A fellow mathematician called Robert Craigen told me in a tweet last October (2020),
I’m quite comfortable with the definition and usage of the term [“civilization”] in the work of Niall Ferguson.
Ferguson’s work then is going to be my concern here. I had asked Craigen in July,
Have you got a theory of civilization, to explain what is being destroyed? I admire (and have blogged about) Collingwood’s theory, worked out in The New Leviathan (1942) in response to the Nazis.
This was in response to his saying,
If you listen closely to those pushing all these things, destruction of civilized society is an explicitly articulated goal.
He was talking about a thread of tweets by Peter Boghossian. I am not going to talk about those tweets as such, but here they are for the record:
How to destroy civilization in 10 easy steps:
Polytropy 