...Unwinding the Spool of Civilization in Ponting's The Green History of the World and Quinn's Ishmael Clive Ponting's The Green History of the World and Daniel Quinn's Ishmael both critique the dominant paradigms of modern human civilization-especially where its relationship with environment is concerned. Both feel strongly that we are in trouble. Neither are quite willing to make final connections and present us with a systematic method for getting out of our impending ecological crisis, but they both do spell out what has been wrong, what is wrong now, and what will happen should we choose not to take evasive action. In the absence of similar works "in the canon" it is hard not to feel as though, (as the character Ishmael promised), if you accept their premises you are doomed to isolation for, those who see the future most clearly are usually outcasts, lost as to what power they may have to change minds and directions. Enlightenment almost always comes at a price, often steep. In the interest of exploring the necessity of dissent, let's follow that line of environmental thought a little further. Ponting presents us with the scientific/cultural evidence that backs up what Quinn is saying: that we as a species are destroying our foundations even as we proclaim our creation-Civilization-a success. If this massive breakdown and foreboding future are certainties, then we must ask-as Quinn does-who or what is telling us lies to make us believe otherwise? His character...
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...as the religious and other daily values which ancient peoples believed in. To compare the Ancient Egyptian civilization to the civilization of Ancient Mesopotamia is surely going to be a task which will not be easy, especially since it is my personal believe that both of these grandiose civilizations cannot be compared to one another. Comparing the Ancient Mesopotamian Civilization to the Civilization of Ancient Egypt is not really possible once you think about the difference of years between the beginnings of each of these Civilizations. Mesopotamia is considered to be at the least 5000 years older than Ancient Egypt. The earliest civilized form of Human development in Mesopotamia is known to Historians to have occurred between 10500-3500 BC (Mayan Archeology), whilst Historians believe the Ancient Egyptian Civilization to have started between the years of approx. 5500- 3100 BC, which is what is considered the Pre-dynastic Period. (Experience ancient) While Ancient Egypt started to develop Mesopotamia already made big progress in forms of Farming, building the first settlements and later cities across Mesopotamia, starting cultures, different civilizations such as the Sumerian civilization, empires, and even inventing the first Ledis 2 known Human writing system. Mesopotamia is considered to be the start of all civilization, (Worldology) and once we consider all the developments and inventions which happened during the timeline...
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...Clash Of civilisation The Clash of Civilizations (COC) is a hypothesis that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. It was proposed by political scientist Samuel P. Huntington in a 1992 lecture at the American Enterprise Institute, which was then developed in a 1993 Foreign Affairs article titled "The Clash of Civilizations? in response to his former student Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. Huntington later expanded his thesis in a 1996 book. Huntington began his thinking by surveying the diverse theories about the nature of global politics in the post-Cold War period. Some theorists and writers argued that human rights, liberal democracy, and capitalist free market economy had become the only remaining ideological alternative for nations in the post-Cold War world. Specifically, Francis Fukuyama argued that the world had reached the 'end of history' in a Hegelian sense. Huntington believed that while the age of ideology had ended, the world had only reverted to a normal state of affairs characterized by cultural conflict. In his thesis, he argued that the primary axis of conflict in the future will be along cultural and religious lines. As an extension, he posits that the concept of different civilizations, as the highest rank of cultural identity, will become increasingly useful in analyzing the potential for conflict. In the 1993 Foreign Affairs article, Huntington writes: ...
