Civilization and wealth or riches

 

To begin with, the ideas or notions connected with the concepts of civilization can be pretty tricky to unravel, and can also be the cause or justification for some pretty " heated " debate.  One very helpful tool in the process of unraveling all these ideas is of course our history which does include the rise and decline of many civilizations,  certainly the civilization of the Roman world would be a good example of that.

I have often asserted in connection with the fall of civilization, that it is a dynamic  of a particular behavior, often known as greed which can be described as the absence of generosity. There are perhaps other ways of looking at this but in particular I think it might involve the degrees to which both wealth and riches become isolated to certain localities , that is, the flow of wealth or riches, becomes more limited in scope, as a result of which fewer people , in general, have the opportunity of getting their needs met. This might include some corruption or  criminal type behaviors.

But looking back at the Roman civilization, in some ways we can understand that they had an idea about civilization which suggested that if an area was under the, more or less, direct control of  Rome, then that area was considered " civilized ".  One exception to this would be of course the Persian empire , which had ,of course, great extent, involved a good deal of both wealth and riches, and of course the conflicts between Rome and Persia exhausted considerable resources on both sides, and therefore limited the flow of both wealth and riches, which can be seen as resulting in problems and difficulties in these regions for a good deal of time.

I know, I should be getting to the point, about right now, but I will simply conclude that this notion of civilization is clearly important to various discussions and problem solving forums going on currently..