Civilization and Ethics: Selections from “The Decay and the Restoration of Civilization” by the Reverend Dr. Albert Schweitzer (vegetarian), Part 1 of 2

Today, it is a pleasure to present selections from “The Decay and the Restoration of Civilization” by the Reverend Dr. Albert Schweitzer (vegetarian). This work explains that civilization’s goal is to establish favorable conditions for living, with the aim of the spiritual and moral perfecting of individuals.

CHAPTER 3 CIVILIZATION ESSENTIALLY ETHICAL IN CHARACTER

“For a quite general definition we may say that civilization is progress, material and spiritual progress, on the part of individuals as of the mass. In what does it consist? First of all in a lessening of the strain imposed on individuals and on the mass by the struggle for existence. The establishment of as favorable conditions of living as possible for all is a demand which must be made partly for its own sake, partly with a view to the spiritual and moral perfecting of individuals, which is the ultimate object of civilization. […]

Which of these kinds of progress is most truly progress in civilization? The latter, though it is the least open to observation. Why? For two reasons. First, the supremacy which we secure by reason over external nature represents not unqualified progress, but a progress which brings with its advantages also disadvantages, which may work in the direction of barbarism. The reason why the economic circumstances of our time endanger our civilization is to be sought for partly in the fact that we have pressed into our service natural forces which can be embodied in machines. But with that there must be such a supremacy of reason over the dispositions of men that they, and the nations which they form, will not use against one another the power which the control of these forces gives them, and thus plunge one another into a struggle for existence which is far more terrible than that between men in a state of nature. A normal claim to be civilized can, then, only be reckoned as valid when it recognizes this distinction between what is essential in civilization and what is not. […]

All attempts at civilization hitherto have been a matter of processes in which the forces of progress were at work in almost every department of life. Great achievements in art, architecture, administration, economics, industry, commerce, and colonization succeeded each other with a spiritual impetus which produced a higher conception of the universe. Any ebb of the tide of civilization made itself felt in the material sphere as well as in the ethical and spiritual earlier, as a rule, in the former than in the latter. […]”