Civilized like Captain Hook, But Capable of Learning

The two papers presented for commentary take quite distinct approaches: Ken Fuchsman traces our species’ trajectory of violence. He ends ambivalently, leaving things open, much as Freud did in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Neither Eros nor Thanatos clearly has the upper hand. Paul Elovitz addresses the same question and emerges with a more positive view in his penultimate sentence, at least with respect to the trajectory of violence and civilized behavior, but his closing words cast a shadow of doubt upon his affirmation of progress.

With respect to the trajectory of violence, the notion of civilization is all but useless. Like James Barrie’s Captain Hook, imperialists were never more sinister than when they were most polite—that is, when they were on “civilizing missions.” Not progress in civilization, but fear for their interests and their lives drove elegantly decked out thugs to enter into the treaties that marked the zeniths of rational collective behavior of their times. However, the violence of the strong against the weak, of power elites against their subjects, of men against women, of dominant ethnic groups against minorities, and the daily intimidation and domination at ground-level social interactions in the family, the school playground, and the job, continue in self-described “civilized” communities.

I think it highly doubtful that Steven Pinker’s data holds much solace when read in the glare of the daily headlines. Freud remains a useful preceptor indeed. What we call “civilization,” on the whole, remains a veneer for our unruly drives. Contemporary elites continue to exalt the warrior-aristocracies and bloodthirsty dynasts who built earlier versions of their current nation-states. Russian elites look back nostalgically to Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, and Joseph Stalin. The Chinese revere their imperial past and also Mao Zedong, who they believe was “seventy percent correct; thirty percent wrong.” The Russians use precisely the same

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metric system for Stalin.

The trajectory of violence at the state level, however, does not look all bad. Immanuel Kant produced the theory that in the long run the escalating costs of warfare would lead to greater unification and cooperation among powerful states. A man of the Enlightenment, Kant believed in humanity’s capacity for collective learning from generation to generation and thus assumed that we would eventually act rationally and choose peace over self-destruction. The prospect of mutually assured destruction has more than once sobered up regimes heading toward a possible nuclear train wreck. For a time, the United Nations (UN), the European Union (EU), and other global movements toward unification seemed to be fulfilling the Kantian vision of the taming of international anarchy. However, among newer nation-states—the vast majority of the member states in the UN—the dominant ethnic groups sometimes conduct ethnic cleansing, to the point of genocide. The UN still remains our best hope for dealing with international anarchy and for addressing the many continuing humanitarian problems of the global community. Alas, even now, reliance upon the most powerful states to control both state- and non-state violence and genocide is still the rule rather than the exception.

Although still dependent upon the goodwill and material support of the most powerful states and the cooperation of dozens of smaller states, the new international structures, if they work, will mitigate or prevent the massive violence produced by warring blocs of states and terrorist networks. They will not, however, at least not in their present form, solve the problem of global economic inequality. To be sure, the extreme inequalities of human populations in both “developed,” and “developing” states and the ecological and environmental depredations connected with the technologies deployed by global capitalism (whether private-corporate or state capitalism) continue. Collective learning about capitalism’s systemic tendency to produce inequality and destructive cycles have not generated any systematic remedy for the relative anarchy of global capitalism. “No pain, no gain” and Joseph Schumpeter’s “creative destruction” remain central aphorisms justifying the most devastating crashes. The critics of capitalism, however, may also take heart from Kant’s notion of collective learning.

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We are perhaps still far from the economic equivalent of the massive destruction and pain of 20^th century warfare that produced the UN and the EU. If global structural remedies come at all, like the structures devised to mitigate state-based international anarchy, they will probably issue from global collective distress rather than peaceful progress.

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