What is a civilization
A civilization is a system consisting of people, human-created entities (like organizations, institutions, and governments), and Nature. and the relationships between them, usually in the form of formal and informal arrangements.
Civilization is an emergent property of human society. It’s based on the relationships and interactions between three areas of human influence: ourselves, our human-designed systems, and our environment. In short, humans, world, and Earth.
A complex system of ideas, beliefs, institutions, tools, laws, languages, literature, art, music, religions, scientific discoveries, and cultures.
It’s a complex system of humans, interacting with other humans, through human-designed institutions, run by humans, yet we strangely feel like we have no control over it. Our civilization is utterly dependent on humans to operate. If humans were to somehow disappear tomorrow, our civilization would grind to a halt and Earth’s natural systems would start converting it back to soil, plants and animals.
I make a point of not referring to civilizations as government. Civilizations include what we call the private sector as well as charity and non-governmental organizations. But it’s easy to conflate civilization with nations and government.
Humans have been experimenting with different civilizations from almost the very beginning. We’ve tried different economic systems, currencies, laws, governments, and institutions, trying to find combinations that work well. You’d think we’d tried just about everything by now, but it was just 250 years ago that a “government of the people, by the people, for the people” was considered a radical idea.
Our civilizations were not intended to work for everyone. The assumption has been that there is a fundamental scarcity of resources, and there would simply not be enough food, shelter, clothing, and other material goods to go around. At best, a society’s goal was to create a high quality of life for its citizens, so individual societies (feudal states, nation states, etc.) were in competition with each other.