The Question of Civilization

We tend to take civilization for granted. I don't mean that we don't appreciate all the benefits (while we certainly do plenty of that), I mean we automatically think that civilization is the only option. It certainly doesn't help that the lines of what is civilization and what isn't are blurred to such a degree that it's almost controversial. In any case, we automatically assume that civilization is advanced, it's progress. To revert to any former human organization is to regress to banging rocks together. Right?

Well, civilization certainly seem to have it's benefits. The surplus of food it generates through agriculture allows specialists dedicated to certain tasks like producing objects designed to make our lives easier. It's because of this that I can choose not to devote my life to foraging for food or hunting animals. I can become a musician or a politician or an architect. All thanks to civilization.

But would living a nomadic lifestyle be so horrible? You live in tight nit community where everybody pulls their own weight. You participate in group activities live picking fruit or hunting game. You spend your days outside, free of the pressures of a large, dense, interconnected society that usually demands that you behave a certain way in order to succeed. You know everybody, everybody knows you, and you share a special familial bond with everyone in your group. Of course, there are societies that sort of meander between these two opposites, like herders or traders along the silk road. But that's beside the point. The question is, which is superior?

Well, you might think civilization, because it's the predominant order of people today. It allows us to create technologies that further or advancement as sentiment beings and as a species as a whole. After all, every time an advanced, organized civilization has collided with any hunter-gatherer peoples, the technologically superior specialists, created by surplus of food from farms, almost always come out vitreous in war or conflict.

But prowess on the battlefield isn't the only measure of the success of humanity's attempt to better
itself. There's categories like overall health, including the prevalence of disease and malnutrition, as well as overall things like suicide and homicide rates. In both of these, hunter-gatherer clearly comes out on top.

So, the debate goes on. whether a complex, advanced, rigidly structural society is superior to a free, nomadic lifestyle or not is a matter of opinion. Most likely, the answer for humanity (like many other solutions involving the masses) lies somewhere in the middle.