Culture Is What We Are, Civilization Is What We Have

On 11 March 2001 the Taliban government of Afghanistan completed the demolition of the two giant Buddhas of Bamiyan, carved into a cliff face in the sixth century and standing fifty five and thirty eight metres tall. Dynamite and artillery turned them into rubble within weeks, despite appeals from governments and scholars around the world. The statues were part of what the Afghan people had, an inheritance of stone. Their destruction was an attack on what they meant, a history of exchange between India, Greece and Central Asia. The distinction behind the topic, that culture is what we are and civilization is what we have, is felt sharply in such acts.

The sentence is usually credited to the sociologist R. M. MacIver, who drew the distinction in his book Society in 1931. By civilization he meant the whole apparatus of techniques and organisation that humans have built for controlling their conditions of life, such as machines, roads, law and administration. By culture he meant the expression of our nature in our modes of living and thinking, in literature, religion, art and recreation. Civilization is a means, and culture is an end. One is possessed and the other is lived.

Earlier thinkers made similar contrasts. In Germany, the word Kultur was used from the eighteenth century for inner cultivation, art and spirit, in contrast with the French and English civilisation, which seemed to the Germans to be a matter of polish and manners. Oswald Spengler wrote in The Decline of the West in 1918 that every culture eventually hardens into a civilization, a stage of cities, money and technique, in which creative energy dries up. For him the movement from culture to civilization was the sign of old age.

The Indian reflection on the subject has been sharp. Gandhi wrote Hind Swaraj in 1909, a polemic against what he called modern civilization, which in his view elevated bodily comfort and material progress above morality. A possibly apocryphal reply is attributed to him when asked what he thought of Western civilization, that it would be a good idea. Rabindranath Tagore, in his lectures on nationalism, likewise warned that a people who gather power and wealth without a deeper life are building a cage. The worry in both cases is of a civilization that has outrun its culture.

The worry in both cases is of a civilization that has outrun its culture.

The distinction helps to explain some experiences of loss. A community can be uprooted from its homeland and still carry its culture. The Parsis who reached Gujarat from Persia more than a thousand years ago kept their religion, language and customs through centuries in a new country. The Jewish diaspora kept its identity across two millennia without a state. Their civilization, in the sense of territory and institutions, was lost or left behind, and their culture, carried in memory and ritual, went with them.

The reverse also happens. A society can possess all the apparatus of civilization and lose its culture. Many immigrants from villages to megacities in India or elsewhere find themselves rich in phones, flats and roads but poor in the songs, festivals and neighbourly ties that gave life its texture. Cities of glass towers may house people who do not know their neighbours. Sociologists describe anomie, the condition in which the old norms have lapsed and nothing has replaced them. A person in such a state has a great deal and does not know who he is.

Culture also shows in the ordinary. The way people greet each other, eat together, address elders or mourn their dead is not a product of machines. Language is perhaps its deepest carrier, and the world is losing languages at a great rate, with linguists estimating that about half of the roughly seven thousand tongues now spoken may vanish by the end of the century. India, which has hundreds, faces the same pressure. When a language dies, a way of seeing disappears along with the stories and the botanical and ecological knowledge it held.

Yet the contrast must not be drawn too sharply. What we have shapes what we are. The printing press changed the way Europeans thought, the railway altered the Indian sense of distance and the mobile phone has reshaped the family. Marshall McLuhan argued in the 1960s that the medium is the message, meaning that tools change the people who use them. A culture that adopts a new technology will not remain the same culture. The question is whether it can absorb the tool on its own terms.

Japan after 1868 offers a case. Under the Meiji emperor the country adopted Western law, industry and military organisation at astonishing speed, and became a modern power within a generation. Yet it kept distinctly Japanese forms of social relation, aesthetics and ritual, so that a visitor sees telephones and tea ceremonies side by side. The model was imitated by many Asian nations, with varying success. It suggests that a people can acquire civilization without surrendering culture, if they choose with care.

The danger is also visible in the reverse, when culture is exalted and civilization disdained. Movements that glorify an imagined pure past and reject learning from others tend to become sterile or violent. Culture left to itself can ossify. A living culture takes in foreign influences, as Indian music took in the violin and Indian cuisine took in the chilli from the Americas. Having and being are bound together in a continuing exchange, and it is hard to say what a people are without referring to what they have made and borrowed.

The topic therefore reads best as a priority and not a separation. A society should ask of its achievements what they are for, and measure its civilization by its culture, whether its cities make people more human and its power more just. But the question is difficult to answer from inside. The inhabitants of a culture do not see it, as a fish does not see water, and notice it only when it is threatened, by which time what they are may already be a little different from what they were.