Civilization - be all and end all?
The game Civilization is about ... Civilization. That is, it is about civilizing the material, animal and human world, and beyond to other worlds in some games. Every game you play is a long march from prehistory, through ancient, classical, medieval, modern and future times; a linear path from a nomadic and isolated way of life to a technological human hive.
But what is "civilization", and have we ever thought of it critically. Perhaps the descendents of Native American tribal peoples would be the obvious folks to cast a cold eye on the concept. As an outsider, I know they have a reputation for ecological responsibility and a historical opposition to the oppression of the colonial state which has now become the United States of America.
I stumbled across an essay called "Fascism, Genocide, and Extinction: An Indictment Against Civilization", written 8 years ago, by an author under the pen name "admin1" on the Republic of Lakotah website.
I should note that this republic really constitutes a rejected proposition and apparently not supported by the Lakotah tribal leaders but led by an activist called Russell Means who was defeated in presidency elections of the Oglala Sioux Tribe in 2006. That's meant to imply he did not have popular support, but even if so that doesn't mean his claim for sovereignty was invalid.
The language of Civ is death
The essay is pretty extreme in it's language and it's propositions, but I think the vision of Civilization described within its pages is coherent with the vision of Civilization in the game of the same name.
What if it is civilization itself—the very thing Gore and friends are saving—that is the cause of ecological catastrophe? [...] In the proper historical context, civilization is revealed to be a fascist system of control, a ten thousand-year genocide against sustainable ways of life that pushes humanity toward extinction.
[...]
Civilization, then, by this view, is the culmination of an evolution, the final stage toward which all other stages of human society were invariably progressing. Civilization is humankind’s final destination. [But] could it be that our perception of civilization as a final, grand stage of human social evolution may somehow be faulty?
In this view, farming is "totalitarian agriculture" which brutally subjugates nature, and works against us. "Something about these steps took away our autonomy. They made us dependent. Supposedly we were freed from the barbarism of self-determination toward a new Freedom of work and a world of stuff." Food surpluses from farming led to more people, which led to a greater need for farmed food, which led to more people, ... and on and on until we are forced to master microscopic bacteria in order to sustain the lives of those unhealthy civis who are dying from their unnatural urban environments, truly outside of nature in the sense of being subject to natural population pressures and balances.
It's a Garden of Eden perspective. To leave our beautifully ignorant but balanced lives we had to understand them, and so destroy them with that understanding, much as Adam and then Eve eat the Apple, influenced by the temptation of the snake. You can make your own mapping of the snake up, you get the picture 😅 🐍
Russell Means meets Sid Meier, or these Meier Means
There are certain congruencies which are interesting to me. I'll go though some of them.
Work
The work ethic at the heart of civilization, the slavery to mass production, is the very distinguishing feature absent from tribal life, where needs are efficiently met in play and joyful activity.
When you have a top down system of organization, such as we find in Civ and in our lives as state citizens, our labour can be view en mass as a variable in an equation, labour * time = production. We do these kinds of calculations from small businesses up to the populous of the entire state, thanks to the wonders of mathematical abstraction. That is, we're removed from our context as complex and individual people and seen as components contributing towards production.
This is completely at odds with "uncivilized" tribal life. The author claims that tribal peoples "required but an average of two hours a day to provide their needs and desires", a stark contrast to a work orientated life. But the Cult of Work requires people to keep working. I commented recently with @tarazkp that society (read: civilized society) is diffuse and build piecemeal, only loosely coordinated. But the structures of civilization taken as a whole comprise a system which is literally organized around work and its management.
Leaning towards conspiracy I could say that our masters intentionally aim to keep us safely occupied with work (and as @tarazkp pointed out, with time wasting games) in order to skim off the cream, a cream which allows them to live far better than the deserve to. Leaning towards generosity I could say that the system is a kind of organism of itself, something that has it's own memes (in the original sense of the word as derived from "gene") that hold it together and compel it to keep it's component parts in order, all towards the goal of growing and strengthening by the simple drive to keep living - it doesn't want to die.
Or as @freebornsociety put it to me in a scathing comment yesterday, "Do you really need gold toilets and 470 pairs of shoes?"
Barbarism and the nomads
Barbarians are an early game stage feature In Civ and your first real existential threat. It looks like they are based on the nomadic people who posed a similar and very real threat to great empires like the Roman Empire and China, which would make them a Barbar / Hun amalgamation. In both cases they eventually overthrew them (though it's always stated not before the systematic rot had set in within the empires).
For Means and his independent Lakotah tribesmen, the "civilizing" of these plays out as it does in the game Civ:
Civilization’s official policy is quite consistent. Tribal people were left with the clear choices of assimilation or death. [...] However, the Native American experience was different in the respect that, from early on, it was clear that assimilation was not an option.
