It was for these reasons that Gandhi believed that western civilization was based on a foundation of sand and would not endure like eastern civilization. It was due to his concern for a spiritual content in civilization that Gandhi consistently put forward his ideas on swadeshi, untouchability, bread labour and. Mahatma Gandhi. In this paper, I will summarize Huntington ideology. In Samuel P.
Huntington elaborately opens up this question with research and examples to explain and persuade readers that the West will never be a universal culture for all, but rather a unique culture that will be accepted by those who appreciate it. For decades now, historians and scholars have debated with one another to determine who. In , Samuel P. In The Clash of Civilizations Huntington argued that the future conflict would be different. The West Versus Reality Since the beginning of history, the rise and descent of civilizations has molded history influencing what nations have become today.
For example, topics such as the birth of a child and sex are still taboo in some eastern countries. People in the west are also more open about their feelings.
If they are angry, they might express. But people in the east might cover it for the sake of diplomacy and politeness. Westerns may also display their feelings and emotions in public. Moreover, the individual is given preference over family, so a person has more freedom and power to take decisions on his own, unlike those in the east. Therefore, concepts like arranged marriages are not common in the west; they marry for love.
Eastern Culture: Arranged marriages are common. Western Culture: Love marriages are common. Eastern Culture: People are conservative and traditional. To have an up-to-date taxonomy of different types of human communities, I would use Service's first three categories, replace "bureaucratic state" with "agrarian civilization," and then add "industrial society" and "modern global society," for a total of six, as follows:.
Band, Tribes, Chiefdoms, then …. Agrarian civilizations : large over , , complex societies ruled by kings, with social stratification and coerced tribute, cities fed by surrounding farmers. Industrial nations: highly complex societies with large-scale governmental presence in lives of citizens. Modern global society: world-wide human society interconnected by rapid communications airlines, Internet, e-mail. Any such evolutionary scheme must, of course, be used cautiously, for it can easily be seen as suggesting progress if present-day bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and agrarian civilizations are seen as fossils of earlier forms.
We must remind ourselves to think of these as examples of human social diversity, rather than as failed industrial nations or worthless parts of global society. How can we ever arrive at a value-free description of the characteristics of civilization? One approach is to distinguish between directionality and progress. Directionality is change over time, the forward movement of history, without judging the value of that change.
For human history, and for cosmological history, this change has not consisted of random fluctuations but of incremental and cumulative processes. Progress, on the other hand, is directionality toward improvement, or movement in a desirable direction, an idea currently not in favor because of the current impossibility of reaching global consensus on issues of value. Another approach to value-free historical descriptions is to think through the process by which some human groups moved from agricultural villages and towns into cities and states; by clarifying this process we can arrive at a more nearly neutral checklist that reflects the complexity of our thinking.
The startling fact revealed by big history about states and civilization is that they emerged independently in many places—at least seven—around the world at about the same time, when viewed on a large time scale.
Egypt and Nubia constituted states by bce, the Indus Valley and China, probably in two places, by about bce, with Mesoamerica and Peru having simple states by about bce. Smaller centers of independent agriculture likely emerged in numerous other places, like the Amazon, Southeastern Asia, Ethiopia, and eastern North America.
How did these cities evolve out of villages and towns? Why did this happen at about the same time everywhere, give or take a few thousand years? How did elite rulers acquire enough power to coerce the masses of people? Why did people allow this to happen? These are questions that can help us understand what civilization is.
Cities cannot survive without a surplus of food being available, since there is not space within a city for everyone to grow their own food. Over time surplus food became available as the climate changed and as people accumulated their learning and techniques. The last Ice Age peaked at about 20, BP before the present, with the present defined as ce. After that, the climate warmed rapidly to about bce and since then has warmed very slowly, until the recent rapid warming began, at least partially induced by humans.
As the climate warmed after the last ice age, agriculture became possible and necessary, as human density increased and large mammals disappeared. At the same time, human ingenuity produced cumulative strategies for survival.
As people and animals domesticated each other, humans learned not to eat their animals at once but to use their products—milk for food, wool for clothes, waste for fertilizer, and muscle power for pulling plows and carts.
Plows, irrigation, pottery for storage, and metallurgy helped make surplus food possible. Recent evidence has shown that as the climate warmed, it also dried in many areas, forcing people to migrate to sources of water. This may be the main reason that most early civilizations developed in river valleys. Of course, they also turned out to be phenomenally fertile from the silt deposited during floods, and irrigation schemes by humans magnified the fertility, first as small projects and later, under state organization, as monumental projects.
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