Task for Practice seminar № 6

Ex.1 What is the difference between the terms “civilization” and “civility”?

Civilization came into prominence in the discourse of the French Revolution, where it named an enduring cultural and communal organization more fundamental than the political constitution of the state and more reasonable than the cultus of religion. “Civilization” thus began to operate in tension with “culture, ” “nation, ” “barbarity, ” and “rural primitivism.” It now owed less to “civil life” than to “civility, ” a term that spoke of an orderliness and integrity of society that enabled the conversation and commerce of various classes and orders within a community.

Civility had a more inclusive and normative character than the older courtly value of courtesy. It also had a range of application extending beyond one’s own community. Externally, “civility” stood in contrast with the disorders and social simplicity of “savagery”; it enabled conversation, diplomacy, and trade between peoples. Internally, civility spoke of the condition of a people at one moment in time. “Civilization, ” in distinction, invoked a narrative of development or progress that depended upon a stage-based theory of civil refinement. This narrative became popular in the wake of early modern explorations of the world. Contacts with illiterate, pastoral peoples who had mastered the smelting and casting of iron set Europeans pondering the characteristics of civility. The capacity of “savage peoples” to learn technology and understand European concepts, coupled with the Europeans’ wish to incorporate these peoples as laborers and suppliers in Western imperial commerce, suggested that such persons were in a more primitive state of development. For these savage peoples to attain civilization meant that they must be educated into the arts of peace and commerce.

The example of China, which Enlightenment philosophers recognized as an integral civilization, further indicated that the history of development might have more than one trajectory. Sociologist Norbert Elias described the mechanism that underlay these cultural and societal developments in the early modern West as the “civilizing process.” Elias saw this process as occurring in two cultural registers. In the nation-states of the West, a regime of masculine power centered in monarchy and a martial aristocracy, operating under an ethic of honor and valor, was transformed into a “civil society” centered in social institutions outside the royal court, where conflict was sublimated in contests of aesthetic display, gentility, and heterosocial conversation. Outside of these nation-states, particularly in places seen as lacking literacy, centralized government, social order, and law, civilization involved a process of acculturation, enabled by commerce and the exchange of knowledge, in which civil society was created and developed.

In contrast to many of the writers he surveyed, Elias was careful to speak of process, not progress. He described a development, not a scheme of evolution or perfection. Elias thus argued for the second of two models of civil improvement that have long contended: the utopian and the processive. In the former, a civil community is perfected in accord with an ideal; in the latter, civilization is a process with an implicit but unprogrammatic tendency.

As the manifestations and expressions of nationalism became increasingly extreme in the twentieth century, thinkers embraced the nonprogrammatic sense of civilization to counter the rhetoric of state selfglorification. G. R. Collingwood and other critics described the nationalist self-celebration of Germany under National Socialism and Fascist Spain as “anticivilizational.” Collingwood memorably redefined the term “barbarity, ” retiring its traditional sense of alien crudity and supplying in its stead the willful selfishness and philistinism of a modern nation-state.

At the same time, the nonprogrammatic view of civilization developed descriptive and critical uses. Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss argued in their “Note on the Notion of Civilization” (1913) that certain phenomena have long existed that are “supranational” in their operation, such as tools, languages, styles of aesthetic expression, and rituals of exchange. Their interdependence and systemic reciprocity are not located within a politically determined boundary.

In its descriptive and historical manifestations, “civilization” thus names a rough set of conditions, influenced by human action, recognized in many times and places, yet lacking an immutable essence.

Civilization not only has a material face, but a social one as well. This human, institutional character of civilization – embodied in the phrase “civil society” – during the late twentieth century increasingly eclipsed “civilization” in the lexicon of governmental agencies and international bodies.

 

Ex.2. What does it mean to be “mass” according to Ortega y Gassett?

There is one fact which, whether for good or ill, is of utmost importance in the public life of Europe at the present moment. This fact is the accession of the masses to complete social power. As the masses, by definition, neither should nor can direct their own personal existence, and still less rule society in general, this fact means that actually Europe is suffering from the greatest crisis that can afflict peoples, nations, and civilisation. Such a crisis has occurred more than once in history. Its characteristics and its consequences are well known. So also is its name. It is called the rebellion of the masses. In order to understand this formidable fact, it is important from the start to avoid giving to the words " rebellion, " " masses, " and " social power" a meaning exclusively or primarily political. Public life is not solely political, but equally, and even primarily, intellectual, moral, economic, religious; it comprises all our collective habits, including our fashions both of dress and of amusement.

Perhaps the best line of approach to this historical phenomenon

may be found by turning our attention to a visual experience, stressing one aspect of our epoch which is plain to our very eyes. This fact is quite simple to enunciate, though not so to analyse. I shall call it the fact of agglomeration, of " plenitude." Towns are full of people, houses full of tenants, hotels full of guests, trains full of travellers, cafes full of customers, parks full of promenaders, consulting-rooms of famous doctors fun of patients, theatres full of spectators, and beaches full of bathers. What previously was, in general, no problem, now begins to be an everyday one, namely, to find room.