And it wasn't an option for those little guys in the game on horses in perennial red coloring, the color of danger. (I don't want to trivialize Native American genocide here, just show how it is (mis)represented in games). The game gives us no way out, we must either fight them or be killed by them. Recently I tried to play a game non-violently which means either have no military units at all or if you do, keeping them away from aggressors because by the game rules they will attack if attacked. Every time the barbarians overrun your fledgeling civilization and the game ends.
Interesting in Civilization: Beyond Earth the barbarians are replaced with native alien creatures, as this game takes place on a newly colonized planet. If you do not attack them you can navigate your civilization to assimilate with them, though it is rather more like the Borg than people with different colored skin living down the street.
Fighting from without and within
Waysism, liberalism and the state (cough I mean racism)
Dan Harmon, the creator if the cosmic horror, darkly funny sci-fi cartoon Rick and Morty has a podcast called Whiting Wongs with one of his writers Jessica Gao (yes I can Google links) with the tag line "An honest conversation about race and writing between two people who think very highly of themselves." It's an extremely candid look into the minds of the liberal establishment view, touching on white guilt, white priveledge, who should be "allowed" into certain conversations, to make certain shows, to voice certain characters, and the messy and confusing world of a regulated rights system which is the progressive worldview. (it also influenced the title of this post in reference to the previous one 😉)
On the one hand it's absolutely terrible, full of the stuff above. On the other hand the extreme candour is not only endearing and funny, but very explanatory on the workings of identity politics in the US. I recommend it, if only for informational purposes.
In episode 3, I Don't Care If I'm White Or Wong, dan has an epiphany which might be useful in this discussion on Civilization:
Dan: I always wondered why would you bother take the racist side if you're white? My racist brethren, maybe all they're thinkin' is, maybe they're actually like straight up like in tune with the non-racist reality that all people are truly the same and their saying "Yea, well if the shoe was on the other foot you'd fuckin', you'd oppress me and you'd like take all the food you could get, and you'd...", and it's like, "we're being kinda cool about it considering we won." It's like simutainously the most like kinda vile thing you could say but ironically the root of my progressiveness is actually more racist because I'm first and foremost thinking like, "man, us white people - we sure are good at being Nazi's. I gotta compensate for that"
The part I'm interesting in here is the imagined "racist brethren" point of view, which to repeat it is:
"Yea, well if the shoe was on the other foot you'd fuckin', you'd oppress me and you'd like take all the food you could get, and you'd...", and it's like, "we're being kinda cool about it considering we won."
It's clear that Civilization the game plants itself firmly in the liberal progressive view of world history and revolving around the enlightenment. Dan's comment above strikes me as essential point to understanding liberal intra-nation, and often intra-race, violent competition. We can oppress you if we want but we don't, we're going to be kinda cool about it since it's better for us if you're all happy. This betrays, not the reality, but the skewed view of reality as a competition between identites. So Dan is racist, but he recognizes that he should not act out his racism because it's for the best, i.e. in his interest.
In the game we find states fighting against each other (sometimes through non-violent means, but fighting none the less) the cohesion of which is signified by their cultural and racial identity and appears in the form of game bonuses loosely based on perceived historical advantages. We also find them cooperating, even forming alliances, but always at arms length. Most importantly, we as player are basing our superiority solely on the fact that it's us, it's our team, this is what we were born as.
All of this flies by the real unracist idea that national borders and ethnic commonality do not need to result in bands of competing groups literally out to get each other in order to increase the stock of their group and consolidate their wins by oppressing the losers.
Civ is politically Western-centric (unsurprisingly), as was covered in an article I referenced before, which notes that
Of all the government types, democracy provides the most economic and scientific bonuses; for players who want to win by creating a wealthy, high-tech nation, it’s the political system of choice.
[...]
Does all this sound familiar? It should to Americans and Europeans, because it fits the modern Western view of politics so nicely. Democracies are creative and wealthy, but not suited for war. Authoritarian political systems are warlike, not prosperous, and they get their technology by stealing it from the democracies. Translate Civ into a book, and it could serve as a text in an American high school civics class.
And don't forget that this high school civics class curriculum is very much in line with the progressive liberal worldview. I think this shows us that Civilization the game is an extension of these modes of teaching, which is more or less intentional. This goes towards answering my original question, "Is Civilization a platform for the ideas of the state?"
Smash the state - rejoin your tribe
However the game is easily critiqued on the grounds of it's assumptions about the one true Civilization. In Civ the goal is to "progress" through the stages of civilization and win by being the best at it, which could be mean the strongest, smartest, most holy, fastest, etc. The basic thing is beating the other players.
