Damn I kind of dropped the ball on this one. But let's finally wrap this one up and see if anything interesting shakes out as a result. This'll be another long one. More to come after this post.
To briefly recap the previous parts of the series, we talked about the problem of violence over the past couple of thousand of years and the accumulations of power and wealth that have occurred over time to deal with that problem, which have slowly built up historically as a kind of strata and steadily changed the structural circumstances that in turn shape the trajectories of the cyclical rising and falling of empires that continues today.
The ruling style of the Assyrian empire I think serves as a near crystalline example of an older, more direct solution to tamping down on widespread violence, when direct violence was a regular social mechanism across many different societies interacting with each other. Terror and overwhelming force were used to extinguish any potential for violence in rivals. The only problem with this was that it instilled intense resentment and bad memory in those tamped down, and as soon as the pressure eased, the downtrodden were ready to roar back to the top.
What seemed to have happened over thousands of years was that the problem was solved - or at least the nature of the problem shifted - more or less accidentally through the gradual proliferation of wealthier and wealthier societies and persistently shifting cultural norms and political ideologies, evolving over a backdrop of centuries upon centuries of accumulating and enduring human wealth, knowledge and technology.
See, to put it really crudely, the threat of going soft from accumulating too much power and wealth and enjoying too high a quality of life for too long becomes less of a threat if the same thing is happening to everyone else.
There are a whole lot of other things happening in the transition from the Middle Ages to the Modern era that we have to gloss over at the moment, and we've covered some of them in the past. There are a whole lot of twisting and turning stories in there to address and to readdress in time, and as always the closer you look the stranger and bewildering things get to looking.
But at a bird's eye view there were a couple of converging pressures that were contributing to this change in the nature of the violence problem. Just look at the dramatic change in personality of the Abrahamic god going from the Old Testament to the New Testament, and then the change from those accompanying principles to the Enlightenment principles and on into the Modern era.
Though on an individual basis there was more than enough hypocrisy to go around, you did have a rapid and explosive proliferation of a religious ideology that stressed love and forgiveness and nonviolence, often at the tip of a sword, but the message was there nonetheless. And Napoleon did the same with the Enlightenment principles as well.
The messages - however cynically they were employed and manipulated - do matter: people begin to internalize guiding principles that they are checking against their lived reality. And on top of that, the messages themselves reflect real changing material and cultural realities in the societies promulgating them.
Further, the imperial European powers were spreading wealth and rapid technological advancement all over the globe during the colonial era, the lions share of which was hostile to and exploitative of conquered populations, but which was nonetheless wealth. Eventually, the modern world exploded into existence, propelled in part by the Industrial Revolution, and the rest is history, to indulge a cliche.
But first, is all of this to say that it was the rapid imperial expansion of the Western world that indirectly brought about the proliferation of wealth and thus changing conditions that allowed for the suppression of direct violence on some absolute level? No and emphatically no. European imperialism steamrolled countless societies whether peaceful or violent or somewhere in between, and there are numerous forms and conceptions of wealth to take into account besides.
What we are describing here are the internal conditions of an evolving civilizational body that has transformed and spread across the globe over thousands of years, which through its imperial nature forces an average mode of conduct upon the many varied societies taken up within it over the course of its evolution. What we are concerned with in the course of this discussion is the evolving nature of bounded civilization as it exists across the globe, not with any sort of possible way of life that a given society could offer in its own provincial domain.
Further, this narrative occurs from a Western perspective, and omits the evolution of societies across the rest of the world which have their own trajectories as they enter into the generalizing and globalizing project of human civilization.
But let's at last deal with the modern problem of violence and what it might mean for the future, as we've now arrived at the contemporary, modern world in the narrative. Much of the violence we see in the modern industrial world is more indirect and economic in nature. We see less widespread kinetic violence and a more distributed, slower, quieter economic violence, which does eventually lead to louder and more spectacular violence over time as the damage is done. Needless to say, we need to unpack this.
There was this observation from a prison therapist that always stuck in my mind: that at the root of most violent acts he observed in his clients was a perceived lack of respect. This to me rings true: if you watch any kind of schoolyard fight break out, it starts with disrespectful comments and sneers and snickers, which leads increasingly to grave and menacing facial expressions, which leads to shoving or chest bumping or spitting, and then eventually the fists start flying. One goes from feeling the need to express one's worth and dignity to others publicly to simply trying to hurt the other person, and make sure one is still standing while the other is on the ground.
Increasingly in the modern world, impulses like these are immediately seized upon by the authorities and marked off for quarantine. This stuff is is very quickly and vigorously socialized away in children: "use your words not your fists" and "violence is never the answer" and so on. You see this in very immediate and decisive personal disciplinary actions, as well as in the transmission of more abstract cultural mores in the course of education.
The state monopolization of violence is carefully doled out through professionalization and credentialization, replete with trainings and rules of engagement and legal maneuvering and so on. We see that further out in the borderlands, or inwards in the impoverished sacrifice zones within the core, the stewards of violent action are given a lot more leeway and lenience, but by and large the administration of violence is carefully controlled in a modern society.
There are many and complex reasons for this. For one thing, a blood feud is much more destructive when you move away from arrows and spears and towards firearms. The sheer explosiveness of the contemporary utilization of energy and the advanced suites of technology that come with it requires elaborate and vigorous taboos on its movements and flows.
Just as interestingly though, direct violence seems to be something that culturally you are to climb up out of, like getting up and out of the dirt. Just as you employ labor power and resources to lay down stone to get out of the dirt and move up the class ladder, you engage in education and the cultivation of trades, commerce, politics, the arts, and so on to build up platforms of public respectability in pursuing higher respect, regard, and ultimately social power.
