308. Where's the Payoff, English Teacher?

"No student is going to keep making a troublesome new distinction unless he sees a payoff.  So where's the payoff on your distinction between the senses of 'civilized' (Post 306)?"

I think there's a payoff right away, in the review immediately following the one that raised the need for a distinction (on Harper Lee's Go Set a Watchman, in The New York Times Book Review, 8-2-15).  In it Ian Buruma says, of our destruction of Nagasaki,  "it's hard to refute [the argument that] that killing a massive number of civilians with a radiating bomb is an act of barbarism."  There we are,  "barbaric" in only one sense of "uncivilized."  (The two senses of "civilized" were "highly developed" and "humane.")

 The sense in which Buruma takes it makes the Greeks and the Romans and all the "advanced" people of the ancient world barbarians.  After becoming aware of the two meanings I don't want to do that so I say, "Wait a minute, Mr. Buruma,  I'm not going along with your 'hard to refute.'"  The payoff is in what you avoid, going along with something you can't agree with when you think about it.

"But all your thought does for you is change 'barbarism' to 'cruelty,' the accurate word you'd have to accept.  A pretty small payoff, I'd say."

I don't think it's small.  With 'cruelty' you become an adult, able to assess how much inhumane behavior is necessary to build and maintain your civilization and how much isn't.  A necessary moral calculation.

"And how do you distinguish necessary cruelty from unnecessary cruelty?"

Not easily, but it can be managed. Looking back we can say that the inhumane killing of the Cimbri at Vercellae was probably necessary to build and preserve the Roman civilization we know and have benefited from.  Whereas the killing of the inhabitants of Mycalessus was not at all necessary to preserve Athenian civilization. 

"I see the difference, but for those who withhold 'civilized' from the inhumane the Romans and the Athenians are both disqualified.  They each were committing 'acts of barbarism' — though I've learned that there were extenuating circumstances at Mycalessus."

You've made my point, letting me make the larger one (this is English-teacher salesmanship now): close attention to words pays off.  Take this word in just one sense and you're standing there accepting the benefits of civilization while calling the givers of those benefits 'barbarians,' indistinguishable from those who would take them away.  You look like — forgive me — a dope.

"Whereas those who see both senses look like what?  Geniuses?"

No, simply adults experiencing the embarrassment they have just privileged themselves to.  "Me, the beneficiary of inhumanity?  Just as I thought I had purged myself of it, civilized myself."

"You don't have to explain the embarrassment to me.  I'm a Christian.  I'm always purging myself, or supposed to be purging myself, of inhumanity."

But you're not always able to do it under the name of civilization.  And before the Age of Enlightenment, the age of the Man of Feeling, you didn't need to.  You could be "civilized" in the classical sense, which carried no "humanity" clause.  The Eighteenth Century, with its expansion of sensibility — and, don't forget, of wealth, which allowed such luxuries — gave us the clause, giving us a new compliment and a new source of embarrassment.

"And gave Christianity it's great chance for a breakthrough.  I have to exult.  All those years hemmed in by the need for survival, victory in worldly competition, with the testosterone necessary to achieve it, finally ended by enough affluence to afford a few Christian feelings.  Oh blessed Enlightenment!"

But not blessed if you let it replace the first meaning of "civilized."  Do that and you forget the givers of this great expansion of humane feeling, the ones who toiled and fought, inhumanely, simply for development — without which you'll have a hard time accounting for the expansion in sensibility.  Forget the givers and you look like an ungrateful child.

"Ah, the Man of Feeling unaware that he stands on the backs of thousands of unfeeling men.  A dope."

No, "child" is the right word.  You've regressed into one-meaning simplicity.  Cut off your education in historical (and moral) complexity.

"It's so hard not to do that.  Life must have been a lot easier before we had these two senses."

Before Christianity came along, you want to say.  I do too.   But I'm not so sure.  I picture pagans happy in their inhumane development of a society, an empire, and then I read Virgil.

"You mean the great celebrator of Rome's bloody victories?"

Yes.  When he looks back on them in the Fourth Eclogue (42 BC) he apparently feels some guilt, what the coming Golden Age will "remove the last traces" of.  He's feeling what "civilized" in sense two would make him feel.  Where did that feeling come from?  It's one sense muscling in on the other, before chronology allows it.

"Ah, but human nature would allow it.  If it's down in there, waiting its time, whatever the religion."

Well, we'll certainly have to allow for the possibility.