I think that, like the Civ and SimCity players who chose to use the game as a way to investigate and express their resistence to the very ideas it carries, it too can be used both ways.
What I've come to see is that when taken at face value, it is a vehicle for the ideals of the state. It contains the simple narratives we all learn in state education and through our societies. But looked at questioningly it could possibly help us challenge those.
Until next time
My next task will be to see how it could be modified into an interesting critique of the systems it relies on.
Thanks for reading. 😸
I'll leave you with this anti-plan against Civilization from the so-called Republic of Lakotah:
The ideal tribal revolution, according to Daniel Quinn, would (1) not take place all at once, (2) work incrementally as people built off of each other’s ideas, (3) be led by no one, (4) not be initiated by any governmental, political, or religious body, (5) have no target end-point, (6) proceed according to no plan, and (7) reward supporters with reciprocal support (Quinn, Story). In this view, then, resistance to civilization takes on an antithetical character to the rigid, centralized and institutional forms of the fascist system. It becomes, in its character and operation, non-teleological, non-hierarchical, non-institutional, de-centralized, and organically organized. In short, it must be everything civilization is not.
Edit notes
I updated the Whiting Wongs section after rereading and finding I muddled up my points.
Image references
I disagree that Civ is Western-centric. Babylon and Korea are the best in-game civilizations for winning the scientific victory. Shoshones, Incas, Aztecs, Polynesians, etc are also very powerful in-game, with better bonuses than the Unites States, France, Venice, Netherlands, and Germany. In real life, some of these civilizations never stood a chance, yet in-game, every civilization has a chance of winning every victory condition.
I also disagree that Civ portrays a progressive view of history. I think the portrayal is very anti-progressive. The progressives tend to either hate religion or think that all religions can get along. They also believe that everyone wants peace. Clearly this doesn't happen in the Civ games. Civ portrays that casualties from war increase over time. It also shows that you can even purchase great scientists and engineers with faith, something progressive atheists hate. Civ also shows that you have to fight for your religion if you want to be militarily and technologically ahead of your enemies.
The tradition, piety, and rationalism are the strongest social policy trees. Honor can also be very dangerous. Progressives hate tradition, piety, and honor... they don't even like commerce, and depending on the individual, maybe not even rationalism or liberty. A progressive would probably go for the patronage and aesthetics trees and get wiped out by mid-game.
Civ also teaches that your worst enemy is probably your neighbor. This makes sense historically. The early wars are fought between people who settled close together for the most fertile lands. It's not racism. When you play multiple games, you realize that you don't intrinsically hate any civilization. It only matters if they are threatening your space. Therefore you always start out attacking whoever is closest to you or whoever is ahead. That's human nature.
You make some good points. I think you're saying some things that I would probably question if I was you also.
One issue I can see is that I confused the meaning of "progressive" by firstly invoking the progressivist movement, as related to the enlightenment, which was my intended meaning, with modern "progressives" by using some examples from Dan Harmon.
Progressivism is not antithetical to religious faith, in fact Western religions have gradually embraced progressivist viewpoints over the centuries, so much so that they are quite tied into modern theology. In addition, many modern democracies have a strong relationship with religion, such as the US and UK for example. While there is Church and State separation it would be ignorant to say that religion does not play a role in politics.
So the progressivist view of history, as opposed to the atheist progressives view of history, is what I meant. But the comparison is limited in some of the ways you've highlighted, that Civ allows for broader religious influence in state affairs than we currently see.
The progressivist view is also a Western view of the world, as the enlightenment was a European event, to which the global "west" owes it's lineage. Just because other middle or far Eastern nations do well or even better than Western nations in the game does not mean that the over arching view of history is not Western-centric, it in fact is. For example we have the Classical period, complete with Greek trappings, the Enlightenment, etc., all from the Western historical world view.
Regarding proximity and racism, on further reflection I think I over played that significantly, I have to agree with you, racism does not really feature in the games, unless you think stereotypes are racist, which I don't on their own. My suggestion was that race has a role to play in national identity in the game, and thus could be seen as race against race in the nation against nation struggle. But it's clear to me that you're right, it is primarily nation against nation and race is largely the clothes the characters wear and does not seem significant.
Holy shot! Where in the galaxy did you take me!?? Fook me!! Did you just merge 5 different genres? Wow. Just, Wow!
Haha, thanks, it's a bit of a mash up of sources 🙃
Zeitgeist movement. Look it up folks
Looking more into this Russel Means guy, he's very much in line with the Zeitgeist perspective. In this video on him by InfoWars he talks about a lot of the same stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if he was influences by it as he was in the film industry as a pretty successful actor.
I'm not sure if Means wrote that article or not, it's posted from the same account that everything on the site is, which went on after his death in 2012 (the article was posted in 2009), but I doubt it.