That is all. Can there be any fact simpler, more patent more constant in actual life? Let us now pierce the plain surface of this observation and we shall be surprised to see how there wells forth an unexpected spring in which the white light of day, of our actual day, is broken up into its rich chromatic content. What is it that we see, and the sight of which causes us so much surprise? We see the multitude, as such, in possession of the places and the instruments created by civilisation. The slightest reflection will then make us surprised at our own surprise. What about it? Is this not the ideal state of things? The theatre has seats to be occupied – in other words, so that the house may be full – and now they are overflowing; people anxious to use them are left standing outside.

Though the fact be quite logical and natural, we cannot but recognise that this did not happen before and that now it does; consequently, there has been a change, an innovation, which justifies, at least for the first moment, our surprise. To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man. The gesture characteristic of his tribe consists in looking at the world with eyes wide open in wonder. Everything in the world is strange and marvelous to well-open eyes. This faculty of wonder is the delight refused to your football " fan" and, on the other hand, is the one which leads the intellectual man through life in the perpetual ecstasy of the visionary. His special attribute is the wonder of the eyes. Hence it was that the ancients gave Minerva her owl, the bird with ever-dazzled eyes.

Agglomeration, fullness, was not frequent before. Why then is it now? The components of the multitudes around us have not sprung from nothing. Approximately the same number of people existed fifteen years ago. Indeed, after the war it might seem natural that their number should be less. Nevertheless, it is here we come up against the first important point. The individuals who made up these multitudes existed, but not qua multitude. Scattered about the world in small groups, or solitary, they lived a life, to all appearances, divergent, dissociate, apart. Each individual or small group occupied a place, its own, in country, village, town, or quarter of the great city. Now, suddenly, they appear as an agglomeration, and looking in any direction our eyes meet with the multitudes. Not only in any direction, but precisely in the best places, the relatively refined creation of human culture, previously reserved to lesser groups, in a word, to minorities. The multitude has suddenly become visible, installing itself in the preferential positions in society.

Before, if it existed, it passed unnoticed, occupying the background of the social stage; now it has advanced to the footlights and is the principal character. There are no longer protagonists; there is only the chorus. The concept of the multitude is quantitative and visual. Without changing its nature, let us translate it into terms of sociology. We then meet with the notion of the " social mass." Society is always a dynamic unity of two component factors: minorities and masses. The minorities are individuals or groups of individuals which are specially qualified. The mass is the assemblage of persons not specially qualified. By masses, then, is not to be understood, solely or mainly, " the working masses." The mass is the average man. In this way what was mere quantity – the multitude – is converted into a qualitative determination: it becomes the common social quality, man as undifferentiated from other men, but as repeating in himself a generic type.

What have we gained by this conversion of quantity into quality? Simply this: by means of the latter we understand the genesis of the former. It is evident to the verge of platitude that the normal formation of a multitude implies the coincidence of desires, ideas, ways of life, in the individuals who constitute it. It will be objected that this is just what happens with every social group, however select it may strive to be. This is true; but there is an essential difference. In those groups which are characterised by not being multitude and mass, the effective coincidence of its members is based on some desire, idea, or ideal, which of itself excludes the great number. To form a minority, of whatever kind, it is necessary beforehand that each member separate himself from the multitude for special, relatively personal, reasons. Their coincidence with the others who form the minority is, then, secondary, posterior to their having each adopted an attitude of singularity, and is consequently, to a large extent, a coincidence in not coinciding.

There are cases in which this singularising character of the group

appears in the light of day: those English groups, which style themselves " nonconformists, " where we have the grouping together of those who agree only in their disagreement in regard to the limitless multitude. This coming together of the minority precisely in order to separate themselves from the majority is a necessary ingredient in the formation of every minority. Speaking of the limited public which listened to a musician of refinement, Mallarme wittily says that this public by its presence in small numbers stressed the absence of the multitude.

Strictly speaking, the mass, as a psychological fact, can be defined without waiting for individuals to appear in mass formation. In the presence of one individual we can decide whether he is " mass" or not. The mass is all that which sets no value on itself – good or ill-based on specific grounds, but which feels itself " just like everybody, " and nevertheless is not concerned about it; is, in fact, quite happy to feel itself as one with everybody else. Imagine a humble-minded man who, having tried to estimate his own worth on specific grounds – asking himself if he has any talent for this or that, if he excels in any direction – realises that he possesses no quality of excellence. Such a man will feel that he is mediocre and commonplace, ill-gifted, but will not feel himself " mass." (From a book by Jose Ortega y Gassett, The Revolt of the Masses. Madrid. 1930, P.1-3)