Evolution of Civilizations as a Term Paper
- Length: 10 pages
- Sources: 6
- Subject: Economics
- Type: Term Paper
- Paper: #37397855
- Related Topic: Evolution, Global Civilization, Jared Diamond
Excerpt from Term Paper :
, lands useful to man, but according to technical and conspicuous for purposes that each civilization.When business needs and adds prestige to urban heritage, religions, however, that mark their territories of pagodas, churches, monasteries, mosques and other places of worship, this singularity is affirmed more, while the forms of urban and rural habitat are specified, they are luxuries or miserable. And civilization, always customary in everyday life acquires additional visibility monumental materializing the skills of craftsmen-artists who enrich the work of the builders.
Added to this are, of course, the wealth and prestige that comes from adding additional, oral traditions of all time, written tradition gradually spread to shops and palaces, and the ideological apparatuses of all kinds, from which they eventually win the depths of peoples. So, the graphics become, like languages, distinctive marks of the various civilizations.
Maturation profoundly affects trade flows of civilization. On the one hand, indeed, she gave birth to a new type of world system, characterized by the establishment, ports and islands in the oasis well tolerated enclaves protected by various empires, trading networks that grow as far as their interconnections as possible, with little regard for the political control of territories crossed or rubbed shoulders.
On the other hand, many seek empires, not without success, to capture market exchanges to enslave them for their own purposes, which greatly expands their capabilities fiscal, administrative and military. Thus, the old-world systems are sometimes stronger, sometimes eroded by the efforts of merchants and the piracy that often accompany them in the marine areas, river and where the caravan trade unfolds.
Besides, one should not overestimate the trade that car a little amber, silk and spices between worlds that continue virtually ignore, as are numerous and fragile sections, strangers to another of these exchange networks. The strengthening of trade occurs only over very long stretches of centuries and the commercial networks do not lengthen significantly at the cost of slow progress and cabotage fleets and offshore navigation. The plurality of global low or no joined by the fragile and thin threads of the exchange remains the rule until the 14th-15th century, despite the frequent links dealers already on the edge of India, China and few folds of the Sunda Archipelago and the Mediterranean.
Trade and empires combine to give writing a civilizing value more abundant, the "Holy Scriptures" where religions brew their myths, their rituals and arcane legal codifications to such as the Justinian Code, or the lex Rhodia With glorious libraries, from Alexandria to Baghdad and Cordoba, create a new heritage, that of literature and art, like their predecessors, Hindus and Chinese that Europe discovered later. Moreover, the monumental heritage enriched by cities less sumptuous than the palace, but a wealth of more diverse and more radiant as it crossed the peregrinations of any kind and, gradually, more and provenance more varied.
The glory of ancient Babylon is now outclassed by that of Byzantium and modern Venice, all examples to generalize to other worlds and other times. Not that we should be seduced by the ideas of Spencer which cities the main focus of all great civilizations, but simply because the consideration of urban phenomena used to weight the opinions that are too frequent religions "universal" senior officers and in any case, the essential reference points the so-called civilizations.
The Geopolitics of these religions, however, their role back to the exact extent appropriate to the macro-sociology. In all the old world systems, the primitive cults are subject gradually conquering pressure, that they come from clans specialized prophets innovative, state attention to the common discipline of their subjects or any other process.
The priests of any kind that these movements are sometimes produced in the units of the states most significant, in a prominent or subordinate, but not the powers that be are indifferent to their action.
Combinations of power and the sacred are simplified gradually according to some models validated by experience: religion imposed by the state to all his subjects (even by the triumph of a victorious church of its rivals, like Christianity) religion confused with the service of the prince or the city; religions tolerated under surveillance, as nations annexed by the traditions of a vast empire; religions imported by merchants, pilgrims (or later colonizers), but chased or tolerated within the limits of local franchises before their eventual consolidation; religions brought by military victories guaranteeing their relevance (in the way of Islam).
In all these figures, religions "universalized" or juxtaposed within the limits of an empire or in many states of the world system in place, take a great weight, when making their major anchors: in governing the ceremonies in which power and civic displays dynastic.
By monopolizing the formation of elites, or the selection to certain functions, appropriating the rites of passage for the entire population, in indoctrinating and watching it, by adding to its rites and prayers of any charitable institutions, caregivers or education in short as "directing minds," that is to say, entering the benefit of a secular habit, to the depths of the customary daily life.
Here is the civilizing aspect of religion, in that they normalize behavior, provide the power it requires respect and tend to govern conventional wisdom. All ambitions met in various ways from one religion to another 8 So that the practices and representations disseminated by each of them becoming, as well as languages?
or customs of everyday life, distinctive signs helping to specify the various civilizations, in other words, there is no of civilization Confucian, Buddhist, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, etc.. But at different times and in different areas, one or other of these qualities can manifest itself with particular vigor, among many features, historically variable, which specify such a civilization.
Conclusion
From this brief overview, probably erroneous in several respects, by the gaps in my information or my reflection, we still draw a conclusion that seems theoretically well-founded. Is that the prospect of a universal civilization feeding the daily lives of all people fairly similar customs, derived from the levels and kinds of life of Western populations and ending of the 20th century ideologies spreading among them, certainly varied, but nonetheless responsible for shared values.
All unfolding on the basis of capitalist economic institutions and in political institutions generalizing the parliamentary democracies of our time is a figment of the imagination, a projection arbitrary unscientific or even pragmatic one that is wishful thinking. Hence the practical conclusion: Civilization as a project should be subject to contradictory thoughts constantly updated to clarify the action of economic agents, state and cultural, whose business is international, and they want know it or not, the main vector of development of civilizations.
This new situation calls into question the very idea of?
"Western civilization," and this is actually made possible, ironically, by the power of this civilization and its maintenance as a reference usurped human development.
Toynbee's idea of?
a civilization replacing the other, a chain of civilization, an idea finally contradicted by the power of Western civilization which requires his continued dominance might be judged as a sham, could be replaced the idea of?
a schism within this civilization. Some might argue that this has already happened with the Reformation, but it seems that the description we make the state of our "civilization," which is undoubtedly the daughter of the schism, shows that the schism has turned imposture.
Our civilization has become today, by the force of his technique, universal civilization (hence the sounds of the "end of History" Fukuyama type and returning to the nineteenth century), the implication of this civilization can only come from within, and the heart of this civilization.
This is why we must pay attention to two facts: how the tension of the relations between America and Europe does not actually schismatic notions (of Europe compared to America) in What the rediscovery of the need to find references to transcendent even those who question our civilization does not reconcile the two poles perceived as enemies for centuries: the need for justice (tempo progressive) and the need for traditional (conservative tempo or reactionary).
The historical perspective is used to classify a civilization (rather than a country) as a unit, is of relatively recent origin. From the middle Ages, most historians have adopted a religious viewpoint or national level. The religious point-of-view prevailed until the eighteenth century among historians Europeans, who saw the revelation Christian as the most important historical event, taking as a reference for classification. The first European historians did not study other cultures rather than as curiosities or as potential areas of missionary activity.
The national point-of-view, unlike religion, is developed in the early sixteenth century from political philosophy and historian of the Italian statesman Niccolo Machiavelli, who argued that…
