Not everyone thinks civilization is a good idea.
Take Henry David Thoreau, the nature lover, the Transcendentalist, the friend of Emerson, the author of Walden. For Thoreau, the term “civilization” was not a marker of cultural achievement, but rather a sign of cultural decay. We see this clearly in the most famous and most often anthologized chapter of Walden, “Why I Lived, and What I Lived for”—the chapter in which Thoreau says, dismally, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
For Thoreau, it was civilization itself that brought such desperation. The opposite of “civilized life” was not “barbarism” nor “savagery” but “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” He identified the idea of civilization with the “mechanical,” with alarm clocks and factory bells and telegraphs and trains and the “hurry and waste” they brought to life.
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