David Butterfield

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739 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 20 May

David Butterfield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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TRIGGERnometry · How Civilisations Die - Ancient Greece Expert David Butterfield · 20 May 2026 podcast

They are sedentary in one place.

And that typically means having an agricultural and economic base which allows them to be rooted in that place.

But more than that, they need stability politically and socially.

Often that means a fixed law code.

Often it means some kind of social hierarchy that gives a sense of place within the society.

And often, but not necessarily, it means a standing military to defend that civilization from external encroachments.

But there's more than that that's required.

And I would point to a self-awareness, a self-conscious realization of the shared civilization of that group of people.

And what that means in practice is the desire somehow to memorialize and to monumentalize what that civilization stands for.

And what that means in practice is a desire to somehow communicate across time and space.

The civilization may want to make monuments for the gods transcendent beyond our human world, or more likely, they may want to leave monuments for their future selves.

So I personally would say that writing or something akin to writing is a necessary technology that a civilization must have.

Why?

Because if you're not able to express your thoughts, ideas and achievements in language through writing, all you can do is preserve an oral tradition.

So, although it's not often seen as a technology, it should be seen as one.

Writing is a necessary part.

That sort of mixture and having the stability to last for, let's say, centuries at a minimum, seems to me to lead us towards a rough definition of a civilization.

As for Western civilization, that's even more contested a claim.

It is a phrase that I use, but it's not the most apt way of describing what I think we mean.

I much prefer the term Western tradition.

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