In short, isn't civilisation the process of making simple things complex and feeling good about it? Civilisation may not be about refinement, but about layering convenience, ritual, and symbolism over simplicity until we confuse effort with meaning. Culture may be the way we live meaningfully; civilisation, the way we complicate that meaning to sustain systems.
Yes, feeling good is what matters - when the so-called uncivilised groups feel good with the least complexity in life, not even being aware of their being fulfilled, the so-called civilised groups feel good by making things complex and finally feel good about having accomplished something.
The Basic Act of 'Eating' as an Example
Basically, we eat to survive - energy needs for our functions as living beings.
It can be coarse and uncooked material, obtained through gathering or hunting (a kind of gathering). Availability is a contingent factor. Contingency is removed through the cultivation of food, growing food, and harvesting it. This process makes culture, and the varying modes of the process lead to civilisation.
From raw material to cooked material is another step towards civilisation. This adds to the complexity. The animal survival mode is refined or made complex, leading to greater vulnerability. Once used to this stage, having no cooked and readily available food can leave humans helpless and susceptible to illness.
Perhaps, both agriculture and cooking came to be by sheer accident, and finding them useful and advantageous, they were improvised and refined further to make them part of the lifestyle.
In the initial stages the food could have been eaten directly as obtained. Now it requires vessels to store, vessels to cook and vessels to eat as well. From a standing position, one needs to sit to eat. And once eaten sitting on the floor, is refined further to sit on a tool that makes sitting easier and then a tool to keep the vessels so that human beings could eat without the trouble to bend low.
The next step is avoiding the trouble to use one's hands to insert food into the mouth, which necessitates washing of the hands, to keep it clean for other activities. Cleaning typically requires water which is cold in the witner, and this is avoided by introducing tools that help one to insert food into the mouth without soiling the hands - spoons, fork etc. Or if one has to use the hands directly, a towel to clean it, without having to wash it during the meals.
To avoid the trouble of washing those tools - utensils, what could be used and thrown away is conceived - disposable plates, cutlery and tissues.
An entire manufacturing chain is created to manufacture materials that help one eat - of varying qualities like durability, safety, beauty, etc., making the process further complex.
There are ancillary processes at each stage or with each aspect of this complex process. Thus, in growing food, there are efforts to boost growth - faster and abundant. A whole lot of inputs are created for that, and research and experiments for the same are carried out in a big way.
While promoting growth and abundance, there pestilences emerge and then there are any number of efforts to check them leading to the devising and manufacturing of pesticides.
Then there emerges threat from pesticides and there is need to introduce safety standards and processes for the same - at each stage of the food creation and consumption chain - seeds, soil, harvest, storing, processing, eating and post-eating.
And education and training for all these aspects and processes as well.
And policies to govern and control all these and personnel to guide and enforce them!!
At this complex stage, eating and related activities - growing food, processing it etc. become culture. And activities like cooking become an art, a profession, a job calling for education and training. Even agriculture could take the form of an art in some cases.
This is how civilisation is built by making very simple things complex and further complex, and undertaking those complexities with precision, and feeling good about having done this.
I recall the story told about the culture of eating - no offence meant to anyone. Some so-called modern civilised man gets into the hands of a forest-dwelling community, still practising the culture of cannibalism. Naturally, he is tied down. Then comes the chief, dressed in the traditional attire of the people, but he addresses the man and converses in chaste English. Despite the horror of the imminent death, the prisoner is not able to contain his curiosity, and he shares the same with the chief: "You appear highly educated. Didn't your education make any difference to your approach to this practice?" He responded warmly: "Oh yes, yes... In earlier times, we used to eat this feast with our bare hands. Now we feast using fork and spoon, and knife, and use tissues to wipe our hands."
Whether the complexities make a finer being out of the persons engaging them, and lead to greater happiness - for themselves and others - that should be the test of a culture.
Religion: Christian Eucharistic Culture as an Example
Another case that comes to my mind is that of religious rituals: typically, the topmost among the rituals Christians follow - the Eucharist.
I believe that Jesus did hold a passover meal, just before his death - the traditional Jewish ritualistic meal; but away from his family of birth (perhaps, his mother was there), but establishing a wider family of the children of God. Forseeing the imminent persecution for his teachings and actions, it is likely that he made the meal symbolic of his life and approaching sacrificial suffering. And his instruction, 'do this in memory of me, ' in all likelihood, was an injunction to follow his model of sacrifice and suffering for the principles he stood for - for approaching God with the freedom of the children of a loving father, of setting aside all rules and regulations for increasing goodness around oneself, for making people happier through fellowship, meals and making them whole.
Perhaps, the initial century of Christianity, starting with a group of Jewish followers of Jesus, gradually realising the broader meanings of Jesus' teachings, made itself more inclusive by absorbing members of other communities, generally despised, threatened and persecuted by the Jewish leadership and the Roman authorities, continued the practice of fellowship meals in which they shared whatever they owned with the members of the community, and blessed God for that spirit.
