The Bloody Pretences of Civilisation

Our capacity for violence as a species is unrivalled.

There is a philosophical argument which tends to repeat over time as to whether humans are fundamentally good or bad. Pondering this question has meant navigating some turbulent internal terrain, crashing on the rocks of disdain for our species of, to quote  Sheldon Solomon, "breathing pieces of defecating meat, no more significant or enduring than a lizard or a potato.”

Nevertheless, I've arrived at somewhat of a conclusion. I think that at an individual level, there are good people. People who are, and who do, good. But collectively as H. sapiens, as a herd, as societies and as groups, we are prone to evil. When discussing the hubris bestowed by our evolved brainpower, it is common to describe humans with adjectives like illogical, irrational, emotional, biased. Apes with a slightly better brain. But one word has always been missing from these descriptors of human existence to me: violence.

To look back over the arc of history is to see a defining characteristic of our species, what sets H. sapiens apart from all others; our  unrivalled capacity for sheer wanton violence. The capacity of H. sapiens to indulge in and justify violence is unsurpassed. And the violence we do is utterly indiscriminate, inflicted on anyone and anything from our own species to the planet. We've spread over and settled the four corners of the globe in a millennia-old blood-drenched quest of subjugation and domination.

Yes, that same arc of history shows that we build things, we write things, paint things, we do great art, we make civilisations. But ultimately, in the end, we have destroyed it all. Every civilisation, every epoch. The things we cherish now - the art, the literature, the accomplishments - are just what survived. Remnants of a time that was before and that, as we are inevitably bound to do, we drove into ashes. To take the anti-colonialist French writer Frantz Fanon's view, it is through violence that we create ourselves.

Our capacity for violence to others H. sapiens is predicated upon the ability to not formally recognise others as “us”. We recognise others as “us” in two ways. The first is seeing shared humanity in them, irrespective of differences of social operational definitions, like religion or nationality, and of genetic differences like skin pigmentation. The second is a process of formal recognition by society, typically enshrined in the laws of a society, that provides legal recognition to an individual’s personhood in that State. The legal recognition of personhood, itself grounded in the recognition of shared humanity, is thus intimately linked to the concept of statehood. Each of these related concepts of personhood and statehood may be deployed to deny recognition of individuals and groups in a society in order to justify the infliction of violence upon them.

The descent into the Holocaust provides a poignant example of this relationship, beginning with the denial of recognition of the humanity of German Jews that underpinned their dehumanisation, followed by the formal revocation of the legal recognition of Jews and protections afforded by the law. A process of social and legal Othering that facilitated mass murder on an industrial scale across Europe. Stalin's Russia would chart a similar course, where intellectual deviation from the tenets of Stalinist Communism provided sufficient justification for dehumanising “enemies of the State”, revoking recognition by society, and justifying mass murder. We could be here all day writing out examples.

Our capacity for violence transcends definitions of society, political systems, ethnicity, the nation state, region, time itself. It is innate and immemorial. It is who we are, what humans do best. Our methods have become ever more sophisticated over time, evolving from stone speartips that could kill an individual to nuclear ballistic missiles that can wipe out whole societies. And at its core is the ability to deny to others recognition as a human being, and to support or turn a blind eye when that denial of recognition extends up to the State level. We didn't know; we were following orders. This latter point is inseparable from this process, because indifference is inherently tied to recognition. The ability, at both the level of personhood and statehood, to decide based on some arbitrary criteria to deny recognition as human beings to a particular population group, relies on our collective indifference to the resulting inhumanity and violence visited upon that group.

So, why am I thinking about our capacity for Othering, for refusing recognition to fellow human beings and responding with indifference to the infliction of violence upon them? Because some dark, dark days lie ahead. Maybe not to the level of industrial scale mass murder. But there is little doubt in my mind that as the conditions of the planet continue to deteriorate along with the volatility of global geopolitics, violence and misery is the inevitable fate of millions of human beings. Because of climate change, we are in a more precarious position than other periods in human history. And this threat occurs at a time when regressive forces have resurged into national and global socio-geopolitics. Yet the wider conversation remains dominated by self-deluded optimism that humans, in our current socio-political organisations, are capable of solving these problems. We're subjected to weekly George Monbiot articles bristling with the sanctimonious confidence that only a middle class toff committed to recycling his almond milk cartons could think. The hard truth is that we, collectively, are incapable of solving any of the major issues facing the world.

There are too many forces that align against achieving solutions to our current state of crisis-lurching. From the disintegration of international organisations to a world where narrow national interests take precedent, to the degeneracy of late-stage capitalism and the unrepentant concentration of elite wealth at the expense of population and planetary health, to the twilight of the era of democratic flourishing and rise of illiberal geopolitical actors. Take Covid-19, for which the reality is that we were gifted from nature a virus that, while highly contagious, was not particularly virulent. And we still have millions dead across the world. If that virus had been more lethal, imagine the level of the calamity we would be mired in? By fluke of nature we were spared a total cataclysm. But we cannot spare ourselves from us, the warmongering savage apes that we are.

The fact that the deterioration of the global climate and of global geopolitics will continue unabated is a call to consider the consequences of our intrinsic collective capacity to Unsee, Other, inflict violence, and turn away in indifference. Just look at the world as we have it, to name just a few examples: Putin's Russia revokes recognition of Ukraine and dehumanises Ukrainians to justify launching missiles at shopping centres; China refuses recognition of humanity and legal status to Uighur Muslims and Falun Gong members, preferring instead to harvest their organs; Israeli foreign policy is grounded in the dehumanisation and revocation of rights of the Palestinians, unseen, unrecognised; India is Othering its Muslim populations and inciting violence supported by the State; America is on a trajectory of irreconcilable Othering both between citizens and against immigrants; The European Union is paying Libya to intercept and detain migrants in the Mediterranean, thrown into imprisonment in appalling conditions, nameless and stateless. All happening, extant.

So I wonder, when whole regions become destabilised and mass displacement occurs, what stories will we tell ourselves to justify removing recognition of shared humanity in others? What narratives will allow us to Unsee fellow human beings? What Othering will spring our governments to power? And what excuses will comfort our indifference to the scale of wanton violence that will be inflicted on those who are already victims? We have 2,000 years of precedent to know many answers to these questions, but no doubt in our ongoing inventiveness for violence, we will concoct more. And we don't care. We think we do. You do, I do. But we don't. We care about performing the trappings of caring, without the reality of caring. We’re the generation of Tweet-based activism. Just think about the level of apathy and indifference to the Covid-19 death toll. That scares me.

George Bernard Shaw once wrote that:

“when the angel of death sounds his trumpet, the pretences of civilisation are blown from men’s heads into the mud like hats in a gust of wind.”

The pretences of civilisation will be in the mud soon enough.