What actually is ‘civilisation’? The dark and loaded history behind Trump’s threat against Iran

In the midst of a war of his own choosing, the president of the United States, Donald Trump, recently tried to threaten his way out of it. On April 7, he posted on Truth Social that unless Iran buckled to his will, “a whole civilization will die tonight”.

He presumably meant to amplify his earlier claim that he intended to bomb Iran back to “the stone age”.

Trump’s words are rarely to be taken at face value. Yet his recent incitement to war crimes proved shocking, even by his standards.

But what actually is “civilisation”? And why has Trump’s threat struck a nerve in even his most ardent loyalists?

Coined in an age of conquest and enslavement

The word “civilisation” is a creation of the age of Enlightenment in the 18th century. It was coined to describe a social order that European philosophers and writers then believed was coming into being in parts of Western Europe.

The word derived from older terms in Europe’s lexicon. To be “civil” denoted politeness, and “civility” a code of peaceful conduct essential to city life.

One of the first people to use the word was French political economist Victor de Riqueti, Marquis de Mirabeau (1715–89). In his work L'ami des Hommes, ou, Traité de la Population (The Friend of Man, or Treatise on Population) (1756), civilisation implied three things.

Mirabeau described the historical role of Christianity as the “primary driving force of civilisation”. What he meant was Christianity curbed human violence and turned Europeans by slow degrees over time toward amity and friendship. In other words, the civilised knew God and acted with divine purpose – or at the very least, were less violent and cruel than the “uncivilised”.

Mirabeau also employed the word to describe the “natural cycle of barbarism and […] civilisation”. Here, he implied all peoples were located somewhere along a pathway in time between the condition of mere barbarians, and the exalted heights occupied by the civilised. Not all may scale the heights, but those who do must take care to avoid falling.

The civilised could see more, know more and have more. That “more”, Mirabeau suggested, was the evidence of their civilisation. The barbarian by contrast, simply lacks.

Finally, Mirabeau used the word to warn of a “return of barbarism and oppression” that would destroy “civilisation and liberty”, endangering “humanity in general”. Civilisation needed defence, especially from the so-called “barbarians”, who he warned may be among us, rather than threatening hordes beyond the city gates.

Here then, at the very origin of the word, lies a deep-laid curse.

Civilisation’s curse is the monumental presumption of separation, of imagining oneself as different from all others, and privileged by that difference. That privilege has so often been expressed in the disdain for, or fear of, “the barbarians” who must be “civilised” – turned away from their presumed savagery, heathenism or mere animality.

A term wrapped up in identity

These connotations still reverberate in contemporary use of the term. It echoes in plural references to particular civilisations in time, such as the Romans, Babylonians, Inca or Mexica.

Although different in language and laws, these civilisations were capable of providing a reasonably refined way of life in flourishing cities, such as with running water, sanitation, roads and bridges. Useful as a teaching aid, this “bricks and mortar” approach reduced civilisation to something like a checklist.

In 1996 the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington invoked this “bricks and mortar” view in The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order. In the post-Cold War era, he argued, global order would be riven not by ideological division so much as by conflicts between distinct civilisations. Huntington’s thesis has been widely discredited, but the idea of plural civilisations remains.

Today, however, the most potent meaning of the word is what we might call the civilisation of capital letters. Western Civilisation, for example, is still regularly invoked to convey a certain history that links Britain and Western Europe with their far-flung colonial offshoots (such as Australia).

Much more than just history, Western Civilisation also implies identity; as if the appellation encompasses who we are as a nation. In this identification lies that deeper curse.

Rarely is Western Civilisation invoked except in warnings that it is in imminent peril, careening toward the end.

Arrogant assumptions

Too frequently has the curse of civilisation inspired this recurrent nightmare. In his 1899 novel, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad presented civilisation as a kind of madness – a derangement of humanity expressed in a nightmarish will to “exterminate all the brutes”.

Thanks to Trump’s threats, this is where we find ourselves now: on the cusp of that persistent curse. As long ago as 1767, one of the earliest adopters of the word, Scots philosopher Adam Ferguson (1723–1816), sought to trace humanity’s path “from rudeness to civilisation”.

Yet Ferguson also questioned the obtuse presumption spawned by the word, that “we are ourselves the supposed standards of politeness and civilisation”. From there it was but a short step to the arrogant assumption that “where our own features do not appear […] that there is nothing which deserves to be known”.

When President Trump says that Iran’s “civilisation” will be “taken out in one night”, we hear echoes of that presumption. His words have made barbarians of us all, equally at the mercy of a madman’s curse.