Barbarisation

 Many explanations have been proposed over the years for the remarkable rise in violent crime and general breakdown of public order that occurred in the final third of the twentieth century. The potential culprits have ranged from lead fumes; to drugs; to the rise of liberal and permissive cultural mores; and more.  

One of the classical theories (distinguishable from but not entirely unrelated to the conservative theory that blames the breakdown on liberal cultural values) is Eric Hobsbawm's theory that traced the late twentieth century crime wave to the general breakdown of community that occurred with the accelerating trends of modernization and urbanization; the increase in anomie and social isolation that accompanied the worldwide movement from farms to cities; the replacement of Gemeinschaft with Gesellschaft. 

According to this theory—one of the most prominent tendencies of the late twentieth century was "barbarisation"—as Hobsbawm calls it—that is, the reversal of the "civilizing process" of classical sociology; the gradual loss of the internalized moral restraints and conventionalized codes of behavior that had regulated the use of violence and other antisocial behavior for most of the post-medieval period—and which had, perhaps, reached their apogee in controlling human social activity during the Victorian era. 

In the essays collected in his 2007 book, Globalisation, Democracy, and Terrorism, Hobsbawm observes this tendency to "barbarisation" in such diverse phenomena as the increasing inability of the nation-state to mobilize and command the tacit support of its citizenry; the increasing prevalence of swear-words in public; the willingness of official ideologists and licensed public intellectuals during the Bush years to openly defend barbaric practices like torture and extraordinary rendition; and the rise of terrorism, political assassination, suicide bombing, and public disorder. 

One of the problems for the Hobsbawm thesis—as for other versions of the theory that attribute the late twentieth century crime wave to some cultural or social dynamic—is that they largely fail to explain why the process reversed itself at the dawn of the twenty-first century. 

Today—in the age of smart phones and universal access to social media—anomie and social isolation have increased by every conceivable measure. People are spending less time interacting with each other in person, and more online, than ever before. Yet, actual rates of violence and antisocial behavior have generally not kept pace. 

Go on any social media platform, and it is immediately clear that every form of internalized moral regulation or conventionalized check on antisocial speech or behavior has all-but collapsed. For the first time in generations, people in public seem to feel no compunction whatsoever about openly using racial and misogynistic slurs; using the rhetoric and imagery of genocidal twentieth century regimes (right-wing influencers called for a "Reichstag fire" moment, for instance, after the slaying of Charlie Kirk last week—the sort of thing that used to only be used as rhetorical criticism of one's opponents; not as an affirmatively-stated aspiration for one's own political movement); and using profane language to call for the death or torture of their political opponents. 

Yet—apart from a brief spike during the early pandemic—violent crime rates are not on an upward trajectory. 

Of course, it's possible that this is about to change. The assassination of Charlie Kirk last week has led many armchair observers to suggest that our country has now launched itself on a new era of political violence—an American "Years of Lead," as some are calling it. 

And indeed—it's hard to escape the impression that there is indeed a pronounced "barbarisation" occurring in public discourse and behavior—far beyond what Hobsbawm could have imagined, at the time of his death in 2012. 

The assassination of Kirk—and the willingness of many on social media to celebrate or make light of it—is obviously a part of this process of barbarisation. But so—it must be said—was Kirk's career. In the days before his death, he openly sought to polarize racial conflict by drawing attention to an isolated case of the murder of a white woman by a Black man on a train in North Carolina. 

This kind of deliberate fanning of racial hate in order to stoke communal violence would have been unthinkable to prior generations of Republican strategists. Even the architects of the Willie Horton ad during the George H.W. Bush era—which Joseph Heller not unreasonably referred to as an "antiblack hate campaign"—felt inwardly-constrained to be more subtle than that. 

Likewise, an earlier generation of GOP activists would have known better than to traffic in such medieval barbarities as antisemitic conspiracy theories—yet Kirk more than anyone was responsible for "mainstreaming" ideas like the so-called "Great Replacement" theory: previously confined to the marginal fringes of the American far-right. 

But perhaps the most obvious sign of the growing "barbarisation" of our culture is that Kirk's rhetoric and ideological extremism have now become the dominant style of the entire U.S. executive branch. Official government social media accounts promote white nationalist–inspired content. The President of the United States posts public comments like "I love the smell of deportations in the morning." The official press officers of the United States government have adopted the role of capering licensed jesters—mocking the victims of their own brutality with puerile japes at the expense of the world's most vulnerable and defenseless people. 

The practices of extraordinary rendition and torture that so appalled Hobsbawm during the Bush era have returned—if anything on an even larger scale. Earlier this year, the U.S. government sent 250 innocent people to a secret prison in El Salvador, where they were evidently beaten, maltreated, and abused. Five men right now are trapped in indefinite detention in Eswatini according to the terms of a U.S. agreement with the African country. Nine others are stranded right now in an open-air prison camp in Ghana—on the administration's orders—and slated to be sent back to countries where they face persecution and torture. 

