Race, history and culture - Ethics - March 1996

UNESCO Courier, Dec, 2001 by Claude Levi-Strauss

World civilization

Finally, wherever a contribution is made, there must be a recipient. But, while there are in fact real cultures which can be localized in time and space, and which may be said to have "contributed" and to be continuing their contributions, what can this "world civilization" be, which is supposed to be the recipient of all these contributions? It is not a civilization distinct from all the others, and yet real in the same sense that they are....[It is] an abstract conception, to which we attribute a moral or logical significance--moral, if we are thinking of an aim to be pursued by existing societies; logical, if we are using the one term to cover the common features which analysis may reveal in the different cultures. In both cases, we must not shut our eyes to the fact that the concept of world civilization is very sketchy and imperfect, and that its intellectual and emotional content is tenuous. To attempt to assess cultural contributions with all the weight of countless centuries behind them...by reference to the sole yardstick of a world civilization which is still a hollow shell, would be greatly to impoverish them, draining away their life-blood and leaving nothing but the bare bones behind.

... The true contribution of a culture consists, not in the list of inventions which it has personally produced, but in its difference from others. The sense of gratitude and respect which each single member of a given culture can and should feel towards all others can only be based on the conviction that the other cultures differ from his own in countless ways....

We have taken the notion of world civilization as a sort of limiting concept or as an epitome of a highly complex process. If our arguments are valid, there is not, and never can be, a world civilization in the absolute sense in which that term is often used, since civilization implies, and indeed consists in, the coexistence of cultures exhibiting the maximum possible diversities. A world civilization could, in fact, represent no more than a worldwide coalition of cultures, each of which would preserve its own originality.

Race and culture [2]

[In 1952,] in a booklet written for UNESCO, I suggested the concept of "coalition" to explain why isolated cultures could not hope to create single-handed the conditions necessary for a truly cumulative history. To achieve this, I said, different cultures must, voluntarily or involuntarily, combine their respective stakes in the great game of history, to increase their chances of making that long run of winning plays by which history progresses. Geneticists are at present [1971] putting forward very similar views on biological evolution, in pointing out that a genome is in reality a system within which certain genes function as regulators and others act in concert on a single characteristic (or the contrary, if several characteristics depend on a single gene). What is true of the individual genome is also true of a population, in which the combination of a number of genetic inheritances--in which until recently a "racial type" would have been identified--must always be such as to allow the establishment of an optimum equilibrium and improve the group's chances of survival. In this sense, it might be said that in the history of populations, genetic recombination plays a part comparable to that played by cultural recombination in the evolution of the ways of life, techniques, knowledge and beliefs by which different societies are distinguished.