The Social Contract: What is the purpose of Civilization

I actually love this question...Deep. I’m being serious.

Why do we? Or why should we?

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-operation_(evolution)

Basically gives a better chance to survive.

 

I would agree with this. It also gives more people a chance at a better quality of life. The cooperation needed for technical advances and the widespread benefit of those advances wouldn't be possible without societal bonds and communication.

 

To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.

 

to argue on the internet

 

Specialization and division of labor, bro. It is the way.

 

Why is there organized basketball and not just streetball 1 vs 1?

People entertain each other while working together.

 

Civilizations aren't created out of a distinct purpose but rather they are the inevitable outcome due to human nature. We are social intelligent animals.

Other social intelligent animals also one can say have created civilisations.
Great apes, elephants, dolphins and orcas who are able to create close knit groups with distinct "language",behaviour and are able to pass knowledge to their younger generations.

As to your question why are humans social, then the answer is that this is our fixed nature.

There are other views from philosophical schools most famously from Rousseau but I don't agree with that. Socialibilllty isn't an accident.

Imo if you abducted babies and left them in a new planet they would still have formed societies.

 

Because god made it that way. Now shut up and quit asking dumb questions.

 

Good post but I think you might be talking about culture rather than civilization. Great apes and many other species have culture in that they appear to pass down knowledge to their young, exist in cooperative groups, and even at least the rudiments of language. That isn't the same as civilization which would be considered a much larger and more technically advanced than the tribe or even the village level.

Looking at human history civilization didn't happen until the development of large scale agriculture that required both cooperation and organization but also things like records and specialized knowledge between many people. Thus civilization sprang up along rivers from cultures that depended on staple crops like rice and wheat highly dependent on cycles of weather and flooding. Civilizations there undertook not just the building of cities but also large scale irrigation and flood control projects. Things like that would've been impossible to take at the tribal level.

To the philosophical question of why civilization exist I think everyone should review Hobbes and Locke. The question of whether civilization and by extension the state, exist as a means of keeping peace and restraining our worst inclinations or as a way of fostering commerce and distributing resources are questions that are still relevant and underpin many of our current political debates.

 

We are building it up to burn it back down.

 

Deep! Do I need to smoke a joint before answering? hmmmm

Humans are pack animals...we live in groups. Always have. Likely always will. Started that way for survival, but continues as the social construct. There are rare exceptions...we have names for them. Loners. In extreme cases, hermits. In today's world, can one live by themself out in the wild? Certainly. Do 'people' want to do that? No. They want to live together, in a commune. It's in our nature.

It's the same phenomenon that groups people together within a 'society' too. People of different races grouped together (this is slowly changing, but still present). People of different social strata group together. Anyone on this board knows that people of different political outlooks also do so.

It's what humans do.

Therefore, I don't think its a 'why' question. It's more 'how'? How do we build societies more effectively. How do we function better within one. How do we become more inclusive (or is that actually better?)?

 

You should read this wikipedia entry if you aren't familiar with these concepts. While not an exact answer, the principles discussed can apply to society as a whole and why we partake and what we give and get in return, or expect at least:

https://www.wikizeroo.org/index.php?q=aHR0cHM6Ly9lbi53aWtpcGVkaWEub3JnL3dpa2kvU29jaWFsX2NvbnRyYWN0

In moral and political philosophy, the social contract is a theory or model that originated during the Age of Enlightenment and usually concerns the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual.[1] Social contract arguments typically posit that individuals have consented, either explicitly or tacitly, to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to the authority (of the ruler, or to the decision of a majority) in exchange for protection of their remaining rights or maintenance of the social order.[2][3] The relation between natural and legal rights is often a topic of social contract theory. The term takes its name from The Social Contract (French: Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique), a 1762 book by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that discussed this concept. Although the antecedents of social contract theory are found in antiquity, in Greek and Stoic philosophy and Roman and Canon Law, the heyday of the social contract was the mid-17th to early 19th centuries, when it emerged as the leading doctrine of political legitimacy.Rawls.[5]

 

I don't know what is the official definition of civilization by scientists and stuff but if it is as you are saying then I have many objections.

In my opinion based on historical paradigms I object to the need of agriculture, the building of cities and writing.

The Kurgans tamed the horse, had a language that is now spoken by 2/3 of the global population and brought patriarchy and their religion who influenced the ancient pantheons for 5k years, to Europe. We still used the means of transportation they invented: the chariot, for war , commerce and trade up until recently.
But because they were nomadic hunter gatherers tribes without any agriculture, without any cities and writing language they weren't a civlization?

 

Yes I'm using a definition that is used in anthropology. I agree with you tribal cultures have very high degrees of knowledge and culture. As someone who is part Mongolian I've always taken pride in how effective the Mongolians were in defeating their "civilized" neighbors. I still think though definitions are important and in this sense if just for classification "civilization" should be applied to cultures that are more organized beyond the tribal level and are capable of things like building cities and irrigation projects. That isn't a slight on tribal cultures but just an acknowledgement that they are different.

For example Mongols could be said to be more advanced than Incas in that Mongols had iron tools, wheels, horses and pulleys but I would still say that the Incas had a civilization whereas Mongols didn't except to the extent they adopted Chinese and Persian civilization. This isn't to say that Incas were superior to Mongols but that their cultures had advanced in different ways. One developed a very sophisticated nomadic culture, the other built cities and very high social organization.

 

Simple: Survival

 

Maybe one way to look at this from an anthropologist view...

Our memory is limited. We can remember maybe a dozen or so of people. Contract or 'you owe me this, I owe you that' can be handled in small pack and group. When it's large, someone has to do that administrative work of recording these contracts. It started with someone writing things down literally on some bamboo (or whatever they used in those old old days) and eventually, it evolved into expensive-looking metal (coins) used by some powerful head (king) which eventually evolved into money. It's about the all mighty powerful $, Yen, Euro, Gold, ... to hold each other to some "you owe me, i owe you" "contract".

 

But this classification is biased and subjective and done by humans who are already part of a non nomadic agricultural urban lifestyle and reeks of exceptionalism.
It downgrades the nomadic lifestyle as inferior just because it is currently in the minority.
As long as you create a wooden hut village and grow rice you are civilized but if you have chariots with not ever seen before horses and wheels, and can dominate conquer and pass your genes and your culture to most of europe and central asia you aren't?

Again I don't know and I'm completely uneducated on the subject however it is interesting to find out when such a classification and definition was created. If it is around the 1800s it would be along with many other highly controversial exceptionalistic sociohistorical definitions.

In my opinion civilization isn't black and white but should be viewed as a spectrum. It isn't a threshold you pass and one day you are civilized and the day before you were a barbarian savage.

Furthermore in the dawn of civilization as is apparently officially defined with the writing system , you have highly sophisticated and extensive epic poems like the epic of Gilgamesh and the Iliad and Odyssey.
These weren't created in a single day or by a single author but were passed down orally for generations for probably many centuries before writing was invented.
And this is only what has been saved and passed down to us. Who knows how many such treasures have been lost especially with the Collapse of the Bronze age.

I refuse to believe that the lifestyle and culture and quite frankly ..civilization described in them are of "uncivilized" people. Definition or not.