Question

How do we infer that there is

Answer 1

Answer:

Not too far removed from Collingwood’s concern with the elimination of physical and moral force via social civilization are accounts of civilized society concerned with the management of violence, if only by removing it from the public sphere. Such a concern is extended in Zygmunt Bauman’s account of civilization to the more general issue of producing readily governable subjects. The “concept of civilization,” he argues, “entered learned discourse in the West as the name of a conscious proselytising crusade waged by men of knowledge and aimed at extirpating the vestiges of wild cultures” (1987, 93).

This proselytizing crusade in the name of civilization is worth considering further. Its rationale is not too difficult to determine when one considers Starobinski’s (1993, 31) assertion: “Taken as a value, civilization constitutes a political and moral norm. It is the criterion against which barbarity, or non-civilization, is judged and condemned.” A similar sort of argument is made by Pagden (1988, 33), who states that civilization “describes a state, social, political, cultural, aesthetic—even moral and physical—which is held to be the optimum condition for all mankind, and this involves the implicit claim that only the civilized can know what it is to be civilized.” It is out of this implicit claim and the judgments passed in its name that the notion of the “burden of civilization” was born. And this, many have argued, is one of the less desirable aspects and outcomes of the idea of civilization