According to Strauss (and many others), the West is the civilization constituted at its core by the coming together of classical philosophy and biblical revelation.
They lead to thinking about what constitutes civilization, and what isn't civilizing.
The New Yorker, February 14 , 2000P. 77 Briefly Noted review of "Scar Vegas" (Harcourt; $22) by Tom Paine... [I]n this debut collection of stories...Paine deftly carries the reader to the point where accepted notions about what constitutes civilization suddenly seem absurd.
It is the brutality that constitutes civilization itself.
Neville, a scientist and a soldier, constitutes a civilization of one.
Maxim Osipov observed that the film's philosophical message was consistent overall with the Bhagavad Gita, a key scripture of Hinduism, in defining what constitutes real culture and civilization.
Many of the core concepts and even specific works and images which, for us, constitute civilization, came to be in this shimmering 173-year interval.
"The nearest human beings were a hundred and twenty-five miles away, and the civilization of which they constituted the very fringe — a civilization remote from nature, artificial, dominated by the exploitation of man by man — seemed unreal, unbelievable," Marshall wrote.
*Even the most cursory visit to any major metropolitan museum or reading of any major literary canon would show that rather than damaging human civilization, religious cultures have constituted it.
"For the last ten thousand years that constitute human civilization, we've existed in the sweetest of sweet spots.
