back to: Nature of Civilizations

The International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations (ISCSC) is an academic association focused on the study of “civilization” - a broad cultural configuration that includes human societies or communities around the world. It grew out of a week-long conference held in Salzburg, Austria, between October 8 and October 15, 1961, whose participants included the eminent scholars Pitirim Sorokin and Arnold Toynbee. Originally centered in Europe, this international organization now operates primarily in the United States although there is an active contingent from Canada, Japan, and Korea.

The ISCSC held its 39th international conference at Western Michigan University (WMU) in Kalamazoo, Michigan, between June 3 and June 6, 2009. Its current president, Andrew Targowski, is a professor of business information systems in the School of Business at WMU. As a young man, he had helped to develop a computer network in Poland called the Infostrada. In 1981, Targowski received political asylum in the United States following the Polish government’s crackdown on Solidarity.

I was born and raised in Michigan but had never been to Kalamazoo. I currently live in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I had attended ISCSC conferences in 2001 (Newark, NJ), 2002 (Jamaica), 2004 (Fairbanks, AK), and 2005 (St. Paul, MN), but nothing since. Kalamazoo was roughly on the route from Minneapolis to Milford, Pennsylvania, where I own a house. I therefore gave serious consideration to attending this conference when the invitation arrived. My proposal to present a paper at the conference was accepted.

Preliminary Arrangements

Conferences are expensive and, because my personal finances are stretched thin, I made every attempt to economize. The conference registration fee was $150 - $75 for retirees. Being 68 years of age, I checked the retiree box. On-campus housing in student dormitories was provided at $38 per night for single occupancy and $28 for double occupancy. I thought I might share a room with Michael Andregg, a friend who lives in St. Paul.

On-campus meals were available at the Fetzer Center, where conference events would be held, and near the student dormitories. Breakfasts cost $12 per meal at the Fetzer Center and $6 per meal near the dormitories. Lunches were $14 per meal at Fetzer; $8.05 near the dormitories. Dinners near the dormitory cost $9.15. They cost $20 at Fetzer on Thursday evening and $35 on Friday evening. On Saturday evening, there would be a group excursion to Saugatuck, Michigan, a resort town on Lake Michigan. The meal for this event was $30. Additionally, there would be a $20 fee for van transportation between Kalamazoo and Saugatuck. I went for dormitory meals plus the group banquet in Saugatuck on Saturday night and also, of course, the van transportation.

I called Michael Andregg two weeks before the conference to propose that we share a room. He declined my offer on the grounds that his sleeping practices were irregular. He was in the habit of waking up at 5:00 a.m. to be at work by 6:00 a.m. This schedule might disturb prospective roommates. Andregg proposed, however, that we share a ride from the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota) to Kalamazoo. He was planning to drive there in his 1991 Honda Civic. We agreed that I would drive to his house in St. Paul, park my car in his garage, and then proceed to the conference in Andregg’s car.

Because Michael Andregg had to be at the conference site in the early afternoon of Wednesday, June 3rd, to assist the conference organizers, we needed to be underway at 3:00 a.m. I would set my alarm clock for 2 p.m., which would give me time to dress and drive to Andregg’s house. The first conference event would be a reception for participants at the Fetzer Center between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Wednesday.
I wrote the ISCSC a check for $277.00 on May 10th. This included $75 for the conference registration fee, $152.00 for four nights in the student dormitories, and $50.00 for the excursion to Saugatuck. I would need to bring a credit card and plenty of cash to pay for my share of the driving expenses and meals during the conference.

My book on civilization theory

My own interest in the ISCSC arose from having written and published a paperback book about civilizations in the context of world history. The title was “Five Epochs of Civilization: World History as Emerging in Five Civilizations.” This book came out in 2000. It was essentially a proposal for how to organize world history in segments, each telling a coherent story.

According to this scheme, human society had seen four discrete “civilizations”, or states of culture, since the first city-states arose in Egypt and Mesopotamia in the 4th millennium B.C. A new cultural or communication technology introduced each civilization: first, ideographic writing; then, alphabetic writing, printing (in Germany in the 15th century A.D.), and finally electronic communication in the form of motion pictures, telegraphy and the telephone, and radio and television broadcasting. A fifth type of communication through the Internet and computer technology had recently been introduced; and this would lay the foundation for a fifth civilization.

Civilizations - cultural configurations - were equated with historical epochs - periods of time - in the sense that a new epoch began with the emergence of a new civilization. According to my scheme, these civilizations were worldwide. In this respect, I broke from other scholars who regarded civilizations as cultures confined to particular peoples or geographical regions. There might be, for instance, an Egyptian, Babylonian, Indian, or Chinese civilization. This was Toynbee’s scheme, for instance. He had identified twenty-one separate civilizations. According to him, our own “western Christian” civilization began in the 8th century A.D.

In addition to communication technologies, civilizations and epochs of history were keyed to changing states of society. The first big change occurred when people who had previously been organized in tribes settled in urban communities. From the temple hierarchy, a separate center of power emerged in the form of monarchical government. The first epoch of world history therefore described the development of government in the first city states and its territorial expansion into kingdoms and, finally, large empires such as Rome’s.

Other civilizations followed. In the second epoch of history, philosophically based world religions emerged, sharing power with imperial government. In the third epoch, begun in Renaissance Italy, two new types of institutions appeared: commerce (or business) and secular education. In the fourth epoch, there were new organizations for delivering news and entertainment. We call them the mass media.

Attempts to gain publicity for the book

With a heavy load of books to sell, I needed to develop a marketing campaign. The first step was to seek book reviews. Five Epochs of Civilization was reviewed in Alan Caruba’s Bookviews.com, The Midwest Book Review, and Booklist, in 2000, and in The Historian, in 2002. There was also interest among foreign reviewers. My book was reviewed in Dawn (Karachi, Pakistan), Xin Hua Book Studies (Beijing, China), The Hindu (Madras, India), and New Nigerian Weekly (Kaduna, Nigeria). Although most of the foreign reviews were positive, my book did not have distribution abroad. I did have a U.S. distributor.

In 2001, I created a website that presented concepts in the book and included an email address for persons wishing to order copies. Originally, the site was located at Quintepoch.com (a pseudo Latin term for “Fifth Epoch”), and later at the more understandable Worldhistorysite.com. Early on, I decided to create parallel pages in five foreign languages - French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, and ltalian - using Altavista’s language translator, Babelfish.

I discovered that this website was not effective in selling books. However, it did eventually attract substantial traffic - between 1,500 and 2,000 daily visits - especially after the website was expanded. An article on how world history could be used to predict the future and a list of important inventions in communication technology were among the the most popular features. At one time, worldhistorysite.com was #1 on Google for the search words “predict the future”.

My book was distributed by Access Publishers Network. I participated in a cooperative exhibit at the national book show, Book Expo, in Chicago in June, 2000. It was at this event that I learned of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations. I ran into another self-publisher, Corinne Gilb of Atherton Press, at one of the Expo events. A long-time member of ISCSC, she and I sat at a table discussing the organization. She knew Michael Andregg and was especially enamored of another ISCSC member, Roger Wescott, who had recently died.

Besides the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations, two other organizations interested me as vehicles for promoting my book: World History Association (WHA) and National Council for History Education (NCHE). I joined both organizations and attended their national conferences. Eventually, I became disillusioned with them, though for different reasons.

World History Association held an annual conference in Boston, MA, in June 2000. I attended it before flying to China to visit my new wife but quickly soured on this organization. First, its Journal declined to publish a review of my book. Second, I had a sense that WHA members were ideologically driven rather than being open-minded about how world history should be organized and taught. Following the lead of historian William McNeill, they believed that changes in society (or civilization) depended primarily upon external contacts between different societies rather than an internal mechanism driving change. In contrast, my theory, following Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee, was that civilizations rose and fell according to an organic life cycle. I felt that editors of the WHA Journal would not review my book because they did not wish to discuss another point of view.

A panel discussion of the proposed guidelines for the curricula of Advanced Placement courses in world history gave me an additional reason to dislike this organization. A committee of eight college and high-school teachers of world history, comprised mainly of WHA members chaired by Peter Stearns of Carnegie Mellon University, had developed a set of guidelines for teaching such courses. The kicker was that the Educational Testing Service of Princeton, New Jersey, which produced standardized tests for Advanced Placement courses, based its tests upon those guidelines. Certain biases were therefore built into the tests including William McNeill’s view of how societies change. Any high-school student who wished to pass the AP tests would, of course, study world history from the recommended perspective. Peter Sterns was author of a glitzy textbook for world-history courses which presumably conformed to the committee’s guidelines.

