CEU Press

Introduction
1. Fear and the social sciences
Fear; Sociology; Anthropology; Psychology
2. The world of symbols
Strategies; Symbols, myths, civilizations; Collapse and regeneration
3. An alien world ?
The world; Human beings; The four jungles; The experience of the alien world
4. The garden of Eden
The myth of the periphery; Consecration; Paradise; The garden
5. The image of the world
The house; The city; The temple and the cathedral; Chaos and cosmos today
6. The moral universe
Amulets and sacraments; Rationalization; Satan; The transformation of evil
7.The world of guilt
Guilt; The religion of guilt; The philosophy of guilt; The politics of guilt; The psychology of guilt; An innocent society?
8. The rational world
Two faces of rationality; Reason and meaning; Reason and morality; Reason and uncertainty
9. The world of beauty
Art; Tragedies
10. The world of play
Homo ludens; Soccer; Play as world of symbol
11. The world of jokes
Jokes and laughter; The comic destruction of reality
12. The world of trivialities
13. Symbols and civilization
References
Index
This is a serious scholarly work that is, at the same time, somewhat unorthodox. On the one hand, it elaborates a systematic theory of civilization. It surveys the major theories of civilization and develops a new hypothesis, according to which existential fear has been a major factor in the generation of human culture. The author argues that in order to mitigate this fear and anxiety, human beings and communities have surrounded themselves not only with the walls of their houses and cities, with tools and weapons, laws and institutions, but also with protective spheres of symbols: myths and religions, values and belief systems, ideas and scientific theories, moral and practical rules of behavior, and a multitude of everyday rituals and trivialities. In a word, with the brilliant construct: civilization.
It is, on the other hand, an unorthodox book in that it studies an unusually wide range of examples and shows that the struggle for safety and freedom, for a meaningful life and human dignity, is present not only in the great symbolic systems of humankind but also in the most trivial of everyday activities and aspects of human existence; in tragedies as well as jokes, in the sacred as well as the profane, in the symbolism of medieval cathedrals as well as in that of contemporary shopping malls, in the great drama of Sin and Salvation as well as in the trivial mythology of perfumes. Ultimately, our trivialities are not trivial at all.
Elemér Hankiss (1928-2015), director of the Institute of Sociology at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.