Civilization and savage cruelty are inseparable, not antithetical, aspects of the same order.

Evidence

The world of the death camps and the society it engenders reveals the progressively intensifying night side of Judeo-Christian civilization. Civilization means slavery, wars, exploitation, and death camps. It also means medical hygiene, elevated religious ideas, beautiful art, and exquisite music. It is an error to imagine that civilization and savage cruelty are antithesis … In our times the cruelties, like most other aspects of our world, have become far more effectively administered than ever before. They have not and will not cease to exist. Both creation and destruction are inseparable aspects of what we call civilization. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 63

Categorization

• DEFINE: Bauman’s key redefinition: ‘civilization’ is not opposed to cruelty but contains administration as its distinction — ‘more effectively administered’ cruelty, foreshadowing the bureaucratic-rationality mechanism.

Related

• Modern civilization centralizes rather than abolishes violence (similarity 0.79)
• Civilization makes violence aversion irrelevant through bureaucratic complicity (similarity 0.78)