It’s Not Pretty: The Earliest Phase of Civilization

While the word ‘civilized’ is often used to denote cultured or polite behavior, not all civilizations were civilized in this sense of the word. In fact, the earliest phases of human civilization tend to be rather ‘uncivilized.’

With startling uniformity, civilizations in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas all began with some rather savage tendencies. With no regard to race, ethnicity, or language, the earliest stages of human cultures featured practices like “exposure” or “abandonment” - historians use these words to describe the practice of leaving unwanted babies in the wilderness.

Perhaps most shocking, every known human civilization on earth practiced, in its initial periods, human sacrifice. They were under the influence of a pre-religious or proto-religious mindset which focused on myth and magic - the attempt to explain and control natural - instead of on a relationship to the deity which forms the core of a more mature religion.

Humans were sacrificed to obtain good weather, good harvests, or military victories. The best and brightest were sacrificed: young, healthy, and good-looking.

The histories of the Old World and the New World are parallel in this regard, as historian Michael Salemink writes:

Abortion, abandonment, and outright infanticide ran as rampant in pre-Columbian America, tribal Africa, the Far East, and the South Pacific as it once had in imperial lands. Ritual human sacrifice and slave trading predominated nearly universally in these cultures as well. Women and children, along with ailing, impoverished, and aged people, faced prevalent neglect, if not absolute contempt. Hindus, Scandinavians, Chinese, Maori, and some Native American communities cremated widows alive in their husbands’ funeral pyres. Euthanasia and cannibalism commonly occurred.

While Hammurabi and Homer may have been geniuses, they and their societies still had not yet developed those hallmarks - a regard for every human life as valuable, and a regard for the liberty of the individual - which mark Western Civilization and Eurocentric culture.

It would take centuries of slow progress, often against resistance, from Abraham to Moses, from Jesus to Augustine, before these concepts - the dignity and value of every human life, and the prominence of personal freedom - established themselves as central cultural edifices.

Civilization took a long time to become civilized!

This Blog’s Author is Guilty of Plagiarism!

You’re reading a post which belongs to a long series of entries dating back to April 2005. Among the earliest installments in this blog are some which contain instances of undeniable plagiarism.

By way of a halfhearted defense, it should be noted that the Internet and the World Wide Web brought about large changes in communication styles. The Oxford English Dictionary chronicles the appearances of words like repost, which appeared as early as 1983 in ‘Usenet newsgroup,’ before the emergence of WWW and the modern Internet.

The OED also informs us that ‘netiquette’ first appeared in 1982. The original context for the word seems to have, in fact, been related to the practice of posting and sharing unsigned humorous texts.

So, from the earliest years, the Internet has been wrestling with the question of how to precisely apply the concept of plagiarism.

The ease of ‘cut and paste’ technology, and the ability to forward emails or parts of emails led to an onslaught of ways to share text: reblogging, retweeting, crossposting, and more.

All of this stretched, mutilated, and challenged the understanding of ‘plagiarism’ as it existed, say, up until 1980 or so.

Without ill intent, many users pasted into their emails paragraphs from something they’d read and wanted to share with others. The ambiguity arises because it is not always clear whether the user intended to claim the text as his own creation - obvious plagiarism - or whether he merely meant to draw attention to a text which he’d seen: “hey, look at this.”

The details of the technology involved kept, and keep, changing: electronic bulletin boards, email discussion lists, FB, Twitter, blogs, etc.

This constant change made it difficult for an appropriate definition of ‘plagiarism’ to develop.

Naturally, from the very beginning of electronic communication, the more thoughtful and astute posters have worked to ensure that they attributed any texts to their true authors. But millions, e.g., have used the acronym “LOL” without citing Wayne Pearson, who allegedly authored it in the mid 1980s.

So, by way of a lukewarm confession and perfunctory admission of guilt, there are, among the earliest posts in this blog, instances of unmistakable plagiarism. These transgressions arose out of ignorance not malice.

It is, however, to be noted that these sins are limited only to the first few years of this blog’s history, and that citation of sources has been scrupulously observed in recent years.