Civilizing Versus Being Civil: Some Ironies (response article)

I suspect that the question, “How civilized are we?” holds several meanings. Perhaps one meaning is: “Where can we direct our hatred?” If we declare ourselves “uncivilized,” we can hate human nature. Or, since all of us began as rather uncivilized creatures, we can hate the children we once were. If we are “civilized” but anxious and depressed because of it, we can hate society and authority for making us so. That is, if we are seeking suitable containers for hatred and self-hatred (for all hatred begins as self-hatred), then the only intolerable answer to the question of our degree of civilization would be: The world is very civilized and everyone is thoroughly content. Albeit a pleasant thought, this statement does not seem to be true. If it were, it would seriously complicate our ability to manage “uncivilized” emotions and impulses.

The noun “civilization” comes to us from the French Enlightenment as civilisation, after the verb “to civilize” had arisen from the adjective “civil.” In this way, the very concept of “civilization” is inextricable from the civilizing projects of the 18^th and 19^th centuries—projects that contain the same fundamental ambivalences with which Professors Elovitz and Fuchsman contend in their poignant essays.

Whether expressed in the domain of education, government, culture, or imperial/colonial conquest, the idea of civilization relies on a belief in a (real or potential) human condition of being civil that is opposed to a (real or potential) human condition of being savage. The violence inherent in such a drastic splitting of human possibilities is closely related to the violence that results from efforts to civilize ourselves and others, and from violent reactions to such efforts.

As both Professors Elovitz and Fuchsman remind us, com-

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plex questions about civilization require that we examine not merely physical violence, physical health, and physical security, but hidden violence, psychic unhealth, and ontological insecurity. One way to do so is to define civilization as the conversion of physical violence and overt domination into structural, invisible, and internalized violence and self-violence. Many thoughtful critics of modernity, from Marx to Nietzsche to Freud to Foucault, have expounded this thesis, yet one of its most memorable depictions remains Franz Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” (The Complete Stories, 1971, 258), in which Rotpeter the ape describes his miraculous transformation into a human being, thus: “I learned things, gentlemen. Ah, one learns things when one has to; one learns when one needs a way out; one learns at all costs. One stands over oneself with a whip; one flays oneself at the slightest opposition.”

The extraordinary self-violence at the heart of Rotpeter’s self-civilization, and the analogy drawn between the training of an ape and the education of a child, suggest a fruitful line of questioning: What does it really mean to be civil? What types of violence are most destructive of our civil being? Here, we must think of “civil being” not merely as “politeness,” but as a central norm of inter-subjective ethics and a governing principle of object-relations: Being civil depends, first, on an individual’s being, and then on her or his ability to treat others as separate and valued beings, to preserve boundaries and to relate with others across boundaries in authentic and meaningful ways.

Rotpeter the ape discovers, amidst torture and terror, that he is able to mimic the behavior, speech, and complex thought of the humans who have imprisoned him, but, like many of Kafka’s characters, Rotpeter lacks the ability to be, to act, and to relate civilly. Rotpeter’s identification with his captors is the only “way out” of his cage (253). His civilization is coerced assimilation: a painful process by which he repudiates in himself all that is not identical to those around him. Having internalized the demands of his tormentors, Rotpeter ultimately thanks his “teachers” for helping him to break his authentic nature, for perceiving that “we were both fighting on the same side against the nature of apes” (257).

Rotpeter’s civilizers train him well, but they do not help him develop a self that is capable of being on its own, or of interacting

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with others in meaningful ways. The civilization-process has taken from Rotpeter not just his animality, but all that is potentially civil and human about him. He is incapable of being human, of acting, communicating with, or challenging the world around him without fearing a return to his dreadful cage. In the end, Rotpeter feels compelled to cover up even his own story of transformation by declaring that his words contain no communicative content, no emotion, no meaning: “I am only imparting knowledge, I am only making a report. To you, also, honored Members of the Academy, I have only made a report” (259).

Rotpeter’s failed or empty civilization thus dares us to reflect upon the hatred and fear motivating our own. If civilizing practices are carried out by those who, themselves, fear a cage (a cage of shame or depression), then they cannot facilitate the development of creative, autonomous, authentic beings that also have the capacity to treat others as such. If we must be civilized or else, then identification with our civilizers (and with their own self-hatred) will be all that protects us from being found to be savage, abhorrent, worthless.

The violence that informs the split between civilized and savage is transmitted via civilizing individuals and institutions, unleashed upon the uncivilized aspects of ourselves and others in the name of progress. This aspect of our civilization is too often ignored and defended against by our manic—if not compulsive—attention to technological change, economic growth, and physical or material improvements.

To the extent that our civilizing practices depend upon a shared (self-) hatred of the uncivilized, they make civil being impossible, not only because they undercut an individual’s authentic being (which must learn to tolerate and integrate the uncivilized aspects of the self), but because individuals who are civilized in this way can not relate with others who do not hate themselves. Encountering non-self-hating, partially-uncivilized others provokes in the self-hating civilized individual an intolerable amount of hatred, envy, and shame, such that civil relating becomes difficult if not impossible. Put another way, the dread of finding ourselves alone with our uncivilized qualities motivates a great many of our civilizing practices, but makes genuine civil being unnecessarily rare.

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