Page 6 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

INTRODUCTION:
ON THE EDGE

In 1936, a Polish journalist reflected in a regional newspaper on the state of local civilization—or

rather its deficits. “It seems strange,” he wrote, “that in the age of airplanes, radio, electricity,

telegraphs, and telephones, in the age when distance and time are disappearing, there live in Poland a

great number of people, especially in the eastern borderlands […] who minimally—or not at all—

benefit from the benefactions of the civilization of the twentieth century.” They lived, the author

continued, “on the level of people from a remote epoch, of an age wholly retarded in spiritual,

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intellectual, and economic development.” In the author’s mind, “civilization” (cywilizacja in Polish)

was wedded to neither connotations of classical antiquity nor the increasingly problematic model of

Western civilization that European poets and artists had heavily criticized in the wake of the Great

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War. Instead, he referred to ever-higher levels of material development and technical innovation.

While the journalist’s comments were published in a region of which few Americans or

western Europeans would have heard, his reference to civilizational development was perfectly in

step with the spirit of the interwar years. Indeed, he drew upon a much broader assumption that was

shared by European elites: some areas of the world and their populations were civilizationally

advanced, while others lagged woefully behind. Europeans measured civilization using metrics as

diverse as building materials, hygiene levels, everyday customs, and literacy rates. French

missionaries criticized the mud huts of Africans, British imperialists lamented the poor hygiene

levels among “natives” in the Raj, and officials in the Soviet Union viewed nomadic Central Asians

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as a backward population that needed to be dragged into the modern world. Whether written in

1 “Potrzebny kulturalne wsi wołyńskiej,” Wołyń, August 9, 1936, 5.
2 David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century (New York, 2015),
158.
3 The literature on European colonialism is vast. For more on the ways in which European imperial powers justified
colonial rule through judgments on the material culture of native peoples, see Michael Adas, Machines as the
Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western dominance (Ithaca, 1989). On central Asia, see

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