As we've talked about before, the nature of violence in human civilization has changed dramatically over the last couple of thousand years, and perhaps most dramatically in the last couple of centuries, alongside material technological development and energy utilization.
There is always a gap between realities on the ground and professed ideals, which does indeed create some very interesting tensions and effects as we'll discuss, and one thing that those tensions do is drive historical development - if not directly into the arms of the professed ideals - in the general direction of those desired ideals. As ubiquitous and commonplace hypocrisy is as a moral and social phenomenon, no one actually wants to be a hypocrite. And if one settles into regular and blatant hypocrisy via convenience and the trappings of power, the loyalty and devotion of one's subordinates can get squishy in a hurry given those conditions. Generally speaking, hypocrisy tends to encourage agitation in various directions.
At least in terms of ideals, one need only compare a sentiment that was more common in the Bronze Age empires that it was perfectly OK to violently smash and dominate one's enemies with common sentiments today in which "civilized" societies abhor violence for the sake of violence, requiring elaborate moral, political, and legal justifications and powerful professional and categorical quarantines for engaging in it, and the stark contrast, bridged by the passage of thousands of years, becomes more than apparent.
This was a process that began in the European context well back into the ancient Christian era, in which the invading pagan Germanic warlords struggled to assimilate their warrior ethic and way of life with a Christian ethic of peace as they settled into "civilized" societies within the remnants of the disintegrating Western Roman Empire. We could see that it wasn't a problem for the powerful to adopt what they (and the populations they ruled) viewed as the most spiritually compelling aspects of Christian mythology while casting aside all of the other qualities troublesome to the exercise of power.
But we could also make out the difficulties and tensions that this cherry-picking could encourage, perhaps most famously in the case of Joan of Arc who was captured by the Burgundians in the course of the Hundred Years' War, who along with the English, for all intents and purposes wanted to inflict the worst tortures on her and then burn her up good for all to see, satisfying their need for revenge and making an example out of her.
And they eventually carried out this underlying intent, but they did so through a highly elaborate series of rituals and a ridiculous show trial, going through preposterous motions to cast her as guilty within a world governed by Christian ideology, so as to dehumanize or better yet, demonize her, and so mark her for violent destruction.
The Christians sure could flip the switch: their societies in the medieval era devised some of the most horrific and diabolical tortures known to human history. But there was the fact of the development of that switch in the first place, which was placing ever more resistance on the impulse to violently dominate. This is roughly what Nietzsche was talking about in terms of the transition from master to slave morality.
For the most part, most of us can agree that this is a good development, setting Nietzsche's conflicting opinion aside. But I want to play devil's advocate for the moment and point out some of the problems with our modern forms of soft power, cold war, and slow violence as well, especially in light of the tensions and distortions brought about by the growing gap between ideal and reality. Because after all, the violent impulse and drive to continuously expand and dominate is still alive and well, despite all the talk of human rights and rule of law and democracy and so on.
Before we embark down that crumbly path, a couple of disclaimers to get ahead of myself and preempt this discussion. I'm not here to extol the virtues of up-front violence and harken back to some golden era of simple and honest force. One can hit up the fascists for that anyway. If one really thinks it is a good idea to return to simpler violent relations, one can take up a sword and engage in mass butchery by hand - which is one way they did things in simpler violenter times - and see how it feels after that. Some minority of people now can and do take part in that, but things are different now and most can't.
On the other hand, this isn't to shit on the ancients either, adopting that Pinkeresque notion that things are just getting better and we're actually doing it right this time around. We're going to poke holes in that too. For that matter, the decreasing levels of kinetic violence we see is only a narrative that lies in an arc of a few thousand years. It is easier to plumb the depths of recent written history, but we're only slowly learning more about deep history day by day, and there is a whole lot of time and geography within that titanic stretch, with its share of many possible narratives buried within.
No, we'll attempt to stay rooted in the present with the reality that we've got, and in the next part, I'll outline some of the issues with the modern relationship to violence and where things could go in the coming decades.
