Participate

The word civil (at least in its civic sense) – like various relatives, notably civilization – derives from the latin for it, civilis. This goes with a pattern of (at least formerly) derogatory terms (pagan, peasant, rustic) derived from latin terms for country folk; because city folk are so much better (or, at least, up to date with the city's latest fashions). Interestingly, various words related to civil have latin translations that are unrelated:

In short, English has conflated fitting in with city life with ideas about how one should behave to earn respect.

The latin words that showed up in that table of translations offer us a few relatives of the English word urban (city-centred again), a word that surely means toga-wearing (a bit outdated), some relatives of human (a bit species-centric) and some related to culture. That last might be a better stem to use for words to refer to what we use civilized to mean; but cultured has been well over-loaded already (with posh overtones that cultivate and polish, used in the sense here, share), so I find myself trying to find a less city-centred word, free of haute couture overtones, for the central story here. As it happens, latin is a rich source of borrowings into English, so happens to provide a fine candidate: the stem particip of several English words comes from

and the whole business of participation is, indeed, a crucial part of the story of what we use civilized to mean. Admittedly, there's a shift of focus – being civilized involves letting others go about what they do, without necessarily joining in; whereas participating in something does indeed involve joining in. Then again, participating at some event or activity only involves being present and respecting it, without necessarily agreeing with it. Being civilized also involves being restrained about things at which others are apt to take offence; on the other hand, proper participation in civilized society includes being willing to (respectfully) do things others are apt to take offence at, requiring of those others the reciprocal willingness to let you go about what you do. The other flaw in pars-based words is that its family has some less savoury members: partial is, at its best, incomplete and has a tendency to be partisan or some kindred opponent of impartial. Still, I believe there's a fairly widely-held belief that our civilization would work better if more folk participated in (or, at the very least, felt comfortable about participating at) it; and a central feature of any civilization that can hope to prosper is that those who live within it can feel that we share in a greater whole, foregoing the parts we don't want (while letting others enjoy them and being respectful to those participating in them, even when it falls to our lot to participate at them) and enjoying the parts we do (without pressuring others to participate in or at them).

At the same time, a large part of why our civilization (which is, indeed, largely city-centric) has problems cohering is that many (quite possibly most) of those caught up in it feel alienated from it in one way or another. Those who are (relatively) poor see little in its power-structures that is even capable of hearing them, much less inclined to listen; those who are not are a minority; and every minority hears our culture (especially its advertising and advertising-funded media) talking to a (possibly mythical) majority of which they are not a part. Paradoxically, almost everyone is a member of at least some minority – because, when you have diverse ways to partition a population, even if each of those partitions has one part that constitutes a majority, most members of the population are put into a minority by at least one of those ways of partitioning – and our culture is indeed rich enough to have many ways to partition folk (economic, religious, ethnic, gender, sexual orientation, entangled or single, parent or not, rural vs urban, by musical taste, by age, …). So our culture needs to learn how to be inclusive: not being generous to those different folk so much as: coming to terms with the fact that most of us are in one minority or another, even if it's only the tiny tiny minority of folk who aren't (otherwise) somewhat weird.

Diversity is normal. Our culture needs to embrace that. In particular, country folk are now a minority: and we city folk might include them better if our terms for being a proper participant in our culture weren't rooted in a presumption that only city folk really make the grade. We also have some cultural baggage (e.g. about conforming, or at least pretending to, and how polite one should be), that's got tagged onto this notion of civilized; and changing our wording would give us a chance to shed (or, at least, rearrange) that baggage.

So perhaps it might be good to start forming words on particip as stem, to take the place of ones currently based on civil as stem; we may want to create some new words. We could, at least, replace civilized with participating; maybe even replace civilisation with the stem itself, particip, as a new word.

Written by Eddy.