire and the advent of the “Dark Ages” is commonly seen as the replacement of civilisation by barbarism. Yet, surely, there was such a thing as, say, a Visigoth civilisation? We may not like it, we may find it barbaric, but we can scarcely deny that it is one way of organising human affairs and thus a civilisation.
What we actually mean — but are too frightened to say — is that we like, we feel at home with, our way of doing things. We cherish our own way of life and are terrified by the prospect of its dissolution. This is fine as long as we don’t then make the mistake of universalising whatever it is we cherish, of claiming our civilisation is the thing itself, the last word in the organisation of human affairs. Enter Roger Osborne.
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This pacey, readable but frequently misguided and intellectually muddled book is, at heart, an assault on the West’s tendency to define its own civilisation as civilisation itself, as superior to all other systems. This makes coexistence impossible. The West’s first reaction when confronted by the alien is to attempt to destroy it or turn it into an image of itself — hence colonialism, slavery, genocide and all the other ills we have imposed. And, latterly, we have the war on terror that George Bush has characterised as “civilisation’s fight” and representing a choice between “civilisation and chaos”.
Those Bushisms are Osborne’s starting point and, at once, we are in a state of confusion. The president was opposing terrorism to civilisation — an initial confusion, I agree, but, in itself, reasonable as, though “civilisation” may be morally neutral, the protection of the people from random violence would seem to be the very least any leader must offer. The real confusion is, in fact, Osborne’s, as he then uses 9/11 and its aftermath to say, “If the war against terror is a war for civilisation then we need a strong sense of what civilisation is.” No we don’t, we just need to have a strong sense that it does not involve flying planes into buildings.
But Osborne suffers from reflex anti-Americanism and one constantly feels the pressure of this prejudice. On page 479, for example, he says the 1987 Wall Street crash did not lead to a depression because “the United States was not the overwhelmingly dominant economy it had been in 1929”, and then, on page 480, he says that, also in the 1980s, “the commercial and military power of the United States” forced countries to adopt free market and globalising policies. This is not necessarily a contradiction but it is the way Osborne puts it. This sort of paleo-leftism also leads him to cover Margaret Thatcher without once mentioning that she came to power when totalitarian union leaders had brought the country to its knees. She defeated them and freed us all, not least the working classes, from incipient tyranny. This was actually better news for the left than it was for the right, but, sadly, they still don’t seem to get it.
This book, therefore, suffers from unresolved prejudices and, as a result, it has to be read against its own grain. Most of the time this does not matter as the bulk of the narrative is simply a lucid account of the last 40,000 years in Europe and America. As a straightforward history and pre-history primer, it is well organised and paced. Osborne has taken on board much of the latest scholarship. He thus rescues the Dark Ages from darkness, pointing out that it was a highly creative phase in Europe, and dispels the mythology of the Saxon “invasion” of Britain, explaining that it was a largely peaceful settlement process. He also demonstrates a true historian’s and storyteller’s sense of what it would be like to live in an utterly different world. This is crucial as, these days, we tend to see every other age through the eyes of our own. The most obvious case is the medieval era, which is vulgarly seen as appallingly cruel — the very word “medieval” having become synonymous with “barbaric”. But the Middle Ages did not invent total war — we did — and the secular mind simply has no access to the unique qualities of the medieval imagination. It was, says Osborne, “imbued with a dense spirituality whose effects we struggle to understand”. And he knows that the rituals we blithely dismiss as “primitive” were not “ light-hearted superstition but a profound understanding that adherence to custom was a matter of life and death”. This is fine and true and precisely the sort of lesson the best history teaches.
Furthermore, his big point — that the West has failed to find a way of co-existing with other civilisations — is unarguable. We should be reminded of the genocide of the American Indian and of the extinction of ways of life in the name of free-market fundamentalism or tourism. We should be forced to consider what it really means to coexist. Maybe it means we should stay at home.
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Yet the muddles and blind spots grow increasingly oppressive as we approach the contemporary. Some I have already mentioned, but there are others, typically to do with art. He rightly sees the Renaissance as the one period whose history actually is art, but fails to take this point further and then, when he comes to modernism, simply seems to embrace John Carey’s argument that it was a conspiracy to keep out the masses. In both cases, he takes the easy way out by dismissing the pretensions of high art without pausing to understand the implications for our conception of civilisation. Maybe art is our own custom that has become a matter of life and death.
But, ultimately, the big problem is that Osborne does not fulfil the task he has set himself, that of evoking a “strong sense” of civilisation. This is, indeed, an urgent matter, not just because of our wars but because of the environmental threats that are now putting all that we are at risk. It is these that ask the deepest questions about our civilisation’s competence and wisdom and these which, astoundingly, Osborne completely ignores.
bryan@bryanappleyard.com.
Civilisation is available at the Books First price of £18 on 0870 165 8585