Judge Not.

Civilizations: Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature, by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (Free Press, 545 pp., $35)

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's Civilizations is one of those grand, all- encompassing histories that many non-historians find appealing. It makes some very alluring promises. "My purpose," Fernandez-Armesto explains, "is to change the way we think about civilization: to present it as a relationship between one species and the rest of nature, an environment refashioned to suit human uses." It takes an especially thoughtful inquiry to transform how we view civilization, to make us rethink not only what we know but how we know.

At first glance, the book looks fresh and bold and, above all, ambitious: a brand new way of viewing human history and culture. Instead of approaching civilizations as detached from nature, Fernandez-Armesto, a member of the modern-history faculty at Oxford, views them as an outgrowth of their natural surroundings. He therefore organizes his book not according to chronology but by environment: highland civilization, tundra civilization, seaboard civilization, Atlantic civilization, etc.

"We cannot get out of the ecosystem in which we are linked, the 'chain of being' which binds us to all the other biota," he writes. "Our species belongs in the great animal continuum. The environments we fashion for ourselves are gouged or cobbled out of what nature has given us." He traces the histories of how various civilizations built themselves out of their natural environs-from the vanished Mongol cities of the Eurasian steppe and the Venetians defying their "water margins" to the Samoyeds who inhabit the "waste land" of northern Scandinavia. All of this is very colorful and, at times, astute. The author's brief discussion of Las Vegas-"The new skyline is dominated by an electrified rip-off of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, a pimple itching at the civilized tradition"-is both funny and clever. His thoughtful, lengthier investigation of island life, particularly his assertion that Hawaii and Easter Island benefited culturally from their relative isolation, is likewise illuminating.

But the book fails-completely-to fulfill its promise that it will change how we think about civilization. Fernandez-Armesto contends that civilization is "a kind of relationship between human society and the natural world." Question: What else could it possibly be? To civilize is to impose order on disorder, to contain (a la Hobbes) the flux and uncertainty of natural life by way of centralized government, economic organization, written language, and so on. This fundamental impulse has been described, analyzed, and debated for thousands of years-which means there's nothing very original about the author's contention that societies are civilized to the extent that they have distanced themselves from their natural surroundings. He has simply attempted to tell the same old story from a not very different angle-one that offers little insight and ends up looking more like a gimmick than like an important new perspective.

But it's worse than a gimmick: It's actually a tool to support the author's cultural relativism. "In a departure from the way civilization is usually understood, I try not to judge societies against a checklist of supposedly civilized characteristics," he writes, adding that "because civilization is seen here as a kind of relationship between human society and the natural world, the degree to which a particular society is civilized is measurable on a scale of its own making." In other words, nobody can make comparative judgments about different civilizations because they are merely functions of their environments, and each environment is a wholly distinct universe that cannot be understood in terms of other ones. No one can suggest that desert civilization is culturally richer than tropical lowland civilization because, among other things, there's very little about desert life that overlaps with tropical lowland life.

All of which seems a very convenient way to circumvent an uncomfortable two-pronged truth facing left-wing academics today-namely, that civilized peoples have rejected socialist totalitarianism, and that the West in general, and the U.S. in particular, seems to be on the "right side of history." To put it more squarely, there is a civilization- Western civilization-that billions of human beings today are scrambling to join by way of internal reform or immigration. For Fernandez-Armesto to suggest that all civilizations must be viewed on their own terms is to ignore this phenomenal migration.

Defenders might reply that even if Fernandez-Armesto doesn't offer a genuinely new paradigm and hides behind his cultural relativism, he does give us a rich and detailed exposition of a remarkable array of peoples scattered around the globe. Well, not exactly. One of the problems with this sort of history is that it runs the distinct risk of straying from its thesis, jumping haphazardly from one subhead to another in an effort to lend a semblance of unity to an unwieldy morass of facts.

Consider the author's discussion of William James's influence on European thought. "It was half-baked nonsense-claiming that a proposition was true inasmuch as it was useful and therefore that Christianity, for instance, was sanctified by its social advantages; but it was, at least, a truly homespun American philosophy, drafted for America by a thinker who resented his brother's notorious self- Europeanization and who crafted a thought system syncopated to the hustle of American life and the bustle of American business." A few pages later, he offers an analysis of the Great Depression that draws a well-worn analogy between European fascists and American business leaders: "Big business barged the little guys off the sidewalk. A few financial pharaohs bestrode 'pyramids' of millions of shareholders, controlling stocks and manipulating voters, just as in Europe dictators took over nominal democracies."

Fernandez-Armesto's meandering, almost careless chronicling of times past-as well as his politics, reflected in his thinly veiled disdain for the American bourgeoisie-overshadows much of his historical narrative. Too bad: The occasionally colorful expositions amount to one of the book's few virtues.