Gradually, over a century or two, the movement gets established as a sect, a religion, and the matters related to God becomes separated from that of the material welfare, and then, a cadre is evolved to take care of those matters, with those aspects becoming distinct, formalised. The spiritual is getting distinct from the material welfare, and symbols and formulae are getting infused into the former to establish rituals. And a few traditions emerge from the linguistic and cultural contexts and get solidified. They become so solid that anyother form of reliving the Jesus experience of the divine in the world becomes a heresy, a threat, a sin, a crime. On the other hand, the rituals become much more complex - with specific space, furniture, decor, vestments, prayer formulae, trained and dedicated people.
Thus the simple meal fellowship emerging to address the basic need of sustenance, where sacrificial sharing of material resources was the core of a spirituality leading to wellbeing of all, became a highly nuanced ritual, bordering the magical. The thanksgiving (Eucharistia) for the spirit of goodness that prompted self-sacrifice, became a ritualistic thanksgiving borrowed from the Judaic tradition.
Making it further magical, the meal aspect got reduced to the real presence in the matter (species) of the Eucharistic ritual, which was induced through the utterance of the magical formulae (institutional words) by duly consecrated priests. And then emerges the practice of storing that material presence for emergency access, whereas the promise of the presence in the fellowship in Jesus' name as well as the presence of God in each of the fellow humans, became conveniently forgotten. Abuse of a fellow human could easily be tolerated, whereas abuse of the magical sacramental presence could not be.
Now, further rituals are developed around the magical presence confined (imprisoned) in the presence of consecrated bread (wafer host), and you have any number of devotions around that - perpetual adoration, 40-hour, 13-hour, 1-hour adoration, with any number of theories and explanations surrounding them. To my mind, such ingenuity in piety is parallel to the formulation of three-day, one-day and limited over cricket!! (Phew, this might sound very irreverent) There is a science about the presence of Jesus in the consecrated bread, formulated with fantastic philosophical concepts of form and matter, substance and accidents, and evolving such terrific concepts as 'trans-substantiation'. Height of theological imagination!!
There are fasts and feasts around its celebration, and they themselves become pious practices and rituals. The piety entrepreneurs don't feel satisfied with the annual solemn celebration of the passover time of establishing the sacrament of the Eucharist (the presence of Jesus in fellowship meals reimagined), that they created a special feast for the Eucharist, with solemn 9-day (what is the significance of 9 days? After the 9 planets?) preparations, fasts (in Germany there are fasts of one week to 3 days in preparation for this feast) and processions along the streets where the encased eucharistic prisoner is taken around.
A business and culture is developed around the devotion - 1) the material for manufacturing the wafer hosts 2) the method for the same 3) the machines for the same 4) vessels for storing the unconsecrated hosts 5) the vessels for storing the consecrated hosts - ciborium 6) the equipment for exposing the consecrated hosts for veneration - the monstrance of various designs - gold or silver plated, with its specific receptacles 7) the ornamental cloth covering of these vessels 8) the special vestments for raising the hosts for veneration and benediction 9) the special cloth cover to shade the minister and the monstrance taken around in procession.
There are special prayers, hymns, music, methods, and symbols for all these details.
The efforts involved in learning and recalling the names of these very many forms of rituals, their materials and the liturgical vessels and items are themselves a task!!
And yet, there are genuine and simple souls who have experienced the divine through such paraphernalia of rituals and blindly believing in this whole system of imprisoning God and imprisoning minds, being elevated to greater visions and noble acts of charity.
However, it is to be admitted that all these put together do not match the amount of goodness the faithful generate around them within their households or in their neighbourhood.
The Contradiction: The Ritualistic Religion Devoid of the Spirit of Christ
And the 21st century Kerala church has shown the folly of all this, with all these kept in tact, priests, consecrated persons and men and women claiming to be folowers of Jesus (perhaps that has taken a backseat, they are merely Christians, another sect built around the faith in Jesus Christ, but very little bothered about his mission or methods) fighting in the Churches, fighting at the altar, fighting reciting prayers, and fighting in the streets and in civil courts, clearly giving a damn to the person of Jesus around whom all this has emerged.
The preachy Christian leadership has not bothered if the rituals being introduced really make sense to the people concerned, or whether there could be possibilities of accommodating the popular aspirations in how the communitarian celebration of faith or communitarian worship is held.
Dom Helder Camara, the radical and martyr bishop of Reciffe is said to have commented when there was an act of desecration of the Eucharist in one of the Churches, addressing the gathering in atonement and protest: 'We are pained at the desecration of the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist; however, we are unconcerned when the presence of God is desecrated in our fellow human beings subjected to exploitation and want.' (paraphrased).
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