This experience confirmed some of my worst stereotypes of academia. It was about money and power, not truth. I was brought up to believe in Plato’s idea that truth is reached by open discussion and debate among competing points of view. Whoever marshals the better arguments and evidence will convince others of the truth of his position and this position will become generally believed. I found that in academic circles today there was no real discussion but, instead, political maneuvering to advance certain points of view. If you as an ideologue could take over a respected organization, you could control the topics discussed at its conferences and the content of its publications. You could select only those works which conform to your point of view. The ultimate power was to control the questions asked on tests.

In this case, I saw how an ideologically motivated group, the World History Association, was able to place its members on a committee of eight teachers which was charged with writing guidelines for Advanced Placement courses in world history. Then a testing organization accepted those guidelines as the basis for questions on AP tests. Finally, high-school teachers of world history were forced to design their courses to prepare students for passing the tests (“teach to tests”) so that the school’s test scores would be high and the public would believe the students had learned something and the schools were effectively teaching. In reality, this was a process for shutting down free inquiry, closing discussion, and, in fact, making the study of world history uninteresting and pedantic. Such was the nature of academic politics.

The National Council for History Education had a different set of problems. First, it did not have a journal that reviewed books. My book was, however, mentioned in one of its newsletters. Second, although world history was within its scope of interest, the NCHE tended to favor American history, especially after Congress appropriated a large sum of money to facilitate such teaching. The NCHE’s national conferences had tightly focused themes, favoring American rather than world history. I twice submitted proposals to make presentations at their conferences but my proposals were not accepted. In 2006, I was, however, invited to make a presentation at the annual conference of the Minnesota chapter of NCHE at Foley high school. The problem here was not hostility but relevance to topics that interested members of this organization.

My Prior Experience with ISCSC

I attended my first conference of the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations at Newark campus of Rutgers University in Newark, New Jersey, in June 2001. Matt Melko reviewed my book at one of the sessions. I sat in the audience. Melko did not like the approach that I took in this book. In fact, he called my scheme of civilization “goofy”. A specific objection was that I was confusing civilizations with historical epochs, or periods of time, and that each epoch seemed to be shorter than the previous one. This offended Melko’s sense of proportion. After he spoke, I was invited to come up to the front table to respond to the review. Few minds were changed. But at least my book was reviewed and there was some opportunity for discussion.

I attended three other annual conferences of the ISCSC in the following four years. There was a conference at the beautiful Frenchman’s Cove resort on the northeast shore of Jamaica. George Von der Muhll and I, for $35 a night each, shared a cottage once occupied by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. I had a minor role in one of the panel discussions.

This conference was marred by the drowning death of a fellow conference participant, Robert Hanson, which some regard as a suicide. I had sat at the breakfast table with him and his wife on that fateful day. On a happier note, I had several leisurely discussions with Corinne Gilb. Of particular interest was that fact that she had been Detroit’s city planner during the administration of Coleman Young. Young’s mistress, who had taken a course from Gilb at Wayne State University, was instrumental in the appointment. I am a native of Detroit and knew the terrain.

I also attended ISCSC conferences in Fairbanks, Alaska, in 2004 and in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 2005. At the Fairbanks conference, I told of my experience as a candidate in Louisiana’s Democratic Presidential primary earlier that year. (I finished fifth among seven candidates, receiving 3,100 votes or 2% of the total.) I abandoned my prepared speech to talk off the cuff. The delivery was better that way. In the context of civilizations, the purpose of the talk was to show that we are living in the epoch of an entertainment culture - Civilization IV - and that its requirements affect other functions in society, including the process of picking a political leader. Presidential candidates have to make themselves accessible and appealing to the media in order to cultivate a favorable image among the public and win votes.

I published an article summarizing my scheme of civilizations in Comparative Civilization Review in the spring of 2002, a review of a book on Mayan archeology in the spring of 2003, and an article on how world history could be used to predict the future of civilizations in the fall of 2006, but did not make any presentations at the 2005 conference in St. Paul. The two articles were also posted on the website, worldhistorysite.com.

Although my contributions were noticed, I remained controversial in certain ISCSC circles. One member, John Hord, wrote me, for instance, advising me to avoid using the word “civilization” in connection with my historical scheme because it conflicted with prevalent views within the ISCSC. I replied that neither he nor the organization had a trademark on this word and I would continue using it because the word was the best one I knew for expressing my views.

Around that time, I became increasingly dissatisfied with ISCSC conferences because there seemed to be little dialogue among members. The speakers seemed to be talking past each other in their separate presentations. Without meaningful dialogue, we seemed to be wasting our time. I expressed my concern to the incoming president and received a phone message from him but we were subsequently unable to connect. Then, when my proposal for a presentation at the 2006 conference in Paris was rejected, I decided to let my membership lapse. The French co-sponsors, like the World History Association, were insisting on conference themes to stress the “diffusionist” view of civilizational change. I would not put up with any more academic power plays.

I continued to receive issues of Comparative Civilization Review (CCR). An article by editor Laina Farhat-Holzman in the spring 2008 titled “Deadly Conspiracy Myths in History” hit one of my hot buttons. It was irritating to me because I do not believe that a lone gunman killed President John F. Kennedy and there are suspicious circumstances surrounding the devastation that occurred on September 11, 2001. Despite the vast importance of those events, U.S. newspapers and media have steadfastly refused to investigate the specific evidences supporting claims of a conspiracy conflicting with the official explanations. Their standard response has been to discuss instead how stupid people like me (and millions of other Americans) are prone to believe in “conspiracy theories”. Farhat-Holzman’s article seemed to be in that vein. I objected to an editor of a scholarly publication such as ours using her position to promote a particular political view.

I wrote a three-page response to Laina Farhat-Holzman and copied several other persons in the ISCSC. She promptly invited me to write my own article about conspiracy theories. This was not quite what I had in mind, so I fired off another letter to Farhat-Holzman. I really wanted CCR to publish my letter as a counterpoint article to what she had written. Matt Melko called me to say that the CCR editors were considering a letters to the editor section to deal with situations such as mine. I was led to believe that eventually my letter would be published, perhaps in an abbreviated form. That was acceptable to me. However, nothing of the sort appeared in subsequent issues. It seemed to be a broken promise. I was prepared to ask Melko for an explanation at the conference in Kalamazoo.

When I learned that Midori Yamanouchi-Rynn would be at the conference, I conceived the purpose of also talking with her. She interested me particularly for two reasons. First, she lived in the area of Scranton, Pennsylvania, which is fifty miles west of Milford where I own a house. Second, I had an engaging conversation with Yamanouchi-Rynn during the cocktail hour at my first ISCSC conference when she let down her hair about life in academia.

The gist of the conversation was that she despised many of her colleagues at the University of Scranton. She considered them persons lacking real interest and knowledge concerning the subjects they taught. They were undisciplined products of the ‘60s counterculture who had wormed their way into tenured positions at American universities. She herself was treated poorly by such persons within her own institution but was respected elsewhere. This conversation confirmed some of my worst stereotypes of higher education today and I wanted to hear more.

In any event, my personal agenda consisted of those two items as I set out for Kalamazoo in Michael Andregg’s car. He drove the entire way because he was worried that the clutch might give out on his 1991 Honda Civic and I might not know what to do.

I thought this might be my last ISCSC conference. It was clear that members would not accept or seriously discuss my “goofy” scheme of civilizations. In fact, I had pretty much exhausted what I could do about the book. I was preparing to write a new book, or perhaps script for a video, that would give a narrative of “big history” (from the Big Bang to man’s future or possible extinction), and then turn to other pursuits. I was coming to the conference primarily because Andrew Targowski had extended an invitation and Kalamazoo, Michigan, was not too far away.

Regarding my issue with Laina Farhat-Holzman, Andregg expressed a useful opinion. I should address my complaint directly to her rather than to Matt Melko, who was not the CCR editor but someone trying to help resolve the complaint. He also stressed that the ISCSC is a volunteer organization that depends on persons such as Farhat-Holzman who actually do the work. It was easy for relatively inactive members such as me to criticize. If I pushed too hard with my complaint, it would serve only to disrupt the organization and perhaps cause hard-working volunteers such as Laina to resign. I could see the wisdom of Andregg’s advice.

We check in at the conference and participate in Wednesday’s events

Michael Andregg is a fast driver and we arrived in Kalamazoo around 1:30 p.m., in plenty of time for the conference. After checking in at Fetzer Center and receiving our conference packages from Betsy Drummer, we drove to the student dormitory at Hoekje (pronounced “Hokey”) Hall. Although it was a long drive around the campus perimeter, we were told of a more direct route that took ten minutes to walk. Andregg had heard that an ISCSC representative, perhaps Laina Farhat-Holzman, had taken a look at the dormitory the day before and decided it was lacking in creature comforts. She had moved to a motel instead.

At Hoekje Hall, a young man with a mattress on his head engaged Andregg and me in a discussion of civilization. Then a woman in charge gave us keys and rooming instructions. Andregg’s room was on the first floor along a corridor to the right as it appeared to someone walking in the front door. My room, #153, was on the first floor along a corridor to the left, nearly to the end.

