In Star Trek they divide planets into pre and post warp. In the book the selfish gene Dawkins says that a societies discovery of evolution is a proxy for whether they are evolved.
Is there any single advance which can be cultural, religious, political, civil, technological, scientific, etc that people feel can bifurcate a society into pre or post civilization?
Agriculture? Warp drives? Machine intelligence? Democracy? Industrial revolution? The discovery of evolution?
Laws
I don’t think that the Federation considers pre-warp planets “uncivilized.” Relatively primitive, perhaps, but not uncivilized. Plenty of planets can and did have a stable, functioning civilization (or more likely several of them) without meeting arbitrary standards of technological advancement.
Anyway, I thought the warp/pre-warp distinction was largely because a pre-warp civilization couldn’t really participate in the galactic stage without FTL travel. So it was considered wrong for people from light years away to pop in and meddle in their affairs and thus their evolutionary path which may or may not lead to the discovery of warp tech. It was Star Trek’s version of “don’t play God.”
By that vein, I suppose fast transportation would be an analogue. If they’re still using feet and pack animals, they’re primitive compared to the modern standard. In fact, the Melanesian cargo cult thing during World War II seems like a textbook example of people with vastly superior tech and transportation appearing out of nowhere and being treated as gods by the locals.
Can you think of any society, past or present, that didn’t have laws? I’m assuming you don’t mean that the laws have to be written down, or that there are full time legal specialists. Even hunter-gatherer societies have traditional methods of dealing with disputes that everyone knows.
Sure, but just having the big guy in charge or shaman decide everything isn’t the same as laws. It’s about sticking to a set of rules that endure over time. They don’t have to be good laws, or fair laws, but it can’t just be the biggest guy is right all the time.
Isn’t the city the very definition of “civilization?”
I’ll go with this.
I was going to suggest that writing or a certain level of stable government might be a test, but “Rule of Law” mostly encapsulates those ideas and goes a step further.
IMHO, it is having a class of people who neither hunt, gather, nor farm, but who trade useful things and services for their needs. They tend to collect in towns which are the very meaning of civilization. So traders mark civilization.
All of those suggestions seem pretty arbitrary to me. “Discovery of evolution” is so obviously a proxy for Dawkins’ pet cause that I don’t think it’s even worthy of further discussion.
Really, we first need to answer the question of what it means to be “civilized.” In anthropological terms, a civilization is/was a society with permanent settlements. So, any nomadic society would by definition be uncivilized.
If we’re talking about social development, things get way murkier. I think we can discard democracy, because plenty of ancient societies (like China and Japan) seems to have been pretty civilized without anything approaching democratic government.
I’d argue that a certain level of stability in society would be the least arbitrary metric. A society where you can be reasonably sure that your basic needs will be met (ie, most Western nations) would be civilized, whereas someplace like Somalia where you can’t take anything for granted would be uncivilized.
Actually, there’s a major theory that agriculture was the technological revolution that made civilization as we know it (cities, culture, laws) possible.
Toilet paper.
I’m not going to pretend that I can define pre-civilisation vs. civilisation, but I can define Ick and Post-Ick. (I also really appreciate indoor plumbing.)
Abolition (of slavery)
I would say generally the traits that define civilization such as agriculture, literacy, the existence of cities, and so forth,
In the modern world I would say the general acceptance of Enlightenment/liberal values such as freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, right to life and liberty, and so forth.
Combined with the theory that people developed agriculture largely to have a steady supply of beer…
I first learned the “beer” theory from Alexei Panshin in his SF novel “Star Well.”
Beer gets my vote.
What’s that? Sorry, I couldn’t hear you over the roaring laughter from all the Greeks and Romans.
My vote: Xenophobia. Then you can call yourself civilized, and the guys on the other side of the hill uncivilized.
Less flippant answer: I’m with robert_columbia on agriculture. At least it seems to be a factor that most people agree on. Agriculture lets you build up a food surplus, which allows for towns, trade, and further down the road all the other activities that extend beyond keeping yourself and your friends and family alive.
Writing, in a complex fashion.
Pictographs are not within my intention.
Another vote for agriculture, based on the effect it has on human society. Agriculture allows you to support larger and larger settlements, eventually needing to be administrated and organised in a way we’d recognise as civilisation in order to sustain itself.
They will all be arbitrary to some extent. Many of the things that have been suggested have merit, one just has to persuade people that the proposed measure is better than others.
For example, “cities” is a nice metric for archeologists, because remains of cities are more durable than more temporary constructs, and the existence of cities implies some degree of social organization and specialization, and offers opportunities for trade and greater projects.
Also, there will always be a value judgement about what civilization is good for.
For example, I think many of us are thinking in the backs of our heads about what is needed for a species to advance onward and upward (even to develop warp drive). This reflects a bias towards progress.
Hot showers.