Civilization

 April 9 Word of the Day: Civilization 

“CIVIL. CIVILITY. The tendency which there is in the meaning of words to run to the surface, till they lose and leave behind all their deeper significance, is well exemplified in the words ‘civil’ and ‘civility’ – words of how deep an import once, how slight and shallow now,” writes Richard Chenevix Trench in ‘A select glossary of English words used formerly in senses different from their present’, Second edition, revised and improved, London, John W. Parker and Son, 1859. Appropriate on a day when an uncivil megalomaniac may catch the world’s attention merely by blurting online that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” on his social media platform, the civilization in question being the Iranian, often thought of as the Persian civilization; or does he mean the American civilization? He doesn’t say. Trench says, “A civil man now is one observant of slight external courtesies in the mutual intercourse between man and man; a civil man once was one who fulfilled all the duties and obligations flowing from his position as a ‘civis,’ and his relations to the other members of that ‘civitas’ to which he belonged, and ‘civility’ the condition in which those were recognized and observed.” Somewhere between these two meanings of civil falls the shadow of the megalomaniac, one who reportedly switches from a pretence of civility to a menacing uncivility in a moment, for whom civilization is a word of most slight and shallow meaning. Trench has words for this word too: “The gradual departure of all deeper significance from the word ‘civility’ has obliged the creation of another word, ‘civilization’, which only came up toward the conclusion of the last century. Johnson does not know it in his Dictionary, except as a technical legal term to express the turning of a criminal process into a civil one; and, according to Boswell, altogether disallowed it in the sense which it has now acquired.” Used in its modern sense, threats of erasure of a civilization from a megalomaniac prompt every effort of civil individuals, in both senses defined by Trench, to reject and denounce this threat, and to call out the dangerous nature of the social media star, failing as he does to fulfil duties and obligations. As this cruel political game goes, the threat and its deeper import is soon superseded by other events that relegate the original blurt to a wound on the collective mind, like all the other scars left on civil societies everywhere as they absorb the true meaning of his lonely platform fantasies.