Is Civilization a Disease‪?‬

Stanton Coit offers his audience a startling diagnosis: civilization may be a disease—and trade, its most vigorous offspring, may be part of the trouble.

In these 1917 lectures, Coit puts the system of social wealth under moral scrutiny, asking what principle drew human communities out of barbarism and whether its growing power has served humanity. Art, education, family life and religion, he argues, cannot simply excuse a trade system that may disregard the humanity of the people within it. The answer depends, too, on whose lives a social order sustains and whose it sacrifices. Drawing on biology, history and Edward Carpenter’s challenge to civilization, Coit asks readers to judge the order they have been taught to admire. If its foundations are inhuman, what could take its place?

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