Evidently more men than women had signed up for the ISCSC conference so dormitory officials had to put a few men in the women’s section of the building. The men’s bathroom, she said, was located in Andregg’s (the men’s) section of the building. That meant that I would have to walk approximately 80 yards from my bed room to the men’s bathroom, passing the front lobby. I could imagine myself doing this several times at night, dressed in my pajamas. I asked for a rubber band to hold the two keys together and attach them to my cell phone.

The room itself was primitive though adequate for my purposes. We were given a blanket whose fiber was thin from too many washings, a wash cloth, two sheets, and two towels. There was a closet with no hangers along with a table and chest of drawers. The room lacked any water facilities. I set my suit case on the table. Then I tossed the canvas cover on the floor and made my bed. I thought I would take a shower and then nap for several hours before heading over to the Fetzer Center for the two-hour reception that began the conference. I set a mechanical alarm clock for around 4:30 p.m.

Stepping out into the corridor, I noticed that the women’s bathroom was directly across the hall from my room. Another conference participant greeted me in the hallway. He was Vladimir Alalykin-Izvekov, a young Russian man who lived in Washington, D.C. He gave me his card. On it he had written the name, “Vlad”, and drawn a smiley face. Vlad had evidently heard of me. He suggested that we have coffee together some time during the conference.

I walked over to the men’s bathroom on the other side of the building with a new set of clothing and a towel. It was surprising to me that this “men’s” bathroom lacked a set of urinals, though the door was clearly marked that way. I then undressed and took a shower. As I was putting on my clothes after showering, another man walked in. He was Pedro Geiger, a middle-aged to elderly man from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. “Pedro”, as I called him, was quite gregarious. In short order, I had made potentially two new friends.

However, the long trip to the bathroom worried me. Then I had an idea for taking care of this problem. I asked the dormitory supervisor if she had an empty bottle. She said she did not. I then asked her if I could buy bottled water or a soft drink in the building. Down another hall was a room with a vending machine. Bottles of water cost $1.25. Surely there was a better way. In front of the supervisor’s office was a cardboard box for recycling bottles. I took one of the bottles from the box and carried it to my room.

Back in my room, I closed the Venetian blinds and took a nap. The alarm clock, however, never rang. When I awoke it was already 5:30 p.m. The reception had begun a half hour earlier. I quickly put on my clothes and walked to Fetzer Center. Although I had a campus map, the route was anything but clear. I asked the dormitory supervisor for directions. She told me to turn left at the sidewalk in front of Hoekje Hall and continue walking. Unfortunately, when I did this, I wound up in a part of the campus far to the left (south) of Fetzer Hall. I had to use building names on my map to work my way back to the right and then forward until I reached my destination.

The reception was not, as I imagined it, a group of people with cocktails standing around and talking with each other. Instead, people were seated at three separate tables, eating hors d’oeuvres. I grabbed a plate and helped myself to the food. The people at my table were all engaged in conversations. I just sat there enjoying the food.

After the reception was over at 7:00 p.m., I ran into Pedro who asked about returning to the dorm. I told him that I knew the way. Michael Andregg said we could take a shortcut through one of the side doors. Pedro and I took his advice. Leaving Fetzer, we walked east on Wilbur Street toward a wooden sculpture. Looking at the map, I realized this was not taking us toward Hoekje Hall. Sangren hall was on our left. We asked for directions and eventually wound up on West Michigan Avenue heading east.

I spotted Bernhard Center which the map showed being closer to Hoekje Hall. So we rounded the building and walked north a block or two. I could tell that Pedro was losing confidence in my ability to find the dormitory. Again, we asked for directions. As luck would have it, the building in front of us was Hoekje Hall. It was the back side of our dormitory. The door was locked. We walked around this building to the front door. Undoubtedly, our walk back to the dormitory was twice as far as it ought to have been.

After leaving Pedro, I struck up a conversation with another conference attendee who was seated on a bench in front of the dormitory. He was Donald Burgy, an artist from the Boston area. Burgy was a man with an easy and pleasing manner. We talked for fifteen minutes or so. Then another man came along to join our conversation. His name was David Maurer. A heavy-set man with glasses, he had a compelling life story and was eager to tell it to us. He gave me a copy of a 17-page paper presenting his view of civilization. An abbreviated version would be presented at the conference.

Originally from Benton Harbor, Maurer now lived in Ypsilanti, Michigan. His passion was reading books of history. He had done so since the age of ten. The purpose in reading books was to try to discover why societies changed. Upon graduating from college, he had tried to enroll in a graduate history program at Michigan State University to develop this interest but was told that, to be accepted into the program, he would have to specialize. To study all of world history was not academically respectable. For the next forty years, Maurer had persevered in his pursuit of truth concerning the nature of human societies by reading an eclectic assortment of books.

For this, Maurer had sacrificed both career success and a normal family life. He had never been married. He said he had once had a steady girl friend but, when she saw what motivated him, she said she considered him a “loser” and abandoned the relationship. His most rewarding job had been to drive a shuttle van between the Detroit Metropolitan Airport and drop-off points in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It paid $20,000 a year.

Maurer had also created a website called Historyexplained.com to present his theories. It had an interactive feature. Viewers could leave comments at the site. For about four years, he had carried on a lively conversation with visitors. Many were high-school students working on projects for their Advanced Placement courses in history. Then, suddenly, Maurer’s website was hit by spammers. It became such a task to maintain the site that he decided to abandon the project.

Maurer had quit this job in order to attend the ISCSC conference in 2008, where he made a presentation. He had a manuscript expressing his theories about civilization but could not find an interested publisher. One told him that he needed to go back to college to earn a Ph.D. before such a manuscript would be considered. He could not afford to self-publish. In fact, with funds running low, he thought his best shot now was to try to get his old job back driving the airport shuttle.

I listened to Maurer’s story with rapt attention. Wow! This was a man attending the ISCSC conference out of true love for the knowledge of civilizations. He was not an academic doing it for professional advancement. In other words, Maurer was a kindred spirit - “my kind of guy”, I later told Michael Andregg. Others, I learned, considered him a bit of a “wild man” because of his behavior at last year’s conference. (He had taken up a full hour of the hour-and-a-half time allotted for three speakers and later gotten into a heated argument with someone.) Yet, he was invited to make a presentation this year. Certain people such as David Wilkinson were working with him. I thought it was worth attending the ISCSC conference to meet this kind of person. What sacrifices he had made to pursue knowledge of civilizations! His motives were pure.

It was after 11:00 p.m. when we finally ended our discussions. I met another conference participant in the hallway. In the course of a brief conversation, I remarked that my only problem with staying at this dormitory was the bathroom situation. The women’s bathroom was right across the hallway from my room while the men’s bathroom was in the other wing of the building. My colleague said that he thought it was OK to use the nearby bathroom.

Before retiring to bed, I peeked cautiously into the bathroom across the hall from my room and a few paces to the left whose door was marked “women”. Right in front of me, as I opened the door, was a row of urinals. Clearly this was designed to be a men’s bathroom and the one on the other side of the building was for women. There must have been a misunderstanding. And so, for the next several days I used the “women’s” bathroom, including the showers at the far end. No one was ever in this bathroom when I entered it after knocking on the door. My problem evidently was solved.

Thursday’s Program - Morning

ISCSC President Andrew Targowski began the serious part of the conference with his keynote address after a brief welcoming statement by the president of Western Michigan University, Dr. John Dunn. Targowski’s presentation was titled “Will Business End or Revive Western Civilization? From Malthusian Trap to Business Growth Trap.” It started at 9:00 a.m. in the Kirsh auditorium at the Fetzer Center.

After first announcing that the Japanese delegation to the ISCSC conference could not attend because of the swine-flu epidemic, Targowski observed that business was important to civilization from its beginning considering that most scholars believe it began with irrigation projects in Mesopotamia and Egypt. Also, he said, business is the “religion” of global society. While per-capita wealth increased by 153% between 1000 A.D. and 1820 A.D., it increased by 800% between 1820 and 1998. Economic growth is the “religion” of business. Yet, growing population reduces per-capita wealth. If the earth reaches its carrying capacity of 8 billion persons by 3000 A.D., we will need two additional planets to support these people in comfort; and that is obviously impossible.

Targowski presented the concept of a “death triangle” facing humanity in the convergence of growing population, destruction of the natural environment, and shortages of energy and other resources. In other words, the curent growth model of business cannot be sustained. He said the United Nations Millennium goals do not address the real problems. Its goal with respect to providing clean water to people is unrealistic. As a refugee from communist Poland, he was not recommending communism but capitalism in a moderate form. The capitalist system needed to promote “sufficiency” in use of resources rather than unbridled growth. He is director of the Center for Sustainable Business Practices at Western Michigan University.

