Thomas Cole, Destruction from The Course of Empire (1836)
Many people nowadays, moved by the horrors of every kind that our time provides in a number overwhelming for anyone the least bit sensitive, think that, as a result of an excessively great technical power, or a kind of moral decadence, or for any other reason, we are entering a period of greater barbarity than the centuries humanity has already gone through. That is far from being the case. All one need do to be convinced is open any ancient text, the Bible, Homer, Caesar, Plutarch. In the Bible, the victims of a massacre number generally in the tens of thousands. Total extermination, in one day, with no exceptions made for sex or age, is not, in Caesar’s accounts, anything extraordinary. According to Plutarch, Marius used to walk in the streets of Rome followed by a troop of slaves who would immediately fall upon anyone greeting him if Marius didn’t return the greeting. Sulla, who was begged on the Senate floor at least to declare whom he intended to have killed, said that he couldn’t recall all the names at that moment, but that he would publish them day by day as they occurred to him. None of the past centuries known to history is poor in atrocious events. The power of weaponry is unimportant in this regard. For large-scale massacres, the simple sword, even of bronze, is a more effective instrument than the airplane.
The contrary belief, so common at the end of the 19th century and up until 1914, that is, the belief in a gradual lessening of barbarity in so-called civilized humanity, is no less erroneous, it seems to me. And illusion in such a matter is dangerous, for who bothers to uproot a thing that seems to be on its way out? War was much easier to accept in 1914 because nobody thought it could be savage, since it was being waged by men who believed themselves free from savagery. Just as those who who constantly say they are too soft-hearted are precisely the ones from whom we should expect, when the occasion presents itself, the calmest and coldest cruelty, so, when a group of humans consider themselves the bearers of civilization, this very belief will make them succumb to the first opportunity of acting like barbarians. In this regard, nothing is more dangerous than the unqualified belief in a race, in a nation, in a social class, in a party. We can no longer have today the naïve confidence in progress that our fathers and grandfathers had; but for the barbarity that is drenching the world in blood we all seek causes outside the society in which we live, in groups of humans who are, or whom we declare to be, foreign to us. I should like to propose considering barbarity a permanent and universal feature of human nature, a feature that develops more or less depending on the freedom to grow given it by circumstances.
Such a view is in perfect harmony with the materialism that the Marxists lay claim to, but it is not in harmony with Marxism itself, which, in its Messianic faith, believes that a certain social class is, through a kind of predestination, the bearer, and the exclusive bearer, of civilization. Marxism thought it possessed the key to history in the notion of class, but it never even began actually to use this key; and in fact it is not useable. I think that one cannot form clear thoughts about human relationships as long as one has not placed the notion of force (/might/strength/power) in the centre, just as proportion is at the centre of mathematics. But the first of these notions needs to be elucidated, just as the second needed to be. To do so is not easy.
I would happily propose the following theorem: one is always barbaric towards the weak. Or, at least, so as not to deny any power to virtue, one might state that: save at the price of an effort of generosity as rare as genius, one is always barbaric towards the weak. The greater or lesser amount of barbarity current in a society would thus depend on the distribution of strengths. This view, if one were able to study it in sufficient depth so as to give it a clear content, would at least make it possible, in theory, to locate any social structure, whether stable or temporary, on a scale of values – on condition that one considers barbarity as an evil and its absence as a good. This restriction is necessary; for there is no shortage of people who, whether through an exclusive, aristocratic appreciation for intellectual culture, or through ambition, or through a kind of idolatry of History and of a dreamed-of future, or because they mistake lack of feeling for firmness of mind, or quite simply through lack of imagination, get along quite well with barbarity and consider it either an detail of no consequence or a useful instrument. That is not my case; nor is it, I should think, the case of those who read this review.
To form an idea of such a relationship between the map of forces in a social system and the degree of barbarity, one must consider this latter notion a little differently from how the crowd does. Public sensitivity comes into play only…
Hitler is not a barbarian – would to God that he were one! Barbarians can cause only limited harm in their acts of ravaging. Like natural calamities, as they destroy they re-awaken the mind to the insecurity of human affairs; their cruelties, their perfidies, mingled with acts of loyalty and generosity and tempered by inconsistency and whim, never imperil anything vital in those who survive their arms. Only an extremely civilized State – but civilized on a very low level, as Rome was – can bring about in those it threatens and in those it makes subject the kind of moral decay that not only cripples in advance any hope for real resistance, but breaks up brutally and definitively continuity in the spiritual life, substituting for it a poor imitation of mediocre conquerors. For only a State that has reached a high level of organization can paralyze in its adversaries the very ability to react, through the power exercised on the imagination by a pitiless mechanism that neither human weaknesses nor human virtues can arrest once it is a question of seizing an advantage, and that is equally ready to use to this end truth or lies, feigned respect for conventions or open contempt for them. We are not, in Europe, in the situation of civilized people struggling against a barbarian, but in the far more difficult and perilous situation of independent countries threatened by colonization; and we will not confront this danger usefully if we do not devise methods in keeping with it.