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...CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS Ms. Majabeen Khaled Hossain Program Director Institute of Hazrat Mohammad ( SAW) House no: 22, Road no: 27, Block K Banani, Dhaka 1213, Bangladesh Phone: +880 2 8816478, 8860206 Fax: +880 2 8812679 E-mail: ihmsaw@gmail.com Table Of Contents SL. No 1. 2 3 4 5 Topic Introduction Defining Civilization Islamic History Why a chash of civilizations Theories negating the existence of a threat Page No 3 5 5 6 9 6 Islamic Threat : Myth or Reality 10 7. Summary 15 8. Bibliography & Works Cited 15 Page 2 of 16 FANTASY OR INEVITABLE Civilization covers a wide variety of essential elements which are required to constitute a civilization with its development, refinement and improvement. The elements are not only available but exist in abundance within most of the regions around the world. Those only need to be searched or explored and benefits drawn to the utmost in order to gradually establish a civilization by using our body and mind bestowed by the Creator as the best of all the creations on earth. It takes time to attain any level of civilization in any country or region. It is a slow process which grows with the extent of time given to it and the amount of efforts made on it. There is hardly any standard parameter by which to judge the level or the measure of civilization attained except their standings as projected at the world stage in terms of progress and development. When a civilization develops in...
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...Early Civilizations Brittney Franzen There are many different reasons or forces that contributed to the make-up of cultural early civilizations. The first force would be the forces of nature and it is natural environment. The factors of this would be climates and seasonal changes. This is important force factor for early civilization because this force affected the people of the early civilization for clothing and food such as game and wild plants. These people were nomadic which means that they would follow the herds of game for their survival. The geographical features also were a major part of the early civilizations because they need to be able to protect themselves from others that may challenge them and their civilization. For example the people of Ancient Greece were in different city states and would challenge each other for territories for farming and other needed resources from the land. The mountains and seas were a major physical land features that would protect them from one and other. But this also in turn created different cultures and civilizations throughout Ancient Greece. So there were many different views that varied from group to group. An example of this would be social societies, religious views, structures, and civilizations altogether are different. The social society would be the government or rulers, merchants, slaves, and priests. The different social classes such as higher classes being the dictator, priests, or other people of the...
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...THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS AND RADICALISM Dr. M. LAL GOEL Also known as Dr. Madan Lal Goel University of West Florida lgoel@uwf.edu Abstract. The notion of a clash of civilizations has gained notoriety since the terrorist attack on WTC on 9/11/2001. Professor Samuel P. Huntington has popularized the view that the coming global conflict will be among major civilizations, not among different political ideologies. He identifies eight major civilizations: the Western (Europe and North America), Slavic (Russia and Eastern Europe), Islamic, Confucian, Hindu, Japanese, Latin American, and the African. Of particular focus in the present paper is the threat to civilization from radical Islam. Three factors that foment radicalism are described: the Islamic theology of exclusiveness, the nostalgic memory of a Muslim empire that lasted nearly 1,000 years, and the consequences of oil boom in the Middle East. Population estimates for different civilizations are provided at the end. Introduction The theory of a clash of civilizations has been with us for some time. British historian Arnold Toynbee used the term in a series of lectures he delivered in 1953. The Middle East specialist Bernard Lewis wrote in 1990 that the Muslim rage against the West is “no less than a clash of civilizations” (Lewis, 1990, p 60). Samuel P. Huntington, a Harvard University political science professor, has given new currency to the notion of a clash of civilizations. His 1993 article in Foreign...
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...The Development of Civilization Prepared for Mr. Bsharah By Chris Treadwell History B1 Spring 2013 Civilization is defined as; an advanced state of cultural and material development in human society, marked by political and social complexity and progress in the arts and sciences. This wasn’t achieved easily, nor was it an ever-progressing movement. More so it was the product of several trial and error advancements in various fields of human endeavor. The starting point for all this advancement is known as the Neolithic Revolution, also referred to as the agricultural revolution. This was the shift from a nomadic hunter-gatherer culture to a more settled agricultural lifestyle. The domestication of plants and animals was a major turning point in mankind’s evolution, but it took more than a millennia to transform from nomads to agrarians. Archeological data indicates that several different forms of plant and animal domestication evolved in separate locations worldwide. “The earliest Neolithic societies appeared in the Middle East about 8000 B.C.E., in China about 4000 B.C.E., and in India about 3600 B.C.E.” The first farming was largely grain based in fertile river-valleys with adequate climate and natural resources to sustain farming. Over time man began developing the where-with-all to change his surrounding environment to suit his needs even further. Certain crops were grown in areas according to availability geographically and ease of production rather than chosen...
