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Coming in on the tail end of the debate about whether the word "civilization" ought to be used or not, let me suggest that the real problem is not the word or concept "civilized" but the concept of progress we have all had drilled into us since the Enlightenment. Certainly complex "civilizations" can be intelligently and usefully distinguished from, say, nomad hunting societies, and that's a job it seems to me historians can and probably ought to do. The issue is rather whether we are sure that it is *better* to live in a "civilization" than in a nomadic hunting society. The way to take *that* issue on is to challenge the assumption that moving to complex societies was necessarily progress. (See for example some of the works of Jared Diamond and others who deal with hunter-gatherers, maybe most accessibly in Diamond's article in the May 1987 *Discover*, pp. 64- 66, which calls the Agricultural Revolution "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race".) Hunter-gatherers almost certainly worked less than we do, worked intermittently rather than almost continuously, had more leisure time, played more, took more naps etc. We have more material goods, but we paid a price for it. One can do much the same thing with many other issues, e.g. the Industrial Revolution. I've been using such opportunities to attack the concept of progress, or at least the automatic assumption of progress, for some time now and while students' initial reaction seems to be bewilderment and shock, in the long run it seems to get their attention and get them to wrestle with the material as well as anything I've tried. Too crazy an idea? Dr. Rhiman A. Rotz, Associate Professor of History Indiana University Northwest, Gary, Indiana 46408, USA Phone: (219) 980-6973 E-mail: rrotz@iunhaw1.iun.indiana.edu
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