To the ancient Greeks, the measure of a civilization was to be found in its selfless beneficence, that, as their proverb proclaims, “a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.” For Lord Kenneth Clark, the art historian, it was courtesy above all that makes a civilization. The protagonist in Paul Theroux’s novel “The Mosquito Coast” believed that ice that paved the pathway from the primitive to the modern.
I don’t know that civilization is a function of any single one of these attributes, but one imperative is being disposed of with alarming haste: modesty.
https://www.nj.com/opinion/2023/09/nj-theaters-gender-neutral-bathrooms-vulgar-letters.html