Targowski introduced me as a former presidential candidate during his talk. In the question and answer session, I asked how the capitalist economy could meet the increased demand for interest payments if its growth were moderated. Targowski replied that there should be some growth but not hyper-growth. I was sitting in a row of some of Targowski’s friends including a man from England who sat next to me. Several rows ahead of us were two elegantly dressed, blonde-haired women who recorded the scene with a video camera.

After a 15-minute coffee break, we had our first breakout session. These lasted an hour and a half each. There were typically three speakers in each of three sessions. Session A was in the larger Putney Lecture Hall. Session B was in room 1450/1460; and Session C in room 1060. The presentations in Session B were typically book reviews. Conference attendees could choose the session that looked most interesting to them.

For the presentation beginning at 10:45 a.m., I chose Session A, titled “Globalization Issues”. There were three speakers: Sisay Asefa, an economist from Ethiopia; Lee Stauffer, a college professor from northern New Mexico; and Michael Dudley, a city planner from Winnipeg, Canada, who was also the panel chair. Each had a half hour.

In a talk titled “Globalization and International Development: Critical Challenges of the 21st Century”, Dr. Asefa argued that foreign direct investment and international trade were more potent tools for reducing poverty in the poor nations than foreign aid. In 2005, foreign aid totaled $106 billion; and direct foreign investment, $281 billion. The poverty line is defined as living on less than $1.00 a day; and one billion people live in poverty. International investment goes disproportionately to South Africa among the African nations.

Another important factor in reducing poverty is international migration. Three percent of the world population lives outside their country of birth. Migration has doubled since 1980. Was there a “brain drain” or a “brain gain” when an educated person migrates to a developed country from an underdeveloped one, Asefa asked? Such persons help their birth country by participating in a network of professionals and by remitting money to that country. They facilitated an international flow of technology and ideas.

Asefa believed that globalization is a force to reduce wealth disparity around the world. Thinking that he had characterized the anti-globalists as “terrorists” and “extremists”, I said in the question-and-answer session that I had participated in the anti-globalist movement several years ago. Dr. Asefa cited that fact that several persons had smashed windows at the 1999 protests in Seattle as evidence of such inclinations in the anti-globalist camp. But his main point was that the anti-globalists failed to balance the benefits of globalization with the cost. He favored further globalization, debt relief, and campaigns against infectious disease to aid the poor.

Dr. Lee Stauffer next spoke on “the origin of civilization in ecological crisis.” She teaches at Northern New Mexico University in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Her main point, I believe, was to challenge the prevailing view that civilizations began when irrigation projects in the near east required large-scale political organization. New Mexico also experiences arid conditions. In her experience, small communities with informal political arrangements can adequately address water shortages. The citizens are each assessed time to work on communal water projects and a “mayor” distributes the available water to them. “Civilization” is not required.

So how did civilization begin? Gordon Childs believed that metallurgy required organized trade to obtain the required metals. Robert DeContero believed that civilization resulted from population achieving a certain density. However, this pattern applied to the Old World, not the Americas. In her view, civilization began when specialized production of goods led to shortages and potential starvation. The hunter-gatherer society does not face this threat because nomadic peoples pursue a variety of food sources. They switch to alternatives when one food is depleted. Specialized agriculture, on the other hand, sometimes experiences shortages. Either one obtains the required foods in trade or a powerful chieftain seizes it. Coercion is needed when the redistribution of resources is not done voluntarily.

Stauffer also noted that civilizations tend to develop in areas of ecological instability. The Tigris and Euphrates rivers, as well as the Nile, have an irregular flow of water. Either there is flooding or drought. The rivers often change course. In India, society has to contend with the monsoon seasons. I asked if civilization might develop from man-made causes. For instance, if one kingdom was territorially expansive, a neighboring kingdom might have to acquire a military structure to defend itself. Dr. Stauffer thought that might a possibility, but it was beyond her scope of discussion.

Finally, Michael Dudley, the city planner from Winnipeg, spoke on “Cold war, hot war: city planning in times of crisis.” He compared the current push for “green cities” to meet the environmental crisis to the proposed design of cities to avert nuclear catastrophe during the Cold War in the 1950s. Then the object was to disperse populations from the urban core so that a nuclear-tipped missile delivered to a city would not destroy its entire population. Now the object is to increase population density in the city so that mass transit can be more effectively used and the surrounding lands are preserved. Today, we are trying to combat runaway suburbanization.

Tokyo is a major city with low per-capita energy consumption. It developed organically instead of being built from a plan. Many cities around the world are trying to to promote green technology. I asked Dudley if he knew R.T. Rybak, mayor of Minneapolis. He did, having been raised in that city. Mayor Rybak was one of the first in our city to drive a hybrid car and, among U.S. mayors, to commit city government to Greenhouse Gas reduction.

Thursday’s Program - Afternoon

Now it was time for lunch. I walked back to the dormitory along a more direct route than before. Dormitory meals were held in the student cafeteria in Ellsworth hall next to Hoekje. When I walked past the dining-room monitor, he noted my conference badge and wrote something down I was not asked for money. I helped myself to a variety of fruits, meats, and other foods and drinks - quite enough food to last for the day. I again checked with the monitor on the way out, but again did not pay. It was a free lunch for me. Then came the ten-minute walk to Fetzer Center.

For the afternoon session beginning at 2:00 p.m., I picked one of the book-review sessions, which was titled “Race/religious conflicts”. Three presentations were scheduled: “Clerical courage, crown, and citizenship in medieval Ethiopia” by Tseggai Isaac; “The citizen and the law in Islamic and Catholic Spain during the middle ages” by Dario Fernandez-Morera; and “The role of race and prejudice in the Russia-Chechnya conflict” by Mariana Tepfenhart. Only one of the scheduled speakers showed: Mariana Tepfenhart. I was the only person in the audience other than a black woman who was a colleague of Tepfenhart’s at Monmouth college in New Jersey. Even so, this session was one of my favorites for the entire conference.

We talked informally for half an hour before Tepfenhart began her presentation. I have recently completed a book-length manuscript on American identity and was interested in the topic of racial conflict in Russia. Russian nationalism and a sense of white identity have been resurgent in the Putin/ Medvedev era. “Russia for Russians” is a popular slogan. In that regard, the Chechen people from the Caucasus region were considered an ethic minority, not truly Russian. The racial identification was ironic considering that the formal term for white people is “Caucasian”.

There was, Tepfenhart pointed out, a long period of conflict between Chechens and the Moscow government, going back to Peter the Great. The Czars used force to try to integrate this people into their empire. Both Catherine the Great and Czar Alexander I sent troops into Chechnya. The Chechens were, like the Sicilians in Italy, a clannish and rebellious people who were quick to avenge past injuries. They practiced Sufism, a mystical type of Islam that put them at odds with other Muslims.

In an attempt at ethnic cleansing, Czar Alexander drove numerous Chechens into Turkey. Because the Bolsheviks promised they would allow ethnic minorities to secede, many Chechens fought with the Red Army. However, Stalin broke this promise. After some Chechens helped the Nazis, he deported half a million Chechens to Kazakhstan and Siberia. Khrushchev allowed them to return. However, Russians held most of the good jobs in Chechnya. An independence movement took root.

A game-changing event was the construction of an oil pipeline which crossed Chechen territory. Political independence now became impossible. Chechen rebels attacked the pipe line, hijacked airplanes, and took hostages. In fact, ransom for hostages is a principal source of revenue in Chechnya today. Boris Yeltsin sent in Russian troops to subdue the rebels. This military measure cost 40,000 to 100,000 lives and was ultimately unsuccessful. Beset by high unemployment and family deaths, the Chechen rebels now staged attacks on Russian soil.

In 1999, Chechen militants invaded the neighboring republic of Dagestan to aid an independence movement. A series of apartment bombings took place in Moscow. Yeltsin resigned the Russian presidency in favor of Vladimir Putin. President Putin had the difficult task of maintaining good relations with the West (which had often accused Russia of human-rights violations) while dealing firmly with the Chechen terror to show that he was a strong leader. The Putin government sent troops in Chechnya billing it as a war against Islamic terrorism. After 9/11, the U.S. government supported this policy.

Today Chechnya remains a member of the Russian Federation. A Putin-appointee, Ramzan Kadyrov, son of a government leader who was assassinated, rules the country with an iron hand. The professional class has largely left the country. Chechen militants are largely discredited after the 2004 hostage-taking incident in a Beslan school. The challenge is to build the Chechen economy.

Another result is that, as Americans stigmatized Muslims following the 9/11 attacks, so the Russian people tend to regard Chechens as terrorists. Their sense of ethnic and national identity, including support for authoritarian government, has been strengthened. The presenter, Mariana Tepfenhart, who is from Romania, said she planned to pursue a Ph.D. in ethnic studies.