These games of social prestige often turn out to be sublimated forms of violence, but in a complex, interconnected, and energy intensive society moving at extremely high velocities, it is certainly preferable to the more physical and kinetic methods.
In the average citizens of developed countries you see a very basic aversion to direct violence. People in the streets turn away from it where it threatens to express itself, just as one walks over the homeless person on the ground, hoping that it will go away if they aren't antagonizing it and that they will be spared. Just as there is a turning away from the dirty and sweating laborer, beastly and atavistic somehow.
And when you do have spontaneous outbursts of physical violence, such as with a mass shooting, what you most often see is a widespread sense of shock in those forced to participate in it, unable to escape its clutches. These events are experienced as surreal and otherworldly, like the disembodied unfolding of a movie, perceivable but disconnected from one's own direct life.
People do remain connected to - and titillated by - the older and so-called "baser" people relations. It shows up in entertainment in particular, but also in the division of labor in general. You see that traditionally a lot of prizefighters are drawn from lower class neighborhoods and hustling immigrants for example, and professional soldiers from rural communities and troubled urban districts, and they are often awarded a prestige of their own for their efforts.
You even saw this sort of thing as far back as ancient Rome: the gladiators for example were drawn from slaves and lower class criminals and prisoners of war. It was a harsh and violent living, but as they existed in a constant struggle for glory given the Roman aesthetic, they were afforded their own niche of bequeathed public regard and often sexualized for their physicality and daily feats of bravery. There was a constant anxiety about aristocratic women being attracted to them, which was quite a dangerous proposition for those garnering too much attention.
Yes, Roman society was predominantly a military one, but in more stable and affluent times more of the aristocracy was insulated from the dangers of military conquest and were often seeking out prestige through political intrigue in the capital for instance, while remaining titillated by those still adhering to the old aesthetic of glorified violent conquest. It was when the society broke down through invasion and civil war that you saw aristocrats don their armor and weapons again, and you saw the warrior emperors re-emerge.
That's sort of the rub of the modern world too: these carefully constructed platforms of social peace and physical security and the realm of the rule of law and civil rights form quite the fragile safety net when tested. The forces of violence are never quite far from the surface, and readily come roaring back under extreme collective strain and duress.
Given the energy intensiveness and the rolling instabilities of modern capital, our social engines of production are perpetually destroying the environments they are ensconced in, and perpetually alienating and antagonizing the human labor they run on. The energy-intensive game of sublimating violent domination into the realms of political, cultural, and economic regard can very quickly break down when it runs up against limits, such as with environmental degradation, pollution, failing states and streams of refugees as imperial systems break down, financial depressions and internal strife, and so on.
And when it does run up against its limits, all of that concentrated energy moving at high velocity can break away sharply and explosively. We saw this expressed spectacularly in the World Wars, when multiple empires vying for power and prestige collided into each other as the imperial system broke down, and multiple fires broke out simultaneously within societies pushing the health of their populations to their breaking points.
Those layers upon layers of technological advancement and material power - pursued by multiple competing powers for the sake of security and prosperity - were the real danger in the final analysis: the vast oceans of firearm and endless walls of machinegun, the mountains of artillery shell and the industrial complexes to back them and produce them, and the exploding populations to set them into motion, which created the conditions for a maelstrom of industrialized violence that turned vast regions into moonscapes and which mutually brought the various combatants to their knees.
This was the meatgrinder that put the old fear back into the hearts of the commanders witnessing them, which led to the mass terror bombing of civilians in WWII, universally utilized by the fighting powers in hopes of cauterizing the wounds and staving off the grinders, forcing their opponents hands before their societies were once again turned inside out by the breakneck industrial pace of the wartime arms race, culminating in the dropping of The Bomb. That old Assyrian tactic of instrumentalized terror had returned to once again rear its ugly head.
Those old taboos were never as far behind us as we thought. From the atrocities of the Eastern Front, to the boobytrapped jungles of Vietnam and the IED strewn sands of Iraq, the cascade of retributive atrocity and war crimes crop up as a reliable human behavior where the conflicts get too hot, moving increasingly from the abandoned and impoverished peripheries closer and closer to the cores.
And where "civil society" breaks back down into violent conquest, the heat and velocity not only produce much destruction, but also intense individual and collective traumas and bad karmic zones that can echo for generations like nuclear fallout. We're seeing this play out in the Ukraine now, and we'll see it continue to advance as the years wear on.
In a way, that strange saga of the Prigozhin mutiny was a striking emblem of this modern brand of fragility. Superficially, it is easy enough to scratch one's head at the spectacle: why would someone stage a mutiny like that without a greater base of support in a place like Russia under a ruler like Putin? What did he think was going to happen?
But looking at the man himself, the saga makes perfect sense. This was a man forged in the criminal underworld and in prison, and whose unique talents became quite useful to the Russian state in the form of contained military power, projecting surplus populations and violence outward to conflict hotspots of interest to the state and society.
All of that energy and desperation of the Ukraine war, which was to be contained on a delimited battlefield, began to leak out. Just imagining the pressure that someone like this had undergone in the field: the waves of traded artillery, the claustrophobic urban warfare, the maddening slog through minefields, all of which was to be contained where the wars were happening, and not tracked back into civilized society like so much mud.
All of that pressure made him pop when it started to become apparent that the Wagner Group - and his power - was going to be taken from him. The simplest explanation for his doomed march to Moscow. He popped, and the rest of the state held, and a fragile state of peace was maintained throughout the failed mutiny in observance of international law, and his forces stood down and he walked. Until his plane went down anyway amidst clouds of plausible deniability. That sort of open force was best contained in the battlefield. For now.
