What can be civilized has been.
Here is the column that was submitted by Ron Smith, a weeklyBaltimore Sun columnist, to the newspaper. However, The Sun decided notto run the piece today for various reasons. Decide for yourself whetherthe decision makers at The Sun made the right decision.
Because of all the reports I’ve read and conversations I’ve had onthe radio this week about Baltimore’s notorious violence being directedthese days randomly at people going about their daily business even inthe supposedly safe “touristy” areas of the city, I reached for my copyof Anthropologist Jack Weatherford’s book, “Savages and Civilization:Who Will Survive?”
Weatherford has traveled just about everywhere in his long anddistinguished career and during his research began to perceive that themodern world was near its end. He argues that cities, the centers ofcivilization, are inherently destructive. “They consume the areasaround themselves,” he writes, “and if they cannot find new materials,they die.” Think of it this way: the discipline of archeology arosefrom what? From the study of dead cities, strewn about the landscape ofthe world. What kills them?He says the cause is the extravagant habits of consumption anddestruction that are at the heart of civilization. Everything iseventually consumed. The forests are denuded. Water, plants, stone,metal, animals, even the land itself is used up. It took thousands ofyears to consume and destroy the birthplace of civilization inMesopotamia, and then the pattern continued in the Mediterranean andEurope, with the eventual need to find vast new areas, the Americas andAustralia, in order to obtain the resources to replace that which hadbeen consumed.
That game is now over. What can be civilized has been. How, youmight wonder, does this tie into the increasing violence in our bigcities? I’ll tell you. Jack Weatherford is an expert on tribalcultures. He has written books about the epic clash between the NativeAmerican and European cultures during the 300 years of warfare betweenthe two. Civilized people have defeated the tribal peoples of theworld, who have been killed or scattered. But the tribal people whosurvived have been moving en masse into the worlds’ major urban areas.And as he notes, “Neither the classless society of communism nor theglobal village of capitalism managed to homogenize the world during thetwentieth century.” Group conflict, far from being eradicated, has beenheightened in modern times. The nation-state swallowed the remainingtribal people but could not digest them.