The final set of discussions this afternoon began at 3:45 p.m., after a 15-minute coffee break in the Fetzer Center lobby. I had to choose between presentations made by two new friends, Pedro Geiger, whose topic was “capitalism, internationalism, socialism”, and David Maurer, talking on “origin of civilization”. I chose Maurer’s session because his identity at this conference (as an independent scholar) was much like my own.

The session itself was titled “Origins of Civilization”. It was chaired by Anthony Stevens-Arroyo who teaches at a college in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, thirty-five miles south of Milford. I attended Professor Stevens-Arroyo’s presentation on the three Abrahamic religions at the 2005 ISCSC conference in St. Paul. I had dinner with the professor and his family at a St. Paul restaurant and later sent him a copy of my manuscript summarizing arguments about Jesus’ Messianic self-consciousness in Albert Schweitzer’s 1965 book, “The Kingdom of God and Primitive Christianity”.

David Maurer led off the session. Much of his talk had to do with archeological evidence of stages in the development of early civilization. The hunter-gatherer society had existed for millennia. Starting around 9,000 B.C., archeologists found evidence of agriculture, domestic animals, and primitive urban culture; but not until the Uruk culture in the 4th millennium B.C. did they find anything suggesting “command economies” and forced labor that are associated with civilization. Maurer uses terms such as “aristocrat/tribal society”, “aristocrat/peasant society”, and “democratic/market” society” to describe civilized societies as they become socially more advanced.

A key point made in Maurer’s presentation, to which I agree, was that a temple culture preceded royal government in the development of civilizations. It was the priests who first developed the command structure that was able to force peasants to surrender grain to the central authority, whose surplus permitted other arts to flourish. Coercive power vested in a hierarchy is the defining mark of civilization. Kings later took over that function.

Maurer, whose brother is a Roman Catholic priest, noted that religious priesthoods evolved from the shamans of tribal culture who were thought to communicate directly with God (or the spirit world). The priests built temples to honor the gods. Able to coerce the surrender of wealth, urban communities under their control became wealthy. Wealth, in turn, attracted pillagers. Kings were persons who organized the military defense to protect this wealth. They may have been temporary warriors, Maurer supposed.

In any event, after 3000 B.C., kings replaced priests as rulers of civilized communities. When the kings in turn rewarded their followers with grants of land or other wealth, an aristocratic class appeared. The essential function of civilized society was to create a pool of surplus wealth from grain confiscated from peasants so that the higher functions could be developed and maintained.

The panel chair, Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, spoke next on the subject of “eschatology: the mysterious internal dynamic to the rise and fall of civilizations”. He gave a history of Jewish prophecy and its Christian consequence; it was the most thorough presentation on this topic that I have ever heard. I was familiar with some of the material through my interest in Schweitzer, but Professor Stevens-Arroyo added much context. Eschatology is the science of the theory of the final days.

The “nabi” - prophet - was someone who could be hired to find lost donkeys. Like Saul, they had ecstatic visions and practiced divination. The Jewish prophets came into their own during the period of the two kingdoms when they opposed the cult of Baal and were persecuted by Queen Jezebel.

The prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah identified God’s message with policy decisions of the Jewish nation state. Isaiah warned against Judaea’s (southern kingdom) becoming allied with Assyria. The northern kingdom of Israel invaded Judaea but was, in turn, conquered by the Assyrians who imposed the religion of the Vestal Virgins on the conquered Jewish nation. The Judaean king Josiah, allied with the Babylonians, opposed the Egyptian pharaoh at the battle of Megiddo (a.k.a. Armageddon) but was killed. It was Josiah, the righteous king, who had discovered the “lost” books of Deuteronomy and restored religious orthodoxy.

Josiah’s reign marked the peak of religious orthodoxy but led to annihilation of the state. The prophet Jeremiah was skeptical of priestly and legal authority. For this he was beaten. Soon enough, however, the Babylonians under Nebuchadnezzar II conquered Jerusalem in 587 B.C., deposed King Jehoiakim, and sent the elite of Jewish society into exile in Babylon. The prophets now divorced God’s power from the fortunes of the Jewish state. Had the Jews lost their identity as a people? No, although politically defeated, they retained their unity as a people through religion. Prophets such as Deutero- and Trito-Isaiah taught that the Jews could regain a prosperous state if they remained faithful to God.

The new prophetic writings spoke of a Messiah who was, at first, heir to the House of David and, later, a divine superman known as “Son of Man”. He would be a light to all nations. Lions would lie down with lambs. A prospering Jewish state would bring peace to the world. Prophecy would bring religious reform that would make the Messianic kingdom possible.

Jewish prophecy now became endowed with clairvoyance - the ability to predict events in the future. In reality, it was not real prediction but a type of writing composed after the fact which was ascribed to a religious figure of the past who lived before the predicted event. For example, the book of Daniel - a figure of the Babylonian exile - was actually written centuries later after the dissolution of Alexander’s Greek empire. Jewish prophecy also developed the theme of the “good” and ”bad” pagans. Ruth was a good pagan. Such literature was based on “mimesis” (“imitation”) assuming, for instance, that if empires fell in the past, they would do so again in the future.

Finally, Professor Stevens-Arroyo spoke of the use of numerology in prophetic scripture. The book of Daniel includes numerical symbols for persons and events. The New Testament Book of Revelation continues this tradition. Written during the reign of Roman emperor Domitian, it refers to a person, Nero, whose name is indicated by the number 666. Judaism meanwhile rejected apocalyptic thinking. It may survive today in the environmental crisis that humanity faces.

The third speaker in this panel was Anne-Marie Oulai, an African American who teaches at Western Michigan University. Her topic was “From Tom-Tom to Wireless Communications: Advancing African Civilization into the Global Civilization.” Its message was a complete surprise to me.

African society is based on strong family ties. Not long ago, messages were sent from village to village by the beat of a drum. But then people moved from villages to the city where they were exposed to radio signals. Telephone service was originally provided by the government. It was bureaucratic and ineffective. Few Africans - about 3% of the population - had access to land-line telephones both because of government ineptness and the difficulty of wiring homes for service. It might take seven months to get phone service after placing an order with the government.

All this changed when telecommunications was deregulated. Private companies set up networks for communication by cell phone. There was competition between the carriers. Today the cell-phone business in Africa is booming. Nigeria has eleven different carriers; and other countries, between three and five. There were an estimated 280 million customers in Africa in 2007. Cell-phone service in Africa now surpasses that in North America. (Canada and the U.S. had 277 million customers in 2007.) By 2012, there may be 500 million African cell-phone subscribers.

Why the success of this new technology? First, 95% of cell-phone customers use prepaid subscriptions. Therefore, they do not need to be employed or have bank accounts. They do not need residential addresses. They simply buy $5 telephone cards and use up the time on the card. Second, they don’t pay for incoming calls. Some business people use this service to take calls from customers. For instance, cab drivers can take calls from people who want rides. People can be reached anytime anywhere. Third, customers do not need one- or two-year subscriptions. They need only to have a phone and buy the cards. They can also transfer unused time on the cards to relatives or friends. They can resell an old phone or buy a used one.

In short, cell-phone networks are relatively easy to set up in Africa. The service is cheap and convenient for people living on that continent. The cell-phone phenomenon belies our image of Africa as an economically backward place.

That was it for the day. The panel discussion ended at 5:15 p.m. There was a reception for members at the Fetzer center. The main lobby includes an exhibit of John Fetzer’s career in radio. Fetzer was the government censor censor for radio stations during World War II. He later acquired radio stations in Nebraska, and then WKZO-AM and WKZO-FM in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He filed an important lawsuit that affected the radio industry. Fetzer was also the owner of the Detroit Tigers baseball team. There were exhibits on his career in the hall at Fetzer Center. There was also a table for published books. Corinne Gilb’s daughter was offering free copies of books that she had written and one written by Roger Wescott. Gilb had died in 2004.

I talked with Professor Stevens-Arroyo’s wife and his son, Adan, who also made a presentation at the conference. Among other things, we talked of the difficulty that today’s college graduates faced in finding employment. We talked, in dire tones, of our changing society. Andrew Targowski came by. He asked me if I would be interested in talking over Matt Melko’s function at Comparative Civilization Review in assigning books to peer reviewers. The request took me by surprise. I have been trying to clear my docket rather than take on additional assignments. So I told Targowski that I was not the right man for this job but, if he couldn’t find anyone else, I might reconsider.

When I ran into David Wilkinson, I asked him if he had received my review of Andrew Targowski’s book, “Information Technology and Societal Development”, that I had written three months earlier. He said that he had not. I insisted that I had sent the review to him by email. I thought I was submitting the review to Comparative Civilization Review for publication. Wilkinson told me that reviews published in this journal first had to be presented at the annual conferences. If it was not reviewed at this conference, we would have to wait another year. Andrew Targowski was, of course, the current ISCSC president. People would be interested in his publications.

