Civilization or Barbarism: Which is more acceptable?

In Walter Benjamin’s “Thesis on the Philosophy of history”, he argued that civilization could not exist without barbarism. Civilization is the stage of human social development and organization that is considered most advanced. Barbarism is the absence of culture and civilization. Walter Benjamin feels that barbarism was not on document at the first stages of civilization. In many societies, there were always examples of barbarism and civilization. There is no actual evidence of civilization because many civilization documents contain barbaric rules, laws, and regulations. Therefore, in many civilizations they believed that they were civil but in actual reality, they depicted some actions of barbarism. Some examples of “civilizations” and documents that contained barbarism consisted of the Qin Dynasty, the pyramids of Egypt, the Hittite law code, the Huns, Rome, and the Greeks.

In the Qin dynasty, they were very structured and had many rules. In some ways, their civilization was barbaric. In the Qin Dynasty, they had something called legalism. In legalism, it required restraint and discipline. The people involved were evil. They were forced to obey Qin Shi Huang.They had an army called the terracotta army. When Qin Shi Huang died, he killed some soldiers to go with him in the afterlife and he forced artisans to make life size models of the soldiers. This showed that in this society, they called themselves a civilization but their actions were barbaric because they had a strong hold on their people and their society was not equal. They had slaves working hard and some died while performing labor on the Great Wall of China. In history books, they only give credit to those who were noble at the time but not the actual builders of th...

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...laves and sex slaves. The Greeks thought that foreigners sounded they were saying “bar, bar, bar” when they were talking so they started calling them barbarians. In certain Greek city-states, politicians would pass laws that were unfair or just for their benefit, and the people would not be able to protest. As a result, the Greek society fell because they only considered the people of high-class ideas. Their society had many strong points but they are barbaric.

As I stated before, the Greeks, Romans, the Qin dynasty, pyramids of Egypt, the Hittite law codes, and the Huns are all examples of barbarism. Edmond de Goncourt once said, “Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise, it would die of civilization”. Can you say that there is no exact definition of civilization because barbarism exists within all societies?