Civilization Is the Glorious Pursuit of the Inessentials of Life

According to Will Durant, civilization,
“…begins where chaos and insecurity end. For when fear is overcome, curiosity and constructiveness are free, and man passes by natural impulse towards the understanding and embellishment of life.”
Civilization depends greatly on geographic conditions, because hostile environments…
“…divert the energies from those inessentials of life that make civilization, and absorb them in hunger and reproduction; nothing is left for the play of the arts and the mind.”
A people will have great difficulty developing civilization “if it depends for its existence upon the precarious fortunes of the chase.” This is because,
“…without that simple sine qua non of culture, a continuity of food, its intelligence will be lavished on the perils of the hunt and the tricks of trade, and nothing will remain for the laces and frills, the curtsies and amenities, the arts and comforts, of civilization.”
Thus, agriculture was essential for the development of civilization:
“It is when man settles down to till the soil and lay up provisions for the uncertain future that he finds time and reason to be civilized. Within that little circle of security — a reliable supply of water and food — he builds his huts, his temples and his schools; he invents productive tools, and domesticates the dog, the ass, the pig, at last himself.”
For this reason, Durant distinguishes between “the primitive” and “the civilized” as follows:
“Preferably we shall call “primitive” all tribes that make little or no provision for unproductive days, and little or no use of writing. In contrast, the civilized may be defined as literate providers.”
Ultimately, Durant is referring to what Austrian economists call “scales of value” or “preference scales.” There are many ends toward which an actor can allocate any given means. These ends have varying degrees of importance. Actors economize their means by allocating them toward their most urgent ends, toward ends that are higher in their “scales of value.” There are always lower-ranked ends that get none of the means, and are left unpursued.
Thus, survival is the most urgent end for most people. Hunter-gatherers bereft of “a continuity of food” “lavish” their labor and intelligence on extracting food directly from nature and trading for necessities. What Durant calls “the laces and frills, the curtsies and amenities, the arts and comforts, of civilization” are left unpursued, because they are less urgent ends than that of survival. For many hunter-gatherers, productivity is so low and thus food is so scarce that they have insufficient means to pursue both the essentials of survival and the inessentials of civilization.
But the greater productivity of agriculture represents an increase in the quantity of means. And so farmers are capable of pursuing not only their topmost ends (survival and security), but also ends further down their value scale.
Human progress is the process of expanding means allowing us to plumb ever deeper into our value scales, and pursue ever-less urgent purposes that were hitherto out of reach.