Hobsbawm wrote in his 2007 volume about the disgraceful fact that the U.S. government under the Bush administration had "formally denounced" and abjured the rules of international law and the law of armed conflict—such as the fundamental prohibition on aggression. Nowadays—while the Trump administration has not yet undertaken a war of aggression on the same scale as the 2003 Invasion of Iraq—they have certainly made clear that they recognize no moral or legal limits on their power to assassinate anyone or invade or bomb any country in the world. 

After blowing up a vessel in international waters earlier this month—a vessel that posed no imminent threat to any human life—observers pointed out to the administration that this extrajudicial execution probably constituted either murder or a war crime. To which the U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance responded on social media: "I don't give a shit what you call it."

Obviously—he was playing to the stands with that one—hoping that his vulgarity and schoolyboyish sadism would win cheers and cries of glee from the isolated, nihilistic, and alienated fan base of trolls that makes up the MAGA movement on social media. 

The most terrifying spectacle the world has ever known,
Vast mobilised armies of maddened adolescents
And criminal leaders mouthing the foulest perfidies
Amid roars of loutish laughter and animal applause (to quote Hugh MacDiarmid)

That is the age of "barbarisation" that we now inhabit. 

Maybe this growing barbarisation of our culture—this conspicuous collapse of all internalized moral constraints, modeled by the leaders of our country and filtering down from them—will once again not actually result in a real statistical increase in violence and crime. 

But if so—the result will hardly be achieved by any return of internalized moral checks or informal social conventions regulating behavior. Rather, it will be because the state's monopoly of violence has become even more pervasive. 

What we are witnessing in this country is indeed a further acceleration of the collapse of Gemeinschaft that Hobsbawm described—the fraying of the informal bonds that regulate social conduct in small-scale communities—and its replacement with the machinery of Gesellschaft—the exchanges of the global market and the use of state-sponsored force—as the only available means to control human conduct. (After all, one theory for why crime rates went into reverse at the dawn of the twenty-first century is that mass surveillance, militarized policing, and mass incarceration made crime physically impossible.)

When people's behavior is no longer regulated according to the internal check of conscience, society must rely entirely on either economic self-interest or coercion to maintain public order. In other words: 

[...] As social bonds decay,
As duty, love, and honour fail to sway,
Fictitious bonds, the bonds of wealth and law,
Still gather strength, and force unwilling awe.

—as Oliver Goldsmith put it in the eighteenth century—at the dawn of the modern era of urbanization and anomie.

What's truly disgusting about all this is that the regime's official ideologists—people like J.D. Vance—often invoke the rhetoric of Gemeinschaft to defend what they are doing. They purport to be defending values of community, religion, tradition, and family against the individualism of the modern era. 

But in reality, the "blood and soil" nationalism they represent is the extreme distillation of the logic of Gesellschaft—the reduction of all human relations to coercion. Vance speaks the rhetoric of "community" and of "concentric circles of affection"—and meanwhile is social media's most boastful and sadistic defender of U.S. state terrorism: lawless assassination, the abduction of innocent people without charge or trial, the illegal rendition of asylum-seekers to secret prisons where they will be confined indefinitely and perhaps even tortured at the hands of their U.S.-paid jailers. 

Liberalism is often accused of being the ideology of "individualism" and Gesellschaft. But in truth, liberalism asks human beings to accept an extraordinarily elaborate set of internalized restraints—the vast galaxy of duties that arise once one has recognized the moral equality and substantive rights of every other human being. As such, liberalism has much more in common with certain strands of communitarian traditionalist conservatism or Toryism than either has to with the barbarized fascism of J.D. Vance. 

The MAGA movement's chief ideologists are not really best thought of as conservatives at all—but as anti-Enlightenment radicals and revolutionaries (thereby meeting Zeev Sternhell's classic definition of fascism). They are not "conserving" any social values at all. They are pioneers and innovators in novel arts of repression, violence, mayhem, terrorism, and barbarity. 

Maybe, then, the "Years of Lead" won't actually come in America. But it won't be because we reestablished community or Gemeinschaft. It will be because—in fear for our safety—we accepted the imposition of an ever more brutal and pervasive Leviathan state—now made all the more dangerous at Trump's and Vance's hands by being equipped with an official ideology of racial exclusivism, religious nationalism, and white, male, heterosexual supremacy. 

And so the victory of Gesellschaft—Goldsmith's "fictitious bonds"—over the informal and nonviolent social bonds of Gemeinschaft that used to regulate human conduct in genuine communities—will be complete.