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...Amanda Pritchett Dr. Kenneth Currie ISS- 1200 3 September 2012 Clash of Civilizations “The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in utilizing organized violence. Westerners often dismiss this fact, non-Westerners never do.” Samuel P. Huntington, Eaton professor of the science of government and director of the John M. Olin Institute for strategic studies at Harvard, wrote a thought-provoking article; “The Clash of Civilizations” was published by Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993. (Foreign Affairs). Huntington’s article given in nine topics, gives the reader a big-picture look at the world which nerved to imagine that a bi-polar rivalry between communism and capitalism was about to be reinstated by a multi-polar world of contradicting civilizations. He argues that the short-term warfare between ideologies is being replaced by the ancient warfare between civilizations. People’s cultural and religious identities will result in future conflicts. Huntington cautions that all this proposes that there will be cultural clangorings in the future. He says the troubling ones "are likely to arise from the interplay of Western arrogance, Islamic intolerance, and assertiveness." This is indeed a debated statement. Such clangoring’s are by no means an evident necessity, after all. Neither is it at all apparent that in the lack of such exterior issues, Western society would not have very uncompromising internal complications...
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...Civilization – A Definition What do ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform writing tablets, Egyptian pyramids of Giza, inscribed oracle bones from ancient Chinese divine rituals, and automobiles have in common? Each of these objects represents a bi-product of an ancient or modern civilization. However, many anthropologists, historians, theorists and sociologists alike disagree with regard to how the term civilization should be defined. According to sociologist Robert Park, “Civilization […] is the result of man’s effort to use the resources of his environment in order to change nature and, where possible, make it less raw, more comfortable and less difficult to endure” (Park, 132). He reasons that civilization should be measured by man’s degree of conquest over nature (133). Historian and author Felipe Fernández-Armesto describes civilization as both a “process of collective self-differentiation from a world characterized […] as barbaric or savage or primitive” and a stage reached when a particular society reaches its “climax” (Fernández-Armesto, 13). While peace activist Scott Nearing believed civilization to be the “most comprehensive, extensive and inclusive life pattern achieved by terrestrial humanity,” the philosopher and revolutionary Karl Marx believed that the beginning of civilization symbolized the beginning of oppression (Nearing, 54). In the simplest sense, the Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb “to civilize” as “to bring out of a state of barbarism, to instruct...
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...The End of History and the Last Man, in which he argued that the progression of human history as a struggle between ideologies is largely at an end, with the world settling on liberal democracy after the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Fukuyama predicted the eventual global triumph of political and economic liberalism. "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such... That is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." According to Fukuyama, since the French Revolution, democracy has repeatedly proven to be a fundamentally better system (ethically, politically, economically) than any of the alternatives. The most basic (and prevalent) error in discussing Fukuyama's work is to confuse 'history' with 'events'. Fukuyama does not claim at any point that events will stop happening in the future. What he is claiming is that all that will happen in the future (even if totalitarianism returns) is that democracy will become more and more prevalent in the long term, although it may have 'temporary' setbacks (which may, of course, last for centuries). He believes that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States HUNGTINGTON’S FUTURE The Clash of Civilizations In 1993...
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...A breakout of a disease in a civilization can not only shift the fabric of a standing civilization, but an outbreak can also change or shape the history of that civilization and subsequently, the world. Usually it’s said that a civilization is impacted economically, socially, or politically. However, a key concept that is overlooked when discussing the impact a disease outbreak is the concept of mortality. The first thought in the human psyche when it relates to a disease outbreak is usually “Will I die from this disease?” It’s not surprising that the next few trains of thought are probably “How can me and my family (or civilization) survive this breakout”. Sometimes the very breakout purpose is question along the lines of “Why is this breakout...
