“Chinese have always lived in houses, yes, if that’s all you mean by ‘civilization’… Everything for oneself, everything for personal utility: a pleasure in cruelty toward the weak and toward animals.” -BAP
People argue over civilization without first understanding what they speak of. I wonder if some modern nations have ever truly had civilization, but it might be better to ask if we have it presently. Our word “civilization” descends from the Latin “civitas”, and its meaning hasn’t drifted far. The common understanding is that a “civilized” society is non-hostile to its neighbors or to strangers, it is productive, introspective, and cohesive among its members. It produces and enjoys culture.
The Roman idea of civitas is not much different on the surface, but utterly foreign underneath. To the early Romans, the world was hostile. In their early years, every summer a different neighbor launched a raid against their city, usually from loosely organized hill-tribes. These hill-tribes are not civilizations, not cities, and do not cultivate civitas. Sometimes it’s not hill-tribes but Gaulish war bands that come raiding, nevertheless, the countryside was full of danger from mobile bands of young warriors wanting to raid and kill. This behavior is Indo-European, but it is not civilized. When these roving tribes did
settle, it was in familial arrangements, villages so small that everyone was related. Some parts of Europe and western America may still know this type of settlement.
As the Romans conquered the Aequi tribe, for instance, their settlements were so small they didn’t even warrant naming. In the Aeneid, Virgil calls the Aequi “a nation of rude mountaineers, addicted to the chase and to predatory habits, by which they sought to supply the deficiencies of their rugged and barren soil.” These were hunter-gatherers in the Italian Apennine Mountains. Rome subjugated the Aequi and caused them to exit their family homesteads (some may say, their longhouses) to form larger settlements, which became cities.
We might call the Aequi “civilized”, but can you impose the virtue of Civitas onto another people? Authentic civitas must rise from within. Civitas is that virtue which causes cities to rise from villages of their own accord. The Aequi familial homesteads were bound together by family ties, not by civitas. Likewise sprawling modern cities aren’t held together by civitas, but by economic convenience. People move in and float away as money demands, without loyalty.
The civic state, by contrast, isn’t held together by blood or money but by the ideal of a society. The powerful families of the familial villages coalesce to form a larger civil society, founded on a common dream or ideal. A Romulus figure appears to inspire a common aspiration into them. The underclasses follow suit. We see that first the aristocratic classes form the idea of a city, and thus birth the city’s daemon, it’s over-spirit; then the city begins to live, populated by lesser men who cannot follow a vision as well as the aristocrats might.
Athens was ruled by the Eupatridae, powerful men who kept the city alive in its spirit, grew its economy, and led wars to defend it. Utterly loyal to the place they ruled through their civitas (or άρετέ). Later these became the Pentekosiomidemnoi, which fulfilled the same role. This old aristocracy was formed as a league of powerful military men who would lead the city with personal care and attention to its virtue and citizenry.
The aristocratic man’s willingness to uphold the city and its ideal is the first sign of civitas. The city isn’t formed around convenience, or led passively, slowly, and receptively; its purpose is to fulfill a dream and therefore must be active, swift, and powerful. These virtues are only characteristic of the most virtuous men of the society, never of its underclasses. But the underclasses become charged with the same energy and purpose as is put forward by their leadership, and thereby improve themselves.
Many cities in the ancient world and even more in the modern world are bereft of civic spirit at all. No virtuous leaders, and so no virtuous populace. Entire nations go without civitas and have no true cities. Urban housing becomes mere slave quarters for global finance.
These are two opposing ends of the civilizational cycle. On the one end is the most basic family structure, the homestead or longhouse. On the other end is the overdeveloped metropolis. The metropolis occurs once the power struggles between small cities are ended, and a single larger state becomes dominant. Just as family ideals are subsumed into the city-state, civic ideals are subsumed into the nation or empire, and usually a secretive class of oligarchs, lacking courage or loyalty, dominates. Civitas is overtaken by patriotism, or by some other more generalized virtue showing adherence to symbols only. The countryside is made safe by the state’s power, and the affairs of the state become too large for a single man to effectively engage in. Men can understand a city and care for a city, but the benefits which one receives through civic care are diminished as the city’s influence grows. The city is no longer the sole interest of the men who live in it; it becomes the interest of everyone under its power as well.
Take Rome as an example: the streets had filled with the poor who were forced from the countryside, who had no virtue and wanted only bread. The nobles who once would fight against the city’s decay could move to their villas in Campania. Poor living conditions in Rome and the homogenization of neighboring cities meant that the upper artisanal classes and merchants could move to other Italian cities with minimal difficulty. In the end, no one was left to care for Rome herself, and the only interests left were those of personal gain. Most often this personal wealth was acquired by using Rome as a skinsuit, pretending that there still was a Rome when her people had abandoned her or when German barbarians moved in. Perhaps the economy kept growing, but Civilization had ended.
As in late Rome, we live in a metropolis which is deprived of personality in favor of function. The people who live in the city are deprioritized in favor of the more wealthy people who travel or commute to the city from outside. As I said, the city becomes a skinsuit for outsiders. The city is no longer a place in itself, with beauty and identity, but only a hub for economic convenience. Likewise, the economic wheels require slaves to work them, and now everywhere we see newly-made highrise apartments where high-salaried tech workers and diversity officers can waste money living the fake glamor of the “urban lifestyle.” This genre of housing which fills most modern cities can only be called slave quarters for the minions of the economic rulers of our fallen cities.
If Civitas is what makes a wattle and daub village into a city, then we have almost no cities left. They’ve been gutted. Even if men had civitas blazing in their hearts, what cities are left to care for or participate in? Globalism is a crusade against this very feeling. If we want cities and civitas to return, we can’t revive it from what we have now. There aren’t even family villages to act as the seeds of a city. So, we must create them. Civitas demands regard and respect for the forebears of the city and its ancestors. At some point, we must become the men whom our descendants will honor. Ancient families enshrined their forebears as household spirits so as to never neglect them or their ideals. How to achieve this? BAP tells us our instincts for piracy and warbands will rise again.
The beginnings of a family village, one which can cultivate a noble line and act as the estate of the pater familias, lie in the leader of the war band claiming land for his own and destroying his enemies. We can find suitable places for this in the less civilized parts of the earth. The civilized parts are merely domesticated now. You must see this, because nowhere is there civitas among the people. Not true civitas, but only its echo, the afterimage of goodwill towards neighbors but never the will to go to war for your city against others. This lack of feeling is a historical aberration which won’t last forever. A day will come when civitas returns to the far reaches of the Western world, if not due to visionary men, then due to the necessity against enemies!
This leads to the greatest point on the nature of the civic virtue: the core unit of civitas, without which it cannot function, is friendship between men. This is what binds the Indo-European kóryos as well as the city-state. It is another reason men have come under attack today. A city inhabited by men who feel loyalty to each other and to their city is much harder to manipulate than a city of atomized individuals. The training of the city’s young boys was of the utmost importance, and every city of note in the Classical and Christian eras alike instituted rituals to initiate their boys into patriotic manhood. This is the purpose of the famous Spartan agoge, for instance. The great bureaucracies of today want men without friends, without a permanent home, without roots, and without the courage to fight. If the Greeks could see modern men, who allow their cities to be uprooted, humiliated, and defiled without consequences, they would be filled with existential grief.
All the virtues in life tie into one another. Loyalty, friendship, and civitas stand side by side. When you cultivate one, you encourage the others. Therefore if we want to see the rise of new and powerful cities, we must first show loyalty to friends, and courage towards our ideal. You are the city. Without this, the world will remain an undifferentiated grey mass.
Originally posted to Twitter.