Western Michigan University provided Internet connections for conference attendees in a room next to the main lobby. Somehow, Wilkinson located my email in his saved messages at UCLA. He then forwarded this message back to my email address. I pulled up the message on the WMU computer. We printed two copies, one for Wilkinson and one for me. Now I had text for a presentation at this conference. I persuaded Wilkinson to add this review to tomorrow’s book review session that started at 3:30 p.m. All I needed to do then was read the email copy. This would clear my review of Targowski’s book for CCR publication.

Having had a large lunch, I skipped dinner. I sat by myself in a chair in the room where other ISCSC members were dining. This gave me an opportunity read some of the hand-out materials. I then stuck around for the annual meeting and election of officers. A significant number of the ISCSC board members had resigned. Replacements were found for most of them. Next year’s conference was to be held at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. My friend Michael Andregg would be the program director. We saw slides of the campus.

I walked back to Hoekje hall to turn in early. At 9:00 a.m. on the following morning, I would have to lead my own panel discussion. I knew my alarm clock did not work. I was worried that I would oversleep. Fortunately, I had a watch that kept time.

Friday’s Program - Morning

Fortunately I awoke at the right time. The first event of the day was to take breakfast in the student cafeteria. Then I walked over to Fetzer to prepare for the session in the Putney Lecture Hall. In view of time restraints, I had decided to read my statement rather than deliver it orally. Originally the statement had taken a half hour to read. While in Beijing, I had cut the time down to 25 minutes. The day before, I had cut several more paragraphs from the paper. The panel chairmen were instructed to ask speakers to keep their presentations to 20 to 25 minutes so there would be time for questions.

My session, titled “Rise and Fall of Civilizations” included three speakers. In the listed order they were: David J. Rosner, speaking on “Conservatism and chaos: Martin Heidegger and the decline of the west”; me, speaking on “Why civilizations decline”; and Donald G. McCloud, speaking on “Globalization - the rise, decline, or mutation of western civilization.”

My own paper was intended to counter the “diffusionist” view of why civilizations change which the World History Association, the French sponsors of the 2006 ISCSC conference, and others were promoting. It also had relevance to what seemed a major theme of the current conference: that environmental limitations would force change in the way business is done. I agreed with that position but also wanted to restate the Spengler-Toynbee view of an “internal dynamic” in the life cycle of civilizations.

What was missing, I felt, was an understanding of the mechanism to explain the civilizational life cycle. For that, I resorted to philosophy. My scheme was loosely related to Hegel but basically my own. I identified a type of thought called “self-consciousness” that drove the development of human societies. My presentation would explain that type of thought and show how it related to the development of civilizations. The mechanism of thought realizing itself drove changes in society.

One of the other speakers, Donald McCloud, was already in the room when I entered. It turned out that he was the dean of international studies at Western Michigan University. McCloud had lived in Malaysia for six years earlier in the present decade. The other speaker, David Rosner, soon arrived. We agreed to go in the order listed in the program. We would hold the questions until all the speakers had finished. That, I thought, would guarantee that everyone would have time to complete his presentation. By the starting time, 9:00 a.m., the room had filled up with 30 to 40 people including Andrew Targowski and other ISCSC leaders. Michael Andregg was leading an alternative panel at this time.

David Rosner was a professor of philosophy at the Metropolitan College of New York. His sharply focused talk concerned the crisis of modernity. Basically, he argued that in the early 20th century western civilization seemed to be falling apart. The old values were disintegrating and no replacement values were in sight. Facing a spiritual “abyss”, humanity sought solace in archaic images reminding one of a lost “golden age”. There was the idea of “rootedness in the land”, the Folkish movement, and racial nationalism. He was referring, of course, to pre-Nazi Germany. But then came the resolution of this cultural anguish in Hitler’s promise of a strong leader who would revive German power and prestige after the debacle of World War I. Militarism gave the illusion of strength. In fact, it led Germany and the world into still deeper troubles.

Rosner’s talk was, then, about the prospect of political Messianism in times of uncertainty. Fearful people want strong leaders to restore confidence. Usually this means conservative leaders who resort to war. Although former President George W. Bush was not mentioned, I assume this was a person Rosner had in mind. However, his talk was also about the pursuit of new values. Spengler had prophesied a new religion. The ‘60s counter-culture in the United States was such an attempt to substitute a new set of values; but this led to a culture of selfishness rather than what could sustain people for longer periods of time. Rosner’s conclusion was that we should beware of absolutist solutions to address our spiritual anguish.

I then faced my first challenge as a moderator of this panel. Pedro Geiger, who was sitting in the front row, asked Rosner a question although I had previously announced that questions were to be held until all speakers were finished. (He had entered the room after I made that announcement and later apologized for speaking out of turn.) Geiger’s question took several minutes to ask. Rosner then gave a rather lengthy response. After he was done, I again repeated the request to hold questions. I also asked questioners and presenters to keep their statements short so that everyone would have time to ask questions in the time we had available. I then began my own presentation.

Briefly, I aligned myself with Spengler and Toynbee who believed that civilizations followed life cycles. Their decline was then a natural progression related to age. I disclosed that I was 68 years of age. My own death would come in due course through the aging process; however, it was possible that I would die sooner if involved in a fatal automobile crash. So, too, with civilizations. They rose and fell according to a natural progression of events but, likewise, could be extinguished if external catastrophes such as conquest by another people or mass starvation occurred.

Then came the part about consciousness and self-consciousness. I gave an example of a nobleman in a carriage who changed his behavior after being robbed. Using my own scheme of civilizations, I explained that the Crusades and other troubling events in the Middle Ages discredited the Papacy and led to the replacement of religion-centered culture during the Renaissance. So also the next civilization, Civilization III, was replaced by a civilization based on entertainment in the aftermath of World War II. (Anyone wishing to read my entire talk can go to http://www.worldhistorysite.com/internaldynamic.html.)

The third speaker, Donald McCloud, discussed whether globalization would replace or alter western civilization. He first noted the competition between China and southeast Asia in trade with the west. The Chinese “Silk Road” carried goods overland along a caravan route. With the Portuguese came the rising importance of trade by sea through the Molucca straights and other routes off the shores of southeast Asia. So, today, we are seeing the global trading system that emerged after World War II replacing older modes of business. We can now move money globally without banks. Technological knowledge spreads quickly.

Both the idea of China as center of the world and the European model of nation-states have become obsolete in this new era. While the nation-state model still occupies our thinking, Pakistan does not fit it very well. The post-war leaders of national independence were mostly educated in Europe. The next generation of leaders was educated locally; they had greater sympathy for authoritarian government.

McCloud discussed the idea of “global cities” which he said were places which had the intellectual capacity to create a new global culture. There were also cities, without this capacity, which acted as “service centers” for global culture. The key to creating global culture was education of the young. Such education allowed young people to step beyond their national identities and see themselves as citizens of the world.

From his experience in Malaysia, Dean McCloud thought that Chinese Malaysians were good examples of this type of person. The Chinese in Malaysia were persecuted by the Malay majority. They therefore did not identify fully with the nation of Malaysia. They considered themselves ethnically Chinese but not citizens of China. These people were best described as “global citizens” - people who could be at home anywhere: In Kuala Lumpur, Sidney, London, or New York.

We had time for plenty of questions. Pedro Geiger asked another one. So did Andrew Andrew Targowski, Laina Farhat-Holzman, Matt Melko, and others prominent in the ISCSC. The questions were equally distributed to the three panelists. I was bewildered by a questioner who characterized my scheme of self-consciousness as “deductive” reasoning but recovered somewhat when I could see that the idea that the carriage would be robbed was a conclusion “induced” from the knowledge of several occurrences with the decision to change plans being “deduced” from that knowledge.

Matt Melko came up to me after the session. He was still troubled by my use of the word “civilization” to describe what he thought were better characterized as “stages” in the development of world society and culture. As in my discussion with John Hord, I repeated the opinion that “civilization” was the best word I could find and no one had a monopoly on such language. Then, Melko remarked, I would alienate myself from other members of the ISCSC who used the word “civilization” in a certain way. Maybe I don’t belong in the ISCSC, I responded. Melko said he believed that I did belong in this organization.

I knew that Matt Melko, like Spengler, Toynbee, and other scholars, was personally invested in the idea of geographically based civilizations, and there was no changing of either of our views. We would just have to live with this disagreement.

Now came the second morning session which began at 10:45 a.m. I wanted to hear my dorm friend, Vladimir Alalykin-Izvekov, who was speaking on the topic of “From Sorokin to Huntington and Beyond: Civilizations in times of Change, Transition, and Crisis” in Session A. On the other hand, Session C, “Economic Issues”, also appealed to me. It was chaired by Dong Hyeon Jung, a South Korean economist whom I had met at previous ISCSC conferences. I think the global economy is the new paradigm which must be considered in the framing of U.S. economic policy, and Jung would know about this. I decided to go to Jung’s presentation and even expressed my regrets to Vladimir just before the session began.

