I am a Montessori teacher of adolescents. The Montessori method for adolescence involves sending the young people out to live on a farm. Her idea is that real work on the land will form a sort of "school in the elements of social life." I have always that that there is only one "social life" being referred to - that of healthy social interaction where one has a secure sense of belonging and sense of self worth and can find out who one is through unbound creative expression.

Perhaps there are two civilizations/social lives.

In one, a young person finds out who they really are and makes a recognized contribution to the whole which cements them as part of some place and people. There is a reciprocal relationship entered into between person and group and person and land/water. The hallmark of this civilization is generosity and gift giving. This is comradeship and "laughing with" a person.

In the other thing we call social life, a young person assimilates into a whole that exploits them. Instead of becoming themselves the young person diminishes themself to fit in. The reciprocity of the other social life does not exist and the young person learns another lesson - ultimately they are alone in the world. That lesson leads to comfort-seeking behavior, selfishness, and hoarding. The hallmarks of this civilization are anxiety, comparing oneself to others, and inequality. This suspicion of the other and "laughing at" a person.

I spend a fair amount of time thinking about our evolutionary environment as humans. For hundreds of thousands of years, the evolutionary unit was not the individual. The unit was likely a band of about 150 people. Success as a lone individual was so rare that those behavior traits were not selected for. But the ability to work together and find one's place within a group of people was selected for over and over again. It likely drove the development of extended childhood/adolescence and extended elderhood, both stages of life that would be selected against if the unit of selection was the individual. Humanity went all in for social life (what you might call civilization).

The piece I had not considered was that there is something about the connection of a group of people to land and water that is key to this social life. It is a triangle - me, we, earth/water. That is the difference between peasants and factory workers in a union. If we were to have a Montessori school in the city, we would have to find the connection to earth/water in the city. It could not just be "anywhere." Each place is its own place and has its own daemons (I recently read the Bear and the Nightingale which references the encounter between Christianity and Russian folk beliefs in a fictional story). Christianity diminished/erased the local gods of hearth, field, water, and forest. Christianity has become part of the other civilization that you reference.

Best to you.