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...Zeph Geyer Ancient World History Rough Draft 11/8/2014 In most civilizations in the ancient world, there were vast differences between the lives of men and women. For example, women could not serve in the Roman Senate, own property in ancient Greece, or ask for divorce. All of these rules existed while men had the ability to do all of these things. The life of a woman in the ancient world was in no way equal to men in most societies. The Egyptians believed that joy and happiness were of the utmost importance in life, and regarded the home and family as a major source of happiness. This meant that the Egyptian’s thought better of women who did not work, and took care of the home and family. All other ancient civilizations had one thing in common. Mesopotamia, Rome, Greece, and Israel were all surrounded by other sets of people. This meant that these other civilizations had to be warlike societies, and this meant women would have less of a role because men believed women could not fight as well in battle. Egypt developed under unique circumstances. The Red Sea and the Mediterranean Sea separated the Egyptians from everyone else in the ancient world. In other words, the Egyptians did not have a warlike society because training like that was unnecessary. Since there was no need for a warlike society in Egypt, women had a more established role in society. Women’s rights in Egypt were more equal to men than other civilizations because of the unique circumstances under which...
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...----------------------------------------------------------- It is often said that with great leaders, great civilizations are built; and with great civilizations, great history is written. It is only with the corruption of leadership and authority that civilizations witness downfall and failure. Throughout Ancient History, the world witnessed three ‘’Greats’’ from three different major civilizations; Alexander the Great, Cyrus the Great, and Cleopatra. Although Cleopatra did not have the title of ‘’The Great,’’ she left a great stamp in the history of the Pharos and Egypt. Cleopatra ruled Egypt from 323 BC to 30 BC. On the other hand, Alexander the Great ruled the other side of world as he led the Greek civilization from 336 BC to 323 BC. Cyrus the Great however, was a Persian ruler who ruled over modern Iran from 559 BC to 530 BC. Although these rulers ruled during different times, in different places, some similarities and differences in their behaviours were observed. Firstly, their tactics to expand their empires had evident differences. In addition, their attitude towards whom they ruled could also be compared through the rules and regulations they put forth during their reigns. Nonetheless, they left architectural treasures that researchers have studies and puzzled upon for years after their rule ended. Those rulers also lived interesting personal lives that may have affected some of the decisions that changed the history they left behind. The battle and leadership tactics, attitude towards people, architectural...
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...As we are studied How the West Won by Rodney Stark we have looked at history and how it has led to the world that we know today. Stark has discussed how western civilization has made the biggest and the greatest impact on the modern world. In this last section of the book called “Modernity” Stark discusses the most recent history and current times in western civilization. Through this book we have seen the modern times coming through the innovations and developments of earlier western culture, but not we see the culmination of all the history and culture. Chapter sixteen discusses one of the most talked about topics in most modern history classes, The Industrial Revolution. In most typical history classes the industrial revolution is a really big deal because the history of innovation and invention is not discussed. This makes the industrial revolution more dramatic and exciting. Stark argues that there were many great innovations and significant progress during the industrial revolution which improved quality of life, but it is...
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...The Clash of Civilizations? by Samuel P. Huntington (SAMUEL P. HUNTINGTON is the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and Director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. This article is the product of the Olin Institute's project on "The Changing Security Environment and American National Interests”. THE NEXT PATTERN OF CONFLICT WORLD POLITICS IS entering a new phase, and intellectuals have not hesitated to proliferate visions of what it will be -- the end of history, the return of traditional rivalries between nation states, and the decline of the nation state from the conflicting pulls of tribalism and globalism, among others. Each of these visions catches aspects of the emerging reality. Yet they all miss a crucial, indeed a central, aspect of what global politics is likely to be in the coming years. It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will be the battle lines of the future. Conflict between civilizations will be the latest phase of the evolution of conflict in the modern world. For a century and a half after the emergence of the...
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