The first speaker in the economic session was a young man named Cheol Hun Park. His topic was “Economic growth and development of Korea under Park Chung-hee and Chun Doo Hwan administrations”. This title refers to two presidents of Korea who led Korea during its period of fastest economic growth. Park Chung-hee was a Korean general who staged a coup d’etat in 1961, a year after Syngman Rhee’s ouster as head of state. He ruled Korea for eighteen years until assassinated by the director of the Korean CIA. Chun Doo Hwan was an army general who served as President of Korea between 1980 and 1988. Both pursued policies of export-led economic growth.

During their period of leadership, the Korean economy grew by 14 times compared with 2.3 times for the world economy. Korea offered low-cost labor for light manufacturing. Park Chung-hee courted foreign investment to produce goods for export. He set targets for export growth. Later, the Korean economy shifted to heavy manufacturing and did equally well. Korean manufacturing is dominated by large firms, called “Chaebol”, who could lower costs by large-scale production and invest in research and development. The price to pay was hyper inflation and inefficiency in overlapping investments.

Chun Doo Hwan, who seized power in 1981, relied less on state planning and more on processes of the free market. He allowed more imported products into Korea and sought increased technology for both consumer and capital goods. Even so, he continued the tradition of authoritarian leadership set by his predecessor. This seemed to be required to combat economic instability in developing nations. The questioning concerned the need for authoritarian government in nations that industrialized rapidly and also the phenomenon of corruption. What is the optimal level of corruption to achieve economic growth, one person asked? There was a lengthy discussion.

I had my hand raised for a long time but the conversation was dominated by persons on the other side of the room. Finally, I put my notepad in my briefcase, rose, and walked over to the door. The panel chair, Dong Hyeon Jung, then said that he had been preparing to recognize me. What was my question? I said only that I wished to catch a presentation in another session and walked out the door.

Unfortunately, Vladimir Alalykin-Izvekov had finished his presentation by the time I arrived. I later learned that his talk was focused on his unified theory of evolution of cultures and civilizations and used as a point of reference concepts of Pitirim Sorokin, Samuel Huntington and other eminent scholars of civilization of the 20th century. To illustrate the main stages of the cultures and civilizations evolution, the speaker presented a number of diagrams in which cultures and civilizations could be seen and mapped as containing the elements of systemic and differential nature, as well as "congeries." Vlad argued that the evolution of cultures and civilizations appears to follow a certain predictable sequence with creative fluctuations and cycles throughout the process.

David Wilkinson, who is the book editor of Comparative Civilization Review, gave the next presentation after I arrived. Its title was: “Landmarks in the Comparative Study of Civilizations”. Wilkinson was also the panel chair. The “landmarks” were scholars who had contributed to our understanding of civilization. His talk concerned the ideas of major thinkers in this field: Hegel, Danilevsky, Spengler, Sorokin, Toynbee, Caroll Quigley, Matthew Melko, and Samuel Huntington (proponent of the “clash of civilizations”).

The German philosopher, Georg W. F. Hegel, who taught at the University of Berlin in the 1820s, developed a grand scheme of history in which civilization moved from east to west across the Eurasian continent. History, he said, would end in a condition of freedom for all people.

Nicollay Danilevsky, a Russian natural scientist in the late 19th century, was first to write history in terms of a series of civilizations. He took civilization beyond Eurasia to include Mesoamerica. Even so, Danilevsky was Russocentric. Wilkinson referred to artist Saul Steinberg's work, “View of the World from 9th Avenue”, in which the details of nearby objects on 9th Avenue are clear while the scene becomes fuzzy as one moves away from one’s own vantage point. So with Danilevsky’s view of the world. This Russian historian conceived of parasitic relationships between civilizations and foresaw a “final war”.

Oswald Spengler, the early 20th century German scholar who wrote “Decline of the West”, broke with the Eurocentric view of human civilizations. There was an “Egyptian civilization”, an “Indian civilization”, a “Western civilization”, etc., all given equal status. Arnold Toynbee, a British historian who lived in the middle and late 20th century, followed Spengler but came up his his own scheme of history. Toynbee was capable of changing his mind upon receiving criticism. His revisions, included in Volume 11 of “A Study of History”, were as interesting as the original text.

Pitirim Sorokin was an emigree from Soviet Russia who founded the Department of Sociology at Harvard. He, like Toynbee, attended the 1961 conference in Salzburg which founded the International Society for the Comparative Study of Civilizations. Sorokin was known for his cyclical view of history in which “ideational” and “sensate” cultures alternate. Ideational culture is a culture dominated by ideas; and sensate culture, one dominated by materialism. Sorokin thought that western civilization was predominantly a sensitive culture focused on technological advancement. It would fall into a decadent phase and be followed by a rebirth of ideational culture.

Carroll Quigley, who taught a two-semester course on civilizations at Georgetown University, died in 1977. Among his many students was Bill Clinton, the future President. His book, “Evolution of Civilization”, had a strong impact on ISCSC members. Quigley was also the source of many writings about “conspiracy theories.”

Wilkinson stressed Quigley’s idea of civilization being related to economic growth. The economy expanded under political protection and the managers then siphoned much of the wealth off for themselves. Society entered a period of conflict as humanity became engrossed in imperialistic wars and scientific knowledge was disrespected. It took many years to recover from those troubles.

Immanuel Wallerstein was a professor of sociology at McGill University and then at the State University of New York (SUNY) until his retirement in 1999. He published a three-volume book, The Modern World-System, bringing together the ideas of Karl Marx and of Fernand Braudel ( who was the subject of a talk by Robert Hanson at the 2004 ISCSC conference on the day before he drowned), and “dependency theory” which divided society between “core” and “periphery” areas. Wilkinson discussed Wallerstein’s idea that periods of economic growth were generally followed by periods of decline. Wallerstein saw the United States as a “hegemon in decline”. He is an influential figure in the anti-globalization movement.

Matt Melko, president of the ISCSC between 1983 and 1986, developed a roster of civilizations like Quigley’s. He has presided over discussions at earlier ISCSC conferences which considered whether “African”, “Latin American”, or other societies should be added to our list of official civilizations. Melko, a professor at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, has also made a study of war and peace. General wars such as the two world wars are rare. They are not “turning points of history” and are, in fact, often meaningless.

Samuel Huntington, who died in December last year, was a political-science professor at Harvard, best known for this thesis that a “clash of civilizations” would characterize world society following the Cold War. Conflicts between religiously or ethnically based civilizations would replace ideological conflicts. Such theories have not been tested. Huntington was an ISCSC member who, to my knowledge, did not attend any conferences. He believed that intercivilizational conflicts could be reduced if governments ceased to meddle in other people’s affairs.

In the discussion period that followed, some suggested that other scholars of civilization such as Lewis Fry Richardson (who studied the causes of war), Fernand Braudel (an economic historian, author of “Civilization and Capitalism” ), and Feliks Koneczny (a Polish philosopher and scholar of civilizations) ought to be added to our list of landmarks. Laina Farhat-Holzman proposed that low birth rates in western Europe, Russia, and Japan would have a major impact on the future of civilization.

A question addressed to the other panelist, Reed Smith, whose presentation was made before I arrived, referred to Spengler’s idea of “retards vs. megalopolis”. Europe was becoming one big city, as was the coastal area of the United States between Boston and Washington, D.C. There was discussion of Sorokin’s idea of civilizations as being mere “congeries”, which are collections of things rather than systems. Some speculated that future science will be focused on the realm of the very small and produce concepts at variance with religion. As business grows larger, it becomes amoral. Those were some of the thoughts expressed.

Friday’s Program - Afternoon

The lunch period began at 12:30 p.m. I hung around the Fetzer Center hall and then walked back to the dorm for a short nap. Pedro Geiger apologized for asking a question after the first presentation of my session. He confessed to some difficulty with the English language. Then I went back to the dorm, skipping lunch. I had no functional alarm clock but, since my own event was out of the way, it did not matter so much.

Matt Melko addressed a plenary session at 2:00 p.m. on the subject of “war, peace, and civilization.” I was about a half hour late. Over many years, Melko had attempted to correlate the outbreak of wars with other conditions. Peace was the prevalent situation but wars frequently occurred throughout history. Since I did not take notes, I cannot remember all that was said. I believe someone asked Melko if his study had reached firm conclusions. He confessed to some doubt. It was sometimes hard to distinguish war from peace and harder still to provide explanations. Matt Melko at least had attempted a systematic study of this subject.

Now, starting at 3:30 p.m., we had our last panel discussion of the day. I was obligated to attend Session B, “Books: Mediterranean Area”, chaired by George Von der Muhll, because I would read my review of Andrew Targowski’s book that we had retrieved from the Internet on the previous day. The other reviewer, besides Von der Muhll and me, was Midori Yamanouchi-Rynn.

