Question
General Knowledge: What is meant to be a civilized person?
Answer
My favorite characterization of the civilized state is due to William James:
"The progress from brute to man is characterized by nothing so much as the decrease in the frequency of proper occasions for fear."
Two alternative but equivalent characterizations are due to Sapolsky, who sees civilization on terms of the replacement of rare acute stress environments with chronic stress environments. The other is due to Desmond Morris, who first noted that the civilized human condition closely resembles that of animals in zoos (hence his book title: The Human Zoo).
A good author to read at the sociological level is Veblen (Theory of the Leisure Class).
Finally, a related way of understanding civilized people is as creatures who increase the refinement of their behaviors without increasing the utility of those behaviors in corresponding ways. This is because the process of civilization is primarily about taking intelligence out of human heads and embedding it in institutions.
My own modest contribution to this set of ideas is this blog post:
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/0...
By the way, it is probably not obvious to those who have never read my blog that my tag line, "civilized person" is meant ironically. I adopted it here on Quora soon after I wrote that post. But I seem to behave in actually civilized ways here, so the irony is kinda lost.
"The progress from brute to man is characterized by nothing so much as the decrease in the frequency of proper occasions for fear."
Two alternative but equivalent characterizations are due to Sapolsky, who sees civilization on terms of the replacement of rare acute stress environments with chronic stress environments. The other is due to Desmond Morris, who first noted that the civilized human condition closely resembles that of animals in zoos (hence his book title: The Human Zoo).
A good author to read at the sociological level is Veblen (Theory of the Leisure Class).
Finally, a related way of understanding civilized people is as creatures who increase the refinement of their behaviors without increasing the utility of those behaviors in corresponding ways. This is because the process of civilization is primarily about taking intelligence out of human heads and embedding it in institutions.
My own modest contribution to this set of ideas is this blog post:
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/0...
By the way, it is probably not obvious to those who have never read my blog that my tag line, "civilized person" is meant ironically. I adopted it here on Quora soon after I wrote that post. But I seem to behave in actually civilized ways here, so the irony is kinda lost.