The Purpose of Civilization

David Cowles
Feb 4, 2025
“We have created an elaborate structure to shield us from immediate awareness of impending doom!”
It’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it: civilization! It’s more or less what separates human beings from horseshoe crabs. In fact, the emergence of ‘civilization’ may be close to a defining trait for our species.
No doubt, civilization confers reproductive and survival advantages, but it does so at a cost: environmental degradation and nearly perpetual warfare, for instance. But civilization has another, even more important function:
It is said that only homo sapiens have a clear sense of universal mortality. Many species, even plants, feel the ‘loss’ of a departed mate. A few even mourn for life (e.g. swans). But few species appear to understand what’s happening when a mate dies.
Trees will attempt to revitalize, sometimes successfully, near-by stumps and elephants follow quite elaborate rituals when caring for their dead. But only humans have Theater of the Absurd (Artaud): Jeremiah could not have been a bullfrog…nor could Ionesco. As far as we know, only humans have the concept of ‘apocalypse’, only humans study ‘eschatology’.
So we are most truly human when, like St. Jerome (or Hamlet), we stare at a long-buried skull and remember, “I too will die (memento mori), everyone I love will die, everything I cherish will disintegrate.” Not easy to live with, but civilization to the rescue! We have created an elaborate structure to shield us from immediate awareness of impending doom!
Civilization provides each of us with a dizzying array of obligations and opportunities tailor made to focus our attention in the here and now. Sometimes, that can be a good thing, e.g., in meditation. Not here!
The distraction known as civilization is so successful than even mature adults (50 – 70) go through life only dimly aware of the rapidly approaching singularity. Friends of mine in their 70s and 80s proclaim their intention to die at their desks and they are proud of it. They choose to live as though they were immortal, knowing they are not. I know, I was one of them.
Is this ‘bad faith’ on a species level? You bet it is! Is it unforgiveable? Not at all. We are not just fleeing from the prospect of personal death; we are fleeing from the certainty of cosmic annihilation.
It may be possible to face personal death with a modicum of grace if one feels that one’s life has served ‘a greater purpose’. Are there things you value above your own longevity? Beauty, Truth, Justice? A loved one? Then it may just be possible to approach personal mortality with equanimity, confident that meaning endures.
Cosmic annihilation is another kettle-of-fish entirely. Now no meaning can endure because there is nothing left to ‘mean’ or to be ‘meant’. Apocalypse does not limit cosmos; it expunges it. Meaning cannot survive because (a) nothing survives and (b) it never existed in the first place.
In their 1967 movie, Yellow Submarine, the Beatles used a ‘vacuum cleaner monster’ to illustrate this eventuality. The ‘dreaded vacuum’ sucks the very fabric of being into oblivion.
Apocalypse does not mark the ‘boundary’ of something, it represents the ‘evaporation’ of everything.
According to Victor Frankl, meaning (purpose) is a prerequisite of human sanity. With all possibility of meaning removed, one can only remain sane by shielding oneself from this realization, i.e. only by bad faith.
Civilization exerts both a centripetal and a centrifugal force on us. Begin with the seemingly benign centripetal attraction of ‘belonging’. As a baby, family is my first experience of belonging, then my neighborhood, classroom, posse, etc. Later, parish, church, town, high school, college. These identities are more or less handed to us at various junctures during the game of life. They get some of us through adolescence.
But then we are adults! We suddenly find ourselves alone in an even wider world, heading straight toward the edge of an abyss. To separate us from that inevitability we build our own Maginot Line. We dig moats and raise earthworks.
We create relationships of ‘belonging’ to isolate ourselves in enclaves of order, i.e. to overcome entropy, to suspend time. We wrap ourselves in layer upon layer of false identities. We practice being oblivious to the absurdity of a world that ends with personal death and cosmic annihilation.
As adults, we find belonging through our jobs: we identify with our companies, our unions, our work groups. Then we join country clubs and bowling leagues, PTA (or PETA) and the Neighborhood Watch. We designate a certain tavern as our local. Cheers, mate! Everybody knows your name.
But at work, from the mailroom to the C-suite, there is order: people report to me, I report to people. All the time I am looking to advance, to claw my way up the socio-economic ladder. Position in the corporate hierarchy creates a sense of belonging too. Now I belong because I am not just like everyone else: I occupy a unique (and ‘indispensable’) position in the social mobile. Unimportant as I am, I imagine I cannot be replaced. I am an anonymous cog but without that cog there is no wheel.
My unique position in the cosmic mobile defines me. And not just at work: my country club has a ladder too, a tennis ladder, and all golfers are required to maintain a ‘handicap’, a numerical expression of one person’s proficiency compared to all others.
Disjunctively, centrifugally, I occupy a defined position in various social hierarchies. So I belong to the extent that I am like others, and I belong to the extent that I am unlike others. How can anyone escape this prison?
“…When I am formulated, sprawling on a pin, when I am pinned and wriggling on the wall, then how should I begin to spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?” - Eliot
Stay tuned. Watch for Escape from Civilization, coming soon to Thoughts While Shaving.
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