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The concept of “civilization” and its labyrinths
09.08.2024
Since it is very common in Brazil for any debate to come very late in the day, there is now a debate on whether Brazil is “Western” or not. Some great Brazilians, ahead of their time, such as Gilberto Freyre, Darcy Ribeiro, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Plínio Salgado, among others, considered it obvious that Brazil was part of a “Latin American” civilisation (I have already explained in another text why I rejected this term in favour of “Ibero-American”) and no other.
But since the generations born and educated in the Sixth Republic are, unfortunately, less brilliant than previous generations, especially in their intellectual strata, here we are, trying to reinvent the wheel and rediscover the fire - and, even worse, ranting, raving and debating when some foreigner, reasonably intelligent and more knowledgeable than us in our Ibero-American literature, comes along and says: “you are not Westerners, but something else, something new and special”.
The very concept of civilization has its controversies, because the word has been used by different authors and at different times with different meanings.
According to Norbert Elias, it only serves to describe a process of “human domestication” over time through technical progress, bureaucratization and the centralization of human relations. In Morgan, Engels, Comte and others, it appears as a “phase” in the evolution of social forms, which usually follows “savagery” and “barbarism”. For all these, as for virtually all Enlightenment and modern thinkers, there is only one civilization, the “human” civilization, and human history is the history of the progress of this one civilization.
The “thinkers of suspicion” such as Nietzsche, however, fortunately buried all positivist and scientific optimism of the 19th century and inevitably and irretrievably obliterated any philosophical notion of “progress”, “humanity” and similar follies - which only managed to flourish in the post-World War II era not by philosophical merit, but by imposition.
Civilization appears in Oswald Spengler as the “mirror” of Culture, and with a pluralistic meaning. Civilizations would be the late and mechanistic phases of cultures, which would have a more organic and spontaneous character. This is how it already appeared in Richard Wagner, for instance, and how it will also appear in Thomas Mann. Here, civilizations are already localized, territorialized, as large-scale complex supra-ethnic historical-cultural systems endowed with the same worldview, the same paradigmatic foundation.
Other authors such as Nikolay Danilevsky (who predates Spengler), Arnold Toynbee, Pitirim Sorokin and other great civilization theorists will not work with such a rigid Culture/Civilization distinction (which is a typical theme of German thought), but in them this territorialized, pluralistic and synchronic notion of civilizations.
Nowhere, in any author, does the notion of equivalence between “civilization” and “hemisphere” appear. There are, of course, only two civilizations on the planet, one “western” and the other “eastern” - so speaking of a “western civilization” does not presuppose an “eastern civilization” and vice versa. I imagine, in fact, that no civilization theorist has ever considered this possibility, but it is still what drives Brazilian reflections on Brazil's place in this debate.
According to this logic, Brazilians, Americans, British, Portuguese, Tupi and Yoruba would belong to the same “western civilization” - which implies that Poles, Ethiopians, Persians and Japanese would belong to the same “eastern civilization”. Anyone can try to understand this reasoning.
Now, this pluralist, synchronic and organicist view of civilizations is almost always associated with “social cycle theories”. Civilization theorists are, almost invariably, also advocates of a cyclical view of the development of human socio-cultural structures, drawing inspiration from Giambattista Vico, Hegel and Ibn Khaldun as well as ancient perspectives on the passage of 'ages'.
For Nikolay Danilevsky, the following civilizations existed: 1) Egyptian, 2) Assyro-Phoenician-Babylonian, 3) Chinese, 4) Chaldean, 5) Indian, 6) Iranian, 7) Jewish, 8) Greek, 9) Roman, 10) Arabic, 11) Roman-Germanic (European). Danilevsky considered the Slavic cultural-historical type still in its infancy, but imbued with the mission to mature as a civilization. He would say that an “American civilization” would eventually emerge.
For Oswald Spengler, one can speak of the following cultures: 1) Egyptian, 2) Babylonian, 3) Indian, 4) Chinese, 5) Mesoamerican, 6) Greco-Roman (Apollonian), 7) Perso-Arabic-Byzantine (Magical), 8) Western (Faustian), 9) Russian. Spengler did not deny the existence of other cultures and this list is only an example for him. He, moreover, focuses on only 3, the Apollonian, the Magical and the Faustian in his analyses, but comments with interest that a new civilization, the Russian, was emerging. Spengler, in fact, had a great impact on Latin America, including Brazil in the 1930s.
Arnold Toynbee lists a much larger number: 1) Minoan, 2) Shang, 3) Indian, 4) Egyptian, 5) Sumerian, 6) Andean, 7) Mayan, 8) Hellenic, 9) Syrian, 10) Sinic, 11) Indian, 12) Hittite, 13) Babylonian, 14) Yucatecan, 15) Mexican, 16) Western, 17) Russian Orthodox, 18) Byzantine Orthodox, 19) Iranian, 20) Arabic, 21) Chinese, 22) Japanese-Korean, 23) Hindu.
There are also other enumerations and classifications, such as those of Gobineau, Leontiev, Quigley, Sorokin, Koneczny, Bagby and Coulborn, and some very famous and recent ones, such as that of Samuel Huntington, who lists: 1) Western, 2) Orthodox, 3) Islamic, 4) Buddhist, 5) Hindu, 6) African, 7) Latin American, 8) Sinic, 9) Japanese.
Huntington's disease is curiously controversial for a variety of contradictory reasons. Among some Atlanticists, it is criticized for “denying” the Pan-Americanist project, part of Atlanticist geopolitics since the Monroe Doctrine. For some Latin American Catholics, on the other hand, this theory would deny our belonging to the “Judeo-Greek-Roman civilization”, which would be the “western civilization” to which they believe they belong. The Slavic Atlanticists also criticize Huntington for wanting their countries (even Russia!) to be considered part of “western civilization”.
But from our point of view, Huntington's classification, inherited e.g. from Dugin, is extremely meritorious and can be seen as a triumph of José Enrique Rodó's “Arielism”, one of the first works to strongly and comprehensively delineate a radical and fundamental distinction between Anglo-Saxon America and Iberian/Latin America as belonging to different civilizations.
This Arielism, which operates by distinguishing the archetypal figures of Ariel and Caliban, deduced from Shakespeare's work, will contrast Latin American spiritualism with Anglo-Saxon materialism, as well as pointing out a plurality of other oppositions that make it impossible to conceive of both spheres. as belonging to the same worldview. This Arielism will influence the entire thought of José Vasconcelos, Manuel Ugarte, Haya de la Torre and the aforementioned Brazilians.
This Ibero-American “detachment” from the West, when “West” means “North America”, is a movement analogous to that which Alain de Benoist, Claudio Mutti, Giorgio Locchi or even Régis Debray seek to detach Europe and its civilizations in relation to the North American West.
In this sense, there is no break in denying our West, since the West itself is the negation of Europe. And since, of course, it would be absurd to claim to be “European” (even though we are clearly the fruit of Europe and the inheritance of its civilization) or to deny our indigenous and African roots, there is no way to deny, oppose or overcome our status as Latin Americans/Libero Americans.
Indeed, the confusion between Our America and the West (in a West that itself already confuses North America and Europe), has become a central element in an Atlanticist and neo-conservative narrative, common in the “alt-right”, which by “Western civilization” is understood to be the defense of the individualist, Thalassocratic, materialist and commercial worldview, which also includes allogenic elements with Semitic-Jewish roots.
Translation by Costantino Ceoldo
