A universal civilization would leave no term for civilizational sub-groups

Evidence

If people have shared a few fundamental values and institutions throughout history, this may explain some constants in human behavior but it cannot illuminate or explain history, which consists of changes in human behavior. In addition, if a universal civilization common to all humanity exists, what term do we then use to identify the major cultural groupings of humanity short of the human race? Humanity is divided into subgroups—tribes, nations, and broader cultural entities normally called civilizations. If the term civilization is elevated and restricted to what is common to humanity as a whole, either one has to invent a new term to refer to the largest cultural groupings of people short of humanity as a whole or one has to assume that these large but not-humanity-wide groupings evaporate. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 154

Categorization

• DEFINE: Shows a definitional trap: elevating ‘civilization’ to the global level forces a renaming or dissolution of the entities history has always called civilizations.
• SEED: An essay angle: how conceptual inflation of a term like ‘civilization’ silently erases the very distinctions it was coined to name.