Reflections on Elovitz’ Article

In 1566, Jean Bodin’s “Method for the Easy Knowledge of History” praised the achievements of his own time in comparison with those of Antiquity. Thus he perpetrated a small intellectual revolution that ended the longing of his predecessors toward the renaissance of the glorious past. For the next three centuries most European historians and philosophers promoted the idea of linear historical time from primitive barbarism to the enlightened present and the more perfect future.

The idea of a civilization as being at an appointed stage of social development was used by Nicolas Antoine Boulanger (1722-1759) and Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) in the late 18^th century. In fact, they emphasized the success of different innovations and showed severance between the primordial primitiveness and the recent progress. Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was probably the first one presenting his serious doubt about the linear progressive social development in his comparison of life in Medieval Europe and early industrial Europe. However, he was not heard by the other intellectuals who preferred to compile their new doctrines to ap-

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propriate the progress.

The people of Western Europe delighted in what they saw as its superior civilized status until the two world wars of the 20^th century wrought great disappointment. They saw mass murders, humiliations, dictatorships, ghettos, death camps, the collapse of the “invincible empires,” usage of nuclear weapons, and more, and they had to reexamine their beliefs in the steady progress doctrine. Oswald Spengler (1880-1936) and Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) revived the idea of the cyclic historical time and proposed new periods of germinations and declines. The situation became even more tangled when the Cold War brought the ideas of progressive linear social development into question, while the world was split between two opposing groups.

Of course, some historians had to recognize their delusions about linear progressive historical time and soon began to talk about historical times of different durations, historical ruptures, and axial ages. The Annales School of historians reexamined civilizations as spectra of different social cultures. Their comprehensions of historical times and civilizations of the past are probably unnecessary since Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Some social scholars have again presented the unified progressive way of modernity led by the Western technologies and cultural appraisals. The idealistic view of the process of globalization is directed to imagining the entire world as a reflection of the West and to ignoring plural interpretations of the processes. Paul H. Elovitz exemplifies this view with his words, “Western civilization which has come to dominate the entire world through its technology, institutions, and values, even while it has lost economic and political supremacy.”

Are we more civilized than our ancestors? If we look in reference to our technological improvements, availability of food and medicine, or our ideas of justice and formal legality, the postmodernist humanity looks absolutely successful as compared to the humanities of the past. Despite this, we know that their primitive technologies, inhumane habits, and underdeveloped laws were quite effective to survive, accumulate new experience, and slowly perfect their societies. However, I would pay attention to the fact that we still have no clear evidence that contemporary violence is much less

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than in the past. Terrifying scenes of human sacrifices and bloody infantry battles are rationalized, as are many forms of homicide and discrimination. We have limited everyday violence, but its outward invisibility does not mean its absence. Can honest historians guarantee that our impression of rape as “a horrendous crime” corroborates a real reduction of rapes in comparison with the Middle Ages?

We have no evidence that the spreading of new technologies assists with overcoming great differences in standards of living between the West and the rest of the world. It seems that those differences are only increased. Regimes, weak or simply disliked by Western politicians, are often collapsed with external influence, including military invasions, but local societies do not receive stability in return. Thus they become even more depressed and aggressive, while people of the West are sincerely convinced that their efforts are helpful. We know success stories about societies that adopted Western laws and technologies and already have considerable profits. However, failure is still usually the case.

To some extent, a belief in linear progressive development is convenient for our linear mind and our wish to plan tomorrow. Thus such discussions about the benefits of “being civilized” or modern, “better off, more civilized” humanity, are only our psychological defense against our fears of uncertainty. Lost in linear historical time, we are like children hiding our faces under a blanket so as not to see real challenges.

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