The relationship between “civilization” and “violence” is not a simple issue, nor for that matter is the concept of “civilization.” We consider the United States to be a civilized society (close but not identical to “civilization”), but our history is a violent one. Start with the European colonization of the continent, indeed of the whole western hemisphere. Then we have slavery, the various gold rushes, the vigilantes, the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow, union-busting, political assassinations, ad infinitum (or at least ad nauseum).
One characteristic of the modern nation-state is said to be its monopoly of the legitimate use of force, but there is also a history of violent abuse of that monopoly. In the decades since the Civil Rights Act, at least, there has been a sustained effort both to acknowledge the excesses of prior state violence and to prevent or afterwards punish the violent misuse of state authority, in addition to preserving the state’s monopoly by prohibiting and punishing individual violence. While we still remain a violent society, especially when it comes to gun violence, we have at least reached a consensus that violence is not an appropriate way to deal with social and political issues.
Or I should say, we had such a consensus. We are rapidly losing it.
Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic, wrote an article this morning (subscription required) that caught my attention: Decivilization May Already Be Under Way.
The line between a normal, functioning society and catastrophic decivilization can be crossed with a single act of mayhem. This is why, for those who have studied violence closely, the brazen murder of a CEO in Midtown Manhattan—and, more important, the brazenness of the cheering reaction to his execution—amounts to a blinking-and-blaring warning signal for a society that has become already too inured to bloodshed and the conditions that exacerbate it. [emphasis added]
She refers to the work of the German sociologist Norbert Elias (The Civilizing Process, 1939), for whom civilization was in part defined by “the process by which the use of violence shifted to the state” and “decivilization” was meant to “suggest a condition in which it shifts back to individuals.” But, for LaFrance, it is not just Brian Thompson’s murder and the gleeful reaction to it; it goes deeper:
[T]he Machiavellianism of contemporary politics has stoked both the nihilism of those who believe that violence is the only answer and the whitewashing of recent violent history. This is how a society reaches the point at which people publicly celebrate the death of a stranger murdered in the street. And it is how the January 6 insurrectionists who ransacked the U.S. Capitol came to be defended by lawmakers as political prisoners.
So now we have this story today: Republican lawmakers invite a Jan. 6 felon to Trump’s inauguration.
The Republican tolerance for violence (when directed against Democrats) didn’t start with Trump — see, e.g., ‘Stop the Recount’: How the Chaotic End of the 2000 Presidential Election Sowed Seeds of Today’s Political Fury. Then there’s this from 2022: Only the GOP Celebrates Political Violence:
But if both Republicans and Democrats, left and right, suffer political violence, the same cannot be said of those who celebrate political violence. That’s not a “both sides” affair in 2020s America.
And Trump exploited it to the hilt.
No Democratic equivalent exists of Donald Trump, who regularly praises and encourages violence as a normal tool of politics. . . .
I’m not going to repost all the stories we’ve heard and written about his taste for violence ever since his infamous slither down his “golden” escalator in 2015 (here is a posting from late October 2024 if you need a refresher: A Brief History of Trump’s Violent Remarks). But here is LaFrance again:
A society’s propensity for violence may be ticking up and up and up, even as life continues to feel normal to most people. A drumbeat of attacks, by different groups or individuals with different motivations, may register as different kinds of problems. But take the broad view and you find they point at the same diagnosis: Our social bonds are disintegrating.
Another word for this unraveling is decivilization. The further a society goes down this path, the fewer behavioral options people identify as possible reactions to grievances. When every disagreement becomes zero-sum and no one is willing to compromise, violence becomes more attractive to people. And when violence becomes widespread, the state may escalate its own use of violence—including egregious attacks on civil liberties.
I am not in any way suggesting, much less advocating, that Democrats adopt the violent rhetoric of the Republicans. I am urging them — us — to recognize what they are saying, what they are normalizing, and to no longer act toward Trump and the GOP as though they respected the norms of political discourse. They have no such respect and no such inhibitions.
The Republican party, prior to and most definitely in concert with Donald Trump, is deliberately creating a climate in this country where violence, both political and cultural, is not just unexceptional, but even normalized, and worst than that, celebrated — as in Trump Mocks Hammer Attack On Pelosi’s Husband In Incendiary Speech.
The Republican party has become a threat to civilization itself.
---------------— Edit 1500 PT 12 Dec -------------------—
Based on some discussions below, I reread LaFrance’s piece. I see now that it is more focused on the death of one plutocrat than on the deaths of many ordinary people who happened to be the wrong skin color in the wrong place, or who spoke out of turn, or who just wanted to live a peaceful life with the wrong person. I stand by my use of her article because of its introduction of the concept of decivilization, which — even though she missed the opportunity to tie it to all those other deaths, and to all the deaths and damage done by the insurance industry — is still a useful word to describe the situation we find ourselves in.
Rereading Eric Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed also contributed to this piece.