I had been looking forward to meeting her again and perhaps continuing the conversation that we had over cocktails at the Newark conference in 2001. This was not to be. Yamanouchi-Rynn was always busy talking with old friends; she had been prominent in the organization back in the 1990s. I learned that, after her troubles at the University of Scranton, she had assumed a high-level administrative position at Lackawanna College, which is also in the Scranton area.

Midori Yamanouchi-Rynn led off with two book reviews. The first was of a book by Vassos Karageorghis titled “Early Cyprus”. The east Mediterranean island of Cyprus exported copper to Sumer (Mesopotamia) in the 18th century B.C. It later provided timber to the Minoans on Crete. There was brisk trade between Cyprus and Egypt during the reign of Pharaoh Ikhnaton.

Starting in the 7th century B.C., Cyprus became an important outpost of Phoenician traders. This was historically significant because the Phoenicians invented the alphabet used by western peoples. They established Carthage and other colonial outputs in both the eastern and western parts of the Mediterranean sea. After conquering Lebanon, the Assyrians held Cyprus for one hundred years. Later the Greeks controlled this island. In later years, Cyprus became known for production of furniture, including thrones, and decorated books. The 6th century B.C. was the heyday of Cypriot sculpture.

The other book reviewed by Midori Yamanouchi-Rynn was Sybile Haynes’, “Etruscan Civilization”. The Etruscans were a people who controlled central Italy before the Romans. They are sometimes called “Tarquins”. Toynbee connects their civilization to that of the Hittites in Anatolian Turkey. Haynes’ book, printed in Hong Kong, was filled with high-quality pictures. The author, who is currently teaching at Oxford University, has a museum background. This book may be the definitive visual collection of artifacts gathered from Etruscan society.

My review of Andrew Targowski’s “Information Technology and Societal Development” came next. I simply read the email copy. Targowski’s computer background shows in the organization of this book, I said. It was filled with flow charts and diagrams of various sorts. I was critical of some of the categories used to frame the discussion and of the mathematical formulae that quantified concepts but, on the whole, praised the book as a comprehensive study of development in computer technology today. The focus was on how this technology was being applied to functions in contemporary society. As one of the pioneers of computer technology in Poland during the 1970s and as professor of information science in the School of Business at Western Michigan University, Targowski had the credentials to author this kind of book.

In the book review, I did pursue a bone of contention that concerns my own view of civilization. I contend that Americans are living primarily in Civilization IV, which is the age of electronic entertainment. The idea that entertainment can be the basis of a civilization grates on the nerves of civilizational scholars such as Targowski. The pursuit of “fun” has been present in all societies and is, perhaps, too unserious a concept to be used in connection with the study of civilization. Targowski argued that such pursuits characterize societies in decline while societies that produce useful goods and services have a future. I denied being an apologist for “la dolce vita” pointing out that entertainment was historically an alternative to the grim business of war. We fun-loving Americans do have a reputation for being soft.

Finally George Von der Muhll, my housemate at the 2002 ISCSC conference in Jamaica, reviewed Kevin Butcher’s book, “Roman Syria and the Middle East.” This was a study of Roman rule in territories now including Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, Turkey, and Iraq, but not Egypt, from 63 B.C. to 636 A.D., when Muslim armies conquered the area. The three themes explored in the book as stated by Von der Muhll were: (1) organizing time and space, (2) economic production and consumption, and (3) construction of communities.

With respect to structures of time and space, the Romans created the calendar that was used throughout the empire. Historians can date events by referring to imperial administrations. Jesus Christ was born, for instance, during the reign of Caesar Augustus. The territory controlled by Rome was divided into provinces which enjoyed a measure of local rule. The political rulers acquired identities based on their degree of cooperation with Rome.

Economically, this area was significant as the western terminus of the Silk Road leading from China to the Mediterranean sea. Tunisia, in north Africa, was the breadbasket of the empire. Roman architecture and roads were a physical sign of this civilization. Our knowledge of history comes both from Roman imperial sources - edicts, tax collections, and coins - and from indigenous records, such as writings in the Christian New Testament, which tend to give a more detailed picture of what life was like then.

Why was Rome interested in its Levantine provinces, Von der Muhll asked? One reason was that this is where Roman generals made their reputation. From Sulla and Marius to Trajan and Hadrian, famous generals were involved in pacifying this region. Pompey, Caesar’s rival, brought Judaea under Roman rule. This region also represented a frontier with Parthia, a kingdom that the Romans were unable to conquer. Though on the eastern periphery of the empire, Rome’s Middle Eastern provinces were politically important. They were also, of course, religiously important, too.

After this session we had a two-hour break before dinner at the Fetzer center. It was during this time, I recall, that I had another significant conversation in the Fetzer lounge. Donald Burgy, whom I had met the first evening, told me of his interest in paleolithic inscriptions. He believed that these were not simply naturalistic drawings but, in fact, a precursor to written language. The orthodox view is that ideographic writing began in Mesopotamia and Egypt in the 4th millennium B.C. It was first used to record commercial transactions. This was all wrong, Burgy said. Writing actually began ten thousand years earlier in the inscriptions that archeologists have found on rocks and the walls of caves.

What is more, Burgy said that he had translated a number of these inscriptions. He had published four articles in Comparative Civilization Review explaining what the symbols meant. Some past issues of CCR were lying on a table. We looked at an issue from Fall 2004. The lead article by Robert Duncan Enzmann and Donald Thomas Burgy was titled “Reading Europe’s Paleolithic Writing”. I had given this article only a cursory glance when I first read the journal because I had not realized its significance. Now Burgy and his colleague were claiming to have “read” the inscriptions, not merely look at them in an archeological context.

The article began with an interpretation of an inscription in a rock found in Gonnersdorf, Germany, dating back to 12,500 B.C. The authors claimed that the markings represented three women at various stages of life - an old crone, a matron, and a maiden carrying a child. “Engraved within the three female silhouettes are abstract signs which identify them as spinsters who twist fibers into strands of thread, string, yarn, lamp wicks, cords, etc.”, the article said. Germanic legend mentions three women - old Urth, middle age Verdandi, and young Skuld - who sit under the tree of life spinning the threads of people’s lives. Perhaps these were the women in the inscription.

A particular symbol - the “twist sign” - was a key to understanding them. This symbol has been found in pictures of Greek women twisting yarn on leg pads; writings in known languages explain their purpose. It is also similar to symbols used in Egyptian hieroglyphics, Minoan Linear B script, and Chinese characters.

I was fascinated by Burgy’s story. He had made a potentially revolutionary discovery yet no one knew about it or even cared. Burgy said that he had collected numerous inscriptions from archeological journals and other sources and had slowly gathered enough knowledge to be able to translate the inscriptions. Yet, when he asked to purchase copies of the original photographs, his request was always denied. He was denied permission to visit the archeological sites. One editor even denied the existence of an inscription which his own journal had published.

The only person who would give Burgy the time of day was Laina Farhat-Holzman. When Burgy submitted his articles to CCR for peer review, all the reviewers recommended against publication. Farhat-Holzman, as editor, had overruled them. That’s why Donald Burgy was able to publish his article.

All of a sudden Laina went from being a goat to a heroine in my eyes. The same qualities of personal stubbornness that had led her to inject her own political views into the journal allowed her to give a second chance to a lonely scholar who might have something quite important to say. That was more than enough to redeem whatever misgivings I might once have had. I had came to this conference with a chip on my shoulder about her article on conspiracy theories and now I wanted to give Laina Farhat-Holzman a medal.

Even so, I, too, had my suspicions. How did Donald Burgy know what the inscriptions meant? It was not enough to say that he had come to certain conclusions through “years of study”. Granted, Burgy was a professional artist who could intuit certain visual things; yet the world of historical scholarship rightly demands proof. I suggested to Burgy that he assemble all his inscriptions and create a “dictionary” of meanings. Burgy resisted the idea. Maybe his evidence was not as solid as he claimed.

I then said that I, as a skeptic, would be willing to sit down with him and try to piece the evidence together in a logical way. Maybe we could develop an inductive argument to establish verbal meanings from scattered inscriptions. From the standpoint of civilizations, such work would be of the highest importance. Burgy was interested in that.

So I had found another nonacademic scholar at the conference again obsessed with revealing the truth. What a group this was! It attracted misfits, eccentrics, amateur scholars - or, in short, people like me. Only persons with a few loose screws would get mixed up in studying something called “civilization” which is subject to so many different interpretations and disciplines or areas of interest. Fate had brought me to this conference. First Maurer, then Burgy - what other interesting characters would I meet here?

I had another conversation during the break period which was not so fortunate. I saw Pedro Geiger sitting by himself in the Fetzer lounge. Although I