There is a lot of fuzziness about the concept of civilization, and this is why the paper starts from an attempt to clarify this concept. This consists in selecting one entity which is commonly acknowledged as a system of civilization, examining its main features, and then exemplifying how to define them operationally. These features are treated as if they were answers to certain questions. Now other systems can be addressed with the same questions; if a system is able to answer them, in this way…
Read moreThere is a lot of fuzziness about the concept of civilization, and this is why the paper starts from an attempt to clarify this concept. This consists in selecting one entity which is commonly acknowledged as a system of civilization, examining its main features, and then exemplifying how to define them operationally. These features are treated as if they were answers to certain questions. Now other systems can be addressed with the same questions; if a system is able to answer them, in this way or other, it proves to be a civilizational system. The answers expected are those to express attitudes toward science, democracy, free market, tolerance, etc. Islam, e.g. does not prove to be a unique civilizational system, since there are represented in it much varying attitudes in each point in question. On the other hand, the communist paradigm does so, since it offers an answer of its own in each of the listed issues. Its answers directly oppose those offered by liberal civilization, thus there are at least two paradigms of civilization, the liberal and the anti-liberal. In the second part, it is argued that though the West is the cradle of liberal civilization, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the trait of being Western and that of being liberal. Also the main totalitarian projects of civilization were bom in the West, while same seeds of liberal civilization (Christianity, science as stemming from mathematics, etc.) came from the East. Nowadays, significant contributions to liberal civilization are due to people from any race, culture and continent. The destiny of liberal civilization is to become universal, while the Western contribution to it, when seen in a great evolutionary perspective, is just a historical episode.