Now to turn to violence in the modern era. I've realized that to get to the critique and make sense of it, I've got a little more ground to cover first. I think setting things up a little better will be worth the effort, and the critique should roll out a little more smoothly too. So bear with me through some backgrounding and then we'll finally get to the critique and possible futures.
What we have is centuries upon centuries - and for that matter millennia - of the evolutionary change of civilization. The rhythmic rise and fall of empires did involve a perpetual, cyclical turning over of seasonal ideologies: beginnings of cultures, growth arcs of cultures, maturities of cultures, declines of cultures, deaths of cultures, and then rinse and repeat. But over time there was also an accumulating strata of long arc ideologies, supported by surviving and transferrable traditions, knowledge bases, technologies, cultural and economic innovations as power shifted from declining cultures to ascendant ones through trade, spoils of warfare and plunder, transfers through absorption and domination, and so on.
And as values held by rising empires grew into their logical conclusions in time and space, and then corrupted as those empires declined, and then the inversions of those values were weaponized by a given empire's enemies and rivals, that cyclical process of transformation was also taking place over a more stable civilizational baseline that was evolving and changing over longer frequencies as well.
Wealth accumulation - and power accumulation for that matter - has a sticky quality to it. It is much better to acquire such things than to lose them. And what we do see is that knowledge and wealth can be systematically destroyed when the powers wielding them weaponize them to hold their power, until the indefensible can no longer be defended and those things are lost, or otherwise transferred to another power. And then whatever remains is tenaciously clung to, and is fiercely utilized by the recovering or ascendant powers to reach back to the perceived high watermark of civilized society, and then to surpass it.
What all of this has to do with violence is the following: part of what makes an empire an empire is the seemingly paradoxical collective presence of both the glorification of and reliance on violence and a simultaneous abhorrence of it. This is because violence is quite costly and tends to produce manifold uncertainties and stresses. As we see with a simple blood feud, if you kill an enemy or rival, those connected to the departed will single-mindedly pursue revenge and try to kill you or those connected to you, and the cycle can continue for a long time.
Deaths in the collective mean diminishing labor power and the loss of resources, often in unpredictable ways in the course of war, which beyond the deaths themselves (which are bad enough) can occur immense additional suffering and even endanger the integrity of a society if the damage is great enough. And besides, there is the additional factor of the natural violence of the surrounding environment, say in the climate and the geography and wildlife and availability of food and so on, to take into account too.
The accumulation of power is often pursued so that this violence can be meted out to one's enemies and rivals and to one's environment so as to influence the totality of those things so that they are not meting violence back on you. Nevermind that the asymmetry of this relation leads to growing contradictions and tensions that produce serious problems of their own, because after all the rest of the universe has agency too. But the empire game goes on today and its players perpetually believe that they can win for good.
Because after all, no one actually likes violence - despite the bucket-loads of it going around historically. It is well and good to mete it out, but to have it done to you is quite the other thing. And the tendency to engage in it tends to produce its augmentation, increasing the frequency and presence of it, which increases the chances of it spilling over and back onto you. The game of empire is the pursuit of having this cake and eating it: of inflicting violence without having it touch you. Of utilizing fire without being burned. But I think I've belabored this point enough.
The accumulation of power then is greatly prosecuted through the accompanying accumulation of wealth, which is partly done through the division of labor in a society. Mirroring an empire's relation to the outer world, violence is also meted out on its own subjects to maintain its particular shape and power and position of its rulers, however the same problems of utilizing violence still exist here as well. And successive generations of rulers after rulers have dealt with these problems in different ways as they've learned and as their societies have evolved, with a general trend observed that soft power is more stable in the long run than hard power, the former being won through legitimacy and the distribution of benefits and spoils to ensure compliance of broad swathes of the population.
This becomes ever more important as wealth is accumulated and distributed through a collective. With more wealth means more propensity to retaliate against violence, and it also means higher standards of living and so higher levels of expectations of lifestyle and treatment. Collective wealth makes a society stronger, but it also raises the bar for legitimacy as well.
Now, as detailed in the historical processes above (processes both cyclical and linear, and so spiraling) wealth and energy utilization has gradually accumulated over the centuries until it exploded in the industrial era. And unsurprisingly with that explosion and mass urbanization and the dramatic raising of living standards, the bar for legitimacy has vastly raised alongside these things, with historical attacks on institutions of slavery, capital punishment, colonialism and imperialism, nepotism, unjust and harsh labor conditions, and so on accompanying the advancement of ideals of the universalist rules of law, human rights, democratic participation and enfranchisement, and the rest of it.
Now, human nature itself, it is argued, has not changed all that dramatically, and whatever human nature may entail, we can see with our own experiences and observations that the formation and maintenance of empire, permeated through with the impulse to ceaselessly expand and dominate and assimilate rivals and detractors, is still well underway to this day, which directly contradicts the universalist human rights ideology that confers legitimacy on contemporary governance. Our ruling elite today have quite the act to follow: to indulge their nature as rulers to continuously expand and augment in power, while at the same time maintaining the legitimacy and goodwill that secures a widespread situation of that power on their subjects.
In the next part, we'll be able to finally get to a critique of those contradictions and tensions and see where they might be leading us.
