I have come across a couple of recent writings promoting
the absurd idea that one of the side-effects of civilization is that it leads
to a dramatic reduction in violence.
The argument goes something like this: because a smaller proportion
of the population dies a violent death today than happens in a typical
traditional (non-civilized) society, we (meaning the denizens of civilization)
are less violent than we (meaning our ignorant savage ancestors) used to be.
And we have modern technology—and especially the organized police state with
its effective technologies of social control—to thank for it.
There are several interesting things about this argument.
First, although it appears to be more sophisticated, it is just a modern
reworking of Hobbes and his "red in tooth and claw" and "war of
all against all" notions.
Second, it (like its Hobbesian predecessor) assumes that
the pacification of the human spirit—the domestication of the human animal—is a
good and desirable thing. Aggression and violence is seen as somehow a bad
thing in and of itself. The distinction between violence intentionally directed
at expanding the capacity to exercise power over others against their will and
the violent response triggered in those on the receiving end of such violence
is not seen as relevant: violence is violence, and all violence is bad. It also
assumes that perpetual threat is not a kind of violence, that a slave who has
had the will to fight scared out of her so that she no longer harbors any hopes
of liberation is not a victim of violence, that the violence perpetrated by the
functionaries of modern post-industrial civilization, because it operates
largely at a psychological level, does not count as violence.
Third, the argument is framed entirely in a
factory-production perspective that reduces unique and individual human beings
to homogenized and interchangeable units in an abstract technological calculus.
This third thing is what bothers me most. And, just so I
am clear about this, it’s the fact that I frequently fall into this
factory-production frame myself that bothers me—clear evidence of just how far
my own thought process has been metabolized.
In a widget factory, where each unit that comes off the
assembly line is cloned from a prototype, the individual unit is not important.
Its fabrication adds nothing unique to the world, nothing that wasn’t there
just a few moments earlier and won’t be there again and again as identical
units are squirted into their packaging. What’s important in a widget factory
isn’t any specific individual widget, it’s the number of widgets that can be
produced and sold in a given unit of time. It’s the ratio of production cost to
unit sale price. It’s return on investment. Individual widgets are abstracted
out of existence, absorbed as data points in statistical metrics. A bizarre
mental schematic emerges from this, a conceptual frame based on ideas of
production efficiency that have no real pre-industrial equivalent.
In post-industrial civilization, where it’s not just
widgets but unique individual human beings who are abstracted out of existence,
converted into consumer units and absorbed as data points in statistical
metrics, ideas of production efficiency find easy application to the social
world. Proportions, percentages, and averages—statistical
abstractions—take the place of actual persons.
So the evidence that civilization reduces violence is
that the proportion of the population who die violent deaths has been dropping
over the last decade (century, millennium) as a direct result of the global
spread of civilization with its (violent) capacity to repress violence. And the
fact that the “spread” of civilization itself is a direct result of violence
and genocide on a massive scale is not enough to off-set overall violence
reduction as measured in relative statistical terms.
For example, the proportion of the population of Japan
who died during the entire course of WWII is orders of magnitude smaller than
the proportion of traditional New Guinea tribesmen killed during “wars” with
neighboring tribes over the same time period. Of course, the fact that the
population sizes are orders of magnitude different gets lost inside the
simplifying statistics. A typical New Guinean skirmish could result in
one or two deaths (if the fighting was particularly ferocious). But there were
2.7 million Japanese killed during the second world war, 140,000 with just two
bombs.
And we are talking human beings here, not widgets. Each
of those deaths—New Guinean and Japanese—represented the destruction of a
one-of-a-kind, never-to-exist-again, human presence.
Within global civilization’s production-efficiency mind
set, there are no actual persons. Death is just a number. An individual life is
just a statistical data point. There are only consumers and potential
consumers, homogenized consumer units modeled on a prototype and being squirted
into their packaging as they roll off the assembly line.
