This morning I was listening to a lecture by Luke Kemp about the fall of civilizations and it started me thinking about the word civilized.
It’s a words that’s so familiar, and so often used, that we stop noticing what it really means. But when you break it down — civil-ized — it starts to sound like something akin to domestication rather than progress. Something done to us. As if we were once raw and natural, and someone came along and said;
“Alright, that’s enough of that. Time to behave.”
The roots of the word tell the story pretty well. It comes from the Latin civis, meaning “citizen,” and civitas, meaning “the state” or “the city.” To be civilized is, quite literally, to be made into a citizen; to be shaped, ordered, ruled. Civilization is the transformation of human beings into manageable members of a collective. It’s the shift from living in nature to living under law.
Which brings me to Thomas Hobbes.
In the seventeenth century, Hobbes imagined a world before civilization; what he called the “state of nature.” It was, in his mind, a nasty and dangerous place. Every person was left to fend for themselves, and life, he said, was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
To escape that chaos, Hobbes believed we entered into a social contract; a kind of collective agreement to give up some personal freedom in exchange for safety and order under a governing power.
In other words, we agreed to be civil-ized.
It’s not a bad deal, when you think about it. A little less freedom, a lot less danger. But it does make you wonder what we gave up along the way.
That’s where Rousseau stepped in a century later and called foul. He saw things differently. To him, humans in their natural state weren’t brutes at all, but rather good, simple, compassionate beings. It wasn’t until we became “civilized” that things went wrong. Rousseau thought the social contract didn’t save us; it corrupted us. It chained us to institutions, property, and inequality. Civilization, he said, was just a prettier word for control.
Hobbes looked at wild humanity and saw chaos. Rousseau looked at civilization and saw corruption. Both were probably right in their own ways. Civilization brought us art, medicine, philosophy; and also greed, hierarchy, and alienation. The word itself carries a soul-wrenching tension: to be civilized is to be polished, yes, but also tamed.
Maybe that’s why modern life feels so strangely hollow at times. We’ve mastered civility (laws, manners, bureaucracy, etc.) but in the process, we lost the untamed parts that made us feel alive. We traded our natural instincts for rules and routines. We became polite instead of honest. Efficient instead of free.
So, I can’t help but wonder if being “civilized” is really the compliment we think it is. Maybe it’s just another way of saying we’ve learned how to behave at scale.
And maybe, the real art of being human lies somewhere in between Hobbes’ chaos and Rousseau’s innocence: civilized enough to live together, but wild enough to still feel alive.
Join us in making the world a better place. You’ll be glad that you did.
Cheers, friends.