(Source: Mad Beppo: For students of French and for some others)
Simone Weil: Reflections on barbarism (1939)
Many people nowadays, moved by the horrors of every kind that our time provides in a number overwhelming for anyone the least bit sensitive, think that, as a result of an excessively great technical power, or a kind of moral decadence, or for any other reason, we are entering a period of greater barbarity than the centuries humanity has already gone through. That is far from being the case. All one need do to be convinced is open any ancient text, the Bible, Homer, Caesar, Plutarch. In the Bible, the victims of a massacre number generally in the tens of thousands. Total extermination, in one day, with no exceptions made for sex or age, is not, in Caesar’s accounts, anything extraordinary. According to Plutarch, Marius used to walk in the streets of Rome followed by a troop of slaves who would immediately fall upon anyone greeting him if Marius didn’t return the greeting. Sulla, who was begged on the Senate floor at least to declare whom he intended to have killed, said that he couldn’t recall all the names at that moment, but that he would publish them day by day as they occurred to him. None of the past centuries known to history is poor in atrocious events. The power of weaponry is unimportant in this regard. For large-scale massacres, the simple sword, even of bronze, is a more effective instrument than the airplane.
The contrary belief, so common at the end of the 19th century and up until 1914, that is, the belief in a gradual lessening of barbarity in so-called civilized humanity, is no less erroneous, it seems to me. And illusion in such a matter is dangerous, for who bothers to uproot a thing that seems to be on its way out? War was much easier to accept in 1914 because nobody thought it could be savage, since it was being waged by men who believed themselves free from savagery. Just as those who who constantly say they are too soft-hearted are precisely the ones from whom we should expect, when the occasion presents itself, the calmest and coldest cruelty, so, when a group of humans consider themselves the bearers of civilization, this very belief will make them succumb to the first opportunity of acting like barbarians. In this regard, nothing is more dangerous than the unqualified belief in a race, in a nation, in a social class, in a party. We can no longer have today the naïve confidence in progress that our fathers and grandfathers had; but for the barbarity that is drenching the world in blood we all seek causes outside the society in which we live, in groups of humans who are, or whom we declare to be, foreign to us. I should like to propose considering barbarity a permanent and universal feature of human nature, a feature that develops more or less depending on the freedom to grow given it by circumstances.
Such a view is in perfect harmony with the materialism that the Marxists lay claim to, but it is not in harmony with Marxism itself, which, in its Messianic faith, believes that a certain social class is, through a kind of predestination, the bearer, and the exclusive bearer, of civilization. Marxism thought it possessed the key to history in the notion of class, but it never even began actually to use this key; and in fact it is not useable. I think that one cannot form clear thoughts about human relationships as long as one has not placed the notion of force (/might/strength/power) in the centre, just as proportion is at the centre of mathematics. But the first of these notions needs to be elucidated, just as the second needed to be. To do so is not easy.
I would happily propose the following theorem: one is always barbaric towards the weak. Or, at least, so as not to deny any power to virtue, one might state that: save at the price of an effort of generosity as rare as genius, one is always barbaric towards the weak. The greater or lesser amount of barbarity current in a society would thus depend on the distribution of strengths. This view, if one were able to study it in sufficient depth so as to give it a clear content, would at least make it possible, in theory, to locate any social structure, whether stable or temporary, on a scale of values – on condition that one considers barbarity as an evil and its absence as a good. This restriction is necessary; for there is no shortage of people who, whether through an exclusive, aristocratic appreciation for intellectual culture, or through ambition, or through a kind of idolatry of History and of a dreamed-of future, or because they mistake lack of feeling for firmness of mind, or quite simply through lack of imagination, get along quite well with barbarity and consider it either an detail of no consequence or a useful instrument. That is not my case; nor is it, I should think, the case of those who read this review.
To form an idea of such a relationship between the map of forces in a social system and the degree of barbarity, one must consider this latter notion a little differently from how the crowd does. Public sensitivity comes into play only…
Hitler is not a barbarian – would to God that he were one! Barbarians can cause only limited harm in their acts of ravaging. Like natural calamities, as they destroy they re-awaken the mind to the insecurity of human affairs; their cruelties, their perfidies, mingled with acts of loyalty and generosity and tempered by inconsistency and whim, never imperil anything vital in those who survive their arms. Only an extremely civilized State – but civilized on a very low level, as Rome was – can bring about in those it threatens and in those it makes subject the kind of moral decay that not only cripples in advance any hope for real resistance, but breaks up brutally and definitively continuity in the spiritual life, substituting for it a poor imitation of mediocre conquerors. For only a State that has reached a high level of organization can paralyze in its adversaries the very ability to react, through the power exercised on the imagination by a pitiless mechanism that neither human weaknesses nor human virtues can arrest once it is a question of seizing an advantage, and that is equally ready to use to this end truth or lies, feigned respect for conventions or open contempt for them. We are not, in Europe, in the situation of civilized people struggling against a barbarian, but in the far more difficult and perilous situation of independent countries threatened by colonization; and we will not confront this danger usefully if we do not devise methods in keeping with it.
(Source: Mad Beppo: For students of French and for some others)