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The Nature of Civilization:

A Psychological Analysis [1977]

by Paul Rosenfels

The real question in thinking about the nature of civilization pertains to the issue of improving the quality of man's interpersonal relationships. Will an expansion of the scientific base of human understanding make any difference in the way people live? Time and time again society has been offered new insights into how to live better lives. These offerings come from philosophers, religious teachers, and political leaders. Within the last century their numbers have been joined by professional and academic minds, purporting to apply scientific tradition to psychological matters. Within the limited world these would-be truth seekers operate, they offer society relief from the struggle with the unknown. If one consents to live in a small enough psychological world, their hold on human insights develops a momentarily convincing clarity. They ask others to become true believers and thus receive the rewards of knowing with certitude what is true instead of being required to bear the stress of searching for what is true. As this process goes forward, schools of dogma develop which prove very useful to many people in reducing inner stress. Because their beliefs make them feel better for the time being, it is easy for them to believe that they are in the presence of objective truth.

It is impossible to use the scientific method when the thinker is guided by what he wants to believe instead of making a full submission to the truth-seeking process. Civilized man has found it a necessary aspect of being normal to accept the standards of thinking and behaving imposed by the social system in which he lives. If he goes outside this system his sense ..........

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mentary will be short and concise, but open and suggestive in nature. Today I look at problems arising from the clash between nature and society, the eternal dilemma facing every civilization.

1. As our planet's resources diminish, we slowly enter a new geopolitical era where natural resources will become the fuel carrying civilizations onward - and against each other. We've seen Russia boosting its crooky capitalist economy with oil money, and many Arab countries thriving on their oil industries. In Ukraine we saw just how hard this geopolitical tension can become when the main supply of energy is cut off. NWO conspiracy fanatics may be crazy, but they understand one thing, and that is that many current and future wars will not be motivated by religion or race, but by resource hunger.

2. Living a primitive lifestyle: while it's a neat idea, it's neither realistic nor productive in the long run. A future environmentally sustainable society needs to abandon the idea of constant economic and industrial growth, and so it inevitably has got to simplify the lifestyle of its citizens. The easiest way to lower the ecological footprint is to reduce the number of people on the planet, but in parallel we also need simplification. This is similar to but not the same as primitivism, which people against civilization argue for. Being against the progress humanity has achieved over thousands of years, and most likely will succeed with again as soon as it desperately flees the dark ages, is neither rational nor effective. Still, some people choose to live more primitively, which is interesting.

3. The brilliance of the German techno-pop band Kraftwerk, theoretically, was to look at technology as a tool to achieve human brilliance. Contrary to many technonerds, Kraftwerk embraced technology, but remained critical of some of its effects, most notably nuclear power ("Radioactivity"), lifestyle ("Man-Machine") and socialization ("Electric Café"). The Kraftwerkian vision of Mensch-Natur-Technik is one of harmony between man, nature and civilization. Given civilization cannot exist without nature, but may at times be at odds with it, a harmonic balance seems necessary. Any ideology or political doctrine failing to understand this should accordingly be seen as self-destructive.

4. Alternative energy: I wish it was that easy.

5. Mary Shelley in her novel Frankenstein, brilliantly highlights the virtue of responsibility and mutual love in the struggle for balance between creator and creation. Frankenstein is a lonely man disconnected from the world, just like his creation is destined to be. Both of them become desperate in the search for mutual understanding, but also of self-control. So it is with technology, and every tool we use to create change in the world: with a positive vision, it can create wonder, with a negative vision, it will destroy everything you hold dear.

6. The Arctic Sea controversy: sometimes, what matters not is what's real, but the effects of what is perceived to be real. We don't know what kind of shipment the Arctic Sea really was transporting. But what we do know is that many Israeli analysts most likely will suspect it carried nuclear material to a certain country in the Middle East. It will fuel Israeli suspicion of Russian-Arab relations and bring it one step closer to the brink of full-scale war with its enemies. And all of it, maybe in reality just because of a mysterious ship carrying timber to Algeria. That is how powerful the force of perception is in world politics.

7. Arnold Kling on the mentality of Conservatives: "Where a progressive is ashamed of our past and hopeful for the future, a conservative is proud of our past and worried about the future." I would add: where a progressive constantly looks for new ways of making things work, a Conservative constantly returns to the ways proven to work.

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第5：

Professor Eva-Lynn Jagoe

COL5059H: Nature and Civilization in the New World

Mondays 11-1

Office NF 219, phone 585-4481

Office hours: Mondays 2:30-3:30 or by appointment

COURSE DESCRIPTION:

When Europeans arrived in the New World, they reacted with differing degrees of surprise and recognition to the indigenous cities and to the nature that surrounded them. Colonization entailed an occupation and redistribution of space that both built upon existing cultures and imposed new economies of extraction and utility. The eighteenth century brought a “rediscovery” of the New World with the invention of an America linked to notions of noble savagery and its apparent opposite: the degeneration of nature in the New World. The voyages of naturalists who classified and appropriated American nature according to European expectations and needs persisted in the nineteenth century and informed creole conceptons of national independence. Modernity emphasized the civilization of the cities over against the barbarism of the country and its savage corollaries: unusable lands and indigenous peoples. In the twentieth century, naturalist discourse transformed into an anthropological one. Crises of modernity led to a reinterpretation of the space of Latin America, in which the distinctions between civilization and barbarism could not be so easily ascribed to the city/nature dichotomy. In this course we will examine the different acculturations of space that have taken place in the New World. These will be grouped according to changing visions of nature and civilization at different times: 1) European and indigenous nature and cities at the time of encounter; 2) European and American visions at the time of the rise of modernity and of nation-building; 3) The failures of modernity and American attempts at recuperations and reinterpretations of space, ending with the postmodern representation of city, memory, and history found in Ricardo Piglia’s The Absent City.

EVALUATION:

60% final paper

40% class participation, 5 critical responses (1-2 pages max. single-spaced), oral presentation

pares nature and civilization by letting her characters have different salient features that signify either nature or civilization. This essay will describe how Bront? depicts nature and civilization by means of the pricipal families and their homes, and also compare the two phenomena to examine whether the author prefers nature or civilization.