Are you civilized? Is your neighbor? How about your President?
Trick question.
As far as I can tell, we don’t have a measure of “how” civilized we are. Sure, an economist will point to GDP, a geographer could point to population, and a librarian could point to how many reference works exist.
But HOW civilized are we?
One measure put forward many years ago has to do with eating.
I love eating. And I love studying behavior. Let’s put the two together.
If I took your civilization and withheld the food supply so it was, say, 25% of normal, what would happen?
Would many people starve quietly, still obeying the rules of decency and law so that civilization continued peacefully?
Or would there be some sort of breakdown in the rules? Would people become more like wild animals, stealing, robbing, murdering, even cannibalizing?
Let’s bring some rigor to the process.
Take any group of people, say the group you’re stuck in a meeting with today, and make them supreme. By that I mean, make everyone else in the world go away. They have the whole Earth to call their own.
How long can this group survive using the rules of society they grew up with? Will they thrive and grow into a new society? Or will they end up at each other’s throats? Or, my favorite, will they run away from each other, dying alone?
Make the group your whole nation. Or the whole Earth. You choose the group.
Then restrict their food. Give them only so many calories every quarter day.
Here’s where the fun starts.
I know that when I get hungry, I attack. I attack the fridge. MUST EAT screams my stomach. The rest of the body follows. When my stomach is full I go back to being all nice and civilized.
How many quarter days would I allow civilization to survive? Maybe two.
How about you?
Behavior, study of... 