The Impact of Globalization on U.S. Business Evolution

Bonner begins with an epigraph from The Ruin, a bizarre and melancholy poem by an anonymous eighth or ninth-century Anglo-Saxon poet who reflects on the Roman remains of Bath. It is a fragmentary artifact from the heart of the Dark Ages, a period long regarded as the polar antithesis of civilization. The poem and other writings from that time, such as the sermons and commentaries of Ælfric (who merits a position in English religious letters with Andrewes, Donne, and Newman), are as sophisticated and sensitive as anything produced now. Which begs the question: if the lowest point in Western history could produce such sublime work, what does this say about us?The astonishingly current sense of Anglo-Saxon poetry should come as no surprise. We've long known that the early Middle Ages were far from as dismal as the Renaissance and Enlightenment tales suggest. Even after the Romans left, England never forgot the memories of the civilisation to which it had been an outpost, and it was never completely isolated from the civilisations that persisted abroad. The people and culture of the Dark Ages were not as static as we might believe from our present global viewpoint. Ælfric and his contemporaries were part of a scholastic network that reached far beyond the limits of modern Europe

St. Theodore, who was appointed Archbishop 

of Canterbury in 668, was a formidable scholar from Tarsus, which is now part of Turkey but was then a Greek-speaking city of the Byzantine Empire, and St. Hadrian, who was appointed abbot of the great monastery at Canterbury around the same time, was originally from North Africa, probably Cyrenaica in modern Libya, an area that had produced three early popes and two of the most important minds of the early church, Tertullian3 Together, Theodore and Hadrian, as well as a regular exchange of intellectuals, carried the teachings of Rome, Antioch, Constantinople, Libya, and Syria to England, where they were woven into the island's local history and an established heritage of Scandinavian literary and cultural influence.4According to Bonner's concept of civilisation, this type of cultural interaction is how civilisation spreads. A constant flow of exchange, imitation, and appropriation—an idea now loudly condemned in principle even as it is still quietly practiced—means that when civilization fades in one place, knowledge of the past is preserved somewhere to serve as a future source of inspiration and recovery.

The first episode of Kenneth Clark's massive series 

Civilisation clearly illustrated this idea, transporting viewers back to the early Middle Ages, when small communities of monks copied manuscripts in beehive cells off the shores of Ireland and Scotland. Clark claims that Western civilization survived the fall of the Western Roman Empire "by clinging to places like Skellig Michael, a pinnacle of rock seven miles from the Irish coast, rising seven hundred feet out of the sea." It is a charming image with some reality, but it does not tell the entire story. Byzantine intellectuals in Canterbury (to say nothing of Byzantine scholars in Byzantium) and eremitic scribes on Skellig Michael contributed equally to the survival of Western civilization.In Defense of Civilization's greatest strength, and the reason it could only have been written by someone with Bonner's extraordinary breadth, is its global and historical reach, which allows it to convey this more full account. According to Nassim Taleb's blurb on the dust jacket, Bonner is a unique academic who is fluent in Persian, Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew in addition to Greek and Latin. This adds dimension to the text when he explores civilizations outside of Europe and classical civilizations beyond Greece and Rome. Even Clark, as educated a man as ever appeared on television, limited what he called his "personal view" of civilization to post-Roman Europe, but Bonner's version goes back to the foundations of civilization in near-eastern prehistory and frequently returns to the history of Iran and China.

Bonner's fluency with genuine sources 

from the ancient Near and Middle East elevates his talks of Persian and Arab civilizations, as well as their influences on the formation and rebirth of European and East Asian civilizations, to the book's high point. I would gladly read another volume devoted solely to this universe and personalities such as Sumerian king Shulgi of Ur and later Sasanian king Khusro I, of whom we only get tantalizing pen sketches as the story progresses through the years. In contrast, his description of modern history is fluent but relies heavily on secondary sources, which are plentiful in that over-tilled area.Despite the title, the book is not so much a defense of civilization as an attempt to define the concept and provide a history of its periodic rise and collapse. Bonner's general theory is that civilization began when man came to regard himself as having a specific position in the world based on a past that is still relevant to him and his future. Bonner identifies the "civilized attitude … in the material culture of the Neolithic period, about 12,000 years ago," prior to the agricultural revolution, consistent with modern studies. According to him, the earliest symptoms of the civilisational mindset may be seen in Neolithic ancestor worship and the use of sacred locations throughout numerous generations, behaviors that are still at the heart of the first complex civilizations 7,000 years later, as evidenced by the pyramids of Giza.